Focuses on the use of various graphic structures in the teaching of both English and other content vocational subjects in Hong Kong. Concludes that many of the knowledge structures are common to the two situations, and makes suggestions for maximizing learning in these situations. (Author/VWL)

Mi'kmaq is a First Nations language spoken in Atlantic Canada and the north-eastern United States--and like most surviving indigenous languages in North America, it is at risk. The small community of Wagmatcook, Cape Breton, determined to see Mi'kmaq return from the brink of extinction, has implemented 2 initiatives that are changing the fate of…

A group of new studies is providing fresh evidence of what many researchers have been saying all along: English immersion has more political appeal than educational merit. Dr. Amy Merickel, co-author of "Effects of the Implementation of Proposition 227 on the Education of English Learners K-12," says it is not possible given the data…

This paper reports on the implementation of an ambitious bilingual instructional programme in the P'urhepecha-speaking region of Michoacan state in Mexico, the Meseta Tarasca. A curriculum of indigenous language preservation and cultural affirmation, overturning the previous Spanish-only programme, has been developed by a group of indigenous…

This article calls attention to the practices, policies, and procedures at the University of Hawai'i that infringe on the rights of Native Hawaiians to utilize the Hawaiian language in learning and teaching, and in the conduct and dissemination of research. Addressing these infringements, however, appears more easily said than done. The author's…

The use of students' second language as the medium of instruction in schools is quite common in former colonies of Western countries. Schools in Hong Kong have had this kind of experience for more than 150 years. In this study, three factors, namely economic, political, and educational, are found to affect the choice of medium of instruction in…

The paper reports the results of a survey of parents (n=12), teachers (n=8) and pupils (n=20) in primary schools in rural Kenya. The sample was divided equally between multilingual and monolingual schools, the former using English or Kiswahili only, right through primary school, the latter using the mother tongue (in this case, Kalenjin) Kalenjin…

Following the results of the Ife Six-Year Primary Project designed to use an indigenous Nigerian language as a medium of instruction in primary schools, some suggestions have been made to introduce it in all Nigerian primary schools. This study investigates the attitudes of student teachers towards mother-tongue instruction. Data for the study…

The Northern Territory's bilingual education programmes, in which local Australian Aboriginal languages and English were used side by side in a minority of Aboriginal primary schools in remote northern Australia, came into being in 1973 under the broader federal government policy imprimatur of "self-determination" for Indigenous…

During the first half of the twentieth century in British Columbia, French language was considered a school subject to be taught as any other using formal classical approaches. Generally, no specific provincial or local policies existed to guide how French was taught and learned. By 1981, however, British Columbia had developed explicit language…

When the East Timorese voted for Independence in 1999 they at least expected to have infrastructure, such as school buildings, available as they started the task of building a new nation. The post-Independence destruction also meant that unexpected priority decisions about what should be built, or rebuilt, first had to be made. In a country…

This paper examines developments in language policy planning in New Zealand over the last 20 years. The paper begins with a description of the New Zealand educational context, the country's changing demographics, and the uptake for learning languages as an elective in schools. The historical and sociopolitical contexts for language planning are…

This article describes a small-scale research project in two schools using content and language integrated learning (CLIL), one English and one Austrian, where in both cases there had been considerable misgivings about appropriate forms of assessment to match the different kinds of language skill developed in the CLIL process. Teachers were…

The acquisition, fostering and further development of literacy in bilingual situations has been widely studied but similar issues in bidialectal settings where nonstandard and standard languages coexist have not attracted sufficient attention. This is the second of a series of studies investigating the use of nonstandard languages or dialects in…

Based on qualitative data (class observations, interviews, a letter from the researcher to the teacher about her classroom practice, videotapes, and documents), this paper reconsiders the staying-in-English rule, a popular classroom rule that requires learners to stay in English. It presents an ESL classroom example in which circumstances and…