Reviews demographic and linguistic consequences of recent processes of migration and minority group influx in Western Europe and describes the case of the Netherlands to illustrate these effects. Highlights first- and second-language studies of immigrant and ethnic minority groups and notes resulting major demographic trends in Dutch society and…

Describes the growth and development of bilingual education on the Navajo Reservation and resultant outcomes for Navajo students, educators, and communities, and demonstrates how learning is mediated by language and culture in the Navajo context, as well as the critical conditions needed to sustain genuine two-language education. (16 references)…

Education is the right, but not the reality, of all. Various international trends are identified to set the scene for languages education. Challenges facing the teaching profession--in the contexts of teachers, students, teacher training, conditions and the curriculum--are addressed by effective strategies. Policy is prioritised, as it is in this…

Singapore's leading literacy policy is affected by a tension between the ideologies associated with English and those attached to Singapore's mother tongues. Singaporeans must safeguard their heritages, keeping themselves open to the places where their ancestors came from by learning their designated mother tongues. At the same time, Singaporeans…

A broad-bases study of the ways in which Hispanics in the United States are dealing with the English language is presented. The report analyzes the latest reliable language data collected by the U.S. census, including the 1980 national census, and finds a steady shift in language usage from Spanish to English among immigrants and native-born…

Strategies are developed for understanding how language variation limits communication. Methods of measuring communication are discussed, including an intelligibility measure used in the Solomon Islands. The analysis of data gathered using communication measurement is discussed. The result of the analysis is a determination of the number of…

This report discusses the progress made in the development of curriculum materials for the Uralic and Altaic languages. A main point is that the instructional objectives for these languages have changed: the need has shifted from basic courses to solid reference works, such as student manuals, reference grammars, readers, dictionaries, and…

This study presents the theories that contribute to what the author has called geolinguistics, a discipline that deals with the external fate of languages as they are distributed over the face of the globe. Such a study is relevant in terms of official language planning when legislators seek to impose a given language on people of varied…

Reviews recent research in multilingualism in Southern Africa, focusing on the role of languages in education, sociolinguistics, and language policy. Much of the research is on South Africa. Topics discussed include language of instruction in schools, teacher education, higher education, adult literacy, language contact, gender and linguistic…

Promoting diversity has become a prominent goal in language-in-education policy discourse in two broad contexts. On the one hand, language policies take on the challenge of maintaining and developing "de facto" linguistic and cultural diversity through language acquisition planning; on the other hand, they portray themselves as active…

A collection of essays on linguistic human rights includes: "Combining Immigrant and Autochthonous Language Rights: A Territorial Approach to Multilingualism" (Francois Grin); "On the Limits of Ethnolinguistic Democracy" (Joshua A. Fishman); "Linguistic Human Rights and Educational Policy in Russia" (Alexei A.…

Ethiopia, a country with 82 distinctly different languages and ethnic groups, has recently emerged from decades of civil war. In the process of restoring civilian rule, alliances have formed between a wide spectrum of local interest groups. Education generally, and language policy more specifically, continues to be one of the most contentious…

The report, entirely in French, presents a study of the instructional approaches used for French native language instruction at the elementary and secondary school levels in five regions of Ontario (northwest, northeast, mid-north, central, and east). It examined the nature and degree of linguistic heterogeneity and the distinctive traits of the…

This paper examines the language planning efforts of the government of Ecuador and groups representing the indigenous peoples of the country. Government sanctioned policy and practice, as well as the grassroots efforts of the Indian population, both aim to influence language behavior and both have ultimately been directed at social and political…

The essays in this volume cover a range of sociopolitical aspects of Indian language planning (i.e., the politics of dialect, the role of the linguist, and the historical foundations of contemporary language problems), problems faced by the actual experiences of Indian language renewal efforts, and the relationship of Indian language renewal and…