This paper investigates a monolingual approach to the teaching of linguistic minority pupils in an English primary school at Key Stage Two (7-11 years old). The work is based on a longitudinal case study of one Russian-speaking migrant pupil and her schooled experience. The analysis and discussion explicate the prohibition of the first or home…

There can be significant diversity in the language experience of minority language children, and in the levels of proficiency reached. The declining numbers of children now exposed to Irish include those from homes where only/mainly Irish is spoken, those with only one Irish-speaking parent, and children from homes where one/both parent(s) speak…

The UK is linguistically rich but faces a reducing uptake of language learning in schools, as pupils feel more withdrawn and disinterested in learning an additional language to English. A key component in many linguistic minority communities to preserve their language is complementary schooling (CS), which has wide-ranging educational and societal…

This article analyses the construction of linguistic value and recognition of linguistic resources in educational spaces in Finland, where Swedish is the second national language and in Sweden, where Finnish is one of five official minority languages. Drawing on ethnographic methods, critically informed notions of language policy and spatial…

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…

In 2000, voters in the US state of Arizona passed Proposition 203 "English for the Children," effectively abolishing bilingual education services in favor of a submersion approach termed Sheltered English Immersion. In this discussion, I use an ethnographic lens to highlight the logistical complexities involved in the negotiation of…

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…

Due to growth in immigration to the Republic of Ireland, the number of language minority students enrolling in primary schools has increased substantially over the last 10 years. The Irish context is a particularly interesting one in that until recently Ireland was a country of net emigration with limited experience of cultural diversity. An…

This paper discusses ways in which young bilingual children understand the principles underlying different writing systems. Six case studies were conducted, involving six-year-olds growing up in London who were learning to write in Chinese, Arabic or Spanish at the same time as English. The children's formal and informal literacy interactions were…