Uplifting Indigenous Mexican Languages and Identities in Schools

We will soon be publishing Culturally Responsive Schooling for Indigenous Mexican Students by William Perez and Rafael Vásquez.  In this post the authors set the stage for their book and discuss its importance.

Last June, Griselda Zarate, a young Indigenous Mexican-origin student, spoke to Spanish-language television about the racial discrimination she and her sister faced while attending the Santa Rita Union School District in Central California USA. The racism that students like Griselda face often spreads by other Mexicans and manifests by language-shaming for the way Indigenous Mexicans speak. Popular culture ridicules Indigenous languages as dialects, holding unequal power relationships against Spanish and English. As a result of these aggressions, the school district passed a resolution to prohibit the disparaging terms “Oaxaquita/o” and “Indito” which translate to “little Oaxacan” and “little Indian” referring to the widely held belief that Indigenous people from Mexico’s Guerrero and Oaxaca states are racially inferior. The district will also establish the first Indigenous Mixtec after school program so that children can have access to learning their language.

California is considered the state with the largest concentration of Indigenous Mexicans. By one estimate, about 800,000 Oaxacans have settled in Southern California and are mostly Zapotec peoples. These communities come from diverse cultures and often speak at least one of the 68 Indigenous languages of Mexico. Despite their rich social, cultural, and linguistic practices, they face many challenges in healthcare, the labor force, education, and other institutions due to historically lived discrimination.

After decades of living among and working with Indigenous communities in Los Angeles, we decided to conduct a study in Southern California with over 150 Indigenous youth from three groups: Mixtecs, Zapotecs, and P’urhépechas. We wanted to find out what happens to Indigenous students who attend schools but largely go unnoticed, or when noticed, face scrutinization. In our book, Culturally Responsive Schooling for Indigenous Mexican Students, we ask: how do Indigenous students experience school, given the traumas many have faced in Mexico for being labeled Indigenous, for speaking Spanish ‘with an accent’ due to the ‘inhibiting’ Indigenous ‘dialects’ they speak, or for coming from ‘underdeveloped’ communities and where society regards them as intellectually ‘inferior’? And how can schools be responsive and address the need to leverage Indigenous students’ cultural and linguistic backgrounds to make meaningful connections to their schooling experiences so they can achieve equitable educational opportunities?

To answer these questions, we looked at students’ multilingualism from the perspective that languages interact with each other and the places they are spoken. Since many Indigenous youth experience language across and in between borders, we introduce a transcultural and translingual approach to illustrate the dynamic and intersectional processes that Indigenous youth engage to construct their identities and linguistic practices in social and educational settings. We emphasize adolescents’ agency in actively negotiating and constructing their identities and the influence of their non-Indigenous Mexican peers and teachers. Despite the verbal abuse youth face, the development of transcultural practices often serves to reinvigorate a sense of who they are and creates strategies to actively debunk anti-Indigenous beliefs. Therefore, the book intends to inform supportive environments that affirm Indigenous identities and languages, foster critical consciousness, and value the transnational experiences of Indigenous Mexican youth.

Studying Indigenous educational experiences and the critical issues these students face is significant to developing innovative approaches in Latinx cultural and linguistic heterogeneity and intra-group ethnic/racial relations. Educational researchers and policymakers will find the book of tremendous value, as it is the first book to our knowledge that examines the academic pathways and identities of Indigenous Mexican students. The findings of this study have the potential to inform local, state, and national policies affecting Indigenous migrant students. Adolescent development scholars will also find the book useful since few studies have been done examining migrant Indigenous youth identity development. We hope that our book contributes to education justice initiatives so that Indigenous students are invisible no more.

Please let us know your thoughts.  We’d like to hear from you.

Rafael Vásquez (rafael.vasquez@cgu.edu) and William Perez (william.perez@lmu.edu)

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Overcoming the Gentrification of Dual Language, Bilingual and Immersion Education edited by M. Garrett Delavan, Juan A. Freire and Kate Menken.

Supporting Increasingly Diverse Student Populations in Schools

We recently published Centering Multilingual Learners and Countering Raciolinguistic Ideologies in Teacher Education by Jeff Bale, Shakina Rajendram, Katie Brubacher, Mama Adobea Nii Owoo, Jennifer Burton, Wales Wong, Yiran Zhang, Elizabeth Jean Larson, Antoinette Gagné and Julie Kerekes. In this post Jeff explains how the book contributes to the field of teacher education and multilingualism. 

“I feel like you’re judging…I don’t know if judging is the right word, but you’re marking somebody on the way they speak. Then, if you hear another person in a different situation, who’s not an English language learner, you might find the same things…[but] then they’re not marked or judged differently…It feels like you have to jump like an extra hoop, like through an extra hoop, you know, constantly.”

Luciana, a multilingual future teacher of math for Grades 4-10, expressed these concerns about assessing English learners in an interview with our research team. Luciana was referring to the English-language assessment tool used in Ontario, and the activities she had been asked to complete with this tool in a required seminar called “Supporting English Language Learners” in the teacher-education program at OISE, University of Toronto. Throughout the conversation, Luciana reflected on her own experiences of constantly having to prove her proficiency in English (as a student in Mexico, where she grew up; to attend university; to get permanent residency in Canada). These experiences led Luciana to question the purpose of assessing English learners, whether it had anything to do with actual language practices, or if the goal were rather to mark certain learners, to make them “jump through an extra hoop, you know, constantly.”

Luciana’s concerns provide powerful examples of what Daniels and Varghese (2019) theorized as white institutional listening, namely how teacher-education programs normalize the raciolinguistic ideologies (Flores & Rosa, 2015; Rosa & Flores, 2017) about Whiteness and standardized English that dominate in Canadian schools. In our book, we analyze how teacher candidates – especially those like Luciana who speak languages racialized in Canada – make sense of new knowledge about supporting multilingual learners in relation to this racial and linguistic ordering. We traced the dynamic shifts in thinking and practice as participants drew on their personal, professional and academic experiences to interpret what it means to work with multilingual students in the classroom.

Our book makes three important contributions to the growing scholarship on teacher education and multilingualism. The first is its analytical scope. At times, we zoom in on interviews with teacher candidates or the major assignments (e.g. lesson plans) they created for the required seminar mentioned earlier. We also provide close analysis of their learning based on Me Map videos we co-created with multilingual youth, in which youth told us about themselves, their friends and family, their ambitions in school, and their languages and cultures. Other times, we consider the 500+ responses we received from teacher candidates in our program on a pedagogical content-knowledge test about supporting multilingual learners. Complementing this broader perspective are interviews with ESL teachers and teacher-leaders, as well as teacher educators in Ontario’s other pre-service programs. Finally, we situate these various levels of analysis within a reading of the policies that govern teacher education in this province. The breadth of this research design allowed us to identify clear connections between different levels of policy appropriation: the policies themselves, teacher-education curriculum, course design, and the lived experiences of multilingual youth, teacher candidates, and teacher educators.

Second, our book identifies the siloed divisions in scholarship of language, race/racism and teacher education. Few applied-linguistic studies of multilingualism and teacher education frame their inquiry in relation to race/racism or (de-)colonization, although this is starting to change. Similarly, critical anti-racist and decolonial scholarship on teacher education only rarely considers multilingualism or language education. In the book, we reflect on how these disciplinary divisions impacted our own study. We describe the shifts in our own thinking and offer them as an example of teacher-education research that takes the relationship between language and race/racism seriously.

Finally, our book makes an important intervention about the ethics of publishing research. There is growing interest in the ethics of doing applied-linguistic research (e.g. de Costa 2016; Pinter & Kuchah, 2021). But how scholars disseminate our work in ethical ways is not often considered. Ours was a complicated study. We were lucky to have a talented group of doctoral-student researchers on the project for almost its entirety. Far from just ‘carrying out’ the work that I as PI, or Antoinette and Julie as co-PIs had conceived, the entire team was responsible for designing, conducting and analyzing the data. The only ethical choice for us was to honour this collective work and share in the writing of this book. It made the writing process a bit more complicated with 10 co-authors! But we think the result is more robust and interesting. We hope you agree.

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Antisocial Language Teaching by JPB Gerald.

Teacher–Researcher Collaboration as a Pathway for Sustaining Translanguaging Pedagogies in K-12 Classrooms

This month we published (Re)imagining Translanguaging Pedagogies through Teacher–Researcher Collaboration edited by Leah Shepard-Carey and Zhongfeng Tian. In this post the editors explain how the book came about.

We identify as language educators and teacher educators with deep commitments to classroom practice, and have further centered our research endeavors in classroom contexts with different stakeholders (teachers, administrators, students, families, etc). Translanguaging pedagogies have been documented increasingly in a variety of classroom contexts, and have shown how honoring and integrating multilingual students’ linguistic repertoires can transform learning (e.g. Cioè‐Peña, 2022; CUNY-NYSIEB, 2021; Ossa Para & Proctor, 2021; Rajendram, 2021; de los Rios & Seltzer, 2017; Tian 2022). As a pedagogical framework, educators should take up ideological stances that value multilingualism, engage in intentional translanguaging pedagogical designs, and shift to meet the needs of learners in the classroom (García et al., 2017).

Adapting this pedagogical framework to co-stances, co-designs, and co-shifts (Tian & Shepard-Carey, 2020), this edited volume emphasizes the potential of teacher–researcher collaboration as one avenue towards expanding the use of translanguaging pedagogies in classrooms. In 2018, we met on a panel at TESOL International’s annual conference and discovered that we were not only doing similar work on translanguaging pedagogies, but also shared a passion for collaborating with educators. Through discussion about our experiences, we observed how translanguaging pedagogies not only required critical and asset-based stances of multilingualism, but required educators (and researchers) to actively address systemic language ideologies and curricular barriers, among various other obstacles. Understanding the challenges of integrating translanguaging into school and classroom culture, we saw a gap in the literature of detailed accounts of how teachers and researchers could work together to design and carry out translanguaging pedagogies and address these challenges. As such, with our adapted framework as a guiding post, we ventured to explore the complex processes of collaborative partnerships in the context of translanguaging pedagogies.

This volume has been over three years in the making, which included the COVID-19 pandemic with both of us finishing dissertations and transitioning into faculty positions. Hence, we are so glad to be able to finally share this work with our communities. This volume aimed to showcase teacher–researcher collaboration from a variety of primary and secondary (K-12) classroom contexts. This included various content areas and program designs such as STEM, newcomer English-medium classrooms, dual immersion and bilingual education, world language, literacy, and content and language integrated learning (CLIL). We also sought to incorporate international perspectives, with chapters from Australia, Austria, Canada, Malaysia, Taiwan and the United States. Each of the chapters in this volume position teacher–researcher collaboration and classroom engagement as part of a larger approach to sustaining translanguaging pedagogies in classrooms and resisting the research-practice divide in education. The cover art, by the very talented Martha Samaniego Calderón, serves as a representation of these complex collaborative processes, illustrating how various members share and negotiate unique and invaluable knowledge and experience, which moves towards collaborative and transformative translanguaging praxis.

We are immensely grateful for the contributions in this volume, the scholars who have inspired this work (Ofelia García, Susana Ibarra Johnson, Kate Seltzer, CUNY-NYSIEB team and many more!). We believe that researchers, educators, and teacher educators will benefit from this work. We hope that, as one of the reviewers, Peter Sayer said, “[this] volume will serve as an important mentor text for researchers and practitioners who want to co-design and carry out collaborative translanguaging-focused projects in classrooms.”

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Translanguaging and English as a Lingua Franca in the Plurilingual Classroom by Anna Mendoza.

A Genuine Exploration of Cross-contextual Research on Multilingualism

This month we published Policy and Practice for Multilingual Educational Settings edited by Siv Björklund and Mikaela Björklund. In this post the editors explain how the book came about.

Back in 2013, some researchers from Åbo Akademi University and Vaasa University in Finland decided it was time to gather a team of international scholars together to explore the cross-professional nature of individual, professional, organisational, and societal multilingualism. One of the results was a simple visualisation of the natural and cross-professional nature, as well as additive potential of multilingualism.

Initially, there was no plan for the network to publish, but over the years and as part of the discussions on a shared research agenda, the network members expressed a genuine interest in applying the thoughts brought forth in the network. During a writers’ workshop, network members with similar interests, representing different contexts, were paired up to explore the cross-contextual and -professional perspectives in a concrete publication project.

Some of the joint efforts have resulted in articles published in various fora. For a number of the joint efforts, mainly focusing on multilingualism from the perspective of education, including policy, practices and teacher training, the aim was to provide a volume containing a range of cross-contextual studies. At least one initial network member has been part of the cross-contextual writers’ teams.

Thanks to Multilingual Matters and the Bilingual Education & Bilingualism series this has now been made possible. As editors, we are proud to present this volume – called Policy and Practice for Multilingual Educational Settings: Comparisons across Contexts  ̶  which we hope will contribute to the further development of the cross-professional and -contextual research on multilingualism.

Mikaela Björklund and Siv Björklund

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Multilingualism in European Language Education edited by Cecilio Lapresta-Rey and Ángel Huguet.

What Makes English in the Multilingual University So Contentious?

This month we published Tension-Filled English at the Multilingual University by Maria Kuteeva. In this post the author introduces the book.

This book is about English at the multilingual university, understood here as a complex and fluid construct reflecting the realities of increasingly diverse populations rather than any official status. Having conducted research at one such university for over a decade, I stumbled on a paradox: on the one hand, university language policies tend to promote and support multilingualism, but on the other, the contact between English and the national language generates competition and tensions which end up pushing multilingual practices backstage. What makes this dynamic of multilingualism vis-à-vis English so contentious?

My previous research findings identified diverse, sometimes contradictory, ways in which English is used and experienced by university stakeholders. Revisiting the work of Bakhtin enabled me to connect the dots between these somewhat disparate findings. Inspired by Bakhtin’s view of language as heteroglossic and filled with social tensions, I set out to develop an analytical framework that would account for how academic language perceptions and practices involve both standard language varieties and translingual practices. In the book, this framework is applied and scrutinised through empirical analyses of English-medium education and writing for publication.

What I find particularly valuable about a Bakhtinian perspective is its potential to reveal often concealed connections between language perceptions and practices of university stakeholders and the forces and processes governing such practices. Revising the Bakhtinian legacy also puts into question the dichotomies between standard and non-standard or native and non-native language use, which have shaped educational and institutional practices at universities around the globe.

The book is organised into three parts so as to guide the reader through the argument that narrows down its focus from theoretical and macro issues (language policies, disciplinary differences) to groups of university stakeholders and finally to individuals. Drawing on examples from universities in the Nordic region, my analyses foreground various aspects of tension-filled English: how it is conceptualised in linguistic research and language policies (Chapters 2 and 3), how it forms part of knowledge construction in academic disciplines (Chapters 4 and 5), and how it is perceived and experienced in educational settings (Chapter 6) and as part of linguistic repertoires during the creative writing process (Chapter 7). Various kinds of tensions have been detected, ranging from the renegotiation and bending of language norms to the emotional strain caused by the increasing use of English.

A Bakhtinian perspective implies that language is never a neutral tool. The overwhelming use of only one language – in this case English – can be limiting in terms of research perspectives, worldviews and voices in academic discourse, leading to what I describe in the book as ‘epistemic monoglossia’. In this regard, some practical suggestions for university policymakers are made in the conclusion chapter. The most important one concerns the need for universities to provide support for both developing academic language skills in English and other languages and raising awareness of the limitations inherent in the sole use of English, particularly in the social sciences and humanities. Such institutional interventions should recognise and support multi/translingual practices in knowledge exchanges and critically evaluate the potential of languages to reflect worldviews and epistemologies rooted in different academic traditions.

Maria Kuteeva, Stockholm University
maria.kuteeva@english.su.se

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Making Language Visible in the University by Bee Bond. 

The Lifelong Translanguaging Journey of Multilingual Families

We recently published Multimodal Communication in Young Multilingual Children by Jieun Kiaer. In this post the author explains the inspiration behind the book. 

I first had the idea to write this book when my daughter Sarah was born. I went back to work after 6 months of maternity leave. Then, I commuted from London to Oxford for many years, often staying away overnight whilst Sarah remained at home with her dad. In the early years of her life, Sarah was mostly looked after by a Korean carer, Mrs. Jung, so she learnt to speak Korean first. Meanwhile, my husband, Ian, could only speak English. Thus, on those evenings when my husband took care of Sarah, communication between them was tricky. They could make it work through body language, but sometimes my husband would call me so that I could translate for them. The same thing happened with my youngest daughter, Jessie, although Sarah was around to help too. This process sparked my intrigue. I found that our family was always able to communicate, despite verbal language barriers. This book is a testament to how we managed to communicate in an enriched, rather than impoverished, manner – much to my surprise!

Often parents feel “pressured to teach their children”, but I quickly learned that it is the other way around: parents learn so much from children too! Even now that my children are teenagers, I see how we flourish as a multilingual family through our interactions at the breakfast and dinner table. Each family builds their own unique language, through daily interaction. This language is tailor-made, reflecting a family’s beliefs and identity. In the book, I explain my family’s and other Korean English families’ language making process from the perspective of translanguaging. In doing so, I demonstrate that mixing one’s linguistic repertoires in a multilingual family is not an imperfect or transitional act. Instead, it is optimising one’s linguistic resources to be most effective, be that for transmitting information, creating humour, or building solidarity. Such practices arise from the diverse linguistic and cultural contexts that multilingual families traverse daily.

My family is in Korea, but thanks to technology, they have also played a big role in the lives of my children. I still remember the days when I used to rack up a huge phone bill to make international calls to Korea when I first came to the UK. Thankfully, I did not have to do the same so that my daughters could talk with their family in Korea. Now we can FaceTime or WhatsApp call for free! Throughout the book, I highlight how technology is so important to multicultural families.

This book mainly deals with data that I collected from my family for over a decade, although it also includes interviews from a Korean community in North London. You will see the importance of community and necessity of maintaining and sharing language and culture no matter where you are based.

Overall, I hope to show that language learning is beyond words. Non-verbal expressions and cultural understanding are just as, if not more, crucial than words. There are no teachers or students in any multilingual family, all members learn together. The journey never ends, no matter how old your children are. Multilingual families embark on a lifelong translanguaging journey.

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Multimodal Literacies in Young Emergent Bilinguals edited by Sally Brown and Ling Hao.

Translanguaging and Decoloniality

This month we published Translanguaging, Coloniality and Decolonial Cracks by Robyn Tyler. In this post the author explores the link between translanguaging and decolonisation.

‘Translanguaging’ and ‘decoloniality’ are both hot topics in applied linguistics research currently. In my book I explore the connections between these ideas by presenting a concrete case of bilingual learning focused on a class of black South African high school students.

The temptation for scholars pursuing social justice can be to see all instances of the inclusion of marginalised languages in education as decolonial. Certainly, African languages have been systematically denigrated and excluded from formal education in South Africa since colonial and Apartheid times. To find their flourishing within the cracks in the coloniality of schooling – as I did at Success High in Cape Town – is certainly worth celebrating.

But African languages (isiXhosa in this case) are used in very complex ways in this context. Their use is constrained by racist and colonial language ideologies. They are used sparingly to allow more time for developing English proficiency. They are enriched by multimodality and multilingualism beyond the ‘home language’. They are contested and adapted through deft identity work.

The Success High case fleshes out the role of language in decolonising schooling in the South. Translanguaging, trans-semiotizing and identity meshing are some of the processes described in the rich meaning-making of the students and their teachers. The data captures teenagers grappling with chemical reactions, engaging with a white teacher-student-researcher and maintaining their good social standing.

Textured episodes of young people learning and growing are presented in a variety of modes, including cartoons, in Translanguaging, Coloniality and Decolonial Cracks: Bilingual Science Learning in South Africa.

Robyn Tyler, University of the Western Cape, rrtyler@uwc.ac.za

For more information about this book, please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Relanguaging Language from a South African Township School by Lara-Stephanie Krause.

Why Intersectionality Matters in the Study of Migration, Language and Identity

This month we published Multilingualism and Gendered Immigrant Identity by Farah Ali. In this post the author introduces the main themes of the book.

When migrants take up residence in a new society and begin the journey of building what many of them hope to be an improved life, this adjustment process is often given different names, such as acculturation, assimilation and/or integration. While each concept involves distinct shifts towards and away from one’s host society and society of origin, all of these processes entail migrants recalibrating their identities and day-to-day practices in a variety of ways so they can navigate life and feel a sense of belonging in their new place of residence. Part of this experience often requires learning another language, a task that is rarely as simple as making the time and effort to learn it. Rather, one’s ability and motivation to learn languages beyond one’s native tongue is shaped by an array of factors, such as the opportunities that are available to language learners, the extent to which a language is necessary in their lives, and – a factor that is often overlooked – the willingness of others to engage with language learners in said language. Together, these factors can play a crucial role in shaping not only migrants’ language learning experiences, but also their identities, cultural connections, and ultimately, their sense of belonging and acceptance in the host society. For sociolinguists interested in studying multilingualism and linguistic behavior among migrant populations, some of the common questions we explore include: how do migrants use their native and second languages in their day-to-day lives? How does the second-generation, born and raised in the host society, continue the process of socially integrating, and how does their linguistic behavior shift, if at all?

In many contexts, however, multilingualism is not just the result of integrating into a host society. Rather, it may be the pre-existing situation in migrants’ societies of origin and/or the host societies to which they move. For instance, while it might be assumed that immigrating to Spain would only require knowledge of Spanish, several autonomous communities in Spain actually have more than one official language. Catalonia, where my study is set, officially recognizes multiple languages, with Catalan and Spanish being the socially dominant ones. As such, migrants’ integration process in this locale also means that they are faced with the possibility of learning both of these languages. While Spanish is the more widely used language across Spain, Catalan is considered the vehicular language by the Catalan government and has been growing in use in the last few decades as the result of continuous linguistic revitalization efforts. More than that, Catalan also carries with it a greater degree of prestige in comparison to Spanish, which may allow for more upward mobility among its speakers. In this scenario, migrants may choose to learn both languages simultaneously, or, if limited in time, motivation, and/or resources, may only focus on one. In the latter context, many choose to forgo the socioeconomic possibilities that learning Catalan may present in favor of learning the language of more immediate need, Spanish.

While it is critical to consider the sociolinguistic situation within a host society, it is also essential to understand how migrants’ identities and experiences serve as key factors that play a major role in the integration process. In other words, different migrant groups may have different experiences with integrating into a given society. In many sociolinguistic studies, migrant groups are often distinguished by their ethnicities, races, and/or nationalities, which serve as the key variable(s) of investigation. While this is certainly a valid approach to studying migrant identities, other aspects of identity can intersect with – or even supersede – the above, in terms of playing a crucial role in shaping migrants’ experiences. That is, one’s ethnicity may be inseparable from one’s gender, and so it is impossible to analyze the experiences of Arab men and Arab women – or Arab women and Latina women – as if they were one and the same. As such, the concept of intersectionality provides a necessary framework for understanding the interconnectedness of identities, and allows us to see how a person’s multiple identities are intertwined and collectively shape one’s experiences. Applied to sociolinguistic research, we can see how intersectional identities extend to informing one’s linguistic behavior, because language not only serves specific communicative functions, but also can be performative of one’s identity.

Multilingualism and Gendered Immigrant Identity: Perspectives from Catalonia examines the intersection of gender and religion among Muslim women in Catalonia, and shows how these intertwined identities are connected to language use, and work hand in hand for many Muslim women as they reflexively or intentionally use language to perform their identities.

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Struggles for Multilingualism and Linguistic Citizenship edited by Quentin Williams, Ana Deumert and Tommaso M. Milani.

How Can Foreign Language Teachers Draw on Learners’ Existing Linguistic Resources to Promote Multilingualism?

This month we published Theoretical and Applied Perspectives on Teaching Foreign Languages in Multilingual Settings edited by Anna Krulatz, Georgios Neokleous and Anne Dahl. In this post the editors explain how the book came about.

We are absolutely thrilled to announce the publication of our edited volume titled, Theoretical and Applied Perspectives on Teaching Foreign Languages in Multilingual Settings. When we first embarked on this journey, it was late summer 2018 and the three of us (Anna, Georgios, and Anne) were sitting at a coffee shop in Lisbon where we were attending the International Conference on Multilingualism, enjoying pastel de nata and our morning coffee and reading through a large pile of chapter proposals that were sent to us from many corners of the world. We didn’t realize then that working on this book would be so rich in rewarding challenges and opportunities for growth, span four continents, and connect scholars and teacher educators working in diverse contexts, to finally reach the printing press after a worldwide pandemic and four years of commitment from so many people who have been involved in this work.

Our interest in editing this volume originated from the arduous challenges and new realities that students and teachers encounter in increasingly linguistically diverse settings around the world. With the intention of meeting the needs of these stakeholders and of providing them with the best possible resources and practical applications, the main objective of this volume is to advance a discussion of how to best connect the acquisition of subsequent foreign languages (FLs) with previous language knowledge to create culturally and linguistically inclusive FL classrooms, and to strengthen the connection between research on multilingualism and FL teaching practice. Contributors were invited to present new approaches to FL instruction in multilingual settings forged in collaboration between FL teachers and researchers of multilingualism.

Originally, we wanted to limit the chapters to contributions from Western contexts, but it soon became clear that the scope would be much wider. We received excellent proposals from scholars working in multilingual settings in places such as Indonesia, Japan, Australia, USA, along with various European countries, and Multilingual Matters and anonymous book proposal reviewers encouraged us to include chapters from parts of the world outside of Europe and North America. We are grateful for their support and advice, and we hope the readers will appreciate the transcontinental scope of the volume.

This book is a result of our (the editors’) and the contributing authors’ commitment to support what we believe to be a universal human right – namely, to be multilingual and freely choose which language(s) to use for communication in any given context, and to draw on whatever available linguistic resources one has to develop a competence in additional languages. As so many other researchers, teachers, and teacher educators working within language education, we recognize that despite an increasing body of research on multilingualism and multilingual learning, FL classroom practices often continue to be monolingual and characterized by strict separation of languages. Such learning environments do not foster language learners’ engagement with their existing linguistic repertoires as a potential resource for FL learning.

An additional challenge is that there seems to be a gap between the advances that have been made through research and FL classrooms where teaching practitioners continue to report a lack of preparedness to work with students who are multilingual. To address this issue, the chapters in this volume aim to promote linguistically responsive language teaching practices in multilingual contexts through forging a dialog between school-based and university-based actors. We hope to advance a discussion of how to best connect the acquisition of subsequent FLs with previous language knowledge to create culturally and linguistically inclusive FL classrooms, and to strengthen the connection between research on multilingualism and FL teaching practice.

We are grateful to all the chapter authors, who have contributed papers reporting on fascinating, novel, and important research that meets this objective. For instance, some of the contributions present proposals for how language education can be reconceptualized if linguistically responsive teaching and learning are applied across disciplines, language barriers, and educational models, while others outline analytical and instructional frameworks for working with multilingual learners. In addition, some of the authors discuss specific classroom examples of cross-linguistic influence, code-switching, and translanguaging to illustrate the role of learners’ linguistic repertoires in FL learning. Our contributors also present new approaches to FL instruction in multilingual settings where the perspectives of FL teachers are in focus, delving deeper into the skills and knowledge that should be addressed in preparing teachers for work in multilingual settings and providing some tentative recommendations for what to incorporate into a teacher training programs in multilingual contexts. We also hope the readers will enjoy the concise, yet extremely insightful and structured Afterword written by our colleague Kristen Lindahl of the University of Texas, San Antonio.

Overall, we believe that the volume contributes to the current debate on how FL teachers can draw on learners’ existing linguistic resources to promote multilingualism and to forge a dialog and bridge the divide between university- and school-based actors. We are truly grateful to the Multilingual Matters staff who supported us along all the stages of this amazing journey. We are absolutely thrilled and humbled that the volume bears their trademark.

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Migration, Multilingualism and Education edited by Latisha Mary, Ann-Birte Krüger and Andrea S. Young.

The Remaking of Language Education

This month we published Liberating Language Education edited by Vally Lytra, Cristina Ros i Solé, Jim Anderson and Vicky Macleroy. In this post the editors reveal what readers can expect from the book.

Liberating Language Education emerged from our desire to unite our passion about language, education, and lived multilingualism with our visions of what language education can mean, feel, and look like in times of unprecedented change and uncertainty. This passion is reflected in our personas of ‘the weaver’, ‘the fool’, ‘the traveller’ and ‘the activist’ in the introduction of the book: they illustrate the complexity and richness of language experience and language learning across the lifespan and highlight the entanglements of the personal and biographical with the historical and socio-cultural dimensions of language and language pedagogy.

This kaleidoscopic perspective is amplified by the plurality and heterogeneity of voices and orientations manifested in the chapter contributions. The book calls into question a single and unified approach to language, culture, and identity, dismantling monolingual and prescriptivist discourses of pedagogy that have long dominated language education. Instead, it proposes new ways of understanding language and language education that move beyond rationalist and instrumental perspectives and emphasise locally situated meaning-making practices, messiness, and unpredictability.

These new ways liberate our understanding of language to encompass the full range of semiotic repertoires, aesthetic resources, and multimodal practices. They reimagine language education from a translingual and transcultural orientation, showcasing multiple, alternative visions of how language education might be enacted. The translingual, transcultural and transformative approach to pedagogy that underpins the book rests on the following principles:

• an integrated and inclusive view of language and language learning
• challenging binaries and fixed positions between formal/informal learning, school/home literacies, schools/other sites of learning
• attention to language hierarchies and linguistic and social inequalities
• a synergetic relationship between language and culture
• the transformative process of language learning as reconfiguring our existing communicative resources and nurturing new ways of being, seeing, feeling and expressing in the world
• foregrounding embodied, material and aesthetic perspectives to pedagogy
• emphasis on learner and teacher agency and making their voices heard
• supporting multiple ways of knowing and a decolonising stance to knowledge building
• creating trusting, respectful and collaborative relations in research and shared ownership of knowledge

This critical and creative translingual and transcultural orientation repositions teachers, learners and researchers as active language policy creators in the remaking of language education today.

Vally Lytra, Cristina Ros i Solé, Jim Anderson and Vicky Macleroy

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like The Dynamics of Language and Inequality in Education edited by Joel Austin Windle, Dánie de Jesus and Lesley Bartlett.