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 paper presents an analysis of teachers' questions and students' responses in content and language integrated learning (CLIL) classes of history. Through the combined application of genre theory and a typology of CLIL teacher academic questions, the study aims at contributing to the understanding of how CLIL students use the foreign…

Many in the field of language policy have called for studies that connect policy texts at the macro level with their interpretations in districts, schools, and classrooms at the micro level. The purpose of this study is to trace Washington's educational language policy through the layers of interpretation to educational practice to see how…

Although the concept of agency has received a lot of interest in recent educational research, its significance in language learning biographies as well as contextual and relational aspects of learner agency are still little studied. This paper aims at a more thorough understanding of agency by studying student teachers' previous language…

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…

The transmission and dissemination of knowledge in Aboriginal societies for the most part occurs orally in an Aboriginal language or in Aboriginal English. However, whilst support is given to speaking skills in Indigenous communities, in our education system less emphasis is given to developing equivalent oral communicative competence in Standard…

This paper discusses structural and ideological challenges to mother tongue-based multilingual education (MTB-MLE) which has in recent years been gaining ground in many educational contexts around the world. The paper argues, however, that MTB-MLE is set against these challenges - referred to here as inequalities of multilingualism - which prevent…

This article focuses on the pedagogical beliefs, practices and ideological assumptions of 15 teachers who work with mother tongue instruction in Sweden. Despite support through provisions in Swedish laws, mother tongue instruction is clearly a marginalized subject, not least due to its non-mandatory status, the limited time allocated for it and…

This paper is an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the grammatical description and advice contained in the new National Curriculum documentation from 2013, focusing on key stages 1 and 2. It builds on previous analyses of deficiencies in the systems of grammar and the materials in earlier incarnations of the National Curriculum. It…

This study investigated how video-based observation may alter the nature of post-observation talk between supervisors and teacher candidates. Audio-recorded post-observation conversations were coded using a conversation analysis framework and interpreted through the lens of interactional sociology. Findings suggest that video-based observations…

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 paper reports on an investigation into the efficacy of a teacher preparation programme that introduced the teaching of African languages to speakers of other African languages in order to produce multi-competent and multi-vocal teachers. A mixed method approach was used to elicit from a pool of 60 (30 experimental; 30 control group)…

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…

Twenty years after democracy, the legacy of apartheid and hitherto unmet challenges of resourcing and teacher development are reflected in a severely inequitable and underperforming education system. This paper focuses on second language writing in the middle years of schooling when 80% of learners face a double challenge: to move from…