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Belonging to a minority or Indigenous group is one of the greatest obstacles to a quality education. This case study examines how Bolivia successfully increased enrollment, reduced drop-out rates and raised achievement among its majority Indigenous population through an ambitious home-language learning program implemented in 1500 schools nation-wide. The Intercultural Bilingual Education Program’s approach consisted of teaching Indigenous children to read and write in their home language first, then gradually integrating Spanish. The chapter describes how the program improved Indigenous children’s educational outcomes, increased their levels of participation and engagement in class, and improved the status of Indigenous languages. Despite these successes, the chapter also highlights several challenges that the program has encountered, including management problems, human resources problems, conceptual problems and public opinion problems.

This chapter focuses on California in order to explain the federal Bilingual Education Act’s (1968) origins and impact. By 1968, California had for nearly a century grappled with educating its linguistically diverse population. Before newly politicized Chicanos became the public face of “the bilingual issue” in the late 1960s, local and state politicians and bureaucrats had cooperated across party lines to devise curricula and legislation to address the growing Spanish-speaking population. Their efforts evinced an impressive degree of grass-roots and state-level innovation in an era most often characterized as one of expanded federal power. This chapter also explores how pivotal the BEA was in gaining a federal commitment to the educational achievement of limited-English-speaking children and in spurring state and local action. At the same time, examining the act’s development from an ambitious bill to its passage in 1968 reveals how philosophically and fiscally limited its terms actually were.

This chapter presents an overview of the theoretical and empirical literature of bilingual education which is relevant to an understanding of how a second or foreign language (L2) can be used as a medium of instruction in schools for the dual goal of achieving bilingualism/biliteracy and cognitive/academic learning. Major theories, principles, concepts and programme options/models in bilingual education are delineated. The factors and conditions promoting or inhibiting success in bilingual education are critically reviewed. Their implications for Hong Kong and other Southeast Asian contexts are discussed.

In this chapter, a brief review of the approaches to LPP is provided. Then a new LPP framework which is specifically useful for understanding bilingual education in Southeast Asian contexts is proposed. The cases of Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia are discussed in light of this framework, and innovative approaches to bilingual education are discussed with a view to exploring possible fruitful directions for tackling LPP difficulties and dilemmas experienced in these societies.

In the 1960s George I. Sánchez entered the most highly engaged phase of his career with regard to national politics, particularly with the Political Association of Spanish-Speaking People (PASSO). He supported the election of John F. Kennedy and served his administration in an advisory capacity as a Latin American expert. He likewise served Lyndon Johnson's administration, though he disliked Johnson personally. He remained an integration purist by continuing to rail against various programs and policies, even when they were designed to help the disadvantaged, earning a reputation at the University of Texas and beyond for his willingness to protest. And he shaped Senator Ralph Yarborough's Bilingual Education Act while briefly being considered by Johnson for an appointment to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. It was at the end of this period that Sánchez's health declined rapidly.

In this chapter, a historical account of the development of the language-in-education (LIE) policy in Hong Kong is provided. The socio-political context is also described in an attempt to situate this policy in the historical context. Major policy developments including the MIGA exercise introduced in 1994, the mandatory linguistic streaming policy introduced in 1998, and recent policy revisions, are also discussed. We make the observation that Hong Kong's postcolonial LIE policy has been plagued with charges of elitism and social stratifying effects. Ironically, the situation seems to be worse than it was during colonial times. In conclusion, we discuss how Hong Kong's postcolonial mother-tongue education policy seems to be more a result of narrowly focused technical rationality than of postcolonial nationalism, and how this decontextualized rationality has run into trouble by failing to pay attention to the larger socio-economic and socio-political effects of the policies. Discussion is also given to the recent policy of implementing Putonghua as MOI for Chinese Language and Literature which, although likely to be driven by the agenda to spread China's national language to Hong Kong, is legitimized in the Hong Kong government's discourse by the pedagogical benefits of Putonghua teaching on the writing skills of Modern Standard Chinese.

This final chapter draws together the principal research findings presented in the book, providing a synthesis of key conclusions in respect of the overarching research questions initially outlined in chapter 1. The discussion presented will relate these findings to previously formulated theories of language revitalisation, and the possible role of education in language revitalisation (as addressed in chapters 2–3). The chapter firstly offers a summary of participants’ present-day Gaelic use, before drawing together findings from the qualitative and quantitative analyses of informants’ ideologies and attitudes. Such speaker perceptions are discussed in relation to Gaelic language use, sociocultural identities, and attitudes to GME as an education system generally. Finally, this chapter draws together the principal conclusions of the book’s principal empirical chapters, with a view to assessing how participants’ beliefs, attitudes and ideologies concerning Gaelic impact on language practices, and on likely future prospects for the maintenance of Gaelic in Scotland. A number of recommendations for activists and policymakers attempting to revitalise minority languages internationally are then presented.

In this chapter, an overview of key empirical studies conducted on issues related to the medium of instruction in Hong Kong schools is presented. The overview follows a chronological order and covers key studies in four main periods: (1) from the 1970s to the early 1980s, (2) the 1980s, (3) the 1990s, and (4) the 2000s. Major research findings in the past three decades point to the general lack of prerequisites for the successful implementation of English-medium education in the majority of secondary schools in Hong Kong. The unfavourable conditions found in these allegedly English-medium schools include: (1) inadequate English skills of the students to benefit from studying in English, (2) lack of language support provided by the school to these students, (3) lack of professional development opportunities for both EMI content teachers and English language subject teachers, (4) lack of Language Across the Curriculum (LAC) co-ordination: little co-ordination among EMI content teachers themselves as well as between the EMI content teachers and English language subject teachers, and (5) unsuccessful design and implementation of the existing Bridging Courses (i.e. the Longman and Macmillan Bridging Courses). In the final section of this chapter, some future directions for research are outlined.

Various perspectives have been brought to bear on the interrelationship of language, culture and identity within sociolinguistics, the sociology of language, social psychology and linguistic anthropology. This chapter is structured into five overarching sections, setting out a wider theoretical framework surrounding the nexus of language and social life. The chapter seeks firstly to define a conceptual framework for examining the interplay of language and sociocultural identity, before addressing the symbolic value of languages, essentialist conceptions of identity and the relationship between language and nationalism. It then introduces the concept of language ideologies and reviews theoretical understandings of how speakers’ culturally constituted beliefs and feelings about language can be seen to impact upon their use of different linguistic varieties. The chapter subsequently considers language socialisation, and focuses on how bilingual (immersion) education may interact with considerations of language and identity, ideologies and socialisation in diverse settings internationally. The framework established will thus conceptualise how these matters can help to frame the key themes and objectives of the book.

In this chapter, the historical development of bilingual education policy and practice in Singapore will first be outlined. In particular, with regard to the bilingual education policy in Singapore which underscores the development of both the English language and the heritage languages, we discuss how it has gradually become a weak form of bilingual education. The heritage languages are merely maintained as a subject while all other subjects are taught in English. Implications of this weak form of bilingual education for other Southeast Asian contexts are discussed. Then the historical development of bilingual education policy and practice in Malaysia is outlined. The tension between nationalist agendas and practical responses to globalization forces is discussed in the context of how LIE policy and practice have gone on a zigzag route in Malaysia. Some implications of the experiences of Singapore and Malaysia for other Southeast Asian contexts are discussed.