Myanmar has experienced more upheaval and crisis in the past decade than perhaps any of the other nations currently members of the Association of Southeast Nations (ASEAN). The impact of the twin crises of COVID and the February 1, 2021 military coup, on the heels of massive educational reforms in Myanmar, has created a crucible in which teachers…

This paper examines recent reforms in English-language testing in Japan using a policy distraction framework. We identify the term 'washback (effect)' and other related discourses as major distractors and investigate how 'washback' discourses have functioned as political slogans or catchphrases in policy deliberation processes and how they have…

This study aims to motivate researchers, teachers and learners to utilize critical social research methodology in the field of second language learning and teaching in which neoliberalism and neocolonialism have been profoundly embedded and overwhelmingly dominant. Therefore, critical reflection (CR), participatory action (PAR) and emancipatory…

This qualitative research study sought to understand teachers' resistance to English language educational change in Kyrgyzstan. The participants were six English teachers working in both rural and urban public schools in Kyrgyzstan. Analysis of non-participant observation and post-observation interviews revealed that, despite changes in English…

China's impressive growth over the last three decades warrants the need to re-evaluate the position and positioning of English in the country's educational system. For long, English has been taught and learned compulsorily alongside Chinese and maths in primary and secondary schools in the mainland of China. It was not until recent years that the…

Within the spirit of conspiration, this article brings together contributions from participants of the PhD-led UCL Reading and React Group 'Colonialism(s), Neoliberalism(s) and Language Teaching and Learning', which ran in 2019/20. Weaving together various perspectives, the article centres on the dialogic nature of the decolonial enterprise and…

The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) has long been considered a global policy in language education. It has been borrowed and adopted by different polities across the world. However, it is still not clear why the CEFR, intended for European usage, has become a ubiquitous tool for overhauling the quality of teaching and…

Whereas major research universities may accommodate programs of study in Arabic, Chinese, or Persian, regional universities and liberal arts colleges have struggled to adapt to a wider and more complex array of world languages and literatures in the 21st century. Many have been forced to choose between radically restructuring or closing programs…

The issues addressed in this work concern primarily the linguistic history and the different language policies that have been adopted from independence till today. Through this paper, the author aims to tackle the status of foreign languages in the Algerian educational system and the extent to which English has been promoted on the expanse of…

This article offers a critical appraisal of "educación intercultural bilingüe," an educational model with at least five decades of implementation. When this term was coined, Indigenous populations were mostly monolingual and their settlements mostly rural and distant from the seats of cultural hegemony and power. The situation is now…

International social unrest in recent years has resulted in many people choosing or being forced to leave their home countries to seek better lives elsewhere, causing drastic demographic shifts. Yet, it has been pointed out that institutional policies and practices in many countries have not caught up with such changing demographics, which have…

The article seeks to formulate a comparative framework that explains the uneven development of schooling in Cyprus and Singapore during the British colonial rule. It specifically focuses on the moment of transition to independence and on the role played by ideas and the interaction of ideas in the evolution of social institutions. The overall…

Situated within the context of globalization, the purpose of this historical policy analysis study was to identify and describe the ways in which multiple actors shaped national higher education internationalization policy within the U.S., and to capture the emerging direction in higher education internationalization policy at the national level…

Despite a century-old narrative as a monolingual country with quaint regional dialects, Thailand is in fact a country of vast linguistic diversity, where a population of approximately 60 million speak more than 70 languages representing five distinct language families (Luangthongkum, 2007; Premsrirat, 2011; Smalley, 1994), the result of a history…

The government of the Sultanate of Oman actively promotes the value of English as a global "lingua franca" to support modernization and national economic growth. This policy, however, creates difficulties for many teachers, who find themselves implementing certain practices that conflict with a vision of English language teaching (ELT)…