ABSTRACT This study explores how newly arrived migrant students (NAMS) experience social and educational inclusion in Norway’s Extended Basic Education Programme (EBEP), designed to prepare and qualify them for upper secondary education. Although the programme is implemented in upper secondary schools to ensure age-appropriate schooling, these schools tend to have high proportions of students with immigrant backgrounds. Based on qualitative interviews with 15 NAMS in three Oslo schools, the study suggests that this concentration limits opportunities for meaningful interaction with Norwegian-born students and restricts access to the dominant linguistic and cultural capital essential for the social and academic inclusion of NAMS. Using Bourdieu’s concepts of cultural, symbolic and social capital, the study highlights a central paradox in inclusion: despite inclusive policy intentions, the structural placement of the EBEP limits access to the dominant linguistic and cultural resources valued within the educational field. Upon completing the EBEP, many students express a desire to transfer to different upper secondary schools with more Norwegian-born peers in order to improve their Norwegian, expand their social networks and feel integrated. The study calls for a re-evaluation of inclusion policies and programme placement, advocating for models that facilitate broader participation and integration within the educational landscape.

ABSTRACT Tourist sites are rich in semiotic resources that interact to construct marketable identities. These resources include language, imagery and materiality. Drawing on 157 photographic images collected from six tourist sites in Arusha, Tanzania, this paper employs socio-semiotic analysis to examine how heterogeneous linguistic and visual-spatial resources combine in a contingent assemblage to produce what is here conceptualised as ‘Maasainess’. Thematic analysis reveals that Maasai identity is constructed by combining ethnolinguistic insertions, visual iconography and stylisation and spatial branding practices. For instance, ethnonymic and toponymic references are embedded in predominantly English-language signage by bottom-up actors such as souvenir shop owners, cultural groups and cultural museums. These resources index Maasai authenticity. At the same time, recurring iconography in the landscape yields a recognisable aesthetic of Maasai heritage. This paper argues that these resources form a multimodal semiotic assemblage characterised by distributed agency, from which ‘Maasainess’ emerges as an authentic and marketable commodity through the interaction of institutional actors, linguistic resources, imagery and material artefacts. More broadly, the paper shows how ethnic identities that are relatively marginalised within the national unity ideology become highly visible within global tourism economies.

This study examines Arabic–Indonesian code-mixing practices in Islamic educational settings as a linguistic phenomenon shaping learning and social interaction. It aims to analyze the forms, functions, and contextual meanings of code-mixing across academic and non-academic domains. Employing a qualitative case study design, the study involved 32 students and one ustadz as key participants. Data were collected through participant observation, audio-recorded interactions, and semi-structured interviews, and analyzed thematically. The findings reveal that code-mixing is predominantly realized through the insertion of Arabic lexical elements. In academic contexts, it functions as a pedagogical and interactional strategy to mediate conceptual understanding, while in non-academic settings it serves as a marker of identity, solidarity, and symbolic capital. These findings highlight code-mixing as a valuable linguistic resource, contributing to the advancement of educational sociolinguistics and informing bilingual pedagogical practices in Islamic educational contexts.

This study examines how English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) interlocutors employ communication strategies during task-based interaction and how these strategies relate to ELF-aware communicative orientations of intelligibility, adaptability, and multilingual–multicultural awareness. Ten university students learning English as an additional language completed a closed information-gap task. Interactional data were video-recorded, transcribed, and analyzed through a combination of distributional analysis and interactional analysis, and complemented by stimulated recall to examine learners’ strategic awareness. The findings show that, beyond commonly reported strategies, participants frequently engaged in co-creating messages, deconstructing complex information, and adaptive self-repair. These strategies enabled learners to collaboratively clarify meaning, adjust their linguistic production in response to interactional demands, and draw on shared multilingual resources. The analysis illustrates how these strategies support three ELF-aware communicative orientations: intelligibility through collaborative clarification and reformulation, adaptability through self-initiated monitoring and adjustment, and multilingual awareness through the use of shared linguistic resources. The findings highlight strategic competence as an interactionally enacted resource that supports collaborative and adaptive meaning-making during task-based interaction, and underscore the pedagogical value of tasks that promote these interactional processes.

ABSTRACT This study examines the shop-sign landscape of Hurghada’s tourism-commercial field to investigate how languages are distributed, visually organised, and socially legitimised in a tourism-oriented marketplace. Drawing on Bourdieu’s framework of cultural capital, it adopts a sequential multi-method design that combines a distributional analysis of 1,293 shop signs, a qualitative visual analysis of representative signs, and semi-structured interviews with 20 merchants and 20 tourists. The findings reveal a clear linguistic hierarchy rather than a random coexistence of codes: English occupied the most dominant and visible position, Arabic retained an important role in local grounding and practical accessibility, and Russian functioned as a more selective resource associated with specific tourist groups. Beyond these distributional patterns, the study shows that language in shop signs operates as more than a communicative tool. It is differentially valued by merchants, materialised through visual and commercial display, and gradually normalised as a legitimate form of tourism-facing business presentation. The study contributes to linguistic landscape research by moving beyond descriptive patterning toward a process-oriented account of how linguistic resources acquire market value and symbolic legitimacy within tourism-commercial space.

This study investigates the dynamic features of language production in senior three students’ English continuation writing. Traditional writing instruction and assessment, which rely on static and linear models, fail to explain the complex fluctuations students exhibit in lexicon, syntax, and discourse construction. To address this issue, the study adopts Complex Dynamic Systems Theory (CDST) as a new analytical framework. Using textual analysis combined with case analysis, the study examines 14 continuation writing texts completed by senior three students from a natural class in a key high school in Taiyuan during a mock exam in the first semester of the 2025 academic year. The analysis focuses on three dimensions: lexicon, syntax, and discourse cohesion. The results show that students’ continuation texts are not simple accumulations of linguistic elements but complex systems characterized by fluctuation and self-organization. Specifically, vocabulary use exhibits obvious nonlinear waxing and waning; syntactic structures show dynamic competition between complex and simple forms; and discourse cohesion emerges as overall coherence from the interaction of micro-level elements. The findings indicate that CDST offers an ecological perspective for understanding students’ writing production. Students should rationally view the nonlinear fluctuations in their writing process, adjust their task-response strategies appropriately, and actively identify and utilize their own linguistic resources, thereby enhancing their English writing competence more effectively.

Visualization is widely recognized as a powerful support for problem-solving across disciplines such as mathematics and science. However, research on visualization has often treated it as a language-neutral cognitive tool, paying limited attention to the linguistic and cultural resources of multilingual learners (MLs). This review synthesizes empirical research on the role of visualization in problem-solving for MLs, clarifying its conceptualization, its study, and the evidence regarding its effectiveness for this population. Drawing on cognitive, cognitive-linguistic, and sociocultural perspectives, the review examines how visual representations interact with language demands, disciplinary practices, and learners’ meaning-making processes. The analysis reveals several tensions in the literature, including limited consideration of learners’ language proficiency and a predominance of monolingual research designs. The review also identifies methodological and theoretical gaps, particularly the need for integrated frameworks that account for both visual and linguistic dimensions of problem-solving. Implications for future research and instructional practice are discussed, highlighting directions for more inclusive, theoretically grounded investigations of visualization in multilingual learning contexts.

ABSTRACT The 2023 Nigerian presidential election was marked by an intensified use of social media for political discourse, where language played a huge role in shaping political support and opposition. The study examines how X users deploy language and linguistic resources to demonstrate support for (or against) the three major presidential candidates in the election. Adopting a descriptive qualitative design, 150 tweets from supporters of Bola Ahmed Tinubu, Peter Obi, and Atiku Abubakar were purposively selected from 7,500 collected (July 2022–February 2023) via rtweet in R and analysed using van Leeuwen’s legitimation theory. The study revealed that language use by tweeters for (de)legitimation was characterised by sarcasm (irony/mockery), humour (jokes/banter), optimism (prayers), verbal aggression (threats/curses), hyperbolic statements (lies), and comparisons. Based on the tenets of van Leeuwen’s theory, the key (de)legitimation strategies deployed were authorisation (40%), rationalisation (33%), and moral evaluation (53%), with mythopoesis absent. X’s short-form constraints limiting narrative strategies and storytelling were confirmed. Overall, the findings demonstrate how supporters use language to construct political support or opposition through appeals to familiar authority and morality in Nigeria’s digital political discourse.

ABSTRACT This paper examines the changing pattern of personal names influenced by ideologies that construct Christian religious identity among Erei people in Cross River State, Nigeria. Using religious identity as conceptual framework, the study accounts for the emerging dimensions of Erei personal names based on motivations from Christian religious beliefs. Data were obtained by means of participant observation and semi-structured interviews involving 32 participants in a 9-month fieldwork. Findings show that colonialism and its Christian religion’s legacy have introduced a new socio-onomastic tradition among Erei people. The naming practice depicts a gradual departure from the crystallised traditional based personal names that express the people’s cosmology and African traditional religion’s worship to a naming culture nuanced in Christian religious ideologies and beliefs system. This conceptualisation produces a set of personal names that reconstruct Christian religious identity and ethnopragmatic representations of the Christian God. The personal names somehow utilised indigenous linguistic resources to rebuke idolatrous beliefs and venerate God as a supernatural being whose works and virtues are dependable, protective, impartial, compassionate, responsive, supreme and worthy of praise. This presents Erei people’s inseparable accessory to Christian religious practices that connect them with similar beliefs of other Christian adherents in Nigeria and beyond.

ABSTRACT Latine novice teachers enter complex classroom contexts when teaching science with the potential for integrating their own and students’ linguistic, cultural, and racial resources and their students’ multiple literacy practices, broadly defined. Drawing on translanguaging theory and pedagogy and interdisciplinarity, this qualitative case study explores the specific, planned, pedagogical resource integration of two Latine novice two-way bilingual education (TWBE) teachers teaching science. Through lesson plans and observation, as well as reflections and interview data, our analysis shows the two TWBE teachers’ interconnectedness between subjects in a way that made them include specific language(s), literacy practices, modes of communication, and science cultural knowledge. This intentional resource and interdisciplinary-guided integration brought new cultural understandings surrounding scientific knowledge, thus expanding the notion of multilingual speakers’ “corriente” in elementary science to include specific language(s), diverse literacy practices and specific, culturally connected and critical science content knowledge. This new “corriente” is specifically tied to critically informed, culturally relevant science knowledge and contributes to transformative, equitable, planned practices in linguistic justice—oriented elementary TWBE science classrooms.

Language provides a window onto how people conceptualize their subjective experiences, including emotions. Although rare, linguistic analyses that go beyond emotion words provide deep insights into emotional experience across cultures. In this study, we explored cultural models of emotion prevalent in the United States and Belgium using verbal descriptions of recent emotional events collected in 2020-2022 from speakers of North American (U.S.) English and Belgian Dutch in the form of semistructured interviews. We analyzed the interviews using three complementary approaches: (1) topic modeling to characterize content, (2) word counting to examine linguistic resources, and (3) inductive analysis to uncover broader themes. Our findings revealed notable cultural differences alongside some similarities. U.S. English speakers used more first-person pronouns and emotion words, emphasized high-arousal emotions, and prioritized asserting personal achievements and openly expressing their feelings. In contrast, Belgian Dutch speakers' descriptions reflected a more moderated approach to emotion, illustrating how social standards and broader worldviews gave meaning to the events, with the use of fewer first-person pronouns and more language focused on relativization and comparison. These differences are unlikely to be fully explained by differences in language structure or the analytical tools used. Our observations are consistent with previous psychological research on U.S. and Belgian culture. At the same time, our samples came only from California and Flanders, respectively, and had no recent history of immigration, potentially limiting the generalizability of our findings. We evaluate our approach against other means of exploring the conceptualization of emotion across cultures. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Textbooks function not only as instructional materials but also as ideological and cultural resources that shape learners’ identities, values, and social orientations. Despite extensive research on textbook discourse, limited attention has been given to the construction of child identity in Indonesian elementary language textbooks, particularly from the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and Islamic educational values. This study investigates how child identity is constructed in Bahasa Indonesia untuk SD Kelas IV through the integration of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and SFL. Employing a qualitative document analysis approach, the study examines verbal and visual data contained in the 185-page textbook, including narratives, informational texts, learning activities, dialogues, instructions, and illustrations. The analysis focuses on transitivity patterns, modality, appraisal resources, and visual representations. The findings reveal four dominant identity constructions: children as active learners, socially responsible community members, emotionally aware individuals, and healthy and responsible citizens. Transitivity analysis indicates a predominance of material processes, suggesting that children are primarily represented as active agents engaged in learning, participation, cooperation, and self-development. Modality and appraisal resources further promote desirable behaviours such as discipline, diligence, responsibility, politeness, and self-confidence, while visual representations reinforce these identities through recurring depictions of educational and collaborative activities. The findings also demonstrate that the identities constructed in the textbook align with several Islamic educational values, including ikhtiar (effort), amanah (responsibility), adab (ethical conduct), ta'awun (cooperation), sabr (perseverance), and tabayyun (critical verification of information). This study contributes to textbook discourse research by showing how linguistic and visual resources systematically construct child identity and transmit educational values. The findings highlight the importance of considering identity formation and value transmission in future textbook development and educational practice.

Dataset of audiovisual unscripted monologues with speech annotations

Flexibly choosing a language in bilingual contexts lets bilingual children use all their linguistic resources, potentially enabling richer expression than single language contexts permit. This study aims to (1) assess whether bilingual children benefit from using all their languages, (2) explore how language balance and executive functioning relate to dual language management, and (3) examine the link between language mixing in an experimental task and daily life. To address these aims, bilingual children (English-Dutch, Polish-Dutch, Turkish-Dutch; n=49) aged 4-7years participated in a semantic verbal fluency task under three conditions: an either-language condition (free use of both languages) and two single-language conditions (restricted to children's dominant or non-dominant language). Language balance was based on children's proficiency in both languages. Executive functioning measures comprised selective attention and working memory. Results revealed a small, non-significant increase in word production in the either-language condition versus the single-language conditions. Children with stronger attention produced more words overall. In the either-language condition, balanced children with high attention skills benefited most. In contrast, balanced children with more limited attention skills struggled in the single-language conditions. Children switched more in the either-language condition. Switching in the task did not correlate meaningfully with daily language mixing. In summary, the either-language condition provided only minor benefits, with attention playing a key role and interacting with contextual requirements and language balance. The findings highlight the complexity of bilingual language use and caution against overgeneralizing experimental results to settings in daily life.

Australia's increasingly diverse classrooms include growing numbers of refugee-background students whose educational experiences are shaped by cultural, linguistic, and socio-emotional complexity. Yet assessment in Australian schools still relies heavily on standardised, language-dependent, norm-referenced measures that privilege monolingual, middle-class, Eurocentric benchmarks. These systems often overlook multilingual repertoires and culturally mediated ways of demonstrating knowledge, misrepresenting capability and reinforcing structural inequities. This systematic review examines how Culturally Responsive Assessment (CRA) can address such bias and promote equity for refugee-background learners in Australian K–12 schools.Guided by the PRISMA 2020 framework, a systematic search of Scopus, ERIC, Web of Science, ProQuest, and Google Scholar identified 21 peer-reviewed studies published between 2010 and 2025. The corpus included qualitative, mixed-methods, conceptual, and review-based research. Data extraction and coding, managed in NVivo, followed Thomas and Harden’s (2008) thematic synthesis approach and were informed by Vygotsky's Sociocultural Theory.Findings show that standardised assessments such as NAPLAN, grounded in monolingual, Eurocentric, and middle-class norms, systematically misrepresent refugee-background students' knowledge and potential. By contrast, CRA practices—arts-based, narrative, multilingual, and community co-designed tasks—recast assessment as multimodal, relational, and dialogic, foregrounding students’ cultural identities, linguistic resources, and participatory agency. These practices enact key Vygotskian concepts of mediation, cultural tools, and the zone of proximal development by emphasising what learners can do with scaffolded support rather than decontextualised written performance. However, CRA implementation is constrained by test-centric accountability regimes, tokenistic school–community engagement, fragmented policy settings, and gaps in teacher preparation and trauma-informed support.The review concludes that CRA can serve as a transformative framework for assessment equity when embedded within a broader sociocultural–intersectional, trauma-informed, and socioecological agenda. It proposes a typology of four systemic domains—policy alignment, teacher professional capacity, community partnership and co-design, and trauma-informed integration—as key leverage points for reform to move CRA from isolated classroom innovation toward sustained institutional change.

ABSTRACT This study examines how translanguaging and multimodal communication function as integrated meaning-making processes in emergent bilingual preschoolers’ geo-spatial reasoning and shape composition. Drawing on video-recorded interactions with Spanish- and Mandarin-speaking children in English-dominant early childhood settings, we analyzed how children mobilized linguistic, embodied, and visual resources to engage in spatial tasks. Rather than treating languages as separate systems, children drew on unified semiotic repertoires, including home languages, gesture, storytelling, and visual representation, to navigate mathematical challenges. Findings indicated that translanguaging facilitated task engagement, activation of culturally grounded background knowledge, and collaborative mathematical reasoning. These results highlight the cognitive and pedagogical value of transmodal approaches to early mathematics instruction, particularly in contexts where bilingual education is limited, and offer implications for classroom practice, teacher preparation, and early childhood policy.

Amharic, a major Semitic language of Ethiopia, remains underrepresented in natural language processing research due to limited linguistic resources. This study addresses the challenge of accurate text classification for low-resource languages by proposing a hybrid framework that integrates a semantically structured Amharic News Ontology (ANO) with traditional TF-IDF features. The ANO was systematically developed through a rigorous four-phase methodology to capture hierarchical relationships between news domain concepts. We formalize a feature fusion technique that combines lexical (TF-IDF) and ontological features into enriched document representations used to train a Logistic Regression classifier. Evaluated on a public dataset of 61,915 Amharic news articles across six categories, our ontology-enhanced model achieved 97.0% accuracy. Statistical analysis revealed a 3.2 percentage point improvement over a TF-IDF-only baseline (McNemar's test ([Formula: see text], [Formula: see text])), with ontology integration particularly effective in disambiguating semantically related categories (Politics-Business confusion reduced by 38%). The experimental results suggest that, for Amharic news classification on the evaluated dataset, integrating structured semantic knowledge through a domain-specific ontology improves classification accuracy by 3.2% compared to a TF-IDF baseline. While these findings demonstrate the potential of ontology-based feature fusion for low-resource languages, they are constrained to the news domain and the specific dataset used.

International students in Saudi universities face academic and adaptation challenges shaped by emotional, cognitive, linguistic, and sociocultural factors. This study examined whether emotional intelligence and cognitive flexibility predicted academic success and adaptation outcomes among international students in Saudi public universities. A quantitative cross-sectional survey was conducted with 410 international students using structured measures of emotional intelligence, cognitive flexibility, academic success, adaptation outcomes, Arabic proficiency, and sociodemographic characteristics. Data were analysed using descriptive statistics, chi-square tests, Kendall’s tau-b correlations, hierarchical regression, and observed-variable path analysis. Duration of residence was significantly associated with Arabic proficiency, χ2(8) = 82.40, p < .001. Arabic proficiency was positively associated with GPA, τ = 0.62, p < .001, and adaptation outcomes, τ = 0.48, p < .001. In hierarchical regression, sociocultural covariates and psychological predictors explained substantial variance in academic success, R2 = 0.53, and adaptation outcomes, R2 = 0.53. Emotional intelligence and cognitive flexibility remained positive predictors of both outcomes after accounting for Arabic proficiency, duration of residence, region of origin, and language of instruction. Findings suggest that international student success in Saudi universities reflects an interaction of emotional, cognitive, linguistic, and contextual resources. Universities should strengthen integrated support for emotional regulation, adaptive thinking, Arabic-language development, and culturally responsive academic guidance.

ABSTRACT This study sought to better understand students’ choices regarding their linguistic resources and the language practices arising from their choices. This study involved multilingual interviews with seven students undertaking education-related postgraduate study in the UK. Data analysis indicates that the students make purposeful choices regarding their linguistic resources for their UK-based studies as part of their broader endeavour of being and becoming. However, their purposefulness is shaped by their assumptions and prejudices in the linguistic ecology at an English-foregrounded university. They seem to see ‘all in English’ as an ideal, while attaching little significance to plurilingual competence.

Abstract Current trends encouraging a move away from monolingual teaching have sparked a renewed interest in the role of translation in language instruction. Yet, there are few theoretically and empirically grounded proposals regarding specific uses of translation in the language classroom. This study argues for the potential of translation in promoting learners' metalinguistic awareness, through metalinguistic talk. Based on the conceptualization of translation as an act of plurilingual mediation, we identify three features of translation that make it particularly suited for this purpose: (i) the separation of form and meaning, (ii) the comparison of linguistic resources across languages and (iii) the communicative objective of translating. We propose an operationalization of the identified features and explore it empirically using data from a project involving 64 young learners of English in Norway (age 8–10) who were audio‐recorded during collaborative translation tasks. Through qualitative analysis of interactions, we investigate ways in which the identified features are manifested in peer interactions. The findings indicate that translation has the potential to generate rich metatalk, making it an effective means for promoting metalinguistic awareness in additional language learning.