This regional dossier aims to provide concise, descriptive information and basic educational statistics about minority language education in a specific region of Europe--Malta. Aspects that are addressed include features of the education system, recent educational policies, main actors, legal arrangements, and support structures, as well as…

The sociolinguistic phenomenon of bidialectism can significantly influence foreign-language learning. This study provides empirical evidence (drawn from the Greek Cypriot bidialectal community) for this influence and it supports the recommendation that foreign-language educators be trained in language-variation issues. The study's methodological…

This paper discusses Singapore's bilingual policy and looks at how the government's top-down and structured language policy has transformed the country into an English-knowing society. Education and language-in-education planning in Singapore are linked closely to the country's economic development and nation-building process. This pair of…

Language-in-education policies within post-colonization, nationalism, and globalization are currently key concerns of the sociology of language as they impact language teaching and learning in multilingual contexts. Despite these concerns, studies of educational language policies for ethnic minorities, in this case, those of South Asians in Hong…

The past 25 years have brought upheaval to the indigenous people of Mexico due to two opposing forces: modernization and globalization, on the one hand, and indigenous uprisings on the other. Suddenly, the topic of indigenous languages and education was brought into official discussions at the national level. This paper examines the tensions that…

This paper examines bilingual children's use of language inside and out of the minority language classroom. A total of 145 children between 8 and 11 years of age, attending 16 bilingual Welsh-English primary schools in North Wales, responded to questionnaires (supplemented by classroom observations) requesting information about their language…

Mauritius is a linguistically diverse island: most people on the island are native speakers of Mauritian Creole, a French-lexified Creole; English is the written medium of instruction in primary schools and French is taught as a compulsory subject. The discontinuity between the home language and the school languages is viewed as problematic by…

This quantitative study examines current practice and challenges of Chinese-English bilingual education in Chinese tertiary institutions and presents a case study of a bilingual course by investigating learners' attitudes toward this educational and language policy. Using a convenience sampling strategy with an instrument modified from a…

Past research has tended to ignore the emergence or existence of "middle zone" varieties such as topolects or regiolects. In addition, attitudinal dynamics have received little attention, including their contribution towards the re-evaluation of the status of language varieties. Regarding the status of Cantonese, linguistic, political…

Singapore's language policy has no place for either the various dialects of Chinese (the exception is Mandarin), or Singlish (a colloquial variety of English). These have been the targets of government campaigns that aim, as far as possible, to ensure that Singaporeans stop using them. However, it is interesting to observe that government…

The paper focuses on education language policy in Slovene Istria and of Slovenia in Italy. On both sides of the Slovene-Italian border there is an ethnically mixed population of Italians and Slovenes, an Italian minority in Slovenia, and a Slovene minority in Italy. On both sides of the border apparently similar systems of bilingual education have…

This article reports on an ethnographic study which investigated the implementation of the Kenyan language-in-education policy in a school in rural Western Kenya. The study reveals the complexity of policy implementation in a multilingual and multiethnic context where language shift and civil unrest are occurring, and where there is pressure to…

From 2011, the new curriculum for introducing English to Japanese primary schools will be fully implemented in the form of "foreign language activities". This innovation forms part of the government's plan to cultivate "Japanese with English abilities", a development based on the awareness, particularly in the business sector,…

This monograph describes the historiography of language ideologies that led to the politicisation of Arabic and the Arabicisation of politics in the Sudan, starting from British colonial rule until the Comprehensive Peace Agreement that was a precursor to the separation of the South as an independent state. The monograph shows that the…

Information and communication technology appears to have had a profound impact on language use in Japan. An important issue arising from this is said to be the increase in the use of Chinese characters (kanji) outside the official standard. This development has made a re-appraisal of the existing script policy necessary in order to accommodate the…