The study of language maintenance and shift (LMS) has attracted a large body of empirical work in language policy and planning (LPP) contexts, including allochthonous (immigrant) and autochthonous (indigenous) languages. However, some critical ontological questions that relate to the scope and terminology of language maintenance studies remain…

Community language schools are grassroots initiatives set up by immigrant communities aiming to teach language and culture to children and descendants of migrants. During the COVID-19 pandemic, issues around ICT and equity sat at the heart of educational planning, ranging from student access to ICT to ensuring teachers' understanding of…

Family language policy (FLP) impacts the maintenance of heritage language(s) in the family domain, where parents play a crucial role in making language-related decisions for their children. Globalisation, immigration, the COVID-19 pandemic, and digital communication have all affected FLP. Studies are now calling for examining how dispersed…

In this paper, we provide an overview of the policies that have existed in relation to Australian First Nations students' languages, and English language and literacy learning before exploring how the politics of distraction manifests in this context. We then share our findings of an analysis of Australian language education policies for First…

This study took a mixed-methods approach to investigate family language planning (FLP) in Hungarian families raising children in Australia. The study aimed to explore the complex factors impacting FLP and how families responded to the rapidly changing social conditions during the outbreak of Covid-19. The pandemic highlighted the shifting…

This study explores community language school teachers' access to classroom resources and school facilities within a framework of educational equity. Community language schools are significant language education providers that exist worldwide. In Australia, as elsewhere in the world, these schools often borrow a classroom at a mainstream school to…

The literature on English-medium instruction (EMI) has predominantly focused on contexts where English is not the first language. Little is known about EMI in traditional English-speaking (Anglophone) contexts like Australia, where English is the first language. The highly internationalised Australian higher education has witnessed a growing…

Following the invasion, or colonisation as some prefer to call it, Indigenous Australia has been characterised by plummeting populations, largely as a result of introduced diseases and the movement of peoples, following the theft of their lands and in response to colonial and subsequent Australian state and federal government policies. At times,…

The diversity of language in Australia in pre-invasion times is well attested, with at least 300 distinct languages being spoken along with many dialects. At that time, many Indigenous people were multilingual, often speaking at least four languages. Today many of these languages have been lost, with fewer than 15 being learned by children as a…

This paper examines how language development aid is managed and distributed via grant programs administered by federal and state Aboriginal affairs departments across Australia. While these departments are not the only organisations offering grants for development and language-related projects in Australia, they are in a good position to…

This article reports on language narratives in the ecology of a Vietnamese community language school (VCLS) in Australia. The study takes a dialogical perspective, where the stories about language that informants in the research setting tell are understood to shape and be shaped by the contexts in which they are told. Systematic analysis of…

This overview identifies some common features of macro-level language planning and briefly summarises the changing approaches to the analysis of macro-planning in the field. It previews six cases of language-in-education planning in response to linguistic diversity presented by the contributors to this issue. The cases show how macro-planning can…

The heterogeneous backgrounds, languages and proficiencies students bring to the classroom have always been a key challenge facing schools that wish to implement heritage language programmes. In this article I describe the evolution of one high school's approach to heritage language education and some of the roadblocks they encountered in…

This paper provides an example of micro-planning which involves community, government and non-government organisations both in the context of immigrants' source and host countries. The community in question is the Hungarian diaspora in Australia. The language planning activities are aimed at maintaining an immigrant heritage language and identity.…

David Ingram's career has traversed several decades of shifting rationale for language policy in Australia. Government and institutional initiatives have at various times favoured traditional foreign language teaching, multicultural imperatives and language diversity, concern for Asian economically strategic languages, or a focus on literacy in…