Language-In-Education Policies: The Discursive Construction of Intercultural Relations (153) (Multilingual Matters) - Softcover

This book is relevant to scholars from a wide variety of academic disciplines. Policy analysts, educators, sociologists, applied linguists, anthropologists, and others will benefit from reading the text (...) This is a book worth reading. -- Ruth Wienk, South Dakota State University, USA * Language Policy (2017) 16 * Scholarly and engaging, Liddicoat's volume makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of language-in-education policy discourse, as it goes beyond the requirements needed for the structuring of language-in-education policy to an examination of the educative value implied by such policies. The case-study approach helps to bridge the gap which exists in language planning and policy between those planners focused on developing structures for good practice and those doing critical analyses of social impacts and outcomes. The volume opens an important possibility of developing accounts of language policy that span both of these discourses and their embedded ideologies. -- Professor Richard B. Baldauf Jr., University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia

This book examines the ideological underpinnings of language-in-education policies that explicitly focus on adding a new language to the learners' existing repertoire. It examines policies for foreign languages, immigrant languages, indigenous languages and external language spread. Each of these contexts provides for different possible relationships between the language learner and the target language group and shows how in different polities different understandings influence how policy is designed. The book develops a theoretical account of language policies as discursive constructions of ideological positions and explicates how ideologies are developed through an examination of case studies from a range of countries. Each chapter in this book takes the form of a series of three in-depth case studies in which policies relating to a particular area of language-in-education policy are examined. Each case examines the language of policy texts from a critical perspective to deconstruct how intercultural relationships are projected.