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…

The number of international students in U.S. higher education has increased in recent years. Many of these students face English language challenges, but we know little about what faculty across the disciplines are doing to support their linguistic needs. This article presents findings from a qualitative study comprised of interviews with 15…

This paper explores how the discourse of Japanese ethnolinguistic identity differently affected three youths in a heritage language class in Australia. Based on a case study involving these informants, I show how the discourse was contested, reproduced, and appropriated. More specifically, I show how language was disaligned from ethnicity and…

This paper focusses on the process of learning mathematics in primary school from the perspectives of 62 girls aged seven to 11. For many of these Singaporean girls, English is not the dominant home language, but they all learn mathematics in English. Despite the fact that achievement in mathematics is high nationally, girls appear to be less…

Reading identities, or the ways that a child constructs the self as a reader across contexts and time, play a role in the development of early reading. Prior research on reading identities has reported primarily on the identities of monolingual children. This multiple case study examines the reading identities of young multilingual children.…

U.S. Latinx youth from immigrant backgrounds bring to schools their transnational literacies, complex lived experiences of marginalization and resistance, and politicized translanguaging practices that are seldom recognized in classrooms. This article examines U.S. Latinx bilingual youth who participated in a podcast project within a…

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…

Informed by the stories of transnational youth's participation in massive multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) in Mexico, this study explores the language/identity development and successful (re)integration of these youth in Mexican schools and communities. Drawing on students' voices, we utilize a multimodal systemic functional…

Currently, there is limited research examining the barriers that immigrant professionals experience when becoming a bilingual teacher in the United States. This study examines the trajectory of a Mexican national, trained as a teacher in his home country, who became a bilingual dual-language educator in a Central Texas school district. Drawing on…

This study examined the role of written feedback in the academic discourse socialization of second language doctoral students at a Canadian research university. Using a second language socialization framework, and foregrounding the sociocultural and interactional contexts of language learning and use, this article considers written feedback to be…

Focusing on five initially committed learners of Chinese who decide to quit the language during their college freshman year, this study is a critique of the institutional structure that disengages foreign language education in American postsecondary schools. The findings reveal three structural issues that may contribute to the declining…

We suggest that while Indigenous languages are threatened by capitalist and neoliberal encroachments, responses from applied linguists in the academy can be misguided. To make our argument, we must first define neoliberalism, and examine how the broader neoliberal discourses of choice, competition and the free market have percolated and distilled…

This study explored how 296 U.S. learners of five foreign languages (FLs), including German, imagined stereotypical native speakers (NSs) and likely learners of German. Results showed that (a) when students of different languages imagined NSs of German, they emphasized different stereotypes; learners of German named the most and the most diverse…

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…

This study used peer-led focus groups to investigate heritage language (HL) and second language (L2) students' language ideologies and identities in "mixed" Spanish courses. We analyzed students' perceptions of themselves and each other, their understandings of fairness in mixed classes, and the relationship of such perceptions to…