James W. Tollefson (ed.), Language policies in education:
Critical issues. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2002. Pp. 350. Pb
$39.95.
Language policies in education brings together a wide-ranging
collection of essays from the United States, Canada, Australia,
Yugoslavia, India and East Asia, Eastern Africa, and the Solomon Islands.
Editor James Tollefson frames the discussion in his introduction and
conclusion on language conflict and language rights in a way that calls
our attention to the central questions. How have educational language
policies maintained unequal access to teaching and learning resources for
language minorities and indigenous language (IL) speakers? What
affirmative measures in the realm of language policy can chart the
clearest course toward redressing these inequalities? And for political
entities in multilingual states in a position of language policy-making
authority, what are the guiding principles of a responsible democratic
approach to resolving ethnolinguistic conflicts? Though few of the authors
take up the questions directly, the editor reminds readers that all
discussions of educational language policy must keep in the foreground
considerations of effective pedagogical practice and constraints on
language learners. These more narrowly circumscribed educational,
developmental, and psycholinguistic determinants are subordinated to
political-ideological impositions at the risk of undermining basic
democratic principles. Multilingual and multicultural accord at the
nation-state level is eroded by attempts to utilize official language
teaching programs as tools of national or political unification if these
programs are not conceived as complementary to individuals' language
learning rights and as consistent with sound first and second language
pedagogy. Particularly instructive on this point are the chapters by Mary
McGroarty, Terrance Wiley, Thomas Donahue, and Teresa McCarty on the
current struggle between the forces of pluralism and exclusion in the
United States, and surveys of political-language conflicts in the former
Yugoslavia and India by Tollefson and Selma Sonntag, respectively.