Bilingual Education & Bilingualism Series

The general perception that a good command of English is enough to gain access and to be successful in higher education hides the complexity of learning and teaching in multilingual environments, and this book shows that all higher education environments are multilingual to some extent. Strategies like translation, interpreting and switching from one language to another not only support learning but also build competence for multilingual professional environments. Whether institutions focus on widening access to minoritised communities or whether they want to attract more international students, the book argues that a multilingual pedagogy is needed to improve student access and success. Building on work by Nancy Hornberger, Colin Baker and Ofelia García, the book extends strategies and techniques from bilingual education at school level to multilingual higher education.

Biliteracy - the use of two or more languages in and around writing- is an inescapable feature of lives and schools worldwide, yet one which most educational policy and practice continue blithely to ignore. The continua of biliteracy featured in the present volume offers a comprehensive yet flexible model to guide educators, researchers, and policy-makers in designing, carrying out, and evaluating educational programs for the development of bilingual and multilingual learners, each program adapted to its own specific context, media, and contents.

In this monograph, Anatoliy V. Kharkhurin presents the results of his empirical investigation into the impact of multilingual practice on an individual's creative potential. Until now, the relationship between these two activities has received little attention in the academic community. The book makes an attempt to resuscitate this theme and provides a solid theoretical framework supported by contemporary empirical research conducted in a variety of geographic, linguistic, and sociocultural locations. This study demonstrates that several factors - such as the multilinguals' age of language acquisition, proficiency in these languages and experience with cultural settings in which these languages were acquired - have a positive impact on selective attention and language mediated concept activation mechanisms. Together, these facilitate generative and innovative capacities of creative thinking. This book will be of great interest not only to scholars in the fields of multilingualism and creativity, but also to educators and all those interested in enhancing foreign language learning and fostering creativity.

Mathematics classrooms are increasingly multilingual, whether they are found in linguistically diverse societies, urban melting pots or planned bilingual programs. The chapters in this book present and discuss examples of mathematics classroom life from a range of multilingual classroom settings, and use these examples to draw out and discuss key issues for the teaching and learning of mathematics and language. These issues relate to pedagogy, students’ learning, curriculum, assessment, policy and aspects of educational theory. The contributions are based on research conducted in mathematics classrooms in Europe, South Asia, North America and Australia. Recurring issues for the learning of mathematics include the relationship between language and mathematics, the relationship between formal and informal mathematical language, and the relationship between students’ home languages and the official language of schooling.

This volume provides a state-of-the-art snapshot of language and education research and demonstrates ways in which local and global processes are intertwined with language learning, use, and policies. Reflecting but also expanding on Nancy Hornberger’s ground-breaking contributions to educational linguistics, this book brings together leading international scholars. Chapters present new research and cutting-edge syntheses addressing current theoretical and methodological issues in researching equity, access, and multilingual education. Organized around three central themes --- bilingual education and bilingualism, the continua of biliteracy, and policy and planning for linguistic diversity in education --- the volume reflects the holistic and dynamic perspective on language (in) education that is the hallmark of educational linguistics as a field.

Do bi- and multilinguals perceive themselves differently in their respective languages? Do they experience different emotions? How do they express emotions and do they have a favourite language for emotional expression? How are emotion words and concepts represented in the bi- and multilingual lexicons? This ground-breaking book opens up a new field of study, bilingualism and emotions, and provides intriguing answers to these and many related questions.

Focusing on the use of African languages in higher education, this book showcases South African higher education practitioners’ attempts to promote a multilingual ethos in their classes. It is a first-time overview of multilingual teaching and learning strategies that have been tried and tested in a number of higher education institutions in South Africa. Despite language-in-education policies that extol the virtues of multilingualism, practice remains oriented towards English-only learning and teaching. In the multilingual contexts of local campuses, this book shows how students and lecturers attempt to understand their multiple identities and use the available languages to create multilingual learning environments.

Until recently, the history of debates about language and thought has been a history of thinking of language in the singular. The purpose of this volume is to reverse this trend and to begin unlocking the mysteries surrounding thinking and speaking in bi- and multilingual speakers. If languages influence the way we think, what happens to those who speak more than one language? And if they do not, how can we explain the difficulties second language learners experience in mapping new words and structures onto real-world referents? The contributors to this volume put forth a novel approach to second language learning, presenting it as a process that involves conceptual development and restructuring, and not simply the mapping of new forms onto pre-existing meanings.

This volume is a unique contribution to the study of language policy and education for English Learners because it focuses on the decade long implementation of “English Only” in Arizona. How this policy influences teacher preparation and classroom practice is the central topic of this volume. Scholars and researchers present their latest findings and concerns regarding the impact that a restrictive language policy has on critical areas for English Learners and diverse students. If a student's language is sanctioned, do they feel welcome in the classroom? If teachers are only taught about subtractive language policy, will they be able to be tolerant of linguistic diversity in their classrooms? The implications of the chapters suggest that Arizona's version of Structured English Immersion may actually limit English Learners' access to English.

Richard Ruiz has inspired generations of scholars in language planning and multilingual education with his unique orientations to language as a problem, a right and a resource. This volume attests to the far-reaching impact of his thinking and teaching, bringing together a selection of his published and unpublished writings on language planning orientations, bilingual and language minority education, language threat and endangerment, voice and empowerment, and even language fun, accompanied by contributions from colleagues and former students reflecting and expanding on Ruiz’ ground-breaking work. This book will be of great interest to both undergraduate and postgraduate students in language planning and multilingual education, Indigenous and minority education, as well as to junior and senior researchers in those fields.

Detailing a decade of life and language use in a remote Alaskan Yup'ik community, Youth Culture, Language Endangerment and Linguistic Survivance provides rare insight into young people's language brokering and Indigenous people's contemporary linguistic ecologies. This book examines how two consecutive groups of youth in a Yup'ik village negotiated eroding heritage language learning resources, changing language ideologies, and gendered subsistence practices while transforming community language use over time. Wyman shows how villagers used specific Yup'ik forms, genres, and discourse practices to foster learning in and out of school, underscoring the stakes of language endangerment. At the same time, by demonstrating how the youth and adults in the study used multiple languages, literacies and translanguaging to sustain a unique subarctic way of life, Wyman illuminates Indigenous peoples’ wide-ranging forms of linguistic survivance in an interconnected world.

The Education of Language Minority Immigrants in the United States draws from quantitative and qualitative research methodologies to inform educational policy and practice. It is based on cutting-edge research and policy analyses from a number of well-known experts on immigrant language minority education in the USA. The collection includes contributions on the acquisition of English, language shift, the maintenance of heritage languages, prospects for long-term educational achievement, how family background, economic status, and gender and identity influence academic adjustment and achievement, challenges for appropriate language testing and placement, and examples of advocacy action research. It concludes with a thoughtful commentary aimed at broadening our understanding of the need to provide quality immigrant language minority education within the context of globalization. This collection will be of value to students and researchers interested in promoting educational equity and achievement for immigrant language minority students.

Population mobility is at an all-time high in human history. One result of this unprecedented movement of peoples around the world is that in many school systems monolingual and monocultural students are the exception rather than the rule, particularly in urban areas. This shift in demographic realities entails enormous challenges for educators and policy-makers. What do teachers need to know in order to teach effectively in linguistically and culturally diverse contexts? How long does it take second language learners to acquire proficiency in the language of school instruction? What are the differences between attaining conversational fluency in everyday contexts and developing proficiency in the language registers required for academic success? What adjustments do we need to make in curriculum, instruction and assessment to ensure that second-language learners understand what is being taught and are assessed in a fair and equitable manner? How long do we need to wait before including second-language learners in high-stakes national examinations and assessments? What role (if any) should be accorded students’ first language in the curriculum? Do bilingual education programs work well for poor children from minority-language backgrounds or should they be reserved only for middle-class children from the majority or dominant group? In addressing these issues, this volume focuses not only on issues of language learning and teaching but also highlights the ways in which power relations in the wider society affect patterns of teacher–student interaction in the classroom. Effective instruction will inevitably challenge patterns of coercive power relations in both school and society.

This book offers a unique view of multilingualism in higher education from a global perspective. It presents a contextualised case of a multilingual language policy which takes the Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) approach. The volume discusses various approaches to multilingual education including CLIL and then proposes guidelines for a multilingual language policy for Universitat Jaume I in Castelló, Spain. It examines the advantages of a multilingual education programme and reviews the success of existing language policies. This book will be an essential resource for researchers and students as well as policy makers.

This book provides comprehensive coverage of language contact in classroom settings. A thorough analysis of the sources and implications of social “disadvantage” is presented first, since the nonstandard dialects that children bring with them to school – and the unfavourable perceptions of these dialects – have traditionally given rise to educational difficulties. The persistence of these perceptions is particularly highlighted. More general issues surrounding the range and implications of language attitudes are dealt with, as is the important “test case” of Black English. The book also discusses foreign-language teaching and learning, as well as the assumptions and intentions underpinning bilingual and multicultural education. Given its breadth and its style, this book should be of interest and value to all teachers, as well as to students and researchers concerned with any aspect of the social life of language.

This groundbreaking volume describes unprecedented changes in education across Latin America, resulting from the endorsement of Indigenous peoples' rights through the development of intercultural bilingual education. The chapters evaluate the ways in which cultural and language differences are being used to create national policies that affirm the presence of Indigenous peoples and their cultures within Mexico, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and Guatemala. Describing the collaboration between grassroots movements and transnational networks, the authors analyze how social change is taking place at the local and regional levels, and they present case studies that illuminate the expansion of intercultural bilingual education. This book is both a call to action for researchers, teachers, policy-makers and Indigenous leaders, and a primer for practitioners seeking to provide better learning opportunities for a diverse student body.

This book calls for critical adaptations when theories of bilingual education, based on practices in the North, are applied to the countries of the global South. For example, it challenges the assumption that transitional models necessarily lead to language shift and cultural assimilation. Taking an ethnographically-based narrative on the purpose and value of bilingual education in Mozambique as a starting point, it shows how, in certain contexts, even a transitional model may strengthen the vitality of local languages and associated cultures, instead of weakening them. The analysis is based on the view that communicative practices in the classroom influence and are influenced by institutional, local and societal processes. Within this framework, the book shows how education in low-status languages can play a role in social and cultural transformation, especially where post-colonial contexts are concerned.

In the wake of recent federal legislation entitled No Child Left Behind, high-stakes standardized testing for accountability purposes is being emphasized in educational systems across the U.S. for all students – including English Language Learners (ELLs). Yet language proficiency mediates test performance, so ELLs typically receive scores far below those of other students. This book explores how tests have become de facto language policy in schools, shaping what is taught in school, how it is taught, and in what language(s) it is taught. In New York City, while most schools responded to testing by increasing the amount of English instruction offered to ELLs, a few schools have preserved native language instruction instead. Moreover, this research documents how tests are a defining force in the daily lives of ELLs and the educators who serve them.

This book explores bilingual community education, specifically the educational spaces shaped and organized by American ethnolinguistic communities for their children in the multilingual city of New York. Employing a rich variety of case studies which highlight the importance of the ethnolinguistic community in bilingual education, this collection examines the various structures that these communities use to educate their children as bilingual Americans. In doing so, it highlights the efforts and activism of these communities and what bilingual community education really means in today's globalized world. The volume offers new understandings of heritage language education, bilingual education, and speech communities for bilingual Americans in the 21st century.

How are words organized in the bilingual mind? How are they linked to concepts? How do bi- and multilinguals process words in their multiple languages? The first aim of this volume is to offer up-to-date answers to these questions. Its second aim is to provide readers with detailed step-by-step introductions to a variety of methodological approaches used to investigate the bilingual lexicon, from traditional neurocognitive and psycholinguistic approaches to the more recent ones that examine language use in context.

Social justice language teacher education is a response to the acknowledgement that there are social/societal inequities that shape access to learning and educational achievement. In social justice language teacher education, social justice is the driving force and primary organizational device for the teacher education agenda. What does “social justice” mean in diverse global locations? What role does English play in promoting or denying equity? How can teachers come to see themselves as advocates for equal educational access and opportunity? This volume begins by articulating a view of social justice teacher education, followed by language teacher educators from 7 countries offering theorized accounts of their situated practices. Authors discuss powerful components of practice, and the challenges and tensions of doing this work within situated societal and institutional power structures.

This volume is the first to offer a comprehensive and, at the same time, in-depth examination of the spread of English and English language education across Greater China. It consists of two parts. Part 1 presents rich sociolinguistic data for easy comparisons between mainland China, Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macao, while Part 2 explores in depth the phenomena inside mainland China to provide contrastive analysis of English language use and education in economically booming areas such as Shanghai and Guangdong and underdeveloped regions like Xinjiang and Yunnan. With the descriptive, comparative and analytical accounts of different territories ranging from nation-states to small villages in remote areas, theories on the spread of English, second/third language acquisition and identity are challenged with new concepts proposed and established.

This book examines how Russian-speaking adoptees in three US families actively shape opportunities for language learning and identity construction in everyday interactions. By focusing on a different practice in each family (i.e. narrative talk about the day, metalinguistic discourse or languaging, and code-switching), the analyses uncover different types of learner agency and show how language socialization is collaborative and co-constructed. The learners in this study achieve agency through resistance, participation, and negotiation, and the findings demonstrate the complex ways in which novices transform communities in transnational contexts. The perspectives inform the fields of second language acquisition and language maintenance and shift. The book further provides a rare glimpse of the quotidian negotiations of adoptive family life and suggestions for supporting adoptees as young bilinguals.

Based on an extended ethnographic study of a dual language (Spanish-English) Kindergarten, this book takes a critical look at children's linguistic (and non-linguistic) interactions and the ways that teaching design can help or hinder language development. With a focus on official “Spanish time”, it explores the particular challenges of supporting the minority language use as well as the teacher's strategies for doing so. In bilingual classrooms, teachers' goals include bilingualism as well as academic achievement for all. The children may share these interests, but have their own agendas as well. This book explores the linguistic and social interactions that may help, or hinder, these multiple and sometimes conflicting agendas. How can teachers design educational practice that takes into consideration broader forces of language hegemony as well as children's immediate interests?

This volume builds on Fortune and Tedick’s 2008 Pathways to Multilingualism: Evolving Perspectives on Immersion Education and showcases the practice and promise of immersion education through in-depth investigations of program design, implementation practices, and policies in one-way, two-way and indigenous programs. Contributors present new research and reflect on possibilities for strengthening practices and policies in immersion education. Questions explored include: What possibilities for program design exist in charter programs for both two-way and indigenous models? How do studies on learner outcomes lead to possibilities for improvements in program implementation? How do existing policies and practices affect struggling immersion learners and what possibilities can be imagined to better serve such learners? In addressing such questions, the volume invites readers to consider the possibilities of immersion education to enrich the language development and educational achievement of future generations of learners.

With contributions from leading scholars all around the world, this volume underlines the ever-pressing need for new language in education policies to include all learners’ voices in the multilingual classroom and to empower teachers to develop responsive and transformative pedagogies. Using testimonies, narratives and examples from different international contexts, this book points clearly to what can be achieved practically in the multilingual classroom so that multilingual learners’ voices are legitimated, while also addressing the complex inter-relating sociolinguistic issues around the promotion of bilingualism and multilingualism in education.

Bilingual education is one of the fastest growing disciplines within applied linguistics. This book includes the work of 20 specialists working in various educational contexts across Europe, Latin America and North America to create a volume which is both comprehensive in scope and multidimensional in its coverage of current bilingual initiatives. The central themes of this volume, which draws on past experiences of bilingual education, include issues in language use in classrooms at elementary, secondary and tertiary levels; participant perspectives on bilingual education experiences; and the language needs of bi- and multilingual students in monolingual schools. This collection will be of interest to teachers and administrators in bi- and multilingual education programs, as well as scholars working in the field of language education.

This ethnographic study explores aspects of bilingual education in two early childhood German–English education centres in Australia. Using various sources of data and multiple methods of analysis, it investigates the processes at work when establishing and implementing a bilingual programme and examines the language attitudes, ideologies and practices of the parents, educators and administrators involved. It addresses the complex relationship between the childcare provider and its clientele in its socio-political context in an attempt to arrive at a broader understanding of institutional bilingual education in early childhood. The book will be of interest to graduate students and researchers in bilingual education, language ideology and early childhood education studies, as well as to teachers, trainee teachers and childcare providers.

The Bilingual Advantage draws together researchers from education, economics, sociology, anthropology and linguistics to examine the economic and employment benefits of bilingualism in the US labor market, countering past research that shows no such benefits exist. Collectively, the authors draw on novel methodological approaches and new data to examine the economics of bilingualism for the new generation of bilinguals entering a digital-age globalized workforce. The authors also pay considerable attention to how to best capture measures of bilingualism and biliteracy, given the constraints of most existing datasets.

This book offers an innovative look at the pre- and post-migration educational experiences of immigrant young adults with a particular focus on members of the Latino community.  Combining quantitative data with original interviews, this book provides an engaging and nuanced look at a population that is both ubiquitous and overlooked, challenging existing assumptions about those categorized as ‘dropouts’ and closely examining the historical contexts for educational interruption in the chosen subgroup.  The combination of accessible prose and compelling new statistical data appeals to a wide audience, particularly academic professionals, education practitioners and policy-makers.