This article focuses on the ever-increasing stress on multilingual education (MLE) in policy documents, especially its pairing with mother tongues in education (MTE). This focus brings into relief the relationship between MTE, the preservation of linguistic diversity and social democracy. We argue that the outcome of this relationship crucially…

Using a sociocultural approach with Indigenous epistemology, we examine language policies related to Lau. We researched how Lau impacted Native language policies through the "Sinajini v. Board of Education of San Juan School District." Native education rights are embedded in treaty rights. As such, Native students have unique statuses…

The maintenance of heritage language is essential to immigrant children's linguistic, cultural, and social development. While there is a large body of literature on heritage language, how heritage language is practiced at home remains largely unknown. Engaging in an autobiographical narrative inquiry, I tell and retell stories of our pedagogical…

A mismatch between one's culture and that of the school they attended -- cultural discontinuity -- has been put forward as a reason for low educational attainment globally. This paper evaluates the cultural discontinuity hypothesis for Indigenous youth in Canada using the 2012 Aboriginal Peoples Survey. I find that Indigenous language instruction…

In "Emile," Rousseau advances significant ideas about language, language learning and teaching: He posits a universal natural language that develops as the child matures; focuses on 'private' words invented by children, on the challenge facing children in their understanding of exceptions to general rules of the mother tongue and on…

This article examines the use of the repertory grid technique as a method to investigate learner perceptions in language education research. An important issue raised in this article concerns how far a researcher's agenda may be unintentionally imposed onto a research study which is investigating learners' perceptions, and how far the ensuing data…

To inform the design of humanizing pedagogies that draw on the whole of learners' linguistic resources, educators must come to know students as language users, and, more centrally, support students to become aware of the dynamism of their own linguistic repertoires. We highlight one instructional approach--"linguistic cartography"--for…

This paper examines how language-based artificial intelligence is envisaged to imagine new futures for indigenous languages. It draws on the visions, programmes, and plans of six language initiatives that are developing language technology for often-marginalised indigenous, tribal, and minority (ITM) languages, such as Gondi, Maithili, Rajasthani…

This article explores relationality and relational accountability in Indigenous education, contextualizing these processes within a current US-wide study of Indigenous-language immersion (ILI) schooling. With the goals of promoting language and culture revitalization alongside education equity, self-determination, and community well-being, ILI…

This article investigates the language orientations in education policy documents for early childhood education and care (ECEC) in Finland and Norway. Finland, an officially bilingual country, and Norway, a predominantly monolingual country, share similar views on ECEC. However, the ECEC field in both countries has undergone major changes in…

This paper analyzes Nepal's language education policy from a decolonial perspective, examining how rights-based (neo)liberal ideologies and policies do not necessarily contribute to creating space, either ideological or implementational (Hornberger, 2005), for Indigenous languages in education. Drawing on the theory of "decoloniality"…

In the Finnish National Core Curriculum for Compulsory Education (2014), the conception of language is based on the communal and functional linguistics model of language. From the perspectives of teaching and learning, this requires that learning contexts and pedagogies enable learning in such learning environments, roles, and processes where the…

The search for a more comprehensive and conscious curriculum for Spanish heritage language learners and Spanish native speakers (SHL/SNS) is a task that many educators are making a priority due to the diversity in the classroom. This paper focuses on presenting the theoretical framework and approaches that have facilitated SHL/SNS instruction in…

An indigenous or community language is the language that nurtures the child in the early years of his or her life. The UNESCO land mark publication in 1953 underscores the importance of educating children in their community languages: an education that is packaged in a language which the child does not understand is simply difficult for the child.…

Mainstream education for sustainable development conceives of nature as a resource or commodity. The natural world is, for the most part, accorded only instrumental or utilitarian value. As a field it thus aligns itself with a longstanding paradigm in western thinking that sees humans as separate from and dominant over nature. The de-natured…