The State of Qatar, in cooperation with the RAND Corporation, launched in 2002 an ambitious educational reform and development plan, "Education for a New Era," which included, among other things, the instating of English as the medium of instruction (EMI) in mathematics, science, and technology in the K-12 system. From the start, the…

In this article we proffer a theoretical model for analyzing power in language policy processes and incorporate ethnographic data to illustrate the usefulness of the model. Grounded in an ethnographic project in the US state of Washington, we examine how nominally identical school district-level programs, which are funded under the same…

This article draws on a 23 month ethnographic study of an emerging--newly established and rapidly growing--Latino community in the New Latino Diaspora of the U.S. in order to examine how educators and parents interpret language education policy (LEP). It analyzes how an English as a Second Language director and one undocumented Mexican mother…

In response to the passage of a state English-only policy and a newly mandated instructional model for English learners that focuses on English acquisition, Arizona introduced training requirements for all of the state's educators related to English learners. This policy coincided with changes in the training Arizona teachers opted to pursue,…

The 2010-2011 academic year marked the beginning of a new chapter in the long and controversial history of medium-of-instruction (MOI) policy in Hong Kong. Under the government's "fine-tuning" policy, schools hitherto compelled to use Chinese as the MOI have been given more scope to teach in English at junior secondary level, thereby…

Singapore's officially bilingual education policy, in which the majority of children are schooled through a non-native medium with their "Mother Tongue" (an ethnic heritage language that is not necessarily spoken in the home) as a single school subject only, has resulted in dramatic language shifts in the population and high academic…

We argue here that the combination of U.S. federal education policy as embodied in the "No Child Left Behind Act of 2001" with the passage of a California state initiative that required that "nearly all classroom instruction [be] in English...for a period not normally intended to exceed one year" in 1998 created a "perfect…