This chapter examines the miscommunication of an intercultural team working on a task via videoconferencing technology using English. We utilize multimodal (inter)action analysis (Norris, 2004, 2011, 2019, 2020) as our theoretical and methodological framework to shed new light on how participants appear to negotiate and co-construct common ground, while they in fact do not achieve conceptual convergence but, instead, produce their own actions. The data for this chapter comes from a corpus of twelve dyads working on tasks via videoconferencing technology in New Zealand. Data was collected from various English monolingual and Serbian multilinguals in various interactive constellations. In this chapter, we focus on a dyadic team with a Serbian native speaker and a monolingual New Zealand English speaker. Rajic and Norris (2018) show that Serbian native speakers’ nonverbal actions vastly differ from New Zealand English speakers’ nonverbal actions. While the difference in production of nonverbal actions is relevant in all interactions, they do not necessarily lead to intercultural miscommunications. However, as noted earlier, interactive alignment is not just a linguistic accomplishment (Pirini & Geenen 2018). Our results conflict somewhat with those of other scholars (House, 1999; Mauranen, 2006), who claim that few miscommunications occur in English as a Lingua Franca interactions. Owing to our analysis, we would like to claim that miscommunications in linguistically and culturally diverse communicative situations are more frequent than previously thought. However, many of the miscommunications that occur cannot be said to come about because of cultural differences.

The linguistic input parents provide to their children is crucial to the development of multilingualism. This chapter focuses on multilingualism in families where children either receive input in two or more home languages that are different from the environment language(s) or grow up in a bilingual community and have at least one additional home language. The chapter discusses quantity and quality of parental input as well as challenges in measurement. It reviews aspects of parental input, drawing upon Spolsky’s (2009) interrelated components of family language policy (FLP) – language ideologies, language management, and language practices. Parental attitudes, beliefs, and language ideologies impact on motivation and goal-setting in relation to the input they provide to their children. Language management is addressed through an examination of models of multilingual upbringing and parental input strategies. The implementation of FLP is reflected in actual language practices within the family. These are considered not only from the parental perspective but also from the children’s reactions to their parents’ input, as child agency plays a substantial role in the eventual success of parents’ strategies and practices.

In this paper I critically review language policies aiming at the integration of immigrants into French minorities in Canada, and use recent survey data to trace the impact of these policies on adult Francophone immigrants’ integration experiences outside of Quebec. An analysis of the intersections between these language policies and the integration trajectories shows interesting, but also worrying trends which are discussed in this paper. While these policies arguably aim at the maintenance of linguistic status quo, both nationally and locally, through reinforcing the existing balance of power between English and French communities, and through leveling asymmetries in French minority settings, they simultaneously work at facilitating but also impeding immigrant integration; as such, they are at times embraced, and at others resisted on immigrants’ pathways.

Despite surface-level changes to the Heritage Languages Program in Ontario, heritage language instruction continues to exist at the margins of school life in Ontario. Public deliberations over this policy have led to intense, racialized conflict among stakeholders. At their most fundamental level, these conflicts have centred on who has – or should have – the power (or the “right”) to determine linguistic and cultural practices within publicly funded schools. To address this question, the chapter builds on my previous work sketching out a political-economy perspective on language policy analysis. Most salient is this theory’s insight that, while capitalism relies on human labour to create all profit and value, it has no internal system for reproducing that labour in the first place. I situate language socialization within this contradiction. When speakers of minoritized and/or racialized languages make demands for access to their languages in the public sphere (be it at work, at school, etc.) they directly challenge this separation between production and social reproduction. Understanding this contradiction moves us beyond searching for better metaphors for framing language policy, and towards concrete political strategies for undermining language-based oppression.