Chapter 5 builds your understanding of the thousands of students who are adding English to their language repertoire and offers many excellent teaching strategies. The chapter does not attempt to provide detailed professional development in EAL/D pedagogy but is more concerned with how harnessing English language learning can connect with wellbeing and achievement. The two overarching goals for this chapter are that you develop empathy with English learners’ perspectives, and that you acquire a wide variety of strategies to support English learning, across the curriculum, with high expectations for all students. Chapters 3 and 4 have stressed that it is important for students to maintain and develop the languages they bring to school, as well as to add English proficiency. Strong English proficiency enables participation in all areas of Australian society and economy, and participation in global communities where English is a shared language.

Chapter 10 takes you to your own professional future. The handy ‘Twelve Principles’ summary enables teachers and school leaders to orient their teaching towards harnessing linguistic diversity for their own professional and personal development, and for the wellbeing and academic achievement of students.

Chapter 1 encourages readers to reflect on their own experience of linguistic diversity, and their perception of the multilingual nature of rural, remote and urban Australia today. The chapter establishes its relevance to readers’ development in the first AITSL Teaching Standards (‘Know your students and how they learn’).

Chapter 2 engages you with both international and local research evidence of the clear connections between teacher support of multilingualism in students, and student wellbeing and school achievement. Understanding the implications of these research findings is core to the argument of the book, and to your engagement with and commitment to developing pedagogy for linguistically diverse classrooms.

This chapter focuses on literacy and linguistic diversity in India as the second most populous nation in the world. India is home to different types of writing systems and linguistic situations; however, literacy acquisition in the region is often defined using alphasyllabic akshara orthographies and multilingualism. Both these characteristics have significant implications for the theory, practice, and policy of literacy acquisition in India. In India, only 44 percent of students in government schools can read Grade-2-level texts in Grade 5 fluently. Within India, there is, however, wide variation, with literacy rates being significantly higher in private schools and in urban areas. We begin with a brief description of the historical and contemporary state of multilingual education policy and practice in India. In addition, the psycholinguistic underpinnings of learning to read in akshara orthographies and of biliteracy acquisition with at least one akshara orthography will be uncovered. Finally, future directions related to literacy development research and practice among diverse populations in India are discussed.

This chapter focuses on literacy and linguistic diversity in Australia. Literacy educators in Australian schools face challenges, including cultural and linguistic diversity among students, communities, and workplaces; variable support from governments in fiscally unstable times; and continual professional and public debates over curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment, and over the role of research and policy. But Australian educators also encounter distinctive, and some at least distinctively inflected historical, cultural, and economic features that have a bearing on their literacy efforts. To background our discussion of those efforts, the chapter opens with a selection of Australia’s demographic and administrative characteristics. This is followed by a discussion of the challenges and opportunities presented to research, practice, and policy by educational engagements with Aboriginal and migrant communities. Implications for the close relationship of literacy to community languages, to pedagogy, to policy formation and maintenance, and to research are also highlighted. Finally, international perspectives on Australian literacy education are presented, including those based on national and international assessment programs.

This chapter makes the case that Willa Cather and Abraham Cahan present immigrant characters in their fiction as potentially powerful figures by virtue of their bi- and multilingualism. These, and other writers such as John Dos Passos, Mike Gold, and Anzia Yezierska, show that those who master English as well as the languages into which they are born are socially, geographically, artistically, and intellectually mobile figures. Such characters, in their codeswitching, exemplify a kind of linguistic mobility that is at the heart of ethnic American modernist literature, and that demonstrates pluralistic values that were often socially and politically absent in the period of their creation. These modernist writers look to language and the interpolation of foreign languages, whether through translational mimesis, codeswitching, or selective reproduction, as empowering. In doing so, they demonstrate the rich potential of an ethnic American literary modernism. The immigrant’s voice, with all its inflections and idiosyncrasies, is presented as the accent of the future.

Monolingualism, bilingualism, and multilingualism represent concepts of individual upbringing and social organization of extreme impact and scope. All in all, the book attempted to guide the reader from a multilingualism-as-problem to a multilingualism-as-resource perspective. However, it also argued that multilingualism cannot work wonders and should not be considered a goal in itself. Running a multilingual society can produce many beneficial effects, but maintaining several languages at the same time also incurs costs that a society must be prepared to burden and share. It is crucial to know which boundary conditions tip the balance from burden to benefit, or vice versa. The book further argues for a continuum from monolingualism to multilingualism based on the dimensions of homogeneity and heterogeneity. It further introduces a novel typology of English in multilingual contexts, distinguishing between English in heritage contexts, English in bilingual heritage contexts, English in contexts of balanced bilingualism, English in indigenous multilingual contexts, English in postcolonial multilingual contexts, and English as a lingua franca in modern multilingual immigrant contexts.

Nathalie Auger, who grew up between and within languages, pleads for a plural and inclusive "hospitable" pedagogy, a pedagogy of and for diversity. Through the encounter and study of social representations of plurilingualism and linguistic diversity within urban multilingualism, she has examined social and linguistic fractures that generate verbal and symbolic violence, multilingual walls and stigmatization. These experiences naturally led her to address these fractures in her work through a linguistically sensitive pedagogy.

Are the dimensions of morphological diversity dependent on the cognitive pathways for processing, storage, and learning of word structure, and if so, how? Conversely, are languages that differ in their morphological structure processed and learned in different ways? This volume examines the relationship between linguistic cognition and the morphological diversity found in the world’s languages. As the idea that domain-general cognitive processes and morphological typology are inextricably linked has moved into the mainstream of linguistics, the field has diversified conceptually and methodologically. This introduction to the volume offers an overview of conceptual issues that underpin the volume’s papers and some of the methodological trends they reflect. It thus serves as a roadmap for the papers that follow.

The purpose of the chapter is: first, to provide an overview of the socio-linguistic landscape of the late antique Mediterranean as a historical setting in which early Christian writers lived, worked, and developed their ideas on languages and religious identities; the linguistic and social practices they observed and experienced everyday set up an important context, even though their theoretical speculations may not directly reflect realities on the ground. Second, to briefly account for Christian encounters with foreign cultures and languages as the religion took off and to inquire into how the socio-linguistic situation in the ancient Mediterranean influenced the development of Christianity in its nascent stage and how Christianity in turn affected linguistic processes in the region. The spread of Christianity among various peoples and ethnic groups within and without the gradually disintegrating Roman empire was concurrent with complex formative processes within Christianity itself and took place amidst Trinitarian and Christological debates. The survey problematizes the role languages and linguistic distinctions played in these controversies and indicates several loci of potential tensions to be discussed further in the book (the alleged links between Punic speakers and Donatists, Germanic speakers and Arians, Syriac speakers and followers of non-Chalcedonian doctrines).

This chapter examines heritage languages in Japan and Korea, the two East Asian countries historically considered linguistically and culturally homogeneous. In consideration of the variation in conceptualizations of and approaches to heritage language, the current chapter adopts an inclusive understanding of the term “heritage language” and categorizes heritage language speakers as individuals with heritage connections and motivations, rather than limiting the designation to individuals who have a good command of the heritage language and are in regular contact with its speakers in familial and community contexts. The chapter then lays out the linguistic diversity and the patterns of language maintenance, shift, and revitalization in Japan and Korea. The chapter discusses ethnic Chinese immigrants and their settlement patterns in relation to language shift, and recent waves of immigrants and their languages in light of societal accommodations in Korea as an immigrant-receiving country. Implications of the findings and directions for future research and practice are suggested.

Chapter 4 describes the fundamental research questions, empirical approaches and findings of language typology, a linguistic subdiscipline studying language from a cross-linguistic perspective. For analysing the languages of the world comparatively in search for structural commonalities (universals) and differences (scope of variation), methodological issues include considerations on the basis of comparison, sampling, and data sources. Typological findings are finally interpreted in terms of their motivations. The chapter ends with recommendations for further reading and a list of short exercises and ideas for small research projects.

This chapter outlines the complex historical processes that have shaped the present-day distribution of communities and ethnic groups across mainland Southeast Asia. The chapter first introduces some general information about the region, the languages, and some conceptual preliminaries for the book. A historical account then traces developments since prehistory through the emergence of early states in the first millennium of the Common Era, followed by the rise of new states associated with migrations from the north, into the modern colonial and postcolonial era. The chapter finishes with a discussion of the area’s politically dominant languages and a survey of the state of the art in linguistic research.