In the US/Mexico borderlands, local language varieties face frequent discrimination and delegitimization, described by Anzaldúa (1987) as 'linguistic terrorism.' The present study uses the three-level positioning framework (Bamberg & Georgakopoulou, 2008) to analyze how young adults in the Rio Grande Valley (RGV) in south Texas construct borderland identities by positioning themselves with respect to 'linguistic terrorism' in sociolinguistic interviews. In their narratives, young adults enact, ascribe, and accept but also reject, subvert, and reconstitute language ideologies, including national identities, raciolinguistic ideologies, and standard language ideologies. An understanding of these multiple and contradictory borderland positionalities holds important implications for critical language awareness as a way for language educators to counter 'linguistic terrorism' in both physical and metaphorical borderlands.

Peer review is now a commonplace practice in process-oriented writing instruction. A crucial aspect of peer review is assessing another classmate’s work, which encompasses the act of disagreement. Given its prevalence in the classroom, it is necessary to analyze how L2 learners mitigate disagreement in the context of peer review with other L2 learners and native speakers. The present paper presents a qualitative analysis of action research from an introductory English writing class at the university level including native speakers of English and international students from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds. The conversation-based peer review sessions were analyzed for various mitigation strategies including token agreement, hedging, prefacing positive remarks and requests for clarification. The analysis shows that L2 learners and native speakers of English use similar mitigation strategies, and it demonstrates the coconstruction of meaning in peer review interactions.

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Over the past 35 years, language immersion programs have been steadily increasing in number throughout the U.S. The popularity of these diverse, linguistically complex educational programs has led to a rather extensive body of research on language immersion and dual language contexts. Research, however, has thus far focused primarily on the quantification of language use (the amount of target language versus first language use) in different settings and with different interlocutors. Very few studies have probed the interesting and significant sociolinguistic question of what students 'do' with languages in the classroom. The present study fills this research gap by investigating the communicative functions of student language use in full and partial Spanish immersion classrooms among kindergarten, first and second graders. Twelve hours of recorded spontaneous classroom speech were analyzed for communicative functions. The results show that contrary to the existing research, students in this classroom use Spanish for a wide variety of communicative functions. These findings suggest that previous depictions of the diglossic classroom speech community may be influenced by the concept of figured worlds (Holland et. al., 1998), whereby our imagined typical immersion classroom differs from the actual reality of student language use.