Multilingual resources in classroom interaction: ethnographic and discourse analytic perspectives

Abstract

This special issue of Language and Education contributes to a distinctive and growing tradition of ethnographic and discourse analytic research on multilingual classroom interaction. To illustrate the nature and significance of the articles assembled here, this introduction provides a brief genealogy of this research tradition. We review two broad generations of studies, along with some of the different orienting theories and methodologies guiding the studies: (1) a first generation of research in multilingual classroom contexts that grew out of the field of linguistic anthropology in North America and (2) a second generation of studies, emerging from the early 1990s onwards, that developed critical, interpretive approaches to the study of multilingual classroom interaction. The second-generation studies were conducted in a wider range of research sites, including post-colonial settings, and they were explicitly framed with reference to language-in-education policies. We then introduce the five articles in this special issue. We argue that they represent a third generation of studies that are opening up new epistemological spaces at the interface with other fields of research, such as multimodality in classroom interaction or ethnography of language policy, while building on the robust foundation of first- and second-generation research in multilingual classrooms.

Keywords:

• multilingual classrooms
• communicative resources
• meaning-making in interaction
• navigating language policies
• teacher and student agency
• critical ethnography
• discourse analysis

Notes

1. Auer (1984) actually uses the term ‘code alternation’.

2. For more detailed reviews of this research, see Martin-Jones (2000, 2007) and Lin (2008).