This commentary highlights major validation challenges raised, explicitly or implicitly, from the four articles in the special issue on "Validity Considerations for Assessing Language Proficiency in Young Language Minority Students." They are concerned with: (1) the construct definition in consideration of young language-minority (LM)…

The impact of neoliberalism on language education has recently attracted scholars' attention. Linguistic entrepreneurship is a conceptual lens through which neoliberal implications for language learning and use can be investigated. This commentary offers comments on common threads of themes running through the four articles in this special issue.…

In this commentary, Flores states that language policing traps language-minoritized students in the position of having to reject their home language practices as inferior to the language practices of schooling. Language-minoritized students who are unable or unwilling to conform to these expectations, says Flores, are placed in the solitary…

The author of this chapter observes that post-9/11 there has been a rapid and significant retrenchment of multiculturalism as public policy, particularly within education. This apparent retrenchment of multiculturalism as public policy has been bolstered by parallel arguments for a more "cosmopolitan" approach to education within an…

This special issue devoted to Catalonia--one of the most successful and longstanding language movements in Europe--gives a unique opportunity to understand some of the complex social dynamics engendered as language revival unfolds and to appreciate the value of in-depth interviewing, focus groups, and ethnographic work in making sometimes subtle…

The content of the present issue of "Review of Research in Education" (RRE) is timely and important, allowing considered, multiperspectival active reflection, what the author calls cerebration, on language diversity as well as a call for concerted action for linking better the findings of research to the imperatives of teaching. In…

In this chapter, the author reviews the legal trajectory of language rights in public schooling in the United States and how language has been intertwined with other policy issues in court cases aimed at expanding access and equity for minority students: desegregation and school finance. Most of these cases originated in the Southwestern United…

The purpose of this article is to respond to a review of the report "Developing Literacy in Second-language Learners: Report of the National Literacy Panel on Language Minority Children and Youth," written by our respected colleague Kathy Escamilla, which appeared in a recent edition of the "Journal of Literacy Research." This will also give us…

During the past two decades, field linguists have expressed serious concerns over the unprecedented rapid loss of "indigenous languages", the endangerment of many others, and the implications of these processes for the education and economic development of "indigenous populations", among other matters. The book to which this article responds is a…

This document is an extension of "Resource Needs for California's English Learners" and is the result of deliberations from several informal meetings and two formal meetings of major stakeholders in the area of English Learner (EL) education. Its intent is to suggest a series of policy options, based on data examined in the initial…

Subtractive education through the medium of a dominant language often transfers Indigenous and minority (IM) children to the dominant group linguistically and culturally within one or two generations. It may lead to the extinction of Indigenous languages, thus contributing to the disappearance of the world's linguistic diversity. A partial result…

This paper presents the root causes of the resistance of mainstream European educational institutions to implementation of minority language programmes (bilingual programmes with both an official/dominant language and an immigrant minority language as media of instruction). Differential treatment of different minority languages in the mainstream…

Charts the recent debates in France in response to the European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages that, if ratified and implemented, would grant limited protection to minority regional languages there. Examines the tenor and substance of the debates surrounding the fate of the charter. Argues that much of its opposition rests on France's…

This paper examines the amount and type of resources that linguistic minority students--those students who come from households where a language other than English is spoken--need to meet the same challenging standards and to have the opportunity to achieve the same educational outcomes as other students. In this paper we first describe the nature…

Language education for students of color is a neutral process. The education of linguistically diverse students is situated in larger issues concerning white supremacy and the distribution of wealth and power. In this article, I argue that the English-only language policy contained within No Child Left Behind (NCLB) justifies a hierarchical racial…