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…

The United States is undergoing a political tug-of-war between globalism and nationalism with world language education caught in the middle of this sociopolitical debate. The current political trend towards nationalism and isolationism is rendering world language education vulnerable to further cuts. This article discusses why it is vital for the…

Representations of a nation's history work as a powerful tool to consolidate a collective identity and build trust in the nation. School textbooks are ideological products that disseminate official ideas about a collective past and heritage; their depictions have an impact on shared understandings of a nation's history. However, what is included…

The historical reversal over the course of several centuries in the West is striking: while language has become much "more" central to public life and "more" politically contentious, religion has become "less" central to public life and "less" politically contentious, notwithstanding the resurgence of public…

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…

The Chinese language movement was launched by the Chinese educationists to demand the recognition of Chinese as an official language to legitimise the status of Chinese education in the national education system in Malaysia. It began in 1952 as a response to the British attempt to establish national primary schools teaching in English and Malay to…

In their study of language ideology, Valdes, Gonzalez, Lopez Garcia, and Marquez (2003) found evidence of a pervasive monolingualist ideology or "discourse of monolingualism" in college-level Spanish departments. This discourse, which mirrors national language ideologies in the United States, is premised on notions of nationalism, linguistic…

Nationalism presents significant challenges to intercultural competence instruction. On the one hand, nationalism promotes the compartmentalization of communities into mutually-exclusive and discretely-defined nationalist entities. In complementary fashion, nationalism also advocates the homogenization of cultural and linguistic practices within…

A middle-school classroom of English as a Second Language (ESL) for Somali and Vietnamese refugees is examined here. With Lefebvre's (1991) theory of the production of space and an additional help of postcolonial criticism (Fanon 1967; Willinsky 1998), this article first reviews how interplays among national flags, teaching and learning…

In this article, the author analyzes the policies that since the early 1990s have actively promoted the status of Spanish both as an international and global language. The focus is on the actions and discourses of Spain's primary language policy agencies, namely, the Cervantes Institute and the Spanish Royal Academy. Although the Institute has…

Danish as a second language textbooks published over the last 15 years have presented the Danish cultural identity as a homogenous and purely national phenomenon. Research into teaching theory, on the other hand, has been more broad-minded, and is based on interactivity. The aim of this paper is to explain this divergence. (Contains 2 notes.)

In recent years, public discourse about German national identity has increasingly focussed on the large foreign population within Germany's borders. Whilst right-wing politicians such as Edmund Stoiber foster fears of identity loss ("Uberfremdung"), more liberal observers, and indeed the ruling red-green coalition, acknowledge that…

Focuses on the increased teaching of French as a foreign language in colleges and the formation of a French Foreign Language Society. These developments are the result of several factors, including superior methods of teaching French, cooperation with countries previously colonized by France or Belgium, and the threat of economic domination by…

Proposes a model for rural education based on the progressive practices of a rural school in Israel in the early 1900s. Desirable characteristics of rural education are organized into four innovative educational models: education for work (including agricultural education); community education; social-ideological education; and curricular autonomy…