<div dir="ltr"><h2>Language-in-education Policies</h2>
<p><em>With Anthony Liddicoat’s book <a href="http://www.multilingual-matters.com/display.asp?isb=9781847699138">Language-in-education Policies</a> out this week we asked him to tell us a bit about how he came to write it.</em></p>
<p><a href="http://channelviewpublications.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/9781847699138.jpg"><img class="" alt="Language-in-education Policies" src="http://channelviewpublications.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/9781847699138.jpg?w=208&h=300" height="300" width="208"></a><br>
</p><p>This
book grew out of a concern that I have had for some time that, while
language-in-education policies often talk about using languages to
develop intercultural understanding, they often don’t seem to focus much
on how they are going to achieve that. To try to understand more about
why this is the case, I started to look more at how policies talked
about intercultural understanding and how these ideas related to other
ways of talking about language and culture. This book, by focusing on
ideas like ‘intercultural relationships’, is one way of trying to get at
this problem within language policy.</p>
<p>The book is organised around a series of case studies of different
polities. There are different ways these case studies could be divided
up but I decide to focus on policy contexts rather than only polities
as I found that quite different things happen depending on the groups
for whom planning is being done. The book has chapters on policies for
foreign language learning, for language education of immigrants, for
language education of indigenous people and for external language
spread. This allowed me to write about the ways there are similarities
and differences between the ways different societies have addressed the
issue. Each chapter has three case studies from different polities for
each policy context.</p>
<p>Although I found focusing on policy contexts the best way to work
with the issues I was dealing with, I didn’t want to lose the
possibility of joining together policy contexts in a single society. For
this reason I decided that I would choose two countries that would be
included in case studies across more than one context. These countries
were Australia and Japan. I chose Australia, not only because it is the
place I am most familiar with but also because it is a society that
represents itself as multicultural. Japan on the other hand has a very
monocultural view of itself. So these two case studies are like opposite
points on a continuum, with the other case studies falling somewhere
between. It is possible to read across these case studies to get a sense
of how Australia and Japan deal with policy across contexts and see
some similarities and differences between contexts in one society.</p>
<p>Writing the book was like a journey across contexts and across countries and I hope that reading it brings the same experience.</p><p><a href="http://channelviewpublications.wordpress.com/2013/04/12/language-in-education-policies/">http://channelviewpublications.wordpress.com/2013/04/12/language-in-education-policies/</a><br>
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