Taking the Norwegian construction industry as its site of study, this article discusses under which conditions migrant workers in the Norwegian construction industry obtain the status as new speakers in the workplace. These conditions are determined by language proficiency requirements and speaker hierarchies that are constructed through language…

Since its publication in 2001, the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) has become a highly influential means of describing language proficiency. Its spread has, however, been marked by contradictions, since the framework has been appropriated in the service of a variety of different policy agendas. In this paper, I argue…

Against the backdrop of growing sociolinguistic interest in transnationalism, this paper uses the notion of "scale" as an "ideological project" (Irvine in "Scale. Discourse and dimensions of social life," University of California Press, California, 2016: 214) to study situated discursive performances of…

Scholars have demonstrated that small-scale relatively private family decisions about language are intertwined with parental language ideologies. Using data from the context of multilingual Central Asian families--including those living in Central Asia and those living abroad--this study employs socially situated analysis of discourse and…

Dual language (DL) programs propose to be vehicles of social justice and transformation by valuing an additional language other than the dominant one in a society and thereby contesting language hierarchies and the subordination of those who speak/use a non-dominant language (Flores, Flores, Educational Policy 30:13-38, 2016; Menken and García,…

I analyze two bills from the state legislatures of California (SB 1174) and Arizona (SB 1242) that propose to expand bilingual education where English-only education was previously the default. Using a critical discourse analysis lens to conduct a directed content analysis, I ask who bilingual education is for, why it is offered, and how the…

An invitation to integrate macro and micro level analyses has been extended to researchers as this integration is felt to be the way forward for language policy research (Ricento, Ideology, politics and language policies: Focus on english, John Benjamins, Amsterdam, 2000). In turn, the notion of 'micro' in language policy has been specified as…

Several states, including Arizona, have enacted English-only legislation, within the past decade, impacting the schooling of students who are identified as English language learner (ELLS). As a result, ELLS in Arizona are assigned to a prescriptive program--apart from their fluent English-speaking peers--for 4 h a day, during a time "not…

Family language policy refers to explicit and overt decisions parents make about language use and language learning as well as implicit processes that legitimize certain language and literacy practices over others in the home. Studies in family language policy have emphasized the ways in which family-internal processes are shaped by and shape…