Multilingual Matters

This book explores alternative approaches to foreign language education in a context which is traditionally dominated by English-only approaches, and widely viewed as highly monolingual. It examines the grassroots classroom practices of teachers and their assistants involved in plurilingual education in the first longitudinal research of its type in the Japanese context. These practices are grounded in depictions of the practitioners’ personal and professional trajectories through explorations of their visual linguistic autobiographies. The holistic ethnography thus deepens understanding of plurilingualism in a hitherto underexplored context, and should be of interest to students and researchers of language teaching, teacher training, language policy, sociolinguistics and plurilingualism.

Builds on Norton’s work on investment to contest pervasive deficit perspectives that portray refugees as helpless victims or a public burden. Set in Türkiye, the country with the largest number of refugees in the world, this book expands the limited literature on higher education for refugees, particularly the gap in research in displacement settings. It examines the experiences of Syrian young adult refugees studying in Turkish universities, highlighting the intersections between linguistic, social, economic and structural challenges and the students’ resourceful approaches to overcoming these barriers. Their stories depict both unique and common experiences of accessing higher education during displacement and underscore the importance of quality language instruction, interpersonal relationships, and supportive faculty members. It contests pervasive deficit perspectives that portray refugees as helpless victims or a public burden and calls into question assumptions about integration in the nation of asylum being the ideal long-term outcome for refugees. The book also lays a methodological foundation for future decolonizing work in applied linguistics, centering the experiences of refugees and disrupting Northern dominance of forced migration scholarship.

A practical research-backed guide for parents raising children across multiple cultures in a world shaped by digital media.Every day, more families span continents, cultures and languages to raise cross-cultural children. Yet even as media brings us closer than ever, travel restrictions and censorship remind us how fragile these connections can be. Offering real-life stories, strategies and activities, this book explores how diverse families use media, both old and new, to bridge cultures and support their parenting journey. We meet kids who balance frequent moves with staying in touch with a distant homeland. We encounter parents navigating multiple languages under one roof. We hear from relatives determined to keep in touch despite the challenges involved. We learn that media remains a vital tool that helps all these cross-cultural families stay connected – through shared recipes that conjure memories, video calls that span time-zones, popular culture that reflects a family''s blended identity, and more. This is a book for anyone preparing for or living the realities of cross-cultural parenting.

This book seeks to understand how language teachers regulate and use their emotions to best serve themselves and their students. It furthers research in the field by providing an in-depth theoretical discussion of emotion regulation alongside a comprehensive exploration in Japan. The study at the heart of the book focuses on three important features: the strategies language teachers employ to regulate their emotions, the motives that they regulate in aid of, and the various contextual factors shaping their strategy and motive decision-making. The findings reveal numerous ways that language teacher emotion regulation is empowered and constrained by identities, notions of good practice, critical experiences and external pressures. The book provides theoretical models of emotion regulation alongside recommendations for researchers, trainers and teachers who are interested in understanding more about the emotional dimension of the language classroom.