Literacies are always learned in particular social places and spaces, and the nature of a site shapes the experiences people have of learning literacies there. This paper considers the experiences of staff in two contrasting workplaces: an early years centre, and an adult education college. Both are educational workplaces, and staff are engaged in…

A central tenet of two-way immersion has been that the minority language children benefit from mother-tongue support in addition to instruction and interaction in the majority language (usually English) with their peers in high prestige programmes, while the English speakers gain valuable opportunities for peer interaction in their L2 with native…

This paper outlines a research project in which three- and four-year-old children in one nursery engaged with editing software to create short animated films. Research questions were related to the knowledge and understanding of multimodal texts that the children developed in the activity, the skills they demonstrated in undertaking the animation…

This paper explores what kinds of advantages and strengths the process of learning to read simultaneously in different languages and scripts might bring about. It is based on a socio-cultural view of learning and literacy and examines early literacy in three parallel literacy classes in Watford, England. It analyses the learning experiences of…

There is now a considerable body of research into issues of gender representation in children's literature. This is no doubt partly due to the perceived importance of such representation for children's social and psychological development. In this paper I analyse gender representation in one stage of a reading scheme which is currently popular in…

For the most part unrecognised by the international community, the introduction of Pinyin in the teaching of Mandarin Chinese to children in the initial years of their schooling in China is one of the largest innovations in the history of language education. It has also provided an example of an effective pedagogical and curricular reform on a…