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This paper is based on an ethnographic project carried out in primary classrooms in the North West of England. The focus of the project was on ways in which the 'roles' of new bilingual classroom assistants were being defined through the organisational practices and communicative routines of daily life in these classrooms (practices and routines primarily orchestrated by monolingual class teachers). We looked at these classroom processes by incorporating insights from classroom observation, from participants' own accounts and from our own analyses of audio and video-recordings of different types of teaching/learning events. We present an account of bilingual teaching/learning events in which the bilingual assistants were able to use the children's home or community language and draw on 'funds of knowledge' (Moll et al., 1992) associated with worlds beyond the school. In our analysis of these events, we focus in particular on: ways in which they drew on the bilingual resources within their communicative repertoire in negotiating their relationship with the children; ways in which they linked home and school contexts for learning; and verbal and non-verbal ways in which knowledge of the world beyond the school was contextualised in classroom discourse.
