This 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…

This study examines how elementary teachers (grades three through five) in dual-language, bilingual programs (Spanish/English) view informal reading inventories (IRIs) to support their students' reading growth. The research, conducted in an urban district in the Northeastern United States, draws on interviews with 20 teachers in these programs.…

Parents, teachers and institutions often attempt to implement monolingual policies in bilingual settings, believing that they thereby facilitate children's bilingual development. Children, however, often have their own communicative agendas. In this study, we investigate how the twofold language policy of an English-medium preschool in Sweden is…

Previous research has shown that content and language integrated learning (CLIL), an educational approach that offers content courses through more than one educational language, increases metalinguistic awareness. This improved insight into language structures is supposed to extend beyond the linguistic domain. In the present study, the question…

This regional dossier aims to provide a concise, description and basic statistics about minority language education in a specific region of Europe. Aspects that are addressed include features of the education system, recent educational policies, main actors, legal arrangements, and support structures, as well as quantitative aspects, such as the…

Challenges exist in implementing science programs in indigenous schools where cross-cultural boundaries between students and teachers are small but teachers do not have formal science education and how to teach science in an indigenous language. This paper presents a model for teaching science within a 'wharekura' (indigenous secondary school) to…

With the aim of bridging the gap between the understanding of individual agency and that of structural constraint, this article deals with the ways in which autobiographical research can provide insight into how individuals negotiate the social contexts in which they are located. Despite the strong utilitarian discourse about the centrality of…

Ten non-English speaking immigrant students shared their lived experiences in their secondary school mathematics classrooms in New Zealand. Through the voices of these students some understandings of the challenges they experienced as second language learners are brought to the fore. The students' perspectives of the language-related challenges…

In 2009, the Japanese government launched the Global 30 (G30) Project, a new initiative to internationalize universities. Selected universities had to create English-medium degree programs at undergraduate level in order to stimulate "internationalization at home." The G30 Project represented a major shift in the focus of…

The concept of bilingualism in Finnish political discourse is predominantly used in the meaning of official or state bilingualism, focusing on the two constitutionally defined "national languages;" that is, Finnish and Swedish. Legally, both Finnish and Swedish-speakers have a right for public services, such as schooling or health care,…

This study examined the challenges facing the teaching as well as the implementation of Awgni as a mother tongue language in primary schools of Awi administrative zone. The need to teach through mother tongue in Ethiopia was widely discussed following the change of the politics in 1991. To this end, the government issued new education and training…

This paper discusses data from a Dutch-medium secondary school in Brussels where almost all pupils speak a different language than Dutch at home. It illustrates that teachers' preference for maintaining the school's monolingual policy did not preclude their creation of haphazard or humorous multilingual interstices that temporarily alleviated the…

The present article analyzes social engagement as an outcome of higher education. It can be conceived as an attitude that by definition only manifests itself over time, and should therefore not be assessed or measured during the years of study or at graduation. The argument is being made that social engagement should be understood in terms of…

This article reports on multilingualism in adult literacy education in Timor-Leste and explores how choices made at the formal level of national language policy are dealt with at the operational level of adult literacy education. The 2002 constitution of Timor-Leste declares Portuguese and Tetum as the official languages. It recognises the need…

In examining how English as a second language (ESL) learners process English formulaic expressions in a nonnative English context, this study aims to investigate the strategies that learners use and how first language (L1) culture and conceptual knowledge could influence the use of the strategies. This study is guided by the research question of…