This article compares metalinguistic awareness among emerging bilingual and multilingual learners of English in Norwegian primary school. Participants were 120 students in grades 5-7 (aged 10-13) attending mainstream English classes in Norway and were divided into three groups based on a linguistic background questionnaire: an L1 Norwegian group,…

Connections between linguistic heterogeneity, educational choices and (family) biographies are complex and ever shifting. With this paper, my aim is to explore the question how social spaces are constructed by multilingual families in migration societies and how they situate social spaces 'in between', thereby challenging both binary and national…

As international migration is becoming a commonplace phenomenon, there is a marked increase in the number of transnational multilingual families worldwide. This contribution examines the multilingual and multicultural identities and life stories of five transnational, multilingual immigrant couples residing in Norway and aims to contribute to the…

Translanguaging has increasingly been embraced in equity-oriented research on foreign language teaching, yet with variable engagement with complex models of culture. In this article, we investigate the nexus of translanguaging and culturally sustaining pedagogies (CSP) as one response to this shortcoming. Extending previous research theoretically…

Despite burgeoning research on translanguaging in education, research on translanguaging approaches to literacy education has lagged behind that of research on oral translanguaging in education. Hence, this article investigates what translanguaging strategies six multilingual newly arrived students used in the production of an academic text, and…

The "optimism hypothesis" claims that immigrant students do better in the Norwegian education system than their socioeconomic status would suggest, due to the strong educational aspirations that immigrant parents might have for their children. Grounded in an educational equity paradigm, this study aims to test this hypothesis by…

This article explores playfulness and creativity in translingual family interactions. In particular, it focuses on how and to what ends adolescents mobilize multilingual resources in family interactions. It investigates the cases of two multilingual families with adolescent children (13-18 years old). The families have different linguistic…

This article sets out to explore the relationships between parental language ideologies, and language use and negotiation in parent-child interaction. The primary dataset is composed of around 10 h of audio recordings of everyday interactions of family members (i.e. a Brazilian mother, a Norwegian father, and a 3-year old Norwegian born daughter)…

Multilingual families and their language policies have attracted considerable attention in recent sociolinguistic work. Adding to this line of research, this article focuses on a case study of a transnational Polish family living in Norway and investigates the role adolescent children may play in the formation of family language policies. To this…

The number of multilingual families in Norway has increased during the last decades, but there are no official statistics concerning the linguistic situation in Norway today. Immigrants account for 15% of the population. In addition, there are mixed-language families where one of the parents does not have Norwegian as his/her mother tongue. Most…

The aim of the paper is to understand how German speakers living in Norway with their families navigate partially shared repertoires. Using the notion of "legitimate peripheral participation," I aim to analyse how family members work towards shared repertoires in the family or account for only partially shared linguistic and cultural…

This study investigates how pre-service teachers (PSTs) negotiate an understanding of which multilingual practices are legitimate in mainstream education in Norway. Data were collected through seven focus groups with 24 PSTs participating in their first field placement. I designed three fictive vignettes about multilingual students in mainstream…

This volume is an important instalment in the rapidly expanding literature on multilingualism in education and language teaching. Within multilingual studies the volume is highly innovative in its application of the concept, theory and perspectives of the Dominant Language Constellations (DLC). The volume reports original research on language…

From a socio-cultural perspective, language offers a means for children to communicate with and learn from others through interaction: language is the medium through which young children are provided cognitive, social, and emotional support in interactions with caregivers, siblings, and peers; and children characterized as dual language learners…

The research question of the present paper is the following: to what degree (if any) is gender relevant as an explanatory factor in, firstly, the process of assimilation and later, the process of (re)vitalisation of indigenous and minority languages in northern Fenno-Scandia (the North Calotte)? The assimilation of the ethnic groups in question…