Language Planning and Policy: Recent Trends, Future Directions

A framework for and overview of the key elements of language planning is presented covering status planning, corpus planning, language-in-education planning, prestige planning and critical approaches to language planning. Within each of these areas, key articles outlining important recent directions are discussed indicating the field’s new found sense of vitality

"Unplanned" Language Policy and Planning

This chapter has as its focus "unplanned" language planning or covert language planning. It suggests four reasons why it is important to examine the unplanned (covert) as well as the planned (overt) instances of language planning. The chapter is an author version

Editing contributed scholarly articles from a language management perspective

Taking language management as its initial perspective, this paper examines some of the sorts of linguistic problems that second language writers of English face when contributing to scholarly journals and some of the issues that editors face when working with authors on those problems. Language management theory (hereafter LMT) is briefly explained. Drawing on a substantial corpus (slightly less than 500,000 words), illustrations of various categories of problem types are provided. One finding shows that it is difficult, in practice, to differentiate between simple language management issues and organized language management issues, because what may appear to be simple management issues may in fact have extended implications. Some problem types are not unique to non-native speakers, but appear with different frequency and distribution in non-native speaker texts as compared with native-speaker texts. Some ethical questions implicit in editing non-native speaker texts are explored

Language Policy and Planning in Botswana, Malawi, Mozambique and South Africa: Some Common Issues

This volume covers the language situation in Botswana, Malawi, Mozambique and South Africa explaining the linguistic diversity, the historical and political contexts and the current language situation, including language-in-education planning, the role of the media, the role of religion, and the roles of non-indigenous languages. The authors are indigenous and have been participants in the language planning context. Botswana, Malawi and Mozambique are not well represented in the international language policy/planning literature, while the South African section draws together the published literature in this area. The purpose of the volumes in this series is to present up-to-date information on polities that are not well-known to researchers in the field. A longer range purpose is to collect comparable information on as many polities as possible in order to facilitate the development of a richer theory to guide language policy and planning in other polities that undertake the development of a national policy on languages. This volume is part of a areal series which is committed to providing descriptions of language planning and policy in countries around the world

Demotivation: Understanding Resistance to English Language Learning - The Case of Vietnamese Students

Demotivation in English language learning was investigated, using Vietnam as a case study, with three main foci: (i) the reasons (i.e., the demotives) underlying demotivation; (ii) the degree of influence of different demotives; and (iii) students’ experiences in overcoming demotivation. Using stimulated recall essays from 100 university students of their foreign language learning experiences, the findings indicated that demotivation was a significant issue for EFL learning, and a framework for discussing the different sources of demotives was developed. While some categories of demotives occurred more frequent than others, no category appeared to be more or less difficult to overcome. Rather, students’ awareness of the role of English language and their determination to succeed were critical factors in overcoming demotivation

Norms and varieties of English and TESOL teacher agency

The growing recognition of the plurality of English underling the World Englishes (WE) paradigm has problematised the conventional second language acquisition (SLA) views of errors. If English use in emerging English-speaking contexts is to be judged by local norms, as argued by WE scholars, applying exocentric norms in these contexts can be inappropriate. On the other hand, despite the significant growth of WE, varieties of new Englishes have yet to develop widely acceptable endocentric norms. These developments have raised a critical question: How can TESOL teachers distinguish between errors in the SLA sense and varietal features in the WE sense? Framed around language management theory (LMT) and teacher agency, this paper investigates how a group of global TESOL practitioners in an Australian university evaluated usages of English as a second language, what criteria they used and what implications their judgments and decision-making processes have for TESOL pedagogy and WE research

Introduction - language planning: where have we been? where might we be going?

This paper provides a brief overview of the development and state of language policy and planning and examines some of the directions that language planners have been taking to engage with issues of importance to their discipline. The papers in this volume of RBLA are linked to the overview and the directions being taken by scholars in the field

Speaking of Science: The Use by Australian University Staff of Language Skills

This paper reviews and examines the increasing trend to publish journal literature in English B i.e. the language use trends in the various scientific disciplines. The impact of communication in English in scientific writing and citation, displacing as it does the use of other languages, has been the topic of discussion in the literature. The question this paper poses is - what impact has this practice had on English-speaking scientists? To answer this question, attitudes towards language use in business as a general indicator of the value placed on languages in multicultural Australia are examined. Then language teaching at Australian Universities is briefly examined and finally university Science Staff language use is studied to see whether they use and cite work published in other languages. Is work in languages other than English ignored by English speaking scientists or does it impact on the field