Volume 33, Issue 5-6 - Special Issue: Researching multilingualism and superdiversity: Grassroots actions and responsibilities

The articles in this thematic issue document studies of grassroots actions in promoting multilingualism across different sectors of society as well as in different social and professional domains. In doing so, the contributors raise issues of the relevance of the notion of community in the age of superdiversity and the researcher’s responsibility in researching multilingualism and superdiversity. Questions are asked as to whether empowerment and social change should be the ultimate goal of community-based research, and how applied linguistics research could impact on policy and practice. This introduction discusses the two related issues – the relevance of the notion of community in superdiversity, and the researcher’s responsibility.

In this article the notion of “community” is examined through a lens which focuses on the way people interact and communicate in and around a Panjabi complementary school. Analysis of linguistic ethnographic data contributes to understandings of how identities are produced and reproduced, and how belonging becomes naturalised. The analysis offers a means to develop a nuanced understanding of the complexity, unpredictability and mobility of late modern, urban “communities”. The article considers linguistic repertoires in play in two family settings, and views these repertoires through the lens of heteroglossia (Bakhtin 1981). The discussion focuses on audio recordings, observational fieldnotes and interviews collected as part of a wider linguistic ethnographic study in four European cities. In the interactions between parents and their teenage daughters, identities were produced and reproduced, and certain kinds of belonging, or “community”, came to be naturalised. Analysis of such interactions developed an understanding of the complexity of “communities”, evident in a number of identifiable signs which recurred in the speech of these and other families in the study.

This article explores the impact of superdiversity on linguistic practices in Southampton, UK. Our focus seeks to identify what these practices are in an environment that we describe as superdiverse, and what is influencing, determining, shaping and contributing to these practices. Southampton is characterised by twenty-first century social mobilities typical of a port city, with a workforce that consists both of those who have settled here for decades, as well as others who are part of the European “new” migration, or who belong to the large international university student population. Our findings arise from a series of linked studies exploring social and linguistic cohesion in Southampton. These provide us with data on the negotiations implicit in the networks that structure urban multilingualism, and allow us to focus above all on examining the impact of our research on the language sensitisation of these communities. We explore the workplaces in a range of sites (public and private, large and small), comprising many nationalities, ethnicities and languages, and representing microcosms of complex, social hierarchies. Our approach is a grassroots, participatory one, seeking to involve our informants with our findings and sharing our analyses and recommendations.

This article investigates the educational trajectories of young multilingual learners in Germany. Drawing on previous ethnographic research in a primary bilingual German-Italian Two-Way-Immersion classroom, this study examines the continuity and fragmentation of multilingual learning as they occur in the transition from primary to secondary education. Scrutinizing conditions and ideologies which underlie these processes, I argue that, in this context, multilingualism as an educational resource undergoes a fundamental meaning shift. While in primary school multilingualism is valued as capital for social inclusion, permitting the emergence of a temporary, spatio-temporally confined bilingual community of practice (Budach 2009), secondary education emphasizes multilingualism as a form of capital for social mobility and individual distinction, which undermines the conditions for a joint multilingual endeavor. The paper demonstrates how multilingual learners cope with this educational and societal imperative, locating their own position and navigating educational options available to them.

In this article, I present and discuss a commemorative book project to mark the fortieth anniversary of the Greek School of Lausanne. I examine the continuities and discontinuities of the notions of language, identity and community as these were represented through the voices of former Greek state officials, teachers and pupils. I take a long view, combining archival material with interviews and written accounts spanning the first twenty years of the establishment and development of the school. Finally, I tentatively reflect on how the book project might have impacted on the Greek community of Lausanne and its school in a period of transition.

In a challenging economic and political context, complementary schools in East London are mentoring each other and forming networks across communities to gain recognition and status for community languages in education and the wider community. As issues of power and status impact in different ways on differently situated communities, complementary schools are uniquely positioned to support the needs of new communities as they discover how quickly their children become dominant in English and lose the active use of the family language when they start school. The study is focused around an Albanian organisation that has developed a strong model of partnership by which mainstream and complementary schools work closely together to develop children’s multilingual skills. The study explores how the mentoring process has supported Polish, Somali, Portuguese and Lithuanian complementary schools to meet the language needs of their communities, to raise the local profile of their cultures, to raise awareness of the importance and value of bilingualism in community languages, and to support pupils to engage directly with examination boards and policy makers at both local and national level.

This article describes the learning which takes place between children, teachers and parents in a multilingual learning community. It centres on a community-based, supplementary/complementary Saturday class where – slightly differently from the usual pattern – the aim is not heritage language maintenance as such, but to enhance the pupils’ mainstream school learning and their chances for success by promoting a “bilingual pedagogy”. This recognises the funds of knowledge that the children bring to their learning and affords opportunities for them to use their home languages in their learning. The article is based on findings from ethnographic case study research, which traces the experiences of language and learning in the home, complementary class and mainstream school of twelve children who have attended the class regularly for at least a year, and often more. In order to illuminate the scope of the data as well as the tensions entailed from different perspectives, the article foregrounds the individual voices of participants in the research. The theoretical frameworks related to language and learning that explain the findings include ecological perspectives, funds of knowledge and the dimensions of time across the generations. The key argument of the article is that the multilingual learning community has grown from and links with the history of the community as a whole. The article ends with some conclusions in relation to mainstream education and implications for the future.

South African higher education is at a critical juncture in the implementation of South Africa’s multilingual language policy promoting institutional status for nine African languages, English, and Afrikaans. South African scholars, not content merely to comment from the sidelines on the policy, its promise, and challenges, have also engaged in implementation efforts. This article explores two such initiatives, both focusing on the use of African languages in higher education institutions where English is already established as the medium of instruction, and both undertaken with explicit goals of righting South Africa’s longstanding social injustices. I collaborated with colleagues at the University of Limpopo and the University of KwaZulu-Natal to assess current implementation and identify next steps and strategies for achieving truly multilingual teaching, learning, and research at their institutions. Taking up Hymes’ (1980) call for ethnographic monitoring of bilingual education, I sought in each case to jointly describe and analyze current communicative conduct, uncover emergent patterns and meanings in program implementation, and evaluate program and policy in terms of social meanings. I argue that ethnographic monitoring in education offers one means toward not taking language inequality for granted.