Volume 38, Issue 6 -

Although not often discussed, complementary (‘mother tongue’) classrooms comprise participants who differ substantially in a number of ways. Differences comprise, e.g. participants’ orientations to and understandings of the indexicalities of linguistic registers, which may have been brought along from the presupposed country of origin. It has local consequences when students and teacher do not share normative models, and students refuse the teacher as an expert authority. For instance, it may disrupt the classroom order and complicate processes of classroom language socialization. The societal context of the complementary classroom also has a potential influence on the local effect of valorized differences. In this paper we illustrate how pronunciation differences are made salient in a Turkish mother tongue classroom in Denmark, and how pronunciation feeds into negotiations of expertise, authority and the keying of classroom activities. Situated humorous performance is juxtaposed and intertwined with practices that conventionally index learning. We compare the case study to the wider societal context to discuss how dominant ideologies of language and education contributed to the teacher’s challenges in the specific classroom setting.

Multilingual families and their language policies have attracted considerable attention in recent sociolinguistic work. Adding to this line of research, this article focuses on a case study of a transnational Polish family living in Norway and investigates the role adolescent children may play in the formation of family language policies. To this end the article analyses stances towards language practices at home taken in an interaction between the father and one of the adolescent daughters of the family. The article argues that the perspectives of adolescent children may be of crucial importance for the establishment of family language policies and thus deserve scholarly attention. Methodologically, the article draws attention to family interviews as a useful tool in generating sociolinguistic data for studies of Family Language Policies and advocates an interactional approach to interview data.

Although Dual Language Immersion Education is growing in popularity in the United States, staffing these programs represents one of the greatest challenges for school administrators. Ironically, this is the case even for Spanish-English Dual Language Immersion programs despite the fact that the United States has the second highest number of Spanish speakers of any country in the world. What barriers hinder Spanish-English Dual Language Immersion schools from filling their teaching positions? This exploratory article suggests that native-speakerism may be part of the problem. Drawing on literature from the field of English Language Teaching, this article goes further to suggest that notions of who is the ideal Dual Language teacher, unless carefully considered, may exacerbate the linguistic marginalization of U.S.-born Latinxs, a group whose Spanish-speaking abilities are too often stigmatized.

The aim of the present academic discussion note is to generate feedback on a recent project that revisits the nature of speech acts as analytic constructs for politeness theory. While speech act has been largely discredited in the field, we believe that they need to be kept in the core of politeness inquiries, in particular if we approach them in combination with other units of analysis. In addition, there are instances in which speech act unavoidably becomes the focal point of research. To discuss this latter notion, we introduce the concept of ritual frame and argue that speech act must be put in the core of an analysis if there is a tension between a ritual frame – an interactional scene in which rights and obligation prevail and the interactants are highly aware of who and where they are – and a particular speech act. As a case study, we examine reflections on an alleged apology in a recent Mixed Martial Arts match.