Mandarin Chinese is the fastest growing foreign language by number of students in the world [Ding and Saunders 2006. "Talking up China: An Analysis of China's Rising Cultural Power and Global Promotion of the Chinese Language." "East Asia" 23 (2): 3-33], but little is known about how it is taking hold in compulsory education in…

The present article contributes to attempts to re-conceptualise the top-down perspective on language policy, by analysing the role of local and city governments' agency in language education policy making. Only few studies analyse the role of lower administrative levels in language policy, other than in implementation of governmental policies, why…

Greater China is used in this article to refer to mainland China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and Macao. While a holistic approach is adopted to present and compare the rapid spread of English and development in English language education in these geographically close, and sociopolitically, culturally and economically interrelated but hugely…

This paper examines the role that cultural identity and grassroots activism and community development have played in the creation, maintenance and expansion of Louisiana French immersion education. Although linguists tend to portray the extinction of endangered minority languages as inevitable, research on the effects of minority language…