"English language teaching in South America. Policy, preparation and practices." Current Issues in Language Planning, 20(2), pp. 199–202

ABSTRACTThe University of KwaZulu-Natal has a bilingual language policy (2006) where students may receive instruction in isiZulu as well as in English. An online survey was carried out for all academic and support staff to gauge their linguistic capacity in isiZulu. Staff profiles were created in relation to their respective Colleges, Schools and Disciplines, and included age, language group, language use, language of schooling and years of experience in the Higher Education sector. It also included modules currently taught by staff through the medium of isiZulu; communicative language proficiency; instructional language proficiency; perceptions of own capacity to teach in isiZulu and perceptions of the time required to develop adequate proficiency to teach in isiZulu. Respondents were also asked to translate a complex sentence into isiZulu, the responses to which were later analysed into three categories: fluent, semi-fluent and not fluent for purposes of comparison with staff perceptions of their own proficiency. Findings revealed a serious gap between current staff capacity to teach in isiZulu, and the implementation of the policy within the projected timeframes. This study also reveals the complexities of teaching when discipline experts and students do not share a common language.

ABSTRACTDespite the essential role of local, regional, national and international languages in human development, there is little reference to language planning in development aid discourse. Beginning with definitions of development aid and language planning, the paper examines how the two were linked in pre- and post-colonial times, showing how language planning scholarship has responded to the overarching shifts in understandings of development over time. While we find that language planning maintains a low profile in human development documents, we note some positive signs in UNESCO’s and UNICEF’s continuing support for language issues. We contrast this support with the World Bank’s concern with measurable outcomes. We conclude with an analysis of how the contributions to this special issue exemplify some of the tensions inherent in language planning for development in a global age.

One of the most crucial language planning decisions that a country can make is “the determination of a language to serve as the medium of instruction in school” (Fasold, 1984, p. 292). The issue of...

ABSTRACTThis paper highlights the political and ideological entanglements of language policy and English language teaching with neocolonialism, neoliberalism, and development aid. It does so by examining the explicit and implicit goals and practices of an educational development aid project in Mindanao, Philippines. The US-funded Job Enabling English Proficiency (or JEEP) project claimed to improve the standard of English in the region through the introduction of imported educational materials and classroom configurations. However, we show how English-only policy, “native-speakerism,” and the use of repetition as a dominant language learning practice in the classroom are all implicated in the politics of neocolonialism in Mindanao. The paper makes a case for language policy as a lens through which the intricacies of development aid in neocolonial conditions may be tracked, critiqued, and transformed.

“What does multilingual education look like in Japan?” Being a researcher originally from Japan, I am often asked this question by my colleagues and students in Hawai'i. Given the diverse populatio...

ABSTRACTThis article starts with an overview of the sociolinguistic situation in Latin America as a context for language policy and planning (LPP) decisions in the academic field. Then it gives a brief overview of the language policy challenges faced by universities to cope with neoliberal internationalisation. A conceptualisation of the domain as a sociological (Bourdieu) and communicational (Gumperz) field is sketched to interpret LPP activities in a comprehensive framework. Next the text turns to the micro-level to give a more detailed account of two specific universities, Unidad Profesional Interdisciplinaria en Ingeniería y Tecnologías Avanzadas (UPIITA), a technology unit in the National Polytechnic Institute (IPN) in Mexico City, and the University of Latin American Integration (UNILA) in southern Brazil. The analysis of both universities reveals the emergence of exceptional plurilingual LPP frameworks: The Mexican UPIITA fosters the learning of more than one foreign language to cope with research and study abroad activities. The Brazilian UNILA integrates students from all over South American through teaching in Portuguese and Spanish as equal languages of instruction. English and other international languages come third as access languages to the international academia. Finally, the article relates its findings to the more general picture of university LPP in Latin America.

ABSTRACTThis paper describes the language policies at 38 institutions of higher education on the Caribbean island of Puerto Rico. As a commonwealth of the US, Spanish and English hold co-official status on Puerto Rico despite the fact that majority of islanders use Spanish as their first language. Given the colonial status of the island, English has held a privileged role in higher education where institutional policies have allowed professors to teach in English or Spanish. After a description of the language context of Puerto Rico, data is presented that used document analysis of university catalogues along with structured interviews with registrars’ offices from the majority of the island’s campuses. The findings describe varying levels of open-language policies, which the author argues can be beneficial to students and professors who are bilingual but a detriment to students who have yet to develop academic language proficiency in both languages. The findings further indicate that the majority of institutions have de facto open-language policies, which allow instructors to use textbooks largely published in English and present their lectures and assessments in Spanish or a mixture of Spanish and English.

ABSTRACTLegislative changes are afoot in New Zealand that are formalising an ideological shift in policy that decreasingly positions the Māori language a matter of interethnic national identity but increasingly as one for Māori self-determination. The Waitangi Tribunal (WAI262, Waitangi Tribunal, 2011) established that, from here on, Māori language policy should be determined in large measure by Māori ideas. This paper advances the question of what these Māori ideas are, and indeed whether these align with those of non-Māori. In particular, the paper reports findings from a large scale qualitative survey that used a folk linguistic approach to solicit what sociolinguistic situation Māori and non-Māori youth envisage language revitalisation policy should produce, and what policy priorities they propose to achieve that. It then critically assesses whether the ideas of these youth align with the Māori language policy objectives of the New Zealand state.

A large body of work has investigated the presence of English and its teaching and learning in the developing world where English is used as a second/foreign language. While this work has provided plausible explanations for the global spread of English as well as its uptake by education policy-makers and communities, there has been limited research on, in Bourdieu's (1991, p. 44) terms, the “economic and social conditions of the acquisition of the legitimate competence” in English. This paper draws on Bourdieu's concepts of linguistic market and linguistic capital to illustrate differential proficiency outcomes for different market actors affiliated with different education markets in Bangladesh. Although Bourdieu focused on the notion of a “unified market” with reference to the dominant or official language, investigating English as a second or foreign language requires exploring multiple markets of English in the polity. Drawing on a diversified understanding of the context of language policy and planning, these markets are located at the national and subnational levels. I argue that while macro-level policy-makers have been guided by “linguistic communism” in introducing English for all, it is actually market forces that determine, to a large extent, who attains linguistic competence and whose competence is likely to be transformed into linguistic capital.