Search

This study explores community language school teachers’ access to classroom resources and school facilities within a framework of educational equity. Community language schools are significant lang...

Community language schools have grown to become significant educational language providers worldwide. Schools operate as global grassroot initiatives (Liddicoat and Taylor-Leech [2014]. “Mi...

In the past decade, there has been increased scholarly interest in the purpose and functions of community language schools, also known as heritage, supplementary or complementary schools. In particular, previous studies have focused on schools operating in minority communities deriving from Asian and Eastern-European countries, showing that notions of identity and belonging to a ‘mother country’ are key purposes of these schools. However, community language schools in Australia operate in minority communities with diverse cultural, historical, social and migration histories and findings from other studies may not be generalisable to other community language schools. To broaden our understanding of the aims and purpose of these schools and to allow for meaningful comparisons, this study focuses on parents reasons for enrolling their children at a Swedish community language school in Australia, often described as a ‘high-shift’, ‘non-visible’ minority community. Seven parents were interviewed. Findi...

Community language schools are unique educational language providers developed as grassroots initiatives by immigrant communities worldwide. However, little is known about community language school teachers’ work or their sense of identity. The present study uses narrative inquiry to explore the experiences and challenges of one Swedish community language school teacher in Australia. Key findings show that community language school teachers’ sense of teacher identity is situated and negotiated in the intersection of people, power relations, and language ideologies which can lead to a lack of job satisfaction, a sense of failure, and marginalisation in wider educational contexts.

Community language schools are complementary schools set up and run by minority communities in Australia. They aim to assist in intergenerational language and identity transmission, but previous research has indicated that these schools position their students in monolingual ways that contradicts how bilingual speakers use their language in contemporary society. As a result, it has been proposed to teach these students through bilingual practices. Drawing on findings from research into the learning sciences, this study aims to explore how students construct their participation in a monolingual learning environment when taught online. Two students aged 14–16 taught in a blended mode (every second lesson online and every second lesson in a classroom) video recorded themselves during their online lessons. Data were analysed using multimodal interaction analysis. The results show how student agency increased outside of the learning environment where students repositioned themselves as peripheral learners and ...