English-medium instruction (EMI) is on the rise around the world due to globalization, internationalization and neoliberal ideologies which equate English with social capital, prestige, and success in the labour market. While many EMI policies aim to equip students with English as a 'lingua academia', produce 'neoliberal subjects' and compete in…

The emergence of Indigenous language revitalization seeks to address historical domination over Indigenous peoples and to recover the loss of ancestral languages as embedded in Indigenous knowledge systems. This paper draws from long-term linguistic ethnographic research on one of the Indigenous Ryukyuan languages: Yaeyaman. I highlight one…

'Race applied to human beings is a "political" division: it is a system of governing people that classifies them into a social hierarchy based on invented biological demarcations' (Roberts, 2011, p. x). Foregrounding our racialized histories, we show how our lives "intersect" in a doctoral seminar in Thailand. Combining…

The personal experiences of three of the authors of this document as Au Pairs in the United States exposed some issues related to social justice and discrimination that made the participants reflect on their identity as speakers and future teachers of English. This article shares, analyzes and interprets these reflections collaboratively in search…

Research supports the premise that adult language and literacy instruction should build on prior linguistic knowledge and the lived experiences of the students. Despite these widely held tenets, classroom practices often do not reflect these ideals, instead providing learning opportunities that are decontextualized and isolated from the students'…

Study-abroad programs tend to assume that their destinations are culturally and linguistically homogenous. However, Western English-speaking destinations, particularly metropolitan cities, have become increasingly culturally and linguistically diverse. Considering such sociolinguistic changes in these destinations, this research examines how…

This article focuses on the 'native speaker effects' (Doerr, N. M., ed. 2009. "The Native Speaker Concept: Ethnographic Investigations of Native Speaker Effects." Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter) pertaining to the construction of eliteness in Spanish-English CLIL-type bilingual programmes in the autonomous community of Castilla-La Mancha…

This paper offers a case study on dialect contact in Máíhiki (Tukanoan, Peru), with the goal of illustrating how documentation of variation can contribute to a general language documentation project. I begin by describing the facts of variation in one dialectally diverse Máíhiki-speaking community. I then argue that the outcomes of dialect mixing…

This article builds on the foundation of the importance of students' voices and experiences in heritage language instruction and how they are rarely asked to consider their lived experiences as rich cultural and historical knowledge outside the HLL classroom.

Immigrant integration in nation states increasingly focuses on the importance of learning the national state language. This is evidenced by increased emphasis on rigorous language testing and tighter citizenship regulations. This paper analyses immigrant integration in two sub-state contexts, Galicia and Wales, where presence of a national…

This article explores the methodological turning points in conducting a critical ethnography on the discursive practices of Italian Canadian youth identities across their multiple worlds in Toronto (cf. Giampapa, 2004a). Specifically, I aim to problematize the construction of the "researcher," researcher identities, and the…

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…

This is an expanded version of a paper given at a conference held in Cape Town, South Africa from December 11-13, 2008 entitled "The Native Speaker and the Mother Tongue." In keeping with the conference's themes of exploring and interrogating the notions of "mother tongue" and "native speaker," I consider…

This dissertation examines the negotiation of language ideologies and identity construction amongst university intermediate level Spanish Heritage Language (SHL) learners in the U.S. Southwest. Combining sociolinguistic and ethnographic methods with discourse analysis, this study seeks to provide deeper insight into the linguistic practices and…