This volume inserts the place of the local in theorizing about language policies and practices in applied linguistics. While the effects of globalization around the world are being discussed in such diverse circles as corporations, law firms, and education, and while the spread of English has come to largely benefit those in positions of power, relatively little has been said about the impact of globalization at the local level, directly or indirectly. Reclaiming the Local in Language Policy and Practice is unique in focusing specifically on the outcomes of globalization in and among the communities affected by these changes. The authors make a case for why it is important for local social practices, communicative conventions, linguistic realities, and knowledge paradigms to actively inform language policies and practices for classrooms and communities in specific contexts, and to critically inform those pertaining to other communities. Engaging with the dominant paradigms in the discipline of applied linguistics, the chapters include research relating to second language acquisition, sociolinguistics, literacy, and language planning. The majority of chapters are case studies of specific contexts and communities, focused on situations of language teaching. Beyond their local contexts these studies are important for initiating discussion of their relevance for other, different communities and contexts. Taken together, the chapters in this book approach the task of reclaiming and making space for the local by means of negotiating with the present and the global. They illuminate the paradox that the local contains complex values of diversity, multilingualism, and plurality that can help to reconceive the multilingual society and education for postmodern times.

This volume inserts the place of the local in theorizing about language policies and practices in applied linguistics. It is unique in focusing specifically on the outcomes of globalization in and among the communities affected by these changes.

Engaged Language Policy and Practices re-envisions language policy and planning as an engaged approach, drawing on and portraying theoretical and educational equity perspectives. It calls for the right to language policy-making in which all concerned—communities, parents, students, educators, and advocates—collectively imagine new strategies for resisting global neoliberal marginalization of home languages and cultural identities. This book subsequently emphasizes the means by which engaged dialectic processes can inform and clarify language policy-making decisions that promote equity. In other words, rather than descriptions of outcomes, the authors emphasize the need to detail the means by which local/regional actors resist and transform inequitable policies. These descriptions of processes thereby provide all actors with ideological, pedagogical, and equity policy tools that can inform situated school and community policy-making. This book depicts ways in which engaged language policy embodies the intersection of critical inquiry, participant involvement, and ongoing engaged language planning processes. It further offers an alternative to the traditional top-down approach to language education policy-making. Engaged Language Policy and Practices is essential reading for scholars, teachers, students, communities, and others concerned with worldwide language and identity equity.

Language problems potentially exist at all levels of human activity, including he local contaxts of communities & institutions. This volume explores the ways in which language planning works as a local activity in a wide variety of contexts around the world & deals with a wide range of language planning issues.

Self-Study in Teacher Education Practices (S-STEP) contribute to teacher education in culturally and linguistically diverse communities and contexts. The chapters reflect the scholarly inquiry of teacher educators dedicated to investigating and improving their practice.

Advancing a rapidly growing field of social science inquiry—the anthropology of policy—this volume extends and solidifies this body of work, focusing on education policy. Its goal is to examine timely issues in education policy from a critical anthropological, ethnographic, and comparative perspective, and through this to theorize new ways of understanding how policy "does its work." At the center is a commitment to an engaged anthropology of education policy that uses anthropological knowledge to imagine and foster more equitable and just forms of schooling. The authors examine the ways in which education policy processes create, reflect, and contest regimes of knowledge and power, sorting and stratifying people, ideas, and resources in particular ways. In contrast to conventional analyses of policy as text-based, dictated, linear, and rational, an anthropological perspective positions policy at the interface of top-down, bottom-up, and meso-level processes, and as de facto and de jure. Demonstrating how education policy operates as a social, cultural, and deeply ideological process "on the ground," each chapter clearly delineates the implications of these understandings for educational access, opportunity, and equity. Providing a single "go to" source on the disciplinary history, theoretical framework, methodology, and empirical applications of the anthropology of education policy across a range of education topics, policy debates, and settings, the book updates and expands on seminal works in the field, carving out an important niche in anthropological studies of public policy.

Providing an East-West flow of language teaching knowledge and know-how to balance prevailing Western-centric perspectives, this book is an in-depth investigation of the impact of Western-based language teacher education on the pedagogy and practice of Chinese English language teachers who received their training in Western institutions or those that emphasize Western-based teaching approaches. A significant and growing number of these teachers will influence millions of language learners in China over the next decades. The Pedagogy and Practice of Western-trained Chinese English Language Teachers: Forefronts Chinese teachers’ voices and experiences in the context of their workplaces and classrooms Connects and balances theory and practice using a sociocultural lens Discusses the Chinese government’s policies on the training of teachers and analyzes them in terms of their impact on both American and Chinese higher education institutions This is a must read book for anyone interested in learning theory adopted from a Western perspective and applied within an Asian setting.