This article investigates culture-based instructional design in its purest form through "The Brownies' Book", a children's periodical produced from 1920 to 1921. Methodologies of examination include historical analysis and critical discourse analysis grounded in a Foucaultian framework. The findings extrapolated from the design of "The Brownies'…

When nonnative English-speaking scientists submit manuscripts for consideration to English-language journals, they sometimes receive comments from the reviewers that are critical of their English language skills. The impact on scientists' identity when making revisions that satisfy reviewer expectations has not been examined carefully. Therefore,…

This article argues that Vietnamese Americans face unique challenges in becoming U.S. educators. To understand the experiences of five preservice Vietnamese American teachers, it examines the similarities and within-group differences in perspectives on teaching and in adaptation strategies of their practicum activities at a California university.…

In this article, I explore language practices in Nigerian primary school classrooms against the backdrop of the policy of mother tongue education. Findings from the study show that there is a classroom bilingual practice that is rather unstructured in terms of curricular application and levels. The study shows that rather than implementing the…

Studies of Mexican and Puerto Rican communities living in the same United States cities suggest that a combination of historical factors and local conditions strongly influence to what extent these two groups interact and form a shared sense of pan-ethnic Latino unity. However, few studies have examined "MexiRican" individuals, those who have one…

This article draws on three in-depth interviews with teenage migrants, two asylum seekers and one from Portugal. The interviews reveal experiences particular to young new arrivals attempting to find ways of being in a global city where they find themselves living in multicultural localities that are occasionally the sites of conflict as well as…

In this article, I examine the manner in which identity impacts on literacy practices, with reference to two 9-year-old girls and two 15-year-old boys who speak or have access to two or more languages. The younger children were part of a year-long study of the British National Literacy Strategy (Wallace, 2005). The older two were interviewed in…

This commentary was written after the May Day of 2006, which hundreds of thousands of Latino immigrants in the United States used to protest against their predicament. As a largely "illegal," hence invisible and unrecognized minority, they find themselves in extremely vulnerable positions in the labour, housing, and political markets, where…

In this article I explore how a group of female university students, mostly British Asian and in their late teens and early twenties, perform femininities in talk about heritage languages. I argue that analysis of this talk reveals ways in which the participants enact "culturally intelligible" gendered subject positions. This frequently involves…

In recent years, the number of Spanish-speaking Latinos in Britain and London has grown considerably. Estimates from different sources put the population in London as high as 300,000. Unfortunately, this growing ethnolinguistic group is an underresearched minority, and information of any kind is hard to come by. In this article, my aim is to…

This study works against heteronormativity, which is prevalent in the second language acquisition field, adding queer perspectives to the growing body of research that questions a narrower, 1-dimensional view of the language learner. There is a common belief that learning an additional language (L2) while surrounded by L2 speakers in a…

This is a critical discourse analysis of "generation 1.5," a term used to refer to students born outside the United States who received part, or most, of their formal education in the United States. The analysis reveals that surrounding "generation 1.5" are 3 interconnected discourses of partiality: a discourse of demographic partiality, a…

This article builds on Norton and Toohey's (2001) critique of good language learner (GLL) research to illustrate how college students in an advanced Spanish conversation course drew on particular ideologies of language and foreign language learning to construct and negotiate their classroom identities. I argue that these ideologies were implicated…

This study examined immigrants' perceptions of their native language and factors that enhance or hinder its use and maintenance. Participants (N = 208) included immigrants to the United States. Results showed that immigrants perceive their native language positively, desire that their children use it alongside English, and perceive negative…

This study was an exploration of how high school language learners and their teacher jointly constructed word meanings through multimodal representation and the sociopolitical reality of learners' lives as mediating factors in the context of simultaneous multiple learning activities. Thirty-three high school Advanced ESL 3 students were taught…