Trickle-down economics is a fallacious metaphor that hurts working people and the civic commons. In this paper, we discuss the role and impact metaphors have in economics education. We explore the stickiness of "truthy" but ultimately false metaphors and offer economics educators alternative metaphors to displace this problematic…

This study seeks to understand the role of family language policy (FLP) in the process of language shift from Bantu languages into Portuguese, the powerful and prestigious language in Mozambique. The study is based on thematic analysis of semi-structured focus group interviews with urban middle class parents of young citizens born after the…

China is a nation with linguistic and ethnic diversity. Putonghua, which translates to "common language" is the common spoken language in mainland China, also known as Standard Chinese historically and Mandarin Chinese in English, has been actively promoted for over half a century aiming at facilitating communication among people with…

Families' mealtime talk has significant implications for children's language development. This study investigated five middle-class Australian Chinese families that differ in their lifestyles and meal routines. It aims to explore: (1) the nature of the Chinese parents' language use in interactions with children at mealtime; and (2) the factors…

This article aims to complexify the linguistic dimension of international schooling in light of the increasing diversification of the field but also as a result of the 'banalisation' of English and the growing 'added' value of multilingual competence in the knowledge economy. Drawing on data from focus groups with mobile families and institutional…

In this study, we revisit the status of English relative to the African languages in South Africa by analysing new national data on the main language spoken outside the home. These data, which derive from the General Household Surveys of 2017 and 2018, complement commonly collected data on the main language spoken within the home. Our analysis…

This paper investigates the language fluency problems of skilled immigrants from mainland China to Canada. It capitalises on interview data to explore the relationships between Chinese immigrants' identities, second language practices, and language skills. It reports the informants' difficulty in integrating into their workplaces and their…

This ethnographic study utilized border theory to examine how a bilingual Latinx teacher created equitable instruction for Mexican immigrant second-graders in a 50-50 dual-language (DL) classroom in the U.S. Midwest. Approximately half the students in the DL classroom came from Spanish-speaking, working-class homes, and half from English-speaking,…

Prior research has investigated the relation between children's language and spatial cognition by assessing the quantity of children's spatial word production, with limited attention to the context in which children use such words. This study tested whether 4-year-olds children's (N = 41, primarily white middle class) adaptive use of task-relevant…

Becoming an effective literacy specialist means developing tools to support students' and teachers' reading and writing aspirations. They are thought to be self critical and respectful of their students' and colleagues' strengths, however, this is not easy. This case study examined the discourses and identities of a highly reflective white female…

This paper explores the language ideologies of three middle-class migrant Greek families in Luxembourg, one 'established' family and two 'new' crisis-led migrant families, all of whose children attend Luxembourgish state schools. While the families differ in terms of migration trajectory, their language ideologies converge. The findings of this…

In the multilingual, multicultural emerging economy of India, the language debate may seem to have settled with the adoption of the Three-Language Formula in the first National Policy of Education 1968. However, 50 years later, does this policy still hold? Has research on language acquisition informed our education policy and classroom practices,…

The aim of this study was to determine the effects of age and family socioeconomic status (SES) on the evaluative language performance of Mandarin-Chinese-speaking young children and their mothers. The participants were 65 mother-child dyads recruited in Taiwan. Thirty-four of these dyads were from middle-class families and 31 were from…

In undertaking a critical discourse analysis of the professed aims and objectives of one of the most influential curricula in the teaching of thinking, this article foregrounds issues of power and ideology latent in curricular discourses of rationality. Specifically, it documents the subtle but powerful ways in which political and class…

Why do children from some minority groups and children living in poverty do poorly in school when compared to white middle-class children? Researchers have offered a large number of different answers to this question. One of the most popular answers has been based on the notion of "decontextualized language." This article argues that…