Katrijn Maryns

Procedures without borders: The language-ideological anchorage of legal-administrative procedures in translocal institutional settings

Theoretical and applied research in the field of institutional discourse analysis calls for an increasing awareness of the constitutive nature of discourse in the representation and the assessment of social identities (Sarangi & Roberts 1999, Eades 2010, Blommaert 2010). The staunchly textualist accounts surviving institutional procedures, however, tend to obscure complex multidiscursive and language-ideologically anchored processes which mould procedural outcomes. On the basis of first-hand ethnographic data collected across legal-administrative procedures in Belgium, this article aims at revealing some meaningful contexts that have been erased in the case of an asylum seeker who became a murder victim and whose asylum file was used in the assize trial as a resource to sketch his social identity. The analysis explores the ideological functioning of textuality in the situated details of communicative practice, thereby aiming for a better understanding of the intricacies of multidiscursive identity construction in translocal procedural settings.

Introduction: The Multilingual Edge of Education

In this volume, we raise the need to invest in new educational perspectives in which multilingualism is valorized and used strategically in settings and contexts of instruction and learning. While the title of the book, ‘The multilingual edge of education’, undeniably alludes to the way in which the multilingual repertoires of pupils in mainstream classrooms are often perceived as an insurmountable problem, it equally underlines more current perspectives in which multilingualism is viewed as possessing cutting-edge potential for transforming linguistically heterogeneous classrooms into more inhabitable, more equitable and more efficiently organized spaces for teaching and learning. Is the multilingual edge an abyss, or do we look to multilingualism for giving learners the edge over the challenges faced by the educational contexts in which they participate today? The chapters in this book are written by an international group of contributors who present findings from empirical studies on different educational approaches which draw on students’ multilingual repertoires as a pedagogical resource for learning and teaching. The authors document a variety of classroom practices, while engaging with students’ and teachers’ experiential voices, local and national policy contexts and so on, so as to explore the potential of multilingualism as learning capital, which, once capitalized upon, can enrich and support educational processes in diverse sociolinguistic contexts.