Language-in-Education Planning

Abstract

This paper attempts to survey language-in-education planning in the 1980s drawing on both formal publications and the more “ephemeral” but often more directky influential documents of government education departments and other authorities. Two problems are immediately evident: first, the influential ephemeral documents are hard to obtain. The second problem in surveying language-in-education planning is symptomatic of language policy-making in general; it is necessary to differentiate between, on the one hand, policy which is little more than uncoordinated good or bad ideas, limited in the range of needs that it seeks to answer, or incidental to policy serving other purposee (e.g., immigration policy) and, on the other hand, systematic, formalized language-in-education planning (cf., Rist 1982). This paper also focuses on only that part of language-in-education policy concerned with second or foreign language teaching and learning; other papers in this volume deal with the areas of literacy and bilingual education.