Educational reform efforts in Bolivia have created possibilities for teacher-training institutions to focus on bilingual intercultural education. How teacher trainers and future teachers embark upon this endeavor differs somewhat depending on the sociolinguistic, historical, and institutional contexts of each community. This article reports…

This study explores the language policy and practice of the Southern African Development Community (SADC), an African regional economic organisation made up of 14 member states (Angola, Botswana, Democratic Republic of Congo, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, United Republic of Tanzania, Zambia…

In the 21st century, learning is at the heart of the modern world's endeavours to become a knowledge economy. It is the key to empowering individuals to be today's world producers and consumers of knowledge. It is essential in enabling people to become critical citizens and to attain self-fulfilment. It is a driver of economic competitiveness as…

This article seeks to explore how various language policies may have impacted Year 12 language candidature in Victoria. Australian Federal and Victorian State Government language policies are but one of the influences yet, it may be argued, the most significant influence. These stand alongside waves of immigration, global events and conflicts, and…

In his latest survey of the prospects for English language teaching in the next 50 years, David Graddol claims that over half the world's international students are taught in English and that universities are increasingly offering courses in English. This seems to be a necessary condition for achieving excellence and prestige. At the same time,…

This paper is about the language attitudes that bilingual youth in Singapore have towards their Mother Tongue and English, and towards codeswitching between the two. The language attitudes of 443 primary school students were investigated using a variation of the matched-guise technique. Status and solidarity dimensions of attitudes, with ethnicity…

This paper explores tensions in translating multilingual language policy to classroom linguistic practice, and especially the paradoxical role of and demand for English as a tool of decolonization for multilingual populations seeking equitable access to a globalizing economy. We take an ecological and sociolinguistic approach, depicting tensions…

The teaching and learning of Irish in primary school is both an important educational issue and central to the national language revitalization effort. The findings of Irish-language programme evaluations, therefore, are invariably scrutinized very closely by different sectors. This paper examines how the later stages of a major evaluation took…

Before colonisation Australia was fully named by its Indigenous population, but that complex network of naming was largely overlooked as Europeans introduced their own names for features and settlements. Each of Australia's states and territories now has a nomenclature authority, whose activities are coordinated through the Committee for…

This paper assumes that language and educational policies are manifestations of the interdependence between linguistic thought and the prevailing "zeitgeist", and hence that an investigation of these policies from an historical perspective falls squarely within the history of linguistics. The policies discussed here are those by the…

This paper uses Cambodia as a case study to problematise the notion of choice in the spread of English. I explore specific historical contexts which were central to the construction of the demand for English and English language teaching (ELT) in Cambodia. The actions of a range of external agencies resulted in the close discursive articulation of…

There have been calls to examine how language policy is mediated at the local level. Although there have been studies that have foregrounded the local, there have yet to be those that look at how language policies become adopted by individual teachers through a process of their personal and professional socialisation. Through the framework of…

The history of language planning in Brazil, the only Portuguese speaking country in South America, is shown to have been decisively influenced at every critical moment by prevailing geopolitical interests. Sharing borders with nine out of the 11 countries that, together with it, make up the continent, Brazil has always been attentive to perceived…

Implicit in the notion of language planning is the issue of preserving linguistic rights, one dimension to be taken into account in considering the relationship between the role of language in social life and security. This paper, however, intends to introduce another dimension, not typically included in the literature on language planning, i.e.…

CThe article is a study of Latino immigrant parents' agency toward primary language (L1) instruction in the face of restrictionist language policy. Certain attitudes and characteristics were associated with advocacy for Spanish L1 instruction. Interviews conducted in an urban California school district among parents with different background…