Language Planning and Student Experiences

This innovative book provides an excellent and critical overview of the intention, interpretation and implementation of Australian language policies. Educationalists and language policymakers in countries, like Japan, destined to depend on immigrants for a human power shortage, will find this book instructive and insightful.

-- Yasukata Yano, Emeritus Professor of Applied Linguistics, Waseda University, Japan

This is a major contribution to our understanding of the interplay between language policy - in all its manifestations - and the realities of teaching and learning. The authors clearly understand the broader significance of multilingualism for our 21st century society and offer some striking insights into the realities and possibilities of languages education in a multicultural context. In so doing they suggest a vision of the 'new spaces' opening up in the future.

-- Lid King, National Director for Languages, England, 2003-2011

A unique perspective on how areas such as language planning, social change and classroom-based research interact and may contribute to the development of language planning theory and language education policy, Lo Bianco's and Aliani's volume stands out as an innovative and much needed contribution to both fields. The 'voices from the classroom' emerging from the authors' longitudinal study nourish, sustain and legitimate new ways of working for language policy makers while offering different tools for scholars exploring education theories in action.

-- Lucilla Lopriore, Roma Tre University, Italy

This book will be a welcome resource for all those interested in the processes of language planning and policymaking, including teachers of foreign or indigenous languages, directors of bilingual schools, applied and educational linguists, sociologists and anthropologists focused on educational settings, micro-ethnographers, and curriculum designers in linguistically diverse schools, as well as those scholars specifically interested in Australian education or policymaking. This book should stimulate future language policy research in other countries that are noticing major slippage between the goals of articulated policy and actual classroom results (e.g. the United States and Britain). It should also prove useful in further elaborating existing language planning theories or models, since it stresses that there should be “constant iteration between school and nation, policy and practice” (p. 132). Finally, it should be of great assistance to language education planners who wish to democratize and increase the efficacy of the planning process by integrating bottom-up perspectives with top-down directives.

-- Alicia Pousada, University of Pennsylvania * The Linguist List 25.7