Drawing from ethnography of communication and language socialization approaches, this paper examines classes on bullying held for Sikh middle school students at a Sikh religious institution in California. Sikh educational programs play an important role in socializing youth into Sikh teachings, practices, and community perspectives. Due to one…

This study looks at how language ideologies affect and are revealed in language socialization practices in a majority-L1 adult ESL classroom, particularly looking at language use and policy. It draws on recent theories and critiques of language socialization (Bayley & Langman, 2011; Bronson & Watson-Gegeo, 2008; Garrett &…

Drawing from long-term ethnographic research in the Andes, this paper examines one Quechua-speaking Indigenous bilingual educator's trajectory as she traversed (and traverses) from rural highland communities of southern Peru through development as teacher, teacher educator, researcher, and advocate for Indigenous identity and language…

Drawing on the work of Philip Deloria (2004) and recent explorations of "American Indian languages in unexpected places" (Webster & Peterson, 2011a), this article challenges received expectations of Native American languages and language users as "rural" and physically distant and of "urban" Indigenous language…

Latino students' educational success is central to America's prosperity--in traditional immigrant destinations and in New Latino Diaspora locations, previously unfamiliar with Latinos. Implicated in this success is the reception young immigrants receive, especially the ways in which they are identified in schools. We describe findings…

This article explores multimodal literacy practices in a transforming multilingual context of an indigenous and endangered Sámi language classroom. Looking at literacy practices as embedded in a complex and shifting terrain of language ideologies, language norms, and individual experiences and attitudes, we examined how multilingual Sámi children…

Theoretically informed by a Foucauldian understanding of power, this article documents how power is exercised and resisted in an English-as-a-foreign-language context. In particular, the article focuses on individual seatwork, during which students were working individually on written exercises, as one of the three basic modes of teaching/learning…

This ethnographic case study uses participant observation and interviewing to explore the multiple, complex relationships between language and identities in a particular Puerto Rican community. Participants included students and teachers from a K-9 school-turned-community center in a rural municipality in Puerto Rico. Participants did not think…

This ethnographic study investigated heritage language maintenance among two distinct groups of Chinese immigrant families (Mandarin and Fujianese) from the social network perspective. The results indicated that a co-ethnic network could be a double-edged sword, which works differently on children from different social classes. While the Mandarin…

Based on a four-year ethnography and informed by poststructuralist theories of identity and language, this article examines how, through lived settlement experiences in Canada, a young man from Mainland China gradually became an immigrant in the folk sense of the term. Though he was considered a success in terms of the diaspora community, he was…

The article reports on the preliminary findings of a project on the constructions of "Greekness" in modern diasporas. The discussion draws on data from the self-identified Greek community of Wellington, New Zealand. Interview data, ethnographic diaries, and everyday real-life spoken interactions were collected. The analysis of the data shows that…

This article draws from ethnographic data collected during a 23-month--language socialization study of mixed-status Mexican families living in the New Latino Diaspora. The analysis focuses on the ways in which siblings in one family talk about citizenship during a discursive event that I call the Planning for the Future Routine. The findings show…

This article reports on an ethnographic case study that explored how Chinese learners' national identities were displayed and reconstructed through their English language-learning journeys in Britain. Drawing on a variety of sources (ethnographic observations, informal conversations, diaries, and narrative interviews), the analysis focuses on the…

This article explores the methodological turning points in conducting a critical ethnography on the discursive practices of Italian Canadian youth identities across their multiple worlds in Toronto (cf. Giampapa, 2004a). Specifically, I aim to problematize the construction of the "researcher," researcher identities, and the conceptualization of…

This article focuses on how issues of power and identity were negotiated when doing a critical sociolinguistic ethnography as a Spanish researcher in the Chinese educational context. Data come from fieldwork conducted in 3 different primary and secondary schools together in Zhejiang province, where inside- and outside-classroom…