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Public education is not just a way to organise and fund education. It is also the expression of a particular ideal about education and of a particular way to conceive of the relationship between education and society. The ideal of public education sees education as an important dimension of the common good and as an important institution in securing the common good. The common good is never what individuals or particular groups want or desire, but always reaches beyond such particular desires towards that which societies as a whole should consider as desirable. This does, of course, put the common good in tension with the desires of individuals and groups. Neo-liberal modes of governance have, over the past decades, put this particular educational set up under pressure and have, according to some, eroded the very idea of the common good. This set of contributions reflects on this state of affairs, partly through an exploration of the idea of publicness itself – how it can be rearticulated and regained – and partly through reflections on the current state of education in the ‘north’ and the ‘south.’ Refereed/Peer-reviewed

People in Africa have undertaken millennia of epistemic and linguistic innovation leading to exploratory migration and the global dispersal of humans along with conquest and empire building. Africa has also experienced returning migration and conquest, including recent centuries of European economic, educational, and socio-political hegemony resulting in epistemic and linguistic erasure. Although post-European colonial administrations since 1960 have espoused political transformation and social justice, attention to linguistic human rights (LHRs) remains limited. The resilience of coloniality and accompanying erasures that continue in post-colonial theory and critical linguistics need careful analysis. Epistemic justice that secures LHRs may only be achieved through what Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o refers to as a radical break involving ‘decolonising the mind’ of public agents and civil society. Collaborative processes that disconnect from coloniality circulating mostly among ‘southern’ rather than ‘northern’ debates and scholarship may prove to be more effective in achieving social justice, transformation, and LHRs.

Key findings, analysis and recommendations that have emerged from a research project, ‘Using Human Language Technology to enhance academic integrity, inclusivity, knowledge exchange, student diversity and retention’ at the University of South Australia conducted in 2019 are discussed in this article. The primary purpose of the project was to address some of the challenges and opportunities afforded by increasing student and teacher diversity at a predominantly English-medium Australian university through newly enhanced human language translation technology (HLT) also known as machine translation (MT). This technology is frequently used for the translation of human language, and it falls under the umbrella of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies. From the institution’s perspective, key aims of the project were to contribute to the university’s Digital Learning Strategy priorities and core values embedded in a structural transformation of the university. These include integrity, accountability, diversity, social justice, engagement and collaboration. The researchers’ objectives focussed on multilingual pedagogies using HLT to support knowledge exchange (transknowledging), and translanguaging for all students. These disrupt inequitable hierarchies, and position bi-/multilingual students as valuable resources for monolingual staff and students.

This article considers the ways in which two senior secondary assessment policies that aim to be inclusive are enacted for students from refugee backgrounds. The final years of secondary school in Australia are shaped by high-stakes assessment requirements. Yet there have been policy moves in South Australia to be more inclusive of students by providing more flexibility for them to demonstrate their learning in diverse ways. We undertook a critical policy analysis to investigate the ways in which South Australian senior secondary certificate policies are enacted in two case study secondary schools. Our analysis of the data indicates that school staff navigate between competing demands of conflicting policy directives. These conflicting directives result in tensions for staff as they enact policies . In high-stakes assessment environments where staff and students strive towards academic achievements, inclusive policies can be limited by other policies that impose uniformity and fairness. The limitations to inclusion noted in this study may be indicative of broader exclusions created by the enactment of policies in high-stakes assessment contexts. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

This book brings to life initiatives among scholars of the south and north to understand better the intelligences and pluralities of multilingualisms in southern communities and spaces of decoloniality. Chapters follow a longue duree perspective of human co-existence with communal presents, pasts, and futures; attachments to place; and insights into how multilingualisms emerge, circulate, and alter over time. Each chapter, informed by the authors’ experiences living and working among southern communities, illustrates nuances in ideas of south and southern, tracing (dis-/inter-) connected discourses in vastly different geopolitical contexts. Authors reflect on the roots, routes and ecologies of linguistic and epistemic heterogeneity while remembering the sociolinguistic knowledge and practices of those who have gone before. The book re-examines the appropriacy of how theories, policies, and methodologies ‘for multilingual contexts’ are transported across different settings and underscores the ethics of research practice and reversal of centre and periphery perspectives through careful listening and conversation. Highlighting the potential of a southern sociolinguistics to articulate a new humanity and more ethical world in registers of care, hope, and love, this volume contributes to new directions in critical and decolonial studies of multilingualism, and to re-imagining sociolinguistics, cultural studies, and applied linguistics more broadly.

Rapidly changing demographics challenge education systems everywhere. Multilingualism, in particular, brings challenges in curriculum, pedagogy and assessment. Here we draw attention to contexts and practices of multilingual education in southern settings that differ from those in northern ones. Whereas much of the literature indicates that multilingual assessment is necessary for reasons of social justice and equity, it remains either elusive or contained to minority communities in Europe and North America. The purpose here is to draw attention to a century of system-wide bilingual and multilingual education policies, practices and assessment in South Africa. The bi-/multilingual design of large-scale assessment measures student knowledge in two or three languages (as conventionally understood). Although not anticipated in policy, it also permits students to make use of their bilingual or multilingual repertoires in high-stakes examinations. We demonstrate that, while challenging to design and administer, students' multilingual repertoires can be brought into the design of large-scale assessment. System-wide use of bi-/multilingual assessments can also address concerns of equity and social justice. Longitudinal data from system-wide assessment further indicate that code-switching and translanguaging are promising only when used to increase students' repertoires for both horizontal purposes and vertical access to language/s of power. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

In this afterword, the authors reflect on the themes and approaches to research on multilingual Sydney that have emerged in the book. Phil Benson does so from his perspective as a Sydney-based co-editor of the book. Kathleen Heugh contributes her reflections from another Australian multilingual city, Adelaide, and from the perspective of discussions of contemporary diversities and multilingualisms circulating in Europe and other post-colonial contexts. The authors also identify important areas for future research that are suggested by the book, but are as yet under-researched. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

We frame multilingualisms through a growing interest in a linguistics and sociology of the ‘south’ and acknowledge earlier contributions of linguists in Africa, the Américas and Asia who have engaged with human mobility, linguistic contact and consequential ecologies that alter over time and space. Recently, conversations of multilingualism have drifted in two directions. Southern conversations have become intertwined with ‘de-colonial theory’, and with ‘southern’ theory, thinking and epistemologies. In these, ‘southern’ is regarded as a metaphor for marginality, coloniality and entanglements of the geopolitical north and south. Northern debates that receive traction appear to focus on recent ‘re-awakenings’ in Europe and North America that mis-remember southern experiences of linguistic diversity. We provide a contextual backdrop for articles in this issue that illustrate intelligences of multilingualisms and the linguistic citizenship of southern people. In these, southern multilingualisms are revealed as phenomena, rather than as a phenomenon defined usually in English. The intention is to suggest a third direction of mutual advantage in rethinking the social imaginary in relation to communality, entanglements and interconnectivities of both South and North. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

In this paper we draw attention to people who journey from one temporal and spatial setting towards another in the ‘South’, who aspire to a reconfigured sense of belonging, prosperity and wellbeing, and their multilinguality and multilingualisms. Through three vignettes of journeys we illustrate how in changing of place that linguistic diversities are encountered and mediated. During moments of North–South and South–South entanglement and exception we argue that multilingualisms re-ecologise along horizontal axes of conviviality, and / or re-index along vertical axes of exclusion. We suggest that ‘rooting’ and ‘rerouting’ multilingualisms are not only multidimensional, but they are also multifaceted as people who choose or are obliged to experience dis.-placement, undertake journeys of anticipation of replacement into regulated or unregulated situations. Multilingualisms in the memories, dreams, complex selves, materiality and complicities of coping have yet to receive sufficient attention from linguists. We attempt to capture these aspects and suggest that southern multilingualisms have much to offer and entice northern multilingualisms. We illustrate how closely integrated are multilingual repertoires with mobilities and temporalities of dislocation and change; with loss, nostalgia and the anticipation of new beginnings; and with multi-scaled complicities between individuals as they re-calibrate lives in turbulent and changing circumstances. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

This paper draws attention to the central concern of authors in this issue, which is to offer translanguaging and genre theory as two promising pedagogical responses to education systems characterised by linguistic as well as socio-economic diversity. It also draws attention to the agency of teachers in the processes of engaging with the linguistic diversity of students. What lies at the heart of current provision of multilingual education in South Africa, the site of concern for most of the authors in this volume, is a systemic failure to engage productively with the linguistic and knowledge repertoires of students. On the one hand, there is misunderstanding of multilingualism in southern contexts and the country's multilingual education policy; on the other hand, there is a reluctance to engage with multilingualism within curriculum and assessment delivery. Translanguaging and genre, although conceptually originating from North Atlantic and Australian contexts, may well offer opportunities for students in southern contexts to expand their own linguistic repertoires and to bridge epistemological difference between community and school Refereed/Peer-reviewed

Linguistic and cultural diversity is a feature of most, if not all, modern societies, whether it results from historical processes of state formation, from the aggregation of colonial possessions a...

An international interest in multilingualism and multilingual education has burgeoned since the turn of the twenty-first century, accompanying apparently significant changes in the physical and virtual mobilities of people, international frameworks, and commitments and goals for socially just education. It has also accompanied major political changes including the unbundling of the Soviet Union and the forging of the European Union. Amongst the social, political and economic turmoil, the visibility of language minority communities has resurfaced as an issue in Europe and North America, while UNESCO’s concerns for the Millennium Development Goals,including universal primary education, literacy, school retention and quality education,have exerted pressure on each signatory country to comply with internationally agreed obligations. Australia, recognised internationally as having introduced innovative and progressive language policy in the 1980s, followed by particularly strong language services and language maintenance programmes for migrant community languages in the early 1990s, met with administrative anomie by the mid-1990s. This has led to a trajectory that turned away from linguistic diversity and multilingualism. An attempt is made in this paper to identify the contemporary trends in multilingualism and multilingual education that may inform a repositioning and reconnection with the international debates, particularly as these have relevance to inappropriate and inadequate responses to Indigenous language communities in the country. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

This article is based on an HSRC study conducted for the Western Cape Education Department in which 75 000 Grade 8 learners were assessed in mathematics and language in 2006. The country's multilingual education policy is currently misinterpreted to mean that the learning of and use of indigenous African languages should be restricted to learning language as a subject beyond Grade 4. English and Afrikaans continue as the only languages of learning, teaching and assessment after Grade 4. Thus the language policy of the terminal years of apartheid continues in the present, except that African students now receive even fewer years of home language education than before. The HSRC study demonstrates, however, that it is possible to design and implement multilingual large-scale system wide assessments beyond Grade 4. We discuss the development of the multilingual language and mathematics instruments, the international benchmarking and standard setting processes they were subjected to and the language testing accommodations we employed. We demonstrate how, for the first time, language was assessed as both a subject and a medium of instruction. We are able to demonstrate through multilingual accommodations in the mathematics instruments that it is possible to offer some measure of linguistic equity to students across the curriculum in large-scale testing. The findings show sufficient evidence that student achievement is enhanced where the home language is used as a language of assessment in comparison with when a second language is used as the language of assessment. They further show that where language accommodations are made in mathematics assessment instruments, students make use of these and achievement appears to increase. The study and its findings are contextualised within an international theory of assessment in linguistically diverse contexts and the implications are offered as a contribution towards the quest for improved student achievement in the South African education system. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

This chapter offers a contextual background to the teaching of English as an Additional Language (EAL) in Australian universities. The discussion then turns towards the efficacy of conventional approaches to languages in education in the context of current diversities, and the role that code-switching and translanguaging may play in teaching English in Asian and Australian contexts. Whereas there has been a recent interest in the potential of translanguaging as a pedagogical approach (e.g. Canagarajah 2011; Garcia and Li Wei 2014), there has been little documentary evidence of a systematic approach to two-way translanguaging (Chinese to English, and English to Chinese) in written assessment tasks in university courses. Here we report on a micro-study in which there has been a systematic pedagogical shift in the teaching EAL for the purposes of preparing students to use English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI) at an Australian university. In this study, an approach that builds on each student’s bilingualism or multilingualism through practices of translanguaging is documented. We report on diagnostic coding and analysis of written assignments of students whose primary language is Chinese. We find a strong correlation between students’ written proficiency in Chinese and in English. We also find a strong correlation of students’ metalinguistic expertise in translation and their proficiency in their home language. We argue that the findings indicate value in shifting from a single objective to teach only English to the development of high level academic proficiency in both the primary language and English.

This volume is timely because what multilingualism means has become a pressing educational matter of concern in the first half of the twenty-first century. This concern is currently framed through several different understandings of multilingualism/s and vocabulary associated with the phenomena. While the understandings of multilingualism differ, there is a common purpose, which is how societal multilingualism/s might best be employed to benefit students in education systems of Europe, North America and indeed everywhere in the world. The editors of this volume, van Avermaet, Slembrouck, van Gorp, Sierens and Maryns, make it explicit that they bring together largely European perspectives of multilingualism and the passage of multilingual education because this is where the impact of current mobility of people is most obviously and visibly evident. Its visibility owes much to electronic, digital and printed media that are well-placed in Europe and other North Atlantic countries to reveal the challenges of diversity in administrative systems, including education. The editors expand European perspectives to include contributions of scholars with different experiences of multilingualism/s in education in Canada, the USA, Southern Africa and French Guyana.

Discourses of development, education, gender, feminism and critical linguistics arrive in Africa from usually well-meaning but often opportunistic agents from other contemporary socio-political and economic contexts. Each of these forms a new layer that veils the earlier discourses and practices. Simultaneously, people in Africa are (re-)positioned as inarticulate; without literacy, literary traditions or education; living in poverty; and thus dependent upon the more ‘developed world’. Women are further positioned as subject to unmediated cultural or religious practices of the African man. Since women clearly lack voice and agency, they need ‘to be spoken for’ or require the intellectual assistance of development agencies, followed soon after by feminist scripts of the centre. These are most often in the international languages of wider communication, which for most women in Africa are at once alluring but impenetrable or undelivering of promised socio-economic or political capital. In this article, counter-hegemonic voice, agency and assertion of linguistic and other forms of citizenship demonstrate that the discourses from without lack the temporal and spatial subtlety required to gauge the business of women in Africa. Often unwittingly, they contrive instead to re-marginalise women. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

Review(s) of: The English language and linguistics companion, by K. Allan, J. Bradshaw, G. Finch, K. Burridge and G. Heydon, London, Palgrave MacMillan, 2010. PP. XVII, 366.

This article offers a historiographic analysis of twentieth century debates amongst agents with linguistic, missionary and ideological interest in the standardisation or harmonisation of two widely used clusters of languages in South Africa, Nguni and Sotho. The discussion illustrates how faith-based and political ideologies interact with and bring influence to bear on the interpretation of linguistic endeavour. It also explores how theoretical considerations of linguistic diversity become entangled with political interest in the process of (re)articulating language policy. Whereas several authors (e.g. Harries in Afr Aff 87(346):25–52, 1988; Errington in Annu Rev Anthropol 30:19–39, 2001) have discussed nineteenth century missionary and linguistic endeavour or offered ideologically conceived proposals for the harmonisation of Nguni and Sotho languages (Nhlapo in Bantu Babel: will the Bantu languages live? The sixpenny library, vol 4. The African Bookman, Cape Town, 1944, in Nguni and Sotho, The African Bookman, Cape Town, 1945; Alexander in Language policy and national unity in South Africa/Azania, Buchu Books, Cape Town, 1989, in Democratically speaking. International perspectives on language planning, National Language Project, Cape Town, pp 56–68, 1992), the focus here is to demonstrate both continuity and disjuncture of debates amongst agents with different interests during the last century. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

This paper provides a background to recent developments in language planning in South Africa. Following a historical review, it focuses on a Bill of Rights in the new constitution which has, since 1993, demanded a shift towards rights-based language policy within a liberal framework. Debates within the Pan South African Language Board (PANSALB) swiftly gravitated towards aspects of corpus planning, particularly lexicography, and practices resorted to a multiplication of structures. It is through these debates, under the mantle of language rights and their institutionalisation, that it is possible to assess whether or not there has been a shift from segregationist planning to rights-based multilingualism/linguistic pluralism. Government's participation in the debates and its response to these also provide an opportunity to weigh the concepts of language planning from below (Alexander, 1992a) and 'governmentality' in relation to language planning (Pennycook, 2002) during a change from autocratic governance ...

The educational crisis in South Africa is examined against the history of language-in-education policy over the last 25 years. The Soweto student revolt in 1976 is identified as a pivotal point, resulting in educational responses which have exacerbated academic failure amongst the majority of school students. The vexed role of African languages in education, vis-a-vis structural constraints, including international `aid', across the continent is discussed as a textured background from which innovative South African educators have had an opportunity to take cognisance. The argument in this article is that curriculum and language-in-education policy changes which came into force in 1997, whilst based on the goal of an equitable school system, are unfortunately flawed both in the conceptualisation process and implementation strategy. The role of African languages, despite policy statements to the contrary, is not adequately addressed. Suggestions which are influenced by developments elsewhere on the continent are offered as alternatives to reconstructing viable education in the country.

Remote communities in Africa are variously positioned as without voice and in need of external aid from agents of the centre, or they are assumed to exhibit recalcitrant behaviour resistant to change and modernity (Carr-Hill and Peart, 2005). An alternative view of communities that exist on the peripheries in the global South is offered here through a discussion of ethnographic data collected during a countrywide study of language medium education from a range of stakeholders including: education officials, teachers, students and community representatives in Somali, Afar and eastern Oromiya Regions in Ethiopia. It will be argued that community participation in education is collaborative rather than recalcitrant. In addition, community views of language and identity indicate that such communities do not need to be spoken for, rather they are indicative of political agency, claims of citizenship knitted into ‘language ideologies’ (e.g. Jaffe, 1999), and rejection of ‘language regimes’ (Kroskrity, 2000, following Laitin, 1993) within the linguistic ecology of a difficult-to-reach part of Ethiopia.

In this paper, narrative data from remote communities in Ethiopia reveal in intimate ways how ‘linguistic citizenship’ (Stroud 2001) is claimed and exercised to resist educational decisions which are insensitive to the rhythms of pastoral or rural life. Even where communities are distant from the discourses and resources of the centre, individuals and community spokespersons express powerful views which resonate with contemporary global and local concerns of linguistic diversity, literacy and migration. While conventional representations suggest that such communities lack agency and voice, are require externally delivered aid and to be ‘spoken for’, this article reveals a matrix of articulate positions on language/s, literacy/ies and participation in both primary school and adult education. Amongst the challenges of (re)interpretation for the researcher is a discordant intersection of fluid temporal and spatial positions of researcher and respondent, simultaneously translocal and transnational. Agitated shifts in time and space recast shades and voice for both respondent and researcher. This paper raises questions for research procedures and interpretation of narrative accounts of literacy(ies), linguistics and educational practices on the margins. In particular, the discussion suggests that an understanding of and sensitivity towards the linguistic citizenship of informants as well as the multilayered positions of the researcher, including the researcher’s own linguistic citizenship, offer productive theoretical and methodological approaches to ethnographic research.

Language education policy based on system-wide implementation of multilingual education in Ethiopia has much to offer the international fields of language policy and bi/multilingual education. In this chapter centralised language policy in the capital, Addis Ababa, will be compared with a decentralised approach taken in the most linguistically diverse region, Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples’ Region (SNNPR). System-wide assessment demonstrates that student achievement in the more linguistically complex and decentralised setting exceeds that in the centralised and more limited bilingual system of Addis Ababa. Attention will be drawn to the influence of policy on teacher education, learning materials development and student achievement.