This article centres on the narrative of Thuli, a 62-year-old black South African domestic worker taking English language literacy classes outside of Johannesburg, South Africa. For Thuli, English literacy is of vital importance because, as she claims, "if you don't have English, you're just as good as a dead person". Drawing primarily…

This paper explores the issue of native language (L1) use in adult English-as-a-second-language (ESL) classes, re-examining the belief that use of the students' L1 is detrimental to target language learning. We discuss research that (a) documents language use in several adult ESL classes in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, and (b) presents survey…

In South Africa, democratic consolidation involves not only building a new state, but also new interfaces between state and society. To strengthen the agency of citizens at these interfaces, recent approaches to development stress the notion of "participatory citizenship." The purpose of this article is to explore the links, rarely…

Three Southeast Asian polities, Cambodia, Laos and Thailand share much of their geography, history, culture, religion and language. Not all speakers of more than 100 languages spoken in the area have a sufficient knowledge of the respective national languages, Khmer, Lao and Thai. Yet, for the most part, the national languages are the only…