O conhecimento metalinguístico, os enquadramentos da construção dos significados nos textos e o ensino de língua portuguesa


 
 
 International student mobility has been increasingly subject to turbulences in politics, culture, economics, natural disasters, and public health. The new decade has witnessed an unprecedented disruption to international student flows and welfare as a consequence of the COVID-19 outbreak. COVID-19 has laid bare how fragile the current transactional higher education model is, in Australia and in other major destination countries like the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and New Zealand. This health crisis hitting international education presents a range of challenges for host universities. In such a fallout, the connection between university communities and international students is more critical than ever. This connection is vital not only to university’s operations and recovery but more importantly, to international students’ learning and wellbeing. This in turn will have longer term impacts on host countries’ and universities’ sustainable international recruitment and reputation as a study destination. Therefore, it is timely to reflect on how we view and conceptualize the way we engage and work with international students. This article presents a new frame for conceptualizing the teaching, learning, and engagement for international students, which emphasizes people-to-people empathy and people-to-people connections.
 
 
 
 Conceptualize Student Connection Through Formal and Informal Curriculum
 Dis/connection has been argued to play “an important role in shaping international students’ wellbeing, performance and life trajectories” (Tran & Gomes, 2017, p. 1). Therefore, it is important to frame international student connectedness not only within the context of formal teaching and learning on campus, but also in a broader setting, taking into account the dynamic, diverse, and fluid features of transnational mobility.
 Some of the primary dimensions of international student connection vital to their academic and social experience and wellbeing have been identified as:
 • Connection with the content and process of teaching and learning• Bonding between host teachers and international students• Engagement with the university communities• Interaction between domestic and international students and among international peers• Integration into relevant social and professional networks, the host community, and the host society• Connection with family and home communities• Online and digital connection
 Based on interviews with around 400 international students, teachers, and international student support staff across different research projects, I identified four main principles underpinning effective engagement and support for international students. Most participants stressed the importance of understanding international students’ study purposes, needs, expectations, and characteristics in the first place in order to meaningfully and productively engage with and cater for this cohort (Tran, 2013). Second, effective teaching of and engagement with international students is based on understanding not only their academic needs but also other aspects that are interlinked with their academic performance, including pastoral care needs, mental health, employment, accommodation, finance, life plans, and aspirations. Third, a sense of belonging to the content of teaching and learning and the pedagogy used by teachers is essential to international students’ engagement with the classroom community. In this regard, connection is intimately linked to international students being included and valued intellectually and culturally in teaching and learning, and in being treated as partners (Green, 2019; Tran, 2013) rather than ‘others’ in the curriculum. Fourth, to position international students as truly an integral component of campus communities, it is essential to develop explicit approaches to engage them not only academically and interculturally, but also mentally and emotionally, especially during hard-hitting crises in international education such as the 2019–2020 COVID-19 outbreak, the 2003 SARS epidemic, and the 2001 September 11 attacks.
 Productive Connectedness
 The lack of engagement between international and domestic students is often identified as a primary area for improvement for universities that host international students, especially in Anglophone countries (Leask, 2009). While international education is supposed to strengthen people-to-people connections and enrich human interactions, ironically it is this lack of connection with the local community, including local students, that international students feel most dissatisfied about in their international education experience. To support and optimize the learning and wellbeing of international students, productive connectedness is essential. Productive connectedness is not simply providing the mere conditions for interaction between domestic and international peers (Tran & Pham, 2016). These conditions alone cannot ensure meaningful and real connectedness but can just lead to artificial or surface engagement between international students and the host communities. Productive connectedness is centered around creating real opportunities for international and local students to not only increase their mutual understandings, but importantly also to reciprocally learn from the encounter of differences and share, negotiate, and contribute to building knowledge, cultural experiences, and skills on a more equal basis. In this regard, productive connectedness is integral to optimizing teaching and learning for international students.
 Teaching and Learning for International Students
 Over the past 15 years, I and my colleagues have undertaken various research on conceptualizing the teaching and learning process for international students, an evolving and dynamic field of scholarship (Tran, 2011; Tran, 2013a, 2013b; Tran & Nguyen, 2015; Tran & Gomes, 2017; Tran & Pham, 2016). Figure 1 summarizes the six interrelated dimensions of teaching and learning for international students emerging from our research: connecting, accommodating, reciprocating, integrating, “relationalizing,” and empathy.
 
 Connecting
 It is critical in effective teaching and learning for international students that conditions are provided to engage them intellectually, culturally, socially, and affectively. Curriculum, pedagogies, and assessment activities should aim at supporting international students to make transnational knowledge, skills, experience, and culture, as well as people-to-people connections (Tran, 2013).
 Accommodating
 Effective teaching and learning for international students cannot be achieved without an effort to understand their purposes to undertake international education, their cultural and educational backgrounds, their characteristics, their identities, and their aspirations. Good teaching and learning practices in international education are often built on educators’ capacities to tailor their curriculum and pedagogies to cater to international students based on an understanding of their study purposes, backgrounds, and identities.
 Reciprocating
 Reciprocal learning and teaching is integral to international education (Tran, 2011). It is centered around positioning international students as co-constructors of knowledge and educators as reciprocal co-learners (Tran, 2013b). It refers to extending beyond mutual understanding and respect for diversity, to validate and reciprocally learn from diverse resources, experiences, and encounters of differences that international classrooms can offer. This is vital to making international students feel included and valued as an integral part of the curriculum and the university community.
 Integrating
 Integrating refers to the purposeful incorporation of international examples, case studies, materials, and perspectives into the curriculum. Strategies to diversify the teaching and learning content and pedagogies are closely connected with de- Westernizing the curriculum and moving away from Euro-centric content (Tran, 2013a). Integrating contributes to enriching students’ global awareness, world mindfulness, and intercultural competence, which are central to internationalizing student experience and outcomes.
 “Relationalizing”
 “Relationalizing” is crucial in assisting domestic and international students to develop open-minded and ethno-relative perspectives. Engaging students in a comparing–contrasting and reflexive process about professional practices, prior experiences, and cultural norms in different countries represents a critical step in assisting them to develop multiple frames of reference and build capacities to relationally learn from richly varied perspectives and experiences that an international classroom can offer.
 Empathy
 International students’ sense of belonging to the classroom and university community significantly depends on the empathy local teachers and students display toward them. Teachers can develop activities that enable students to develop an understanding and empathy toward what it feels like to be an international student in an unfamiliar academic and social environment, studying in a language that is not their mother tongue. One of the teacher-participants in our research shared an activity she used to help all students develop empathy:I asked for volunteers, I’d speak to them in English and they had to answer in their language. The group had to try and figure out from their body language and tone of voice what they were actually saying to me...But what I try and make them understand that part of the reason we’re doing that, not in English, is because it’s like excluding the local students and it’s making them look like foreigners and to understand the challenge.
 Conclusion
 Effective practices in engaging, teachin

This chapter investigates children’s approach to writing their mother tongue — in this case, Maya — when they were instructed in a second language — here, Spanish. The question examined is whether the children can use principles acquired in Spanish instruction for determining how Maya should be written. The focus of the investigation was how children create blank spaces between units that will be termed here “words’: what sort of criteria do they use? Previous research has shown that counting words in oral sentences is not an easy task for illiterate people (Scribner & Cole, 1981). Can the principles for word identification learned in literacy in one language be used in a second language that do not have consolidated written tradition? The children were asked to work in small groups in order to facilitate discussion amongst them and the researcher. They listened to tape-recorded sentences in Mayan, which they then wrote using the Latin alphabet, learned in Spanish instruction. The analysis of their use of blanks within the different sentences suggests that the children used some principles learned in Spanish but also considered the specificity of their own mother tongue. For example, the children often joined verbs and pronouns in writing, as it is often the case in Spanish with clitic pronouns, and consistently separated with blanks lexical items even if these were written with only a few letters. These principles may have been learned in the acquisition of Spanish literacy. However, they did not restrict their criteria to principles that can be identified in Spanish. Principles that are related to the structure of the syllable in Maya could also be observed. Specifically, Mayan syllables are simple, and can have the form CV or CVC. At the beginning of a word, Mayan syllables always have a consonant, although in the middle of a word there may be syllables that start with a vowel. The children respected this principle and tended to consistently join pronouns with verbs when the pronouns were written with only one letter, a vowel. Furthermore, Mayan syllables do not have dipthongs, and the children recognised this in their consistent segmentation of pronouns from verbs when the verbs ended in a vowel and the pronoun started with a vowel. These results lead to the conclusion that the children learned principles about the segmentation of sentences into words from their experience with written Spanish and used these principles in writing Maya, but they did not do so without consideration of the particularities of their mother tongue. The principles were adapted and used in conjunction with others, specific to Maya, revealing the children’s metalinguistic knowledge and their potential as informants about their own mother tongue.

by Wolfgang Butzkamm and John A W Caldwell narr studienbucher 2009 978-3-8233-6492-4 The question of whether the mother tongue (MT) should be allowed in foreign language (FL) teaching has a long history in methodology debates. It has often been argued that the MT should definitely be avoided as it has a detrimental effect on learning a foreign language. Wolfgang Butzkamm and John Caldwell, however, claim not only that the monolingual approach has a weak basis in theory (even though they consider it a comprehensible reaction to the outcomes of the grammar-translation method), but also that it is better to work with the MT as a ‘natural tendency’ in FL teaching. To support their inclination towards a more relaxed approach to MT use, they scrutinise the reality of what they call the ‘MT taboo’, formulate a theory of MT use in the FL classroom and exemplify their insights through practical teaching techniques. It is the combination of theory and practice that makes the book much more than a ‘how to use the MT in FL teaching’ guide. The book discusses the importance of ‘immersion’ for MT acquisition, which means that a child is exposed to a huge amount of language, first learning chunks of language for communicative purposes and much later learning to break them down into parts. Since it is impractical to reproduce this natural process of acquiring a language in the FL classroom because of restrictions on the time available and, therefore, the exposure to the target language, FL teaching has to provide a focus on both meaning and structure. A prudent use of MT here helps make life easier for teachers and learners: ‘sandwiching’, mirroring and contrasting or literal translation, as the authors show, can be embedded in pattern drills in grammar teaching, dialogue work and drama. Moreover, it can increase the input of authentic material in the form of, for example, bilingual readers or DVDs with subtitles. A controlled use of the MT in the FL classroom also allows access to the understanding of language concepts that each learner has, even if those concepts are different in the MT and the FL. For example, when a teacher wants to show how continuous tenses are formed to learners whose own language has no continuous tenses, translation is a better way to express finer shades of meaning than an explanation or paraphrase in the target language. When the FL can be integrated into existing knowledge (ie the MT), the FL is ‘deforeignised’ and confidence is built up in the learner. In other words, the MT can be useful in promoting understanding of both form and meaning (which use of the FL alone often fails to do). Real understanding and control are key words in this book, and it is argued that fashionable methods of communicative language teaching which strictly exclude the MT often cause a learning situation in which students do not really understand what they are saying (but merely parrot phrases for no communicative reason) and, as a result, skills learning is impeded. The authors put their case convincingly, supporting their arguments with insights into the mechanisms used by children growing up bilingually: mixing their languages is a tactic that helps them learn. A separate chapter discusses ‘translation as a fifth skill’ with the help of some intellectually demanding (and therefore enjoyable) classroom activities, which, not least, help develop MT competence. The authors do admit that there are many situations where monolingualism is preferable, especially for classroom management, and claim that a controlled use of the MT should actually increase the time available for using the FL. The book is aimed particularly at student teachers, having study questions and tasks at the end of each chapter as well as many practical ideas, but I am sure that experienced teachers will also benefit from it. A benchmark in its field, the book is a must for all those who want to contribute to the debate over the pros and cons of using the MT in FL teaching.

Reviewed by: Review of Language, Emotion, and Politics in South India: The Making of a Mother Tongue Amanda Weidman Lisa Mitchell. Review of Language, Emotion, and Politics in South India: The Making of a Mother Tongue. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009. 304 pp. Lisa Mitchell’s Language, Emotion and Politics in South India makes a brilliant intervention in the study of language and modernity by critically interrogating the concept of the “mother tongue” as it arose in the context of Telugu linguistic nationalism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. At the heart of Mitchell’s book is the argument that the mother tongue concept is neither natural nor primordial, but contingent upon shifts in understandings of language that emerged in particular historical and socio-cultural contexts. Mitchell shows how the notion of mother tongues as the bases for ethno-linguistic identification in present-day India required a polyglossic, multilingual situation to give way to (or at least be discursively overpowered by) a monolingual sensibility in which languages, now seen as attributes of persons, become objects of affective attachment. Such a shift in the experience of language is encapsulated, as Mitchell argues, in the difference between rasa, the term generally used in premodern India for pleasure or aesthetic taste in language, and abhimanam, [End Page 1091] the term most commonly used at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century to indicate affection, pride, devotion towards a specific language recognized as one’s “mother tongue.” The book consists of a series of superbly reasoned chapters that draw on the close reading of a range of sources, including precolonial grammatical treatises, maps, literary works, lexicons, and primers, as well as ethnography. Each chapter presents a crucial way in which language ideology and linguistic practice changed in order to enable the structure of feeling embodied in devotion to one’s mother tongue, an emotion which would subsequently be channeled for political purposes to create the linguistically defined state of Andhra Pradesh in 1952. In the first chapter, Mitchell contrasts the idea of desa bhasa—language of the land, or language as one of the many features of a landscape, a tool one might use when in that place, prevalent in the early 19th century and before—with the term matr bhasha, literally “mother tongue,” which began to be used at the end of the 19th century. Embodying the notion of language as an inalienable aspect of each individual, the term matr bhasa makes Telugu into “the language of the people.” This shift in conceptualizing the relationship between language and speakers required making language into a definable, bounded object that could be contrasted with other similarly defined and bounded languages. The second chapter shows how this process of objectification actually entailed personifying language: portraying language as having a life of its own, including a birth, kinship with other languages, stages of development, and eventual death. Mitchell shows how such modes of representing human lives in self-contained narratives of individual and autonomous subjectivity arose in South India in the 1870s and 1880s with the first novels and modern autobiographies and were extended to inanimate categories such as language. The third chapter, one of the most tightly and impressively reasoned in the book, examines shifts in categories used to represent languages introduced by colonial etymologists. Contrasting the Sanskrit vyakarana grammatical tradition, which classified language on the basis of intelligibility and appropriateness for use in literary composition, with colonial etymology, which classified languages on the basis of notions of history and common origin, Mitchell argues that colonial etymology introduced the notion of the “foreign” and the idea of “pure ” languages into a system which had previously not included such concepts. Devotion to one’s mother tongue, and the fear of loss or defilement [End Page 1092] of one’s language by another, are ideas that depend on the notion of linguistic purity. The fourth and fifth chapters demonstrate how the objectification of language entailed a shift from language as learned in use and for particular kinds of content and contexts to language studied as a content-less medium, equivalent to any other language. By the end of the nineteenth...

A teacher's language awareness (TLA) is generally believed to exert a tremendous influence on language instruction. However, reviewing literature revealed that it has not received due attention in teacher training centers in Iran. Therefore, this paper reports on an investigation into the metalinguistic awareness of prospective teachers at Teacher Education Universities of Iran training to be junior and senior high school English teachers. The study focuses on the test performance of these prospective teachers as an indication of their explicit knowledge base and also the relationship between the metalinguistic knowledge and their error identification capability. To that end, a metalinguistic knowledge test (MKT) and a grammaticality judgment test (GJT) were administered to 207 student teachers to canvass the nature and extent of their repertoire of explicit knowledge about language and of grammatical terminologies as part of their TLA. The results revealed a moderate level of metalinguistic knowledge and a significant relationship between metalinguistic knowledge and error identification ability. Moreover, the findings of the study shed light on the prominence of metalinguistic knowledge as a means of improving teachers' linguistic proficiency, detected the lacunae in student teachers' knowledge about language and signaled the need for improvement in prospective teachers' metalinguistic knowledge.

Metalinguistic knowledge refers to the explicit and declarative knowledge that learners have regarding language which plays a critical role in second language acquisition (SLA). Previous research has examined issues regarding metalinguistic knowledge in areas such as instructed SLA, teacher education, L2 learner individual differences, and L2 assessment. Practitioners who work with English language learners and pre‐service teachers are also invested in finding the most effective way to help students and student teachers take advantage of, and develop, their metalinguistic knowledge in language classrooms. Some questions with immediate relevance to classroom teaching are: What types of corrective feedback help students take advantage of their metalinguistic knowledge? How much focus on form is needed when implementing communicative activities in the classroom? What are pre‐service teachers' perceptions of the importance of metalinguistic knowledge, and what professional development activities help enhance their metalinguistic knowledge?

Limited rigorous evidence is available from sub-Saharan Africa regarding whether children who learn to read in their mother tongue will have higher learning outcomes in other subjects. A randomised controlled trial of mother-tongue literacy instruction, the Primary Math and Reading (PRIMR) Initiative, was implemented in Kenya from 2013 to 2014. We compared the impacts of the PRIMR mother-tongue treatment group in two languages with those of another group that did not use mother tongue, but utilised the same instructional components. Results showed that assignment to the mother-tongue group had no additional benefits for English or Kiswahili learning outcomes beyond the non-mother-tongue group, and that the mother-tongue group had somewhat lower mathematics outcomes. Classroom observational analysis showed that assignment to the mother-tongue group had only small impacts on the usage of mother tongue in other subjects. Advocates for mother-tongue programmes must consider such results alongside local implementation resistance in programme design.

The study investigated the perception of the student teachers in the use of Mother Tongue as a medium of instruction in Grades 1-3 and the perceived problems associated with its use.It also determined the relationship between attitude and age, sex, and place of origin (district).Guided by the Gardner's Socio-educational model (1985), the study collected data through a survey involving 150 student teachers enrolled in Bachelor of Education in Foundation Phase program at Central University of Technology and Free State University.Data were analysed using frequency, mean, mode, and standard deviation.The relationship between variables was determined through the Chi-Square test for independence using SPSS.The outcomes showed that most of the respondents agree that the use of home language as a medium of instruction is good in principle.They believe it would enable teachers to express themselves clearly, and it would also make the lessons interesting to learners.However, some problems associated with its use were also identified, such as: difficulty in translation, teacher's low proficiency in Mother Tongue, learners' low proficiency in Mother Tongue, degradation of English proficiency, and lack of teacher's training in teaching Mother Tongue.Findings further revealed that the place of origin, not age and gender, influences the respondents' perception.The study, therefore, proves that the student teachers, in general, have positive attitude towards the use of Mother Tongue as medium of instruction and are willing to undergo training to be able to teach using the mother tongue.

In this article, we report on a two-part qualitative case study on Finnish student language teachers' views of linguistic concepts related to teaching sentence structures and their ability to recognise linguistic concepts in mother tongue and foreign language textbooks. In addition, our aim is to gain experience of collaboration between mother tongue and foreign language students. The current Finnish National Core Curriculum for Basic Education (2014, translated 2016) emphasises language awareness, including linguistic and cross-linguistic awareness. Language education requires L1 and L2 teachers to co-operate, and it is important for teachers to gain experience of such cooperation already during their pedagogical studies The focus of our study is on student language teachers' ability to recognise linguistic concepts in mother tongue and foreign language textbooks. The informants are mother tongue (Finnish) and foreign language students (studying English, Swedish, German, and Russian). The study found that the students were able to find syntactic and morphological concepts in particular. Overall, they understood language and defined "linguistic concepts" from a grammatical point of view; and a functional approach to learning a language stood out. In the textbooks, the students found both similarities and differences in using linguistic concepts related to sentence structures. Overall, co-operation between L1 and L2 teachers was considered important.

In our postdigital society and education systems, humans have become fabricated hybrids of organism and machine, we have become cyborgs. Ignoring the affective dimension of education, digitalized environments give way to an ethical and conceptual vacuum, wherein student teachers and teacher educators risk being reduced to repeaters of slogans. Writing education after ChatGPT asking about what a word might hold, I put postdigital literature in conversation with posthuman affect theory because we need new vocabularies and a view of language as material to describe our postdigital web of entanglements and how this relates to the way we educate teachers. In the posthuman project, humans as affective are significant and need to be written – as in storied – for us to become creative with its functionings. By thinking inter alia with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of rhizomatic writing, and with Hannah Arendt on the concept of mother tongue, I address the need to approach teacher education in a new way, by way of affects and storying. This implies a view of writing as a political life-engendering force and processes of subjective becomings. My aim is to bring teacher education to life by discussing affects in students and storied cyborgs. Based on Arendt, Cassin, (2024), argues that the relationship between language and people must be dissolved and what makes a language a mother tongue is probably the ability to invent and that poetry, the making (and creation) of language, belongs naturally to the mother tongue (p. 94). The performative power that thus lies in language as politics requires a vigilance to avoid conformity, submission, obedience and in a worst case, prejudice: Without a mother tongue, when the mother tongue is no longer a language, it is nothing but propaganda. That is because you have a responsibility for the words you use, a responsibility as a writer, and not just as a receiver or communicative intermediary (...) In general, language derives its political power from its performative effect. (Cassin, 2024, p. 96-7) Writing teacher education in times of failing recruitment to the profession and smaller cohorts of children demographically speaking, putting affect back in might prove pivotal for saving education as knowledge producer and inclusive democracy builder. It implies affirming educators and student teachers a mother tongue for learning and educational innovation: writing as storying not only asking what might a word then hold, but also who holds our words, or should we say ‘what’ holds our words? Given this, I discuss teacher education in general and the master thesis in particular. Writing after ChatGPT challenges issues concerning theory/practice relationships, research and research methodologies, evaluation and professionalism just to mention a few. Key words: Teacher education; Writing; Post-perspectives on education and research; evaluating ontology; the affective turn; subjective becomings; storying;

The search for new paradigms and perspectives for practical theology in South Africa begins with the context, South Africa. What perspectives are given and what perspectives respond to the call of this context when this African context is brought into dialogue with the thoughts of a thinker who has to a large extent determined the paradigm of postmodern Western thought? This article was inspired by the hope that such a dialogue will reveal unique outcomes that could offer perspectives and possible paradigms for doing postfoundational practical theology in South Africa. I specifically brought into dialogue Heidegger�s understanding of language and the poetics of Being, with ubuntu, interpreted as Being-with [mit-Sein] and how African ubuntu can be interpreted as being of language � poetically Africa dwells-with-others. This dialogue in Africa with Africa, on and of the house of Being, can only but �gift� practical theology with new perspectives and paradigms, because practical theology can be understood as a critical theological reflection on the word event (language event) in the various sub-disciplines of practical theology (homiletics, pastorate, liturgics and diaconical ministry), responding to the Word event of Scripture as the written said in answer to the Divine saying.I have reflected on this dialogue, not as an outsider objectifying Africa or postmodernism, but as one born in Africa (as-one-in-Africa) whose mother tongue (house of Being) is that of middle Europe. Theology has always been most creative at the intersection or intercessions of paradigms of thought, that is, Jerusalem�Athens, Jerusalem�Athens�Alexandria, Jerusalem�Athens�Alexandria�Rome, et cetera. The time has come for southern Africa to be part of this intersection and these intercessions, to offer perspectives and paradigms for practical theology.

This chapter examines the complex intersections of language, colonialism, foundational literacy education and pedagogical practices in Pakistan. While Urdu, the national language and lingua franca of Pakistan, is a primary medium for curricula development and instruction in schools in most of the low literacy areas of Pakistan, research shows that most Early Years and primary grade students of such areas do not have a coherent understanding of the Urdu language as it is not their mother tongue. Therefore, their primary literacy needs are often unmet, causing them to simply rote-learn the curriculum content instead of acquiring linguistic proficiency. This issue carries onto their acquisition, or lack thereof, of English, the nation’s official language. Moreover, the foundational literacy teachers in most low-literacy, rural areas are not well-trained themselves, thus adding another challenge to the process of literacy acquisition. The issue of literacy acquisition in such a context is then two-fold: the student does not have comprehension ability outside of their mother tongue, and the teacher does not have enough tools or training to teach within the student’s mother tongue. Such a situation in the multilingual landscape of Pakistan is a critical, yet under-addressed issue within the broader realm of language learning and foundational literacy education. By using the educational NGO, The Citizens Foundation’s schools as case studies, the chapter consolidates the issues of literacy learning and lack of linguistic proficiency in Pakistan by tracing the colonial impacts on regional and vernacular language development in the country. Moreover, it underscores the importance of including the Mother Tongue Based Multilingual Education (MTB MLE) system within curriculum development as well as teacher training for schools in low literacy areas of Pakistan, so that the learning outcomes for linguistic proficiency can be maximised.

Scholars of language teaching agree that the development of initial literacy is best achieved when taught in the mother tongue. Namibia’s language policy for schools prescribes teaching using mother tongue or the predominant local language as a medium of instruction during the first three years of schooling. This study reports on a study of how Namibian lecturers prepare student teachers to teach literacy in mother tongue (Oshikwanyama and Oshindonga) dialects of Oshiwambo language. Data were collected through classroom observations, semi-structured interviews and document analysis. Content analysis was used to analyse the data. The main findings are that most of the lecturers were proficient in the languages in question and they fluently explained the literacy content in Oshikwanyama and Oshindonga. However, the preparation was constrained by a lack of prescribed books in the African languages. The study aims at filling a gap in the literature on how Namibian student teachers are prepared to teach literacy in mother tongue grounded within a sociocultural perspective.

The purpose of the paper is to reveal a key issue of multilingual classroom i.e. anxiety. When the teacher is mono-or bi-lingual and learners are multilingual then anxiety level of students is very high which creates threatened, de-motivated, and hold-back attitude among students for learning. As a result, such multilingual classroom is nothing more than a prison for learners which blatantly impairs learning and hampers open communication between teacher and student, who belong to diverse lingual background. Therefore, the paper suggests a strategy acronym as OBWMC (Off and on throwing Basic Words in Multilingual Classrooms). The strategy invites instructor to learn some basic 20-25 words of the learners' mother tongue. In a multilingual classroom mere knowing 20-25 words of students' mother tongue can infuse interest among learners towards language learning, lowers the affectivefilter and bolsters learner's self-esteem. Moreover, it also increases respect for other languages and dispel monotony of monolingual classrooms.

This ethnographic study examines literacy activities in a Tibetan-Canadian family, members of a heritage language community facing intergenerational language loss. Drawing from twelve months of video ethnography, as well as ethnographic interviews and participant observation, I show how children use sound, gesture, and objects to mediate a shared understanding of the Tibetan heritage language, despite the dominance of English in their spoken repertoires. Informed by anthropological methods of language socialization, I examine children’s multimodal articulations of metalinguistic knowledge to argue that literacy activities provide material anchors for Tibetan children to identify as heritage language speakers through a process that I term heritage language recognition—an interactive objectification of language as culture that does not rely on metapragmatic discourse. Analyses discuss heritage language recognition in conversational patterns of entextualization, demonstrating that metalinguistic knowledge can be located in young children’s multimodal repertoires. (Heritage languages, language socialization, literacy, metalinguistic knowledge, multimodality)