Working Papers in Urban Language and Literacies

This Coalition for Language Education is committed to developing the communicative capacities of individuals, groups and institutions and the range of languages and linguistic styles – the ‘linguistic repertoires’ – that they can draw on.  We are involved in different fields and sectors of language education, working as individuals, organisations and associations, but we are drawn together by the conviction that more can and should be done to acknowledge and develop the linguistic potential of people in the UK.  Shared language is vital to social life, and in the UK, English plays a key role.  But language diversity is also central, and it needs to be seen as a source of enrichment, not as a deficiency or threat.  Learning languages and knowing about culture and communication extends the relationships and situations that we can participate in.  When education broadens our ability to understand and communicate across social, cultural and linguistic differences, drawing flexibly and creatively on a range of media, it enhances well-being and strengthens democracy.

For the most part in the UK, language education is too narrow.  Change takes time, but those who seek it can gain strength from coalition.  Coalition facilitates the exchange of ideas and experiences of what works, of what’s challenging, how to overcome obstacles, and how to support cooperation across locations.  Individual initiatives can show that they are not isolated or eccentric, and that they are part of a much broader general development that provides inspiration and strength.  Coalition can help us see the bigger picture, and add weight to what we say in conversations with local and national policy makers.

Our Coalition comes together around six tenets and six broad tasks, and we are currently seeking signatures in support.

The amateur arts form an important part of the UK's cultural landscape, with a substantial number of people involved in 'over 60,000 participant-driven, self-governed amateur arts groups' (Milling et al, 2014, p.4). These voluntary, part-time groups often draw together participants with a wide range of different skill and ability levels, yet are frequently able to successfully consolidate this mixed ability membership into coherent productions such as shows and performances. How is this challenging feat achieved across the day-today running and rehearsing of these groups? Taking an amateur dance company, Richmond Ballet, as a case study, this paper adopts a multi-scalar approach. It first theorises Richmond Ballet as a Community of Practice (CoP) and then addresses what is often identified as a weakness in the CoP model, its overemphasis on harmonious relations. Drawing upon ethnographic participant observation, the paper identifies an episode of crossplay in which a member who should be rehearsing on the dance floor engages with two others sitting at the side. This has the potential to derail the rehearsal and disrupt the group's voluntary ethos, but the paper draws on multimodal Conversation Analysis (MMCA) to reveal the intricately coordinated actions with which these risks are circumvented. Moments like these are likely to occur right across the spectrum of the amateur arts, but the ways in which they are managed are often too subtle and fleeting for other social science methods to grasp. Overall, the paper presents that the combination of ethnography and MMCA as an important resource for advancing CoP research and appreciating social dynamics in the amateur arts.

This document reports on an informal consultation with 50+ people involved with different subfields of language education in the UK (EAL, ESOL, EAP, EFL, CLs, MFL, Early Years, mainstream English). They were asked what they thought the main problems were, whether there could be a case for a new cross-sectoral coalition, and what its unifying principles might be. A number of areas of concern emerged, together with potential actions. These centred on approaches to linguistic diversity, models of language, teacher education, assessment, and policy making. After elaborating on each of these areas, the document tries to synthesise it all in seven tasks for a new coalition: Identifying collective problems; reinvigorating models of language for education; engaging with linguistic stratification & diversity; probing traditional boundaries; energising language classrooms; taking action on policy; reviving language teachers and enriching teacher education. The text was produced as the prelude to a seminar on

Neste artigo, discuto como recursos linguísticos reconhecidos como “português” covariam com outros recursos materiais e produzem diferentes efeitos de mobilidade num mesmo quadro espaço-temporal. Em face desses efeitos, tais recursos linguísticos ocupam função metapragmática numa economia política de circulação e distribuição de recursos. Este artigo participa do debate sobre recursos, localizando-o em sua conexão como matéria valorada no agregado semiótico e a ordenação indexical metapragmaticamente modelada no contexto de ocorrência do recurso em covariação com recursos de ordens diversas. Para isso, analiso comparativamente as formas metapragmáticas em diferentes interações com duas participantes de uma etnografia longitudinal sobre migração estudantil realizada de 2014 a 2020. Na análise, foco nas condições materiais da circulação de duas participantes da pesquisa, que são interpretadas como dois pontos extremos de um continuum no conjunto etnográfico analisado. A análise aponta que as participantes regimentam metapragmáticas diferenciais de acordo com a covariação de recursos do “Português” com outros recursos materiais, mantendo uma reflexividade também sobre esses outros recursos e agindo em face ao acúmulo ou precariedade de tais recursos ao longo da sua experiência diante desta língua. A noção de recurso em estudos sobre repertórios em contexto de mobilidade apresenta um grande potencial para explicar as dinâmicas de acesso desigual para além de questões de conhecimento linguístico, pois pode evidenciar os efeitos de recursos materiais diversos na produção de hierarquias de falantes móveis do “português”.

Palavras-chave: migração; português; mobilidade; recursos.

In this paper, I discuss how linguistic resources recognized as “Portuguese” covary with other material resources and produce different mobility effects within the same spatio-temporal framework. Considering these effects, such linguistic resources occupy a metapragmatic function in a political economy of circulation and distribution of resources. This paper participates in the debate about resources, locating it in its connection as valued matter in the semiotic aggregate and the indexical ordering metapragmatically modeled in the context of the resource’s occurrence in covariation with resources of different orders. To this end, I comparatively analyze metapragmatic forms in different interactions with two participants in a longitudinal ethnography on student migration conducted from 2014 to 2020. In the analysis, I focus on the material conditions of the circulation of two participants, which are interpreted as two extreme points of a continuum in the analyzed ethnographic scenario. The analysis points out that the participants rule differential metapragmatics according to the covariation of “Portuguese” resources with other material resources, by maintaining a reflexivity also on these other resources and acting in the face of the accumulation or precariousness of such resources throughout their experience in front of this language. The notion of resource in studies on repertoires in the context of mobility has great potential to explain the dynamics of unequal access beyond issues of linguistic knowledge, because it can highlight the effects of different material resources in the production of hierarchies of mobile speakers of “Portuguese”.

Keywords: migration; Portuguese language; mobility; resources.

Building on sustained discussion among eleven people actively engaged in teaching English to adult speakers of other languages (ESOL), this paper asks what ‘participatory’ approaches to ESOL now look like in England.  First it sketches a lineage – from Freire through Auerbach, Action Aid and Reflect ESOL to English for Action (EfA), the non-profit organisation that provides our main but not exclusive vantage point.  Then it details four often interacting strands of activity in play in participatory ESOL (PE): language teaching, teacher training, community organising, and action research.  PE emerges from these as an approach that listens to students and engages them in dialogue, that reaches beyond traditional student-teacher roles to include critique and action on social conditions, and that maintains an explicit focus on language throughout while also questioning the hegemony of English itself.  But how does this work in practice?  What about “difficulties, dilemmas, frustration, strangeness, disagreement and criticism” (Duboc & Ferraz 2018:243)?  And what if participatory ESOL is harder to achieve in some places than others?  Recognising variation in the manner and extent to which PE gets enacted, the paper isolates two fundamental features that can also be found in other sectors of language education – antipathy to the top-down, one-way teaching that Freire calls ‘banking education’, and an openness to cultural diversity and broader social change.  It points to potential for cross-sectoral alliances, both to push for changes in national policy and to strengthen language teacher education more generally, and it also sketches a programme of Freirean ‘conscientization’ directed towards teachers in highly restrictive workplaces that could also be a worthwhile possibility for participatory ESOL.  Rather like an end-of-project report, the paper is intended as a comprehensive account of key issues emerging in our collaboration, from which sharper arguments and ideas can be formulated later, and it is accompanied by a series of podcasts in which team members reflect on some of the issues emerging.

What contribution can working papers (WPs) make to a more open academy, and where do they stand in current debates about Open Science?  They used to provide speedier publication and feedback as well as cost-free/low-cost access, but with the availability of digital repositories like PURE or ResearchGate, do WPs still have a role?  To answer these questions, this paper refers to Working Papers in Urban Language & Literacies (WPULL; www.wpull.org).  It argues that WPs can play a significant role community-building around shared interests, and within an overarching commitment to deliberative, dialogical reasoning, WPs can be more flexible in genre and audience than a journal, and more responsive to circumambient situations and events – key qualities if applied linguistics focuses on ‘real-world problems’ that require the attention of a variety of stakeholders.  Building on a principled understanding of knowledge-making as a situated cultural practice, WPs can be open and reflexive about their geo-historical grounding, provide a view of academic work ‘in the round’ rather than just in its highly styled end-products, and make a low-tech contribution to intellectual decolonisation.  Where a standardising universalist model of Open Access might see working papers as sloppy and elitist vehicles for self-promotion, the case of WPULL argues for the substantial contribution that WPs can make to a vigorous and more open economy of knowledge.

This paper explores the notion of Linguistic Citizenship, a term coined by Chris Stroud at the turn of the millennium in Southern Africa to draw attention to 'grassroots' engagements with language (specifically multilingualism) as a dynamic of transformation. Linguistic Citizenship is an attempt to work through a blueprint of language for navigating living the complexities of a diverse and difficult world in conviviality (and convivial contest) with different Others. It is a disruptive engagement with the 'coloniality of language' involving the expansion and retooling of available linguistic resources. This paper presents three vignettes that reflect three themes that have emerged as significant in the work on Linguistic Citizenship under the rubrics of 'love', 'hope' and 'care': (a) rethinking the dynamic role of language/multilingualism in the reconstruction of postcolonial citizenships; (b) exploring the strategic uses of acts of Linguistic Citizenship in the revitalisation and maintenance of languages; and (c) building empowering contexts for education. The paper concludes with a brief scoping of what Linguistic Citizenship could mean for how we think about multilingualism in our contemporary world.

This paper outlines a research agenda centred on the production of spaces of dialogue and solidarity between peripheral territories. The term 'transperipheries' summarises a proposal for research and engagement developed collectively by seven researchers situated in the field of applied linguistics. The transperipheries agenda offers a pathway for breaking with established paradigms that divorce knowledge production about inequality from the subjects and territories engaged in its contestation from marginalised positionalities. In other words, we argue for bridging the distance between production of knowledge about peripheries and production of knowledge from peripheries, while also projecting spaces of dialogue and reflection between regional, national and global peripheries. The paper provides examples of epistemic work undertaken by the contributing authors as a way of showing how research on themes such as literacies, translation, racialisation and violence, can be revisited through a transperipheral lens. We invite readers from all kinds of peripheries and epistemic fields to build on and debate this research agenda.

Este texto propõe uma agenda de pesquisa sobre a produção de espaços de diálogo e solidariedade entre territórios periféricos. O termo ‘transperiferias’ traduz esta proposta de pesquisa e engajamento, elaborada coletivamente por sete pesquisadores/as situados/as no campo aplicado dos estudos da linguagem. A agenda das transperiferias oferece caminhos de ruptura com paradigmas que situam, de um lado, a produção de conhecimento sobre desigualdade e, de outro lado, os sujeitos e territórios que se engajam com a contestação dessa desigualdade a partir de posicionalidades marginais. Propõe-se, em outras palavras, uma aproximação entre a produção de saber “sobre” as periferias com a produção de conhecimento “das” periferias, ao mesmo tempo em que se projetam espaços de diálogo e reflexão “entre” periferias, regionais, nacionais e globais. O texto justapõe os tipos de engajamento e produção epistêmica de cada um/a dos/as pesquisadores/as, de modo a apontar para formas em que objetos de investigação, como letramentos, tradução, processos de racialização, violência etc., podem ser revisitados numa visão transperiférica. Convidamos sujeitos de diferentes periferias, bem como campos epistêmicos diversos, a ampliarem e tensionarem essa agenda de investigação.

This paper outlines a research agenda centred on the production of spaces of dialogue and solidarity between peripheral territories. The term ‘transperipheries’ summarises a proposal for research and engagement developed collectively by seven researchers situated in the field of applied linguistics. The transperipheries agenda offers a pathway for breaking with  established paradigms that divorce knowledge production about inequality from the subjects and territories engaged in its contestation from marginalised positionalities.  In other words, we argue for bridging the distance between production of knowledge about peripheries and production of knowledge from peripheries, while also projecting spaces of dialogue and reflection  between regional, national and global peripheries.  The paper provides examples of epistemic work undertaken by the contributing authors as a way of showing how research on themes such as literacies, translation, racialisation, and violence, can be revisited through a transperipheral lens.  We invite readers from all kinds of peripheries and epistemic fields to build on and debate this research agenda.

Can we really talk about *advanced* linguistic ethnography, and if so, what does it look like?  This paper offers quite a personal view of training programmes, PhDs, interdisciplinary relationships and academic career structures, covering courses like ‘Security, Ethnography & Discourse’, the epistemic sensibilities emerging in doctoral projects, the challenges for talk of ‘cutting edge breakthroughs’ in an interdisciplinary programme like linguistic ethnography, as well as the need to consider organisational constraints and opportunities, career-stage included, in efforts to move forward, both individually and collectively.

Media in general, and, in particular new media that are the product of digital technology, have not been a key domain of study in language policy and language planning. However, such media have increasingly become central sites of everyday linguistic practice and, by extension, policy. The investigation of language policy in digital media contexts contributes an important dimension to a comprehensive understanding of language policy and language planning as it focuses on nontraditional actors and non-traditional domains, which are generally free from established regulatory frameworks and national borders. Following a review of developments and studies to date, the paper concludes by speculating about where we are going in terms of digital technology, namely Web 4.0 which will see increasing automation through Artificial Intelligence, augmented reality and big data, and its implications for language policy. By reviewing how we have got to this point, I would like to pose the following questions: Is language policy ready and able to cope with an era in which language management is increasingly automated? What have we learned from earlier eras of language policy? Are our tools, concepts and methods fit for purpose and, if not, how might they need to evolve? And, how can / why should language policy be relevant in this technologized present and future?

This paper describes national policy for teaching English to adult migrants in England, and asks what ESOL teaching can do to overcome the fragmentation and hostility it finds, opening up to multilingualism instead. After a historical sketch of recent national ESOL policy, it turns to theories of citizenship, comparing citizenship as legal status with definitions that emphasise agency, and it looks at how these can be materialised in ESOL classrooms. It then considers the theoretical and empirical backing provided by sociolinguistic research, along with practical steps that universities can take to support an idea of linguistic citizenship that prioritises participation and voice.

In this paper I examine how multilingual spaces emerge within institutions across a number of sectors in the city. Drawing on their repertoires of linguistic resources actors (institutional agents and clients) assume agency to change practice and forge ideological justifications for new practice routines. Repertoires of linguistic resources comprise not just linguistic forms but also experiences and encounters in the multilingual city and the ability to find creative solutions drawing on multimodal resources. The ideological stances that accompany practice and reflection on multilingual spaces represent notions of pluralism and transnational identities. They embrace symbols of belonging to a variety of places and practice communities. In this way the city as an organic network of de-centralised institutions accommodates practices and ideologies that differ from the prevailing one-language nation-state position. It develops its own city language narrative. That narrative is supported and in part shaped by a university-based research project-Multilingual Manchesterwhich introduced a new epistemology into the study of urban multilingualism, many of its elements echoing the decoloniality agenda. There is, however, a risk that the activist agenda might become unsustainable as the neoliberal corporate university environment adopts 'diversity' as a commodity and defaults to a stance that is shaped by colonial legacies.

By focusing predominantly on discourse production and language management, language policy research de-emphasizes the material sources of inequality. The paper argues that language management, often restricted by ritualistic and symbolic gestures, cannot rectify historically formed relations of power, and it calls for critical examination of both sociolinguistic and socioeconomic consequences of language reforms.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss how emotions are significant in the context of an increasingly globalized world, especially in relation to the phenomenon of migration. Research in many academic disciplines during the last two decades highlights the importance of emotions to international relations, human mobility and the new emotional networks or borders that emerge from globalization and transnationalization processes. As this research shows, the role of language is significant, yet it is inseparable from the importance of spaces, bodies, and practices. Theorizing emotions as discursive-social-embodied processes enables an analysis of the different modalitiesincluding languagethrough which emotions are constituted and circulated in globalizing and transnational contexts, and highlights their subversive and transformative possibilities. It is suggested that future research needs to delve deeper into exploring the complexities and interplay of these modalities and the impact they have on the affective economies of societies at the macro-and micro-levels. It is important to acknowledge how different people and groups bring different emotional histories and embodied experiences with them, and that these histories and embodiments are embedded in a wider context of sociopolitical forces, needs and interests that involve complex, multiple actors across national borders.

Public discourse in a range of countries has been reported to be characterised by Othering practices that support dichotomies between a national and monolingual "in-group" and multilingual speakers who are constructed as secondary citizens and often associated with special needs, even if they have grown up locally. Less in the focus of analysis is the fact that such patterns are also found in our field, and a closer look at linguistic publications reveals that certain patterns of Othering might be typical or even systemic, rather than exceptional. Exclusionary practices are evident in terminology that continues to reflect a narrow, monolingual view of (ethnic and) linguistic in-groups. Monolingual practices still tend to be canonised as defining the normal, unmarked case, and bilinguals are then assessed against this yardstick in terms of deviations. As a result, they can be erased as native speakers, have their language use analysed through a lens of potential errors and problems, or be excluded from the speaker pool for linguistic analysis. We present examples from different linguistic subdisciplines and discuss languageideological implications and possible effects on research perspectives and agendas.

Although generally accepted that there can be no ethnographic research without collaboration, there is a growing interest in a more explicit and deliberate collaborative ethnographic research (Lassiter 2005; Campbell & Lassiter 2015). Building on my own experience of Freirean participatory and critical pedagogy and participatory classroom research (Bryers et al 2013; Cooke et al, 2019), I take an explicitly participatory approach to my project: an investigation of the day-today language practices in and around the east London borough of Tower Hamlets.
In education settings, participatory approaches make central the reciprocal learning that takes place in classrooms and problematise the teacher-student hierarchy via dialogue and transformative action (Freire 1970). In similar ways, in a research setting, participatory ethnography disrupts the roles of 'researcher' and 'researched' to move toward a new role of 'co-researcher', where knowledge and ideas are more explicitly co-constructed.
In this project, participants take on active co-researcher roles, exploring and reflecting on their own sociolinguistic experiences. I reflect on this approach towards research by describing and discussing the two main methods of data collection: walking interviews, where participants decide their own research sites, lead the interviews and gather other participants along the way; and 'visual diagramming' where participants carry out their own sociolinguistic observations and represent their ideas in a visual format.

Discourse analysts have worked on digital data for decades now, initially treating digital data as human texts, then increasingly as human, multimodal interaction mediated through digital media, also attending to digital platforms and their affordances in ethnographically inspired discourse analyses. But going further in this direction, I argue that to take digital data seriously, discourse analysts also need to account for algorithmic agency in digital discourse, going beyond the mere affordances of these media in meaning-making processes. Digital data scholars, platform scholars, critical algorithm studies and many other disciplines invite us to come to grips with how digital media program sociality and thus make discourse at least partially technical. Accepting this invitation, this paper outlines four different forms of algorithmic entextualisation and three manifestations of algorithmic power, concluding with five ways of advancing the analysis of algorithmic power in digital discourse.

This study of a postcolonial site engages with epistemic justice from the perspective of language. It understands epistemic justice as relating to issues of knowledge, understanding, and participation in communicative practices. It suggests that monoglossic language-in-education policies, often colonial in origin, constitute a form of epistemic injustice by denying learners the opportunity to learn in a familiar language and removing their ability to make epistemic contributions, a capacity central to human value. It further suggests that translanguaging in formal school settings is for the most part geared towards a monolingual outcome, that is, towards accessing knowledge in an official language. This unidirectional impetus means that translanguaging remains an affirmative rather than transformative strategy, leaving underlying hierarchies of value and relations of knowing unchanged. In contrast, this study presents linguistic ethnographic data from a three-year pilot project in Cape Town where primary school learners could choose their medium of instruction to Grade 6 and use all languages in subject classrooms. It analyses how a Grade 6 learner used laminated, multilingual, affective and epistemic stances to construct others as knowers, negotiate epistemic authority, and promote solidarity. It proposes that, in so doing, she constructed new decolonial relations of knowing and being. It further proposes that the shift from a monolingual to a multilingual episteme, which substantially improved educational performance overall, also enabled the emergence of politically fragile yet institutionally robust social, epistemic, and moral orders from below, orders that could lay the basis for greater epistemic justice.

As “an attempt at a comprehensive political stance on language” (Stroud 2008:45), ‘Linguistic Citizenship’ (LC) deserves to be a mainstream concept in socio- and applied linguistics. But the evaluation of its potential needs to be context-sensitive, reckoning with the specifics of the environments where it is taken up.  In this chapter, we review LC’s relevance to the UK, focusing on the ways in which we have been working with it at the Hub for Education & Language Diversity (www.kcl.ac.uk/held).  HELD aligns with LC’s commitment to democratic participation, to voice, to the heterogeneity of linguistic resources, and to the political value of linguistic understanding, as well as with LC’s emphasis on ground-level citizenship acts and practices, and its profound embedding in socio- and applied linguistics.  But education and everyday life are also influenced by state-centred definitions of citizenship, bringing state policy and provision into focus at HELD, as well as the role that universities can play promoting LC.  The chapter also discusses two concepts we have been working with that complement Linguistic Citizenship: the ‘Total Linguistic Fact’, an encapsulation of sociolinguistic thought that can be turned to the practical planning of classroom activity, bringing out its ideological dynamics; and the ‘diasporic local’, which creates new possibilities for multi-directional communication and learning by dispensing with ‘non-citizen outsider’ as a hegemonic classification in language teaching and language teacher education.

This case study digs into the practices and beliefs about multilingualism of two Belgian teachers of French as a foreign language (Français Langue Étrangère, FLE), and it approaches this from three angles. First, the classroom is studied as a pool of linguistic resources, with the help of concepts such as repertoire and translanguaging; then, the analysis turns to the FLE space and its related 'regime of language'; finally, the linguistic experience of one of the FLE teachers is presented with a language portrait. These elements lead into a discussion of the strengths and limitations of both the theoretical frameworks (i.e. translanguaging, repertoire) and the teachers' beliefs and practices, drawing in the notion of 'sociolinguistic citizenship'. Overall, alongside other research (e.g. Cooke et al., 2018, 2019), this study points to the need for sociolinguistics to support teachers like these, who are developing inclusive models of linguistic citizenship intuitively, working against the grain of national and elitist European discourse.

This paper is about the relationship between citizenship and ESOL for adult migrant students. When citizenship was inserted into the ESOL curriculum following the Nationality, Asylum & Immigration Act 2002, some teachers welcomed it, others were anxious, and some resisted it as ideological and intrusive. Over time, policy attention has moved on to other curriculum themes, such as the teaching of British Values and employability. Yet ESOL remains a crucial site for the citizenship education of migrant adults in the UK. But what does this mean? To answer this question, this paper draws on our recently-edited collection, Brokering Britain, Educating Citizens. Linking citizenship and socio-linguistic theory with three case studies of migrant language learning taken from our book, the paper distinguishes between citizenship as top-down, prescribed and state-centric (and concerned with promoting national identity, national language and national security) and citizenship as a participatory, dialogic and emergent practice. It shows the relevance of this second, bottom-up idea of citizenship to ESOL provision. In doing so, the paper draws attention to the pivotal role of ESOL teachers as 'brokers' of citizenship mediating between top-down, mandated ideas of citizenship and the ideas and experiences of ESOL students as they emerge in the classroom. It goes on to outline four key principles that we believe should inform ESOL provision and the practice of its teachers if ESOL is to be consistent with the democratic citizenship its practitioners mostly advocate.

Jan Blommaert was an extraordinary person and a brilliant academic – warm, hospitable, humorous and hugely energising. In addition, he was profoundly committed to a programme of sociolinguistics that he often traced to Dell Hymes.  A number of this programme’s core elements were spelled out in the introduction to Hymes’ 1969 collection, Reinventing Anthropology, a “book… for people for whom ‘the way things are’ is not reason enough for the ways things are, who find fundamental questions pertinent and in need of personal answer” (1969:7).  My account of the value and vitality that Jan brought to sociolinguistics borrows from the title of Hymes’ introduction, “The use of anthropology: Critical, political, personal” and, as well as citing some of Jan’s own words, it draws on the reflections of others as evidence of the vigour, clarity and coherence with which he articulated a practice and purpose for work on language in society.

This short paper takes a sociolinguistic look at participatory pedagogy and argues that participatory pedagogy offers a fuller and more creative exploration of language than many other types of language teaching.  The central sociolinguistic idea is that linguistic form, interactional activity and ideology are all very closely tied together in communication, and that if you want to a properly rounded account of language, you need to reckon with the inter-connectedness of these three elements in what sociolinguists call ‘the total linguistic fact’.  Certainly, there have been lots of attempts to treat these elements separately both in linguistics and language education, focusing on linguistic form on its own, or leaving out ideology when language form and language use are taken together.  But this kind of selective vision certainly doesn’t stop ideology being a huge influence in every classroom, and instead, there’s a good case for reflecting on different ideological possibilities, potentially exploring different formats and configurations (which is what teachers routinely do with linguistic form and interactional activity).  Participatory pedagogy is a good example of this kind of active engagement with the ineradicably ideological dimension of communication, and far from being wayward, it is actually grounded in a more open and honest recognition of the total linguistic fact than a lot of other language pedagogies.

Over c.50 years, language education has been a significant site of ideological struggle over England's position in the world, whether in processes of decolonisation or globalisation, and the last two decades have seen intensifications in the assertion of English nationalism in central government. Our discussion of this history starts with a glance back at the development of multicultural language education in the 1970s and 1980s, highlighting four factors that contributed to this: activist pressure from minority communities; educational philosophies valuing the 'whole child'; educational decision-making embedded in local democratic structures; and a legislative strategy that combined the promotion of good community relations with restrictive immigration policies. This started to change in the 1990s, with the curriculum centralisation and the side-lining of local authorities initiated by the Thatcher government. Efforts to regulate substantially increased population movement also made borders and immigration status more of a priority than multiculturalism, and after 2001, security, social cohesion and the suspicion of Muslims started to dominate public discourse. These developments have can be traced in six areas of language education policy: standard English, English as an additional language for school students, English for adult speakers of other languages, modern languages, and community languages in mainstream and supplementary schools. In the final section, we reflect on the role of universities in the processes we describe