This article focuses on the ever-increasing stress on multilingual education (MLE) in policy documents, especially its pairing with mother tongues in education (MTE). This focus brings into relief the relationship between MTE, the preservation of linguistic diversity and social democracy. We argue that the outcome of this relationship crucially…

There is a sizable Hungarian minority living in Romania, who have the right to learn in their mother-tongue. While most Hungarians are enrolled in Hungarian medium education, there is a small number of families who opt for mainstream Romanian monolingual schools. According to the Law, the latter group can choose to learn Hungarian in an optional…

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…

Background: Over the years, the majority of the Basotho nation and many countries have known Lesotho as a country which has Sesotho and English as the only spoken languages and as medium of instruction in schools. Whereas, in reality, Lesotho has many spoken languages. Many tribes have their own spoken languages which, hitherto, have not been…

Reading and comprehending the mother tongue is one of the most important basic academic skills required for the meaningful and significant learning of every subject, especially in earlier stages of education. Though National Policy Frameworks strongly advocate an integrated approach to the teaching of different skills of language, the school does…

This paper proposes a framework for multilingual language-in-education policy implementation, offered as a critically constructive response to India's recent "National Education Policy 2020" (GOI, 2020). Rooted in India's existing educational language policy, our linguistically inclusive 'Languages for Learning' (LFL) framework is, we…

This paper analyzes Nepal's language education policy from a decolonial perspective, examining how rights-based (neo)liberal ideologies and policies do not necessarily contribute to creating space, either ideological or implementational (Hornberger, 2005), for Indigenous languages in education. Drawing on the theory of "decoloniality"…

In honor of the 50th Anniversary of "Foreign Language Annals," and recognizing the seminal role this journal has in informing the language education profession about policies and programs, we sketch a future for advocacy for language education in the United States. Drawing on the Languages for All initiative and the work of the…

One in three children enrolled in US early childhood programs is a dual language learner. While dual language learners have been the target of sweeping educational reforms under the guise of justice, these reforms--which pathologize dual language learners as problems to be remediated rather than assets to be developed--have largely ignored the…

Histories of colonization conjointly with the current economic global climate have enabled English to become a dominant global language. The desire for citizens to attain English language proficiency on a nation-wide level is a common pursuit in developing countries, including the island nations of the South Pacific where English competency is…

Language policy and planning in Nepal has been contested due to the co-existence of multiple contradictory discourses concerning teaching and learning of local, national, foreign, and international languages. Recently a multilingual policy was issued to create space for the once-banned ethnic/indigenous languages in public schooling, further…

With an increase in multilingual learners in U.S. public schools, there is an imperative to understand the language practices, ideologies, and pedagogies within culturally and linguistically sustaining heritage language programs inside schools. Building on principles of translanguaging as a theory of practical language (Garcia, 2009; Li, 2018),…

Anxieties about Chinese-Mongolian-English trilingual program in Inner Mongolia reflect three linguistic ideologies, that is, the instrumental and the essentialist among Mongolian elites and the assimilationist among Han elites. Mongolian ethnicity is on trial in front of an upsurge of Chinese nationalism. Both pro and con trilingual education…

Dual language (DL) programs propose to be vehicles of social justice and transformation by valuing an additional language other than the dominant one in a society and thereby contesting language hierarchies and the subordination of those who speak/use a non-dominant language (Flores, Flores, Educational Policy 30:13-38, 2016; Menken and García,…

The language in education policy in Kenya recommends mother tongue education in primary school learning. The purpose of this study was to explore the development of mother tongues as academic languages at the lower primary section in which the languages are supposed to be used. The exploration was on the functions they play in classroom…