While language education programs were created with an equity stance in mind--with the goals of increasing access and facilitating academic success for ethnically and linguistically marginalized students--the larger educational context has compromised access for multiply marginalized students. Recognizing a need for more complex understandings of…

To commemorate "Lau v. Nichols," this paper reports on findings from archival data revealing its micro- and macro-level genesis, successive activities, and that despite its historic role in language policy development and critical importance for codifying language rights, the vision for educational equity by the Cantonese-speaking,…

Much recent research examines how teachers navigate language policy in dual language bilingual education (DLBE) classrooms (Cervantes-Soon et al., 2017; Palmer & Martínez, 2013). While previous work has illustrated that teachers' language use is varied and related to identity, little research has considered the role of emotions in this setting…

Choosing which additional language to include in national curricula and when to begin teaching it are important educational policy decisions. The current study aims to provide a contextually embedded picture of such policymaking process in the Iranian context. More specifically, the study is intended to explain the agency mechanism of different…

Dual language (DL) programs propose to be vehicles of social justice and transformation by valuing an additional language other than the dominant one in a society and thereby contesting language hierarchies and the subordination of those who speak/use a non-dominant language (Flores, Flores, Educational Policy 30:13-38, 2016; Menken and García,…

The introduction of English and other foreign languages as media of instruction, which is generally referred to as content and language integrated learning (CLIL), has transformed the teaching experiences of a large number of educators. Yet their daily struggles and personally ambivalent stances have hardly been examined. This paper addresses this…

In this article we proffer a theoretical model for analyzing power in language policy processes and incorporate ethnographic data to illustrate the usefulness of the model. Grounded in an ethnographic project in the US state of Washington, we examine how nominally identical school district-level programs, which are funded under the same…

This article reports on year-long critical ethnographic study conducted in a Singapore school and examines how the standard English language educational policy is interpreted by a Secondary 3 (Grade 9) female student from China. She is a member of an exclusive group of academically able students who has been carefully recruited by the local…

The evolution of Rwanda's language policies since 1996 has played and continues to play a critical role in social reconstruction following war and genocide. Rwanda's new English language policy aims to drop French and install English as the only language of instruction. The policy-makers frame the change as a major factor in the success of social…