Empowerment Through Language and Education: Cases and Case Studies from North America, Europe, Africa and Japan

The last two decades have alerted applied linguists and their bureaucratic counterparts – those who make or advise government on language policy – to the issue of dealing with language problems in an accountable fashion. Why do these problems seem so intractable? How is it that these problems have not yet satisfactorily been solved? What is it that continues to drive the interest in this? To the scholars from many parts of the world who have been invited to discuss this anew in the proposed volume, it was evident that language planners, policy makers and language managers do not know just how much work there is for language teachers to do if all of the academically desirable arrangements or policies proposed are to be implemented successfully. Indeed, the challenge to implement these at times ambitious plans of language policy makers is normally much bigger than the policy makers estimate.

The Editors: Albert Weideman is director of the Unit for Academic Literacy of the University of Pretoria, and formerly Director of Professional Programmes in the Faculty of Education at the University of the Western Cape. He was director of the teacher development agency Language Methods and Programmes (L-MAP), and director of the Centre for Education Development (CENEDUS) at the University of Stellenbosch. Before that, he taught Latin and English at the University of the Orange Free State. His main interests are alternative and innovative second language teaching methodologies, and he has published more than 30 scholarly articles on this. He serves on the editorial boards of a number of accredited journals.
Birgit Smieja lectures at the Landau Campus of the University of Koblenz-Landau, where she teaches applied linguistics as well as practical language courses, cultural studies, and educational theory for primary school teachers. Her study on language attitudes and language use in Botswana, published by Peter Lang in 2003, has placed her at the cutting edge of our academic consciousness of the interface between language and education. She has spoken to international academic audiences in Belgium, South Africa, Namibia, Botswana and Tanzania, and has published in scholarly journals on a variety of topics. She has edited three volumes of studies that focus on African languages. She was formerly a research co-ordinator of the LiCCA project (Languages in Contact and Conflict in Africa) and involved in several field studies in Tanzania and Botswana involving various universities and schools.