This paper explores language practice in early childhood education for children new to the majority language, discussing how language practice can be transformed through actions such as reflexive dialogues with educators. In a Swedish action-research project, educators and researchers collaborated in reflexive dialogues to develop language…

This article explores some implications of plurilingualism and translingual practice for teaching and learning in higher education. Research in this area tends to focus on the undergraduate experience whereas our focus is on doctoral supervision, a less-discussed but rich site for studying plurilingual and translingual practice. We consider…

Discourses of languagelessness that suggest that Latinxs are not fully proficient in either English or Spanish have a long history in the United States. These discourses produce raciolinguistic categories that frame the bilingualism of Latinxs as deficient and in need of remediation. In this article, the researchers examine one such…

Bangladesh does not have an official second language. However, apart from Bangla, English is the only other language widely used in the country. There has been a sustained debate whether English is a foreign language (EFL) or English is the second language (ESL) in Bangladesh, for often it is found that the function of English in the country is…

Code-switching is a common yet complicated phenomenon. With the rapid development of cross cultural communication, the contact between language and language varieties become all the more frequent. With the appearance of more and more bilingual and multilingual communities, code-switching becomes a linguistic phenomenon of significant academic…

A number of language acquisition patterns have been identified in the signing of a newly designated population of bimodal bilingual individuals--"heritage signers." This article examines subject-referent tracking forms in the ASL (American Sign Language) narratives of six elementary-school-aged, native-signing, bimodal bilinguals made at…

A recent surge of findings on bilingual cognitive advantage has attracted attention from both researchers and the media. An advantage has been demonstrated with regard to, inter alia, inhibiting, switching, monitoring and updating. However, Paap et al. argue that the advantage does not exist or is only limited to executive functioning. Both sides…

This study explored linguistic multi-competence in Fiji students and their conversational partners through a description of linguistic diversity in one school community. Students' caregivers (n = 75), teachers (n = 25) and year 4 students (n = 40) in an urban school of Fiji completed paper-based questionnaires regarding: 75 students, 75 mothers,…

While South Africa has been lauded as a multilingual country that accorded official status to 11 languages, the academic notion of multilingualism has always been conceived from a monolingual perspective. Monolingual ideologies, which inadvertently favoured European languages to the detriment of local languages, were passed on to African countries…

Bilingualism and biculturalism have a very immediate impact on the make-up of literary works of bilingual and bicultural authors with immediate linguistic traces of bilingual and bicultural mosaic of textual creation. Code-switching is a linguistic and cultural practice used by bilinguals in writing and speaking. This article examines the…

English Language Learners (ELLs) early schooling often involves a mix of their native (L1) and second (L2) languages. Spanglish speakers take this one step further and employ a hybrid language practice to compensate for their lack of fluency in both Spanish and English. Unlike conventional ELLs, these students use the two languages simultaneously…

This paper critiques the role of translanguaging in deaf education by examining how, and under what conditions, translanguaging practices can enhance learning and teaching. The paper explores the premise that translanguaging represents an additive view of bilingualism and multilingualism for deaf learners and offers an innovative departure from,…

This paper explores the sociolinguistic practices of a group of young bilingual rappers in the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico. Against the background of ongoing language shift to Spanish in the region, the language choices of a group of Maya youths involved in Hip Hop culture and their agency as policy-makers at the grassroots level is analysed.…

The term "translanguaging" has appeared with growing frequency in research about the education of linguistic minority students. Amid increasing application of the term, concern emerges regarding the consistency of its definitions and characterizations, specifically with respect to the term's social justice implications, which risk…

In this article, I synthesize extant research that documents how teachers foster and sustain children's diverse literacy practices within the early childhood classroom. Framing this review with Bakhtin's heteroglossia, I draw on theoretical and empirical scholarship in the fields of biliteracy, translanguaging, and culturally sustaining pedagogy.…