Professional development on issues of language and culture is often separate from professional development on issues related to STEM education, resulting in linguistic and cultural gaps in K-12 STEM pedagogy and practice. To address this issue, we have designed a model of professional development in which we work with educators to build cultural…

The purpose of this article is to re-conceptualize the role of the monolingual teacher in mainstream K-12 classrooms in the United States who work with students who are mostly multilingual and transnational. The proposed role for monolingual teachers is to incorporate at least some of the resources available in students' native languages, even if…

All native speakers of Arabic read in a language variety that is remarkably distant from the one they use in everyday speech. The study tested the impact of this distance on reading accuracy and fluency by comparing reading of Standard Arabic (StA) words, used in StA only, versus Spoken Arabic (SpA) words, used in SpA too, among Arabic native…

In this work we report on a collaborative project at a large Northeastern University, in which we explored how to best collaborate to develop interdisciplinary teaching units, which integrate intercultural citizenship (Byram, 2008) into world languages, mathematics and social studies sixth grade curricula. We argue for the importance of addressing…

In the early 1990s, the government of Papua New Guinea (PNG) enacted educational reform. It officially abandoned its English-only policy at elementary school level, in favour of community languages. In response, the Kairak community of East New Britain Province developed a vernacular literacy programme. This paper, based on original fieldwork…

Negotiating their double identity as Mauritians and Muslims in multilingual and in multiethnic Mauritius, Mauritian Muslims have been socialised into reading and writing in Kreol in madrassahs, while they have never been exposed to Kreol literacy in mainstream education. At the point where Kreol is being introduced as an optional school subject,…

Basil Bernstein (1971) introduced the notion of the Restricted and the Elaborated code, claiming that working-class speakers have access only to the former but middle-class members to both. In an attempt to test this theory in the Iranian context and to investigate the effect of social class on the quality of students language use, we examined the…

The study presented in this paper focuses on young people's languaging, or ways-with-being-with-words, including literacies, in everyday practices that stretch across formal and informal learning spaces. Taking sociocultural and ethnographic points of departure, the aim of the study is to investigate aspects of young people's situated and…

The two decades from 1950 to 1970 were a crucial period of educational reorganization in Malaysia that stemmed from the decolonization after the Second World War. This educational reorganization sought to address the perennial issue of nation building via educational language policy. The development of Chinese education was under severe threat as…

Sociolinguists have been fighting dialect prejudice since the 1960s, but deficit views of non-standard English are regaining currency in educational discourse. In this paper I argue that the traditional sociolinguistic response--stressing dialect systematicity and tolerance of "difference"--may no longer be effective by questioning a key…

Latino students' educational success is central to America's prosperity--in traditional immigrant destinations and in New Latino Diaspora locations, previously unfamiliar with Latinos. Implicated in this success is the reception young immigrants receive, especially the ways in which they are identified in schools. We describe findings from 6 years…

In this paper, a series of vignettes is used to explore important current challenges in TESOL. These vignettes are drawn from many different settings, including Bengali-, Pahari- and Chinese-speaking children in UK primary schools, speakers of Aboriginal English in Australia and Chinese teachers of English on courses in Higher Education. A number…

Social psychologists have suggested that language-based ideologies related to "stereotype threat" (i.e. variations in performance-based on ability perceptions of language groups) may affect students' academic achievement regardless of school language support. However, it is unclear whether efforts to support students' first language…

This paper reports the findings of a small-scale research project which investigated the levels of awareness and knowledge of written standard English of 10 and 11-year-old children in two English primary schools. The project involved repeating in 2010 a written questionnaire previously used with children in the same schools in three separate…

In this article, I report on a small project involving the use of guided reading groups, levelled texts and running records in a multilingual primary school in Singapore. I focus on running records and ask whether their use is suitable pedagogically and practically for the Singaporean context. The analysis of 22 records of primary one and primary…