Focusing on language education policies in Bangladesh, this article shows how the policies have distracted people's attention from the harms inflicted on the country's Indigenous communities and their languages. I discuss two factors that have contributed to policy distractions in this context: a strong form of Bangla linguistic nationalism and a…

Singapore is an ethnically, linguistically, and culturally diverse nation-state that has always practiced deliberate language policy and planning. The bilingual education policy, introduced shortly after the young nation's independence has led to the emergence of English-knowing bilinguals who are proficient in both English and their ethnically…

This paper discusses how the political interplay between English-in-society and English-in-education policy in the Global South(s) facilitates what I term 'English as a subtle technology of policy distraction' in postcolonial spheres that were colonised by languages other than English. 'English as a subtle technology of policy distraction' is…

University classrooms are increasingly populated by students with diverse nationalities and native languages (L1). The growing number of students in English-led classrooms who speak English as a second or lower language (L2) may face added difficulties in understanding the specific task objectives or directions, as explained by native-…

In Hong Kong, Chinese and English are considered separate mediums of instruction. English immersion is expected for schools that teach with English as the medium of instruction, and direct instruction in Chinese is often used to teach English in Chinese medium schools. Evidently, a great divide persists in the Hong Kong government curriculum. In…

Language and learning norms constitute the biggest constraint for refugee learners attempting to access education in Uganda because they struggle to demonstrate competencies in English despite acquiring them in their local language (Arabic, French, or Swahili). Learners are assigned to lower levels, contributing to misalignment between their…

The paper focuses on the communication of three bilingual couples, each speaking a different lingua franca (LF). Positioning theory offers a methodological framework to explain language choice in interactive positioning within personal contacts. A comparative view of the couples' storylines benefits from the differences between them. The analysis…

This article compares metalinguistic awareness among emerging bilingual and multilingual learners of English in Norwegian primary school. Participants were 120 students in grades 5-7 (aged 10-13) attending mainstream English classes in Norway and were divided into three groups based on a linguistic background questionnaire: an L1 Norwegian group,…

This book demonstrates the importance of raising multilingual children in the UK, both for the children's own benefit and for the benefit of society as a whole. Against the backdrop of both the rich linguistic diversity already present in the UK and the challenges faced by any languages other than a few major European languages to find any space…

Storytelling passes down traditions and values while preserving languages and serving as a natural site for linguistic innovation and creativity. This article describes an approach to creating multilingual, multimodal stories that were developed for an after-school club at a rural Tanzanian secondary school. Club members told stories, wrote…

The aim of the Regional Dossier series is to provide concise descriptions of regional or minority languages in education, mainly in Europe but also in other parts of the world. The majority of the Hungarian-speaking population in Slovenia lives in the bilingual ethnically mixed area of the Prekmurje region, where both Slovene and Hungarian are…

The effect of first language transfer on second language acquisition and learning has been a major theoretical concept in second language research and pedagogy since the 1950s. In order to give a historical perspective, the authors offer a brief presentation of some of the major topics from the broad spectrum of issues that have been examined by…

Drawing on the concept of family language policy (FLP), this paper reports on how four Chinese-English interlingual families maintain the minority language of Chinese with their preteenager children in Australia. The study takes an integrative approach to explore both parents' and children's perspectives on language development. While highlighting…

What's the relevance of 'Linguistic Citizenship' (LC), a concept developed in southern Africa, to language education in England? LC is committed to democratic participation and voice, to linguistic diversity and the value of sociolinguistic understanding (Stroud 2001), and it provides a framework for contesting linguistic conditions in England,…

American Norwegian (AmNo), a moribund heritage variety of Norwegian spoken predominantly in the Upper Midwest of the US, licenses "wh"-infinitives (i.e. indirect questions), which are structures that are not acceptable in either standard Norwegian Bokmål or Norwegian dialects. Adopting a spanning-account of syntax (Blix, 2021; Julien,…