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As part of a larger project, we studied how a foreign language test got discursively constructed in the talk of upper-secondary-school leavers. A group of students were asked to keep an oral diary to record their ideas, feelings and experiences of preparing for and taking the test over the last spring term of school, as part of a high-stakes national examination. In addition, they took part in discussions either in pairs or groups of three after having learned about the final test results. After transcribing the data, drawing on a form of discourse analysis originally launched by a group of social psychologists, we identified (at least) four interpretative repertoires in the students' accounts -with different constructions of themselves as test-takers, the test, and their performance in the test -including expectations and explanations for success or failure as well as credit or blame. The findings point to variation in the uses of these repertoires, not only from one context to another but also from moment to moment. I IntroductionWe are involved in a project focusing on a high-stakes English test and one critical aspect of its validity, that is, its values and social consequences, referred to in the assessment field as consequential validity. In this article, we report on a longitudinal study on how the test was discursively constructed in the talk of students who took it over the last term of school.As background to our study, we begin by summarizing related previous studies and by describing the examination and the English test in it. After this, we spell out the starting points of our study, it being very different from previous ones in some respects. We then move on to explain the research design of our study, more

This introductory article serves two purposes. Firstly, it provides the background for the set of 11 articles that appear in the special issue of this journal and summarizes the articles along a number of dimensions. All the articles address aspects of multilingualism as subjectively experienced and they all make use of visual methodologies. Secondly, it subjects the articles to two meta-analyses. The first one compares and contrasts the studies by site: production, image and audiencing. The second one, in contrast, classifies the studies by the research strategy chosen by the researchers: looking, seeing or designing. The article concludes by pointing to future directions in research on multilingualism as lived, and suggests a visual turn.

In this paper we investigate multilingualism as a phenomenon which pervades different social and cultural levels but is manifested in the everyday life of multilingual individuals. As an illustration, we examine multilingualism from the perspective of a young Sami boy, Ante, and explore how different languages function as a complex Á but at times problematic Á set of resources for him. To capture the complexity and fluidity in the relationships between various languages in his life, we base our theorising on such concepts as 'linguistic resources', 'heteroglossia' and 'languaging'. With the help of multimodal data we examine how the linguistic resources present in Ante's daily life may provide affordances and set constraints for him. In addition, we study how Ante himself, as a multilingual child, takes issue with the languages in his life. We argue that the multilingualism present in Ante's environment embodies many opportunities and resources, but is also a source of ambiguity. The ways in which Ante moves between languages, makes choices between them and positions himself in relation to them seem to suggest that while languages do position Ante in various ways, he can also choose which language to use and when as part of his active languaging work.

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Considering the central role of identity in understanding teacher development, this paper addresses the ways in which pre-service language teachers envision their identities as future professionals. The paper is based on a qualitative study of 61 students' visualisations of their future work during their first semester in language teacher education. The visualisations and accompanying descriptive texts were analysed using the principles of qualitative content analysis. In the analysis, two different ways of perceiving future professions, and thereby identities as professionals, were identified. The first was a nature-oriented perspective that focused on desired characteristics of the profession, its activities, environment and social relationships, and the other a status-oriented perspective that focused on the societal status of the profession. The natureoriented perspective was further divided into three subcategories that illustrated different career options. The implications of the different ideal professional selves for teacher education are also highlighted.

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