This study explored how ideologies of language and literacy and social and academic identities were constructed and contested during a literature discussion. In the event, a group of five (and later six) boys in a fourth grade bilingual classroom attempt to identify an unknown word in their novel: booger. Microethnographic discourse analysis and…

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…

This study presents a sequential analysis of the enactment of teacher identity in closing disagreements among students in small group peer interactions in an advanced academic writing class. In doing so, it discusses: (a) the micro-details of how oppositional stances and opinions are constructed, challenged and/or defended; (b) the sequential…

Using discourse analytic methodology, this study examines video data collected during a social group intervention designed to promote engagement between teens with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) and their peers. The analysis focuses on the interactive means by which the participants construct the identity of the group member with an ASD,…

This article examines email exchanges between eight Master's-level school counseling student interns and their internship supervisor to investigate how politeness strategies contribute to professional identity development in supervisory discourse. Our analysis demonstrates how identity development occurs via collaborative facework accomplished…

This paper offers detailed analysis of ethnographic data concerning an adult literacy student producing and discussing a text about China, using the framework for investigating the discoursal construction of writer identity developed by Burgess and Ivanic (2010). It sheds light on how writer identity changes and develops over time by showing how…

Undocumented migration is a major demographic trend, yet both under researched and under-theorized. This is particularly the case for undocumented students in the U.S., as most studies that target this population have spotlighted extraordinary adolescents (e.g., Gonzales, 2008). Much less is known about the everyday unextraordinary experiences of…

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…

This paper examines students' activity during reading hour in a multicultural secondary school in Madrid (Spain). It discusses two dimensions of the event: (1) How elements such as body posture, reading volume, reading speed and clarity were used by students to position themselves in relation to their linguistic competencies, the social order of…

Drawing mainly on Pierre Bourdieu's notions of symbolic capital, Bakhtin's concept of voice and heteroglossia in the novel, and Gee's theory of Discourses and the term third space as applied in education, I construct a theoretical framework for heritage language (HL) literacy and identity processes. I propose that HL literacy acquisition be viewed…

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…

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…

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:…