This article discusses the results of an empirical study that examined the translanguaging practices of primary-grade, bilingual Latino students, as mediated by bilingual teacher candidates (TCs), in an after-school program in the southwestern United States. Expansive Learning theory, within the cultural-historical activity tradition, guided the…

Many young children of Mexican heritage enter U.S. schools with knowledge of two language systems and emergent biliterate abilities. Bilingualism in young children may go unnoticed when instructional practices favor English. This case study describes how Lucía's bilingualism and emergent biliteracy parallel competencies essential to literacy…

Drawing on Cultural Historical Activity Theory, language socialization, and the notion of "third space," this article examines how bilingual, Latina/o students (Latina/o English learners) use sophisticated linguistic, cultural, and mathematical tools to solve community-based problems. This article examines the inherent tensions in using…

This article investigates when and how narratives of personal experience and displacement reference and characterize dimensions of time and space, with a focus on how temporal elasticity might serve as an interactional resource. Examining the dynamic, situated, and intertwined nature of such narratives, the analysis looks at how…

Sociolinguists have made considerable headway in identifying and describing the relationship between mobility, linguistic resources, and forms of inequality. Despite such advances, however, we argue that it is as important as ever to continue to rethink what kinds of phenomena are analyzed, the distinctions and categories that might be imposed on…

Drawing on the first phase of a larger sociolinguistic ethnography, this article explores how individual migrants of African and Chinese backgrounds expand their multilingual repertoires in Africa Town in Guangzhou, China. Focusing on two cases, I demonstrate how they maintain and develop transnational and translocal connections simultaneously…

In Native American communities, the "global here and now" (Appadurai, 2001) is linked to twin movements for standardization and English supremacy, resulting in the decline of Indigenous languages and persistent educational disparities. This article takes up Appadurai's call to democratize research on globalization, juxtaposing theories that…

This article examines how speakers of Kam Muang in Northern Thailand draw on distinct temporalities (the slow paced, long-term historical temporality of "longue duree"; the medium paced, autobiographical temporality of intermediate time frames; and the fast-paced, immediate temporality of the "courte duree") to conceptualize their community's…

This report is part of a larger, 2-year ethnography of bi- and multilingual speakers in Japan. On the basis of audio and videotape recordings of discussions among international students in a Japanese university, this study examines participants' deployment of different conversational resources to understand and talk about marginalizing…

This article seeks to situate Spanish as a global language by exploring both the top-down institutional processes that promote it and the bottom-up grassroots actions that are also increasingly important in the spread and maintenance of global Spanish. This article argues that one of the most important influences now in the explosion of Spanish…

Global English is under contestation. Although some consider lingua franca English (LFE) as a neutral medium or code that does not belong to any specific culture or nationality, others see the deceptive nature of this linguistic globalization. Along with Spring (2007/this issue), they see global English as embodying partisan interests and values.…

In this article, the authors briefly describe key issues central to what Spring (2007) refers to as the "industrial-consumer paradigm" and the role of English as the global language characterized by what Harvey (1990) called "time and space compression." The authors also comment and provide a critique of some of its primary principles examining…

Joel Spring (2007/this issue) argues that in most nation states around the world today, English plays a central role primarily as a commodity of globalization. At the same time in the United States, English is being perpetuated in nationalistic terms as the only legitimate language. This is done through a variety of mechanisms such as language…

Choosing any one alternative out of the three educational models provided by Joel Spring (2007/this issue) may not really be adequate for a new social-sociolinguistic theory for a potentially just world order. In this article, the author contends that as an alternative to the persistently degenerating consumerist model of the education security…