Kelleen Toohey
Biographic Data
| ID | 157489 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Kelleen Toohey |
| GIVEN NAMES | Kelleen |
| FAMILY NAME | Toohey |
| SIGNATURE | TOOHEY K |
| AFFILIATIONS | Simon Fraser University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0602-2967 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 273 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 24 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1985 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Overview of Qualitative Research in Applied Linguistics
This entry provides an overview of Qualitative Methods in Applied Linguistics. Three categories organize the entries: (a) Theoretical‐, philosophical‐, and discipline‐based perspectives; (b) Qualitative research design and methodology; and (c) Qualitative research committed to specific sociopolitical and ethical positions. The categories overlap significantly but reflect entries' major emphases. The first category includes entries outlining the h…
Posthuman Perspectives in Applied Linguistics Inquiry
Posthuman perspectives are of increasing interest across diverse disciplines (applied linguistics, feminism, animal science, philosophy, sociology, geography, and several others). A commonality across these perspectives may be recognition of the need to go beyond the binary understandings of Western humanism (e.g., male/female, nature/culture, mind/body, human/non‐human, words/deeds, and so on) and concomitant hierarchies of value. While humanism…
A different difference in teacher education
In this paper we propose that posthuman and decolonizing perspectives on difference might provide a foundation for English as an additional language (EAL) teacher education programs. We briefly examine current outcomes of schooling for EAL students and current teacher education in Canada, showing the necessity and urgency of developing practices for equity. We then discuss posthuman perspectives on difference and their intersections with decoloni…
The Onto-Epistemologies of New Materialism
The Douglas Fir Group (2016) argued that applied linguistics needed new interdisciplinary perspectives, and I suggest here that the concepts provided by new materialism might aid in gaining such perspectives. New materialism foregrounds the material nature of humans, discourses, machines, other objects, other species, and the natural environment, as well as constant change, non-binary thinking, and the porosity of boundaries; it also asks for the…
Disrupting Boundaries in Education and Research
In Disrupting Boundaries in Education and Research, six educational researchers explore together the potentialities of transdisciplinary research that de-centres human behaviour and gives materiality its due in the making of educational worlds. The book presents accounts of what happens when researchers think and act with new materiality and post-human theories to disrupt boundaries such as self and other, human and non-human, representation and …
Multilingual and multimodal composition at school
In this article, we explain how recent research on multilingualism, multilingual education, and multimodality informs our thinking about the use of ScribJab, a multilingual iPad application and website (ScribJab.com), which enables users to compose, illustrate, and narrate stories in two languages. Drawing on excerpts from ethnographic observations in two schools, we recount how students and teachers took up ScribJab and illustrate how the tool's…
Les théories de l'investissement et la prise en compte de la matérialité dans les situations d'apprentissage des langues
Pour illustrer comment les théories de la matérialité (Barad, 2007 ; Ingold, 2011 ; Latour, 2005) informent nos recherches plus récentes, nous présentons un bref sommaire de quelques résultats de deux projets de production vidéo menés auprès d'enfants bilingues et plurilingues en situation d'apprentissage de l'anglais. Nous proposons que l'analyse des réseaux formés par les outils de production, les enfants et les autres participants humains et m…
That Sounds So Cooool”
Many observers have argued that minority language speakers often have difficulty with school‐based literacy and that the poorer school achievement of such learners occurs at least partly as a result of these difficulties. At the same time, many have argued for a recognition of the multiple literacies required for citizens in a 21st century world. In this study the researchers examined a specific case in which English language learners ( ELL s) ma…
Richard F. Young
In Discursive Practice in Language Learning and Teaching, Richard Young shows how recent seemingly diverse theoretical perspectives and empirical studies in linguistics, applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, anthropology, sociology, and philosophy can be synthesized to provide language educators and language education researchers with rich descriptive and analytical means to investigate the relationship between language learning and learning con…
Identity, language learning, and social change
In this review article on identity, language learning, and social change, we argue that contemporary poststructuralist theories of language, identity, and power offer new perspectives on language learning and teaching, and have been of considerable interest in our field. We first review poststructuralist theories of language, subjectivity, and positioning and explain sociocultural theories of language learning. We then discuss constructs of inves…
Hidden Losses
Data from ESL students’ records in Vancouver are examined in the light of the BC Ministry of Education’s claim that ESL high school students are more successful than students whose first language is English. We argue that the academic achievement of well-to-do students whose parents are skilled workers or entrepreneurs may mask the completion rates of students who entered BC through the family and refugee classes. The latter students, like their …
A Multilingual Child's Literacy Practices and Contrasting Identities in the Figured Worlds of French Immersion Classrooms
In this paper, we explore the intersection of practice, identity, resources and literacy central to the New Literacy Studies and recent second language research informed by sociocultural theories of learning and language. Drawing on the construct figured worlds of literacy that describe how representations of literacy practices invoked in relation to certain people frame their social position and the construction of their identities, we discuss l…
Fighting Structural and Power Inequities
(2005). Fighting Structural and Power Inequities: Two Perspectives. Curriculum Inquiry: Vol. 35, No. 4, pp. 483-491
Critical Pedagogies and Language Learning
This important volume on the critical pedagogical approach addresses such topics as critical multiculturalism, gender and language learning, and popular culture. Critical pedagogies are instructional approaches aimed at transforming existing social relations in the interest of greater equity in schools and communities. This paperback edition on the pedagogical approach addresses such topics as critical multiculturalism, gender and language learni…
Articles
Using Bourdieu’s theory of different types of capital and social “fields,” this paper analyzes one curriculum model, the ESL Co-op program, which is designed to meet the needs of immigrant adolescents who are primarily dependent on their first language. The program couples instruction in English as a second language (ESL) with work experience. ESL Co-op is offered in two secondary schools in a suburban Vancouver school district that is the most r…
Disputes in Child L2 Learning
This article concerns how peer disputes are involved in classroom language learning. Drawing from data collected in a longitudinal study of six young English language learners in Canadian public school classrooms, the article shows how two girls (one of Polish background and one of Punjabi Sikh background) differentially engage in disputes. Disputes appeared to provide the Polish child with occasions to negotiate new meanings or to negotiate or d…
Changing Perspectives on Good Language Learners
Language and culture are no longer scripts to be acquired, as much as they are conversations in which people can participate.The question of who is learning what and how much is essentially a question of what conversations they are part of, and this question is a subset of the more powerful question of what conversations are around to be had in a given culture.(McDermott, 1993, p. 295) n The notion of best practices has been a preoccupation in a …
"Comments on Kelleen Toohey's "'Breaking Them up, Taking Them Away'
Kelleen Toohey, Comments on Kelleen Toohey's "'Breaking Them up, Taking Them Away': ESL Students in Grade 1": The Use of the Community-of-Practice Perspective in Language Minority Research. The Author Responds, TESOL Quarterly, Vol. 33, No. 1 (Spring, 1999), pp. 132-136
Breaking Them up, Taking Them Away
This article describes a longitudinal ethnographic research project in a Grade 1 classroom enrolling L2 learners and Anglophones. Using a community-of-practice perspective rarely applied in L2 research, the author examines three classroom practices that she argues contribute to the construction of L2 learners as individuals and as such reinforce traditional second language acquisition perspectives. More importantly, they serve to differentiate pa…
Developing Critical Perspectives on Beginning Literacy
From the Ethnography of Communication to Critical Ethnography in ESL Teacher Education
The TESOL Quarterly publishes brief commentaries on aspects of English language teaching. For this issue, we asked two teacher educators the following question: How has qualitative research informed your work in teacher education
"A Response to "Minority Education Policy
A Response to “Minority Education Policy
(1989). A Response to “Minority Education Policy: Assumptions and Propositions”. Curriculum Inquiry: Vol. 19, No. 4, pp. 431-435
Minority Educational Failure
This paper examines pedagogical responses to the documentation of the features of non-standard dialects in the United States, Britain, Canada, and the Caribbean over about the last 20 years. It is argued that, beyond demonstrating the universal principle that all dialects are structurally equal, rule-governed, and complex, there have been few positive results in schools for non-standard dialect-speaking students of the efforts to document structu…
Northern Native Canadian language education
Cet article débat de l'établissement d'une éducation unilingue anglaise dans les écoles autochtones de l'Ontario nord. Cet établissement a coincidé avec un accroissement du contrôle gouvernemental fédéral sur les écoles autochtones, ainsi que sur une implication accrue du fédéral dans la vie communautaire en général, à partir des années 50. Une évaluation de la pratique de l'anglais chez les élèves d'une école autochtone de l'Ontario nord en 1980…
Identity, language learning, and social change
In this review article on identity, language learning, and social change, we argue that contemporary poststructuralist theories of language, identity, and power offer new perspectives on language learning and teaching, and have been of considerable interest in our field. We first review poststructuralist theories of language, subjectivity, and positioning and explain sociocultural theories of language learning. We then discuss constructs of inves…
Changing Perspectives on Good Language Learners
Language and culture are no longer scripts to be acquired, as much as they are conversations in which people can participate.The question of who is learning what and how much is essentially a question of what conversations they are part of, and this question is a subset of the more powerful question of what conversations are around to be had in a given culture.(McDermott, 1993, p. 295) n The notion of best practices has been a preoccupation in a …
That Sounds So Cooool”
Many observers have argued that minority language speakers often have difficulty with school‐based literacy and that the poorer school achievement of such learners occurs at least partly as a result of these difficulties. At the same time, many have argued for a recognition of the multiple literacies required for citizens in a 21st century world. In this study the researchers examined a specific case in which English language learners ( ELL s) ma…
Breaking Them up, Taking Them Away
This article describes a longitudinal ethnographic research project in a Grade 1 classroom enrolling L2 learners and Anglophones. Using a community-of-practice perspective rarely applied in L2 research, the author examines three classroom practices that she argues contribute to the construction of L2 learners as individuals and as such reinforce traditional second language acquisition perspectives. More importantly, they serve to differentiate pa…
Multilingual and multimodal composition at school
In this article, we explain how recent research on multilingualism, multilingual education, and multimodality informs our thinking about the use of ScribJab, a multilingual iPad application and website (ScribJab.com), which enables users to compose, illustrate, and narrate stories in two languages. Drawing on excerpts from ethnographic observations in two schools, we recount how students and teachers took up ScribJab and illustrate how the tool's…
Hidden Losses
Data from ESL students’ records in Vancouver are examined in the light of the BC Ministry of Education’s claim that ESL high school students are more successful than students whose first language is English. We argue that the academic achievement of well-to-do students whose parents are skilled workers or entrepreneurs may mask the completion rates of students who entered BC through the family and refugee classes. The latter students, like their …
Disputes in Child L2 Learning
This article concerns how peer disputes are involved in classroom language learning. Drawing from data collected in a longitudinal study of six young English language learners in Canadian public school classrooms, the article shows how two girls (one of Polish background and one of Punjabi Sikh background) differentially engage in disputes. Disputes appeared to provide the Polish child with occasions to negotiate new meanings or to negotiate or d…
Les théories de l'investissement et la prise en compte de la matérialité dans les situations d'apprentissage des langues
Pour illustrer comment les théories de la matérialité (Barad, 2007 ; Ingold, 2011 ; Latour, 2005) informent nos recherches plus récentes, nous présentons un bref sommaire de quelques résultats de deux projets de production vidéo menés auprès d'enfants bilingues et plurilingues en situation d'apprentissage de l'anglais. Nous proposons que l'analyse des réseaux formés par les outils de production, les enfants et les autres participants humains et m…
Minority Educational Failure
This paper examines pedagogical responses to the documentation of the features of non-standard dialects in the United States, Britain, Canada, and the Caribbean over about the last 20 years. It is argued that, beyond demonstrating the universal principle that all dialects are structurally equal, rule-governed, and complex, there have been few positive results in schools for non-standard dialect-speaking students of the efforts to document structu…
Northern Native Canadian language education
Cet article débat de l'établissement d'une éducation unilingue anglaise dans les écoles autochtones de l'Ontario nord. Cet établissement a coincidé avec un accroissement du contrôle gouvernemental fédéral sur les écoles autochtones, ainsi que sur une implication accrue du fédéral dans la vie communautaire en général, à partir des années 50. Une évaluation de la pratique de l'anglais chez les élèves d'une école autochtone de l'Ontario nord en 1980…
Minority Educational Failure
This paper examines pedagogical responses to the documentation of the features of non-standard dialects in the United States, Britain, Canada, and the Caribbean over about the last 20 years. It is argued that, beyond demonstrating the universal principle that all dialects are structurally equal, rule-governed, and complex, there have been few positive results in schools for non-standard dialect-speaking students of the efforts to document structu…
"A Response to "Minority Education Policy
A Response to “Minority Education Policy
(1989). A Response to “Minority Education Policy: Assumptions and Propositions”. Curriculum Inquiry: Vol. 19, No. 4, pp. 431-435
From the Ethnography of Communication to Critical Ethnography in ESL Teacher Education
The TESOL Quarterly publishes brief commentaries on aspects of English language teaching. For this issue, we asked two teacher educators the following question: How has qualitative research informed your work in teacher education
Developing Critical Perspectives on Beginning Literacy
Breaking Them up, Taking Them Away
This article describes a longitudinal ethnographic research project in a Grade 1 classroom enrolling L2 learners and Anglophones. Using a community-of-practice perspective rarely applied in L2 research, the author examines three classroom practices that she argues contribute to the construction of L2 learners as individuals and as such reinforce traditional second language acquisition perspectives. More importantly, they serve to differentiate pa…
"Comments on Kelleen Toohey's "'Breaking Them up, Taking Them Away'
Kelleen Toohey, Comments on Kelleen Toohey's "'Breaking Them up, Taking Them Away': ESL Students in Grade 1": The Use of the Community-of-Practice Perspective in Language Minority Research. The Author Responds, TESOL Quarterly, Vol. 33, No. 1 (Spring, 1999), pp. 132-136
Articles
Using Bourdieu’s theory of different types of capital and social “fields,” this paper analyzes one curriculum model, the ESL Co-op program, which is designed to meet the needs of immigrant adolescents who are primarily dependent on their first language. The program couples instruction in English as a second language (ESL) with work experience. ESL Co-op is offered in two secondary schools in a suburban Vancouver school district that is the most r…
Disputes in Child L2 Learning
This article concerns how peer disputes are involved in classroom language learning. Drawing from data collected in a longitudinal study of six young English language learners in Canadian public school classrooms, the article shows how two girls (one of Polish background and one of Punjabi Sikh background) differentially engage in disputes. Disputes appeared to provide the Polish child with occasions to negotiate new meanings or to negotiate or d…
Changing Perspectives on Good Language Learners
Language and culture are no longer scripts to be acquired, as much as they are conversations in which people can participate.The question of who is learning what and how much is essentially a question of what conversations they are part of, and this question is a subset of the more powerful question of what conversations are around to be had in a given culture.(McDermott, 1993, p. 295) n The notion of best practices has been a preoccupation in a …
Critical Pedagogies and Language Learning
This important volume on the critical pedagogical approach addresses such topics as critical multiculturalism, gender and language learning, and popular culture. Critical pedagogies are instructional approaches aimed at transforming existing social relations in the interest of greater equity in schools and communities. This paperback edition on the pedagogical approach addresses such topics as critical multiculturalism, gender and language learni…
Fighting Structural and Power Inequities
(2005). Fighting Structural and Power Inequities: Two Perspectives. Curriculum Inquiry: Vol. 35, No. 4, pp. 483-491
A Multilingual Child's Literacy Practices and Contrasting Identities in the Figured Worlds of French Immersion Classrooms
In this paper, we explore the intersection of practice, identity, resources and literacy central to the New Literacy Studies and recent second language research informed by sociocultural theories of learning and language. Drawing on the construct figured worlds of literacy that describe how representations of literacy practices invoked in relation to certain people frame their social position and the construction of their identities, we discuss l…
Hidden Losses
Data from ESL students’ records in Vancouver are examined in the light of the BC Ministry of Education’s claim that ESL high school students are more successful than students whose first language is English. We argue that the academic achievement of well-to-do students whose parents are skilled workers or entrepreneurs may mask the completion rates of students who entered BC through the family and refugee classes. The latter students, like their …
Identity, language learning, and social change
In this review article on identity, language learning, and social change, we argue that contemporary poststructuralist theories of language, identity, and power offer new perspectives on language learning and teaching, and have been of considerable interest in our field. We first review poststructuralist theories of language, subjectivity, and positioning and explain sociocultural theories of language learning. We then discuss constructs of inves…
Richard F. Young
In Discursive Practice in Language Learning and Teaching, Richard Young shows how recent seemingly diverse theoretical perspectives and empirical studies in linguistics, applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, anthropology, sociology, and philosophy can be synthesized to provide language educators and language education researchers with rich descriptive and analytical means to investigate the relationship between language learning and learning con…
That Sounds So Cooool”
Many observers have argued that minority language speakers often have difficulty with school‐based literacy and that the poorer school achievement of such learners occurs at least partly as a result of these difficulties. At the same time, many have argued for a recognition of the multiple literacies required for citizens in a 21st century world. In this study the researchers examined a specific case in which English language learners ( ELL s) ma…
Multilingual and multimodal composition at school
In this article, we explain how recent research on multilingualism, multilingual education, and multimodality informs our thinking about the use of ScribJab, a multilingual iPad application and website (ScribJab.com), which enables users to compose, illustrate, and narrate stories in two languages. Drawing on excerpts from ethnographic observations in two schools, we recount how students and teachers took up ScribJab and illustrate how the tool's…
Les théories de l'investissement et la prise en compte de la matérialité dans les situations d'apprentissage des langues
Pour illustrer comment les théories de la matérialité (Barad, 2007 ; Ingold, 2011 ; Latour, 2005) informent nos recherches plus récentes, nous présentons un bref sommaire de quelques résultats de deux projets de production vidéo menés auprès d'enfants bilingues et plurilingues en situation d'apprentissage de l'anglais. Nous proposons que l'analyse des réseaux formés par les outils de production, les enfants et les autres participants humains et m…
Disrupting Boundaries in Education and Research
In Disrupting Boundaries in Education and Research, six educational researchers explore together the potentialities of transdisciplinary research that de-centres human behaviour and gives materiality its due in the making of educational worlds. The book presents accounts of what happens when researchers think and act with new materiality and post-human theories to disrupt boundaries such as self and other, human and non-human, representation and …
The Onto-Epistemologies of New Materialism
The Douglas Fir Group (2016) argued that applied linguistics needed new interdisciplinary perspectives, and I suggest here that the concepts provided by new materialism might aid in gaining such perspectives. New materialism foregrounds the material nature of humans, discourses, machines, other objects, other species, and the natural environment, as well as constant change, non-binary thinking, and the porosity of boundaries; it also asks for the…
A different difference in teacher education
In this paper we propose that posthuman and decolonizing perspectives on difference might provide a foundation for English as an additional language (EAL) teacher education programs. We briefly examine current outcomes of schooling for EAL students and current teacher education in Canada, showing the necessity and urgency of developing practices for equity. We then discuss posthuman perspectives on difference and their intersections with decoloni…
Overview of Qualitative Research in Applied Linguistics
This entry provides an overview of Qualitative Methods in Applied Linguistics. Three categories organize the entries: (a) Theoretical‐, philosophical‐, and discipline‐based perspectives; (b) Qualitative research design and methodology; and (c) Qualitative research committed to specific sociopolitical and ethical positions. The categories overlap significantly but reflect entries' major emphases. The first category includes entries outlining the h…
Posthuman Perspectives in Applied Linguistics Inquiry
Posthuman perspectives are of increasing interest across diverse disciplines (applied linguistics, feminism, animal science, philosophy, sociology, geography, and several others). A commonality across these perspectives may be recognition of the need to go beyond the binary understandings of Western humanism (e.g., male/female, nature/culture, mind/body, human/non‐human, words/deeds, and so on) and concomitant hierarchies of value. While humanism…
Sociology (19 works) · Pedagogy (16 works) · Psychology (14 works) · Multilingual Education and Policy (13 works) · EFL/ESL Teaching and Learning (10 works) · Mathematics education (9 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Linguistics (8 works) · Political science (8 works) · Second Language Learning and Teaching (7 works)