This paper presents data from two studies--a nationwide quantitative research and an ethnographic study--on immigrant parents' perspectives about heritage language maintenance and education in Greek state schools. The quantitative data come from a large-scale questionnaire survey, which aimed at the investigation of the needs and requirements for…

In 2012, the Supreme Education Council of the State of Qatar decreed a change from English to Arabic as a medium of instruction in four of the colleges of Qatar University. This surprise move created much controversy, especially among the students, the first stakeholders to be affected by this decision, related to the impact this change would have…

The education system has played a crucial role in Welsh language maintenance, with Welsh-medium education providing a central locus of language transmission. However, language transmission through education is not without pitfalls. This paper discusses the impact of top-down minority language transmission and the growing issue of formal domain…

In the Basque Country, Northern Spain, Basque (Euskera) and Spanish are official languages. In recent decades, Basque language revitalization and the efforts to make this an unmarked language (normalization) have co-existed with the rapid increase in immigration from outside the Basque region, and most recently from outside Spain. Given the…

In this paper, we present a synthesis of a series of studies, carried out by our research groups, from the Greek educational context on teachers' and immigrant students' views on issues of bilingual acquisition and of heritage language learning and teaching. Albeit including heterogeneous samples and employing quantitative and qualitative…

The 2002 Language Policy for Higher Education (LPHE) identifies the currently dominant language of instruction--English--as being a possible barrier to many African students in accessing and successfully completing studies at higher education level. The LPHE thus requires that black African languages be developed at Higher Education Institutions…

In Australia, languages education in early childhood and primary education includes three main approaches: transitional, enrichment and full bilingual programmes. This article proposes that transitional and enrichment programmes in Australia are constituted and shaped by competing and contested institutional, material, discursive and economic…

A challenge noted in a number of endangered language contexts is the need to mix second-language (L2) learners of the target language with first-language (L1) speakers of that language in a less planned way than is found in the two-way immersion approach. Such mixing of L1 speakers of the target language with L2 learners arises from the difficulty…

Using data from the work of a Language Commission set by the Faroese Government in 2005 to formulate a proposal for an official Faroese language policy and findings from my own study on language use among young Faroe Islanders, this paper questions whether the present language policy in the Faroes is an effective strategy to maintain and protect a…

The survey questionnaire and a description of the coding system used for analyzing the data collected in a survey of Cherokee language and education are presented. The survey was designed to study language use, bilingualism, and education in the Cherokee community. The survey encompassed 198 Cherokee children between the ages of 5 and 14 who…