In the multilingual environments of Africa, national literacy policies vary in terms of the attention they give to the roles and purposes of local, national and international languages. In the context of the global Sustainable Development Agenda, the instrumental purpose of literacy is often assumed, if not explicitly spelled out. At community…

The present study looks into the effects of early multilingual education by investigating linguistic knowledge and metalinguistic awareness in young learners at the primary level. The study aims to establish whether children in multilingual education programmes perform higher on a measure of metalinguistic awareness and with regards to their L1…

The article presents the dimensions of communication in multiethnic and multilingual education settings, the main barriers to sustainable relationships between students of different backgrounds and strategies to overcome those barriers. The main research question of the study is: What are the main barriers in sustainable relationships between…

This paper focuses on an innovative transdisciplinary educational arts-based learning project, LangScape Curators, which links to and leads from research conducted for the AHRC-funded "Translation and Translanguaging" project. Here, we describe how we work collaboratively with creative practitioners to use a variety of creative arts…

For more than two decades, accommodations have served as the primary strategy for ensuring the valid participation of multilingual learners (MLLs) in high-stakes summative assessments. Using historical analyses of the evolution of testing accommodation guidelines and related instructional practices, the authors explain how the application of…

This study examines how language choice in epitaphs in Alsatian cemeteries mirrors language shifts in Alsace, a region in Eastern France that changed nationalities between France and Germany four times between 1870 and 1945. Language choice on tombstones was expected to be made according to the language of the ruling power, but the results show…

In qualitative educational research, the languages spoken by the participants and the researchers can greatly impact the quality of the data collected. This paper will explore the advantages and disadvantages of being an insider researcher by virtue of speaking the same language(s) as the participants. Whether the researcher is a linguistic…

The article substantiates the synergistic concept of complex linguistic and rhetorical (L&R) training necessary for the high-quality professional training of a future specialist of any direction and profile of higher school education; the specification is made on the example of a teacher of a foreign language (foreign languages). The…

Challenging the notion that English-medium instruction (EMI) is necessarily an English-only space, the authors argue for an alternative vision of EMI settings as spaces that benefit both emergent bi/multilinguals and their English-monolingual peers. Given that the enactment of EMI varies according to the underlying language ideologies of the…

In this study, we examine how bilingual students in elementary school use their languages and what this means for their meaning-making in science. The class was multilingual with students bilingual in different minority languages and the teacher monolingual in Swedish. The analysis is based on a pragmatic approach and the theory of…

Using National Assessment of Educational Progress data from 2003 to 2015, this brief describes changes in the reading and mathematics performance of multilingual students--defined as students who report a primary home language or languages other than English. Although all students' scores improved, multilingual students' scores improved two to…

The study presented here, theoretically framed at the crossroads of sociocultural and decolonial perspectives, draws attention to the sudden proliferation of two specific neologisms in the area of language, education and identity across time and space. It particularly highlights concerns regarding the ways in which these are deployed within…

Drawing on the notion of translanguaging, I show how learners in a Black township secondary school in Cape Town use their multilingual repertoire to achieve power, agency and voice. I use the conceptualisation of the prototypical pedagogical macrogenre from systemic functional linguistics to show how translanguaging can be used strategically to…

After World War II there was a push to reinvigorate the economies and industries of Western Europe, and to find methods to avoid the outbreak of more wars in the region. As a result, the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) was founded in 1952 (European Coal and Steel Community, 2016) an important step towards the full European Union (EU), led…

The impact of neoliberalism on language education has recently attracted scholars' attention. Linguistic entrepreneurship is a conceptual lens through which neoliberal implications for language learning and use can be investigated. This commentary offers comments on common threads of themes running through the four articles in this special issue.…