Classroom code-switching among postgraduate EFL students in Saudi Arabia: Attitudes, reasons, and perceptions.

Double vowels, double fairness? Assessing the viability of diphthongs as novel strategies for gender fairness in Italian

This study examines the pragmatic acceptance of translanguaging practices among secondary school teachers in Kazakhstan, highlighting a notable gap between official language policy and classroom realities. Although policy mandates monolingual instruction in Kazakh-medium schools, in practice, teachers frequently incorporate Russian and English to support student comprehension and address challenges related to Kazakh language proficiency and limited teaching resources. Drawing on interviews with nine teachers as agents of ‘micro-language implementation’ within broader ‘macro-language policies’ (Baldauf, 2006) and employing the critical framework of language choice and ideologies (Blackledge & Creese, 2010), the research examines language use strategies and ideologies among secondary school teachers. The findings reveal that despite formal education in Kazakh, some teachers rely on Russian for certain social functions, reflecting ongoing reverse language shift dynamics. This study underscores the need for more inclusive language policies that reflect multilingual realities and calls for further research into classroom pedagogies in educational institutions. The insights aim to inform policymakers and educational stakeholders about effective language development, planning, and the implementation of reforms in Kazakhstan.

ABSTRACT This article examines how the concept of ‘skill’ has been defined and institutionalized in primary mathematics curricula across five national systems the United States, England, Finland, Singapore, and Türkiye and within OECD policy frameworks between 1900 and 2025. The analysis draws on 23 official curriculum texts and supranational policy documents (approximately 197,000 words of policy language across Periods III—V) coded using a four-category analytical matrix applied to identifiable policy statements. Intercoder reliability was established on a 20% subsample (Cohen’s κ = .76–.83). The study reconstructs five periods of paradigmatic change and develops a three-type typology of discourse—architecture alignment. Findings indicate that in many contexts competency language in curriculum documents has expanded ahead of corresponding transformation in content organization and assessment design. Competency framing is frequently layered onto content structures whose epistemic logic remains predominantly procedural. Evidence from Singapore and Finland demonstrates that coherent alignment between skill discourse and epistemic architecture is achievable when professional knowledge infrastructures and assessment systems support the curriculum’s epistemological aims across successive reform cycles. The proposed typology offers a comparative analytical framework for examining how global competency discourses interact with national curriculum structures and accountability regimes.

ABSTRACT This study examines how Putonghua-oriented family language policy operates in Sichuanese three-generation households where young parents formulate language goals and grandparents provide daily childcare. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 31 families in Sichuan, China, the analysis shows that grandparents’ limited standard Putonghua competence led to varied outcomes: some grandparents used Chuanpu (Sichuan-accented Putonghua) to comply with the family policy, some maintained Sichuanese and assigned Putonghua to parents or school, and some households developed divided language routines across caregivers. In families where grandparents used Chuanpu, children whose standard pronunciation was sanctioned by schooling could correct grandparents’ speech, gaining local evaluative authority over standard pronunciation. Grandparents managed this shift through apology, self-deprecation, play and reframing. The study contributes to family language policy research by showing how standard language ideology can redistribute domain-specific corrective authority over pronunciation within intimate caregiving relationships.

In South African universities, English predominates as the medium of instruction, despite institutional language policies advocating for the inclusion of African Indigenous languages. The Council of Higher Education observed that the student protests in 2015 and 2016 highlighted deep-rooted issues that led to student dissatisfaction, mainly because course content was delivered in the dominant language. This study examines the ongoing exclusion of African language speakers in Open Distance e-Learning (ODeL) environments in South Africa. Using translanguaging concepts within a phenomenological qualitative research framework, the research aims to understand students’ lived experiences regarding language in an ODeL institution and to identify challenges faced by African language speakers, such as difficulties understanding course materials in English. Contribution: Through reflective and dialogical methods, combined with interpretation, the study reveals how the dominance of English in ODeL, along with technological factors, creates barriers to knowledge access, whereas the use of African languages without mediation encourages positive attitudes towards learning. It recommends that ODeL institutions make better use of African languages to support student self-learning, improving accessibility, understanding, and pass rates. Because of colonial history and global power dynamics, English is often viewed as the language of opportunity and success. There is an urgent need to reflect on how globalisation continues to disempower African groups within knowledge systems.

ABSTRACT This study examines how Arabic-speaking kindergarten teachers in monolingual settings in Israel navigate the diglossic divide between Spoken Arabic and Standard Arabic during shared story reading. Using a linguistic ethnographic design, it draws on video-recorded observations, field notes, and interviews with fifteen teachers, combining qualitative analysis with quantitative mapping of strategies. Translanguaging emerged as the dominant orientation (73.3%). Rather than alternating between bounded codes, teachers moved along a lexico-phonological continuum. A distinctive practice identified is Register Levelling: intra-register adjustment within StA through substitution of lexically distant forms with accessible cognate or identical items. Cognate-focused strategies (15.6%) worked by making phonological correspondences between spoken and standard forms explicit; direct translation (11.1%) appeared sparingly and was seen by teachers as counterproductive. For translanguaging theory, the implication is structural: in diglossic settings, repertoire deployment operates not across separate systems but intra-systemically. What the data foreground is teacher cognition itself: diglossia recast not as variety choice but as the active management of lexical distance, a reframing with consequences for both teacher education and language policy.

ABSTRACT This study examines how Black superintendents and Black families co-create district policy to transform schooling for Black children. Drawing on interviews with four superintendents, it shows how policy emerges not from administrative decree but from collective design. Grounded in culturally responsive school leadership, findings identify three co-creative practices: Shared Design, where families and leaders draft policies together; Dialogic Accountability, where community feedback shapes implementation; and Cultural Translation, where familial knowledge reframes policy language and purpose. Co-creation functions as a form of Black educational governance,– a freedom practice bridging institutional power with community wisdom.

ABSTRACT This study presents the first systematic bibliography of English language teaching materials for Turkish learners (1848–1928), spanning from the earliest known text produced for readers of the Ottoman Turkish script to the final publications preceding the 1928 script reform. This previously undocumented corpus of textbooks sheds light on the full scope and development of English instruction during the critical transition from the Ottoman to early Republican educational systems. Positioned at the intersection of educational history and cultural heritage, these materials are curricular artefacts reflecting broader shifts in language policy, pedagogy, and cultural transmission. Additionally, through archival and bibliographic research, this study categorises the textbooks according to their pedagogical focus, ranging from self-learning to spoken instruction. Treating textbooks as historical sources, the article contributes to understanding the material culture of education and to preserving the historical significance of these rare works, ensuring they are not lost to future scholarship.

Abstract This study examines the relationship between educational language policies and national identity construction in Portuguese-speaking countries during the postcolonial era. Through a comparative case study methodology employing critical discourse analysis and policy ethnography, the research analyzes how language planning strategies embedded within educational policies contribute to the construction and reconstruction of national identity across Lusophone nations. The study reveals three dominant characteristics shaping contemporary language planning approaches: the persistent hegemony of Portuguese as the primary medium of formal education, the marginalized status of indigenous and local languages despite constitutional recognition, and increasing tensions between linguistic pragmatism and cultural authenticity in postcolonial identity formation. The analysis demonstrates that Portuguese dominance in educational systems creates hierarchical identity structures where Portuguese proficiency becomes synonymous with full citizenship participation, while speakers of indigenous languages face systematic disadvantages that reproduce colonial-era inequalities. The findings suggest that educational language policies function as subtle instruments of cultural hegemony that shape not only linguistic competencies but also fundamental categories of national belonging. The research contributes to postcolonial linguistics scholarship by providing systematic analysis of how educational language policies operate as mechanisms of both cultural domination and resistance, offering evidence-based insights for developing more equitable and culturally responsive language planning frameworks.

ABSTRACT This article presents a critical discourse analysis of Victoria’s inclusive education policy regarding disability, examining its online multimodal Easy English version through Wodak’s Discourse-Historical Approach and Kress’s multimodal analysis. Despite decades of policy reform aimed at fostering inclusive education, a gap between policy rhetoric and practical implementation persists. We critically examine the visual and textual elements to investigate how language and multimodal representations in policy documents shape or consolidate understandings of disability and implementation of inclusion. The analysis reveals how institutional documents may reflect an underlying discourse of deficit or construct disempowering practices. This research contributes to ongoing scholarly debate about policy discourse in developing understandings of inclusive practices. The findings highlight the need to attend to discourse and representation within the complex interplay between policy language, institutional practices, and educational outcomes for students with disabilities in Victorian schools. This study emphasises the importance of addressing such issues for effective educational inclusion.

ABSTRACT This paper examines language policy (LP) in Bangladesh as a postcolonial regime shaped by lasting tensions between formal state legitimacy and uneven institutional practice. Using qualitative documentary analysis, the study examined the constitutional provisions, legal acts, administrative orders, court decisions, education policies and related policy documents produced between 1972 and 2026. The analysis distinguishes between explicit policy – which formally privileges Bengali – and the implicit or de facto policy through which English has retained authority across key institutional domains. The findings demonstrate that Bengali has remained the dominant language of constitutional legitimacy, public authority and symbolic nationhood, while English continues to structure high-value domains (e.g. the judiciary, higher education, public service recruitment). Meanwhile, multilingualism remains weakly articulated in policy, and indigenous and minoritised languages have received limited recognition within formal policy frameworks. The article argues that Bangladesh’s LP is therefore best understood as a stratified LP regime in which symbolic monolingualism, functional bilingualism and multilingual marginalisation coexist. This stratification produces unequal access to institutional engagement, representation, education and mobility, with implications for human rights and broader social inequality. The discussion contributes to debates on postcolonial LP by showing how the explicit Bengali-centred policy coexists with the institutional dominance of English and the marginalisation of other languages.

ABSTRACT This study investigates how school administrators in Thailand's Deep South (TDS) understand and position Global Englishes (GE), examining how their beliefs mediate English language policy implementation. Nine administrators from Pattani, Yala, and Narathiwat provinces participated in semi-structured interviews exploring their stances on linguistic diversity, native-speakerism, and GE Language Teaching principles. Inductive qualitative content analysis revealed three key findings. First, administrators recognized linguistic pluralism but faced institutional constraints, particularly assessment regimes privileging standardized varieties, limiting their capacity to enact pluralistic approaches. Second, some administrators actively resisted linguistic imperialism by repositioning local English varieties as legitimate identity markers and directing teachers toward regionally relevant practices. Third, administrators demonstrated openness to Global Englishes Language Teaching (GELT) principles including intelligibility-focused assessment, translanguaging, and cultural integration, but identified systemic barriers including native-speaker preference, teacher preparation needs, and accountability pressures. The findings reveal that administrators function as ideological gatekeepers whose beliefs fundamentally shape whether alternative frameworks can move from theory to practice. Sustainable language policy reform requires engaging administrators as stakeholders, addressing structural barriers, and coordinating transformation of beliefs, policies, assessments, and societal ideologies. For culturally marginalized communities, such transformation represents an essential step toward epistemic justice and linguistic self-determination.

ABSTRACT Academic publishing has long served as a site of language regulation, shaping which knowledge becomes publishable, under what linguistic conditions, and at what cost. The normalization of generative artificial intelligence sharpens these concerns, as AI tools are now increasingly entangled with manuscript preparation, editorial screening, and peer-review governance. This article examines AI-mediated academic publishing as an emerging domain of language policy and planning. It reports a qualitative document analysis of 10 author-facing policy texts from six major publishing ecosystems: Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, SAGE, and Oxford University Press/Oxford Academic. Combining structured qualitative content coding with reflexive thematic analysis, the study examines how these documents regulate language assistance, authorship, disclosure, responsibility, and textual acceptability. The analysis identifies four recurring policy logics: conditional permission for AI-assisted language improvement, prohibition of AI authorship, individualized author responsibility, and uneven disclosure thresholds. The article argues that AI does not simply lower linguistic barriers to publication. Rather, it reworks standard language ideology, redistributes compliance burdens, and subjects multilingual scholars to new forms of suspicion, disclosure risk, and credibility assessment within the infrastructures of scholarly publishing.

This paper is a summary of eight months of participatory observation at the Manoel Rocha Filho Municipal School, located in the rural area of the municipality of Barreiras, in western Bahia state, on Portuguese as a host language (Grosso, 2010) in a migratory educational context. Seeking to understand the effects caused by institutional reception policies in a multicultural context, this text aims to promote pedagogical practices of Portuguese as a reception language through a teaching unit applied in language workshops offered outside school hours. The theoretical framework is grounded in three dialogical axes: child migration from an anthropological perspective (Ariès, 1978; Moscoso, 2009; Sarmento, 2007; Corsaro, 1997); migrant childhood as a subject of rights (Bhabha, 2014; Rifiotis, 2018; Marinho and Paiva, 2022; Moreira and De Paiva, 2022; including laws and regulations addressing the topic); and educational language policies articulated with the dimensions of the ethics of care (Carneiro, 2021; Severo; Chambal Nhampoca, 2021). About methodology, the pedagogical proposal is based on action-participation research (Thiollent, 1985), which takes the form of a set of guidelines and actions organized in the form of a didactic sequence (Dolz; Noverraz; Schneuwly, 2003; XXX; Orgado, 2017). This work aims to demonstrate that the welcome offered to migrant students at the Manoel Rocha Filho Municipal School is not limited to ensuring their right to education by guaranteeing their enrollment in the educational system of western Bahia. It also includes dialogue with the educational reality of these students, with a view to developing contextualized teaching materials based on Portuguese as the language of reception to minimize the linguistic, intercultural, and social differences that constitute the child migration process in western Bahia.

This note presents Houria Alami M'chichi's thesis on languages and politics in the Maghreb. It situates the work within debates on language policy, cultural identity, and political power in North African societies. The note points to the importance of studying the relations between Arabic, Berber, French, and other linguistic practices in order to understand the political and social dynamics of language in the Maghreb.

ABSTRACT In this study of Dual Language Bilingual Education (DLBE), we conducted a quantitative study with K−3 teachers in five schools with DLBE-treatment teachers teaching in English and Spanish and non-DLBE-comparison teachers teaching only in English. The DLBE treatment teachers participated in an 18-month graduate certification with five coaching sessions focused on oral language, vocabulary, and small-group instruction (academic constructs) and classroom interactions (sociocultural). We observed beginning and end-of-year language arts instruction in English and Spanish. For analysis, we used two instruments to measure teachers’ instructional implementation of (1) academic constructs; and (2) classroom interactions. Using descriptive statistics and regression analysis, we examined changes to teachers’ academic content instruction and their classroom interactions over time analyzing effects by treatment condition, experience, age, grade-level, and language of instruction. Findings demonstrate that all DLBE-treatment teachers improved on academic constructs over time. Older DLBE-teachers with fewer years of experience developed more than younger teachers with more consecutive and cumulative experience. DLBE-treatment teachers instructing Spanish demonstrated the highest effect size in creating a classroom ecology of respect. Implications elucidate how explicit professional development alongside of instructional coaching can foster instructional expertise in academic constructs and creating a classroom ecology of interaction and respect. A matrix for language policy and planning is furnished as districts scale and develop their DLBE teaching community.

ABSTRACT This study examines how Chinese parents in the Netherlands manage their family language policy (FLP) and how emotions shape that process. Adopting an ethnographic approach, the study draws on data from 12 Chinese families in the Netherlands, including home observations, semi-structured interviews, participant-generated recordings and photographs. The findings show that Chinese parents remain strongly committed to Mandarin maintenance, but this commitment is continually bounded by concerns about family cohesion, parent–child relationships and the emotional satisfaction of all family members. Emotional well-being thus functions as the organising principle of their FLP. The analysis identifies a mechanism consisting of four interrelated dimensions: ideology, strategy, process and outcome. Ideology sets the boundaries of acceptable parental practice by positioning family harmony above achieving linguistic goals. Strategy operates within those boundaries by sustaining Mandarin learning through limited enforcement and flexible adjustment. Process makes this strategy feasible through substantial emotional labour, including emotional regulation, emotional buffering and emotional negotiation. Outcome, in turn, redefines what counts as successful linguistic achievement. The study suggests that inconsistency and reduced enforcement in FLP may be better understood as emotionally grounded parental self-restraint rather than weak commitment.

ABSTRACT This article reconceptualizes family language policy as chronotope-mediated governance: the interactional process through which culturally recognizable time–space frames make language choice accountable in the next turn. In dialogue with language policy as practice, it treats policy as observable in participants’ orientations to norms of appropriate language use. Drawing on naturally occurring audio recordings from three Iraqi Arab Muslim families in Wellington, New Zealand, and using Conversation Analysis-informed sequential analysis, the study examines recurrent family events – school-return talk, homeland and return futures, transnational kin contact, mediated ritual co-viewing, and Qur’anic lessons – analyzed as chronotopically keyed time–space frames that authorize deontic shifts and reorganize participation rights. Across these events, Arabic-oriented normativity is pursued through medium requests and repair, candidate replacement, and distributed monitoring (including sibling correction and invoked authority), while conditional evaluation in lesson routines renders correctness publicly observable and sanctionable; boundary cases where English passes clarify the scope conditions and interactional costs of enforcement. The article proposes a portable interactional mechanism for linking recurrent family events to the turn-by-turn production, negotiation, and occasional suspension of Arabic-oriented norms in everyday interaction, thereby illuminating how heritage Arabic maintenance is sustained and contested.

ABSTRACT Boarding schools dominate compulsory education in Tibetan areas of China and enrol approximately 78% of children aged 6–18; yet their consequences for intergenerational language transmission remain underexamined from a family perspective. Drawing on Norton’s investment framework and Bourdieu’s notions of field and habitus, this multi-sited qualitative study analyses semi-structured interviews with administrators, parents, teachers, and students across Sichuan Province and the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) to examine how families negotiate linguistic investment within boarding schools. Employing a focal case strategy, we document standard-language normalisation and three interrelated actor responses: parents pursue contradictory investment through a dual-track strategy, balancing institutional compliance with private ethnic-language remediation; teachers create shrinking interstitial spaces for Tibetan within monolingual boarding environments; and one focal case (Dolma) exhibits a U-shaped trajectory from adolescent self-silencing to reconstruction at university, suggesting a pattern warranting further investigation. Together, they reveal what we term the ‘rationality trap’: a structural configuration in which individually rational choices converge to produce collective language shift. Treating the examination-driven linguistic marketplace as a supra-regional field, we show how families and educators reproduce the structural conditions that constrain them.