Teacher Collaboration and Talk in Multilingual Classrooms

Angela Creese is Professor of Educational Linguistics at the School of Education, University of Birmingham. She is a researcher in the fields of sociolinguistics, multilingualism and linguistic ethnography and currently leads, the Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project, Translation and translanguaging: Investigating linguistic and cultural transformations in superdiverse wards in four UK cities (TLANG).

Angela Creese is Senior Lecturer in the School of Education, University of Birmingham, UK. Her research interests are in multilingual classrooms, community languages, complementary schooling and linguistic ethnography.

This book provides fine-grained analyses and vivid descriptions of teachers at work in multilingual classrooms, and it will fill a substantial gap in our understanding of EAL provision in the UK, where policy and pedagogic doctrine tends to dictate the terms of debate, paying insufficient attention to how things actually work out on the ground. Angela Creese considers a range of academic and policy discussions relevant to EAL provision, but repeatedly observes that the debates often fail to keep “pace with practice in our interactionally complex classrooms”. Creese brings us closer to the lived dynamics of teaching in urban classrooms, pointing to hitherto unnoticed and unstudied subtleties and variations, and in doing so, she provides the kind of empirical orientation that is indispensable for the effective development of EAL provision.

This highly topical book offers a critical analysis of collaboration between English as an additional language (EAL) teachers and subject teachers in schools. Angela Creese raises important questions about how issues of power and positioning affect the implementation of educational policy for bilingual children, and about how diversity is viewed in English schools. This excellent book will be of immense value to teachers, researchers, and policy-makers.

Kelleen Toohey, Simon Fraser University, in International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, Vol 9, No. 4, 2006:

This book has many strengths, the most important of which is the knitting together of theory, research and three specific case studies in describing a situation in schools that will be familiar to most readers.

Creese's book addresses important issues in modern multilingual classrooms. It highlights the tensions in the push for pluralism within standards-based education, the realization of inclusion in linguistically diverse classrooms, the structuring of teachers and languages into a hierarchy, and the ability of language to both enforce and change these influences. While the topics covered may be diverse, the implications of Creese's research are pressing and call for a re-examination of how EAL inclusion policies are realized in practice.

The research study reported here is highly informative not only because of its findings but also because of the research methodology, which combines different types of data collection. Other strengths of the volume are the inclusion of different theoretical approaches and the structure and style of the volume. The volume will be useful for researchers, policy makers, and teachers who work in situations with two teachers in the classroom.

What a refreshing fusion of a classroom discourse analysis grounded in linguistic anthropology, and a policy analysis looking at the role of power in the enactment of top-down policies for multilingual students. This book was a fascinating read. This book is ambitious and well-researched on many levels. Creese has made a valuable contribution to our understanding of the ways that policies and their concomitant ideologies play out in multilingual secondary classrooms.