South Africa immediately springs to mind as the epitome of multilingual language policies. In fact, its Constitution granted official status to 11 languages in 1996, and the Language Policy in Higher Education passed by the Ministry of Education in 2002 required universities to develop and use the indigenous official languages as academic…

This paper analyses how teachers and toddlers enact participation frames in bidialectal early education in Limburg, the Netherlands. Teachers' language choice is often context-bound as they use the national language, Dutch, for instruction and the regional language, Limburgish, for playful or social-emotional situations with individual children.…

The aim of the Regional Dossier series is to provide concise descriptions of regional or minority languages in education, mainly in Europe but also in other parts of the world. The majority of the Hungarian-speaking population in Slovenia lives in the bilingual ethnically mixed area of the Prekmurje region, where both Slovene and Hungarian are…

This article makes the case for conducting ethnographic research of a multi-scalar nature that links language policy processes and ideologies of language with everyday practices, on the ground, in local schools and classrooms. As with other researchers engaged in the ethnography of language policy (e.g. McCarty, 2011; Johnson, 2013), my concern is…

This paper documents English teachers' and advanced English students' perspectives on the use of Spanish in the English classroom in Puerto Rico. Using qualitative data collection methods such as interviews and focus group data, the researchers document the ways that many English teachers on the island justify their use of Spanish in the English…

Language policy is an influencing factor of the educational outcome for pupils in Africa. Colonial languages have been largely used and African Languages are neglected. Despite this, the South African Constitution (1996) declares eleven official languages. However, curricular developments favour Afrikaans and English. To analyse the implementation…

With the increase in linguistic and cultural diversity in South Korea, the landscape of English education in Korean classrooms has been changing. This has led to an increased need to explore the language and literacy practices of the emergent multilingual youth in Korea where one (official) language (Korean) has been predominantly used as the…

The current study examines bilingual children as language policy agents in the interplay between official language policy and education policy at three Swedish-medium preschools in Finland. For this purpose we monitored nine Finnish-Swedish bilingual children aged 3 to 5 years for 18 months. The preschools were located in three different parts of…

The present contribution discusses the importance of communicative strategies in introducing English as a Lingua Franca (ELF). A brief meta-analysis of the research conducted in the area of pragmatics reveals that one of the most salient elements of using ELF is the users' ability to conduct meaningful exchanges through various communicative…

This article reveals how center-periphery relations have unfolded, over time, in language policy processes in one nation--Timor-Leste--on the global periphery. We take a "longue durée" perspective on the language policy processes at work in this historical context, showing how different regimes of language were imposed, in the past, by…

This article discusses the findings of an empirical study that investigated the writing practices in a multilingual, rural, fourth-grade classroom in Kenya. The study was undergirded by Bakhtin's heteroglossia. Analysis of texts indicated that these emergent multilinguals used multiple semiotic resources to maximize the chances of meeting the…

Personal, social, cultural, economic, and political factors influence the language/s used by family members in the home domain. This study examines how family language policies are planned and developed in Filipino-Malaysian families in Malaysia. The language used at home in such mixed or exogamous marriages is also influenced by the ethnicity of…

Internationalisation is a buzzword in European higher education, and many universities work hard to devise and implement strategies that will help facilitate increased transnational student mobility. In this context, English is commonly seen as the "natural" choice for university internationalisation, and English is accordingly promoted…

Focusing on code-switching from conversation analysis and sociolinguistic perspectives, this paper examines interactions between 10-12-year-old language learners of immigrant origin and locally born students as they are engaging in verbal pair work. All are students attending language classes in state primary schools in Barcelona in which Catalan…

Reviews use of mixed-code teaching in Hong Kong schools and outlines educators' efforts to persuade the government to accept mixed-code as not only inevitable, but preferable in most Hong Kong schools. Notes that English must be preserved for business purposes, but the Chinese medium of instruction is receiving greater emphasis as Hong Kong nears…