This article investigates the language attitudes, language practices and identity construction of a group of ethnic minority students in a secondary school in Hong Kong. Drawing on data from focus group and individual interviews, this research shows that the ethnic minority students negotiate and contest their heritage identity by utilizing their…

Research on multilingual classrooms usually focuses on contexts where both teachers and pupils share the same linguistic repertoire; what can be called "symmetrical" multilingual classrooms. This paper sets out to investigate whether (and how) pupils' multilingual resources can be used in classrooms where the teacher does not share pupils'…

This article examines several "language practice" interactions among adult immigrant students in an ESL classroom in the U.S. from the perspective of performativity theory. In drawing on performativity theory, it conceptualizes such classroom interactions, along with the research practices used to investigate them, as constitutive actions. That…

In this manuscript we report on a curriculum design project in which we worked with students in an urban immigrant community to study their own language practices in different contexts. We gathered videotaped data of students in the classroom as well as videos they took of their language practices in other settings. We focus on one student's…

This paper focuses on issues of reproduction and the manufacturing of national/ethnic and religious identities in the deterritorialized space of the Moroccan immigrant diaspora. More specifically, this paper examines Moroccan immigrant children's language socialization into pan-Arabic and Islamic identities in relation to the teaching of the…

Most analyses of the sociolinguistic aspects of immigration focus on contexts where a single language is official and widely used. In bilingual Catalonia, newly arriving immigrants find themselves in a situation where the administration seeks to treat Catalan as a fully functional public language while large sectors of the local population still…

The present ethnographic case study investigates how the identities of immigrant minority pupils are constructed in a multicultural classroom in a Flemish primary school. From the analysis of the class teacher's discourse, it emerges that both Flemish native pupils' identities and those of immigrant minority pupils are constructed as homogeneous:…

Focusing on code-switching from conversation analysis and sociolinguistic perspectives, this paper examines interactions between 10-12-year-old language learners of immigrant origin and locally born students as they are engaging in verbal pair work. All are students attending language classes in state primary schools in Barcelona in which Catalan…

The data in this article comes from a larger 3-year ethnographic study that examines the transnational immigrant lives of second-generation Latina youth whose families reside in northern California and maintain close ties to small rural communities in western Mexico. In the course of the study, three bilingual youth and I developed a participatory…

This article documents tagging as one of several informal literacy practices used by newcomer Mexican youth in a Midwest school and classroom setting. Specifically, it details how tagging travels into the classroom. Using the tool of interactional ethnography to analyze videotaped classroom observation data of an English Learner Science setting, I…

In this article we examine the complexities of immigrant children's role as translators and linguistic mediators between their parents and their teachers during parent-teacher conferences. In our analyses, we first examine the linguistic structure of teachers' narratives about the children, and then look at how children construct their moral and…

What are the aspirations of Adult ESOL learners and what social and institutional factors constrain them? What are the consequent implications for Adult ESOL practitioners? This paper draws on a corpus of 76 interviews with adult migrants learning English in the UK, analyzing four of them in detail using a case study methodology. Despite the high…

This paper examines a discussion among a teacher and four Latin-American women in a family literacy class who engage for the first time in the practice of peer-editing a learner's text. In the analysis, it becomes evident that they have different ideas of and responses to the text. Whereas the teacher's focus is on revising the textual elements,…