The manuscript describes Chinese immigrant children's literacy and identity in online and in-person Chinese heritage language classrooms. The theoretical perspectives on multimodality and positioning theory are utilized as theoretical perspectives. The data were collected with the same heritage language teacher and the students during the COVID-19…

This article focuses on the pedagogical beliefs, practices and ideological assumptions of 15 teachers who work with mother tongue instruction in Sweden. Despite support through provisions in Swedish laws, mother tongue instruction is clearly a marginalized subject, not least due to its non-mandatory status, the limited time allocated for it and…

This article draws on research carried out in a Chinese complementary school in Scotland. The research focused on children's experience of learning to read Chinese and on the strategies that they used to support their learning. Here, I provide an account of one particular aspect of this research, namely the creation of a dialogic space for…

This article builds on the growing research interest in complementary schooling in England and internationally but a field of study less well trodden in Scotland. It takes a socio-cultural view of literacy learning and demonstrates how in a Chinese complementary school in central Scotland, spaces are created for children of primary-school age to…

Literacy has been a crucial aspect of education as a human right for over 50 years, but this basic right remains unassured for at least 700 million adults worldwide. In 1999, UNESCO acknowledged that schools are not making the expected contribution to increasing national literacy rates or providing individuals with the literacy skills they need.…

Recently throughout Africa, there has been an increase in mother tongue primary education in minority language communities. There are many reasons for justifying this innovation, one of which is that local cultures are strengthened by mother tongue literacy. This paper examines the link between literacy and culture through the outcomes of a series…

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 explores the ways in which dual language books are used in England to support bilingual pupils in school. While pupils in many schools speak a wide range of languages at home, these hardly feature in the curriculum. In the context of a project in which an education authority provided dual language books to primary schools, the paper…

This paper explores the effectiveness of initial vernacular education for successful transfer to English. The data is drawn from the personal, innovative experiences of a local vernacular elementary school teacher in Papua New Guinea, who helped individual children to gain literacy skills in the local vernacular. As a result, the children were…