Multilinguality, Multimodality, and Multicompetence: Codeswitching and Modeswitching by Minority...

Multilinguality, Multimodality, andMulticompetence: Codeswitching andModeswitching by Minority EthnicChildren in Complementary SchoolsLI WEIUniversity of London, Birkbeck CollegeDepartment of Applied Linguistics &Communication30 Russell Square, BloomsburyLondon WC1B 5DT, United KingdomEmail: [email protected]

This article examines the multilingual and multimodal practices of British Chinese children incomplementary school classes from a multicompetence perspective. Using classroom interac-tion data from a number of Chinese complementary schools in 3 different cities in England,the article argues that the multicompetence perspective enables a holistic look at codeswitch-ing and modeswitching by multilingual children of minority ethnic background and helps tohighlight creativity and criticality—2 important and closely related concepts that have hithertobeen underexplored in multilingualism research.

THIS ARTICLE EXAMINES THE MULTILIN-GUAL practices of minority ethnic children of im-migrant parentage in the complementary schoolcontext. By multilingual practices, I mean be-haviours that involve the use of different linguis-tic systems. These include choice of specific lan-guages, switching between languages, mixing andtemporary borrowing of elements from languagesthat are not part of the speaker’s normal lin-guistic repertoire, imitating other speakers’ ac-cents or style, as well as switching among speech,writing, and signing. Some of these practiceshave been termed “crossing” (Rampton, 1995)or “translanguaging” (Creese & Blackledge, 2010;Garcıa, 2009; Williams, 1996). I have used theterm “translanguaging” in a rather different senseelsewhere (Li Wei, 2011). To avoid confusion, Iwill use the traditional term “codeswitching” as aconvenient umbrella term in the present articleto cover various kinds of multilingual practices,

The Modern Language Journal, 95, iii, (2011)DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-4781.2011.01209.x0026-7902/11/1–15 $1.50/0C©2011 The Modern Language Journal

although I would prefer to use the term “translan-guaging” in principle. Codeswitching also seemsa convenient term for switching between speak-ing and writing modes, which is the case in thepresent article. Such switching is part of the mul-timodality communication in which all of us areroutinely engaged, but it has received relativelylittle attention in codeswitching and multilingual-ism research generally.

Although codeswitching practices are commonfor the multilingual language users themselves,there is a widespread perception that such be-haviours are out of the ordinary, abnormal, ordeviant. Baetens Beardsmore (2003) talked aboutthe fears of bilingualism—parental (“What have Idone to my child?”), cultural (“Will bilingualismlead to cultural alienation?”), educational (“Doesbilingualism hinder academic progress?”), andpolitico-ideological (“Is bilingualism a threat tosociety and the nation-state?”). Many, if not all,of these fears are for the kind of multilingualcodeswitching practices I have described here.There is a pervasive belief in society, bilingualor monolingual alike, that languages are best tobe kept separate, discreet, and pure; mixing and

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switching between languages are seen as interfer-ence or trespassing, which would have a detrimen-tal effect on both individual language users andthe communities in which they live. This is partof the One Language Only (OLON) or One Lan-guage at a Time (OLAT) ideology that I have dis-cussed elsewhere (e.g., Li Wei & Wu, 2009).

In this article, I will approach multilingualpractices of young children of minority ethnicbackground from a multicompetence perspec-tive (e.g., Cook, 1991). As fearful and nega-tive attitudes toward codeswitching still exist andare particularly strong regarding minority ethnicchildren, some of whom may simultaneously besocially and educationally disadvantaged, a the-oretical perspective that emphasizes the positiveand competent aspects of the multilingual prac-tice is needed. The concept of multicompetenceaims to capture the knowledge of the multilinguallanguage user in a holistic way by accounting forall of the languages he or she knows, as well asknowledge of the norms for using the languagesin context and of how the different languagesmay interact in producing well-formed, contex-tually appropriate mixed-code utterances. I willargue that multilingual and multimodal practicesof the kind that I am studying in this article pro-vide good evidence of multicompetence, which,in turn, provides a good theoretical perspectiveon the practices of children of minority ethnicbackgrounds.

The multilingual language user group I am fo-cusing on in the present study is British Chinesechildren, who form one of the largest groups ofminority ethnic children of immigrant parentsin the United Kingdom. Despite the tremendousprogress in the British society in terms of socialattitudes toward minority ethnic communities inthe last 20 years, public perception of minorityethnic children, especially those who speak lan-guages other than English at home, is that ofproblems. Their multilinguality often seems to bea contributing factor; that is, the children’s ap-parent underachievement or the socioeconomicdisadvantage they are experiencing has been at-tributed to the fact that they do not speak Englishonly or all the time. Even those minority ethnicchildren who are judged to be successful at schoolare often perceived to be lacking in creativity andcriticality; they are seen as hardworking but pas-sive learners. I aim to demonstrate in this articlethat the multicompetence approach can help toreveal these children’s creativity and criticality asshown through their multilingual and multimodalpractices.

The specific context that I am studying is that ofcomplementary schools, a voluntary organisationby minority ethnic, usually immigrant, communi-ties in Britain for their children’s generations tolearn and use the ethnic languages. They are simi-lar to the heritage language schools in the UnitedStates and the community language schools inAustralia and elsewhere. A particular focus of thecomplementary schools is on the teaching of lit-eracy in the ethnic languages. I have discussedelsewhere the history and current state of comple-mentary schools in Britain (Li Wei, 2006). It hasbeen suggested that the complementary schoolsprovide a reassuring environment or “safe space”(Li Wei & Wu, 2009; Martin, Bhatt, Bhojani, &Creese, 2004, 2006) for multilingual practices andthe expression of multicompetence, a space that isgenerally lacking in other domains of the contem-porary British society. However, as we will see laterin the article, it is the minority ethnic childrenthemselves who create this “safe space” throughtheir multilingual practices. In other words, thecomplementary schools are not institutionally safespaces but are made safe interactionally by themultilingual language users (cf. Li Wei, 2011).

The structure of the article is as follows. I will be-gin with a discussion of the public discourse on mi-nority ethnic communities and their children inthe United Kingdom. I will then outline the com-plementary school context. The concept of multi-competence will be discussed with particular ref-erence to multilingual and multimodal practices.The main body of the article is devoted to an analy-sis of examples of codeswitching and modeswitch-ing by the multilingual British Chinese childrenin complementary classes. Theoretical and prac-tical implications of the study will be discussed inthe concluding section of the article.

PUBLIC DISCOURSE ON MINORITY ETHNICCOMMUNITIES AND THEIR CHILDREN INTHE UNITED KINGDOM

Even a cursory look at the public discourseon minority ethnic communities in the UnitedKingdom, as exemplified in newspapers andtelevision and radio programmes, reveals threecontradictory views—crisis, neglect, and celebra-tion. These views are often associated with dif-ferent groups of minority ethnic communitiesand their children. For example, the UK govern-ment publishes school pupils’ annual examina-tion results. Roughly 40% of all secondary schoolpupils achieve five good GCSE-level (General Cer-tificate of Secondary Education) qualifications,

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including English and maths, at the age of 16.However, whereas the Chinese and Indian pupilsconsistently outperform everyone else at 60% andover 50%, respectively, achieving five good GC-SEs, Pakistani and Bangladeshi youngsters usu-ally achieve around 30%. For the black pupils,the overall figure is around 26%, with those fromblack Caribbean backgrounds at just over 20%(see Smith, 2005, for a detailed analysis). Everyyear, when such figures are released, there is anoutcry in the media about the black and Asianchildren’s apparent underachievement. Some at-tack the government and the schools for lettingthe minority ethnic children down; others claimthat school underachievement of minority ethnicchildren is a result of the ideology of multicultur-alism. Some commentators link the poor schoolexam results with other social problems (e.g., gunand knife crimes, drugs, and theft). Yet, as far asthe Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities areconcerned, no official statistics ever show any con-nection between these groups and the cited so-cial problems. In the meantime, politicians try touse the Chinese and Indian communities, espe-cially their children, as examples of success stories,but they often stereotype them as hardworking,highly aspirational, and self-sufficient; they tendnot to ask for government support, mind theirown business, and generally do not cause troubleto other people. However, behind this seeminglypositive talk is a tendency to neglect the needsof these communities; they are left to their owndevices. Support programmes that the nationaland local governments as well as charities organ-ise and provide do not usually target these groups.There is a tendency in British society that minor-ity groups are neglected unless a major problemis perceived.

Similar to the success stories about the Indianand Chinese children in Britain is the celebratorydiscourse surrounding ethnic and cultural diver-sity. Difference is sometimes seen as a good thingby definition, without consideration for its impli-cations. In fact, globalisation has brought with itsignificant changes not only to mainstream soci-ety but also to minority ethnic communities. Com-munities with historical roots and contemporaryconnections with other nations, societies, and cul-tures are experiencing tremendous social changesin the postmodern era. The public celebration ofdiversity often ignores such changes within theminority communities. A key effect of the cele-bratory discourse is that it reenforces differencesbetween ethnic and cultural groups. As a result,minority ethnic communities and their childrencannot be accepted as “normal” British.

The multilinguality of the minority ethnic com-munities and their children seems to be a key con-tributing factor to the complex stigma associatedwith them, which goes from one extreme of low-achieving, problematic youth gangs congregatingin deprived urban centres at one end, to hard-working, well-behaved children aiming for con-ventionally safe professions at the other. Their ap-parent inability to manage their linguistic reper-toire by using only English creates communica-tion barriers with mainstream society and givesrise to a “semilingual” state of mind (i.e., defi-cient knowledge of any language). In September2002, the then Home Secretary of the Britishgovernment, David Blunkett, talked in a pub-lic speech about the “schizophrenia” bedevilingminority ethnic communities that, according tohim, was caused by their not speaking Englishat home. More ironic is the general perceptionthat the multilingual practices exemplified in theminority ethnic children’s everyday social interac-tion are a sign of a lack of creativity and critical-ity; they are seen to accept whatever comes theirway, seldom challenge anything, or are unable toraise questions and produce coherent and origi-nal thoughts.

I will show in this article that by looking atminority ethnic children’s multilingual and mul-timodal practices from a multicompetence per-spective, one can reveal clear and strong evidenceof creativity and criticality. Rather than deficientin any way in their linguistic knowledge, thesechildren are highly capable of fully utilising themultilingual resources they have, challenging thestatus quo, and expressing their views systemati-cally and insightfully. However, given the stigmathat we have just talked about, the expression ofthe children’s multicompetence does require aspecial space, which seems to be provided in thecomplementary schools.

THE COMPLEMENTARY SCHOOLSMOVEMENT FOR MINORITY ETHNIC ANDLINGUISTIC CHILDREN

Complementary schools have been a major so-ciopolitical and educational movement in Britainsince the 1950s. Initially they were formed bythe black community as a means of tackling racismtoward, and underachievement among, black chil-dren. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Muslim com-munities set up a number of faith schools, es-pecially for girls. Some of these schools laterreceived governmental recognition along withother faith schools. However, the vast majorityof complementary schools in today’s Britain are


cultural and language schools and usually runoutside the hours of mainstream schools (i.e.,on weekends). There are over 2,000 such schoolsaccording to the national resource centre Con-tinYou’s register (http://www.continyou.org.uk).However, such figures are likely to be an underesti-mate, as these schools are voluntary organisationsand many are very small and informal. They maybe based in a private home or a community cen-tre, which may not have adequate insurance cov-erage or fully meet the current requirements ofhealth and safety legislations. Most of the teachersare parents or professionals who are keen to helptheir own communities. Many of them have teach-ing experience, but they may not hold a teachingqualification from the United Kingdom.

Complementary schools have attracted a cer-tain amount of public debate vis-a-vis the defini-tion of schooling, government’s involvement ineducational management, and alternative peda-gogical practices. However, on the whole, thereis a lack of awareness of complementary schoolsby mainstream schoolteachers and the generalpublic. Many mainstream teachers are not awarethat a significant number of their pupils also at-tend complementary schools on weekends; nor dothey know what is being taught and how in theseschools. For their part, complementary schools donot usually attempt to interact with other educa-tional institutions. This includes complementaryschools of other minority ethnic communities. Soa teacher at a Turkish complementary school inthe northeast of London may not have spoken to aGujarati school or a Chinese schoolteacher in thesame area. They tend to operate entirely withintheir own communities.

Whilst the establishment of the complementaryschools is sometimes seen as a challenge to thedominant ideology of uniculturalism in Britain,the ideology of the complementary schools them-selves is rarely questioned. For instance, mostcomplementary schools have an implicit OLONor OLAT policy, usually the minority ethnic lan-guage of course. I have raised the question else-where (Li Wei & Wu, 2008, 2009) about the im-plications of such policies. To me, OLON andOLAT policies are another form of the mono-lingual ideology. Although it is understandablethat the complementary schools want to insist onusing specific community languages in this partic-ular domain, the long-term consequence of thecompartmentalisation of community languages isan issue of concern. In any case, maintaining astrict “no English” policy in the complementaryschools is almost impossible due to the frequent

and habitual codeswitching by both the teachersand the pupils. Martin et al. (2004) and Creese,Bhatt, Bhojani, and Martin (2006), in a series ofarticles on complementary schools in Leicester inthe English Midlands, documented in some detailthe extent of multilingual practices in this partic-ular context. We will see later in this article ex-amples of multilingual practices in the Chinesecomplementary schools.

Most complementary schools in the UnitedKingdom have literacy teaching as their key objec-tive, as there is a widespread perception that theBritish-born generations of minority ethnic chil-dren have lost the ability to read and write in theethnic languages. Block (2008) questioned themetaphor of loss that often occurs in the discoursesurrounding children of immigrant parents. Howcan a community grieve over the loss of a lan-guage in the younger generation when it is neverfully acquired? It seems almost like a victim men-tality, blaming what may well be a change that hashappened more or less naturally on human andenvironmental factors. Yet, this is a much morecomplex issue than it looks. As Francis, Archer,and Mau (2009) pointed out, there is a tendencyin immigrant communities to treat their ethniclanguage not as a live issue in everyday life butas heritage, a cultural relic that can be learnedabout and memorialised. It certainly seems to bethe dominant discourse among many communitymembers, including parents and teachers. How-ever, as we will see later in the present article,the children often contest this notion of culturelinked to some remote past and negotiate a morecomplex one focusing on a here-and-now artic-ulation of culture. Minority ethnic communitiesthemselves also need to accept that their childrenare no longer monolinguals. Their linguistic iden-tity is different from that of their parents as wellas that of other children in society.

MULTILINGUAL PRACTICES FROM AMULTICOMPETENCE PERSPECTIVE

I have found that a more positive, as well asa more productive, way to look at multilingualpractices of minority ethnic children is to seethem from a multicompetence perspective. Multi-competence is a theoretical concept developed byCook (1991, 1992, 2007, 2009) in the context ofsecond-language (L2) learning to reflect the total-ity of linguistic knowledge in one mind. It startsfrom the point that the mind of the L2 user isdifferent from that of the monolingual speakerand aims to capture the L2 user’s state of the

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mind by investigating how he or she puts to useknowledge of more than one language and howthe different linguistic systems interact and im-pact on the language user’s mind. The concept issometimes mistakenly described as “multilingualcompetence,” but it goes way beyond the abilityto use multiple languages. In addition to the spe-cific contributions the multicompetence concepthas made to second language acquisition, it in-vites a reevaluation of the native-speaker normthat still dominates many studies of bilingualismand multilingualism. It also enables us to focusmore on the linguistic and conceptual link in themultilingual language user’s mind.

The notion of multicompetence is particularlyuseful in describing and understanding multilin-gual practices such as codeswitching. As a distinc-tive and defining feature of being bilingual ormultilingual, codeswitching requires knowledgeand competence in all the languages involved,plus the involvement of higher level executive sys-tems to manage across the languages, as ampleresearch evidence has confirmed. Furthermore,codeswitching is not simply a combination andmixture of two languages but creative strategies bythe language user. A multicompetence approachenables us to investigate the structural, cogni-tive, and sociocultural dimensions of codeswitch-ing in an integrated and holistic way. It also hasthe added value of revealing the multilingual lan-guage users’ creativity and criticality that mani-fest in their multilingual practices. Creativity hererefers to the ability to choose between followingand flouting the rules and norms of behaviour,including the use of language, and to push andbreak boundaries between the old and the new,the conventional and the original, and the ac-ceptable and the challenging (see also Li Wei &Wu, 2009). An important prerequisite for linguis-tic creativity is knowledge of the linguistic system.For the multilingual, it is crucial to consider thatknowledge in a holistic way, not just one of the lan-guages in the multilingual language user’s linguis-tic repertoire, which would be only a subsystem forthe user. A holistic conceptualization of the knowl-edge of the multilingual language user wouldneed to account for all the languages he or sheknows as well as knowledge of the norms for use ofthe languages in context and of how the differentlanguages may interact in producing well-formed,contextually appropriate mixed-code utterances.The knowledge of appropriate use of multilin-gual resources in context also provides the foun-dation for criticality—the ability to use evidenceappropriately, systematically, and insightfully toinform considered views of cultural, social, and

linguistic phenomena, to question and problema-tize received wisdom, and to express views ade-quately through reasoned responses to situations.The two concepts—creativity and criticality—areintrinsically linked: One cannot push or breakboundaries (i.e., being creative, without beingcritical) and the best expression of one’s criticalityis one’s creativity (see Li Wei, 2011). I will explorethese concepts further with data from the Chinesecomplementary schools. I will show how BritishChinese pupils in complementary schools usecodeswitching and modeswitching as a symbolicand creative resource in a supposedly Chinese-only environment.

By focusing on the creativity and criticality ofthe multilingual language user, our take on multi-competence embraces the notion of symbolic com-petence , as developed by Kramsch and her asso-ciates (e.g., Kramsch, 2006; Kramsch & Whiteside,2008). Kramsch and Whiteside (2008) pointedout:

Social actors in multilingual settings seem to activatemore than a communicative competence that wouldenable them to communicate accurately, effectively,and appropriately with one another. They seem todisplay a particularly acute ability to play with vari-ous linguistic codes and with the various spatial andtemporal resonances of these codes. We call this com-petence “symbolic competence.” (p. 664)

Symbolic competence is defined as “the ability notonly to approximate or appropriate for oneselfsomeone else’s language, but to shape the verycontext in which the language is learned andused” (Kramsch & Whiteside, 2008, p. 664). Ex-tending Bourdieu’s notion of sens pratique , whichis exercised by a habitus that structures the veryfield it is structured by in a quest for symbolic sur-vival (Bourdieu, 1997/2000), Kramsch and White-side (2008) argue that a multilingual sens pra-tique multiplies the possibilities of meaning of-fered by the various codes in presence. As theysuggested:

In today’s global and migratory world, distinctionmight not come so much from the ownership of onesocial or linguistic patrimony (e.g., Mexican or Chi-nese culture, English language) as much as it comesfrom the ability to play a game of distinction on themargins of established patrimonies. (p. 664)

MULTILINGUAL PRACTICES OF THEBRITISH CHINESE CHILDREN INCOMPLEMENTARY SCHOOLS

The present study takes the British Chinesechildren as an example. The current Chinesecommunity in the United Kingdom is developed


from post-war migrants, who began to arrive inthe country in the 1950s. The vast majority ofthe post-war Chinese immigrants were from HongKong. They were Cantonese and/or Hakka speak-ers. Many of them were peasants and labourers,who left an urbanising Hong Kong to seek a bet-ter living in Britain. They tend to be engaged inlargely family-based catering businesses and otherservice industries. Later cohorts of Chinese immi-grants had a more mixed background, some withgood education and professional qualifications.They gradually built a community structure, pro-viding services not only in catering but also healthcare, travel, finance and insurance, and legaladvice. The Chinese now form the third largestimmigrant community in Britain, after those ofAfro-Caribbean origin and from the Indian sub-continent. Over a quarter of them are now British-born. A more detailed account of the currentsociolinguistic situation of the Chinese commu-nity in the United Kingdom can be found inLi Wei (2007).

There were informal reports of “home school-ing,” that is, children being taught by their parentsand others at home, among the Chinese fam-ilies in the 1950s and 1960s in cities such asLondon, Liverpool, and Manchester where therewere significant numbers of Chinese residents(You, 2006). The very first “Chinese schools”emerged on the basis of such collectives of familiesproviding private education to their children. Thereasons for the emergence of such schools werecomplex. There is no doubt that racial discrimina-tion played a role, but the fact that the vast major-ity of the Chinese were, and still are, engaged inservice industries has led to scattered settlementsright across the country. It is often said that anytown or village in Britain with around 2,000 ormore residents will have at least one family-runChinese takeaway. The Chinese children of thesefamilies would have little or no contact with otherChinese children if there were no Chinese com-plementary school.

The establishment of the Chinese schoolsmust be seen as a major achievement of thecommunity in their determination to supportthemselves. According to the UK Federation ofChinese Schools and the UK Association for thePromotion of Chinese Education, the two largestnational organisations for Chinese complemen-tary schools, there are over 200 such schoolsin the United Kingdom (http://www.ukfcs.info/and http://www.ukapce.org.uk/). They are lo-cated in major urban centres. Many families haveto travel for hours to send their children to theschools. They receive little support from the lo-

cal education authorities. They are almost entirelyself-financed. Parents pay fees to send their chil-dren, and local Chinese businesses offer sponsor-ships and other support (e.g., paying for the hireof premises and facilities). Many of the schoolsuse teaching materials provided free of chargeby voluntary organisations and other agencies inmainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Theteachers are mainly enthusiastic Chinese parentsand university students.

In the last decade or so, a pattern has emerged.There are now four types of Chinese schools:(a) for Cantonese-speaking children from HongKong immigrant families; (b) for Cantonese-speaking children of Hong Kong immigrant fami-lies with particular religious affiliations (i.e, run byChristian churches); (c) for Mandarin-speakingchildren from mainland China; and (d) forMandarin-speaking children of Buddhist families,mainly from Taiwan. Most of the schools runclasses over the weekend for up to 4 hours. Parentsplay a crucial role in the schools—they pay, gov-ern, and teach. A typical Chinese complementaryschool in the United Kingdom looks like the fol-lowing: It rents its premises from a local school oreducation centre. There is a temporary receptiondesk at the entrance for parents to speak to theteachers about any issues of interest. A sales deskor area is available for the children to buy snacksand drinks. Space is provided for the staff to havetea and coffee during break time and to havemeetings. The children are grouped accordingto proficiency in Chinese. There are traditionalChinese dance, arts, and sports sessions beforeor after the language and literacy sessions. Manyschools also provide English language lessons forparents.

Within the Chinese complementary schoolscontext, there is a clear policy that only Chineseshould be used by the teachers and pupils (see LiWei & Wu, 2008). There are significant differencesbetween the teachers’ and the pupils’ linguisticproficiency and preference: The teachers tend tobe native speakers of Chinese, have had a substan-tial monolingual experience as Chinese speakers,and prefer to use Chinese most, if not all, of thetime, whereas the pupils have had limited andcontext-specific input in Chinese, have high pro-ficiency in English, and use English as the linguafranca with their peers, including other childrenof Chinese ethnic origin. The children’s Englishlanguage proficiency in most cases is much moresophisticated than that of the teachers. Li andWu (2009) examined examples of how childrenmanipulate the discrepancies in the languageproficiencies and preferences in Chinese and

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English between themselves and their teachers totheir own advantages in the classroom. In this ar-ticle, I will show how codeswitching is creativelyused not only in the children’s learning processbut also as an act of identity and rebellion againstthe OLON or OLAT policies.

The data for this article come out of a largeproject investigating multilingual practices incomplementary schools in a number of minor-ity ethnic communities in the United Kingdom(see the Acknowledgments section), as well astwo associated projects that focused specifically onthe Chinese complementary schools. The Chinesecomplementary schools in the larger project werebased in Manchester. We chose one Cantoneseschool and one Mandarin school there (see Li Wei& Wu, 2009, for a discussion of some of the find-ings; see also Blackledge & Creese, 2010). Oneof the associated projects took place in Newcastleprior to the larger multicommunity project. Likethe larger project, this pilot study investigated oneCantonese school and one Mandarin school (seeLi Wei, 1993; Li Wei & Wu, 2008, for reports ofsome of the findings from this pilot study). Theother associated project is an ongoing one thatis being carried out as a follow-up and an ex-tension of the larger project in a London-basedschool. The school is a Cantonese school. As withthe other Chinese complementary schools in theUnited Kingdom, all of the Cantonese schools alsoteach Mandarin. However, none of the Mandarinschools teach Cantonese. This may be seen as asign of the changing hierarchies among varietiesof the Chinese language as a result of the risingpolitico-economic power of mainland China (seeLi Wei & Zhu Hua, 2010a, 2010b).

In all five schools, extensive ethnographic ob-servations were made. After initial meetings withthe administrators in each school explaining thepurpose of the research project, informationsheets were distributed to teachers, parents, andpupils, and permissions were sought for furtherdata collection. We were allowed access to ob-serve classroom interaction and to collect data in arange of settings, including break time and formalschool events such as prize-giving ceremonies. Aselection of teachers, administrators, parents, andpupils were interviewed, and recordings, both au-dio and video, were made in the classroom as wellas during break time. We chose to focus on the 10-to 12-year-old groups in all the schools we studied,although some of the classes also included chil-dren as young as 8 or as old as 14. In what follows,I focus specifically on the pupils’ multilingualand multimodal practices. All of the examples aretaken from the transcripts of audio-recorded in-

teractions. All examples are given in standard Chi-nese and English orthography. The Chinese text isfollowed by a pinyin transliteration—the Roman-ized rendition of the pronunciation of the Chi-nese characters—in brackets. The English glossand translation are given underneath the Chinesetranscript.

Codeswitching

One of the tensions in Chinese complemen-tary school classrooms is between the traditionalway of teaching and what is appropriate for thisparticular group of Chinese pupils. Example 1 istaken from a recording of a Mandarin session inthe London Chinese school. The school was setup as a Cantonese school. The majority of chil-dren in this school are Cantonese–English bilin-guals. However, since 2001, Mandarin is also of-fered to all children. In this example, the teacherhas asked the class to make sentences with theChinese adverb� (jiu). This is a particularly com-plex word, as it has several meanings, including atonce, as early as, just about , really, simply, exactly,and so on, and can be used with various func-tions. A girl (G1) responded to the teacher andmade a sentence with the target word. The teacherasked the class whether G1 got the sentence right.This is a typical teaching method in Chinese class-rooms, in which the teacher asks the pupils topoint out each other’s mistakes and correct themcollectively. In written examinations, “correctingmistakes” is often used as a method of assessingthe learner’s linguistic knowledge. However, as wecan see in the example, the pupils think that thiskind of pedagogical activity is picking on people,not just the language errors. Two kinds of culturalexpectations and practices seem to be at workhere.

EXAMPLE 1(G1: girl in class; T: teacher; B1 and B2: boys inclass)

G1: �� (ta jiu xiang shuijiao)�He really/just wants to sleep.

T: Good. Is there any mistake in what she said?. . . (no response from pupils)T: (To B1) XXX, what do you think?

B1: M ji la?NEG. know PART.Don’t know.

T: (To B2) XX, ��(ni ne)You PART.How about you?

B2: ��(wo ye) mu ji.I also


I also don’t know/ (am) a hen.All laugh loudly.T: Stop it. ��(anjing)�Be quiet.

Silence.B1: Can we do something else?T: �� (xian shuo wanle zheige)�

Let’s finish talking about this first.B2: Why��(zongyao tiao renjia cuo a)?

always pick other people mistake PART.Why do we always pick on other’s mistakes?

When the class did not respond to her ini-tial question, the teacher specified B1 and askedhim to say whether he thought G1 had produceda correct sentence with the target word. B1 re-sponded in Cantonese, as he is a Cantonese asa first-language (L1) speaker and he knew thatthe teacher also understood Cantonese. His re-sponse consists of a typical Cantonese negationmarker m, a verb ji (‘know’), and an utteranceparticle la. I have spelt these out in Roman let-ters as the pronunciation here is a crucial factor.When the teacher turned to B2 and asked forhis opinion, B2 made a pun by simply adding avowel to the Cantonese negation marker. How-ever, mu in Mandarin means female , and ji in Man-darin means chicken. By changing the pronuncia-tion from m ji to mu ji, B2 made the phrase intoI am also a hen. Cantonese–Mandarin bilingualswould understand the pun easily, and the wholeclass laughed. B2 thus gained some authority, or atleast popularity, in the classroom context. Whenthe teacher tried to stop him making fun of the ac-tivity, both boys, B1 and B2, protested and askedthe teacher to change the activity to somethingdifferent. B2’s direct question to the teacher chal-lenges the pedagogical practice.

There is another even subtler, but perhapsmore important, aspect of the two boys’ responsesto the teacher in this example. Let us remind our-selves that this is a Mandarin session for a groupof children, most of whom are Cantonese–Englishbilinguals. They are learning Mandarin as an ad-ditional language. Mandarin is being actively pro-moted in the Chinese community in Britain as anew Chinese lingua franca to connect with main-land China and is fast gaining currency, at least informal settings. Official visits by the Chinese em-bassy staff to the local Chinese community organ-isations are always conducted in Mandarin, andcultural events such as Chinese New Year celebra-tions are increasingly done in Mandarin, as well.Mandarin has also replaced Cantonese in muchof the satellite television and other entertainmentmedia in Europe. Even Cantonese-speaking par-ents often encourage their children to learn Man-darin at the Chinese school. However, enthusi-

asm for Mandarin is not universal in the Chinesediaspora. There are groups who feel a strongeraffinity to Hong Kong and nostalgia for the pre-1997 life in the former British colony. They see thespread of Mandarin as another example of the in-creasing power and influence of the Chinese gov-ernment in Beijing. Even among people who arenot directly linked to Hong Kong, there are thosewho see the spread of Mandarin as a threat toCantonese cultural heritage. Recent reports fromthe Cantonese-speaking Guangdong province ofmainland China of public protests against the test-ing of Mandarin proficiency for people who wishto hold public office and the increasing use ofMandarin in the media are examples of the pop-ular unease. What we do not know is how British-born generations of Chinese children and youngpeople feel about the elevated status of Mandarinvis-a-vis Cantonese. Although we cannot be abso-lutely sure why B1 chose to respond to the teacherin Cantonese in the present example, his choiceof language, and B2’s making fun of it, certainlyhas the effect of undermining the purpose of theclass, which is to teach Mandarin.

When we presented the case to the head teacherof the school and asked if she thought the pupilswere resisting Mandarin, she gave a very inter-esting answer. She told us that when the schoolfirst decided to teach Mandarin to the childrenon a voluntary basis in an extended period follow-ing the normal standard hours for Cantonese—in other words, so the children could decide forthemselves whether they wanted to stay for an ex-tra hour for Mandarin—the take-up rate was verylow, around 20%. So the school decided to in-corporate Mandarin in the main teaching hoursand made it compulsory for all. The head teacherclaimed that it has been a success and the schoolhas been held as an example of excellence in pro-moting Mandarin by the UK. Association for thePromotion of Chinese Education, which is themain national advocate for Mandarin teaching.The examples we have seen here in the pupils’ ac-tual responses in the classroom may show a differ-ent side of the story. The children may not be allthat pleased with the imposition of Mandarin onthem. Whether this is simply a concern of learningload or more of an ideological issue, one cannotbe sure.

A similar example was observed in the Man-darin school in Manchester (see also Li Wei & Wu,2009). In Example 2, the teacher had asked a boyto read out a text and then turned to the class toask if the boy had made any mistakes in the read-ing. First, a girl (G1) and a boy (B1) respondedto the teacher and tried to pick out mistakes in

Li Wei 9

the pronunciation. H reacted differently and saidto the class, “Stop picking on people. It’s cruel.”However, G1 and the teacher ignored him andcontinued with the exercise. As with the boys inExample 1, H in Example 2 clearly knew what theteacher expected of him. After girl Y’s reading, Hpicked out a mistake himself, which was verifiedby the teacher. Then, he immediately changed histack. His next remark—that Y spoke too fast—wasvery much tongue-in-cheek and aimed at mockingthe whole pedagogical task.

EXAMPLE 2(T: Teacher, G1: girl in class; B1: boy in class; H:key participant boy)

T: �, ��?Um, not bad. Can you tell where he mademistakes?

G1: Yeah, ‘�’ (zhang) � �‘zang’ (zhang tashuo zang).Yeah, ‘zhang’, he said ‘zang.’

T: ��Um.

B1: ‘�’ (cong) ��‘chong ’ (cong ta shuo chong) �‘Cong’, he said ‘chong.’

H: Stop picking on people. It’s cruel.G1: ‘��’��‘��’ (xuexiao menqian ta

shuo xuexiao mianqian) �‘In front of the school entrance, he said, ‘school,face, front’.’

T: �� (buguo yijing heng hao la)�

Um, but it was pretty good.(T naming the next person to do the exercise, Y. Yreads fluently.). . .

H: I think she said ‘sha’ instead of ‘shua.’T (repeated the word): ��(wan shua)H (teasing voice): I know. She said it too fast.

(Classroom recording: K6)

It could be the case that H was playing a gendergame and wanted to defend the boy who did thefirst reading. He may have picked out a mistakein Y’s reading because she was a girl. However, inboth Examples 1 and 2, the pupils had little dif-ficulty in understanding what the teachers askedthem to do in the classroom. They were very much“on task.” What they wanted to challenge were (a)the teacher’s authority and (b) traditional ways ofChinese teaching. These examples also show thatthe pupils’ language skills, in both English andChinese (Mandarin and Cantonese), are highlydeveloped. They are able to manipulate themstrategically and creatively to gain control of theclassroom and turn the tables on their teachers.

Examples 3 and 4, also collected in the Manch-ester schools, further demonstrate how well de-

veloped some of the pupils’ Chinese skills are, es-pecially in the speaking mode, and how they usetheir skills to influence the classroom proceed-ings.

EXAMPLE 3(T: Teacher, D: boy in class; Lucy: Key participantgirl)

T (explaining the task): If you make a sentence youhave to include the person.

D: XXX (a classmate’s name) ��, ��

(yibian fangpi yibian lashi) �XXX was farting while doing a poo.

(pupils laugh)T: D, �� (zhege buyao zai ketang

shang shuo), especially in front of ladies. Be agentleman, don’t say this, how to say, (XXX)D, don’t say that in the class,

Lucy (ironically, low voice): (XXX) all gentleman!(Boys and girls argue about this.). . .

T: �, ��, �� (ai,nvsheng shuohua de shihou, nansheng yingdangbaochi anjing) �Be a gentleman.Ai, boys should keep silent while girls are speak-ing.

Lucy (low voice): Oh my God. She’s always got that tosay.

(Pupils make disagreeing noises.)(Classroom recording: Lucy)

This example was taken from the Mandarinschool. The class was doing a sentence-makingexercise; that is, the pupils were asked to makesentences using certain words and phrases. Thephrase given by the teacher was ��. . . ��. . .

(yibian. . . yibian. . .) (‘doing one thing while do-ing something else’). D, a boy, volunteered andmade a sentence of someone in the class (us-ing a specific pupil’s name) farting while makinga poo. He was very quick and the sentence hemade was grammatically perfect. This caused thewhole class to laugh, which was D’s intention. Theteacher felt that she had to control D somehowbecause he was making fun of a classmate, andshe told him that he must not say such things infront of the girls. I have called this socializationalteaching (Li Wei & Wu, 2010); that is, it is notonly aimed at teaching language structures butalso imparting cultural values to the pupils. Theteacher’s socializational teaching in the presentcontext led to a dispute between the boys andgirls and the whole class moved away from the in-tended pedagogical task of sentence-making. Theteacher then had to put a stop to it to regaincontrol. However, she asked the boys to be quietwhen the girls were talking. Lucy was not happy


that the teacher kept stressing the point about“gentlemen” and “ladies.” The comment shemade was in quite a low voice, probably only audi-ble to the girls immediately around her. We pickedup this example because the key participant pupilswore USB recorders. Key participant pupils werechosen from volunteers in advance of the record-ing with permission from themselves, their par-ents, and the class teachers.

In Example 4, from the Cantonese school, theteacher asked the class to revise silently before adictation test. However, one boy (B) moaned anddid not want to do it.

EXAMPLE 4(T: Teacher, B: boy in class)

T: ��(nei hoyi m man de. Nalingdan ma)You don’t have to revise. You just get an egg (zeromark).

B: ��?��(lingdan?yuguo ngo na yaba fen, sifou yau yaba dan na)?An egg (zero mark)? If I get 100 marks, does itmean I get 100 eggs?

All laughed.B: Anyone got this?(Classroom recording: T3B)

B was aware of the meaning of “an egg” as zeromark but chose to pick on the point and made funof it. He then switched to English to seek groupapproval. His skills in both languages won him in-fluential status in the class, which simultaneouslyundermined the teacher’s authority in the class-room.

These examples show that the pupils’ multi-lingual practices in the complementary schoolclassrooms is multilayered: Through switching be-tween languages, they are making fun of the ped-agogical tasks, showing off their language skills,rejecting traditional values imposed on them,challenging the teacher’s authority, and demon-strating their symbolic competence as well as mul-tilingual identities.

Modeswitching

I want to turn now to some examples of multi-lingual practices that involve different modalities.As has been said earlier, a particular focus of thecomplementary schools for minority ethnic chil-dren in Britain is on literacy teaching (i.e., literacyin the heritage language, not English). However,all of the children are literate in English, as well;some may have learned other languages and writ-ing systems, too. As far as the Chinese complemen-tary schools are concerned, most of the teachers

believe that teaching the children to read andwrite Chinese characters is their most importanttask. Most of the classroom time is spent on get-ting the children to read the Chinese charactersand a considerable amount of writing is also donein the classroom.

Most of the Chinese characters are eitherpictographs and ideographs or a combinationof the two. Examples of pictographs include thefollowing:

� � � �

sun moon mountain umbrella

Examples of ideographs include the following:

� � �

one two three middle

An example of a pictograph–ideograph com-pound is

�

sun + moon = bright

To teach the characters, the teacher sometimesdraws pictures showing the origins of pictographsor analyzes and explains the meanings of theideographs. Many Chinese pupils are fascinatedby the stories behind some of the characters. How-ever, it is traditional for the Chinese teachers toinsist on good handwriting, by which they oftenmean following a strict order of the strokes andbalance of sizes of the different component parts.They also tend to ask the pupils to copy the char-acters repeatedly. It is very common for a teacherat a Chinese school to ask the pupils to copy anynew character 50–100 times, and collective correc-tion of mistakes in character writing is a commonactivity in class.

As in some of the earlier examples, the pupils inthe schools that we studied were unhappy with theteaching method, even though they were keen tolearn about the characters. In Example 5, whichwas recorded in a Mandarin school in Newcastle,the pupils are making fun of the task by deliber-ately writing the wrong characters.

EXAMPLE 5(T: teacher; B1: boy in class)

T: ��(houcheshi de houyou mei you yige xiao shu)?The word ‘wait’ in waiting room, does it have asmall downward stroke or not?

(No response from the pupils)Teacher writes on the whiteboard: �� (houcheshi‘waiting room,’ without the stroke in the middle)T: ��(zhege hou dui bu dui)?

This wait, is it correct?B1: Don’t know. �, ��(dui, budui) �

Correct, not correct.

Li Wei 11

T: �� (ni shanglai xie yixia.xie dui de.)You come up and write one. Write the correctone.

B1 goes to the whiteboard and writes � (monkey).Everybody laughs.The teacher puts a cross over it and says, ��

�(renzhen dian ‘Be serious.’) and writes the correctcharacter �.

In this example, the teacher was trying to drawthe pupils’ attention to the details of a specificcharacter. She deliberately wrote the wrong char-acter, without the small downward stroke in themiddle, and asked the class whether it was cor-rect. The teacher’s question �� (dui bu dui“correct or not”) is of a unique syntactic structurein Chinese, A not A. B1 knows exactly what theteacher was asking and how the structure worked.He first responded in English “Don’t know.” Hethen switched to Chinese and copied the teacher’sphrase, except that he added a very short pause af-ter the first �(dui “correct”), making it sound asif he was hesitating. The response then became“Correct, not correct,” meaning “I’m not surewhether it is correct or not.” When the teacherasked him to come up to the whiteboard andwrite the correct character, he wrote the characterfor “monkey,” which has the target character for“wait” in it but has an additional radical on the leftmeaning “animal.” What it shows is that B1 knewexactly how to write the correct character. He tookthe opportunity to make fun of the exercise andmade the class laugh.

I have seen many examples of the pupils delib-erately changing the Chinese characters to makethem funny or rude. The exercise books that theyare given in the Chinese schools often bear thecharacters �� “copying character book” onthe front. I have seen several pupils changing theword � “copy” to � “stir-fry,” which differs inthe left semantic radical, from “hand” to “fire.”This is particularly culturally relevant as many ofthe children are from families that run Chineserestaurants and takeaways.

The last example I want to discuss comes fromthe Cantonese school in Newcastle. In this case,the teacher is trying to explain the difference be-tween the traditional complex character for food,�, which could also mean “rice” and is oftenused by Cantonese speakers, and its simplifiedversion of mainland China, �, which is increas-ingly popular in the Chinese immigrant commu-nities. After writing both characters side by sideon the whiteboard, the teacher asked the class thefollowing:

EXAMPLE 6(T: teacher; G1: girl in class; B1 and B2: boys inclass)

T: �� (nimen kan zheliangge zi you shengme butong)?

What difference can you see between the twocharacters?

G1: Can we write (using finger spelling in the air toindicate the character)?

T: ��(shanglai xie yixia)�Come up and write it.

G1 goes up and writes on the whiteboard, �.B1: That’s rice.T: You come.

B1 goes up and writes � (which sounds the same butis only half of the character).Some pupils giggle.B1: That’s simplified.B2: Yeah, that’s how they write it in the restaurant.

First, G1 responded to the teacher with fingerspelling, which is very common among literateChinese language users. Homonyms are a specialfeature of the Chinese language, which has thou-sands of characters that have the same pronunci-ation. Chinese people often try to spell the targetcharacters with their fingers in the air, for exam-ple, when they try to tell others exactly which char-acters their names are. However, in reality it is verydifficult for anyone to understand finger spellingunless it is accompanied by verbal explanation ofhow it is written. The teacher in Example 6 henceasked G1 to come to the whiteboard and write thecharacter out. The character G1 wrote has the se-mantic radical “rice” in it. However, it is not a stan-dard character. She may have seen people writingit in Chinese restaurants. B1 recognised it andsaid that it meant “rice.” The teacher asked himto write his alternative. The character B1 wrote isthe phonetic radical of the target character andis often used by Chinese restaurant waiters as ashorthand when taking orders. But, it is not a cor-rect form for the word “food” or “rice.” Whensome of his classmates giggled, he protested andclaimed that he wrote a simplified character. Hisfriend B2 came to his defence by claiming that it isdone in Chinese restaurants. Again, the exampleshows that the pupils are very aware of the detailsof the Chinese characters, as well as what is goingon the social world around them.

Two key issues emerge from these examples.First, let us remind ourselves that one of the prin-cipal objectives of the complementary schoolsis to teach literacy. Often literacy is under-stood narrowly as being in one language—in thepresent case, Chinese. If we look at the chil-dren’s language abilities from such a monoliteracy


perspective, we would have grounds to claim thatthe Chinese schools have failed in their principalobjective. Yet, if we adopt a multiliteracy perspec-tive, we can argue that the children are highlyskilled in putting their linguistic knowledge tocreative and critical use. The notion of multilit-eracy was invented by the New London Group(1996), an international group of educators whowanted to highlight both the increasing salienceof linguistic and cultural diversity in schools andclassrooms as well as the increasing complexity oftexts being used in literacy education—that is, theproliferation of multimodal ways of making mean-ing where the written word is mixed with visual,audio, and spatial patterns. It led to a major shiftof interest in literacy pedagogy from conventionalwritten or print text to multimodal signs that areoften mediated through new technologies. Thisbrings us to the second and closely related issueemerging from the present examples.

The teaching and learning in the complemen-tary school classrooms that we have studied in-volve a range of modalities, as they do in any class-room, including speech, writing, gesture, gaze,body posture, movement, and so on. In otherwords, teaching and learning are a multimodalactivity. In the present case, we have chosen to fo-cus on examples in which the teachers and pupilsemploy speech, writing, and gestures (e.g., fin-ger spelling) in the teaching of Chinese char-acters. They switch between these modalities tomake sense and negotiate meaning of the activ-ities in which they are engaged. In multilingual-ism research, there has so far been very little re-search on multimodal codeswitching, except forSebba’s work on written multilingual texts (cf.Sebba, 2010; in press).

Drawing data from the same core project asthe present study, Lytra, Martin, Barac, and Bhatt(2010) discussed other examples of multimodal-ity interactions in Turkish and Gujarati literacyclasses, in which they observed parallel commu-nication via mobile phones, hand-held computergames, and other technical gadgets (see also, Ly-tra, in press). In the Chinese schools that we stud-ied, almost all of the pupils have mobile phonesand many bring computer games and other gad-gets with them. They often text each other in classwhile listening to what the teacher has to say. Theyalso communicate with others outside the schoolwhile following the class. Although most of themtext message in English, many have Chinese inputfunctions in their mobile phones and many of thecomputer games are in Chinese. Moreover, theChinese complementary schools often show Chi-nese films and video, most of which have both Chi-nese and English subtitles. The complex system of

sound, vision, gesture, and digital and electronicsigns and signals provides a multimodal learningenvironment, in which knowledge of the differentlanguages, including the writing systems, are putto use. Such multimodality interaction, and themultiliteracy practices, require further, systematicexamination.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

As I described at the beginning of this article,the complementary schools for minority ethnicchildren in Britain are set up to teach literacyin the heritage languages. Most of them have anOLON or OLAT policy. The Chinese complemen-tary schools are no exception. However, as ourexamples show, both the teachers and the pupilsuse a great deal of English and they codeswitchfrequently and regularly in and out of the class-room. Their behaviours provide further examplesof the kind of argument Heller and Martin-Jones(2001) put forward that multilingual practices area symbolic resource of contestation and struggleagainst institutional ideologies. In particular, wehave shown through examples of classroom inter-action how Chinese pupils used their languageskills to simultaneously follow and flout the rulesand norms of behaviour in the school. They ex-ploit the full sets of their linguistic and modalresources to showcase their creativity and criti-cality by challenging the teacher’s authority andtraditional ways of Chinese teaching and subvert-ing the pedagogic task. These examples also showthat the pupils’ communication skills, if under-stood from a multilingual and multimodal per-spective, are highly developed. They are able toswitch between languages and modalities strategi-cally to gain control of the classroom and turn thetable on their teachers. They are also highly skill-ful in manipulating the discrepancies in languageproficiencies between themselves and the teach-ers. These skills are an important part of whatKramsch (2006) called “symbolic competence.”Through codeswitching and modeswitching, thechildren are shifting frames of reference and mak-ing relevant local as well as global semiotic re-sources, including gender, life experience, popu-lar culture, and language ideologies.

Although the examples may give the impressionthat English is used by the pupils to counter theteaching of Chinese language and heritage, wewant to emphasise the flexible, creative bilingual-ism expressed through the pupils’ creative useof codeswitching, which is made possible by the“safe” environment of the complementary school(see also Blackledge & Creese, 2010). It is impor-tant to point out that it is the pupils who make

Li Wei 13

the complementary school a “safe space” throughtheir multilingual practices, which are often inopposition to the discourses of the institutionsand teachers, not in opposition to the institutionalpurpose. The pupils’ multilingual creativity—theability to choose between following and floutingthe rules and norms of behaviour, and very of-ten to do both simultaneously—in the classroomis perhaps the most significant finding of thepresent study and a point that I wish to highlight.Creativity in my view is about pushing and break-ing the boundaries between the old and the new,the conventional and the original, and the accept-able and the challenging. It entails a high level ofcriticality, as well—that is, the ability to assess thesituation systematically and insightfully, to ques-tion and problematize received wisdom, and toarticulate views and opinions in a reasoned way.The examples we have seen in this article showthat the pupils are fully aware of the rules and ex-pectations of the school and of the teachers. Yet,they dare to challenge authority and tradition.They clearly feel confident about their identitiesand abilities.

Creativity and criticality often come out of ten-sions, conflicts, competitions, differences, andchange. Bilingualism and multilingualism by thenature of the phenomena entail tension, if notoutright conflict—tensions between ideologies,policies, and practices; tensions in historical andcurrent contexts; tensions between generationswithin a community (i.e., ongoing changes),and tensions between different communities. Allof these provide important sources of creativityand criticality. Viewed from this perspective, theOLON and OLAT policies of the complementaryschools, like the monolingual ideologies, policies,and practices of other institutions, could harmthe development of creativity and criticality asthey block the access to knowledge in differentlanguages and modalities and reduce the self-confidence of the multilingual language user.

The multicompetence perspective that I havetried to apply in this article enables a holisticlook at multilingual and multimodal practices. Ithelps to highlight creativity and criticality, shownthrough codeswitching and modeswitching. Theexamples we have seen of switching between dif-ferent modalities are particularly good evidenceof multicompetence of this group of multilinguallanguage users and the creative and critical use ofthe multilingual resources they have. The switch-ing between speech and writing and gestures, plusvarious other activities in different communica-tion channels, also contributes to the children’ssense of being new and different from their par-ents and grandparents. They are a new generation

of British citizens and a new generation of eth-nic Chinese in Britain. By approaching multilin-gual and multimodal practices from a multicom-petence perspective, I hope to have contributedto an emerging body of evidence of new multilin-gualism (e.g., Cenoz & Gorter, 2006; Pennycook,2010), especially among young people (e.g., Cut-ler, 2008; Eckert, 2008; Jaspers, 2008), and to a bet-ter understanding of multilingual pupils’ knowl-edge and skills as well as their perspectives on theworld, especially on education, cultural tradition,and social relationships.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First and foremost, I have benefitted a great dealfrom talking and working with Vivian Cook, who de-veloped the multicompetence concept. His advice andsupport have been most important to me. The arti-cle has been presented at various seminars and con-ferences, especially the American Association for Ap-plied Linguistics (AAAL) conference in Atlanta in 2010.I am very grateful to the warm reception and construc-tive comments from the audience. Jasone Cenoz andDurk Gorter have provided valuable support through-out the writing process, without which the article maynever have been written. The Economic and Social Re-search Council of Great Britain funded the project “In-vestigating Multilingualism in Complementary Schoolsin Four Communities” (ESRC, RES-000–23-1180), fromwhich this article draws some of its examples. Apart frommyself, the research team of the project included An-gela Creese, Taskın Barac, Arvind Bhatt, Adrian Black-ledge, Shahela Hamid, Vally Lytra, Dilek Yagcioglu-Ali,the late Peter Martin, and Chao-Jung Wu, who collectedmost of the Chinese data. Zhu Hua is currently work-ing with me in Chinese schools in London. She hasprovided important input into the data analysis in thisarticle.

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