The relationship between national languages and schooling is a recurring theme in Derrida's writings on education, playing an important role in the challenge he mounts to traditional understandings of the French State's involvement in the teaching of philosophy. In this essay, I follow this thread of thinking across several of Derrida's texts,…

A national language policy reflects how a state looks at the languages used by its people. It assigns certain roles to languages, and addresses the issues of language education and language of education. Pakistan, a multilingual country, has yet no language policy at national level. This absence of policy has caused many issues, including the…

Thomas Babington Macaulay's 1835 minute on Indian education is widely held to be representative of the views which underpinned the English East India Company's replacement of Persian with English as the official language of administration in India in 1837, and the promotion of English and Indian vernacular languages as part of colonial educational…

Although a significant number of practitioners are being progressively exposed to English as a lingua franca (ELF) research findings and developments, we still face the challenge of bringing ELF into the ELT classroom in a more systematic way and on a regular basis. It is a fact that once EFL learners move into contexts of use outside the…

The aim of the Regional Dossier series is to provide concise descriptions of minority languages in education, mainly in Europe but also in other parts of the world. In the Slovene Littoral, Slovene and Italian are official languages and thus they share equal status in public and private life. Learners in this region attend schools either with…

The article discusses ELF-aware pedagogy as a possible way to integrate English as a lingua franca (ELF) in English language classrooms and explores the extent to which task-based language teaching (TBLT) could contribute to this end. ELF-aware pedagogy involves enriching teaching practices with appropriate metalinguistic and reflective activities…

International Sign (IS) and American Sign Language (ASL) have both been used as lingua francas within international deaf contexts. Perspectives on the uses of IS and ASL as lingua francas in such contexts are connected to discourses pertaining to the form, function, status, value, languageness, and global reach of IS and ASL. While there are some…

Italy is characterized by a considerable amount of language variation. Only a few spoken vernaculars enjoy institutional support and are officially recognized as minority languages. Among these, Friulian is one of the largest in terms of number of speakers. In the past decade, the assessment of Friulian language vitality has yielded discordant…

This article will discuss Paulo Freire's global influences on environmental pedagogies and argue that ecopedagogical reinventions are essential for 'quality' education, as touted in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) #4, for global, all-inclusive 'development' that is planetarily sustainable. The politics of how 'development' is…

Although translation may be considered the "sine qua non" of bilingual legislation, the perceived authenticity and equivalence of different language versions of the same law are contingent on the disavowal of translation. Yet precisely because of such disavowal, translated versions of law are paradoxically valorized as equal in meaning…

In the interactive game Battle developed by the Garborg Center, a literary museum in Norway, the players face an engaging political case: a fictive nation is considering changing its own unique official language to English. Four interest groups debate the language situation, from different standpoints. Identity, culture, and democracy are all in…

We discuss how the colonisation of the island of Ireland has marginalised and delegitimised Gaeilge, the Irish language, and the relationship of this colonial genealogy in place to local educational institutions and the practices therein. The hegemonic and homogenising processes of British colonialism continue to reverberate in modern discourses…

The literary museum tradition in Norway is dominated by a historical-biographical and site-specific approach to museum education. The Centre for Norwegian Language and Litterature, with its three museum departements, has choosen a different approach. By narrowing literature to patterns, ideas, and emotions and addressing current cultural…

In ELT contexts, the concept of ELF awareness has been proposed as a means of developing the skills, strategies, and overall outlook that learners require to competently participate in ELF interactions. Depending on the teaching context, this can be a demanding process. We discuss the ELF-aware instructional interventions carried out by two…

Multilingualism is widespread in the world today and English is, in many cases, one of the languages in the multilingual speaker's repertoire. English as a lingua franca (ELF) is used by multilingual speakers who can also communicate in other languages and use their multilingual and multicultural resources in creative ways. This paper aims at…