ESL Teachers’ Readiness During Covid 19: Guglielmino Readiness Scale

The new line of research in language policy and planning acknowledges the importance of decentralized language policy decisions. There is widespread dissatisfaction with central governments' top-down approach, and it is time to redirect the wheels. Covid 19 imposed a hybrid education model in Morocco: teacher-directed versus self-directed learning. The purpose of this paper is to investigate ESL teachers’ readiness in sustaining a self-directed learning language policy using Guglielmino readiness scale. The results will sustain research in critical language policy and seek ways to involve teachers in policymaking.

Multilingualism and Mobility as Collateral Results of Hegemonic Language Policy

This article shows, with Malaysia as a case study, that an ethnonationalist language policy need not have disempowering consequences for minorities. Malaysia politicizes ethnic difference between Malaysians of Malay, Chinese, and Indian descent. Ethnic Malays enjoy economic concessions unavailable to others, law defines Malaysia as Islamic and speaking Bahasa, and Malay ethnonationalism constructs Chinese– and Indian–Malaysians as perpetual visitors. Nonetheless, Bahasa has only added to the multilingual repertoires of non-Malays, rather than replaced it. This article analyses survey data about the multilingual practices of Malaysian youth and their folk linguistic talk about what guides their multilingualism. By drawing on critical language policy, it appears that policy may be so ethnonationalist that it has caused disassociation, especially amongst Indian–Malaysians, and sustained multilingualism. The Chinese–Malaysian experience, however, is better explained by a posthumanist perspective whereby language choices appear guided by material and immaterial resources within the Chinese–Malaysian community, rather than by matters of power or politics. In any case, the relative greater multilingualism of Chinese– and Indian–Malaysians was perceived as empowering non-Malay mobility despite ethnonationalist policy.

Inequality and Class in Language Policy and Planning

In recent years, critical language policy and planning (LPP) researchers have increasingly turned to political economy as a source discipline, and neoliberalism has come to be a baseline concept. Nevertheless, political economy in LPP research is often underdeveloped; neoliberalism remains ill-defined and under-theorised; and inequality and class are virtually erased from analysis. This chapter elaborates on the value of these concepts for LPP research. It begins with a brief discussion of LPP and then discusses political economy as a field of inquiry, neoliberalism as a master frame for a growing body of LPP research, and finally, inequality and class as key constructs for understanding the effects of neoliberalism on contemporary societies. This theoretical background is followed by a section examining how inequality and class have emerged as constructs in recent LPP research, and the chapter closes with considerations about further research.

Native-speakerism and English without Borders Program: investigating language ideologies through a language policy

English without Borders (EwB) is a Brazilian government-sponsored Program created to enhance linguistic proficiency of potential candidates for outward mobility. Assuming that language ideologies embody as well as are embodied by language policies, this paper aims at examining the native-speakerism ideology. It draws on texts comprising instances of enactment and interpretations of EwB in addition to evidences posed by decisions arising from its implementation to examine how native-speakerism is positioned through the Program. Building on critical language policy approach, it employs critical discourse analysis resources to investigate how native-speakerism is challenged or reinforced by the agenda implemented by EwB. Evidences point to the overlapping of deconstructing and corroborating perspectives, especially regarding local interpretations posed by the Language Center coordinators whose considerations about the linguistic diversity of English are marked by ambivalent thoughts on the issue. The coexistence of such tensions indicates the pervasive nature of native-speakerism concerning English in Brazil.