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 paper reports on a design experiment (Brown, 1992) where we explored how providing a linguistic support for understanding historical documents affected students comprehension of historical documents and their disciplinary literacy. The functional approach to disciplinary literacy parallels historians' reading practices while supporting…

The present study explores the ways in which peers take up a teacher-like discourse to enforce normative uses of language in a classroom, effectively socializing one another to the institutional use of English which in turn signals class membership. Such an uptake of teacher-like discourses and practices can be characterized as subteaching…

One of the common practices in many basic schools in Ghana is the constant reminder to students to speak English at all times, and the threat of sanctions to those who do not abide by this language regulation. Considering that Ghana is a multilingual country, one would have thought that any of the Ghanaian languages can be used by students at…

For over 15 years now, various commentators have highlighted the 'monolingual bias' inherent in SLA and TESOL research, which invariably constructs bi/multilingualism in deficit terms. In contrast, these critics have advocated an additive bilingual approach to SLA and TESOL, albeit, not as yet to any great effect. In this paper, I explore why so…

This paper deals with the ways in which minority students in the Danish public school system bring mono-lingually based norms into their poly-lingual peer group interaction. In sequential micro-analyses of interaction we show how the students use the voice of an authority in their reproduction and negotiation of linguistic norms. We base our…

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…

This paper considers the processes of using folk stories for the teaching of community languages in a UK complementary school. We look at the appropriation of folk stories by teachers to teach young people Mandarin while also considering their possibilities as heritage texts. We consider how the teacher and students use the folk story as…

This paper discusses the connection between language ideologies and educational migration. South Korea is experiencing a boom in short-term migration among pre-university students, a phenomenon known as "jogi yuhak." This trend is driven in part by ideologies that link valorized forms of English with specific geographical locations; but at the…

This paper explores rehearsals as a central learning structure of an urban youth organization. Drawing on research in participation, expertise, activity, multiliteracies, and situated cognition, it seeks to understand the extent to which the infrequently studied activity of rehearsal provides a space for cognitive growth. Using thematic coding and…

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…

This article explores the attribution of linguistic resources to multilingual students in a primary school in the Netherlands. Drawing on an ethnographic study of a regular, multicultural classroom, it describes patterns of attribution emerging from observations of classroom activities and interviews with the teacher. Its focus is on the…

This paper reports on an ethnographic study of classroom practices in a township school in the Wesbank settlement near Cape Town, South Africa. Focusing on the ways in which a multilingual and highly diverse student population confronts English literacy, we argue for a view in which norms are seen as emergent and contingent on occasion, place,…