This paper examines the intersection of heritage-language education advocacy with anti-racist activism in the 1970s and 1980s in Toronto. The province of Ontario initiated the Heritage Languages Program in 1977. By focusing on discontinuities in the policy's implementation, the paper identifies multiple strategies that Black anti-racist activists…

Drawing on the authors' experiences developing Rosetta Stone Chickasaw (RSC), an asynchronous online Chikashshanompa' (Chickasaw language) course, this article shares examples of how relationality is enacted in online Indigenous language learning. We discuss the RSC interface and ways that it created opportunities and barriers to centering…

Many theoretical models of second or additional language learning posit a crucial role for meaningful social interaction in the target language. However, it is not always clear to language educators how to create such opportunities or what counts as meaningful interaction. This can become even more difficult when the target language is an…

In North America, and worldwide, Indigenous languages are disappearing at an alarming rate. There are, however, models of success for language revitalization in immersion language programs, usually found in tribal colleges and universities. Whether the language learners are tribal college students greeting one another in their native language,…

In the United States, English is not the official language but the dominant one. But for many students, the dominance of English instruction has come at the expense of losing their first language. For much of our history of schooling in the United States, students have been forced to leave their heritage or home languages at the door when they…

This article focuses on language displacement in the High Mountains of Central Veracruz. It begins by presenting a brief historical account of the Nahuatl presence in the region in order to distinguish this group from other Nahuatl-speaking groups. Later, it describes the situation of language loss that is currently underway and argues that the…

This case centers on a Vietnamese language and culture program situated within an urban context. It illustrates how sociohistorical and geopolitical contexts interplay in understanding relations within schools as well as school-community relations. A new ethnoburb creates both opportunities and challenges for the Vietnamese community related to…

Drawing on evidence from indigenous language immersion programs in the United States, this article makes the case that these immersion programs are vital to healing the negative effects of colonialism and assimilationist schooling that have disrupted many indigenous homes and communities. It describes how these programs are furthering efforts to…

Papahana Kaiapuni is a K-12 public school program in which the Hawaiian language is the medium of instruction. In 1987, parents and language activists started the program in response to the dwindling number of speakers that resulted from a nearly century-long ban on the indigenous language. This study examined how participation in this indigenous…

An extensive body of research documents the successes of immigrant groups in establishing community language schools. Studied within this tradition, Latino immigrant communities appear to come up short, because of the scarcity of such schools for Spanish-speaking children. However, as we show in this paper, Latino immigrant communities do have…

As we search for a new paradigm in post-apartheid South Africa, the knowledge base and worldview of the KhoeSan first Indigenous peoples is largely missing. The South African government has established various mechanisms as agents for social change. Institutions of higher learning have implemented transformation programs. KhoeSan peoples, however,…

Native languages are disappearing quickly in this country, but there are many programs that are underway trying to save Native languages before they are gone. One such program is the Euchee/Yuchi Language Project which uses a modified version of the Master-Apprentice Language Learning Program (MALLP). Elder language speakers, masters, and younger…

This paper examines educational practices in Spain and in particular Madrid. With this contextual frame as the starting point the following issues are discussed: the "official" conceptualization of cultural diversity, educational policies and resolutions related to cultural diversity, and school programs and resources facilitated by…

Why would anyone want to spend thousands of hours away from home and pay hundreds of dollars in tuition to acquire one of the world's most difficult languages? For Anishinaabe people, that is an easy question to answer. The Ojibwe language is the thread that ties communities together and unites all Anishinaabe as one people sharing a common…

This paper is an exploratory study of the childhood academic language environments (CALEs) of bilingual Japanese expatriate students. Student (n=28) and parent (n=67) surveys were adapted from the Life History Calendar (Caspi et al. 1996) to gather retrospective CALE data at a Japanese-English bilingual high school. Principal Components Analysis…