Israel has two official languages: Hebrew and Arabic, and one semi-official language, English. Within this multilingual environment, the national English curriculum relates to all learners as one homogenous population. There are no specific directives regarding the linguistic needs of diverse language backgrounds. Studies of literacy acquisition…

Born and educated in the UK, with Arab parents and Muslims, second-generation British-Arab immigrants in Cardiff find themselves at the core of a complex web of power relations which potentiates their production of multilingual practices. However, while Cardiff is officially bilingual, English being the dominant language and Welsh becoming…

Bilingualism characterizes people in linguistically heterogeneous settlements like Nairobi among other urban centres in Kenya. But the country is also predominantly rural (where you find people of a common language settled in one geographical rural region) in which mother tongues are primary means of communication. Children in lower primary in…

The status of a language is very often described and measured by different factors, including the length of time it has been in use in a particular territory, the official recognition it has been given by governmental units, and the number and proportion of speakers. Spanish has a unique history and, so some argue status, in the contemporary…

Language--both oral and written--is an essential driver in the process of individual and national development. But languages are living things; they need to develop, thrive, and be used effectively--and many need to be revitalized and even saved from an early death--in order for all people of the world, especially those most excluded and…

Timor-Leste celebrated its formal political independence on 20th May 2002. The National Constitution of the new nation declared the endogenous lingua franca (Tetum) and the former colonial language (Portuguese) to be co-official. The remaining local languages were given the status of national languages. Indonesian and English were designated as…

This monograph provides an overview of the language situation in the three Baltic countries: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. It examines the recent change in language regimes that the Baltic States have deliberately brought about since the restitution of their independence, the nature of these changes, the opposition they have engendered and the…

This article presents a qualitative case study of a seven-year-old Mexican American student and his family. Using Critical Discourse Analysis, we examine both the child's emergent ideas about language, as expressed in bilingual literature discussions, and his parents' ideological discourses about the use of a minority language in public schools.…

The development of literacy in selected bilingual societies was investigated. Historical and comparative studies were conducted of medieval Jewish communities, the Navajo community, a northern New Mexico village, and the countries of Paraguay and Tonga. The goal of the case studies was to develop a model for the development of literacy in the…

Over 200 news items, journal articles, position papers, and other citations concerning the issue of English as the official language of the United States are included in this bibliography. While information on state and federal legislative efforts is presented, testimony of congressional hearings is kept to a minimum, as are unpublished…

Two basic approaches to language treatment have been defined, the policy approach and the cultivation approach. The former deals with the selection of a national language, standardization, literacy, orthography, and the stratification of code varieties, and is a macro approach. The latter concerns correctness, efficiency, specialized functions,…

As stated in Part 1 of this discussion, Canada is a hybrid, making use of both the macro, or policy, model and the micro, or cultivation, model of language treatment. Some concrete measures are taking place in language status and corpus planning on the inter-federal-provincial level and the provincial level, particularly in Quebec. One such…

There are at least 6,000--7,000 languages spoken in the world today, with over half of them endangered. And 61 percent of the endangered languages are within the Asia and Pacific Region. The publication is a report derived from the Regional (Asia and Pacific Region) Workshop on Mother Tongue/Bilingual Literacy Programs for Ethnic Minorities, held…

A discussion of the language and literacy situation in Singapore looks at the role of each of the four official languages (English, Mandarin Chinese, Tamil, and Malay) and at trends and issues in adult and vocational education for labor force development. Usage patterns of each official language, common dialects and varieties and their use, and…