The adoption of the English language paradigm and the subsequent implementation of bilingual policies worldwide are generating new linguistic hierarchies. These have an effect on the linguistic diversity at the sub-national level and on individuals' linguistic human rights. This article reports the results of a case study on an individual's…

Internationalisation is a buzzword in European higher education, and many universities work hard to devise and implement strategies that will help facilitate increased transnational student mobility. In this context, English is commonly seen as the "natural" choice for university internationalisation, and English is accordingly promoted…

The present study analyses bilingual conversations taking place in binational families living in the UK. The focus is on two Polish/English stepfamilies, where the Polish mothers' concern with preserving and developing their children's linguistic and cultural identity collides with the English partner's limited knowledge of Polish. While the paper…

In line with recent Conversation Analytic work on language learning as situated practice, this article investigates how interactants can create language learning opportunities for themselves and others in and through social interaction. The study shows how the participants of "Big Brother Finland," a reality TV show, whose main…

This article closely examines the bilingual talk emerging from informal discussions among young people attending a bilingual school in Wales. In contrast to the common focus on issues of bilinguals' linguistic competence in the literature, this paper advocates a speaker's perspective and considers bilingualism to be the sedimentation of social and…

Having been the scene of language planning for more than a century in relation to the two competing written standards of Norwegian, Norwegian language planners are now facing a new challenge: how to deal with what has been termed "domain loss" where Norwegian is perceived as losing out to English in important sectors of society,…

The widespread use of cell phones has led to the proliferation of messages sent using the Short Messaging Service (SMS). The 160-character limit on text messages encourages the use of shortenings and other shortcuts in language use. When bilingual speakers use SMS, their access to multiple sources of vocabulary, sentence structure, and other…

This article examines what we call "micro-level language policy-in-process"--that is, how a target--language-only policy emerges "in situ" in the foreign language classroom. More precisely, we investigate the role of "language policing", the mechanism deployed by the teacher and/or pupils to (re-)establish the…

This work explores the use of multimodal communication in a community of expert "World of Warcraft"® players and its impact on politeness, identity, and relationships. Players in the community regularly communicated using three linguistic modes quasi-simultaneously: text chat, voice chat, and face-to-face interaction. Using the…

This paper investigates the use of multilingual resources by plurilingual participants in two English language classrooms in Luxembourg. Using Conversation Analysis and drawing on transcriptions of video-recordings, we present three examples of student use of multilingual resources and their respective teacher next turn management (through…

Morpho-syntactic features of Modern Standard Arabic mix intricately with those of Egyptian Colloquial Arabic in ordinary speech. I study the lexical, phonological and syntactic features of verb phrase morphemes and constituents in different tenses, aspects, moods. A corpus of over 3000 phrases was collected from religious, political/economic and…

This article presents an ethnographic study of how bilingual teachers and children use their home language, TexMex, to mediate academic content and standard languages. From the premise that TESOL educators can benefit from a fuller understanding of students' linguistic repertoires, the study describes language practices in a second-grade classroom…

The present article examines discourses on bilingualism in French immersion schools and connects local ideologies of bilingualism to a more global view of what it means to be bilingual in Canada. Bilingualism is usually regarded as two isolated monolingualisms (or monolingual systems) in which there is no place for code-switching, uneven language…

The aim of this paper is to account for language choice and alternation phenomena we have observed in a French complementary school classroom in Scotland. In this classroom, talk can be conducted in French (the official medium of instruction), in English (the other language in contact) and in both French and English. A critical review of the…

This article documents an extended Mexican family's social practices surrounding literacy as they engage with bilingual children's literature in a unique context that draws from both home and school without the pressures of curriculum mandates. The research is situated within the southeastern United States where English-dominant practices permeate…