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…

In this article, I explore the meaning of disability within the everyday lives of Clear River third-grade students. The concept of a disability narrative is developed to explain how expert disability labels shape the experience of academic performance and failure. Previous studies of disability labeling have neglected the life of the label after…

An ethnographic study of language proficiency in the home and school languages of bilingual children was conducted. From a qualitative sociolinguistic perspective, language proficiency, the relation of linguistic performance to community language use and attitudes, and the correlation of the sociolinguistic findings on language repertoire with…

A study investigated the relationship between relative language proficiency and the types of questions produced by bilingual children in different settings and situations, taking into account the whole language repertoire in both languages and in different settings. The subjects were six third-graders in a self-contained maintenance bilingual…