23 - Language in education

Summary

This chapter discusses the discrepancies between patterns of contemporary late-modern and globalized multilingualism, and educational approaches to policy and the teaching and learning of languages. Language education needs to take as its point of departure how globalization has affected the constitution of speech community, the organization of multilingualism, and language learning, the very idea of language itself and the transformation of politics of language in contemporary society. Global developments also challenge traditional conceptions of multilingualism in terms of separate and bounded linguistic systems. Language educational policy and planning responses to diversity continue to rely on an outdated idea of language politics and include increasing emphasis on the teaching of languages in addition to the dominant language of power within a nation-state's centric and scaled framework. Global developments have brought into relief the sterility and inadequacy of a narrow systemic view of language in language teaching.