For over a decade, the Department of Education in Papua New Guinea (PNG) has adopted vernacular education as a way of ensuring that the educational experiences of children in schools draw on the cultural and linguistic knowledge they bring to the classroom. In PNG, there are many potential vernaculars--apart from the local languages, there are Tok…

Although the Lao People's Democratic Republic has speakers of up to 230 different languages belonging to four ethnolinguistic families, the Lao Government's policy as stated in its Education Law is that Lao is the official language of education at all levels. This creates a challenging situation for teachers in ethnic minority villages throughout…

This paper examines bilingual children's use of language inside and out of the minority language classroom. A total of 145 children between 8 and 11 years of age, attending 16 bilingual Welsh-English primary schools in North Wales, responded to questionnaires (supplemented by classroom observations) requesting information about their language…

A strong case can be made for developing more flexible and relevant multilingual strategies for teaching and learning within the field of bilingual education. This paper aims to demonstrate how current linguistic and educational practices in countries like Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique and Ethiopia suggest new directions for research and practice. A…

The purpose of this mixed-methods study was to explore and identify issues related to training teachers to use a bilingual writing rubric designed to examine the biliterate writing of emerging bilingual students who are participating in a biliteracy model. Findings indicate the need to provide clarifications on the rubric rating criteria and the…

A framework for language planning categorizes 22 language planning goals in terms of the intersections between 3 types (status, corpus, and acquisition) and 2 approaches (policy and cultivation) of language planning. The model helps literacy developers to answer the question of which literacies to develop for what purpose. (Contains 44…

This study explores the literacy practices that are involved in transnational social and information networking among youths of immigrant backgrounds in the United States. In particular, it investigates the ways in which young migrants of diverse national origins in the United States are utilising digital media to organise social relationships…

This paper explores the social and cultural knowledge embedded in the textbooks for language and literacy education in a Chinese heritage language school, the Zhonguo School, in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. It examines how Chinese language arts textbooks introduce the child reader to cultural knowledge considered legitimate and valued in China as…

This paper draws on Wenger's model of community of practice to present preliminary findings on how processes of negotiation of meaning and identity formation occur in knowledge construction, meaning-making and interaction in two secondary Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) science classrooms. It uses a multimodal conversation analysis…

In a study of the verbal environment, teachers' language was analyzed in two different interactive contexts: when interacting with a different number of interlocutors, and when talking to children of different linguistic competence. Results show that in both interactive contexts teachers tend to adapt their linguistic style to the characteristics…

In many English as a Second Language (ESL) programs across the United States classroom teachers, ESL specialists, and bilingual paraprofessional share responsibility for teaching English language learners. Expectations of "shared responsibility" are constructed and negotiated through local discourses. This study explores how the roles and…

The hierarchical system of speech acts developed by Sinclair and Coulthard ("Towards an analysis of discourse: The English used by teachers and pupils." Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975) to describe interaction in traditional classrooms and later applied to face-to-face communication by Stenstrom ("An introduction to spoken interaction"…

Drawing on interviews, observations, and videorecorded data collected in a "sheltered" grade 7 social studies class in a Mid-western US city, the current paper explores the learning opportunities provided for English language learners (ELLs) and the discursive strategies used by a teacher, consciously or unconsciously, to help her students become…

We describe a collaborative project in which university researchers, teachers and Grade 4-5 English language learners (ELLs) investigated the sociohistorical contexts and practices in which the ELLs participate, through a "community scan". Many observers have argued that schools and teachers have such minimal knowledge of the…

Discusses globalization and diversification within four language issues for adult literacy: (1) the spread of a small number of world languages, (2) development of the varieties of language, (3) choice of language for education and official life, and (4) disappearing languages. (JP)