This paper suggests elements of an agenda for future sociolinguistics among minority groups, by seeing it as a mutual relationship that involves benefits to researcher and researched. We focus on two aspects of the relationship. One is the political, economic and social benefits that can accrue to a minority group as a result of the research.…

This paper describes a collaborative action-research project initiated by two professors of multilingual = multicultural education at a large US university, whose goal was to update a required first-semester graduate course in a bilingual/second language teacher-education programme and to adapt it to the needs of students and schools faced with…

This paper is about multilingual signs in Tokyo. It is based on empirical research conducted in 2003. Special attention is given to the distinction between official and nonofficial multilingual signs. It will be demonstrated that the two types of signs exhibit some essentially different characteristics with regard to the languages contained and…

The author suggests that models positioning the multilingual writer as passively conditioned by "interference" from his or her first language, as well as more correlative models of the interrelationships of multiple languages in writing, need to be revised. Analyzing works written to different audiences, in different contexts, and in…

In Belgium and Brussels, macrocontextual features such as language policy and language legislation have a profound impact on people's language use and on the way languages are learned. In order to explain this impact, the political and economic developments that have determined the current context of learners in Brussels are discussed. Secondly, a…

This article reports on a qualitative case study involving pedagogical innovations grounded in culturally and linguistically inclusive approaches to curriculum. In this project, kindergarten children were supported in collaboratively authoring Dual Language Identity Texts. Our findings suggest that as family and teacher conceptions of literacy…

In this paper we question key terms which appear frequently in discussions of language teaching and learning: "language" and "heritage". The paper draws on empirical data from one of four linked case studies in a larger project funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), "Investigating Multilingualism in…

People have enough trouble defining themselves and determining what they want in life when they operate within a single language and culture, but the job gets trickier when they live in a world of multiple lexicons, grammars, histories, cultures, audiences and social systems, where identity and perceptions vary by language context. This paper…

This paper examines legislation concerning language policy and language choice in the UK and South Africa. In particular an account of the pressures and imperatives to which such policy development must respond is provided. The paper suggests that the comparison between South Africa and the UK is relevant and compelling, not least because both…

This paper revisits a successful short-course in academic literacy that was conducted for 50 "disadvantaged" students enrolled in the first year of an education degree at an Australian regional university (see Hirst, Henderson, Allan, Bode & Kocatepe, 2004). Based on a sociocultural approach to learning and drawing on a…

Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) is a unique technological institute comprised of eight colleges, including the National Technical Institute for the Deaf. At the institute, deaf students and deaf culture intermingle (not always seamlessly) with students from other nations, states, and cities. Like most other universities, its students are…

In contemporary U.S. culture, young children are not only oriented by their own multiple cultures (racial, ethnic, age, gender, and family, to name several), but also by living and learning within a socioculturally conditioned world filled with many different conditions of cultural difference. In this article, the author presents several vignettes…

Modern primary teachers must adapt literacy programmes and ensure efficient learning for all. They must also support children with language and literacy difficulties, children learning English as an additional language and possibly teach a modern foreign language. To do this effectively, they need to understand the applied linguistics research…

The aim of the article is to analyse the qualitative and quantitative aspects of the skills of reading and text-understanding, focusing on the comparative analysis of experiences of meaning in native language, Romanian and English in the case of Hungarian pupils. We attempted to present the qualitative indexes and factors of the process of reading…

Educational leadership in Sweden has reached a turning point. There is now a widespread acceptance of the fact that Sweden increasingly has many citizens whose origins and/or upbringing are non-European. In turn, the school has become a multicultural meeting place where previous assumptions about curriculum consensus and cultural order have been…