News media plays a crucial role in the student loan policy ecosystem by influencing how policymakers and the public understand the "problem" of student loans. Prior research emphasizes the causal impact of the media on the social construction of policy issues and the lack of knowledge about the authors of news articles. Theory also…

This paper uses a modest finding from a research study as a window into the world of social work education in Scotland. The study demonstrated that students believed by their classmates to be most dominant (white, straight men) were in fact the most reluctant to speak out. This finding is woven into an examination of a social work pedagogy…

This study investigates the realisation of apology speech act strategies of Bahasa Indonesia by 60 Indonesian people from across Indonesia as well as their perceptions and evaluations of apologies. For triangulation, the data was collected using three methods: Oral Discourse Completion Task (DCT), Likert scale surveys, and in-depth interviews. The…

As few studies have investigated how pre-school children produce and negotiate social positions when powerful positions are claimed, this study explores how 3-5 year-old children construct the social order of peer play when balancing the power game within the interaction. This is a video documented ethnographical case study where the methodology…

This research, conducted at a major university in Tanzania, investigated the personal experiences of multilingual students vis-à-vis the government's language policy requiring Swahili as the language of instruction (LoI) at the primary level and English at the secondary level. The participants, who spoke 25 different languages as their L1, were…

The objective of the study is to explore the possibilities of pedagogical translanguaging as a strategy to develop critical language awareness among a group of primary school students from the Basque Autonomous Community (Spain). The study is part of a broader ethnographically based research project, which was developed over two school years in…

The contribution seeks to apply the principles of J. L. Austin's speech-act theories to the study of local business segregation in the Jim Crow South. In particular, it borrows the notions of illocutionary and perlocutionary force when examining the seemingly bland and prosaic statements that are often used to normalise segregation within the…

Linguistic landscaping is an emerging field of sociolinguistics exploring language in its textual form in the public sphere. Studies on Linguistic Landscape (LL) can be used as a tool to interpret language vitality in a given territory. The present study investigates visibility and vitality of languages in public space of Bihta, an upcoming…

Quality education is increasingly considered essential for human development. However, the mainstream approach to quality as a neutral technology often ignores deeply embedded issues of power relations. This article interrogates the taken-for-granted idea of 'quality education' by exploring the ways in which students navigate the assumption of…

This article centers on the discursive moves that two adolescent girls in rural Appalachia use to negotiate dominant discourses regarding Appalachian identity and language. The data is drawn from a year-long critical ethnographic teacher-researcher study in a senior English class located within a rural high school in the Appalachian region of the…

This study investigates the multilingual practices and ideologies of North Korean refugee students in neoliberal South Korean society. Language tracking forms were completed over a seven-day period and individual interviews about participants' perceptions of English, Chinese, South Korean, and North Korean were conducted. The findings show that…

Transnational mobility results in a diversification of languages and cultures in the workplace. A common means of managing this diversity is to introduce language policies that often privilege English or the locally dominant language(s). In contrast, managing their everyday working lives may require employees to draw on a range of multilingual and…

When academics, who occupy a traditional position of power and privilege, engage with community members whose thinking, attitudes, and responses have been shaped by ongoing sociohistorical oppression and disadvantage, democratic participation is not easy to attain. Yet, unless community members feel able to participate freely, the valuable local…

Two middle school teachers consider the function of the word popular in middle school life and illustrate that the lesser used term powerful is often more applicable. They offer an alternative vocabulary for social standing and examine the factors that can influence that standing. By discussing the manifold ways that the social life of students…

Secondary English teachers are charged with helping all students to read, write, and understand English in its many forms and functions. However, students' language can be as diverse as the literature teachers bring to the classroom. Not all students come to the classroom with the skills to write standardized English; even fewer students come with…