Examines South Africa's 11-official-languages policy, with a focus on the current debate on mother tongue education versus education in a foreign language--English or Afrikaans. It is argued that for the new education policy to achieve its intended objective--to promote mother tongue education--then mother tongue education must be cleansed of the…

Focuses on attitudes and competencies of eighth grade native Rumansch speakers in Samedan, Switzerland. Argues that Samedan pupils--with their bi- or plurilingul backgrounds, a Romance language as a main school language, and the geographical proximity of Italian--have more positive attitudes toward French and better competencies than monolingual…

This compact and well-written book considers multiple language use, some of its quantitative aspects, how people feel about multiple languages, and what society should or might do about multiple language problems. A list of comments, criticisms, and suggestions for revision is included with this largely favorable review. (SLD)

Reports on an investigation into the use of English in a prison in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa 5 years after the declaration of an official multilingual policy. Findings suggest that the use of English predominates in the high, official domains, that there is a marked avoidance of Afrikaans, and that Xhosa, the main language of the…

Argues that global English usage is triggering linguistic genocide in many areas of the world. Equates globalization with war and colonization, and with power structures taking control of natural resources--including land, water, and humans. Asserts that education in a mother tongue must be a human right. (Contains 50 references.) (NB)

This article reviews selected literature on the topics of bilingual and multicultural counseling and supervision and provides a framework for understanding salient issues in the delivery of bilingual services. It also presents practical interventions and ideas for future empirical work in this area.

Araki is one of around a hundred languages of the Republic of Vanuatu. It is a language spoken by the people of Araki, an islet situated near the south western part of Santo, in the north of Vanuatu. Linguistic statistics have shown a gradual decline in the number of speakers. This study presents evidence to show that Araki is a declining language…

From some psycholinguistic perspectives, this study examines language transfer by exploring the nature of the multilingual mental lexicon in relation to sources of language transfer. It assumes that the multilingual mental lexicon contains not only lexemes but also language-specific lemmas; language-specific lemmas may activate language-specific…

The paper presents the language policies being implemented in French primary schools under the present educational reform and considers how they tackle the question of sociocultural and linguistic pluralism. It questions the choice of teaching one foreign language from a very early age at kindergarten rather than opting for a model of language…

In multilingual Europe, visual discourse may function as a cross-culturally strategic form of communication, thanks in part to its perceptual and iconic availability. In this regard, we offer a social semiotic critique of a range of visual resources deployed in the official promotional texts of 30 of the 43 cities either nominated or competing for…

There are more than 6000 languages spoken by the 6 billion people in the world today--however, those languages are not evenly divided among the world's population--over 90% of people globally speak only about 300 majority languages--the remaining 5700 languages being termed "minority languages". These languages represent the…

The present study investigated the language familiarity hypothesis formulated by Mackay [(1970). How does language familiarity influence stuttering under delayed auditory feedback? "Perceptual and Motor Skills", 30, 655-669] that bilinguals speak faster and stutter less under delayed auditory feedback (DAF) when speaking their more…

The Specialist Schools Initiative in England has urged schools to plan their teaching of foreign languages in relation to the linguistic needs and preferences of their local communities. The changing multilingual fabric of many parts of Britain make such a goal a potentially difficult and controversial process. This paper explores the views of a…

Tracing the effects of the "laissez-faire" postcolonial politics of language in the United States, which in fact enabled English to become the dominant language through cultural rather than institutional means, the essay then suggests how the linguistic memory that emerges from decolonization and nation building continues, often in…

This work describes a framework that combines techniques from Adaptive Hypermedia and Natural Language processing in order to create, in a fully automated way, on-line information systems from linear texts in electronic format, such as textbooks. The process is divided into two steps: an "off-line" processing step, which analyses the source text,…