As global neoliberalism continues to take root, States aim to produce linguistically-skilled human capital to gain an advantage within highly-competitive market conditions. With this relationship in view, English language proficiency constitutes a 'rational' educational pathway for national and personal-level success within an outwardly…

Modern Foreign Languages (MFL) as a secondary school subject is affected by two policies, namely the English Baccalaureate (EBacc) and Progress 8, which contribute to the measurement of performance in exams at age 16 (GCSEs). In this paper, I discuss the concept of performance measurement in schools and the purpose it purportedly serves, before…

This paper explores Cultural and Creative Industry (CCI) teaching and curriculum development across disciplines, based on a case study of a newly established Cultural and Creative Industry (CCI) programme at the School of Modern Languages, Cardiff University, UK. It illustrates how different academic values and goals influence styles of teaching…

The article explores the ways in which concerns of history, in terms of content, concepts and methodology, find space or do not find space within textbooks used for teaching languages. These may be more important as sites of "knowledge" than social science books, because the latter are often regarded as insignificant within the formal…

There has been a rapid global expansion of English instruction in the early grades in public school curricula. Particularly in so-called developing countries, the increase of and its shift from exclusively private to public education is linked to the idea that acquiring English promotes personal, social, and economic development. The author takes…

The global middle class (GMC) is a theoretical construct that seeks to globalise a set of attributes identified in studies of school choice in the global north, and to a lesser extent in developing nations in Asia. As theorised by Ball a mobile middle class with cosmopolitan sensibilities drives international education options in global cities.…

Social capital--the social relations between people--is an important component of the family environment and is crucial for the creation of human capital for the next generation. Drawing on James S. Coleman's theory of family capital, this study focuses on parents' utilization of social capital to support children's literacy acquisition in four…

Research into parents' secondary-school choices suggests that many middle-class parents are keen to secure a middle-class peer group for their children. This article reports the findings of a small-scale, qualitative study into whether a similar phenomenon exists at primary-school level and, if so, why. In-depth interviews were conducted with 56…

This article uses ethnographic research from two Year 8 classes in two middle-sized secondary schools about a kilometre apart in a Swedish west-coast town to examine how new policies for personalised learning have developed in practice, in the performative cultures of modern schools in a commodity society. One school stands in a predominantly…

This article, part of a larger study, examines three middle-class, Hispanic Canadian families' conceptualizations of language, culture, and identity. Via an analysis of interview data, the findings indicate that the parents assigned diverse meanings to heritage language development (HLD) and held high expectations for their children's formation of…

Two-way bilingual immersion education, offered in a fast-growing number of primary schools in the United States, provides primary language maintenance to minority language speakers while simultaneously offering an enrichment "foreign" language immersion experience to English-speaking children in the same classroom, generally with the same teacher.…

This paper describes dominant discourses and practices which permeate English language learning and information and communication technologies (ICT). Through the adoption of a critical discourse analytic perspective, and drawing on New Literacy Studies research, it discusses how English language learning and ICT practices have come to take…