Educational policies and practices in the current age of heightened globalization are increasingly grounded on unjust binary curriculum approaches that favor educational designs from Minority-World countries at the expense of epistemologies of indigenous people in Majority-World nations that are typically deemed culturally inferior (Gupta, 2015).…

The articles in this issue of "Language and Education" highlight three important areas of research that inspire empirical investigation and theoretical debate in the field of language policy and planning (LPP): (1) the tension between power and agency, (2) the multi-layered nature of policy-making, and (3) researcher positionality. This…

Objective: Taiwan recently published new language education policy documents and Indigenous language textbooks to support the emerging Indigenous language revitalization initiative. Thus, this study investigates how these current Indigenous policy documents and textbooks portray Indigenous agency and also examine how their contents construct…

A growing body of research has demonstrated that neoliberal discourses have negatively impacted dual language bilingual education (DLBE) for students designated as English learners. This study uses the concept of expropriation to refer to the co-opting and dispossessing of educational resources, opportunities, and rights from language-minoritized…

Language education and schooling are important topics in post-conflict contexts. This study explores the existing situation of mother tongue education in the de facto Abkhazia. The study had the following research questions: (1) What was the ethnic composition of Abkhazia during the Soviet Union, and how Russian occupation changed it? (2) How well…

The prevalence of English monolingualism in the current sociopolitical public has well been documented in the field of educational linguistics. In the United States, the monolingual underpinnings of educational policies have been criticized extensively for putting language minority (LM) students at a disadvantage. An important consequence of such…

This paper seeks to understand why the educational experiences of ethnic minority Chinese lag behind the educational experiences of Han Chinese through the lens of multiculturalism education. We conduct a critical discourse analysis of educational laws and policies from 1982 to 2012 to trace how multicultural education is articulated in Chinese…

The management of bilingualism in the Spanish autonomous community of Navarre is a source of tension. The implementation of English medium of instruction in the public educational system has clashed with attempts to break with the linguistic territoriality regime by promoting Basque schooling. This paper brings together ideologies on English and…

The medium of instruction (MOI) has been a contested issue in multilingual polities globally, as English medium of instruction (EMI) has seen unprecedented growth, threatening the use and sometimes very survival of local/indigenous and even national languages. While the struggles to address related issues have been well researched, how and why…

The concept "language legitimacy", which entails issues of social class, ethnicity and culture as well as those of dominance and power, is a very important one with implications for both educational policy and practice. This article begins with a brief discussion of the two major ways in which the concept of "language…

This article explores the mobilization dynamics of a school-based minority language revitalization initiative in the French Basque Country, known as the Ikastola Movement. Bringing the study of language revitalization into dialogue with social movement theory, I discuss how the solidarity of Basque language activists was influenced by state-level…

In 2000, voters in the US state of Arizona passed Proposition 203 "English for the Children," effectively abolishing bilingual education services in favor of a submersion approach termed Sheltered English Immersion. In this discussion, I use an ethnographic lens to highlight the logistical complexities involved in the negotiation of…

Issues related to supporting the language of schooling have become important social and educational policy concerns in Ireland. This article reports on a three-year investigation of the micro-climate of English language support provision in 70 post-primary schools since 2007 and highlights potential points of leverage in the educational system for…

Presents findings of a study of Bangladeshi women's relations with their children's school in Birmingham in the United Kingdom, and the ways in which languages and literacies are regarded as thresholds of power between the minority-culture women and the dominant-culture institution. Mothers of 6-year-old children were interviewed about their…