Language Education Policy in Global Perspective

Bilingual education, even in the United States, has developed as a result of explicit and implicit language policies that are carried out sometimes by nation-states, other times by ethnolinguistic groups and families, and yet other times by educators themselves. Sometimes the language education policy has to do with enrichment, or the addition of a second language, as in elite forms of bilingual education for majority children. Other language policies have to do with the maintenance of a minority language or even the revi-talization of a language that has been lost, as in the case of the Maori Kohanga Reo “language nest” programs for preschoolers. At yet other times, the language education policy is about ensuring that language minority children shift as quickly as possible to a dominant language. This is the case with transitional bilingual education programs in the United States for immigrant children and in many African countries for children speaking languages other than those used in the educational system.

Scholars such as Robert Kaplan and Richard Baldauf distinguish between “language planning,” which is about activities to promote linguistic change including beliefs, practices, and laws and regulations, and “language policy,” which consists of the laws and regulations themselves. But Bernard Spolsky uses the term language policy for the entire enterprise, distinguishing between practices, beliefs, or ideology, and what he calls management (the laws and regulations, which for others is planning). This entry uses this broader definition of language policy, referring then to the field, as Sue Wright and Thomas Ricento have done before, as language policy and language planning (LPLP).

Bilingual education is perhaps the most important instrument of LPLP. It is directly related to what has been called acquisition planning because the implementation of bilingual education programs creates new language learners and new users of a language. Also, by giving a language a prestigious domain in which to function such as the school, bilingual education is also a means of status planning, that is, modifying the prestige of a language. Finally, because of the school's emphasis on literacy, bilingual education is an important means of corpus planning, standardizing the language forms, and developing new terms for academic functions.

Three stages of their geopolitical climate, episte-mological paradigms (concerning the nature of knowledge), and research paradigms are identified and described later. These three stages have influenced the views of language held, the models of LPLP pursued, and the corresponding bilingual education models developed throughout the world. Although this discussion has been simplified by referring to stages in practice and as dependent on societal circumstance, the views of language, models of LPLP used, and bilingual education models extend throughout time. Thus, language ideologies, LPLP activities, and bilingual education practices that were prevalent in the early 1970s are equally valuable today in some contexts, although not all. This entry explains the different models of bilingual education that have resulted [Page 436]from different views of language and different LPLP models in global contexts.