Global Perspectives on Multilingualism

In this timely volume, international scholars examine how multilingual schooling is handled in schools across the world with a series of case studies from South Africa, Nigeria, Germany, Colombia, Slovakia, New Zealand, and Taiwan. Presenting new contributions arising from the varied contexts of multilingualism today, this collection urges educators to employ broader definitions of multilingualism; to treat the intricate messiness of language modes and language community goals as factors that mediate instructional and organizational designs, practices, and policies; to question the hopes or disappointments of democracy as we now know it; and to consider the connections or disconnections of teaching with the cultures represented in the classroom. Demonstrating the commonalities among exemplars of practice, this book will help U.S. educators construct more effective policies and programs for multilingual instruction in K–12 schools.

Contributors: Roger Barnard, Carole Bloch, Gabriele Budach, Sol Colmenares, Chen-ching Li, Anne-Marie de Mejía, Ursula Neumann, Tope Omoniyi, Hans-Joachim Roth, Harvey Tejada, Ildikó Vančo, and Rosemary Wildsmith-Cromarty

María E. Torres-Guzmán is a professor of bilingual/bicultural education in the Department of International and Transcultural Studies at Teachers College, Columbia University. Joel Gómez is an associate professor of educational leadership and interim associate dean for research at the Graduate School of Education and Human Development at George Washington University.

This book brings together an international set of contributors on the
all-important theme of multilingualism as a means of bringing our world
together. Writing from vantage points in societies undergoing rapid
political change, the authors show us how to make our educational
environments more reflective of the multilingual realities of learners'
lives -- depicting a rich array of alternatives from multilingual
stories for early childhood literacy, to instructional strategies and
curricular design that draw on multilingual resources, to language
policy and planning that focus on the language and educational rights of
Indigenous, heritage language, and Deaf populations.
—Nancy H. Hornberger, Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania