This paper draws on qualitative research that examines the language practices and learning experiences of ten adolescent multilingual immigrant and refugee English Learners (ELs) from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Specific questions addressed include: How do these students capitalize on home languages as they engage in linguistic…

Student-active science teaching that includes interactions among students is suggested to support students' reasoning skills. However, little is known about what are the beneficial modes of interaction to support learning. In the present study, we investigated how different types of classroom discussion on socioscientific issues can encourage…

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…

Alternative education provides different and powerful opportunities for learning. In this article, the author focuses on students who resist stereotypes that are produced and maintained by dominant powers and ideologies, and who share their knowledge and experiences with systemic marginalization. Drawing from classroom videos, qualitative…

The socio-cultural conditions of late modernity induce a "reflexive imperative" amongst young people, which also results in metapragmatic and metalinguistic behaviour, as has been demonstrated by linguistic ethnographers (LE). However, recent LE studies on reflexivity in Western European settings have mainly focused on how groups of…

This paper focuses on the forms of reflexivity that emerge in the conversational narratives of Latin American teenage school girls co-produced during sociolinguistic interviews, in a multicultural school in the centre of Madrid. The narratives about confrontation at school portray the girls' actions and ways of making sense of such behaviours, in…

Most sociolinguistic studies rely on apparent time, cross-sectional methods to analyze language change. On the basis of apparent time data, sociolinguists have hypothesized that cultural processes of lifespan change create predictable cycles of linguistic behavior in which adolescents lead in the use of vernacular variants and advance sound change…

This study investigates the pronunciation of English among Norwegian adolescents by applying sociolinguistic methods in a second language context. Results from an auditory analysis of seven phonological variables show a blended use of linguistic features from American English and British English, with some additional pronunciations, forming a…

Dyadic teacher-student interactions represent a potentially valuable opportunity for adolescent emergent bilingual students to access academic knowledge, develop language proficiency, and acquire literacy skills in secondary school contexts. But to what extent are these conversations actually an affordance for students? Drawing upon insights in…

This study investigated the use of text-message abbreviations (textisms) in Australian adolescents and young adults, and relations between textism use and literacy abilities. Fifty-two high school students aged 13-15 years, and 53 undergraduates aged 18-24 years, all users of predictive texting, translated conventional English sentences into…

In recent years there has been growing awareness of the need to support primary and secondary students in developing competencies for active and participatory citizenship. Among the essential competencies identified in a recent study of politically active teachers was the ability to expand ideas into arguments. This article reports on the early…