Cover image JPG. Full text TXT. Dublin Core XML. This study investigates experiences in the learning of Swahili across two university programs in African studies, one in Dar es Salaam, and the other in Mexico City, with the goal of understanding how emerging social identities intersect with institutional language policies in the multilingual classroom.
There is also the additional goal of clarifying the impact of global networks in the spread of the language from its eastern African origins to its present position in Latin America.
The study unfolds as an examination of participants' classroom activities and interviews, generating an account of how multiple identities surface through discourse and investments in language learning.
Data are interpreted across thematic, critical, and descriptive discourse analyses to describe how material, ideological, and symbolic groups manifest among participants; illustrate how classroom talk reproduces or resists structures of power and inequality; and show how code choices are indicative of ideologies of standardization and monolingualism.
Findings are presented as microanalyses of successive, linked class meetings in each study context. These data reveal classroom speech events to be mechanisms of guiding learners into the use of English and Spanish to analyze and comment on Standard Swahili. Accordingly, participation in classroom communities of practice requires English-language knowledge in both contexts, and centers upon the acquisition of Standard Swahili communicative competence.
