The role of agency in language planning and policy (LPP) is a recent focus of scholarship. Interest in agency has seen new issues and contexts being given prominence in LPP research. In this introduction, we present an overview of theoretical definitions of agency and the ways it has emerged as a concept in LPP scholarship. We consider how…

This paper examines the development of the First Language Maintenance and Development (FLMD) program in South Australia. This program is the main language policy activity that specifically focuses on language maintenance in government primary schools and has existed since 1986. During this time, the program has evolved largely as the result of ad…

This paper overviews issues relating to the role of ideologies and attitudes in multilingual education (MLE). It argues that ideologies and attitudes are constituent parts of the language planning process and shape the possibilities for multilingualism in educational programmes in complex ways, but most frequently work to constrain the ways that…

Even though pedagogy and language policy and planning are well researched and well-established fields in their own rights, the relationships between these two fields are not systematically addressed. One of the consequences of this situation is that our understanding of the impact of policy on practices of language teaching is not clearly…

This paper overviews some of the domains of application of micro-level language planning approaches to foster multilingual education. It examines the language planning of local agents and the contexts in which their work contributes to multilingual education, either to expand or limit educational possibilities. It identifies four broad contexts of…

Language is central to the practice of religion and decisions about language use characterise the ways in which religious practice is constructed. In the religious domain, language is often viewed as having more than a communicative function and languages themselves may have the status of holy artefacts. This attribution of holiness plays a…

This book examines the ideological underpinnings of language-in-education policies that explicitly focus on adding a new language to the learners' existing repertoire. It examines policies for foreign languages, immigrant languages, indigenous languages and external language spread. Each of these contexts provides for different possible…

This paper investigates the place of pedagogy in language-in-education policy through an analysis of how the macro-level of government policy interacts with the micro-level of local educational practice. It argues that pedagogy is typically considered a micro-level activity and policy frequently devolves decision-making about pedagogy to…

Feminist language planning is an active engagement with the ways in which language represents and reproduces gender. It is not specifically concerned with the ways in which language presents women, although this is a major focus, but rather how language positions both males and females and how it enters into the social practices that gender people…

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…

Australia's language and multicultural policies have constructed the intercultural dimension of Australian identity and practice in a number of different ways relating to different community groups. This paper traces the evolution of multicultural policy from the 1970s until the present through the main national policy documents in order to…

This paper examines ways in which language planning has been used to address issues of security. It gives an overview of a range of areas of security in which government-level language planning has had a role as a way of developing a typology of language planning work in this area. It examines the nexus between language, communication and security…

Discusses the impact of the development of a dictionary of Jersey Norman French. The dictionary has created a perception among speakers of Jersey French that they did not know the language. This perception appears to be the result of the ecological change that the dictionary produced by repositioning the language from an oral habitat to a written…

Language planning for literacy has typically focused on models of provision of print-based literacy programmes in order to develop widespread literate capabilities in reading and writing. This paper argues that contemporary literacy planning needs to consider more than models of delivery and engage with issues related to defining the nature of…

Australia's language-in-education policy documents have consistently included references to the place of "culture" in language teaching. This paper seeks to examine how the major national policies conceptualise culture and interculturality in relationship to languages education. For each policy, this study will analyse the language…