Singapore has been taken by many researchers as a fascinating living language policy and planning laboratory. Language and education policy in Singapore has been pivotal not only to the establishment and growth of schooling, but to the very project of nation building. Since their inception, ‘mother tongue’ policies have been established with two explicit goals. Firstly there is the development and training of human and intellectual capital for the expansion and networking of a Singaporean service and information economy. Secondly there is the maintenance of cultural heritage and values as a means for social cohesion and, indeed, the maintenance of community and regional social capital. These tasks have been fraught with tension and contradiction, both in relation to the conditions of rapid cultural, economic and political change in Asia and globally, but as well because of the tensions between the so called ‘world language English’ and Singapore’s three other official languages, Tamil, Malay and Mandarin. This has been complicated, of course, by the challenges of vibrant regional dialects and the emergence of Singlish as a powerful medium of community life.

Distinguished multiculturalist Sonia Nieto speaks directly to current and future teachers in this thoughtful integration of a selection of her key writings with creative pedagogical features. Offering information, insights, and motivation to teach students of diverse cultural, racial, and linguistic backgrounds, this text is intended for upper-undergraduate and graduate-level students and professional development courses. Examples are included throughout to illustrate real-life dilemmas about diversity that teachers face in their own classrooms; ideas about how language, culture, and teaching are linked; and ways to engage with these ideas through reflection and collaborative inquiry. Each chapter includes critical questions; classroom activities; and community activities suggesting projects beyond the classroom context. Over half of the chapters are new to this edition, bringing it up-to-date in terms of recent educational policy issues and demographic changes in our society.

An enlarged edition to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of John Guillory’s formative text on the literary canon. Since its publication in 1993, John Guillory’s Cultural Capital has been a signal text for understanding the codification and uses of the literary canon. Cultural Capital reconsiders the social basis for aesthetic judgment and exposes the unequal distribution of symbolic and linguistic knowledge on which culture has long been based. Drawing from Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology, Guillory argues that canon formation must be understood less as a question of the representation of social groups and more as a question of the distribution of cultural capital in schools, which regulate access to literacy, to the practices of reading and writing. Now, as the crisis of the canon has evolved into the so-called crisis of the humanities, Guillory’s groundbreaking, incisive work has never been more urgent. As scholar and critic Merve Emre writes in her introduction to this enlarged edition: “Exclusion, selection, reflection, representation—these are the terms on which the canon wars of the last century were fought, and the terms that continue to inform debates about, for instance, decolonizing the curriculum and the rhetoric of antiracist pedagogy.”

For several decades, cultural imperialism has been the dominant paradigm for conceptualizing, labeling, predicting, and explaining the effects of international television. It has been used as an unchallenged premise for numerous essays on the topic of imported television influence, despite the fact that the assumption of strong cultural influence is not necessarily reflected in the body of research that exists within this field of study. In The Impact of International Television: A Paradigm Shift, editor Michael G. Elasmar and his contributors challenge the dominant paradigm of cultural imperialism, and offer an alternative paradigm with which to evaluate international or crossborder message influence. In this volume, Elasmar has collected original research from leading scholars working in the area of crossborder media influence, and contributes his own meta-analysis to examine what research findings actually show on the influences of crossborder messages. The contributions included here illustrate points, such as: the contentions of cultural imperialism and the context in which its assumptions emerged and developed; the complexities of the relationship between exposure to foreign television and its subsequent effects on local audience members; the applicability of quantitative methods to a topic commonly tackled using argumentation, critical theory, and other qualitative approaches; and the difficulty of achieving strong and homogenous effects. In bringing together the work of independent researchers, The Impact of International Television: A Paradigm Shift bridges over 40 years of research efforts focused on imported television influence, the results of which, as a whole, challenge the de facto strong and homogenous effects assumed by those who support the paradigm of cultural imperialism. The volume sets a theory-driven agenda of research and offers an alternative paradigm for the new generation of researchers interested in international media effects. As such, the volume is intended for scholars, researchers, and students in international and intercultural communication, cross-cultural communication, mass communication, media effects, media and society, and related areas. It will also be of great interest to academics in international relations, cross-cultural and social psychology, intergroup and international relations, international public opinion, and peace studies.

Language Disabilities in Cultural and Linguistic Diversity offers a new approach to understanding the familiar dilemma of disentangling difficulties in communication for learners developing the language of schooling. The author takes a socio-cultural Vygotskian approach to reinterpret international research in language disabilities, namely specific language impairment, communication difficulties, dyslexia and deafness.

This book presents an in-depth study of the language policies present in the Canadian province of Quebec, and considers them from a comparative perspective, with special focus on Singapore and Wales. In so doing, it uses a mix of methods to look at the effects of language planning on language use: questionnaires, linguistic landscapes (visible language in public space), ethnography, and psycholinguistic experiments. Besides offering background information on Canada and Quebec, the comparative element uses data from Singapore and Wales to shine a new light on how language is managed in Quebec.

This state-of-the-art volume provides an interdisciplinary overview of current topics and research foci in the areas of linguistic diversity and migration-induced multilingualism and aims to lay the foundations for interdisciplinary work and the development of a common methodological framework for the field. Linguistic diversity and migration-induced multilingualism are complex, mufti-faceted phenomena that need to be studied from different, complementary perspectives. The volume comprises a total of fourteen contributions from linguistic, educationist, and urban sociological perspectives and highlights the areas of language acquisition, contact and change, multilingual identities, urban spaces, and education. Linguistic diversity can be framed as a result of current processes of migration and globalization. As such the topic of the present volume addresses both a general audience interested in migration and globalization on a more general level, and a more specialized audience interested in the linguistic repercussions of these large-scale societal developments.