While language education programs were created with an equity stance in mind--with the goals of increasing access and facilitating academic success for ethnically and linguistically marginalized students--the larger educational context has compromised access for multiply marginalized students. Recognizing a need for more complex understandings of…

Advocacy strategies are characterized by collaborations amongst various stakeholders working together to create changes and reforms. In language education policy, this refers to various types of initiatives and activities intended to create language policy reforms on local and/or national levels. In this paper such activities are traced, analyzed…

This study aimed to explore the implementation of the Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education (MTB-MLE) policy by public elementary teachers in the Philippines through a case study approach. Specifically, the study sought to examine how three elementary teachers in one public school institution distinctively implement the MTB-MLE policy in…

This article is about current policy in the coordination of opportunities for adult migrants in England to learn English. People who move to a different country experience a need to learn the dominant language of their new environment, to support their settlement. A willingness to learn the language is a marker of social inclusion from a political…

Pakistan, one of the eight countries comprising South Asia, has more than 212.2 million people, making it the world's fifth most populous country after China, India, USA, and Indonesia. It has also the world's second-largest Muslim population. Eberhard et al. (Ethnologue: languages of the world, SIL International, 2020) report 77 languages used by…

This article explores how language learning is an integral component of progressing linguistic reconciliation in contexts of war and conflict. Sri Lanka is a case where ethnolinguistic division and the devaluation of Tamil as a co-official language has led to linguistic injustice for Tamil people and users of Tamil. In the post-war landscape,…

Through ethnographic fieldwork and sociological theory drawing from French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, this article describes possibilities and restrictions for Chinese language education for Chinese-diasporic youth in the San Francisco area, 50 years after "Lau v. Nichols." I examine four sites of this education, all of which serve…

This article is about navigating asylum, employment and language policy in a new country as an asylum seeker. Through the story of one individual, we show that profound inequalities are exacerbated when forced migrants are limited in their choice of language they might study or use. The individual is Tailor F, an Iraqi man seeking asylum, and the…

This article explores the extent to which the medium of instruction (MOI) policy in Hong Kong affect ethnic minority students' Chinese language learning in school amidst postcolonial policy changes, and how the "flexible" MOI policy affects Chinese as a second language (CSL) frontline teaching in mainstream secondary schools with…

Increasingly across the U.S. and other industrialized democracies, teachers take dual classroom roles as both content and English language educators. Nevertheless, research on how educators actually understand and implement mainstreaming language education policies at the school and district level are sparse. This paper contributes a unique…

The term 'new speaker' has recently emerged as an attempt by sociolinguists not only to understand the different types of speaker profiles that can be found in contemporary societies, but also to grasp the underlying processes of becoming a legitimate speaker in a given society. In this article, we combine the results from two studies situated in…

This study examined how three champion principals of Asian language dual language bilingual education (DLBE) programs--Cantonese, Korean, and Mandarin--in California have navigated the oscillating language-in-education policies after the Lau decision. We explored principals' various roles through a lens of agency in a social justice leadership…

Language planning and policy (LPP), as a field of research, emerged to solve the "problem" of multilingualism in newly independent nation-states. LPP's principal emphasis was the reproduction of one-state, one-language policies. Indigenous languages were systematically erased through top-down, colonial medium-of-instruction policies,…

Bilingual education as a whole has been gentrifying, as more privileged students replace Transnational Language Learners (TLLs) in bilingual education spaces and policies (Valdez et al. in Educ Policy 30(6):849-883, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1177/0895904814556750). We argue this is an extension of coloniality (Mignolo in Local histories/global…

This paper critiques the contribution made by specialists working within the COST Action Network on New Speakers Programme. It then offers an evaluation of the progress made to date in a number of fields such as conceptual advancement, ideological dispositions, migration and international mobility before contributing a series of policy related…