ABSTRACT
In the same school as Nozrul is Abdul, a fourteen-year-old Bangladeshi boy who has been living in the UK for eighteen months and who had virtually no written or spoken English on arrival. Much of his time at the school has been spent in small withdrawal groups, but now he spends the vast majority of his time in mainstream classes, sometimes with the support of a member of the school’s EAL department. Perceived by his English teacher as a ‘polite, hardworking student’, he is following, among other subjects, a public examination course in English, in an unsetted class in which he is one of ten Sylheti-speakers and in which all but two students are bilingual.
