What's the relevance of ‘Linguistic Citizenship' (LC), a concept developed in southern Africa, to language education in England? LC is committed to democratic participation and voice, to linguistic diversity and the value of sociolinguistic understanding (Stroud 2001), and it provides a framework for contesting linguistic conditions in England, where vernacular multilingualism faces monolingual language education policies and an officially ‘hostile environment for migrants'. In fact, LC lines up with four sources of opposition to this: civil society and small-scale community organisations cultivating heritage language multilingualism; experience of system-wide ‘hospitality to diversity' in education in England in the 1970s & 1980s; c.50 years of linguistics research in Britain; and universities themselves. Drawing on LC's pedigree in sociolinguistics, we then turn to the Hub for Education & Language Diversity, a collaboration between King's and non-profit language organisations which approaches LC as a multi-dimensional programme of language development. This includes BA & MA classes; teacher training (with resonant concepts like ‘diasporic local'); and efforts to broaden ideas about university ‘impact’. Overall, Linguistic Citizenship invites us to reassess the lie of the land in language education, and suggests an array of practical but principled initiatives at different points of the language teaching/university interface.

The assessment of students in the classroom has been going on since time immemorial. What is comparatively recent, however, is the systematic study of classroom-based assessment (CBA). The term ‘CBA’ has been putatively linked to Michael Scriven's (1967) work on formative and summative evaluation. However, current interest in such assessment and how it is enacted has, to a large extent, been prompted by shifts in educational policy in various contexts and evolving education systems. This, in turn, has led to the increase in research activity that is detailed in the timeline that follows. At the same time, considerable effort has been exerted by various governments and professional associations into the development of CBA frameworks, but as publications related to these are not strictly research documents, a separate list of examples is provided as supplementary material.

This position paper builds on three of our earlier publications on the same subject (Jenkins & Leung 2014; Leung, Lewkowicz & Jenkins 2016; Jenkins & Leung 2017), as well as a number of conference papers we have given both jointly and individually. However, what we have not done up to this point is to propose alternatives to the large-scale standardized English tests administered by the major international examination boards, of which we have been so critical, despite the fact that we have been discussing other possibilities among ourselves for several years. The opportunity to publish a position paper on English language assessment therefore provided an ideal opportunity to present our alternatives, and this we do in the final part of the paper.

With global attention currently focused on the challenge of providing Education for All (UNESCO 2000), we must ensure that the language of teaching and learning remains a topic on the agenda towards making sure that the education being provided is effective. This is therefore a critical time to review medium of instruction debates, and to reassess what empirical evidence exists to guide policymaking that is both appropriate and achievable. Contributing to this endeavour, this paper argues for the approximate replication of two key studies. The first is Afolayan (1976), a widely-cited study conducted in Ife, Nigeria to test the effectiveness of teaching children in the mother tongue for six years of primary education. We argue that the frequency with which the success of this study is cited, without due attention paid to the details of its methodological procedure, may actually be detrimental to the success of other experiments, thus necessitating the careful replication of the original study. The second study is Siegel (1997b), one of the few studies that have been conducted to evaluate the impact of initial education in an English-based pidgin on the subsequent learning of English. We argue that there is an urgent need for replication of one of the few available studies of pidgins and creoles in education, given the prevalence of negative attitudes towards this category of languages.

A great deal has happened in the study and understanding of multilingualism in England since it was last considered in ARAL (Reid 1985). To examine these changes, this review will concentrate on the dynamic and contested relationships among 1) educational policy, 2) academic discourse, and 3) everyday sociolinguistic practice. Our account is limited to England and to its newer heritage languages; due to limitations of space, it also does not provide any detailed discussion of particular languages. For fuller sociolinguistic discussion of thirty one of these, we refer the reader to Alladina and Edwards (1991), a major step forwards in the documentation of linguistic diversity in the British Isles which provides an idea of the wide but uneven spread of multilingualism across a range of institutional sites (including, for example, press and broadcasting as well as education).

Formative assessment, particularly in the current form known as Assessment for Learning (AfL), has caught the attention of policymakers in many education jurisdictions. Diverse educational systems such as Hong Kong and Western Canada have publicly endorsed the principles and practice of AfL. In the United Kingdom, progressive devolution of state power from London has meant that Scotland and Wales now have national autonomy in education matters. In a dramatic reversal of policy, both of these “home” countries have in the past four years dismantled the heavily test-oriented schooling regime. Instead both the Welsh and Scottish administrations have adopted assessment policies that prioritize learning. This article discusses (1) the political and ideological trajectories that have supported the emergence of the for-learning assessment policies and (2) the fit (or lack of) between AfL principles and the prevailing espoused educational values in these two nations. The potential impact of these developments for assessment of English as an additional/second language (EAL) in schooling education will be discussed.

The performance of polymer-based photovoltaic devices is limited by several factors like high band-gap and low charge-carrier mobility, to name a few. Thicker active-layers have high optical absorption but the transport of carriers in them is inefficient. Thus the optimal thickness of the active-layers has to be determined carefully. This conflict can be resolved using a three-dimensional (3D) microscale textured grating shaped solar cell geometry. The solar cells in this study were fabricated on photoresist gratings to give them 3D texture required for enhanced light absorption. Introduction of texturing has a significant effect on over all power conversion efficiency of the devices. Grating based solar cell having 2 micron pitch showed improved power conversion efficiency over the flat solar cell. In addition to favorable guiding of optical modes, the improvement in efficiency is accomplished by homogenous coverage of the spin-coated active layer, which is a challenging process for non-flat surfaces. Uniform thickness in this study was facilitated by the sufficiently high pitch and low height of the underlying photoresist gratings.