ABSTRACT
Most of the studies on medium of instruction, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s, were conducted in the field of bilingual education and focused on the effects of choices of medium of instruction at the micro level, including the classroom and the individual. The studies were motivated by educational concerns. Questions being addressed at the time pertained largely to the effectiveness and efficiency of different models of immersion in the acquisition of the first language and the second language, and in academic achievement in content subjects (for a critique of research on bilingual education, see Paulston, 1980). Although research on language policy sees language-policy issues as very much shaping-as well as being shaped by-the broader social and political issues, most of the earlier studies of medium of instruction had not been situated in the sociopolitical contexts in which they were implemented, and of which they were a part. The emergence in the 1990s of critical linguistics as a field of study focusing on linguistic human rights, and the role of language in power, control, dom-
inance, and equality, has provided new insights and new foci for investigations of language-in-education policies (see, e.g., Fairclough, 1989; Pennycook, 1998; Phillipson, 1992, 2000a; Skutnabb-Kangas, 2000, 2002; Tollefson, 1995, 2002).
