Language, education, and society in a changing world

Language, Education and Society in a Changing World brings together recent research in language planning, bilingualism, translation, discourse analysis, cultural awareness, second language learning and first and second language literacy. Expert contributors, including John Edwards, Rosamond Mitchell, Bernard Spolsky and Andrew Cohen, address many of the issues facing language teachers, researchers and policy makers in a world where languages are becoming extinct at an alarming rate and are frequently a focus for dispute and conflict; where foreign language teaching and learning are confronted by new technological and practical demands; and where modern communication media require the development of new linguistic techniques. These factors, together with the continued slow economic and educational development in the third world, where access to a 'world language' is often promoted as an educational panacea, present Applied Linguistics with major philosophical as well as practical problems. Drawing on research from North America, the European Union, Guatemala, Japan, Nigeria and Russia, this collection underlines the interdisciplinary nature of the challenges facing Applied Linguistics at the end of the twentieth century.