Graduates who typically have L1 English, have majored in one foreign language (FL, L2) or more at university and have gone on to occupy FL posts in the UK civil service have reported mismatches between their pre-employment L2 learning and the tasks they face in the workplace. Such reported divergences in UK civil service capability have not,…

In the introduction to the special issue "Languaging the worker: globalized governmentalities in/of language in peripheral spaces", we take up the notion of governmentality as a means to interrogate the complex relationship between language, labor, power, and subjectivity in peripheral multilingual spaces. Our aim here is to argue for…

This case study examines the consequences of community language attitudes and ideologies on later-generation heritage speakers through qualitative sociolinguistic and discourse analysis of 22 interviews with first- and second-generation Latinos of diverse backgrounds in a major US metropolitan area. The findings show that imposed deficit…

This article puts forth new ways of thinking about "becoming multilingual" in transnational and contemporary times by investigating the significance of multilingualism for multilingual student teachers enrolled in French language teacher education programs within the provinces of Alberta and Ontario. As more diversity is present in…

Given that intervention has been relatively under-researched in pragmatics, this paper offers a linguistic-pragmatic examination of a case of bystander intervention, a notion which is generally known in social psychology. This study approaches the phenomenon of bystander intervention by analyzing discourse data transcribed from a video posted…

Besides to the communicative function of language there is the social function which shows the role that language plays in society. This can be noted in sociolinguistics through code switching. The main purpose of the case study is to investigate and understand the functions of Arabic-English code switching among the bilingual Saudi speakers in…

Engineering has been slowly integrated into K-12 science classrooms in the United States as the result of recent science education reforms. Such changes in science teaching require that a science teacher is confident with and committed to content, practices, language, and cultures related to both science and engineering. However, from the…

This study presents a sociolinguistic analysis of a Korean-English bilingual child's code-switching practices from the perspective of language socialization. The ethnographic description and discourse analysis of a migrant Korean family's interaction in the US home shows how the social meanings of languages and language ideologies present within…

This study examined classroom routine and interactional patterns of Grade 5 English Language reading comprehension lessons through delineating the speech act functions of instructional discourse that was based on Malcolm's sociolinguistic model (Malcolm, 1979a; Malcolm, 1979b; Malcolm, 1982; Malcolm, 1986). It also evaluated the classroom…

This article examines the role of translanguaging practices and pedagogies in two-way dual language classrooms. Much of the recent expansion of dual language programs across the US has occurred in mid-sized cities and rural communities where English monolingualism is the norm; however, the extant literature on flexible language practices in…

Much of the literature on social class and language study in schools argues that for middle-class parents and their children, languages are chosen for their capacity to offer forms of distinction that provide an edge in the global labour market. In this paper, we draw on data collected from interviews with parents and children in middle-class…

Online language learning and teaching in multimodal contexts has been identified as one of the key research areas in computer-aided learning (CALL) (Lamy, 2013; White, 2014). This paper aims to explore meaning-making in online language learner interactions via desktop videoconferencing (DVC) and in doing so illustrate multimodal transcription and…

This paper draws on a Linguistic Ethnography (Blommaert & Rampton 2011) of a group of academically elite students in Singapore. The group comprises locals born in Singapore, as well as immigrants from China and Vietnam. My informants all attended a top-ranked secondary school in Singapore. I present data from interviews and a focus group…

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 article engages with Archer's call to further research on reflexivity and social change under conditions of late modernity (2007, 2010, 2012) from the perspective of existing work on reflexive discourse in the language disciplines (Silverstein 1976, Lucy 1993). Drawing from a linguistic ethnography of the networked trajectories of a group of…