South Africa is facing the challenge of creating a viable nation from a situation of interplay between diverse racial, ethnic and linguistic forces. This article discusses the implications for education of the evolving picture of language policy as South Africa addresses the task of nation-building. Language policy is important because of its key…

This article examines the salience and content of representations of language education in a corpus of English- and French-Canadian newspapers. Findings suggest that English-Canadian newspapers foreground official-language education issues, in which public schools are represented as the primary means by which Canadians can gain equal access to…

This article considers a fundamental issue in language planning, namely, whether or not to introduce a curriculum for the mother tongue (MT), in the wider context of a complex language planning situation in Thailand. It details recent moves in the consideration of this issue for the Thai Lao (Isan) of Northeast Thailand, Thailand's largest…

Since the 1960s, bilingualism has become a defining aspect of Canadian identity. And yet, fifty years after the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism was formed and with over forty years of federal government funding and supports for second-language education, relatively few English Canadians speak or choose to speak French. What…

Governmental education policies provide vague, general confines in which local actors have to design concrete policies tailored to their needs. Such policies rely on the local capacities of schools for implementing them. Recently, qualitative studies reveal that a great deal of variation in policy enactment should be attributed to school…

As universities seek to become more international, their need to engage with a wider range of languages, particularly English, seems more prominent. At the same time, universities are also regarded by many stakeholders as key institutions to preserve a given national language and culture. This apparent tension makes universities a fruitful ground…

This article reports on the initial findings from an ethnographic study conducted in a preparatory class for young refugees in Cologne, Germany. Focusing on the current language policy which aims to integrate newly arrived children into the German society through language assimilation in schools, this study examines how such policies (re)produce…

Macro-level policy makers, perceived as stakeholders of language management, employ a range of language policy strategies to legitimise hegemonic control over meso- (i.e. family) and micro- (i.e. individual) level language ideologies (Cassels-Johnson 2013). However, language policies of an individual are often difficult to detect because they are…

This article considers the relevance of language policy and planning (LPP) for language education in the United States in relation to the country's longstanding and continuing multilingualism. In reflecting on the U.S. context, one striking feature is the absence of a guiding overarching explicit national educational language policy. Language…

Utah's dual language education (DL) initiative, officially introduced in 2007 and backed by unique state-level planning, is touted as a new "mainstreaming" of DL and is sparking interest across the U.S. Using a critical language policy lens and a mixed method approach, we asked which student groups were positioned discursively and…

Singlish -- "the name given to the colloquial variety of English spoken in Singapore" [Wee, Lionel. 2014. "Linguistic Chutzpah and the Speak Good Singlish Movement." "World Englishes" 33 (1): 85-99], incorporating Chinese dialect (particularly Hokkien) and Malay lexical and grammatical elements -- has for some time…

Globalization as an increasingly influencing force has led English language to become the lingua franca of the world. However, the global spread of English is considered as linguistic and cultural imperialism of English speaking countries to exert their dominance, power, culture, ideology and language over the periphery countries. The devastating…

The main goal of this study is to examine the barriers and prospects of intercultural education in Cypriot schools of the southern part of the island with regard to not only learning the language of the reception country, but also the language of origin. Taking this as the point of departure, this study aims to explore the content and goals of…

The relevance of the problem range addressed in the study is conditioned by the system of education functioning under multiculturalism in modern polyethnic societies and their social stability much depending on the balanced use of languages of ethnoses that reside in the region as well as on the respectful attitude to their representatives in…

This dissertation is a local, specific study on the Chamorro language policies of Guam. Scholars have noted since the beginning of the American occupation that the Indigenous Chamorro language of Guam is dying and is in danger of becoming extinct within the next generation. As the hub of American military presence in the Asia Pacific region, the…