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.

The chapters reporting on the recent widespread and early introduction of English as a Foreign Language in Korea and Vietnam cast a different light on questions of inclusionary language education policy and equitable access to learning resources. Powerful global tendencies and historical imperatives, unlikely to be deflected to any significant degree for the foreseeable future, have objectively imposed hard constraints on local and national educational systems. The tension between the legacy of colonialism and the gradual unfolding of sovereignty on the one hand, and the universal need for access to languages of world communication (LWC) on the other, poses the most complex problems of language planning and language policy. These difficult questions present themselves in terms that are even less easily disentangled in the case of recently independent countries, unlike Korea and Vietnam, with a wide diversity of vernacular lingua francas and local indigenous languages, none of which can provide full access anytime soon to basic texts and didactic resources in the sciences and related technical fields.

To their credit, the authors in this volume avoid the facile global-phobic response to the expansion of LWCs among the newly independent nations of Africa and Asia, and to the developing inter-LWC realignments almost everywhere else outside the English-speaking regions. Refreshingly absent, as well, is some of the very bad advice that is offered at times on how the learning of former colonial languages, in Africa for example, might be limited or discouraged. This argument goes as follows: Given that English, French, and Portuguese are spoken by social and political elites and rarely (as yet) by the majority in officially anglophone, francophone, and lusophone countries, maintaining their official status (e.g., teaching them to children in public schools) perpetuates inequality.

All this leads us to a consideration of my (admittedly somewhat tendentious) reading of Alamin Mazrui's chapter on the English language in African education. In by far the book's most pertinent contribution to the debate on the expansion of LWCs, the reader is reminded of the complexity of language planning issues and of the high stakes involved in policy decisions. Mazrui's measured discussion lays out the challenges that confront the East African anglophone region and South Africa. As a necessary point of departure, it is pointed out that educational authorities of newly independent countries depreciate the national/indigenous languages of their people at their own peril. The unavoidable task of indigenization (276) must set realizable and progressively verifiable objectives in the area of corpus and status planning: a gradualist and deliberate approach to the introduction of African languages as media of instruction “moving upward slowly from lower to higher grades” (278). Offering advanced studies of and in the African languages at the university level counts among the permanent academic objectives of the multilingual nation. Much more fundamental than an emblem of national identity and sovereignty, the “recentering of African languages” corresponds to the immediate conditions of language and literacy development of child learners, especially the overwhelming majority who have not yet advanced significantly in their second language (L2) learning of English, in this case. In the early grades in particular, no justification or pretext should stand in the way of implementing bilingual instructional models that include a major component in literacy-related, cognitively challenging, academic discourse domains in the language that child learners know, or know best. No research evidence to date has disproved the basic hypothesis (slightly updated) of the 1953 UNESCO declaration on vernacular languages in education: Literacy learning that is supported by instruction in the language that preliterate children understand is an effective alternative to literacy instruction exclusively in languages of which learners have no knowledge. This proposal amounts to one of bilingual instruction within the broader framework of a multilingual system. Its design features take as their starting point the most effective and efficient means of developing higher-order language abilities, and teaching literacy and second languages, crucially to include second-language literacy in a LWC, English in the case of the countries under consideration in this chapter. Mazrui does not put forward this last proposal explicitly (in fact, there may not be agreement on this point); however, I believe it follows from some of the general principles assumed in the chapter. Two additional fronts in the process of decolonialization are the transformation of English, “creating counter-hegemonic discourses within this same imperial language” (277), and a diversification of dependence and interdependence relations including, strategically, the horizontal dimension at the regional level.

In his discussion of the role of English in the struggle against apartheid (tracing the account back to Soweto 1976) and for a post-1990 democratic South Africa, Mazrui touches on the inevitability of the new linguistic realignment, but then seems to hold back from developing its full implications. For historical reasons, the evolving South African experiment in official multilingualism may well set the educational language policy and planning landmarks for the entire region. In all likelihood, all of the eleven recognized languages of the nation will continue to maintain their “official” status. Whatever specific provisions and privileges, in each case, turn out to viable in the long term, the 1996 constitutional measures on language policy will stand as an important example. On the other hand, the inevitable displacement of Afrikaans by English, reducing it from its former “co-national” standing to its rightful place alongside the now official Sepedi, Sesotho, Setswana, siSwati, Tshivenda, Xitsonga, isiNdebele, isiXhosa, and isiZulu, will imply, probably sooner than later, the undisputed ascendancy of one “central-national” language among the official eleven. To be fair, it seems that few observers of language education in multilingual Africa have drawn out the logic of the tendencies in literacy attainment and L2 learning of former colonial languages since the early 1960s along these lines. From this point of view, correcting the imbalance between elite bilingualism and popular bilingualism is unlikely to be served by restricting access to the LWCs in the public sector, but, to the contrary, by expanding access to them. Following Mazrui's proposals of indigenization, transformation, and appropriation of the former colonial languages, and diversification of relations of interdependence and communication, we can go further: A multilingual educational system that promotes additive bilingualism, building upon the platform of indigenous language knowledge and indigenous discourse competence, is the one most favorably situated to ambitiously expand the teaching of literacy and literacy-related language abilities in children's first and second languages. Thus, the programming of second-language learning of official languages in the elementary school need not hesitate to apply the most effective and efficient methods. Saving us from at least one unnecessary side discussion, no contradiction is necessarily posed between the progressive inclusion of ILs in the curriculum and universal L2 content-based instruction. The challenge for linguists and educational planners lies in understanding the dynamics of multilingual systems and child bilingual development, neither of which are yet well understood. For example, in the context of rapid linguistic change (e.g. the learning of new languages by children), what are the long-term prospects of survival for indigenous languages with relatively few speakers? For now we are compelled to consider such questions as independent of and separate from those that underlie the central tasks of multilingual educational language policy.