One often cited challenge to effective mother tongue-based bilingual education (MTBE) in multilingual countries like Ghana is the difficulty of developing curriculum and instructional materials in many languages. To explain this situation, factors such as shortage of writers and teachers in the local languages, lack of interest on the part of…

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 reflects on the state of educational language policy two decades into a post-Apartheid South Africa caught between official multilingualism and English. The focus is on the national language-in-education policy (LiEP) that advocates additive bi/multilingualism, and a provincial counterpart, the language transformation plan (LTP). Using…

This chapter addresses the issue of pedagogy and bilingual/multilingual education: how best to match teaching-and-learning approaches to the literacy development needs of students in multilingual educational settings. More specifically, it makes the case for what is known as the "Sydney school" genre-based literacy development approach.…

The authors of papers in this special issue are in agreement that if schools are to reverse underachievement among rural and township students in the South African context the instructional space must be expanded to include students' and teachers' multilingual repertoires together with a focus on explicitly demystifying how academic…

Although there has been research on literacy as a sociocultural practice, L2 literacy researchers have yet to incorporate and consider how the material characteristics of a writing system interact with sociocultural factors in shaping literacy practices. Drawing on conceptions of literacy as a sociocultural practice, psycholinguistic and…

While "voice" is frequently invoked in discussions of pupils' agency and empowerment, less attention has been paid to the dialogic dynamics of children's voices and the sociocultural features shaping their emergence. Drawing on linguistic ethnographic research involving recent recordings of 10- and 11-year-old children's…

This paper examines the key linguistic arguments underpinning Basil Bernstein's theory of "elaborated" and "restricted" "codes". Building on a review of selected highlights from the collective critical response to Bernstein, the paper attempts to clarify the relationship of the theory to "deficit" views…

It is a long-standing and commonly held belief in the United Kingdom and elsewhere that the use of elite forms of language reflects superior intellect and education. Expert opinion from sociolinguistics, however, contends that such a view is the result of middle-class bias and cannot be scientifically justified. In the 1960s and 1970s, such…

In large parts of the developed world, increased connectivity has led to changes in the communicational landscape. Meaning-making associated with new media disturbs established ways of describing and defining literacy, leading some academics and educators to identify "new literacies" as a distinct break from traditional and predominantly…

In this article, we examine the relationship between classroom talk, teacher-student roles and paradigms for literacy and learning in two ninth-grade English Language Arts classes. Our goal was to understand how these roles and practices socialized students into norms for academic language and literacy as they read and wrote poetry in preparation…

This article builds on the growing research interest in complementary schooling in England and internationally but a field of study less well trodden in Scotland. It takes a socio-cultural view of literacy learning and demonstrates how in a Chinese complementary school in central Scotland, spaces are created for children of primary-school age to…

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…

Over a 13-month period, the Schome Park Programme operated the first "closed" (i.e. protected) Teen Second Life project in Europe. The project organised diverse educational events that centred on use of a virtual world and an associated asynchronous forum and wiki. Students and staff together exploited the affordances of the environment to develop…

This paper considers the policy environment of adult literacy as a space within which sites of learning are shaped and given value. It explores the interplay between international, national and local visions of what literacy is, who literacy learners are and what counts as learning, thereby linking broader social formations with local practices of…