This book sheds light on the role of mother tongue-based multilingual education (MTB MLE) as a means to enhance educational outcomes, creating a space for non-dominant languages alongside more dominant regional, national and international languages. It brings together a number of underlying concerns including the maintenance of non-dominant…

Children and youth from refugee backgrounds have complex language experiences owing to their journeys away from their homelands often taking them through multiple contexts. This study was motivated by a desire to better understand the language resources of students newly arrived as refugees in Australia and their embodied and contextualised…

This article discusses how academic writing pedagogies for multilingual students can be transformed by the literacy traditions that these students bring to North American classrooms. This is an embodied and personal rendition, situated in the author's South Asian literacies as illustrative of Global South traditions, and draws from his own…

Using data from multilingual settings in universities and adjacent learning contexts in East Asia, North Africa, Central and North America and Europe, this book provides examples of the heuristic value of translanguaging and epistemological decentring. Despite this and other theoretical and empirical work, and ever stronger calls for the inclusion…

Over the past few decades, many Southeast Asian governments have promoted English language education (hereafter ELE) as a linguistic pathway for developing human capital and improving global economic competitiveness of their nations. However, Kirkpatrick (2017. Language education policy among the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN).…

The Asia-Pacific region hosts the largest number of refugees and displaced people in the world, and is the place of origin for nearly half of all international migrants. However, data related to the unique language-in-education needs of refugee and migrant children in and from this area is sparse. The report aims to create a stronger knowledge…

The World Bank's focus on foundational skills requires that issues of language and Language of Instruction be brought to the forefront of education policy discussions. Poor Language of Instruction policies harm learning, access, equity, cost-effectiveness, and inclusion. Yet nearly 37% of students in low- and middle-income countries are taught in…

This article explores language policy in Southeast Asia, focussing on two recent state and other institutional reform efforts and directions: one towards English, and the other towards the mother tongues. However, what needs to be highlighted is the bifurcated nature of language policy reforms in the region. That is, these two policy directions…

This paper discusses structural and ideological challenges to mother tongue-based multilingual education (MTB-MLE) which has in recent years been gaining ground in many educational contexts around the world. The paper argues, however, that MTB-MLE is set against these challenges - referred to here as inequalities of multilingualism - which prevent…

Monitoring and evaluation (M&E) are essential management tools for any educational programme or project. This booklet compiles 13 research instruments used in the regional study on the use of language(s) in classrooms in ethnolinguistic communities. The tools can be used by programme personnel such as teachers, programme coordinators,…

The number of Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education (MTB MLE) programmes has increased in recent years, especially in the Asia-Pacific Region. The case study booklet in this MTB MLE Resource Kit describes programmes in Afghanistan, Nepal and Pakistan that are examples of what language communities can do to help their children prepare to enter…

This study examined the perceptions of three Muslim families on multilingual development in their children with autism. Findings indicate that the families' goal of maintaining normalcy in their children's life could not be attained without immersion in multiple languages. They believe that immersion in multilingual contexts helped their children…

This book brings together current research by leading international scholars on the often contentious nature of language policies and their practical outcomes in North America, Australia and Europe. It presents a range of perspectives from which to engage with a variety of pressing issues raised by multilingualism, multiculturalism, immigration,…

Discussions of multilingualism in education, as exemplified by the articles in this issue, can be critically reevaluated using perspectives available from poststructuralism. These perspectives focus on the potential ambiguity of language and language practices. This, in turn, encourages us to question simple notions of the relationship of learners…

The final report of a workshop convened by UNESCO is presented. The objective of the workshop was to formulate a conceptual framework for language instruction in a multicultural context that would be in harmony with the aspirations and interests of the population of individual countries and that would contribute to bringing national communities…