The cases of Estonia and South Africa illustrate how a lack of coherence between a language policy and that policy's implementation plan can reduce both the policy and the implementation plan to symbolic acts of no benefit to students or communities. Comparison of these countries' language-in-education plans highlights the need to examine…

Contends that the Black struggle for educational equality resulted in a new perspective in multicultural education--antiracist education. Stresses that homogeneous mainstream doctrine, international hegemony of English, and political devaluing of ethnicity contributed to the marginalization of community languages instruction. Concludes that the…

Describes the program to restore the Adyghe language in the Republic of Adyghe, following its independence from the Soviet Union. The principal elements of the program include teacher training, development of course materials, and assessment procedures. The article concludes that as more emphasis is given to the Adyghe language, its status will…

Examined the emergence of Runyakitara as a new language in Uganda in the 1980s. The formation of Runyakitara through the realignment of four Western Bantu varieties illustrates the potential for the use of language as a resource in ethnic competition. Discusses the construction of Runyakitara in the context of the current political situation in…

Children who speak different home languages and dialects in a monolingual classroom often carry the challenge of having to develop literacy in a different language. This article presents a qualitative study of five first graders who speak different home languages in an inner city mainstream English classroom. Through interviews, classroom writing,…

Research in multilingual societies often attends to the micro level of linguistic interactions, as linguistic minority speakers negotiate their way through a majority-language world. However, this research does not always engage with the social, political and historical contexts that produce and reproduce the conditions within which some…

This study investigated the effect of the cultural background of immigrant children on affective variables in learning three different languages. Participants were students in secondary multicultural classrooms in Spain. A total of 114 students, aged 12 to 16, answered a questionnaire based on Gardner's Attitude = Motivation Test Battery assessing…

Cross-linguistic influence (CLI) is receiving increasing attention in multilingual learners (Cenoz "et al.", 2001). Research with bilingual learners has analysed CLI in relation to language dominance (see, for instance, Hulk & Muller, 2000; Yip & Stephen, 2000) and to language dominance and grade in school settings (Cenoz, 2003; Lasagabaster,…

Using a framework from cultural studies and focusing on theories put forward by Pierre Bourdieu, the goal in this paper is to consider how some West Africans interact with foreign languages and cultures in an era of global capital, especially when it comes to the activities of migrants venturing into overseas labour markets and to the production…

The year-long study that was the context for this article explored the complicated relationship among the shaping of ESOL as a school construct, the historical legacy of colonialism, and the contemporary influence of globalizing forces on the teaching of English worldwide and the lives of multilingual students enrolled in ESOL. In the context of a…

This article discusses the results of a survey conducted to explore how students and host teachers perceive the strengths of nonnative-English-speaking (NNES) teacher trainees based on their classroom practice. Responding to a questionnaire evaluating the NNES ESL teacher trainees in their classrooms, host teachers named the following as their…

Written for the layperson, this books presents perspectives in support of cultural diversity in America and against language restrictionism and establishment of English as the single official language. In a series of topical discussions, the book brings what linguists have learned about language acquisition to the issue of how the United States…

A study investigated the relationships among language proficiency, learning mode, learning style, abstract reasoning, and age of second language acquisition in 227 adults. The subjects, most of whom were university students, included 17 monolinguals, 120 partial multilinguals, and 90 competent multilinguals. For comparison with competent…

The member countries of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development generally provide monolingual basic education, and the imposition of a common language remains one of the political and economic functions of the schools. Multilingual or bilingual education is marginal. The individual states' language policies reflect interests in…

A study of the interlanguage of bilinguals and multilinguals compared the oral French proficiency of 20 native Swedish-speaking and 20 Finnish-speaking university students as evidenced in error patterns in oral tests. With the exception of phonological and phonetic errors in pronunciation, errors were classified by word class (article, noun,…