This article explores the relationship between language, hegemony and identity in a desegregated school in suburban Johannesburg, South Africa. Drawing on post-structuralist theories of language learning and identity that evaluate cultural models of literacy, ideologies and institutional discourses, this article examines how multilingual learners'…

Intercultural bilingual education (IBE) programmes in Latin America pose interesting questions for sociolinguistics, since their implementation interrogates the link between language and the nation resulting from the emergence of nation-states, but also from processes of decolonization. In the case of Argentina, a new legal framework and the…

Previous studies on the field of education abroad have mainly focused on the factors influencing the mobility of international students from developing to developed countries and very few have been conducted to investigate the factors influencing the flow of international students to the Asia Pacific region. As a piece of country-specific…

Whereas the assessment of complex problem solving (CPS) has received increasing attention in the context of international large-scale assessments, its fairness in regard to students' cultural background has gone largely unexplored. On the basis of a student sample of 9th-graders (N = 299), including a representative number of immigrant students (N…

In France, most teachers still receive scant training in how to support plurilingual children in their learning of and through the language of instruction. In the absence of relevant, in-depth knowledge about language, we believe that many teachers are practising language policies based on beliefs rooted in ideologies unsupported by research…

The present paper discusses the components of language teachers' awareness, which should differ qualitatively and quantitatively from that of language learners and users. It is argued that especially teachers of English, the European lingua franca, should develop plurilingual awareness to train learners to become multilingual citizens. This…

This article presents the findings of a corpus-based study of the use of English vis-à-vis Cantonese and Putonghua in Hong Kong's Legislative Council in the past four decades. The objective of the study was to track the changing fortunes of the three languages in a key government institution during a period of unprecedented political, economic and…

Since 1980, the number of people in the United States who speak a language other than English at home has increased by 140% (United States Census Bureau, 2010). Therefore a greater percentage of students now are multilingual. Throughout the world, multilingualism is considered the norm and monolingualism is the exception (Auer & Wei, 2008). In…

In 1957 Ghana was the first sub-Saharan colonial nation-state to achieve independence from British rule. The language of literacy instruction, however, remained English throughout most of Ghana's independence, effectively thwarting reading and writing in 11 major and 67 minor indigenous languages in use today. After years of policy shifts,…

Seventeen years ago Gloria Ladson-Billings (1995) published the landmark article "Toward a Theory of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy," giving a coherent theoretical statement for resource pedagogies that had been building throughout the 1970s and 1980s. I, like countless teachers and university-based researchers, have been inspired by what it means…

Hollywood movies have been a prime site for the representation of intercultural and multilingual encounters for decades. As such, they are not only of interest to everyday cinemagoers or home viewers, but have increasingly attracted the attention of scholars from various disciplines, including socio-linguistics. A main focus of much previous work,…

This study reports findings from a micro-ethnographic analysis of the academic literacy socialization of six multilingual students in the field of education as they progressed through their first-year of doctoral education. The main purpose of this study was to investigate the academic socialization processes that these multilingual students…

With contributions from leading scholars all around the world, this volume underlines the ever-pressing need for new language in education policies to include all learners' voices in the multilingual classroom and to empower teachers to develop responsive and transformative pedagogies. Using testimonies, narratives and examples from different…

Research into language acquisition and oral language use was examined in order to identify key factors that contribute to the successful acquisition of second language (L2) listening ability. The factors were grouped into three major domains: affective, cognitive, and interpersonal. It is claimed that in each domain, proficient L2 listeners have…

South African higher education is at a critical juncture in the implementation of South Africa's multilingual language policy promoting institutional status for nine African languages, English, and Afrikaans. South African scholars, not content merely to comment from the sidelines on the policy, its promise, and challenges, have also engaged in…