Whilst mainstream schools in England may encourage multilingualism by insisting on the study of foreign languages, multilingual children are not always provided with support for the maintenance of their heritage languages and cultures. In response to this shortcoming, communities organise themselves to support their young members by setting up…

The manuscript describes Chinese immigrant children's literacy and identity in online and in-person Chinese heritage language classrooms. The theoretical perspectives on multimodality and positioning theory are utilized as theoretical perspectives. The data were collected with the same heritage language teacher and the students during the COVID-19…

Pairing affect theory with raciolinguistic perspectives, this study examines the racialized and embodied identities of second-generation Chinese American heritage language learners. Drawing on the data collected through in-depth interviews, the study observes that second-generation Chinese Americans' affective experiences, such as their racialized…

This article examines the dynamics of heritage language (HL) identity development by analysing the life history accounts of three Chinese heritage language (CHL) learners growing up in the UK. Drawing on narrative data, the study contributes to the growing body of HL identity research by capturing the individual trajectories of CHL learners…

This study inquires how students of Arab heritage in an urban setting in Denmark interpret Islamic literacy artefacts available in their homes, and how these interpretations reflect broader faith literacy practices in the students' diaspora community. Through a linguistic ethnographic study design students have been invited to photograph literacy…

The UK is linguistically rich but faces a reducing uptake of language learning in schools, as pupils feel more withdrawn and disinterested in learning an additional language to English. A key component in many linguistic minority communities to preserve their language is complementary schooling (CS), which has wide-ranging educational and societal…

The increasing occurrence of multilingualism in the educational sphere is challenging teachers to deal with the coexistence of different languages in the classroom. The present paper presents the analysis of language portraits as a tool to make students' multilingualism visible by using colours to represent their multilingual repertoires. Through…

While study abroad (SA) has long been considered an opportunity for language learning, relatively little research has investigated how short-term SA programs hosted by Anglophone countries support varied aspects of sojourners' language learning. To address this gap, the current study examined how 10 college students from a Korean university…

This 17-month ethnographic case study, which is grounded in the notions of citizenship, language, and Bakhtin's ideological becoming, examines the complex interplay of ideologies of citizenship, language, and identity in a church-based citizenship class in a Northeastern U.S. city. This study reveals the disconnects of ideologies of citizenship…

This study explores the language use of Southeast Asian marriage-migrant mothers in South Korea with their mixed-heritage children, and the challenges related to heritage language (HL) transmission. Drawing on interviews with nine women, the study finds that they encountered multiple obstacles to teaching the HL to their children. Their Korean…

In the past decade, there has been increased scholarly interest in the purpose and functions of community language schools, also known as heritage, supplementary or complementary schools. In particular, previous studies have focused on schools operating in minority communities deriving from Asian and Eastern-European countries, showing that…

The study is situated in a bridge writing course that serves multilingual international students during their first year in college. Based on interviews with 36 Chinese international students and detailed tracing of one focal student's literacy activities, this study examines the social production of a translocal literacy learning space that spans…

This paper investigates Mandarin learning experiences of Chinese American teenagers from working-class families. Drawing on a subset of data from a larger ethnographic study, we focus on 14 middle schoolers who studied Mandarin as a heritage language at a socially engaging school with Mandarin as part of its official curriculum. The data highlight…

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…

This study critically examines the literacy levels of undergraduate students in Pakistan to compare and contrast the proficiency levels, particularly reading and writing of their mother tongues versus Urdu and English, and to study real and perceived vitality of local/regional mother tongues vis-à-vis Urdu and English. The research investigated…