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In this paper we propose that posthuman and decolonizing perspectives on difference might provide a foundation for English as an additional language (EAL) teacher education programs. We briefly examine current outcomes of schooling for EAL students and current teacher education in Canada, showing the necessity and urgency of developing practices for equity. We then discuss posthuman perspectives on difference and their intersections with decolonizing scholarship. Finally, we speculate that EAL teacher education that employs posthuman and decolonizing views might aid us in reconceptualising language education, de-centre Whiteness, 'native speakerism' and the white gaze around which concepts of difference and diversity have been assembled.

The Douglas Fir Group (2016) argued that applied linguistics needed new interdisciplinary perspectives, and I suggest here that the concepts provided by new materialism might aid in gaining such perspectives. New materialism foregrounds the material nature of humans, discourses, machines, other objects, other species, and the natural environment, as well as constant change, non-binary thinking, and the porosity of boundaries; it also asks for the posing of new problems and new concepts to 'bring forth a world distinct from what we already are' (Colebrook and Weinstein 2017: 4). Refusing the central binaries and hierarchies of Cartesian thinking, new materialism's relational ontology stresses becoming; people, discourses, practices, and things are continually in relation and becoming different from what they were before. New materialist conceptions of knowledge/knowing and language/languaging are also relational, processual, and entangled. I review recent new materialist educational research and present two descriptions of events in my own research to show what pedagogical and research-oriented questions might be stimulated from this perspective.

Discusses an ethnographic study that followed cohorts of English-as-Second-Language learners enrolled in mainstream Canadian classrooms in kindergarten through Grade 2. Examines classroom practices that appear to offer participants access to the linguistic resources of their community and those in which participants appear to have limited access to these resources. (Author/VWL)

In this article, we explain how recent research on multilingualism, multilingual education, and multimodality informs our thinking about the use of "ScribJab," a multilingual iPad application and website ("ScribJab.com"), which enables users to compose, illustrate, and narrate stories in two languages. Drawing on excerpts from ethnographic observations in two schools, we recount how students and teachers took up "ScribJab" and illustrate how the tool's design was linked with and contradicted teachers' and schools' stated and enacted language policies, ideas about assessment, and understandings of multimodality. We conclude by arguing that the ecology of the classrooms was materially altered by "ScribJab" and further changes are required to make multilingual pedagogies, multimodal composition, and their assessment more commonplace in schools. We propose that future work on multilingual and multimodal education may need to consider more than the human aspects of classroom life.

The promise of "21st century learning" is that digital technologies will transform traditional learning and mobilize skills deemed necessary in an emerging digital culture. In two case studies of video making, one in a Grade 4 classroom, and one in an adult literacy setting, the authors develop the concept of "production pedagogies" as complex multiliteracies embedded in video production oriented to meaningful social ends. Drawing upon concepts of translation in Actor Network Theory (ANT) and the "workaround," the authors trace how in spite of the imaginary of "21st Century Literacy," policy regimes privileged networks oriented to "minimal proficiency" print literacy. They theorize that the workarounds in which practitioners engaged illuminate three nodes or sites of action to strengthen production pedagogy networks: how learners are defined or problematized in literacy projects, how people get access to powerful digital literacy tools for learning, and how time-space regimes of traditional schooling are reconfigured.

Many observers have argued that minority language speakers often have difficulty with school-based literacy and that the poorer school achievement of such learners occurs at least partly as a result of these difficulties. At the same time, many have argued for a recognition of the multiple literacies required for citizens in a 21st century world. In this study the researchers examined a specific case in which English language learners (ELLs) made short videos about sustainability and social justice, to determine the diverse literacy practices such activities entailed. The researchers found that children produced storyboards and scripts, and videos with titles, and engaged in several other literacy activities, discussing what "made sense" in sequencing in a documentary story, what sustainability and social justice meant, how to report on information they had gathered, and so on. They also examined how new materiality theories might assist us in analyzing how ELLs engage in digital literacy activities. These theories encourage us to think about how human beings interact with other kinds of materials to accomplish perhaps novel tasks. With respect to language learning, such a view might challenge our conceptions of language and literacy learning. For new materiality theorists, language and literacy cannot be an "out-there" kind of "thing" that learners put "inside" themselves. Rather, languages and literacies and people and their activities and other materials accompany one another, and are entangled in sociomaterial assemblages that rub up against one another in complex and as yet unpredictable ways.

In this paper, we present excerpts from ethnographic data collected when a diverse classroom of children, some of whom were multilingual and others monolingual in English, used iPads to make videos. We discuss the practices, social relations, objects and material conditions that emerged as the children engaged in this production, with special attention to one child participating in the process. Drawing on New Literacy Studies, theories of the material and the construct "sociomaterial assemblage," and another construct, "production pedagogies," we analyzed the particular interactions this child engaged in while videomaking. These theoretical lenses helped us identify the challenges she faced and some of her strengths that might have been obscured from view during classroom negotiation of textual language, but were revealed when she interacted with digital technologies and multimodal texts. Video production allowed her to position herself and be positioned as knowledgeable, creative and as a legitimate peer with something to contribute.

In this review article on identity, language learning, and social change, we argue that contemporary poststructuralist theories of language, identity, and power offer new perspectives on language learning and teaching, and have been of considerable interest in our field. We first review poststructuralist theories of language, subjectivity, and positioning and explain sociocultural theories of language learning. We then discuss constructs of "INVESTMENT" and "IMAGINED COMMUNITIES/IMAGINED IDENTITIES" (Norton Peirce 1995; Norton 1997, 2000, 2001), showing how these have been used by diverse identity researchers. Illustrative examples of studies that investigate how identity categories like race, gender, and sexuality interact with language learning are discussed. Common qualitative research methods used in studies of identity and language learning are presented, and we review the research on identity and language teaching in different regions of the world. We examine how digital technologies may be affecting language learners' identities, and how learner resistance impacts language learning. Recent critiques of research on identity and language learning are explored, and we consider directions for research in an era of increasing globalization. We anticipate that the identities and investments of language learners, as well as their teachers, will continue to generate exciting and innovative research in the future.

In this article, Elizabeth Marshall and Kelleen Toohey use critical discourse analysis to examine educators' efforts to incorporate funds of knowledge from the communities and families of Punjabi Sikh students in a Canadian elementary school. Using MP3 players, students first recorded and then translated their grandparents' stories of life in India into picture books to serve as cultural resources in their school community. In retelling their grandparents' stories, students drew on a multiplicity of ancestral, globalized, and Western discourses in their textual and pictorial illustrations. The authors examine what happens when the funds of knowledge that students bring to school contradict normative, Western understandings of what is appropriate for children and how school might appropriately respond to varying community perceptions of good and evil. (Contains 3 notes and 3 figures.)

We describe a collaborative project in which university researchers, teachers and Grade 4-5 English language learners (ELLs) investigated the sociohistorical contexts and practices in which the ELLs participate, through a "community scan". Many observers have argued that schools and teachers have such minimal knowledge of the outside-school lives of their multilingual and multicultural students that they are unable to build upon the "funds of knowledge" that students and other members of their communities have. In particular, a large body of recent literature argues that school "literacy" education should be linked to literacies that children develop in their homes and communities. We present here a study centred on a public school located in a Canadian Punjabi-Sikh community. For our scan we collected census and other demographic representations of the community, as well as media reports and academic literature concerned with Punjabi-Sikh immigration. In addition, our scan included interviews with teachers, principals, parents and community leaders. Students' investigations and representations of the community and of out-of-school multiliteracies were also collected. The authors argue that such information is crucial in the development of pedagogy that values and promotes the reworking of the practices, images, texts and symbols that children already use. (Contains 6 figures and 3 notes.)

Data from ESL students' records in Vancouver are examined in the light of the BC Ministry of Education's claim that ESL high school students are more successful than students whose first language is English. We argue that the academic achievement of well-to-do students whose parents are skilled workers or entrepreneurs may mask the completion rates of students who entered BC through the family and refugee classes. The latter students, like their counterparts throughout Canada, are disappearing through the cracks in the education system. We maintain that it is time for provincial ministries, school boards, postsecondary institutions, and other stakeholders to work together to improve the current situation, which prevents many immigrant youths from achieving their educational aspirations.

This article explores definitions of reading comprehension, research on how reading comprehension is assessed, and issues in assessing the reading comprehension of English language learners (ELLs). By way of illustration, I present aspects of the literacy practices of an intermediate-grade ELL in a suburban school of the Lower Mainland of British Columbia. This learner, Aman, is evaluated as being "not yet within expectations" on a reading-comprehension test given by the BC Ministry of Education. The article examines Aman's writing, showing that she has appropriated some important aspects of written language, and argues that her writing and reading comprehension must be supported so that she can achieve as fully as possible the benefits of her education. This case is representative of many ELLs' trajectories in English literacy learning in BC schools and illustrates some of the human faces behind ELL achievement patterns.

In this paper, we explore the intersection of practice, identity, resources and literacy central to the New Literacy Studies and recent second language research informed by sociocultural theories of learning and language. Drawing on the construct figured worlds of literacy that describe how representations of literacy practices invoked in relation to certain people frame their social position and the construction of their identities, we discuss literacy practices and teacher discourse documented in our classroom research. We present data excerpts that illustrate how a multilingual child is variously constructed as "literate child" in the figured worlds of elementary school French Immersion classrooms. In particular, we consider how her literacy practices are shaped and her identities mediated in different ways socially, materially and linguistically. We argue that the mediation of her identities in classroom literacy activities is tied to teacher expectations of her future educational progress. Finally, we suggest that partnerships between researchers, educational practitioners and policy makers aimed at documenting classroom literacy practices may highlight how interpretations of multilingual children's identities can serve to fix or change their social relations and educational paths.

Much research on reading and writing in schools continues to focus on individual cognitive skills. In contrast, investigations of literacy-learning in out-of-school settings have often taken a socio-cultural perspective, situating reading and writing in social relations and cultural institutions. The last 20 years have seen a proliferation of studies documenting the ways in which printed texts are taken up in a wide variety of settings from after-school clubs and community-based adult literacy programmes to workplaces, the Internet, and "everyday life". Increasingly, there have been calls for sociocultural literacy researchers to begin directing their attention to mainstream educational contexts. In this paper, we join in and seek to contribute to such calls by drawing out some of the complexities and caveats that also need to be kept in mind. After briefly reviewing what it means to define literacy and learning in relation to socio-cultural context, we explore some recent arguments for conceptual and methodological refinements. We then turn our attention to schools and to what a socio-cultural definition of literacy has to offer in terms of addressing diversity and educational inequity, and we draw out several issues that require closer consideration.

Examines classroom activities engaged in by more and less experienced Punjabi-Sikh Grade 1 speakers of English and discusses how relationship between those speakers are implicated in their speech activities. Three occasions in this classroom are examined: A common, teacher-directed interaction; an excerpt of children at play; and a playful interaction between an adult and a group of children. (VWL)

Comments on an article on the socialization process of Grade 1 English-as-a-Second-Language students in a Canadian public school. The author of that article responds to these comments. (Author/VWL)

Describes recent developments in heritage language education in British Columbia, Canada, discussing issues a heritage language advisory committee encountered in creating such policy, defining heritage language and the clientele for heritage language education, reviewing appropriate curricula, encouraging program development, and arranging financing. (nine references) (Author/CB)