Upon arrival in Sweden, adult migrants are required to learn Swedish at the earliest opportunity. This requirement also extends to deaf migrants, regardless of their linguistic and educational backgrounds. This paper presents findings and experiences derived from a project focused on the multilingual situation of deaf migrants in Sweden. Some deaf…

Language assessment is a central aspect not only of language education in the general population, but also amongst heterogeneous, low-incidence populations. One such population are immigrant deaf and hard-of-hearing learners (IDML) who are bimodal-multilingual and whose languages development often includes the spoken, written, and/or signed…

Not only does language practice in shop signs generate a sense of place with particular meanings to visitors, it also indicates the kind of economic activity performed in that place. By investigating and comparing the shop name signs in the two largest foreign migrant neighbourhoods in Guangzhou, specifically, Baohan Straight Street (African…

This paper critically analyses the meaning and use of translanguaging as an inclusive pedagogical strategy in the context of a bilingual deaf education classroom where there are asymmetrical sensorial experiences of being deaf and being hearing, and different access to 'codified' (either speech or sign-language) resources. The pedagogical…

Chinatowns, as neighborhoods for overseas ethnic Chinese, have garnered considerable scholarly attention from linguistic landscape (LL) researchers in recent years. These investigations tend to treat old immigrants who have been tied to the neighborhoods for generations as the key text producers of LL, with far too little attention paid to the LL…

This paper presents the first in-depth analysis of linguistic landscape (LL) of a migrant area in Dubai. While Arabic is the official language of the country, few foreigners learn it and English has become the lingua franca that allows migrant communities to communicate. Nonetheless, English and Arabic are mother tongues to a minority of resident…

This article is aimed to demonstrate how language policy at the local school level may create space for translanguaging. Focus is on a Mother Tongue (MT) classroom for Somali in a primary school in Sweden by way of an analysis of layers of language policy, with focus on spatial aspects. The empirical material consists of policy documents,…

Increased attention to urban diversity as a site of study has fostered the recent development of linguistic landscape studies. To date, however, much of the research in this area has concerned the use and spread of English to the exclusion of other global languages. In a case study situated in Box Hill, a large suburb of Melbourne, we adopted a…

Deaf education professionals are regularly challenged by the linguistic and cultural diversity of deaf youth. The present article focuses on how young deaf people residing in France who are migrants or the children of migrants define themselves, and how parents and professionals perceive their linguistic and cultural diversity. The theoretical…

The conference papers from a colloquium on issues in bilingualism and biculturalism include: "Le bilinguisme et biculturalisme: essai de definition" ("Bilingualism and Biculturalism: Attempt at Definition") (Francois Grosjean); "La variation individuelle dans l'acquisition d'une langue seconde" ("Individual…