This colloquium discussed a multilingual approach to language learning, language teaching and language assessment in school settings. This approach implies looking at language acquisition and use from a holistic perspective, taking into account not only the target language but all the languages known by the learner; such a perspective brings…

By extending the notion of metroethnicity, this paper proposes the notion of metrolingualism, creative linguistic practices across borders of culture, history and politics. Metrolingualism gives us a way to move beyond current terms such as "multilingualism" and "multiculturalism". It is a product of modern and often urban interaction, describing…

The widespread use of cell phones has led to the proliferation of messages sent using the Short Messaging Service (SMS). The 160-character limit on text messages encourages the use of shortenings and other shortcuts in language use. When bilingual speakers use SMS, their access to multiple sources of vocabulary, sentence structure, and other…

English, French, and bilingual English-French 17-month-old infants were compared for their performance on a word learning task using the Switch task. Object names presented a /b/ vs. /g/ contrast that is phonemic in both English and French, and auditory strings comprised English and French pronunciations by an adult bilingual. Infants were…

This article examines what we call "micro-level language policy-in-process"--that is, how a target--language-only policy emerges "in situ" in the foreign language classroom. More precisely, we investigate the role of "language policing", the mechanism deployed by the teacher and/or pupils to (re-)establish the…

The purpose of the present study is to investigate the mediational function of the gesture-speech interface in the instructional conversation that emerged as teachers attempted to explain the meaning of English words to their students in two EFL classrooms in the Ukraine. Its analytical framework is provided by Vygotsky's sociocultural psychology…

Language, literacy, and culture intersect almost everywhere, of course. I analyze three phenomena where intersections occur between cognitive skills, personal attitudes, social practices, and macro-societal structures in ways that are salient, puzzling, and also illuminating about the multiple dimensions of learning literacy in situations of…

This work explores the use of multimodal communication in a community of expert "World of Warcraft"® players and its impact on politeness, identity, and relationships. Players in the community regularly communicated using three linguistic modes quasi-simultaneously: text chat, voice chat, and face-to-face interaction. Using the…

This paper investigates the use of multilingual resources by plurilingual participants in two English language classrooms in Luxembourg. Using Conversation Analysis and drawing on transcriptions of video-recordings, we present three examples of student use of multilingual resources and their respective teacher next turn management (through…

The use of students' mother tongue (MT/L1) in the second/foreign language classroom has been debated in language teaching theory and practice for many decades. Most language teaching methods advocate the use of the target language (TL) in the classroom. However, recent research has elevated the role of L1 in the classroom. This paper illustrates…

Morpho-syntactic features of Modern Standard Arabic mix intricately with those of Egyptian Colloquial Arabic in ordinary speech. I study the lexical, phonological and syntactic features of verb phrase morphemes and constituents in different tenses, aspects, moods. A corpus of over 3000 phrases was collected from religious, political/economic and…

This qualitative study examined code-switching patterns in the writing-related talk of 6 emergent Spanish-English bilingual first-grade children. Audio recordings, field notes, and writing artifacts documenting participant activities and language use in Spanish and English writing workshops were gathered over the course of 6 months and analyzed…

Following from Lewis, Jones, and Baker (this issue), this article analyses the relationship between the new concept of "translanguaging" particularly in the classroom context and more historic terms such as code-switching and translation, indicating differences in (socio)linguistic and ideological understandings as well as in classroom…

This volume presents the latest research from internationally recognized researchers and practitioners on language, literacy and numeracy, cognition, and social and emotional development of deaf learners. In their contributions, authors sketch the backgrounds and contexts of their research, take interdisciplinary perspectives in merging their own…

English and French have been retained by Vanuatu's education system as the two media of instruction. Other languages are ignored and often explicitly banned by school policies. However, code-switching between the official and other languages is common, with particularly frequent use of Bislama, the national dialect of Melanesian Pidgin. While it…