This volume inserts the place of the local in theorizing about language policies and practices in applied linguistics. While the effects of globalization around the world are being discussed in such diverse circles as corporations, law firms, and education, and while the spread of English has come to largely benefit those in positions of power, relatively little has been said about the impact of globalization at the local level, directly or indirectly. Reclaiming the Local in Language Policy and Practice is unique in focusing specifically on the outcomes of globalization in and among the communities affected by these changes. The authors make a case for why it is important for local social practices, communicative conventions, linguistic realities, and knowledge paradigms to actively inform language policies and practices for classrooms and communities in specific contexts, and to critically inform those pertaining to other communities. Engaging with the dominant paradigms in the discipline of applied linguistics, the chapters include research relating to second language acquisition, sociolinguistics, literacy, and language planning. The majority of chapters are case studies of specific contexts and communities, focused on situations of language teaching. Beyond their local contexts these studies are important for initiating discussion of their relevance for other, different communities and contexts. Taken together, the chapters in this book approach the task of reclaiming and making space for the local by means of negotiating with the present and the global. They illuminate the paradox that the local contains complex values of diversity, multilingualism, and plurality that can help to reconceive the multilingual society and education for postmodern times.

Engaged Language Policy and Practices re-envisions language policy and planning as an engaged approach, drawing on and portraying theoretical and educational equity perspectives. It calls for the right to language policy-making in which all concerned—communities, parents, students, educators, and advocates—collectively imagine new strategies for resisting global neoliberal marginalization of home languages and cultural identities. This book subsequently emphasizes the means by which engaged dialectic processes can inform and clarify language policy-making decisions that promote equity. In other words, rather than descriptions of outcomes, the authors emphasize the need to detail the means by which local/regional actors resist and transform inequitable policies. These descriptions of processes thereby provide all actors with ideological, pedagogical, and equity policy tools that can inform situated school and community policy-making. This book depicts ways in which engaged language policy embodies the intersection of critical inquiry, participant involvement, and ongoing engaged language planning processes. It further offers an alternative to the traditional top-down approach to language education policy-making. Engaged Language Policy and Practices is essential reading for scholars, teachers, students, communities, and others concerned with worldwide language and identity equity.

This book employs the realm of English Language Teaching (ELT) as a discursive point of departure to explore how individuals, groups, entities and institutions apprehend, embrace, deal with, manipulate, problematize and resist glocal flows of people, ideas, information, goods, and technology. It apprehends and attends to tensions arising from the fluidly local-global construction and negotiation of borders of identity and interaction within a diverse array of contexts and English education therein. These tensions, whether conceptual or pedagogical, may arise in and through governmental and institutional policymaking, teacher training, or curriculum and materials development, and in the learning experience both within and beyond the classroom, as teachers and students engage with course content and each other.

An exploration of the impact of globalization on diverse cultures and how this effects the dominant languages across Asian civilisations.

Language problems potentially exist at all levels of human activity, including he local contaxts of communities & institutions. This volume explores the ways in which language planning works as a local activity in a wide variety of contexts around the world & deals with a wide range of language planning issues.

This volume offers comprehensive 'state-of-the-art' overviews of educational policies concerning the teaching of English in a large number of Asian countries. Each contribution is written by a leading expert and gives a clear assessment of current policies and future trends. Starting with a description of the English education policies in the respective countries, the contributors then delve into the 'nuts and bolts' of the English education policies and how they play out in practice in the education system, in schools, in the curriculum, and in teaching. Topics covered include the balance between the acquisition of English and the national language, political, cultural, economic and technical factors that strengthen or weaken the learning of English.