This study examines the social construction of proficiency and the discursive practices prevalent in linguistically diverse schools that afford or constrain participation in language learning communities. Drawing from discourse studies, positioning theory and a sociocultural framework, this study analyzed data from audio recordings and…

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…

In this article, I show that despite a seemingly inclusive, language-based identity promoted in schools and pedagogical materials, Basque identity and language are embedded with social histories that exclude large swaths of the would-be Basque nation: women and second language learners of Basque. To the extent that these processes continue to…

In this paper we describe an action-research project that our research team proposed to a group of teachers working in a special education school. The main idea was to introduce new methods to teach reading and writing in their school, mainly constructivist-based ones on teaching the function of writing text. In this paper we focus on the process…

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 studies high school classroom sequences, compiled through critical sociolinguistic ethnography, where norm-transgression is made explicit, and how authority is recovered by the teacher after an open period where class participants generally seize to digress. This way, we will be able to approach several dimensions of linguistic…

We describe the Situated Activity System of finishing craft assignments in preschool: the specific, routinized way that child and teacher jointly close the child's craft assignment, employing a specific discourse pattern. We analyzed the interactions of 14 Dutch children between 2.1 and 3.10 years old while they were finishing their craft…

We report an analysis of the language used by two instructors teaching two undergraduate mathematics classes that exhibited high student participation yet differed in their level of dialogical engagement. We focus on the way instructors' language contributes to opening or closing the opportunities for students' engagement with mathematical dialog,…

"Ingles Sin Barreras" is an English-language program that is highly advertised on Spanish-language television in the United States, to the point that it has become a pop-culture phenomenon. In this article, I argue that few people actually use it to learn English, but instead consume it as a symbol of national belonging. This article puts…

Global trends call for new research to investigate multimodal designing mediated by new technologies and the implications for classroom spaces. This article addresses the relationship between new technologies, students' multimodal designing, and the social production of classroom spaces. Multimodal semiotics and sociological principles are applied…

A teacher's language awareness (TLA) is generally believed to have a significant impact on grammar or form-focused (FonF) instruction. TLA has traditionally been assumed to be a cognitive construct. A more recent view on TLA argues for its sociocultural significance in second language learning. This paper builds on this recent view and attempts to…

Research on language classroom code-switching ranges from describing both teachers' and learners' first language and target language use to making connections between code-switching and student learning. However, few studies compare differences in practice between native and non-native speaker teachers and even fewer consider culture of learning…

Recent reforms to curriculum standards in China have highlighted for the first time "emotion and attitude education". This new focus is the pedagogic backdrop to the research reported in this article-an exploration of how evaluative stance is construed through the co-deployment of linguistic and visual resources in primary and secondary textbooks…

The "stigma" associated with ESL in K-12 public schools is a widely referenced if little explored topic. In this paper, I consider how this "stigma" was produced in a high school ESL class in Hawai'i, specifically, as it was licensed by and framed in terms of teaching students "respect." Based on analysis of two extended teacher-fronted…