Turbulence and dilemma: implications of diversity and multilingualism in Australian education

Abstract

An international interest in multilingualism and multilingual education has burgeoned since the turn of the twenty-first century, accompanying apparently significant changes in the physical and virtual mobilities of people, international frameworks, and commitments and goals for socially just education. It has also accompanied major political changes including the unbundling of the Soviet Union and the forging of the European Union. Amongst the social, political and economic turmoil, the visibility of language minority communities has resurfaced as an issue in Europe and North America, while UNESCO's concerns for the Millennium Development Goals, including universal primary education, literacy, school retention and quality education, have exerted pressure on each signatory country to comply with internationally agreed obligations. Australia, recognised internationally as having introduced innovative and progressive language policy in the 1980s, followed by particularly strong language services and language maintenance programmes for migrant community languages in the early 1990s, met with administrative anomie by the mid-1990s. This has led to a trajectory that turned away from linguistic diversity and multilingualism. An attempt is made in this paper to identify the contemporary trends in multilingualism and multilingual education that may inform a repositioning and reconnection with the international debates, particularly as these have relevance to inappropriate and inadequate responses to Indigenous language communities in the country.

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