The focus of this paper is on the effects of the use of the home language (i.e. isiZulu) on teachers' and learners' understanding and use of core concepts in mathematics and science at the senior phase, in contexts where the language of instruction is English. It reports on a national, collaborative, multilingual research project which attempts to…

In the early 1980s, the Hawaiian language had reached its low point with fewer than 50 native speakers of Hawaiian under the age of 18. Outside of the Ni'ihau community, a small group of families in Honolulu and Hilo were raising their children through Hawaiian. This article shares the perspectives of three pioneering families of the Hawaiian…

From a legal and institutional point of view, the current situation of the different languages in Spain has a double basis: the fact that the Spanish Constitution acknowledges the country's multilingual and multicultural character, and the country's organisation into Autonomous Communities. Such a constitutional framework has made it possible for…

The popular and official description of the Gaeltacht as Irish-speaking rather than bilingual areas reflects the historically dominant discourse on language ideology in Ireland. While there is little evidence that the Gaeltacht people want to learn English at the expense of their Irish, as may have been the case throughout Ireland in the past,…

The language of instruction is the medium through which knowledge is transmitted during the educational process. Because of this, the issue of what language the teachers use when giving lectures and what language is used to compile the text materials they adopt becomes a core issue in educational development for any multiethnic, multilingual…

The purpose of this paper is to examine a language policy in a two-way immersion programme and to explicate the dimensions as well as dynamics involved in the teacher's interpretation and implementation of the policy. The Korean-English two-way immersion kindergarten classroom where this research was conducted, adopted a 70: 30 language…

Explores the link between national language policy and practice in Irish-medium schools, which are known in Irish Gaelic as Gaelscoileanna. Provides an overview of the state's language policy since 1922 to promote Irish by using the schools as the primary vehicle for policy implementation. (Author/VWL)

The paper problematises student writing as social practice from the perspective of lecturers' discursive practices. The paper uses data from a major study at a higher learning institution in Tanzania to explore lecturers' discursive practices and familiarity with the university orders of discourse including English medium of instruction, in…

Africa's educational systems are undergoing a quiet revolution. As these systems move away from working exclusively in the old colonial languages, usually English or French, bilingual schools which use local indigenous languages are springing up in many regions of Africa. This paper points out the historical processes driving the bilingual…

This paper investigates the code-switching behaviour of two native speaker teachers teaching their mother tongue--French and Korean, respectively--to predominantly English monolingual students in New Zealand secondary schools. A close analysis of these teachers' classroom discourse and their perceptions about classroom language use reveals a range…

Since the post-Soviet context is not particularly well known to the majority of readers, the author uses this introduction to provide a general background against which developments in particular post-Soviet countries can be better understood. The author begins by placing these developments in the sociohistoric context of language policies of the…

Singapore is unique in that it has not only embraced English as one of its official languages, but has made the language of its colonizers the "de facto" working language of the nation and the sole medium of instruction in all its schools, while assigning its other three official languages, Mandarin, Malay, and Tamil, an L2 status in the…

The evaluation of bilingual education in the Basque Country has gone through different stages during the last 25 years. From 1983 onwards, language models of schooling A, B and D were developed, according to parental choice. Model A is not considered a bilingual education model, since L2 is taught as a subject only, while models B and D are…

The goal of this brief, prepared jointly by the National Hispanic Caucus of State Legislators (NHCSL) and the Tomás Rivera Policy Institute (TRPI), is to bring to policy saliency--at the national, state, and local levels--to the educational crisis caused by the under-achievement of Hispanic youth. Specifically, this report addresses two issues of…

This is the full report, and a separate research brief also was published. Austin Independent School District (AISD) served 5,450 pre-K students in 2009-2010. Approximately 70% of sampled English-speaking pre-K students and 74% of sampled Spanish-speaking pre-K students had faster than the expected growth rate on an assessment of receptive…