In its language policy and planning (LPP), Colombia offers ethnoeducation for ethnic groups, with Spanish as a second language, and for the protection/revitalization of native languages. However, these LPP measures are insufficiently implemented. Meanwhile, with regard to foreign languages, LPP have specifically advocated a Spanish-English…

How does early educational quality affect longer-term academic outcomes? We shed light on this question via a natural experiment in the Philippines--the implementation of a mother tongue education policy in public schools in kindergarten to Grade 3. This policy led to an unexpected decline in educational quality, but differentially in a subset of…

The government of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has designed a range of policies, initiatives, and projects that aim to improve and revive the Arabic language on political, cultural, and educational levels. During the past decade, these initiatives emerged as a response to a perceived decline in the use of the Arabic language and challenges faced…

In this qualitative study, the experiences, training, and challenges of teachers in primary schools in a community in southwest Nigeria were explored. The purpose of this study was to identify the experiences of teachers about their training for mother tongue instruction and how they teach pupils with the mother tongue or local language of the…

This paper addresses the paucity of research on policy agents' responses to the shift to teaching online during the first lockdown in heritage language education and pedagogy. Collected in the context of a small-scale exploratory study, it focuses on the reflective accounts of a group of heritage language teachers in a Greek school in francophone…

The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 marks a significant shift in India's educational framework, particularly with its emphasis on multilingual education (MLE) and mother tongue-based instruction (MTI). Recognizing India's vast linguistic diversity, the policy advocates for teaching in the mother tongue or local language until at least Grade…

This study primarily focuses on the situation of Hungarians in minority situations in relation to language varieties, i.e. it interprets the various language policy issues primarily in the context of the Hungarian-speaking community, rather than in the context of Hungary, where the place, role and relationship between standard and non-standard…

Family language policy research often neglects the dynamic nature of FLP over time. Here, we interview second generation members of migrant families for their recollections as heritage language learners and their experiences setting their own FLP towards their children. We use a transdisciplinary oral history/narrative methodology to discern…

Drawing on Sutton and Levinson's Socio-cultural Approach to policy, this study explores the experiences and collective language beliefs of 25 teachers implementing the Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education (MTBMLE) policy in two urban Philippine school districts. Mixed methods were used to understand policy enactment and teacher perspectives.…

This Case Study is based on research conducted in a higher-education institution in the United Kingdom. It examines the role of spoken language and how aspects of three different levels mediate learning: interpersonal (i.e., dialogue and personal information/interaction), sociohistorical (i.e., learning about the culture, traditions, and history…

Language plays a crucial role in education; yet, while issues of language are undoubtedly relevant to all teachers, school-level language policies, which aim to provide explicit guidance underpinned by a clear set of principles, are too often conspicuous by their absence. In a range of educational contexts around the world it has been found that…

This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the motivations that key policy documents have put forward as justifications for Sweden's mother-tongue instruction in immigrant and historical minority languages as a multicultural policy that has endured for nearly half a century. The diachronic development of these motivations is analysed in four…

Thomas Babington Macaulay's 1835 minute on Indian education is widely held to be representative of the views which underpinned the English East India Company's replacement of Persian with English as the official language of administration in India in 1837, and the promotion of English and Indian vernacular languages as part of colonial educational…

Mother Tongue Education (MTE), despite being the most reliable method of learning, is a challenge for the African countries that fail to implement MTE policies due to lack of resources, stakeholders' attitudes towards mother tongues, and lack of political will. Keeping in view the plight of the primary implementers of such policies, hence, this…

This study analyses practices regarding home languages in a nursery school from a multilingual district in Germany, and the language policies and discourses that become visible in these. First, the context is outlined of Early Childhood Education and Care for multilingual children in Germany; then, the concepts of practices, discourses and…