Towards a plurilingual habitus: engendering interlinguality in urban spaces

This article focuses on the potential of the multilingual city to create spaces in which monolingual hegemonies may be challenged, inclusive, intercultural values may be nurtured, and plurilingualism may be valorised. Following a contextualisation of linguistic diversity in theories of globalisation and superdiversity, discourses of deficit and power are addressed, arguing that the problematisation of multilingualism and pathologisation of plurilingualism reflect a monolingual habitus. Bringing about a shift towards a plurilingual habitus requires a Deep Approach, as it involves a critical revaluing of deep-seated dispositions. It suggests that the city offers spaces, which can engender interlinguality, a construct that includes interculturality, criticality and a commitment to creative and flexible use of other languages in shared, pluralistic spaces. It then proposes critical, participatory and ethnographic research in three multidimensional spaces: the urban school and a potential interlingual curriculum; networks, lobbying for inclusive policy and organising celebratory events in public spaces; and grass roots-level local spaces, some created by linguistic communities to exercise agency and maintain their languages and cultures, and some emerging as linguistically hybrid spaces for convivial encounter

Policy enactment, context and performativity: ontological politics and researching Australian National Partnership policies

Recently, critical policy scholars have used the concepts of enactment, context and performativity as an analytic toolkit to illuminate the complex processes of the policy cycle, in particular, the ways in which a multitude of official education reform policies are taken up, challenged and/or resisted by actors in local, situation-specific practices. This set of theoretical tools are usually deployed to analyse interview data collected from a single school or cluster of schools to draw findings or conclusions about the complex processes of policy enactment. We aim to build on this critical policy studies work by, firstly, highlighting key aspects of these theoretical/methodological constructs, secondly, exploring the performative role of research in the materiality of specific contexts and, thirdly, theorising education policy research in terms of ontological politics. We ground this work in a recent collaborative enquiry research project undertaken in Queensland, Australia. This research project emerged in the Australian policy context of National Partnership Agreement policies which were designed to reform public or government-funded schools servicing low socio-economic communities, in order to improve student learning outcomes, specifically in literacy and numeracy as measured by high-stakes national testing. © 2014 © 2014 Taylor & Francis

Children's views and strategies for making friends in linguistically diverse English medium instruction settings

Despite one in four children in Australia entering preschool using English as an additional language or dialect (EAL/D) (Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), 2017), Australian classrooms are predominantly monolingual English-speaking. This mismatch in languages may affect how participation and relationships are established. This chapter explores children’s strategies for making friends in settings characterised by linguistic diversity but where the medium of instruction is English. Child friendly interviews (video recorded) with 72 preschool-aged children, 3-4 years, were conducted in at a preschool in inner-city centre. Children were asked to talk and draw a picture about making friends when there are language differences. Children’s responses not only revealed their competencies in using non-verbal strategies to communicate with each other but also reflected inclusive attitudes. The importance of using a variety of languages as media of instruction, such as including songs and words representative of the minority languages of the classroom, and having conversations about language difference are highlighted