This article examines some of the problems concerning the language of instruction in higher education within Europe and relates them to the African context. The author argues that there is reason to be worried about the spread of the use of English as a language of instruction in higher education, to the detriment of the smaller European languages…

Background Context: In most immigrant-receiving societies, an important question, both for researchers and policy makers, has been the weighing of the relative efficiency of different formulas in the learning of the host language by immigrant students, especially the potential impact of specific services on social integration and the role of…

Reviews studies on language loss in individuals rather than groups in three categories: research on optimal age for foreign language learning; studies on cognitive aspects of language loss; and investigations concerning attitudes toward language learning, maintenance, and loss. Believes such research may ultimately tell foreign language teachers…

This article discusses six teaching strategies identified by teacher-researchers as supporting their goal to improve learning and teaching for all children in the intercultural setting of a kindergarten in "Aotearoa" New Zealand. As a Centre of Innovation, the kindergarten received government funding for a 3-year action research project…

Africa's educational systems are undergoing a quiet revolution. As these systems move away from working exclusively in the old colonial languages, usually English or French, bilingual schools which use local indigenous languages are springing up in many regions of Africa. This paper points out the historical processes driving the bilingual…

According to the Medical Council of Malawi, one of the conditions for a licence to be granted to an individual who wants to practise medicine in Malawi is the practitioner's ability to speak and write English fluently. This means that the expatriate medical practitioner is not required by law to demonstrate fluency in Chichewa (the national…

This paper discusses the relationship between pidgins and creoles and indigenous language maintenance, explaining that the development of pidgin and creole languages always occurs in the context of language contact, often between a European colonial language and one or more indigenous languages. Pidgins are languages that are primarily used as a…

This study explores Spanish language maintenance in Southbridge, Massachusetts, a suburban town with a vibrant Puerto Rican community. The investigation focuses on the extent to which Southbridge Puerto Ricans use Spanish and English at home, and their attitudes toward Spanish language maintenance. Survey data, especially the impact of factors…

The notion of site is critical to ethnography and provides a sense of spatial stability--somewhere the researcher enters in order to research what is contained within. Using contemporary understandings of space, the author reflects on two studies to explore the (im)possibility of poststructuralist ethnography. The first study was undertaken in a…

This study considers the relationship between Cajun ethnicity and the intergenerational transmission of the French language. The commonsensical assumption of a positive relationship between ethnic identity and language transmission is questioned. It is suggested that if an ethnicity is associated with socioeconomic disadvantages, then the greater…

Examines one stage of ethnic identity formation and its affects on attitudes toward the heritage language among a group of Americans of Asian descent in the United States. Studied published narratives to discover whether feelings of ambivalence and evasion experienced by this population toward their ethnicity extended to the heritage language, and…

Discusses the relationship between bilingualism and gender within a feminist poststructuralist framework. Suggests that all language contact phenomena, including bilingualism, acquire different meanings in different contexts and can be linked to gender only indirectly. (Author/VWL)

Among American Indian Pueblo tribes, community-based language revitalisation initiatives have been established in response to a growing language shift towards English. This has been most prominent among school age children, prompting some tribes to extend tribal language programmes into local public schools. For centuries, the transmission of…

This monograph discusses the language situation in Japan, with an emphasis on language planning and policy. Japan has long considered itself to be a monoethnic and therefore monolingual society, despite the existence of substantial old-comer ethnic minorities, and this--with the instrumental exception of English--has been reflected in its language…

The first concept proposed by this paper for explaining the global dynamics of linguistic phenomena is "language power," the total investment in time, money, and energy that is made for the purpose of learning or preserving a particular language. Indicators that become factors in the formula for determining language power include…