Language Planning And Education

Language Planning is a resurgent academic discipline, reflecting the importance of language in issues of migration, globalisation, cultural diversity, nation-building, education and ethnic identity. Written as an advanced introduction, this book engages with all these themes but focuses specifically on language planning as it relates to education, addressing such issues as bilingualism and the education of linguistic minority pupils in North America and Europe, the educational and equity implications of the global spread of English, and the choice of media of instruction in post-colonial societies. Contextualising this discussion, the first two chapters describe the emergence and evolution of language planning as an academic discipline, and introduce key concepts in the practice of language planning. The book is wide-ranging in its coverage, with detailed discussion of the context of language policy in a variety of countries and communities across North America, Europe, Africa and Asia.

Includes papers on Aboriginal language planning, Aboriginal bilingual education and language and education in the Torres Strait separately annotated.

This volume investigates the policy and practice of medium of instruction at different levels of education in Asian polities including Bangladesh, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, the Maldives, Nepal, Timor-Leste and Vietnam. The chapters provide an informed understanding of the context, process, actors, goals and outcomes of medium of instruction policies from a language policy and planning perspective. The volume has an emphasis on the exploration of medium of instruction in action which brings into focus the perspectives of micro policy enactors including teachers, students, and parents in the local context, generating crucial empirical insights. This critical analysis of the goals, outcomes and experiences of this trend in global language-in-education will be of interest to language and education students, researchers, practicing teachers, executives in academia and language studies and to education policymaking authorities in Asia and other parts of the world. The volume updates existing research on medium of instruction and takes the field forward in a fast-changing world as English medium instruction policies are globalised. This book was originally published as a special issue of Current Issues in Language Planning.

In the sociopolitics of language, sometimes yesterday’s solution is tomorrow’s problem. This volume examines the evolving nature of language acquisition planning through a collection of papers that consider how decisions about language learning and teaching are mediated by a confluence of psychological, ideological, and historical forces. The first two parts of the volume feature empirical studies of formal and informal education across the lifespan and around the globe. Case studies map the agents, resources, and attitudes needed for creating moments and spaces for language learning that may, at times, collide with wider beliefs and policies that privilege some languages over others. The third part of the volume is devoted to conceptual contributions that take up theoretical issues related to epistemological and conceptual challenges for language acquisition planning. These contributions reflect on the full spectrum of social and cognitive factors that intersect with the planning of language teaching and learning including ethnic and racial power relations, historically situated political systems, language ideologies, community language socialization, relationships among stakeholders in communities and schools, interpersonal interaction, and intrapersonal development. In all, the volume demonstrates the multifaceted and socially situated nature of language acquisition planning.

Language problems potentially exist at all levels of human activity, including he local contaxts of communities & institutions. This volume explores the ways in which language planning works as a local activity in a wide variety of contexts around the world & deals with a wide range of language planning issues.

This book is a timely comparison of the divergent worlds of policy implementation and policy ambition, the messy, often contradictory here-and-now reality of languages in schools and the sharp-edged, shiny, future-oriented representation of languages in policy. Two deep rooted tendencies in Australian political and social life, multiculturalism and Asian regionalism, are represented as key phases in the country’s experimentation with language education planning. Presenting data from a five year ethnographic study combined with a 40 year span of policy analysis, this volume is a rare book length treatment of the chasm between imagined policy and its experienced delivery, and will provide insights that policymakers around the world can draw on.

This revised second edition is a comprehensive overview of why we speak the languages that we do. It covers language learning imposed by political and economic agendas as well as language choices entered into willingly for reasons of social mobility, economic advantage and group identity.

The Contributions to the Sociology of Language series features publications dealing with sociolinguistic theory, methods, findings and applications. It addresses the study of language in society in its broadest sense, as a truly international and interdisciplinary field in which various approaches – theoretical and empirical – supplement and complement each other. The series invites the attention of scholars interested in language in society from a broad range of disciplines – anthropology, education, history, linguistics, political science, and sociology. To discuss your book idea or submit a proposal, please contact Natalie Fecher.