Producing local materials is a challenge to mother tongue education programs especially in linguistically diverse contexts. To address this, a five-day teacher training program on materials localization for K-3 teachers in a linguistically diverse area in the Philippines was designed and implemented. The program was based on frameworks about…

The world has become seemingly smaller with the advancements of technologies, instead of taking days to receive a written letter, it takes seconds to get an email. While the connection is obvious there still seems to be a barrier between the majority of the world's population: Language. Though it seems irrelevant in people's small communities, the…

Despite the extensive research on translanguaging in bi/multilingual classrooms, research on the context of first language (L1) classrooms remains scarce. This study fills the research gap by examining how a translanguaging space was created in an L1 classroom to prepare students to inhabit a world with different linguistic and cultural practices.…

Children's writing development is a matter of concern for Australian and other education systems. Factors related to the nature of writing as a literate skill, school writing pedagogy, and diminishing role of writing in a screen-dominant environment may account for this educational concern. What happens in a child's writing when immigrant parents…

Current research on language revitalisation through education has highlighted the impact of the standard language ideology on minoritised language practices. This ideology is intertwined with emerging literacy practices in language revitalisation, leading to debates on what to teach minority language students, and how. The paper argues that…

One of the features of the growing prominence of English across the globe is the proliferation of English-medium instruction (EMI) programmes at all levels of education, driven by a neoliberal agenda which places a disproportionate value on English over other languages. While this spread has primarily affected more developed, urban contexts, EMI…

In the field of applied linguistics, the use of multiple languages in educational settings has often been studied from a pedagogical perspective, focusing on teacher practices. In order for multilingual teaching pedagogies, such as translanguaging to reach their full potential, pupils should participate actively in classroom interaction and be…

Grammar competition has been proposed as a model for second language (L2) acquisition. Variational Learning provides a framework within which to investigate the idea of grammar competition as the model requires a marriage of quantitative properties of the input with Universal Grammar. A diachronic variational model of grammar competition is…

Framed by decolonial theory, this paper explores how language and literacy ideologies, including Anglonormativity, or the expectation that children should be proficient in a standardised version of English and are deficient if not, shape language and literacy practices in South African classrooms. While not legitimised, the use of fluid language…

Purpose: Language sample analysis is widely regarded as the gold standard of language assessment. However, the uncertainty regarding the optimal length of sample and the limited availability of developmental language data for nonmainstream languages such as Afrikaans complicate reliable use of the method. The study aimed to provide guidelines on…

The practice of translanguaging offers emergent bilinguals the opportunity to access their full linguistic repertoire. This qualitative study uses the lenses of dynamic bilingualism and idiolect, or one's own unique language patterns, to explore emergent bilinguals' translanguaging and reading comprehension strategies during a reading think-aloud,…

Language and accent strongly influence the formation of social groups. By five years of age, children already show strong social preferences for peers who speak their native language with a familiar accent (Kinzler, Shutts, DeJesus, & Spelke, 2009). However, little is known about the factors that modulate the strength and direction of…

As a branch of artificial intelligence, automated speech recognition (ASR) technology is increasingly used to detect speech, process it to text, and derive the meaning of natural language for various learning and assessment purposes. ASR inaccuracy may pose serious threats to valid score interpretations and fair score use for all when it is…

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…

Although not often discussed, complementary ('mother tongue') classrooms comprise participants who differ substantially in a number of ways. Differences comprise, e.g. participants' orientations to and understandings of the indexicalities of linguistic registers, which may have been brought along from the presupposed country of origin. It has…