This article extends two conversations in the heritage language (HL) scholarship: 1) the need to strengthen the linguistic self-confidence among receptive bilinguals (who are typically associated with beginning-level HL students); 2) the need for more critical explorations of receptive bilinguals' self-reported, albeit minimal, spoken Spanish in…

The authors present three distinct cases of English-Spanish bilinguals on the U.S.-Mexico border to illustrate how legitimate and authentic language use functions as forms of symbolic capital (P. Bourdieu, 1991). Language practices in the occupational domain exemplify how varieties of English and Spanish come into contact, are negotiated, and…

In the past three decades or so, the conceptual rigor of intertextuality has exercised enormous influence on pedagogical practices. In this context, intertextuality can also be used as a means of harnessing students' critical stances that are crucial for teaching language skills. Based on eight qualitative student interviews at a university in…

This article discusses the results of an empirical study that examined young bilingual students' discussions of picture books dealing with gender themes in a Spanish/English bilingual classroom. The study focused on the reading of five picture books by sixteen 5-year-old Mexican-origin children at a small charter school. The data were collected by…

Recent conservative reviews of Australia's national English curriculum argue for a return to less critical approaches to English language education and a stronger emphasis on traditional, functional approaches to provide adequate English learning experiences for school-age students. This neoliberal shift poses a threat to adolescent learners from…

Research in English language teaching and teacher identity has increasingly focused on understanding non-native English-speaking teachers. In addition, much of this research has been conducted in adult English as a second language (ESL) settings. Through a multiple-case qualitative study of four teachers in an underexplored research setting--that…

This research is an ethnographic case study of a book group focusing on the reading and teaching of multicultural literature in a rural, predominately white, middle school setting. We examine how participants co-constructed teacher identities through the parallel narratives they created about themselves and their students. We discovered that the…

This article focuses in two ways on Daisaku Ikeda (b. 1928) and language and culture education. First, the author excerpts Ikeda's translated and lesser-known Japanese speeches to explicate his view of world language learning and cultural exchange as curricular components of a broader educational philosophy for becoming "fully human." Second, the…

This critical instrumental case study examines a transformative world language learning approach to a unit on culture in an introductory Japanese class in a public high school. Couched in recent post-9/11 language "policy" debates, which strikingly lack mention of religion, spirituality, or environmental issues of climate change and…

Studies have shown that learners with high degrees of socialization with the target language community acquire the target language better (Lybeck, 2002; Schumann, 1978). Milroy's (1987) use of social network theory in sociolinguistics indicates that socialization patterns are constituted by structural relationships of different types and…

Building on previous critical research regarding student resistance to English Language Teaching (ELT), this paper illustrates Chilean high-school English teachers' use of narrative to make sense of ideological challenges from students. While the government of Chile is promoting English in connection with the nation's export-oriented economic…