Linguistics and Education最新文献

Nebraska is increasingly becoming a linguistically and culturally diverse state. As a designated refugee resettlement state, Nebraska rural and urban communities harbor different world languages. With the current research showing the importance of home languages for educational success and the importance of multilingualism, this study seeks to discuss community language ideologies through data analysis of a sample of community members (N = 1584). The study uses survey methods and quantitative statistical analysis. The findings disclose that a dominant monolingual ideology is rooted among community members. Community members’ language ideologies varied by race and educational background. In addition, community members’ ideologies in language politics and intolerance to multilingualism predicted their views on language support for multilingual students. Implications for educators, families and other community members are discussed.

Language is a fundamental tool that people use to express and communicate their sense of self to a wider social world. An individual's identity is understood as being fluid, unfixed and multifaceted. Therefore, how an individual presents their identity through the use of languages in one's linguistic repertoire is a complex and dynamic process. This present study explored the linguistic repertoire and linguistic identities of Taiwanese multilingual students, ranging in age from 11 to 17, through the use of a Language Portrait Silhouette. The analysis focused on the qualitative data and sought to understand how individuals represent their rapport with their languages through the choice of color, the mapping location of a language on the silhouette and written narratives. Results revealed that Taiwanese students’ identities are evolving as their linguistic repertoire is expanding. That is to indicate that Taiwanese multilingual students’ linguistic identities are flexible and constantly changing.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the use of language portraits as a tool for longitudinally investigating the changes in children's language awareness within a project that combines and implements translanguaging pedagogy and pluralistic approaches in an Italian primary and middle school (from Grade 1 to 8) with a high percentage of immigrant students. The language portraits produced by 71 children (between 9 and 12 years old) before and after their exposure to multilingual pedagogies were analysed using NVivo R1 in order to identify recurring patterns and differences. After engaging in multilingual activities, the emergent bilingual children whose first language portraits did not include their home languages decided to represent them. The majority of the children in the second language portrait also represent the languages spoken by their peers, indicating the recognition of the collective linguistic repertoire, as a result of the implementation of multilingual pedagogies.

Schools worldwide rely heavily on textbooks to disseminate knowledge and guide pedagogical choices. In critical discourse studies, textbooks have been shown to function as national policy instruments, carry a hidden curriculum, and enact a global agenda. The existing literature, however, pays a little attention to the fact that textbooks also represent competing discourses rather than merely being ideological apparatuses. The purpose of this study is to fill this gap by examining national subjecthood, alterity, and the way textbooks engender competing discourses and make them accessible to learners. Based on critical and post-structuralist discourse traditions, 12 English language textbooks were analyzed in one province of Pakistan. National subjecthood appears to have been constituted through various discursive indexes, including religion, gendered subjectivity, languages, literature, and patriotic sentiments among others. The Other is constituted in textbooks both as internals (religious minorities) and externals (e.g., India). Additionally, textbooks offer learners competing discourses with a possibility to negotiate their subject positions.

This article examines a primary-school child's response to a writing initiative arranged by his academic parents to address his writing deficiency in a context of “crisis” discourses about children's writing. While the child protested the intervention, he wrote reluctantly for 18 months and produced 205 texts of over 25,000 words. Analyses of the texts using children's “agency” and “subjectification” showed his linguistic resistance to the writing routine. While he capitalised his dislike of the parental intervention as a recurrent writing topic, he also exploited linguistic transgression, translanguaging and language play as vital mechanisms for resistance. Paradoxically, such forms of resistance also pointed to his mastery of rhetorical conventions and linguistic resources. The findings provide rationale for applied linguists, language educators and researchers to reflect on children's writing development and their agency on one hand and ethical issues in intervening in and researching children's writing life on the other.