This article describes a wayfinding study conducted in an urban, academic library to better understand the experiences of multilingual student populations. The study, which incorporated traditional user experience methods and video ethnography, exposed communication obstacles and spatial challenges encountered by students of English for speakers…

With a growing population of emergent bilingual learners in the United States, we are seeing more emergent bilinguals qualifying for special education services. Special education teachers must be prepared to meet the linguistic needs of their students in addition to disability related needs. One way of doing so involves adopting Culturally…

Judicial discourse can grant or deprive liberty to litigants. It is, therefore, important to ensure fair hearing during trials and even more as courtrooms have become multilingual settings. In the Court of First Instance of Bafoussam, French (one of the official languages of Cameroon) often come into contact with more than 250 national languages.…

Foreign language teaching in the Slovenian educational context begins in the first grade (age 6). Many studies report a lack of qualified teachers at this stage of learning around the world and numerous authors emphasise the misconception that basic linguistic and didactic knowledge of teachers is sufficient for teaching children. All three…

This paper targets the aim of 'strengthening the students' multilingualism' in a second language subject in Sweden, "Swedish as a second language" (SSL), which represents a relatively rare L2 design internationally. The study investigates how "ideological space" for multilingualism with regard to this aim opens…

This paper examines current practices that embrace the union between foreign language (L2) teaching and translation in higher education (HE). The rejection of monolingualism and prescriptive principles in favour of bi-, multi-, or plurilingualism; a diversified interdisciplinarity; new sociocultural realities characterised by greater international…

The purpose of this study is to investigate how triadic dialog promotes generalization of growing figural patterns during classroom talk in multilingual classrooms and crucial linguistic terms that the teacher and students draw on in their home language, as they engage in pattern generalization. Ten sessions in two classrooms in grade 7 were…

The number of children learning English entering U.S. schools continues to rise, yet the majority of classroom teachers remain English-dominant. Many teachers feel under-prepared to work with the growing number of multilingual students. However, they can draw on a familiar curricular structure, shared reading, to build on children's cultural and…

A key factor that has been found to be critical in shaping family language policy is parents' linguistic identities, or "parents' personal experiences with bilingualism, biculturalism or second language learning" (King, Kendall A. & Lyn Fogle. 2006. Bilingual parenting as good parenting: Parents' perspectives on family language…

Hong Kong's 'trilingual and biliterate' language policy (TaB, [characters omitted]) is almost as old as the special administrative region (SAR) itself. Through free education and language support measures in school, students are expected to be conversant in English and Putonghua in addition to Cantonese, and be able to read and understand written…

Research shows that humor can play an important role in students' language learning and literacy development. However, studies on how teachers intentionally enact humor as a pedagogical tool are still limited. This classroom discourse study examines the interactional construction and pedagogical functions of humor in one U.S. multilingual high…

Language learning has long been one of the most challenging issues facing non-Chinese speaking (NCS) students who are mainly ethnic minorities immersed in a multilingual environment in Hong Kong. Previous research on the education of NCS students suggested that early support from an immersion programme at a pre-school age may contribute to higher…

Dialogic, sense-making interactions are critical venues for language development and science learning, particularly for emergent multilingual students. Designing and facilitating such learning opportunities is pedagogically complex work and often requires significant shifts in practice. We report on a design study in which we partnered with 5th…

While the role of parental ideologies on children's bi/multilingual development and the role of children's beliefs about multilingualism are well-documented, less work examines how parental and student ideologies are enacted through talk. That is, how do students interpret what their family caregivers tell them about bi/multilingualism, and how do…

Young multilingual learners are a highly diverse group who benefit from high-quality classroom instruction that includes rich language and literacy development opportunities. However, some of these children will experience academic difficulties even with robust support. It can be challenging to distinguish between their language learning needs and…