ABSTRACT
This chapter considers language in one of its most studied and controversial domains, that of education. As users of different languages, varieties and registers, most of us are quite linguistically opinionated to begin with. Add to this our own school experiences, and we have the necessary ingredients for strong opinions about which language(s) are suitable for the purposes of education and how they ought to be used in schools. This was the case in Soweto, where the apartheid government imposed Afrikaans as a language of schooling for South African students and police shot dozens of teenage students for staging protests against this language-in-education policy. Strong opinions continue to be expressed in less repressive contexts, such as the Japanese Ministry of Education’s policy of educating Brazilian Nikkei immigrants, who are speakers of Portuguese, only in Japanese (Riordan, 2005) and Singapore’s ‘Speak Good English Movement’, the government campaign against the use of Singlish (Singapore English) in school. As we pointed out in Chapter 2, on language varieties, and Chapter 5, on language planning, the notions of ‘standard varieties’, ‘norms’ and ‘correctness’ are central to the work of applied linguists, and perhaps nowhere more so than in the area of education.
