This article bridges scholarship in global education with elementary classroom teaching by presenting a series of lessons that challenge the idea of national culture as fixed and stable. When teaching about another country other than the United States, teachers tend to rely on misappropriated generalizations around food, holidays, and folktales…

Research in international student success, satisfaction, and challenges seems still to be constructed around the colonial, imperial paradigm. Informed by deficit models of language, culture, and literacy teaching, such research portrays international students' challenges in terms of deficiency; discounts other languages, cultures, and literacy…

Teaching English literacy in First Nations Australian communities is bound up with the policy aim of improving the social and economic outcomes of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and the desire to acknowledge, recognise and respect their unique cultural identities, languages and knowledges. But for English literacy teachers working…

This paper discusses how I design and teach an Interculturality in Language and Literary Studies (ILLS) Course. In doing this, I am very much influenced by the post-structural and post-colonial and interdisciplinary nature of my PhD study. The course itself is for sixth semester undergraduate students, after they have passed Skilled Courses,…

Japan and Great Britain are both island nations with long histories. Nationalists in both nations like to emphasise the things that separate members of 'our' nation from others across the sea, and this includes language. In the British case the arrogant assumption that 'everyone else can learn English' has led to a serious decline in the number of…

Linguist Rosina Lippi-Green concludes in her book, "English with an Accent: Language, Ideology, and Discrimination in the United States," "Accent discrimination can be found everywhere in our daily lives. In fact, such behavior is so commonly accepted, so widely perceived as appropriate, that it must be seen as the last back door to…

This article discusses the relationship between values expressed by "Hindu children" in Norway and hegemonic "Norwegian values". The discussion is based on interviews with children from the Indian Punjabi and the Sri Lankan Tamil traditions and on observations in religious education (RE) lessons. The children emphasise the…

This is one of the commentaries on Wu's "Interpretation, autonomy, and transformation: Chinese pedagogic discourse in a cross-cultural perspective" ("JCS", 43(5), 569-590). It highlights the paper's demystification of Western pedagogic discourse and recovery of the meaning of Chinese traditional pedagogic discourse as a…

The paper argues that ethnolinguistic vitality depends on four crucial social psychological factors: perceived strength differential, intergroup distance, utilitarianism and intergroup discordance. The influence of these factors on the vitality of subordinate and dominant groups is outlined. It is proposed that the vitality of both types of groups…

In this paper I outline the challenges for feminist language planning in the context of a global lingua franca--English. Drawing upon the views of speakers of "World Englishes" I discuss their reactions as well as reported practices in relation to gender-inclusive language use. This reveals the complexities of managing the tension between the…

This paper describes a case study of language development in rural Papua New Guinea, in which parents felt the local school was not meeting the educational needs of their children. In this case study, the local, national and global narratives concerning use of the vernacular in education were apparent in the negotiation leading to an apparent…

This special issue of "mediAzioni," the online journal of the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies on Translation, Languages and Culture (SITLeC) of the University of Bologna at Forli, derives from the "Study Day on Child Language Brokering" held in Forli in 2008. The Study Day began with a morning session during which…

Learning new languages potentially gives people vital skills to build more successful relationships, and understanding the social influences at work today may help us to know which type of language education is most beneficial. This article explores three social influences--globalisation, localisation and glocalisation--from the perspective of…

Switzerland's multilingual and multicultural image as an exemplary model of successful cohabitation and conflict management gives a misleading static impression of harmonious intercultural relations. The highly complex Swiss society faces challenges from the coalition of cultural and linguistic entities that live beside, rather than with, one…

The incorporation of "creole" vernacular languages into texts written in "standard" languages is an especially fraught crossroads of intercultural communication. This article considers the difference between a kind of literary tourism in which non-Caribbean readers "taste" the flavour of creole language within…