Miguel Pérez-Milans

Urban Schools and English Language Education in Late Modern China : A Critical Sociolinguistic Ethnography

1. Institutions, Modernization, and Chinas Late Modernity 2. Doing Critical Sociolinguistic Ethnography in Schools 3. Three Social Images for Three Competitive Schools 4. Learning to be a Good Community Member 5. Reform and Innovation in Chinas English Language Education: Insights from the Classroom 6. China, the Institutionalization of English Education, and the New Economy

Multilingual discursive practices and processes of social change in globalising institutional spaces : a critical ethnographic perspective

This special issue aims to study multilingualism in relation to contemporary processes of transformation of institutional spaces. Our focus is on the ways in which multilingual communicative practices, institutional logics and wider processes of social change are interwoven in the production of everyday life in contemporary institutions (Heller & Martin-Jones, 2001). By drawing on sociolinguistic ethnographies carried out in different institutional contexts across the world (Spain, the United States and Argentina), the present volume seeks to reflect on how socio-cultural processes of change derived from economic neoliberalization and the increasing mobility of people, ideas and practices around the globe are forcing local institutions to reposition themselves, and redefine their missions and social functions. We believe multilingualism is a privileged standpoint for the study of those processes, and particularly so in the case of institutional spaces connected to the modern nation-state. As such, they are social spaces historically tied to those socio-economic and political forms of organization built upon the discursive construction and legitimization of a monolingual citizenry, which in turn resulted from the one-state-onenation-one-culture-one-language ideological framework (Bauman & Briggs, 2003). Thus, the increasing multilingual configuration of late modern societies poses various dilemmas and challenges which need to be empirically traced. Discourse is central to

Language education and institutional change in a Madrid multilingual school

This article examines the institutional transformations of language-in-education programmes in Madrid, linked to wider socio-economic processes of change. Drawing on a research teams ethnographic revisit, we explore how wider processes are impacting everyday discursive practices in the Bridging Class (BC) programme, first implemented in 2003 to teach Spanish to the children of migrant workers in state schools. We focus on the coexistence of this programme with the recently implemented Bilingual Schools Programme, aimed to equip students from working-class areas to compete in global markets. Based on the analysis of interviews and classroom interactions with BC students at one secondary school, in connection with the wider socio-historical processes underlying language-in-education policies, this study reveals a process of discrediting of the BC that contributed to a local hierarchisation of programmes (and its participants). Further implications are discussed regarding how individuals collaborated with each other under these institutional conditions.

Language, neoliberalism, and the commodification of pedagogy

ABSTRACT Although it has revealed the material conditions under which language education programmes are implemented worldwide, research on neoliberalism and language commodification has not yet adequately centred pedagogy. Thus, processes commodifying ‘objects’ other than language as product go unnoticed in educational settings. Drawing on a four-year ethnography in Hong Kong, this article details the processes whereby social actors formulated pedagogy as a ‘commodity register’ to create distinction, index normative roles and desirable social personae. It also shows how some actors concurrently constructed pedagogy as a resource for advancing ethnic-group activist concerns, leading to unpredicted tensions and forms of inequality.

We don’t do anything: analysing the construction of legitimate knowledge in multilingual schools

This article explores the ways in which what counts as legitimate knowledge is produced and negotiated in two multilingual classrooms of two different programmes designed to “attend to diversity” at secondary schools in the Madrid region. Following a sociolinguistic approach, the article focuses on the ways in which local identities, beliefs and social relations emerging from situated practice become a window through which to understand how different social experiences and academic trajectories are institutionally constructed in connection with broader social processes. For this reason, the article seeks to connect recorded and observed classroom interactional patterns, through which legitimate knowledge is produced, with social actors’ (teachers and students) positioning(s), and the academic trajectories of students enrolled in such programmes. We end with a discussion about the possible consequences of such practices for migrant students, recently arrived in the Madrid classrooms, in terms of academic success and school participation.