This paper proposes a personalised instructional strategy, "student-selected vocabulary," to facilitate secondary school students' vocabulary building. It then reports how this personalised instructional strategy was implemented and evaluated through a teacher-led intervention study of 57 low-achieving Hong Kong secondary school…

This article is the guest editors' introduction to the special issue "Language in Epistemic Access: Mobilising Multilingualism and Literacy Development for More Equitable Education in South Africa". The issue offers complementary perspectives on improving epistemic access for all learners but especially those whose home language…

This paper reports on the classroom languaging practices of a group of science teachers in rural and township schools in South Africa where the majority of learners learn through the medium of English, despite the fact that it is the home language of only a small minority; and learners' poor English proficiency frequently restricts their…

Dialogic theories and practices in education have grown over the last decade; in the United Kingdom, however, most research in the field has been carried out in primary schools. Six leading academic researchers in the field are interviewed to explore the reasons for this primary bias to date, and their perceptions of both the difficulties and the…

Content-based instruction (CBI) adopts a second language (L2) as the medium of instruction for some or all academic subjects to facilitate L2 learning. There seem however, no uniform policies concerning which academic subjects should be taught in L2, in case only some subjects are involved. Conventional wisdom tends to favour Humanities subjects…

Cognitive models of the writing process make a distinction between the functions of planning and translation: the first to generate ideas, the second to represent these ideas in written linguistic conventions. For many writers however, ideas do not always appear to precede the act of writing, rather they appear to be discovered through it. This…

This paper investigates Mandarin learning experiences of Chinese American teenagers from working-class families. Drawing on a subset of data from a larger ethnographic study, we focus on 14 middle schoolers who studied Mandarin as a heritage language at a socially engaging school with Mandarin as part of its official curriculum. The data highlight…

The present study evaluates the impact of the fine-tuning medium of instruction (MOI) policy in Hong Kong in the early stages of its implementation. It explores the key stakeholders' perspectives on a school-based policy via a case study, which gathered multiple sources of qualitative data (i.e. focus groups/interviews, open-ended…

This article focuses on teaching critical literacy in the context of Singapore. It begins with a conceptualization of critical literacy as a stance oriented to questioning and challenging the often taken-for-granted meanings and assumptions found in "everyday" texts. It then discusses how this stance can be cultivated in students through…

This article is informed by van Lier's ecological approach to linguistics in considering the affordances Korean-born students perceived in using Korean or English language in an Aotearoa New Zealand high school setting. Here, I regard affordances as the students' perceptions of their languages as linguistic resources enabling them to…

In this paper, we examine some of the tenets of the current conceptualisations of communicative competence. Drawing on the empirical data collected in linguistically diverse university classrooms, we show that meaning-making in social interaction is considerably more complex and fluid than is envisaged in theoretical models of communicative…

While internationally there is a growing body of work investigating mainstreaming of English as an additional language (EAL), this topic has not featured strongly in research in the United Kingdom, and there are only a few studies that focus on the extent to which government policies and prescriptions concerning EAL students are actually being…

Young people's perceptions may offer an insight into the complex associations between language, education and social class. However, little research has asked young people what they think of their own talking. Forty-two British adolescents aged between 14 and 15 years were interviewed: 21 attended a school in a working class area; 21 attended…

This study investigates students' work on analyzing a literary text, a cartoon strip, with focus on their use of instructional, analytical concepts. Excerpts from a group conversation and from individually written texts are analyzed from a sociocultural, dialogical perspective. The analysis of the conversation shows how such concepts help the…

There are still many South African teachers who are challenged by the implementation of the relatively new system of education. They have to explore a variety of strategies as they try to transform their pedagogy to enhance learning in their classrooms. This post-apartheid system also challenges educators to be transformative individuals who…