It has been almost a decade since the introduction of the primary EFL education policy in Taiwan. Many controversial issues and problems have emerged from this implementation that continue to constitute great challenges for the Taiwanese government in reforming current policies and practices related to English language teaching at the primary…

Primary school second/foreign language (SL/FL) programmes in Asia, as well as in other parts of the world, are becoming more common, with many targeting English as the SL or FL. The pressures for such English language programmes come from top-down notions that in a globalised world English is required for societies to be competitive, especially…

On the premise that the learning of a second or foreign language should contribute to, rather than subtract from, the cultural and linguistic resources which a learner already possesses, this paper documents an individual teacher's pedagogically centred challenge to a politically driven and potentially exclusive English-only language policy within…

This contribution compares literacy instruction in three different scripts in Eritrea. It uses data stemming from classroom observations of beginning readers of Tigrinya (Ge'ez script), Arabic (Arabic script) and Saho (Roman alphabet), the examination of teaching materials, and teacher interviews. Our analysis focuses on literacy events. We…

This article examines the distributional pattern of signs in the linguistic landscape of a neighbourhood in the commercial district of Phonm Penh, Cambodia. Informed by the frameworks of ethnolinguistic vitality and ethnocultural stereotypes, it discusses the developing multilingualism from socio-economic and historical perspectives. An analysis…

This paper presents results from an ethnography of language policy which examined language policy appropriation for bilingual learners in a large urban US school district. The purpose of this article is to explore the space left by current US language policy for developmental bilingual education and, specifically, the focus is on how a group of…

This paper critically describes the process of language policy-making in the Free State province of South Africa since 1994, based on an adapted version of the "streams approach" to policy-making. Three policy-making phases are identified, namely a first phase under the Free State Provincial Language Committee; a second phase under the…

This book on education in South-East Asia is the very first of its kind to comprehensively cover and discuss the education systems and issues in all the countries in the region--the ten member nations of the Association of South-East Asian nations (ASEAN) plus Timor Leste. The eleven chapters on country case studies are written by education…

The institutionalization of separate standard varieties for Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian in the 1990s was hailed by many Bosnians as the long-denied recognition of the Bosnian idiom as distinct from the Serbian and Croatian varieties it had so often been subordinated under. Yet the accompanying codification of Bosnian standard language forms has…

After Algeria wrenched its independence from France in 1962, the government newly formed decided to achieve Arabization. Standard Arabic became thus the official language of Algeria and the complete Arabization of all public institutions was voted in January 1991. Actually, the Algerian linguistic situation is one of multilingualism where Algerian…

This article presents the language policy and sociolinguistic realities of Hmong people in Lao Cai province, Vietnam. Minority children, who have their own mother tongue, are educated in Vietnamese, a language that few understand. In response to this situation, the Ministry of Education and Training of Vietnam in collaboration with UNICEF,…

This paper discusses a teaching dilemma faced by mathematics teachers in the Malaysian Chinese primary schools in coping with the latest changes in language policy. In 2003, Malaysia launched a new language policy of teaching mathematics using English as the language of instruction in all schools. However, due to the complex sociocultural demands…

In conjunction with other linguistic constructs, language ideologies are thought to be both components and determinants of language policies--decisions about language use at micro and macro levels. Although much work has been done towards identifying language ideology constructs in localised educational settings, the existence of such constructs…

This article presents an overview of language-in-education policy development between 1999 and 2010 in the Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste. In the decade since independence language-in-education policy in this newly independent country has been dominated by debates about the medium of instruction. Over time, policy has shifted from an…

Approximately five million English Language Learners (ELLs) attend public schools in the United States. Because the majority of ELLs tend to live in immigrant families, schools become the means to provide ELLs with the English skills necessary to be competent in school and in life. Federal and state policies regarding instructional arrangements…