This article presents the results of an analysis of ethnographic data collected in three second language mathematics classrooms in Canada. The elementary school classes consisted of a group of indigenous students, a group of new immigrant students and a class in a French immersion programme. The focus of the analysis was on the sources of meaning…

Variationist researchers are increasingly adopting intersectionality approaches to analyse identity-linked practice. However, the field of sociolinguistic variation is yet to embrace the full ramifications of intersectionality as an analytical framework. The current paper offers a new method for integrating intersectional approaches into…

Children and young people from migrated families often learn host languages faster than their parents might do, and from very young ages they help their parents, families or community members by translating or interpreting, known as child language brokering (CLB). Language brokers need to mediate with different languages in different contexts and…

The increasing occurrence of multilingualism in the educational sphere is challenging teachers to deal with the coexistence of different languages in the classroom. The present paper presents the analysis of language portraits as a tool to make students' multilingualism visible by using colours to represent their multilingual repertoires. Through…

The first paper in this collection refers to recent theorising about Globalisation and the resultant outcomes for educational contexts specifically in relation to English language learning in Australia. Much has been written about the importance of the global economy, its influence on education and mounting commentary that the English language is…

This paper presents data from two studies--a nationwide quantitative research and an ethnographic study--on immigrant parents' perspectives about heritage language maintenance and education in Greek state schools. The quantitative data come from a large-scale questionnaire survey, which aimed at the investigation of the needs and requirements for…

"No Child Left Behind" is federal education legislation consisting of implementation programs intended to reconcile the goals of insuring equality while promoting competition in public education in the United States. Immigrant students whose primary languages are not English are included in the mandate of "NCLB," categorized as…

In this article, we examine the affordances of polylingual and polycultural learning ecologies in expanding the linguistic repertoires of children, particularly young Dual Language Learners. In contrast to settings that promote the development of English and academic language at the expense of maintaining and developing home language, we argue…

In Canadian public primary schools, newcomer West African refugees like other ethnic immigrant students are a visible minority group, often referred as Linguistic and Culturally Different (LCD) students. In the province of British Columbia, newcomer immigrant students are subjected to a battery of tests, as soon as they enroll in the primary…