Three definitions are given of the (debated) nature of ‘Applied Linguistics’ (AL):

1. (1) foreign language (L2) teaching/learning;

2. (2) use of linguistic knowledge to solve problems where language is a central issue;

3. (3) anything related to language except theoretical linguistics.

Rejecting (3), the authors develop specific aspects of definitions (1) and (2).

Definition (1):

• - Relation between language theory and AL: main approaches to L2 teaching (e.g., Reform Movement, structuralist and behaviorist trends, contrastive analysis, audiolingual methods, L2 development (error analysis and interlanguage — supported by generative theory);

• - Interdisciplinarity: research in L2 (cognitive) psycholinguistics: experimental investigations on language processing, e.g., language activation by bilinguals;

• - Interdisciplinarity: growing interest in the social contexts of L2 acquisition: development of ‘communicative language teaching,’ of usage-based teaching (with corpora), attention paid to learners’ age/gender/social class and the sociocultural context of development.

Definition (2):

• - Focus on multilingualism: cognitive advantage/disadvantage of bi/multilingualism;

• - Language policy and planning in AL;

• - International, national, local policies (CEFR, ACTFL);

• - The spread of English, local standards of English;

• - Bilingual education (immersion, CLIL).

• - Language testing: psychometric-structuralist, integrative-sociolinguistic approaches, moral/ethical dilemmas in testing;

• - Neurolinguistic issues related to bilingual aphasia (e.g., affected areas of the brain and location of language in the brain; use of modern tools (ERP, fMRI) for research).

After the US entered WWI, federal and state governments took action to suppress or even ban the use of languages other than English through the mails, in schools, and in various public settings. Moves to require English targeted nonanglophones, whether they were born in the US or had immigrated from elsewhere, and official English became a rallying cry for those bent on reducing or eliminating immigration. But such laws have little impact on the acquisition of English, as newcomers to the US continue to acquire English at rates equal to or better than those in previous generations. Without official language legislation at the federal level, the US manages to have more monolingual speakers of the majority language than many nations that do impose language bans on their residents.

Chapter 3 reports on the evidence-gathering undertaken in Wales. By interviewing selected politicians and a range of senior civil servants charged with the formulation and implementation of language policy, an evaluation is made of current thinking on the relevance of the new speaker phenomenon within official language policy. These enquiries are supplemented by interviews with civil society policy formulators, decision-makers from national organisations and academic specialists who have studied the phenomenon. Several innovative interventions are identified and evaluated at both national and local level. But the neat division between governmental and civil society policy formulators is misleading. Neither category is impervious to the ideas of the other for in so many minority language communities there is a close relationship between them. In the most promising contexts this interaction is mutually stimulating, if not necessarily co-dependent, as together they fight for the survival of their threatened languages.

This chapter examines models of multilingual education currently implemented in formal education systems around the world. Within the presentation of these models the chapter addresses the ideologies underlying the conceptualisations of the various programmes, the issue of the choice of language to be learned in relation to local contexts, types of learners enrolled in these programmes and the diverse outcomes of these models. This overview will (1) provide a backdrop to a discussion on the dominance of English and dominant European languages within these curricula, and (2) address the minoritisation of migrant and indigenous minority speakers’ bi-multilingualism and home languages. We conclude with a discussion of new approaches to the conceptualisation of multilingual education as a more flexible and dynamic process and the impact of such findings for language policymakers and educators at all levels.

Codeswitchingching, well known as a speech style in which bilinguals alternate languages between or within sentences, has recently been joined by a new term, translanguaging, which is widely used in bilingual education with a similar meaning. Among a variety of perspectives within the translanguaging literature, some scholars have adopted deconstructivism, the view that discrete languages and multilingualism do not actually exist. Deconstructivists see translanguaging as a theoretical alternative to codeswitching, as codeswitching implies internalized linguistic diversity. In this chapter, the author argues that the political use of language names (a concern of deconstructivists) can and should be distinguished from the social and structural idealizations used to study linguistic diversity, favoring what the author calls an Integrated Multilingual Model of bilingualism, contrasted with the Unitary and Dual Competence models. The author further distinguishes grammars from linguistic repertoires, arguing that bilinguals, like everybody, have a single linguistic repertoire but a richly diverse mental grammar, a viewpoint the author calls a multilingual perspective on translanguaging.

As a settler nation, the United States is a contact zone unto itself, with a dynamic ecology of migrating, multilingual speakers of minority and minoritized languages, and emergent language varieties. This chapter examines the linguistic, social, and political policies associated with many of these communities, drawing on research that examines the real and imagined pasts and presents of language users. Acknowledging the inherently political and ideological practice of separating and naming languages, the chapter focuses on the mobilization of diverse linguistic resources, highlighting the fluidity of multilingualism in US contexts. The chapter provides a broad and, by necessity, selective overview of Indigenous and immigrant language contact, change, loss, and survival in the US. Starting with a brief history and overview of current work with respect to immigrant languages, the chapter then describes examples of current research on Indigenous languages in the US. Discussion in each section is organized around contemporary research and theory on language status, language corpus, and language acquisition. The chapter concludes with consideration of the possibilities created by multilingual speakers’ adaptive strategies to help their languages survive and thrive in the US’s aggressively monoglossic context.

Jeff MacSwan describes himself as an "incorrigible" child of the working class in the United States. His work continues to be devoted to disadvantaged children. From the "opportunity room" to the university, Mac Swan deals with commitment, understanding, respect in his pedagogical approach to fighting ideology about natural limitations and socio-economic reproduction.

Chapter 15 highlights the shared concerns of translation scholars and teachers that derive from the recognition that communities and people are increasingly multilingual. Scholars increasingly favour a model of education that privileges mutual exchange and co-construction of knowledge between teacher and students and which fosters translanguaging as a pedagogical model in bilingual education and in a variety of educational contexts where the school language and the learners’ languages do not coincide. The chapter examines the principles embraced by the multilingual turn in educational linguistics and explains how these tenets underpin novel translation teaching approaches and methods in higher education.

This chapter frames bilingual education in a social theoretical perspective on standard languages and standardization that shape the use of more than one language in education and in society. Bilingual education offers a rich area in which to investigate the tensions surrounding standard language, standardization and institutionalized normativity in multilingual contexts. We present the case of bilingual education in the USA, where English language dominance has a long and contentious history. A civil rights and social justice issue in the 1960s and 1970s, a way of transitioning immigrant and minority language children into English-only instruction in the 1980s and an increasing ‘problem’ for standardized assessment and racialized nativist politics since the 1990s, bilingual education remains a highly contested and politicized issue, grounded in conflicting notions of language-as-problem, language-as-right and language-as-resource. We focus on the layered historicity of bilingual education in California, where bilingual education has recently come to evoke a multilingual future in which mobility and global identity figure prominently for all. In this age of globalization, we examine some key questions raised at the intersection of language educational issues, the growing demands of a global economy and the future of bilingual and multilingual education in neoliberal times.

This chapter focuses on education and language policies as sources of ethnic conflict in the reform era, focusing on Xinjiang where the problem has been most salient. Those sources of ethnic woes stem again from intensified tensions of the autonomous system, or the paradox of centralization and ethnicization. The driving force here is the state’s developmentalism in minority education: centralization inheres in the state’s expansion of higher education on the one hand and of bilingual education on the other, while ethnicization is manifest in the state’s intensified preferential policies to promote those goals. Expansion of higher and bilingual education for minorities aims at economic development and political integration. However, aided by preferential policies, this expansion has come up against the realities of the new market economy, which favors competitive skills and disadvantages minority students. Both processes – preferential policies for minority access to higher education but disadvantages for minority graduates in the market place – enhance ethnicization at the expense of integration.

This chapter highlights an innovative approach to bilingual school programmes in government schools in Australia. The phenomenon, which can be described as merged or harmonized curriculum, integrates the national curriculum requirements of two countries. Formal merged curricula are usually underpinned by an official bilateral government agreement. Informal merged curricula can take different forms depending on the contexts and people involved; the example used here describes how teachers at a school with a Japanese bilingual programme use aspects of maths curriculum and pedagogy drawn from Australia and Japan. The chapter introduces examples of formal and informal merged curricula in two schools and analyses them from a theoretical perspective based on the 4Cs Framework, the Language Triptych and the seven principles as outlined in Chapter 1 (Coyle, 2007). This study highlights one of the 4Cs – culture – but understands that all 4Cs are interconnected. Merged curricula provide a useful lens to analyse cultural implications of bilingual education.

This chapter argues that disciplining of bilingual education as a scholarly field served to divorce discussions of bilingual education from broader political and economic struggles in favor of the seemingly objective pursuit of the benefits of bilingual education. This disciplining of bilingual education was part of a larger discursive shift that reframed discussions of racial inequality from a focus on unequal access and the need for structural change to a focus on the deficiencies of racialized communities and the need for modifying these deficiencies. The chapter ends with a call for bilingual education scholars to situate issues of language inequality within the broader white supremacist and capitalist relations of power. This will offer bilingual education scholars tools for rejecting deficit perspectives of language-minoritized children and pointing to the broader racial stratification that makes these deficit perspectives possible to begin with.

This chapter analyzes major shifts in US educational policies toward bilingual education in California, where voters are often called on to decide policy by voting on propositions. It focuses on: how language policies have functioned as an instrument of social control; the lingering impact of the Americanization century and English-only ideologies on contemporary educational policies; the contemporary English-only movement and its impact on language minority education; and how a series of discriminatory propositions in California set the stage for language restriction in 1998. The chapter next looks at factors affecting the resurgence of bilingual education as “dual-language” education amidst discourses of globalization since 2016. The chapter concludes by noting new threats to immigrants posed by the criminalization of immigrant status and efforts to deny education as a human right. Implicit in this discussion are questions related to the relationship between language policy and racism and the salience of language policies in racial politics.

An important goal of this edited volume is to address the following challenge: What can scholars of language politics and policy contribute to our understanding of things as they are (the "Why?" Question) while also providing concrete suggestions and describing actual policies that have enhanced democratic participation and inclusion (the "What" Answer)? The contributors fully embrace the fundamental reality that virtually all contemporary nation-states have multiple language groups among their citizens, and that acceptance and legitimation of linguistic and cultural diversity is beneficial for societal well-being, and not just beneficial for minority/minoritized language communities. In exploring and explaining language politics and policies in diverse contexts in Canada and the United States, using a variety of data sources and disciplinary perspectives, the authors describe the challenges and set-backs, along with the many positive steps taken in recent years to advance the interests and aspirations of speakers of marginalized/minoritized languages. The authors remain hopeful that positive change is possible while acknowledging that ideologies about language and the role of language in national development and identity remain potent forces that are often difficult to challenge, let alone dislodge, when they become embedded in the daily lives and common sense views of citizens.

Minnesota has a decades-long history of welcoming and resettling refugees, but there exists a longstanding gap in programming for minority language students and an absence of instruction to develop and build upon students’ native languages. To address these educational inequities, the 2014 Learning English for Academic Proficiency and Success (LEAPS) Act was written and passed in the Minnesota state legislature. This sweeping state law revises many statutes to draw greater attention to English learner education, including recommendations for increased support for native languages. Drawing on interviews with key policy officials, close analysis of the text of the law, we examine the development and implementation of the law. We demonstrate how local culture, in particular what has been termed ‘Minnesota Nice,’ has shaped both the law’s development and implementation path. This chapter demonstrates the utility of narrative analysis in yielding insights into how language policies are developed, interpreted, and prioritized.

This chapter argues that disciplining of bilingual education as a scholarly field served to divorce discussions of bilingual education from broader political and economic struggles in favor of the seemingly objective pursuit of the benefits of bilingual education. This disciplining of bilingual education was part of a larger discursive shift that reframed discussions of racial inequality from a focus on unequal access and the need for structural change to a focus on the deficiencies of racialized communities and the need for modifying these deficiencies. The chapter ends with a call for bilingual education scholars to situate issues of language inequality within the broader white supremacist and capitalist relations of power. This will offer bilingual education scholars tools for rejecting deficit perspectives of language-minoritized children and pointing to the broader racial stratification that makes these deficit perspectives possible to begin with.