This paper reports on the classroom languaging practices of a group of science teachers in rural and township schools in South Africa where the majority of learners learn through the medium of English, despite the fact that it is the home language of only a small minority; and learners' poor English proficiency frequently restricts their access to…

The purpose of this mixed-methods study was to explore and identify issues related to training teachers to use a bilingual writing rubric designed to examine the biliterate writing of emerging bilingual students who are participating in a biliteracy model. Findings indicate the need to provide clarifications on the rubric rating criteria and the…

The present study evaluates the impact of the fine-tuning medium of instruction (MOI) policy in Hong Kong in the early stages of its implementation. It explores the key stakeholders' perspectives on a school-based policy via a case study, which gathered multiple sources of qualitative data (i.e. focus groups/interviews, open-ended questionnaires,…

The everyday reality of children's multilingualism is a significant resource for expanding students' perspectives on the world, but many questions remain regarding the negotiation of these resources in mainstream classrooms. Drawing on research from a long-term Canadian study of multiliterate pedagogies, this paper explores mediation of home…

This paper draws on Wenger's model of community of practice to present preliminary findings on how processes of negotiation of meaning and identity formation occur in knowledge construction, meaning-making and interaction in two secondary Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) science classrooms. It uses a multimodal conversation analysis…

Research has demonstrated that popular culture often finds its way into classroom discourse, generally in the form of intertextual references that students make. As some scholars have shown, such allusions are often ignored. Even if they are validated, this does not happen in a systematic way that would exploit their full potential as a learning…

A strong case can be made for developing more flexible and relevant multilingual strategies for teaching and learning within the field of bilingual education. This paper aims to demonstrate how current linguistic and educational practices in countries like Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique and Ethiopia suggest new directions for research and practice. A…

There have been calls to examine how language policy is mediated at the local level. Although there have been studies that have foregrounded the local, there have yet to be those that look at how language policies become adopted by individual teachers through a process of their personal and professional socialisation. Through the framework of…

Under the Israeli language education policy, the mother tongue is learned first for several years, followed by a second language (English for Jews, Hebrew for Arabs) and then a third language (English for Arabs, Arabic/French for Jews). This type of limited bilingualism seems to suit the Israeli reality in the context of the Israeli-Arab conflict,…

This paper proposes to overcome the traditional essentialist and dichotomous ways of conceptualising language and language pedagogies, i.e. to go beyond linguistic purist perspectives. Analysing bilingual teaching practices in a science lesson, the paper proposes that practical bilingual pedagogies can be developed to help students in bilingual…

This article examines colonial language policies and practices at the government Central School, Hong Kong--the so-called Eton of the East--in the second half of the nineteenth century. The article, which draws on a range of unpublished primary sources, seeks to enhance our knowledge of an important episode in Hong Kong's educational history and,…

Describes and explores the activities of members of a listserv group in their efforts to defend bilingual education in Arizona. Attempts to delineate ways in which such a "virtual" group develops the cohesion it requires to sustain its activities in the absence of direct, face-to-face contact. (Author/VWL)

This paper focuses on teacher-student interaction in two Gujarati complementary school classrooms in one school in the East Midlands city of Leicester, UK. To date, little work has been published on interaction in complementary schools, and little is therefore known about the cultures of learning and teaching in such contexts. Our study of…

In England, government initiatives to recruit more ethnic minority teachers into mainstream schools have met with only limited success. One important reason for this may be that the factors that contribute to their distinctive professional skills and identities, and their potential to help raise the achievements of ethnic minority pupils, are not…

This paper presents findings from a study of teaching and learning strategies co-constructed by peers in a Spanish/English dual language first grade classroom. Grounded in sociocultural theory and developed using ethnographic approaches to data collection and analysis, the study analyses the children's mediation of their own and each other's…