Modern Foreign Languages (MFL) as a secondary school subject is affected by two policies, namely the English Baccalaureate (EBacc) and Progress 8, which contribute to the measurement of performance in exams at age 16 (GCSEs). In this paper, I discuss the concept of performance measurement in schools and the purpose it purportedly serves, before…

This paper explores linguistic life-histories from five participants in a larger interview study with U.S.-based adults. These five interviewees were middle-class White women from monolingual English-speaking families who pursued multilingual learning trajectories in young adulthood. Having previously attained proficiency in one language through…

This article aims to complexify the linguistic dimension of international schooling in light of the increasing diversification of the field but also as a result of the 'banalisation' of English and the growing 'added' value of multilingual competence in the knowledge economy. Drawing on data from focus groups with mobile families and institutional…

Informed by Bourdieu's conceptualisation of habitus and its relation with social class, this study explores the construction and negotiation of middle-class identity among a group of urban overseas returnees in China. Using ethnographic interviews and online observational data, the study found that participants built a compliant identity…

This ethnographic study utilized border theory to examine how a bilingual Latinx teacher created equitable instruction for Mexican immigrant second-graders in a 50-50 dual-language (DL) classroom in the U.S. Midwest. Approximately half the students in the DL classroom came from Spanish-speaking, working-class homes, and half from English-speaking,…