Language policies in education: Critical issues

Abstract

James W. Tollefson (ed.), Language policies in education: Critical issues. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2002. Pp. 350. Pb $39.95.Language policies in education brings together a wide-ranging collection of essays from the United States, Canada, Australia, Yugoslavia, India and East Asia, Eastern Africa, and the Solomon Islands. Editor James Tollefson frames the discussion in his introduction and conclusion on language conflict and language rights in a way that calls our attention to the central questions. How have educational language policies maintained unequal access to teaching and learning resources for language minorities and indigenous language (IL) speakers? What affirmative measures in the realm of language policy can chart the clearest course toward redressing these inequalities? And for political entities in multilingual states in a position of language policy-making authority, what are the guiding principles of a responsible democratic approach to resolving ethnolinguistic conflicts? Though few of the authors take up the questions directly, the editor reminds readers that all discussions of educational language policy must keep in the foreground considerations of effective pedagogical practice and constraints on language learners. These more narrowly circumscribed educational, developmental, and psycholinguistic determinants are subordinated to political-ideological impositions at the risk of undermining basic democratic principles. Multilingual and multicultural accord at the nation-state level is eroded by attempts to utilize official language teaching programs as tools of national or political unification if these programs are not conceived as complementary to individuals' language learning rights and as consistent with sound first and second language pedagogy. Particularly instructive on this point are the chapters by Mary McGroarty, Terrance Wiley, Thomas Donahue, and Teresa McCarty on the current struggle between the forces of pluralism and exclusion in the United States, and surveys of political-language conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and India by Tollefson and Selma Sonntag, respectively.