The use of home languages has previously been advocated in highly multilingual UK classrooms. However, drawing on the home languages and cultural insight of children who use English as an Additional Language (EAL) may also have important social and academic benefits in contexts where monolingualism is the norm. Conducted in a small local authority…

Previous studies have demonstrated how primary-school-aged children learning a minority language at school revert to the use of their dominant L1 in peer-peer situations, both within and outside the classroom. Identifying the cause of this pattern is central to language policy strategies and initiatives across many minority language regions, and…

This study critically examines the literacy levels of undergraduate students in Pakistan to compare and contrast the proficiency levels, particularly reading and writing of their mother tongues versus Urdu and English, and to study real and perceived vitality of local/regional mother tongues vis-à-vis Urdu and English. The research investigated…

This article focuses on the English language experiences of a group of pre-sessional students, an under-represented group in the literature on language and education. In particular, it investigates the opportunities that such students have to use English outside the classroom, shown to be a key factor in student satisfaction with their study…

This paper examines bilingual children's use of language inside and out of the minority language classroom. A total of 145 children between 8 and 11 years of age, attending 16 bilingual Welsh-English primary schools in North Wales, responded to questionnaires (supplemented by classroom observations) requesting information about their language…

Research conducted in the 1980s and 1990s pointed to a widening gap on Hong Kong university campuses between institutional language policy, which stipulated the use of English, and classroom practice, which often involved the use of Cantonese to explain and discuss English written materials. This article presents the findings of a multidimensional…

The multifaceted ways in which English Language Learners (ELLs) engage in "acts of identity" (Le Page & Tabouret-Keller, 1985) through their language use have created new challenges for ESL pedagogy. Heterogeneous identities have called into question the native speaker construct and the assumed links between ethnicity and language expertise.…