Marilyn Martin-Jones

Bilingual Resources and 'Funds of Knowledge' for Teaching and Learning in Multi-ethnic Classrooms in Britain

This paper is based on an ethnographic project carried out in primary classrooms in the North West of England. The focus of the project was on ways in which the roles of new bilingual classroom assistants were being defined through the organisational practices and communicative routines of daily life in these classrooms (practices and routines primarily orchestrated by monolingual class teachers). We looked at these classroom processes by incorporating insights from classroom observation, from participants own accounts and from our own analyses of audio and video-recordings of different types of teaching/learning events. We present an account of bilingual teaching/learning events in which the bilingual assistants were able to use the childrens home or community language and draw on funds of knowledge (Moll et al., 1992) associated with worlds beyond the school. In our analysis of these events, we focus in particular on: ways in which they drew on the bilingual resources within their communicative repertoire in negotiating their relationship with the children; ways in which they linked home and school contexts for learning; and verbal and non-verbal ways in which knowledge of the world beyond the school was contextualised in classroom discourse.

Improving Learning in College : Rethinking Literacies Across the Curriculum

Part 1: What Are The Issues? 1. Literacies as a resource for learning in college Part 2: What Does The Research Tell Us? 2. What students do with reading and writing in their everyday lives 3. Ways of understanding literacy practices 4. Literacies across the college curriculum 5. Comparisons across contexts: The textual mediation of learning on Childcare courses Part 3: What Are The Implications? 6. Making a difference: The conception, implementation and analysis of changes in practice 7. Recontextualizing the research: Bilingual literacies for learning in Wales 8. Conceptualizing the interface between everyday and curriculum literacy practices 9. Implications for learning in college and beyond

Multilingual resources in classroom interaction: ethnographic and discourse analytic perspectives

This special issue of Language and Education contributes to a distinctive and growing tradition of ethnographic and discourse analytic research on multilingual classroom interaction. To illustrate the nature and significance of the articles assembled here, this introduction provides a brief genealogy of this research tradition. We review two broad generations of studies, along with some of the different orienting theories and methodologies guiding the studies: (1) a first generation of research in multilingual classroom contexts that grew out of the field of linguistic anthropology in North America and (2) a second generation of studies, emerging from the early 1990s onwards, that developed critical, interpretive approaches to the study of multilingual classroom interaction. The second-generation studies were conducted in a wider range of research sites, including post-colonial settings, and they were explicitly framed with reference to language-in-education policies. We then introduce the five articles in this special issue. We argue that they represent a third generation of studies that are opening up new epistemological spaces at the interface with other fields of research, such as multimodality in classroom interaction or ethnography of language policy, while building on the robust foundation of first- and second-generation research in multilingual classrooms.

Writing the Resistance: Literacy in East Timor 1975–1999

Abstract This paper provides an account of the ways in which literacy, in different languages, was embedded in the East Timorese struggle against the Indonesian invasion and subsequent occupation, from 1975 to 1999. Our account is primarily historiographical in nature and is based on a corpus of written texts gathered during four phases of the struggle, on photographs of people ‘writing the Resistance’, on published resources, on Estêvão Cabrals own historical account of the Resistance and on his direct observation of literacy practices on three broad fronts: the armed, the clandestine and the diplomatic front. We describe the ways in which literacy mediated the struggle on each of these fronts. We also document the diverse and multilingual nature of the literacies associated with the political work of the Resistance and the values generated through the use of different languages for the production of particular kind of texts. We take account of texts produced and circulated within the Resistance and those produced for a wider audience. In addition, we chart the changes in literacy practices ushered in by the advent of new technologies and, at the same time, by the changing political, economic and cultural conditions of the struggle.

‘A classroom is not a classroom if students are talking to me in Berber’: language ideologies and multilingual resources in secondary school English classes in Libya

This paper reports on an ethnographic study carried out by Adel Asker in 2009, with teachers and learners, in English classes in a secondary school in the north-west of Libya. Arabic is the official medium of instruction in all Libyan secondary schools, but most teachers and students in this region are Berber speakers. Adel Askers aim was to investigate the ways in which beliefs and ideologies about ‘appropriate’ language use, embedded in broader socio-cultural, political and historical contexts, were being reproduced through multilingual classroom interaction and codeswitching practices, in local English classes. In this paper, we show how teachers and students’ own accounts of their multilingual practices revealed different beliefs and ideologies about the ‘appropriacy’ of different language choices with teachers and with members of their peer group. We also describe the ways in which students moved in and out of Berber, English and Arabic, employing the contrast between these languages as a communicative resource and as a means of indexing wider cultural values. We demonstrate how they did this in whole-class teacher–student interactions and in student–student interactions, in situated negotiation of language learner identities, sometimes colluding with and sometimes contesting the teachers’ agenda.

Bilingual literacy in and for working lives on the land: case studies of young Welsh speakers in North Wales

Abstract This article is based on ethnographic research on literacy carried out with young bilinguals, aged 16–19, in North Wales from 2005 to 2007. Here, we present case studies of five young people who were enrolled in a bilingual vocational course in agriculture in a local college and who were planning to make a living for themselves on the land and to create a workplace for themselves where Welsh could be used. All five of these young people were working in land-based industries, on a part-time basis, as they pursued their studies at college. The main focus of this part of our investigation was on the ways in which literacy, in Welsh and in English, mediated the work they did on the land. This work included running their own businesses on the family farm or smallholding, collaborating with older members of the household (parents or grandparents) in handling the farm paperwork and the digitised record keeping, and searching the Web for funding opportunities to initiate agri-environmental schemes or land improvement projects. In analysing the ethnographic and textual data from this part of the project, we show how the young peoples language choices and literacy practices were shaped by the nature of the land-based enterprises they were involved in. Some were reading and writing predominantly in Welsh for local clients, some were engaged in bilingual literacy practices, and others made predominant use of English. We also show how the local literacy practices of these young people and their families were bound up with global changes in agriculture, with changes in the everyday work routines of farmers, and with changes in the literacy practices and uses of texts in contemporary workplaces.

Multilingual literacies in the global south: language policy, literacy learning and use

This special issue focuses on literacy research in multilingual contexts in the global south. It examines the interfaces between language policies and language ideologies at the national level, the...

Researching language-in-education in diverse, twenty-first century settings

ABSTRACT The two opening sections of this Afterword show how the studies in this collection reflect wider trends in research related to language-in-education policy and practice in contemporary contexts of linguistic and cultural diversity: namely, the turn towards interpretive research and the diversification of research sites. The third section focuses on the nature of the innovation in research design and methodology that is evident in the different articles. Attention is drawn to the fact that, in each case, innovation is achieved by locating the research at the interface between research into communicative practices in classrooms and other fields of research in education. The fourth section is devoted to the way in which the authors address the epistemological and methodological challenges that arise in research in linguistically diverse settings. Here, the discussion centres on three main challenges: first, the challenge of dealing with asymmetries in researcher–researched relationships; second, the challenge of creating conditions for engaging in extended dialogue with research participants; and third, the challenge of critical, reflexive work and the need to be prepared to be surprised. The concluding section then calls for research that provides glimpses into avenues for change and development in different areas of language-in-education policy and practice

Introduction: Researching language-in-education in diverse, twenty-first century settings

ABSTRACT The articles in this special issue present research carried out in diverse linguistic contexts in the United Kingdom. The focus is primarily on Scotland and England, two educational jurisdictions where there is increasing divergence in language-in-education policy and practice. The articles discuss research into different forms of language-in-education provision, so our introduction traces the historical context for the emergence of these forms of provision. We then turn to the authors reflections on the role of research in garnering knowledge about teaching/learning practices in specific settings, identifying the strengths and/or limits of particular practices and contributing to educational debates. We also compare the research lenses adopted in each study, showing that most studies focus in on the detail of classroom practices and learning processes, while one article takes a wide angle, historical approach and builds an account of shifts in policy discourses. In our concluding section, we argue that, if we are to build a fuller understanding of language-in-education policy and practice in contemporary contexts of diversity, we need research of both types. Language policies need to be seen – not as prescriptions that are ‘fixed’ in texts – but as fluid discursive processes that unfold in different ways, on different scales.