Promoting diversity through Language-in-Education policies: focus on Australia and the European Union

Abstract

Promoting diversity has become a prominent goal in language-in-education policy discourse in two broad contexts. On the one hand, language policies take on the challenge of maintaining and developing de facto linguistic and cultural diversity through language acquisition planning; on the other hand, they portray themselves as active agents of social change and aim to develop positive cross-cultural attitudes through language education. This paper discusses these two main aspects of language-in-education policies. The discussion is focused on the Australian and the European policy discourses. These two contexts offer an interesting point of comparison as they represent Western democracies with a highly multicultural and multi-ethnic population.