In September 1998, the Education Department of the fledgling Hong Kong Special Administrative Region implemented a controversial medium-of-instruction policy which compelled around three-quarters of the territory's hitherto English-medium secondary schools to switch to Chinese-medium teaching in Forms 1-3 (years 7-9). Only 112 schools were…

Outlines the plain English movement, examines how it has influenced legislation and education, and discusses publications pertinent to the movement. (ARH)

Article also appeared in "International Journal of the Sociology of Language," n1. (DD)

The new English translation of Paolo Rossi's classic study, "Logic and the Art of Memory," presents a useful opportunity to examine contemporary efforts to understand what its subtitle calls "the quest for universal language." At the same time, a seventeenth-century philosophical romance, Thomas Urquhart's, "Jewel," affords a good test case for…

Five basic questions are posited that pertain equally to "fully alive,""partly alive," and "barely alive" languages. These three types of languages may be seen as existing along a continuum, differing in the degrees to which they can be linked to the dynamics of reward processes and institutional spill-overs that…

Defines and traces the history of diglossia, and offers an extensive bibliography on the subject. The need for an overall integration of research within the socioevolutionary context of diglossia is highlighted. (32 references) (LT)

Places the activities of the National Setswana Language Council, a language-planning body in Botswana, into the current language-planning theory in order to understand language-planning problems in the Council. A brief theoretical framework is presented; a description of the origins, objectives, and language-planning problems of the Council are…

Proposes two new models of language planning. The first develops a three-level view of language planning and aims to develop a more strategic approach. The second, the Integrated Planning model, is designed to facilitate a comprehensive and integrative approach to reinforcing targeted languages. (Author/VWL)

Provides an overview of the language situation in Botswana. Describes the language profile of the country, including the number of languages and dialects spoken, the number of speakers of each language, and the various roles each language plays in society. (Author/VWL)

Discusses the fifth volume of the "Etimologia Vortaro de Esperanto" (Etymological Dictionary of Esperanto). The dictionary provides not only the etynom of each Esperanto term, but also the etymology of the ethnic language words from which the editor derived the terms in question. (Author/VWL)

Uses the metaphor of ecology of language to explore ideologies underlying multilingual language policies, and the continua of biliteracy framework as ecological heuristic for situating the challenges faced in implementing them. Considers community and classroom challenges inherent in implementing these new ideologies, as evident in Bolivia and…

This volume is about the role of different languages in science and scientific communication, with the focus on the status and function of entire languages like English, Chinese, Russian, etc. and not on structural details of these languages--following the distinction between status and corpus in language planning. However, the latter, i.e. corpus…

This paper discusses the collision between government guidelines on "kanji" use in public documents and Japanese naming practice that places significance on written forms. The tension between the state's need to control the legibility of its texts through allowable "kanji" character lists collides with people's rights and desires to name their own…

The argument put forward here is that we are witnessing the emergence of a concept of English as a lingua franca, which creates a set of attitudes about correctness and in particular "grammatical correctness". The traditional "native-speaker" as final arbiter can only apply to English as a national language. It is the…

This paper aims to highlight some of the issues that are appearing in full force now that the Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) option is being ever more taken into consideration by schools and education authorities throughout Europe. The reasons for the interest in CLIL-based learning are various, including the support given to this…