Over c. 50 years, language education has been a significant site of ideological struggle over England’s position in the world, and the last two decades have seen intensification in the assertion of English nationalism in central government. Our analysis of this history starts with the development of multicultural language education in the 1970s and 1980s, highlighting the factors that contributed to this: activist pressure from minority communities, educational philosophies valuing the ‘whole child’, educational decision-making embedded in local democratic structures, and a legislative strategy that promotied good community relations. This started to change in the 1990s, with the curriculum centralisation and the side-lining of LEAs initiated by the Thatcher government. Efforts to regulate increased population movement also made borders and immigration status more of a priority than multiculturalism, and after 2001, security, social cohesion and the suspicion of Muslims started to dominate public discourse. These developments are analysed in six areas of language education policy: standard English, English as an additional language for school students, English for adult speakers of other languages, modern languages, and community languages in mainstream and supplementary schools. Finally, we consider the role of universities in these processes.

This introductory chapter sets out the rationale for the book and in particular for its focus on the relationship between social integration and language development in the experiences of newcomer school students with English as an additional language. It also provides a critical examination and definitional review of key terms and concepts at the heart of the discussion: EAL, newly arrived, mainstreaming, language development and social integration.

Chapter 1 outlines the peculiarities of language learning in predominantly Anglophone contexts, highlighting the challenges that Anglophone countries face in the teaching of modern languages compared to non-Anglophone countries. Tracing the development of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) in the United Kingdom and Australia, the chapter explains why CLIL in such contexts is most often taught by language specialists, in contrast to content-area specialists, as is often the case in Europe where CLIL has been established for much longer. The chapter considers how CLIL offers a pedagogic model for mainstream modern language teachers in Anglophone-dominant contexts and how the same professional knowledge base might also have the potential to support the teaching of English as an additional language (EAL). The origins of how CLIL globally has become synonymous with learning English are also traced. A research agenda around the themes of sustainability, pedagogy, and social justice for CLIL in Anglophone-dominant contexts is proposed.

This chapter seeks to evaluate how student users of English are viewed beyond the English-as-school-subject curriculum, both in and out of classrooms. In particular, it exposes some of the tangible effects of ontologies of English in the education context, with important implications for education policy. Despite extensive scholarly work in Applied Linguistics offering positive reconceptualisations of language use in a variety of approaches, such as World Englishes, English as a Lingua Franca, and translanguaging (e.g. Creese and Blackledge, 2010; Hornberger and Link, 2012; García and Wei, 2014; García and Kleyn, 2016), the notion of a ‘target’ for the learning and teaching of ‘good English’ for most monolingual mainstream teachers in the United Kingdom remains based on the norms of Standard English, or N-English (to adopt the categorisation terminology proposed by Hall, this volume). For more discussion on the nature of linguistic norms, see Harder (this volume). In this chapter, I show how the presentation of Standard English as the ideal, on the assumption that it is “the language we have in common” (DES, 1988, p. 14), alienates not just multilingual learners of English but also many school children who would regard themselves as first-language English speakers.