Research in the field of sociolinguistics has taken a relational and artistic turn, as scholars have developed creative means of showing research findings. Drawing on relational ethics, we explore the capacity of art to reach beyond the indexical. Both in research practice and in the representation of research outcomes, the arts offer imaginative domains which are rich seams of potential. We suggest sociolinguistic ethnographic poetry is equipped with the means to evoke the rhythm and rhyme - the music - of social life. Poetry is able to open up sociolinguistics and imagine new ways of working and new ways of saying. We engage with others in this Dialogue to signal the need for innovative, engaged responses to fundamentally ethical questions of relations with, and representation of, others.

Translanguaging involves communication through available semiotic resources, including embodied action. In this paper, we report research in which we observed communication in a volleyball team. We also show how we found conventional academic writing to have limited scope in the representation of embodied communicative practice and came to ethnographic drama as a viable alternative. In the theatre, the enaction of everyday communication is laid out before the audience, inviting reflection, and critical evaluation. We discuss theatre techniques that steer the audience away from emotional involvement and towards intellectual judgement. We propose that techniques introduced in Bertolt Brecht's [1978. Brecht on Theatre. London: Bloomsbury Academic ] theatre of estrangement have the potential to expand the range and scope of ethnographic analysis, offering a creative means of critical reflection on translanguaging as embodied communication.

This book argues for an approach to linguistic ethnography which departs from the perspective of the academic researcher, to amplify instead the voices of participants, researchers and collaborators. It reflects on ways of reporting research which add multiple perspectives and represent ambiguity more meaningfully than traditional academic prose.

This ethnographic drama script is adapted from observations conducted in a large city centre library in the UK. It is a creative curation of field notes, transcripts, audio recordings, video recordings, conversations, and observations. The ethnographic drama tells a story of political tension in everyday life at a time of austerity.

In this paper, we discuss the affordances of an approach to the representation, interpretation, and democratization of sociolinguistic research, which utilizes the tools and methods of the theatre. Taking as an example a team ethnographic research project conducted across four cities in the UK, we discuss the process of creating drama from material observed as social practice. Drawing on observations in a welfare advice centre in a Chinese community centre, and a city-based volleyball team, we propose that theatre techniques enable audiences and academic researchers to see communicative encounters in a new light. We propose that ethnographic drama offers three opportunities in particular: (i) it has the potential to make available outcomes of research beyond the academy; (ii) it has the potential to discover understandings of ethnographic material which remain latent in accounts that do not involve performance; and (iii) it has the capacity to democratize voice, privileging the voices of research participants rather than those of academic researchers. Ethnographic drama thus offers considerable potential in the representation, interpretation, and democratization of sociolinguistic research.

What does it mean to young people to be multilingual? What do multilingual speakers' linguistic resources mean to them? Are they happy to discard their languages, and assimilate to English, or are there other issues at stake? Do communities set out to ensure that their languages are maintained and passed on to the next generation, and if so, how, and why? What if speakers appropriate and make use of linguistic resources not typically associated with their ‘ethnic' or ‘heritage' group? Is there consensus about the role and value of particular sets of linguistic resources, or is this contested, and negotiated? How do negotiations about linguistic resources and identities play out in institutional contexts, and what language practices are used in these negotiations? Adrian Blackledge and Angela Creese address these questions, taking a critical perspective to examine issues such as nationalism, heritage, culture, identity negotiation, ideology and power. They offer responses from their detailed investigations of the language practices of multilingual young people and their teaching experiences in complementary schools in four cities in England. As a comprehensive examination of the issues surrounding multilingualism, it will be essential reading for advanced students and researchers of sociolinguistics and multilingualism. This book brings together leading academics and practitioners working in the area of language, gender, sexuality and education, consolidating recent developments and moving the field forward in a contemporary context. This unique and timely volume captures current themes, debates, theories and methods in the field, and will be of interest to scholars and practitioners working around the world in the areas of Applied Linguistics, Teaching English as a Foreign Language, Education, Sociology and Discourse Studies. The chapters in this volume outline and discuss examples of teacher educators in diverse global contexts who have provided successful self-initiated innovations for their teacher learners. The collection suggests that a way forward for second language teacher preparation programs is through 'reflective practice as innovation'. The cultural diversity of the Asia-Pacific region is reflected in a multitude of linguistic ecologies of languages of lesser power, i.e., of indigenous and immigrant languages whose speakers lack collective linguistic power, especially in education. This volume looks at a representative sampling of such communities. Some receive strong government support, while others receive none. For some indigenous languages, the same government schools that once tried to stamp out indigenous languages are now the vehicles of language revival. As the various chapters in this book show, some parents strongly support the use of languages other than the national language in education, while others are actively against it, and perhaps a majority have ambivalent feelings. The overall meta-theme that emerges from the collection is the need to view the teaching and learning of these languages in relation to the different needs of the speakers within a sociolinguistics of mobility. An anthology of articles on ethnic bilingualism and bilingual education from a sociolinguistic perspective. It covers theoretical paradigms (primarily structural-functionalism and group conflict theory and the problem formulations in BE typical of the paradigms), practical research methodology and a number of exemplificatory case studies. This text provides an introduction to the field of sociolinguistics for second and foreign language teachers. This book provides an introduction to the field of sociolinguistics for second and foreign language teachers. Chapters cover the basic areas of sociolinguistics, including regional and social variations in dialects, language and gender, World English, and intercultural communication. Each chapter has been specially written for this collection by an individual who has done extensive research on the topic explored. This is the first introductory text to address explicitly the pedagogical implications of current theory and research in sociolinguistics. The book will also be of interest to any teachers with students from linguistically diverse backgrounds. This volume develops a theoretical and critical foundation for understanding "maladministration"—the phenomena of harmful administrative and organisational behaviours in educational systems. Chapter authors provide theoretical and practice-based perspectives across international contexts regarding common destructive practices that occur in educational organisations, such as negligence and mistreatment of people, professional dishonesty, fraud and embezzlement, abuse of power, and corrupt organisational cultures. International Perspectives on Maladministration in Education shines a light on this complex topic by examining various practices at individual, group, organisational, and system levels; the contexts and influences that give rise to them; and potential remedies to ensure more accountable, just, and safe institutions. It is clearly illogical to search for one good, universal solution for multilingual education when educational contexts differ so widely due to demographic and social factors. The situation is further complicated by the motivations of learners and teachers, and by attitudes towards multilingualism and ‘otherness’. The studies in this volume seek to investigate not only whether certain solutions and practices are ‘good’, but also when and for whom they make sense. The book covers a wide range of Western multilingual contexts, and uncovers common themes and practices, shared aims and preoccupations, and often similar solutions, within seemingly diverse contexts. In addition to chapters based on empirical data, this book offers theoretical contributions in the shape of a discussion of the appropriateness of L1-Ln terminology when discussing complex multilingual realities, and looks at how the age factor works in classroom settings. Sociolinguistic Perspectives Communication Strategies Parent perceptions Representations, Constructions and Negotiations A Functional Linguistics Perspective Linguistic Perspectives on Language and Education Sociolinguistic Perspectives on Bilingual Education Sociocultural and educational perspectives Education in Languages of Lesser Power

This paper reports an element of a team linguistic ethnography which investigated the ways people communicate with each other in the changing, dynamic environments of superdiverse cities in the UK. The particular example examined here is that of a ‘translation zone’ between an advice worker and her Chinese clients in a community centre with a remit to support Chinese people in the city. In the interaction the advice worker, herself a migrant from China, translates relevant aspects of the complex, bureaucratic welfare benefits system, deploying interlingual, intralingual, and intersemiotic translation. More than this, however, the advice worker engages in recontextualisation, co-constructing and re-shaping the client’s narrative so that it meets the criteria of the government welfare benefits office. Recontextualisation is a consistent feature of the discourse practice of the advice worker as she seeks to support her clients. We propose that it may well be a salient feature of interactional encounters as people seek help and advocacy to negotiate complex bureaucratic systems.

Drawing on data from a four-year linguistic ethnography in a large city library, this chapter considers encounters which support language learning when a range of different proficiencies across a variety of languages are in use. It describes the pedagogic skills of a library staff member as she strategically performs a communicative competence which embraces semiotic resources not typical of the professional genre. Words and phrases from different languages become mobile resources for her to create convivial moments in situ in what are otherwise mundane encounters about library membership and book loans. The chapter describes this pedagogic approach as translanguaging because less attention is paid to language boundaries, correctness in structure and form and more to creativity and communication. In this translanguaging environment linguistic, difference is seen as a resource rather than a problem. The chapter argues that urban superdiversity (Vertovec, 2007) provides the backdrop for these translanguaging practices in which language lessons create convivial moments between strangers.

In this book research in process and research findings are represented in a play script which brings vividly to life both ethnographic research methods and communication in the world of sport. This highly original book brings innovation and imagination to the representation of language in social life.

This highly original book brings compelling narratives of migration and social diversity vividly to life. At once a play script and an outcome of ethnographic research, this book is a rich resource for the interpretation and representation of life in the multilingual city.

Service encounters are often fleeting interactions between strangers, which are beset with trip wires and obstacles. The potential for instability in such encounters is often countered by ritual interaction - small ceremonies in which civility is freely given, and transgression is accounted for and forgiven. Service encounters are not conducted through speech alone, but through embodied communication, in which interactants do not only speak, but point, smile, shrug, nod, gesture, grimace, and so on. In this paper, we consider the deployment of embodied communication, including but not limited to speech, as supportive and remedial interaction in a service encounter between a team of city centre butchers and a customer. The example is from extensive field work conducted in a four-year ethnographic research project across four cities in the UK. The analysis finds that in seeking to understand how people communicate in encounters with strangers, we must pay close attention not only to speech, but also to the ritual deployment of the body as a resource for communication.

Stereotypes are chronotopic (Bakhtin, 1994) in the sense that they make good use of character types in time and space to utter identifiable speech forms and make evident other semiotic displays. This paper argues for sociolinguistics to expand its interpretation of the chronotope to encompass the relationship between "character" and "author" in identity texts. It suggests that conflating author and character in identity scholarship, as is the case in much sociolinguistic research, risks losing an opportunity to understand how people author characters in their narratives to project sets of values and beliefs. Using linguistic ethnography, we report on two migrant women and their interactions among colleagues to illustrate their authoring of two characters, namely the peasant and the cosmopolitan. We show how these specific women mobilize these characters in narrative production to refute harmful traditions and ethnolinguistic stereotypes in favour of cosmopolitan identities which draw on broader geographical and social scales associated with the city.

This article explores the information desk of a city library as a site for language learning. Using a linguistic ethnographic approach, the interactions between a customer experience and information assistant and the many library users who approach her information desk were analysed. Findings are that, in addition to providing information about library resources, information desks are sites at which bits and pieces of different languages are taught and learned. Such language teaching and learning episodes created interactions of inclusion and welcome that went far beyond purely transactional information. Rather, language-related episodes created moments of human contact and engagement, which were upheld through the translanguaging practices of interactants, the disposition and workplace competence of library staff, and the spatial ecology of the information desk. Furthermore, the article contributes to ongoing theoretical debates about translanguaging by noting that normativity and pressure toward uniformity are as much a part of languaging processes as creativity and flexibility. Our definition of translanguaging recognises the opposing pull of centrifugal and centripetal forces. The article ends by asking what schools, and language education, might learn from public libraries in creating arenas that maintain communitarianism, diversity of expression, and the development of civic skills.

This book breaks new ground in its representation of the voices of people in a superdiverse city. Poetic and compelling, it places the reader at the heart of the market, surrounded by the voices of people from all over the world. Based on four years of ethnographic research, it is a book that reimagines the conventions of ethnographic writing.