Language Education and the Challenges of Globalisation: Sociolinguistic Issues

Edith Esch · Martin Solly

Jun 2014 · Cambridge Scholars Publishing

About this ebook

This book, by an international group of scholars, focuses on a number of sociolinguistic issues, some of them complex and controversial, linked to language education in the age of globalisation. It examines these in different contexts of immigration and super-diversity, in the light of new mobilities and new conceptualisations of changing social realities and language communities.

The various investigations presented in the volume are often united and interconnected in their approaches to these key areas of focus, although each peer-edited chapter brings its own relevance to the work as a whole, and each reflects the complexities and practices of the particular contexts and speech communities examined.

The insights presented provide a useful way of looking at the current state of the art of language education across the different levels of schooling and also within the various contexts analysed. Because of the increasing interest in language education as a result of both the growing number of migrant children in schools and the globalisation associated with the rapid spread of English, the volume will be of interest to a wide international readership, including scholars and students of sociolinguistics and language education.

About the author

Martin Solly is Associate Professor of English Language and Linguistics in the Department of Culture, Politics and Society at the University of Turin. He is particularly concerned with language education and the relationship between language and context (namely, institutional, disciplinary, intercultural, community), as well as with how language choice impacts on the construction and representation of identity.

Edith Esch was Senior Research Fellow in the Faculty of Education of the University of Cambridge and is an Emeritus Fellow of Lucy Cavendish College. Her main current research is in second language education with a special interest in the influence of the British and French pedagogical cultures in post-colonial contexts and more particularly in multilingual societies in Africa where both are in contact.