In studies of minority language education, researchers tend to base their arguments on the assumption that knowledge empowers and ignorance disempowers. In this article, however, I show two alternative dynamics of knowledge and relations of dominance by drawing on my ethnographic fieldwork at a secondary school in Aotearoa/New Zealand in 1997-8.…

The teaching and learning of Irish in primary school is both an important educational issue and central to the national language revitalization effort. The findings of Irish-language programme evaluations, therefore, are invariably scrutinized very closely by different sectors. This paper examines how the later stages of a major evaluation took…

Many Chinese and Taiwanese parents in the United States see benefits of Chinese schools in providing their children the opportunity to learn Chinese culture and language. The results of this qualitative study involving interviews with thirteen Chinese and Taiwanese parents indicated that there were three main reasons why parents want to send their…

Every language has some way of reporting what someone else has said. To express what Jakobson [Jakobson, R., 1990. "Shifters, categories, and the Russian verb. Selected writings". "Word and Language". Mouton, The Hague, Paris, pp. 130-153] called "speech within speech", the speaker can use their own words, recasting…

The nominal lexicon of Seri is characterized by a prevalence of analytical descriptive terms. We explore the consequences of this typological trait in the landscape domain. The complex landscape terms of Seri classify geographic entities in terms of their material make-up and spatial properties such as shape, orientation, and merological…

CThe article is a study of Latino immigrant parents' agency toward primary language (L1) instruction in the face of restrictionist language policy. Certain attitudes and characteristics were associated with advocacy for Spanish L1 instruction. Interviews conducted in an urban California school district among parents with different background…

Cambodian Americans are a fairly recent language minority group in the United States; most families arrived in the United States as refugees during the 1980s. Over the past 30 years, there has been great concern in the community regarding the maintenance loss of their native Khmer language. This article provides an historical and contemporary…

The object of this exploratory study was to test two hypotheses. The first was that a student's preferential cognitive style, sequential or simultaneous, can negatively affect the imaginative fiction texts that he or she produces. The second hypothesis was that students possessing a sequential or simultaneous preferential cognitive style would…

This study is concerned with an exploration of the politics of language with predominately white pre-service teachers through a linguistic activity. It is a continuous, joint effort of three teacher educators working at two universities. Different pedagogical emphases and data collection methods are used at these two universities to investigate…

This qualitative study investigates attitudes toward heritage language (HL) maintenance among Chinese immigrant parents and their second-generation children. Specific attention is given to exploring (1) what attitudes are held by the Chinese parents and children toward Chinese language maintenance in the USA, (2) what efforts are engaged in by the…

Two main bodies of literature are identifiable in minority education policy studies in China. Many adopt a descriptive approach to examining policy documents and general outcomes in their historical contexts while others focus on evaluating preferential policies made to address inequality issues in minority education. In most discussions,…

This paper explores the challenges that neoliberalism and the globalized new economy present to the politics of linguistic minority movements by ethnographically examining language policy as a discursive process, rooted in political economy. Following the post-WWII period, as most Western States restructured from welfarism to neoliberalism, there…

This report presents information on the Connecting Worlds/Mundos Unidos Project and provides a general comparison overview of accomplishments during its five years of operation. The Connecting Worlds/Mundos Unidos Project has been operating in the El Paso Independent School District (EPISD) for eleven years, but in the present format as a Jacob K.…

This working paper explores contemporary research on the effectiveness of program models used in North America to assist English language learners (ELLs) to develop proficient English literacy. Implications will be drawn from the findings of this research and the paper will conclude with recommendations for practical application at the middle…

Language access mandates in the USA, which require that governmental services be provided in any needed language, have been largely ignored since their first enacting. However, the past decade has seen an increase in the number of national, state, and local efforts to accommodate limited English-proficient individuals. This article provides an…