Examining the impact of global forces on Chinese Malaysian language identities and practices illuminates the ongoing tensions between the external expectations for globally powerful languages such as English and Mandarin and the internal realities of how people respond to these and other languages in the specific contexts of their daily lives. For multilingual Chinese Malaysians, a combination of practical, strategic, symbolic, and emotional factors shape decisions about language acquisition and language use within the interconnected domains of family, education, religion, media, and occupational spheres. Although Chinese Malaysians and others connect the global spread of Mandarin to the emerging economic and political power of the PRC, there are major barriers to Mandarin becoming a globally significant language medium beyond the Chinese linguistic and cultural sphere. In the Malaysian context, Mandarin skills remain a key marker of Chinese ancestral and cultural identity, while English skills are valued primarily for their practical use.

This study examined whether the language sample elicitation technique (i.e., storytelling and story-retelling tasks with pictorial support) affects lexical diversity (D), grammaticality (grammatical errors per communication unit [GE/CU]), sentence length (mean length of utterance in words [MLUw]), and sentence complexity (subordination index [SI]), which are commonly used indices for diagnosing primary language impairment in Spanish-English-speaking children in the United States. Method: Twenty bilingual Spanish-English-speaking children with typical language development and 20 with primary language impairment participated in the study. Four analyses of variance were conducted to evaluate the effect of language elicitation technique and group on D, GE/CU, MLUw, and SI. Also, 2 discriminant analyses were conducted to assess which indices were more effective for story retelling and storytelling and their classification accuracy across elicitation techniques. Results: D, MLUw, and SI were influenced by the type of elicitation technique, but GE/CU was not. The classification accuracy of language sample analysis was greater in story retelling than in storytelling, with GE/CU and D being useful indicators of language abilities in story retelling and GE/CU and SI in storytelling. Conclusion: Two indices in language sample analysis may be sufficient for diagnosis in 4- to 5-year-old bilingual Spanish-English-speaking children.

This article offers critical perspectives on collaborative partnerships and feminist teaching that revise paradigms of power, prioritize student agency, enrich curriculum and scholarship, and sustain empowered communities of learning that challenge institutional compartmentalization. The authors reflect on how co-created curriculum can catalyze new professional partnerships that in turn contribute to refreshed learning experiences and communities. This article presents evidence of how a partnership orientation effectively encompasses an ethic and practice of feminist teaching, posits a framework of feminist pedagogy and praxis into the discourse of partnership, and exemplifies possibilities of these practices as important steps towards a (re)vision of liberatory learning.