ABSTRACT
This conclusion chapter presents some closing thoughts covered in the preceding chapters of this book. The book gives us a critical, historical and comparative perspective on contemporary policies and practices related to adult language education and migration. It spans policy and practice in nine nation-states: Australia, Canada, France, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, Spain, the United Kingdom (UK) and the United States (US). The policy chapters provide us with detailed, informative accounts of the commonalities and differences in the discursive processes involved in policy creation across the nine national contexts featured here, showing how the creation of language education policies has been shaped, historically, by political and economic conditions in each nation-state or autonomous region and by powerful discourses about migration and national identity. The book reassures that there is still room for agency and for opening up spaces for alternative ways of working, albeit in challenging contemporary conditions.
