The use of students' first language (L1) in additional language (L2) instruction has been a recurring theme in language education research. While research has documented the amount of L1 use and its purposes in L2 instruction, little research has investigated the multifaceted motives that influence language choices at the micro level of social…

This article theorizes translanguaging as a space of simultaneity to analyze how teachers use translanguaging to create a multilingual classroom space and engage students with their multilingual identities and epistemologies in the classroom. The data in this article are drawn from an ethnographic study of language policies and practices in a…

For many children in Flanders, Belgium, the language of instruction is not their first language. Allowing children to use their heritage languages in the classroom has been argued to have functional and socioemotional benefits. In two exploratory studies, we introduced a multilingual task in four classrooms across three linguistically and socially…

One of the central considerations in the validity argument for the TOEFL iBT is the relationship between the language on the exam and the language required for university courses. Corpus linguistics has recently been shown to be an effective way to explore this relationship, which can also be considered as an aspect of authenticity. Applying…

This article explores the identities of a group of elementary teachers who participated in a professional development (PD) project on multilingual language learners. We study how the participating teachers drew on different aspects of their identities to respond to encouragement to increase their attention to students' diverse multilingual…

This article reports analysis of data collected from a quasi-experimental study in 2 Canadian late French immersion science classes. We examine if, how, and when the first language (L1) is used when students in the first years of their second language learning talk about complex science concepts. We compare differences in groups following a…

Discussions of multilingualism in education, as exemplified by the articles in this issue, can be critically reevaluated using perspectives available from poststructuralism. These perspectives focus on the potential ambiguity of language and language practices. This, in turn, encourages us to question simple notions of the relationship of learners…