The speed at which populations move across physical and virtual borders has blurred the lines between nations and languages. As a result, children of immigrants choose to negotiate flexible identities that include being members of their family’s newly adopted culture while simultaneously maintaining long-distance relationships with their respective homelands. The 11 chapters of this book take the reader on a multifaceted journey with a nine-person team of multilingual ethnographers who perform a sociolinguistic qualitative study of four interlocking case studies in eight different complementary (heritage) schools located in England. The case studies were held in two Bengali schools (Birmingham), one Cantonese school, one Mandarin school (Manchester), two Gujarati schools (Leicester), and two Turkish schools (London). Ethnographers worked in pairs, and each school received at least one ethnographer (sometimes both) who was bilingual in the target language of the school.

Coming from a postmodern orientation, the researchers adopted a critical ethnographic approach, which often called them to make connections between public policy and local practices of multilingualism. Through recordings, videos, interviews, and field notes, the team raised questions and offered responses regarding the linguistic practices of the people involved in complementary schools.

One of the recurring themes in the book is the contrast between an institutionalized official policy of separate bilingualism and the more frequent classroom practice of flexible bilingualism—what Blackledge and Creese prefer to term translanguaging or heteroglossia as opposed to codeswitching—in which teachers and students used whatever language resources were available to them to communicate effectively. The authors take Bailey’s (Reference Bailey and Heller2007) “social constructivist approach” and view codeswitching “not as the use of two separate codes but rather as the heteroglossic use of different signs combined as a resource to make meaning” (p. 65). A social constructivist opposes classifications of languages or communities as bounded autonomous systems. The resulting recordings and field notes produced some fascinating accounts and linguistic examples of translanguaging, student negotiation of multilingual and multicultural identities through choice of linguistic resource and other rhetorical devices, along with teacher and student negotiations of power within the complementary school setting.

Although rumors of the demise of nationalism and the age of globalization predict a bleak future for minority ethnicities—especially in cosmopolitan cities such as the ones studied in this volume—a surprising result from the data collected in this study is the recurring theme of nationalism in all of the eight complementary schools. As people who live in a diaspora and face pressure from monolingual ideologies, a strong loyalty links members of “an ethnic diaspora to their homeland” (p. 185). The study revealed that the teaching of language was intrinsically tied to the teaching of culture through national symbols, myths, and collective memories of heroic deeds.

Some positives in the book are the detailed and careful documentation presented about the background and methodologies used to perform an ethnographic study of this magnitude. Coming from a sociocultural perspective, this volume contains detailed narratives of classroom interactions and field notes. Although there are no systematic criteria for the selection of excerpts of linguistic data for analysis, the excerpts sprinkled throughout the chapters—used to illustrate the various themes that emerged from the study—provide valuable insight into modern urban multilingualism. Although pupils were normally cooperative and engaged in their language learning, examples of uncooperative behavior surfaced as a pattern. An example from the text, in addition to being an interesting case of translanguaging, shows Bengali students who challenged the teacher’s pronunciation of the name of a new child on her arrival at school:

The children insisted on the anglicized version of the student’s name by using the /z/ in place of the Bengali /j/.

Anyone interested in language contact, bilingualism, multilingualism, language policy, or heritage language classroom practices should find very worthwhile the narratives and rich, authentic examples taken from audio and video recordings of interactions among students, teachers, and parents in complementary school communities.