In her groundbreaking and innovative study the author takes us on a fascinating journey
through some of Madrid's multilingual and multicultural schools and reveals the role played by
linguistic practices in the construction of inequality through such processes as what she calls
de-capitalization and ethnicization. Through a critical sociolinguistic and discourse analysis
of the data collected in an ethnographic study the book shows the exclusion caused by
monolingualizing tendencies and ideologies of deficit in education and society.The book opens a
timely discussion of the management of diversity in multilingual and multicultural classrooms
both for countries with a long tradition of migration flows and for those where the phenomenon
is relatively new as is the case in Spain. This study of linguistic practices in the classroom
makes clear the need to rethink some key linguistic concepts such as practice competence
discourse and language and to integrate different approaches in qualitative research. The
volume is essential reading for students and researchers working in sociolinguistics education
and related areas as well as for all teachers and social workers who deal with the increasing
heterogeneity of our late modern societies in their work.
