In 1968 the Bilingual Education Act marked the first comprehensive federal intervention in the schooling of language minoritized students by creating financial incentives for bilingual education in an effort to address social and educational inequities created by poverty and linguistic isolation in schools. Since that time federal education…

The authors of papers in this special issue are in agreement that if schools are to reverse underachievement among rural and township students in the South African context the instructional space must be expanded to include students' and teachers' multilingual repertoires together with a focus on explicitly demystifying how academic language…