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.
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.