Flexible Multilingual Education

Extremely readable, this book offers critical windows into a wide range of educational contexts illustrating different approaches to bilingual and multilingual education. The author sets the agenda for much needed future implementations of what he defines as flexible multilingual education by drawing lessons from the impact that each of the programs and policies analyzed has had on children's, parents' and society's language attitudes, ideologies and practices. All in all, a valuable resource for researchers, teachers and policy makers.

-- Mireia Trenchs-Parera, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain

Adopting a resource-based and flexible view of language, Jean-Jacques Weber's volume is an important contribution to the literature on language and education, moving us beyond ethnolinguistic essentialism and urging policy makers and educators to recognize, and work with, the complex multilingual repertoires of children. The argument, innovative, nuanced and convincing, draws in data from a range of contexts, contrasting fixed and flexible language-in-education policies in Europe, Asia, Africa and the United States.

-- Ana Deumert, University of Cape Town, South Africa

This important contribution to language education signals an era of complex multilingual repertoires among youth living in super diverse societies. It takes a needed step in moving beyond compartmentalized and dichotomized language policies towards education that acknowledges students' rich linguistic and hybrid identity resources while evoking the need for critical inquiry-based education.

-- Kathryn A. Davis, University of Hawai`I at Manoa, USA

This volume presents a thorough description of current language-in-education policies across the world together with a compelling and well-articulated defense of flexible multilingual education. This is a book that combines strong convictions with scientific rigor.

 

-- Xavier Martin-Rubió, Universitat de Lleida, Spain * International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 2014 *

This book is an important addition to studies on multilingual education. One of its main strengths is its comprehensiveness and comparative nature. Given the wide-ranging content in this book and its painstaking descriptiveness, I would recommend its inclusion in the recommended readings portion of syllabi for both undergraduate- and graduate-level courses and seminars on multilingual education. 

-- Jason Steve Sarkozi, Central Michigan University, USA * LINGUIST List 26.14