Recently, those examining the role teachers of language minority students play in the language policy-making process have found that their autonomy has been threatened by increasing standardization as reflected in rigid one-size fits all curricular mandates focused on the learning of discrete skills in the national language, enforced high-stakes…

This article describes and analyzes how rural Nicaraguan teachers and NGO leaders are working with a US university-based team to develop a locally responsive, critical, and inquiry-based approach to the Ministry of Education requirement for English in secondary school. This requirement has placed a new and challenging expectation upon rural…

This study examines the English language teaching (ELT) policies and measures taken under the United States Army Military Government in Korea (USAMGIK) from 1945 to 1948, in an attempt to illuminate their implications on the current ELT in Korea. The study analyzes data derived from documents of the Korean and the U.S. governments, literature on…

This paper investigates the Chinese state's English language ideologies as reflected in official Chinese foreign language education policies (FLEP). It contends that the Chinese FLEP not only indicate a way by which the state gains consent, maintains cultural governance, and exerts hegemony internally, but also shows the traces of the combined…

This paper explores a period of advocacy on behalf of Spanish language education in the United States from 1914 to 1945. It interrogates claims made by policy actors about the centrality of Spanish language education to US geopolitical and economic interests in Latin America. I make two arguments: first, that realization of US economic and…

This paper analyzes the context of Spanish language teaching in Brazil. We examine the representations of and attitudes toward Rioplatense/Argentinean Spanish and Peninsular Spanish--and toward the speakers of each of these varieties--held by Brazilian learners of Spanish as a foreign language. To provide the context in which Spanish learning…

This paper describes the cultural semantics of internet courses in American accent. Such courses are offered by corporate providers to specific groups of customers: people in search of success in the globalized business environment. The core of such courses is an order of indexicality which stresses uniformity and homogeneity, producing an…

This paper investigates the foreign language management strategies of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Lazio, Italy. Based on empirical data from a questionnaire survey and ethnographic interviews, it also aims to validate the hypothesis that macro-level language planning (on a national scale) may not reflect language problems…

This paper examines the ideologies of language which underpin mainstream applied linguistic research and educational policy generation for English language teaching in Japan. Over the last 30 years a burgeoning literature has devoted itself to the task of researching and directing English language education in Japan, but has, by its own admission,…

This paper uses Cambodia as a case study to problematise the notion of choice in the spread of English. I explore specific historical contexts which were central to the construction of the demand for English and English language teaching (ELT) in Cambodia. The actions of a range of external agencies resulted in the close discursive articulation of…

A tension exists for teachers in Texas bilingual third and fifth grade classrooms between state and local bilingual education policy, which encourages them to transition students gradually from Spanish into English instruction while providing bilingual support; and state and federal accountability policy, which requires them to choose a single…

This survey of third-grade teachers of English Language Learners (ELLs) in Arizona regarding school language and accountability policies--Proposition 203 (a voter-initiative that restricts the use of bilingual education programs in Arizona schools), the federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB), and Arizona LEARNS (the state's high-stakes…

Explores how academic linguists have become marginalized from policy-making aimed at reforming English teaching in English schools, and how they are now beginning to contribute again. A pluralistic model is applied to two critical incidents. (Author/VWL)