This ethnographic study aims to foreground the voices of 34 first through twelfth graders who belong to first-generation immigrant families from Mexico and Central America and attend Nueva Vida Church (fictitious name) in a Midwestern US city. They insightfully reflect upon their language, culture and citizenship during Sunday school class focus…

This article examines the use of translanguaging as a pedagogical tool to support learning within bilingual classrooms in schools in Wales. Translanguaging is considered within non-pedagogic and pedagogic school contexts; hence, a distinction is made between universal and classroom translanguaging. Translanguaging has evoked debate surrounding the…

This article examines the discursive construction of social presence and identity in a bilingual collaboration between tertiary distance learners of German in New Zealand and Academic English students in Germany. Drawing on positioning theory, this small-scale study investigated the collaborative practices of a group of students, whose synchronous…

This article puts forward a solution to the impending shortage of culturally and linguistically competent interpreters: the education of heritage signers as heritage language learners. It examines the current landscape of American Sign Language (ASL) as a course of study and the difficulties heritage signers report when they begin learning ASL. In…

This study investigated how students learning English and students learning Spanish activated multilingual repertoires as they participated in one high school program that aimed to promote reciprocal learning and teaching of multilingual literacy practices. Grounded in sociocultural theory, we examined how students drew upon Spanish, English, and…

This mixed-methods study investigates the ideologies, attitudes, and understandings of language, bilingualism, and second language acquisition among students, teachers, and parents in a Bay Area dual immersion (DI) program. The work shows that despite rhetoric and awareness of language variation, students' and teachers' approaches to language…

Code-switching has always been an intriguing phenomenon to sociolinguists. While the general attitude to it seems negative, people seem to code-switch quite frequently. Teachers of English as a foreign language too frequently claim that they do not like to code-switch in the language classroom for various reasons--many are of the opinion that only…

This paper first considers what it means to become truly proficient in a language other than the native one. It then looks briefly at the evolution of dual language programs. Next, it focuses on the issue of whether the first language (L1) or the second language (L2) serves as the language of mediation. Other dual language program issues are then…

This article analyzes the genre of the sourced comic as an important pedagogical tool in the development of both alphabetic and multimodal literacies. We argue that sourced comics provide multiple design elements with which students can explore their complex relationships with scholarly sources, make visible various power relations informing…

This paper looks at current grassroots efforts to revitalise Yucatec Maya, an indigenous language of Mexico, in social media and more specifically on Facebook. In contrast to the limitations of institutional language promotion, the inclusion of Maya on Facebook shows the possibilities that social networks offer not only for actual use of…

This study investigates the role of code-switching (CS) between Turkish (L1) and English (L2) in Turkish EFL (English as a foreign language) classroom interaction. It aims at describing and analyzing the pedagogical functions and sequential organization of CS in teacher talk. The research draws on the recordings of four intermediate level…

This paper considers when and for what purposes Peer Assisted Study Session (PASS) Leaders at an English medium university use their first language (when that language is not the dominant language of instruction) to facilitate PASS sessions in an English speaking university. This small qualitative exploratory study examines the experiences of…

Simultaneous bilingual education of a child is a dynamic process. Construction of linguistic competences undeniably depends on the conditions of the linguistic environment of the child. This education in a monolingual family, requires the practice of parenting tactics to increase the frequency of the language use in minority, during which,…

Facing a dramatic decline in English standards over the past decade, the Hong Kong Government introduced the "Fine-tuning Medium of Instruction (MOI) policy" in 2010 to address the grievances arising from different sectors in the community. Integrating content and language has become popular in second/foreign language teaching in recent…

Bilingual preschool education is under researched compared with bilingual school education. There is also a lack of research on bilingual preschool teachers' agency and how they negotiate between two languages in the classroom. We examined the language practices of five bilingual preschool teachers working within three different socio-linguistic…