Abstract In this article, we study how Sound Picturebooks constitute a multimodal narrative that enables students to develop their literacy, not only in terms of basic reading and writing skills, but also as a multidimensional interaction with other forms of representation such as images, sounds and actions. In line with the aims of the Pedagogy of Multiliteracies (New London Group 1996), we select and analyze fifteen Sound Picturebooks whose features allows us to implement the Learning by Design tenets and the four pedagogical components of the Knowledge Processes Framework: experiencing, conceptualizing, analyzing and applying. The goal is to foster basic multimodal literacies – literary, linguistic, visual and musical – and provide learners with the opportunity to construct meaning as a dynamic process of transformation and creative inquiry. Specifically, we explore the auditory features that these Sound Picturebooks contain and the extent to which the themes conveyed in the stories can be connected with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals for the further discussion of social concerns. Our analyzes show that such multimodal narratives integrate crucial features to cultivate and broaden students’ multiliteracies in the classroom.

Abstract The contribution seeks to apply the principles of J. L. Austin’s speech-act theories to the study of local business segregation in the Jim Crow South. In particular, it borrows the notions of illocutionary and perlocutionary force when examining the seemingly bland and prosaic statements that are often used to normalise segregation within the business of commercial entertainment. For purposes of expanding the complexity of typical Manichaean (i.e., Black vs White) ethnic studies, this analysis was developed within the context of tri-racial segregation as applied to rural moviegoing within Robeson County, North Carolina during the first half of the twentieth century. Notably, the development of Robeson’s historical cinema-exhibition spaces eventually resulted in a highly unusual venue – i.e., the three-entrance theatre – whose physical architecture reflected tensions between local ethnic demographics and desired social hierarchies. Yet even in the face of these unusual physical constructs, this study contends that seemingly everyday objective/descriptive and non-demonising language remained an essential component in enforcing segregation.

Abstract Medical researchers are ethically and legally required to inform participants and get written permission before enrolling them into a human research project (Informed Consent). Accordingly, information and consent represent a complex procedure, and the participant concerned “must receive comprehensible oral and written information” (Swiss legislation: Human Research Act (HRA) Art. 16). A triangle of stakeholders is involved in the procedure: ethics committees that review and approve research projects and Informed Consent (IC) documents, medical researchers who produce the documents and discuss enrolment with patients, and patients who have to be informed comprehensibly. From a linguistic point of view, the question arises as to which perceptions of comprehensibility form the basis of the IC process and how shared language can be established considering the complex relationship between these stakeholders. This contribution presents findings from two perspectives (ethics committees and researchers) while considering the needs of all three stakeholders. Firstly, the conceptualisation of comprehensibility among three ethic committees is presented, and steps toward harmonisation are outlined. Secondly, limitations of how researchers conduct oral IC information are analysed, and the measures that were implemented to improve patient information are discussed. A transdisciplinary approach is key in establishing these solutions because they do not stem from linguistic analysis alone but have been developed in close collaboration with members of ethics committees and medical researchers. Thus, the project shows how the expertise of applied linguistics in cooperation with practitioners can deliver an important impact in both academic analysis and optimisation of professional procedures.

Abstract Drawn from a larger project on reported speech in parliamentary interaction (Reber, forthcoming), this paper studies visuo-material performances of so-called “literalized” (Rumsey, 1992) quoting, i.e., verbatim reproductions of original utterances. Taking an interactional-linguistic perspective, I analyze how participants accomplish ‘literalized’ reported speech through vocal, verbal, and visual cues, recruiting their material documents. The data are culled from video recordings of Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs), a parliamentary session where the Prime Minister (PM) takes questions from the Leader of the Opposition (LO) and Members of Parliament (MPs) at the British House of Commons. I place my focus on cases where speakers use original documents as visual aids, a classic rhetoric device of persuasion, and show how paper documents are constituted, celebrated, and rhetorically enacted as (seemingly) original documents in embodied, situated ways. As a conclusion, I argue that the display of original documents allows the speaker to make claims of having not only evidential but also experiential access to their sources, a practice that underpins their evidential authority.

Abstract There has been a long history of early Irish language learning in Ireland as a result of Government policy to promote greater use of Irish. All children learn Irish in school from age 4–18 years. The majority learn Irish as a subject, typically for 30–40 minutes per day, and the levels of competence achieved are mostly disappointing. Approximately 6.7% of primary school children learn Irish in an immersion context, however, and these children achieve a high standard of communicative competence. In this paper we examine the impact of Government policy on the transfer of linguistic competence from the classroom to wider society in the context of a minority language that is becoming increasingly marginalised. We draw on data from three studies to explore the relationship between Irish-medium school attendance and the desire and opportunity to use Irish outside of school while attending school, and later as an adult. The first study also investigated students’ attitudes towards learning and using Irish. All three studies examined parents use of Irish in the home and the influence that the language spoken in their home during childhood and the language of their schooling had on their current language practices. Overall, Irish-medium schools are very successful in educating proficient speakers of Irish who have very positive attitudes towards Irish. These positive attitudes and proficiency do not necessarily transfer to use of Irish in the home. While attendance at an Irish-medium school as a child has a positive effect on later use of Irish, when former students become parents, the effect is quite small. The perennial challenge persists in transferring competence in a minority language acquired in school to the home and community.

Abstract This paper explores headteachers’ and teachers’ perceptions of foreign languages(FL) and cultural learning in three primary schools in areas of disadvantage in England. Drawing upon a new theoretical frame for primary languages, Critical Cosmopolitanism (Delanty, 2006; Beck and Sznaider, 2006) and The Grammar of Culture (Holliday, 2018), we argue that the grand narrative of a target language inhabited by a target culture is outdated and approaches to cultural learning in primary schools could lead the way. There is substantial evidence that most learners find language lessons fun, particularly activities such as songs, stories and intercultural events (Driscoll et al., 2004, 2014; Cable et al. 2010). The discourse on conditions for inclusive practice is less commonplace and little is known about FL learning in areas of high deprivation (Nikolov & Mihaljević Djigunović, 2011). Teachers and headteachers in this study were committed to cultural learning and staff adopted creative approaches to teaching. The findings, however, also indicate that traditional notions of a mono or homogenised national culture with associated stereotypes linger in teachers’ framing of FL. There exists a need for a more personalised approach to cultural learning drawing upon children’s own cultural experiences. Data was analysed thematically following strict ethical guidelines and all names were anonymised to ensure confidentiality.

In this response I will focus on themes in the special issue that resonate particularly with my experience of collaborative AL research with people involved in various professions, mainly in healthcare. The themes concern perspectivity and transcendence, and more specifically what it could mean to transcend perspectives.

Abstract This paper examines the ways in which the ethnic minority group the Tujia in Enshi, China, engages with heritage tourism, as a complex project of designing authenticity. Authenticity is taken as part of the chronotopic phenomena of identity making: the complex interplay of multiple, nonrandom timespace frames of discourses and semiotic performances which condition and offer new potentials to the meanings of authenticity. We show ethnographically the chronotopic nature of the local production of “authentic” heritage for tourism in Enshi. This leads to a historical grounding of the Tujia in China’s nation-building and state politics of multiculturalism, which uncovers the anxiety of inauthenticity experienced by the Tujia in Enshi with their own minority status and cultural heritage, as well as their strategic chronotopic incorporation of both “authentic” and “inauthentic” aspects of local identity practices into a new order of authenticity afforded by heritage tourism as a form of new economy. Through such practices, we argue, the Tujia in Enshi chronotopically shift away from the periphery towards a new and reconfigured center of meaning-making, although this reappropriation of authenticity still must be understood within the “cunning of recognition” scheme, i.e. within the constraints of late modernity.

Abstract The challenge of contemporary South Africa is that of building a (post)nation of postracial equity in a fragmented world of a globalized ethical, economic and ecological meltdown. In this paper, we seek to explore the idea of multilingualism as a technology in the conceptualization of alternative, competing futures. We suggest that multilingualism is understood in terms of how encounters across difference are mediated and structured linguistically offer a space for interrupting colonial relationships. Furthermore, we argue that multilingualism should be approached as a site where colonial power dynamics of languages and speakers are troubled, and where the potential for new empowering linguistic mediations of the mutualities of our common humanity with different others are worked out.

Drawing on 95 text histories from a longitudinal project on writing for publication in 4 national contexts, this article analyses the language ideologies enacted in referees’ and editors’ comments on articles submitted for publication in English-medium ‘international’ journals. It considers how orientations to ‘English’, ‘language’ and ‘language work’ are enacted in practices of reviewer uptake and the consequences of such practices for knowledge production, evaluation and circulation. In exploring evaluation practices, the article problematizes three foundational categories in applied linguistics: (1) The treating of English as a single stable semiotic resource over which the ‘native’ speaker is attributed a privileged evaluative position; (2) The overriding transparency approach to language and communication; (3) The focus on production as distinct from uptake.