This article focuses on the ever-increasing stress on multilingual education (MLE) in policy documents, especially its pairing with mother tongues in education (MTE). This focus brings into relief the relationship between MTE, the preservation of linguistic diversity and social democracy. We argue that the outcome of this relationship crucially…

Due to the increased mobility and linguistic and cultural diversity internationally, there has been a renewed interest in the linguistic practices of immigrant families. Earlier scholarship focused on the difference between parenting in monolingual contexts and bilingual parenting conceptualised as management of more than one language in a family.…

Families engage in a range of cultural practices in their everyday lives that shape children's early literacies. Given the growing number of children who are living outside the country of their birth or their parents' birth, more research is needed to highlight the under-recognised literacies of young children shaped by their family cultural…

A growing body of research on identity and language learning has investigated how immigrant learners construct their identities in the process of acquiring a second language (L2). Much of the research, however, is situated in Western contexts. This study looks at how three Thai immigrants acquired an L2, Cantonese, and constructed their identities…

The dissertation focuses on the Chinese literacy experiences of different generations of Thai Chinese families in Thailand, spanning periods characterized by varying ideologies toward the Chinese language, which have either constrained or facilitated its acquisition. This qualitative work examines how evolving national policies and international…

Storytelling passes down traditions and values while preserving languages and serving as a natural site for linguistic innovation and creativity. This article describes an approach to creating multilingual, multimodal stories that were developed for an after-school club at a rural Tanzanian secondary school. Club members told stories, wrote…

While the majority of children in Sweden attend preschool, children of immigrant background have lower enrollment rates. Limited research has explored why immigrant families do not attend preschool. This study helps to fill this void by exploring the perspectives of 10 skilled immigrant mothers who do not send their children to preschool. Data…

This dissertation focuses on the consequences of exclusionary ethnic nationalisms by examining historical and contemporary language practices regarding educational systems in Burma. Despite its long presence, Burmanisation has recently gained heightened attention as it is central to the political discourses that emerged in response to the military…

Coloniality in education and language policies continues to impact Indigenous communities in implicit and complex ways. In this article, we describe the case of Colombia where, like in many other countries in the Global South, educational policy messages are contradictory. While ethno-education policies purport to sustain Indigenous languages and…

Using transnational literacies as the theoretical framework, this qualitative case study explores the transnational language and literacy practices of one female China-U.S. transnational adolescent, Meiyi, and her family. The data corpus includes critical ethnographic data generated over 3 years. Through data generation and analysis guided by…

The study of family language policy has emerged as a significant domain for multilingual development, language maintenance and cultural continuity. Family Language Policy seeks to connect the studies of child language acquisition with the field of language policy research in its approach to understand language maintenance and shift among different…

Drawing on Asian Critical Race Theory, this qualitative case study analyzed first-generation Chinese immigrant parents' language ideologies on their children's heritage language (HL) maintenance in the United States. The findings revealed parents' persistence in preserving their HLs for their children, as they considered HLs to be an integral…

Indigenous language revitalization (ILR), or the act of reversing the language shift from English back to Native languages, is an essential task. Since their inception, tribal colleges and universities (TCUs) have worked to support and often lead language communities in this task. Since its beginning, Sitting Bull College (SBC), located on the…

This article promotes a grounded approach to Indigenous language revitalization that honours Indigenous peoples' desire to restore Indigenous language use in their daily lives. The approach offers a way of revitalizing Indigenous languages by reintegrating them into Indigenous social life and an Indigenous way of learning, thus also sustaining and…

Second language research has traditionally been characterized by the cognitive perspective which focuses on how the individual processes language. There has been an emerging trend over the past few decades on taking into consideration the social influences on second language learning based on diverse theoretical frameworks. Research on second…