From January 2017 until January 2020, the Stormont assembly in Northern Ireland was suspended, with the Irish language being cited as the main stumbling block to the restoration of government. The continued debate around the necessity of an Irish Language Act (ILA) for Northern Ireland is bound up with more general divisions in society surrounding…

This study reports on the linguistic and sociocultural affordances available to multilinguals through their engagement in a social learning space at a Community of Practices (CoPs). Despite the existence of studies on CoP in language learning contexts, however, little work has been conducted on the affordances of a multilingual learning community,…

Previous studies of linguistic "mudes" in minority language contexts, this is, biographical junctures where speakers enact changes in their linguistic repertoire, have contributed to our understanding of how linguistic codes are appropriated across the lifespan using a largely temporal frame of reference. However, our research in Catalan…

For diasporic communities, beyond the obvious dichotomy between the home language and the language used by the host community, there lie the complexities of language use and language ideologies related to standard and non-standard versions spoken by the community members. These complexities galvanise various attitudes performed through linguistic…

The article presents a study of five Polish multicultural and multilingual families in Finland, and their engagement in digitally mediated family communication. Explored through an ethnographic inquiry into the in-app communication practices of Polish migrant mothers and children, the study contributes to the body of research at the intersection…

In the early twenty-first century Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) emerged as a distinctively European pedagogy for raising additional language competence. Although CLIL scholarship has been abundant and has taken many different directions, there is a dearth of ethnographic research to shed light on the situated ambivalences of CLIL…

This article focuses on mother tongue teaching in Arabic, Dari, Pashto and Somali as it is practised in a linguistically diverse primary school in Denmark. The article draws on a linguistic ethnography of language teaching across the curriculum, and the analysis focuses on three mother tongue teachers. Drawing on classroom observations and…

Critical studies on internationalisation of higher education (IHE) have addressed the uneven global geopolitics of knowledge production as reinforced and reproduced through policy making and mechanism of professional organisations. Yet it remains unknown about the dynamics of epistemic exchanges in between agents at multiple dimensions of IHE,…

The aim of this study was to explore patterns of children's agency enactment in second-language learning as reflected in their language learning and social interactions in a bilingual Arabic-Hebrew-speaking classroom. We examined the connection between these behaviour patterns and the children's L2 progress in the bilingual classroom. The study…

To understand long-term motivations for second language (L2) learning/socialisation, this study analyses the biographical narratives of 30 Hong Kong Chinese who are proficient in Japanese by using ethnographic interviews. From a situated learning perspective, our research findings originate in the participants' transformational episodes and centre…

Mandarin Chinese is the fastest growing foreign language by number of students in the world [Ding and Saunders 2006. "Talking up China: An Analysis of China's Rising Cultural Power and Global Promotion of the Chinese Language." "East Asia" 23 (2): 3-33], but little is known about how it is taking hold in compulsory education in…

Indigenous languages of Mexico have largely been excluded from formal education spaces. This ethnographic action research study highlights a context where "Diidxazá"/ Isthmus Zapotec, an Indigenous language of Oaxaca, has recently begun to be taught in higher education. We examine the ways that administrators, the teacher, and students…

This study explores language ideologies of English at a Korean university where English has been adopted as an official language. This study draws on ethnographic data in order to understand how speakers respond to and experience the institutional language policy. The findings show that language ideologies in this university represent the…

Reports on aspects of an ethnographic study carried out in six newly integrated schools in post-aparthied South Africa. Presents evidence that these schools are sites of struggle between competing discourses that construct, maintain, and change social identities in these communities and the wider society. (Author/VWL)

This report discusses an investigation on the processes involved in the acquisition of French by students in late immersion programs in Australia. An ethnographic style of data collection was used in the study, which covered a full year. (Contains 14 references.) (JL)