This ethnography examines how teachers interpret and enact language-in-education policies in an adult ESL classroom in the United States, where students simultaneously received job training as Certified Nursing Assistants (CNAs). We draw on postmodern and interpretive lenses from the ethnography of communication, considering how workforce-oriented…

This article investigates how a contemporary urban vernacular (CUV) called Ortensvenska is used for social positioning at a prestigious inner-city Stockholm school. Previous studies have indicated that CUV is often a feature of those on the societal margins, but little research has focused on prestigious spaces where high-achieving students…

Discourse and identity practices in heritage language contexts have received significant attention in applied linguistics in recent years. One line of research in this realm has sought to adopt scales, the spatiotemporal niches within which social identification and learning take place. This article problematizes modernity as a scale of its own…

This paper uses a study of the withdrawal of English as a medium of instruction in Indonesian schools to examine the role of language in nation-building using the sociological concept of imaginary signification. The main reason for the withdrawal is located in the tension between two main imaginary significations of the nation's identity. The…

As part of an ethnographic study of a secondary English Language Arts classroom, one teacher took a critical translingual approach to curriculum and instruction, encouraging students to engage in translanguaging and to explore the intersections of language with power and identity. The larger study's central question was, what does participation in…

Based on an ethnography of a language policy in the region of Apurímac in the Peruvian Andes, I analyze the boundaries that are constructed by a community of practice of Quechua "experts" in a context where resources in the indigenous language become more valuable. Although the declared wish is to build a regional "us," Quechua…

Teacher identity has recently emerged as an important site of research, with studies focusing on various aspects of social identities. In this study, we employ a poststructuralist intersectionality framework to teacher identity using a duoethnographic approach as a research method. This involved using narratives to explore our professional…