Preface

James W. Tollefson
University of Washington

The new series edited by Professor Shen Qi examines the most important area of language policy and planning(LPP): language policies in education. Since LPP emerged as a separate discipline in the 1960s and 1970s, the focus of LPP research has gradually expanded from its initial limited concern with corpus and status planning in developing nations to a broader range of status, corpus, and acquisition planning issues in all contexts where there are multiple language varieties. Because multilingualism and systematic language variation are present in virtually all contexts worldwide, from large-scale social systems such as nation-states to the micro-level daily interactions in classrooms, households, workplaces, and other public and private spaces, LPP has come to be seen as pervasive in all social settings and a central concern of the social sciences.

Among the wide range of LPP contexts deserving researchers'attention, it is arguably the case that none is more important than education. In the increasingly plurilingual world under globalization, schools everywhere are characterized by intense attention to language teaching and learning. Indeed, one cannot conceive of curriculum policy, textbook and materials design, assessment, the organizational systems of classrooms, professional preparation programs for teachers and administrators, and the arcane details of budgets and funding unless one seriously considers language education issues.

Although language education policies are thus inevitably important around the world, there remains wide variation in the processes of policymaking, the goals and the systems for implementing policies, and the relationship between language education policies and other areas of social policy and planning. Therefore it is crucial that LPP research adopt a comparative approach that seeks to discover the commonalities and the variability in language education policy in different contexts. Policies that may be effective in one setting may not work elsewhere, and so scholars and policymakers must develop a broad perspective that can only come from serious comparative investigation of language policies in avariety of educational contexts. It is for this reason that this new series of books on language education policies in East Asia, Europe, Africa, North America, Latin America and the Middle East promises to be valuable for all LPP scholars.

Under the editorial leadership of Professor Shen Qi, this new series can also fill an additional gap in LPP scholarship, namely the limited research on language education policies conducted by scholars in Chinese-speaking areas of the world. In conjunction with the increasing number of well trained LPP scholars in China and China's growing attention to the importance of LPP in education, this series of books promises to stimulate the development of comparative international research that is led by researchers based in China, and that contributes to the understanding of language educationin China as well as in regions around the world.