This article examines ethnographic data that show Belgian adolescents of Moroccan descent stylizing Standard Dutch. Analysis addresses the importance of this variety in Belgian-Flemish society and in the school these boys attended, and shows how in interviews with Moroccan boys the hegemonic status of this variety is generally accepted. In…

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 analyses the contribution of student agency and teacher contingency in the construction of classroom discourse in adult English for speakers of other languages (ESOL) classes for refugees and asylum seekers, for whom the identity of student itself can constitute a stable point in a highly unstable and potentially threatening lifeworld.…

This is a study of the assessment of the speaking skills of adult learners of English for speakers of other languages (ESOL). It is prompted by a concern that participants can have differing expectations of what nature of speech event a speaking test actually is. This concern was identified during the administration and analysis of assessments…

This article begins by arguing for some bridge building in ESOL research between what is often seen as a quantitative/qualitative dichotomy. Instead of taking up a position on one side or the other, the differences are construed as different ways of seeing, depending upon the nature of the research questions asked. As a qualitative researcher by…

Research in the field of adult ESOL internationally is both spasmodic and fragmentary. The papers in this special issue therefore constitute a major contribution to the field by providing new insights into ESOL research from the perspective of current pedagogical practices in the British context. In this paper, I provide a response to this…

This article examines how question-answer sequences are constructed in primary school instructional activities. The interaction between teacher and students in two 3rd-year groups is analyzed using a conversation-analytic approach. Four questioning patterns--"yes-no, alternative, wh-questions", and a "non-interrogative format" very frequently used…

This paper examines the relationship between policy and politics in relation to the development of public-sector primary education through Breton and Gaelic, considering closely the patterns of power through which such provision is delivered. Brittany and Scotland present many similarities as culturally distinctive territories, contained within…

Stance-taking and stance-support are two discourse behaviours that define the expository/argumentative essay genre, the mastery of which is the key to academic success in higher education. The aim of this study is to discover the extent to which a group of high school students from a non-native English-speaking background are capable of engaging…

Researchers and instructors have been interested in the investigation and teaching of formulaic sequences for the past four decades. In academic writing, for example, these expressions are extremely frequent in the production of published authors in academic disciplines but rarely used by university students. The present study focused on the…

The paper explores the manner in which written texts are selected and used in the adult English for speakers of other languages (ESOL) classroom. Taking a sociocultural view of the reading process and of the nature of text, it argues that ESOL students have potentially rich textual resources, which are typically not acknowledged in the classroom:…

This article uses a functional view of language to frame and analyze issues of language and content in mainstream classrooms. Describing a Western Canadian grade one/two science class, it examines how a teacher and her class of young ESL students were able to build up a simple theory of magnetism in a scientific register, link its technical terms…

One of the central concerns of English as a Second Language (ESL) education within many English-speaking countries has been the relationship between content and language teaching. In Victoria, a state of Australia, the educational policy of mainstreaming ESL is presented as a means of catering to the language learning needs of ESL students within…

Research into the teaching and learning of language and content in mainstream classrooms research tends to treat content as a fixed body of knowledge to be (re)constructed by learners. There is little research which seeks to understand how language and the curriculum are constructed and related in interaction by learners. In this paper, I report…

Much of the content-based language teaching (CBLT) literature describes the benefits to be gained by integrating content with language teaching aims and rejects the formal separation between "content" and "language" as a pedagogic necessity for language learning. This paper looks at interactions in classrooms in English schools where educational…