Recent studies have demonstrated how teachers can draw on students' multilingual resources in teaching English writing, even in monolingually oriented policy settings. However, limited research has been conducted outside of countries where English is the majority language or in classes where few students share a language background. This article reports on a linguistic ethnography of English writing instruction in two introductory classes for newly arrived students in Norway (Grades 8–10, N = 22), where students and teachers negotiated the role of students' diverse language backgrounds and emerging Norwegian. Data reflect 3 months of participant observation, including classroom video recording, recording of students' computer screens, text collection, and creation of language portraits, followed by stimulated recall interviews. The teachers and students drew on multilingual resources in various ways during writing instruction, most extensively in receptive and oral uses. However, Norwegian assumed a privileged position among the language resources of the class while students sidelined their less formal or prestigious literacy resources. The study demonstrates teachers' and students' ability to reshape English writing instruction as a multilingual space but also concludes that multilingual literacy must be promoted as more than an instrumental resource in the service of English writing development.
Translation has recently been revived as an approach to language learning that builds on students’ linguistic repertoires, particularly in linguistically diverse classrooms. However, few studies have examined how students use translation as part of writing in an additional language. This article provides new insights based on the translation practices of 22 newly arrived students in Norway during English writing instruction. Using linguistic ethnographic methods, the study combines multiple data sources (screen recordings, classroom audio recordings, language portraits, student texts, interviews) that provide detailed insights into translation moves and participant perspectives. The findings highlight the linguistic and mediational translation strategies that structured students’ translation practices during English writing, but also reveal tensions in students’ orientations to translation. Despite these tensions, translation served as a key means of aligning students’ communicative resources to write in English as an additional language. A translingual orientation toward writing and translation facilitates the recognition of students’ translation practices as alignment of ecological affordances with an integrated repertoire of semiotic resources across languages, modalities, and media. We conclude that translation can develop students’ performative competence in ways that support their in‐school English writing but also prepare them to encounter text in new contexts.
Translanguaging has gained prominence as a way to understand multilingual practices and draw on these in additional language teaching, but questions remain regarding its application in various educational contexts. This study investigates the significance of translanguaging across instructional settings by comparing discourses of markedness in accelerated, mainstream, and sheltered classes taught by the same teacher, where both linguistically majoritized and minoritized students were learning English as an additional language. Data are drawn from four months of linguistic ethnographic fieldwork at a Norwegian upper secondary school and include field notes, video and screen recordings, texts, language portraits, and teacher and student interviews. I found that translanguaging was marked in two largely separate ways: (1) bilingual English-Norwegian practices were more frequently marked in accelerated and mainstream settings, in relation to students’ perceived English proficiency level; whereas (2) translanguaging drawing on minoritized languages was more consistently marked in all three settings as a deviation from majority linguistic practices, thus distinguishing majoritized (English-Norwegian) from minoritized translanguaging. Implications include the importance of analyzing translanguaging in relation to locally salient discourses and contextualizing pedagogical interventions in larger struggles for justice.
In the Nordic countries, policy debates about English often highlight the threat of domain loss for national languages, but the high status of English may also have a differential impact on people in Nordic societies. This article investigates a policy gap in Norwegian upper secondary education, whereby an advanced English subject requirement may hinder graduation for immigrant adolescents with little previous English instruction, despite English not being the medium of education in Norway. The aim of the study is to examine the impact of the upper secondary English requirement and of sheltered instruction as a local policy solution for such students. I use nexus analysis (Hult, 2015) to analyze ethnographic data from one upper secondary school that created an ad hoc sheltered English class. Data include field notes, classroom video and audio recordings, language portraits, and interviews with one school leader, one teacher, and six students. I draw on decolonial theory (e.g., García et al., 2021; Santos, 2007), notably Anglonormativity (McKinney, 2017), to trace discursive, interactional, and personal policy scales. I found that the sheltered class reflected discourses of integration and Anglonormativity, but nonetheless offered greater affordances for participation than a mainstream English class. Furthermore, comparing the emphasis on English remediation with students’ broader repertoires surfaced possibilities for reframing students as resourceful multilingual learners. I discuss policy options that might better address underlying issues of epistemic justice, compared to solutions limited to increasing students’ proficiency in languages of power like English.
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