ABSTRACT
This chapter explores what happens when the notions of linguistic capital and cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1982/1991) are teamed with the notions of peer social capital (Valenzuela, 1999) and attentive silence (Cheung, 1993) to explain adolescents’ language practices in a multilingual high school. Although it is not typically discussed in educational research, “silence talks” (Gerrard and Javed, 1994: 65), and I will argue that an analysis of its presence can offer something significant to research on language practices and literacy education. In making this argument, I will draw upon the findings from a four-year critical ethnographic study (1996-2000) that investigated how immigrant high-school students born in Hong Kong used Cantonese as well as English to achieve academic and social success in a Canadian school where English was the language of instruction.1
