Language Policy in Multilingual Educational Contexts

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In many countries where populations speak more than one language in everyday life, education takes place in multilingual contexts. The language(s) a person learns at school and is educated in is/are determined by the policies of individual governments, which favor the dominant state language(s). Speakers of languages other than the official and national languages recognized for instructional purposes are often at a disadvantage. In many countries experts generally recommend multilingual education in at least three languages as essential for participating at national and global levels: mother tongue, a regional or national language, and a global language. Language policies and models of multilingual education are examined at regional, national, and international levels.

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Suzanne Romaine has been Merton Professor of English Language at the University of Oxford since 1984. She has held a variety of scholarships and visiting fellowships at other universities, including the Rotary International Foundation Fellowship (University of Edinburgh) and the Canada Commonwealth Scholarship (Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto). In 1991–1992 she was Kerstin Hesselgren Professor at the University of Uppsala, Sweden. This award for outstanding women in the humanities is sponsored by the Swedish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences. Prof. Romaine's research interests lie primarily in historical linguistics and sociolinguistics, especially in problems of societal multilingualism, linguistic diversity, language change, language acquisition, and language contact in the broadest sense. Her book Vanishing voices: the extinction of the world's languages, written jointly with Daniel Nettle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) won the British Association for Applied Linguistics Book Prize in 2001. Other books include Language in society. An introduction to sociolinguistics. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994; 2nd ed., 2000), Communicating gender (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1999), Bilingualism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989; 2nd ed., 1995), Language, education and development: rural and urban Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), and Pidgin and Creole Languages (London: Longman, 1988).

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