Whole-body sense-making offers insights for the analysis of identity work in learning in multilingual classroom contexts. The concept has the potential to draw together two strands of classroom discourse scholarship, namely multilingual and multimodal discourse studies. The data presented in this paper constitutes a moment of whole-body…

Increasing international mobility has raised awareness on the fluidity and porous nature of boundaries not only between nation states, but also between named languages. Despite the complexities of overlaps across a wider spectrum of languages and classrooms worldwide, orthodox education programmes still reflect monolingual and epistemic biases,…

This study employed a metaphor analysis approach to investigate instructor language as it relates to the positioning of agency within a college developmental reading course context. Agency, or the socioculturally mediated potential to act, is a crucial part of self-regulated, self-efficacious learning and contributes to identity formation and…

For language teachers who are concerned about referring to their own and students' identities other than in the roles of "teacher" and "student" in the classroom, this conversation analytic study aims to give insights into the use of identity. Detailed analysis of the data of English for a Specific Purpose (ESP) classrooms…

This article examines multilingual interactions in the complementary school classroom for ethnic Chinese children in the UK. Through a detailed analysis of classroom exchanges amongst the children and their teachers, the study aims to demonstrate how they alternate between different varieties of Chinese and English and different modes of…

Scholars and practitioners have increasingly come to recognise the centrality of learner agency in generating learning opportunities. Such agency is most clearly observed in the initiatives that learners take in the language classroom. Despite the importance of learner initiatives, however, a precise and comprehensive understanding of what such…

This article explores the issue of identity as revealed by the discourse of two trainee teachers' microteaching classes which formed part of their vocational Masters programme in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages at the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland. Transcripts are used to explore possible modifications in ESL trainees'…