Language minority students represent an increasing percentage of the school-age student population in the United States. Because the number of English language learners (ELLs) is on the rise nationwide, some states have enacted English-only legislation that impacts the educational experiences of ELLs and the teachers who work with them. Many…

The Educational Technical Assistance Act of 2002, authorized the Southwest Regional Advisory Committee (RAC), whose members represent the states of Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas, to identify and prioritize the region's educational needs and recommend how those needs can be met. The Southwest RAC conducted three public…

This paper presents an up-to-date overview of language policies and practices in Lithuania, paying particular attention to the latest developments that have taken place in national educational contexts. Against the background of recent sociodemographic changes in the three Baltic republics, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, it analyzes issues…

Originating from many different sources, Russian as a heritage language in Finland displays a spectrum of developmental tendencies: both attrition and maintenance can be observed in various degrees. The Finnish educational system allows for the organization of bilingual pre-schools and schools when there are sufficient numbers of potential pupils.…

Subtractive education through the medium of a dominant language often transfers Indigenous and minority (IM) children to the dominant group linguistically and culturally within one or two generations. It may lead to the extinction of Indigenous languages, thus contributing to the disappearance of the world's linguistic diversity. A partial result…

This article analyzes how minority-language students responded to what they felt to be disrespectful behavior of a mainstream teacher towards their language from a case at an Aotearoa/New Zealand school in 1997-1998. Even when minority language is recognized officially and institutionally, as in Aotearoa/New Zealand, some minority-language…

Offers a response to an article on scholarship and linguistic rights. The focus of the response is on strengthening the foundations underpinning a field that is of increasing interest not only to sociolinguistics, but also to lawyers, educationalists, economists, anthropologists, policymakers, and others. (Author/VWL)

Canada receives over 30,000 refugees each year, approximately 10% of whom are under five years of age. While to varying degrees the factors influencing the experiences of adult refugees have been identified and researched, the experiences of young refugee children "living in-between" has only recently begun to capture researchers'…

The present ethnographic case study investigates how the identities of immigrant minority pupils are constructed in a multicultural classroom in a Flemish primary school. From the analysis of the class teacher's discourse, it emerges that both Flemish native pupils' identities and those of immigrant minority pupils are constructed as homogeneous:…

This article explores the components of an "adequate" education for linguistic minority students in California and attempts to distinguish these from the components of an adequate education for low-income students who are native English speakers. About 1.6 million students were classified as English learners (ELs) in California in 2006.…

Recently throughout Africa, there has been an increase in mother tongue primary education in minority language communities. There are many reasons for justifying this innovation, one of which is that local cultures are strengthened by mother tongue literacy. This paper examines the link between literacy and culture through the outcomes of a series…

On national and international assessments, students attending French-language schools in Ontario usually perform worse than students attending English-language schools. Interpreting these results is challenging because the French- and English-language schools differ both in prescribed curriculum and in how the curriculum is taught. In addition,…

This monograph describes the overall language situation in Luxembourg, a highly multilingual country in Western Europe, from a language policy and planning perspective. The first part discusses the social and historical contexts, including major societal changes and uncertainties about the future, which are bound up with Europeanisation and the…

This paper presents the root causes of the resistance of mainstream European educational institutions to implementation of minority language programmes (bilingual programmes with both an official/dominant language and an immigrant minority language as media of instruction). Differential treatment of different minority languages in the mainstream…

Educational arenas are important sites for understanding how diversity and democracy become operationalised since they constitute and at the same time must attend to students' different needs. This article focuses on diversity from two specific angles: how research activities allow for particular ways of understanding human differences and how…