Intersections in Language Planning and Policy

Book excerpt: This volume encompasses the range of issues encountered by language scholars who teach and research in departments of languages and cultures within the higher education system, predominantly in Australia, but touching other universities worldwide. Related studies on language planning, methodology or pedagogy have focused on one or more of these same issues, but rarely on their totality. Intersections as a metaphor running discreetly through the essays in this volume, connects them all to a lived reality. The field of languages and cultures, as it is practised and reflected upon in Australian universities, is essentially an interdisciplinary and interconnecting space - one in which linguistic and disciplinary diversities meet and join forces, rather than collide or disperse along different pathways. The international and local studies featured here focus on language planning, new pedagogies and language reclamation and link to meeting points and commonalities. They show that language scholars are increasingly finding themselves on common ground as they tackle issues of policy and practice affecting their field, whether within their institutions, within the tertiary system, or within the framework of government policy.