This chapter provides a descriptive review of research on language-ineducation policy and planning. We intend no theoretical generalizations but rather a descriptive summary of present research (1990–1993). With various interpretations of language-in-education policy available in the literature, it is first necessary to establish the perspective which guides this review. Ingram (1990), for example, confines language-in-education to second or foreign language teaching and learning although he mentions literacy and bilingual education as topics in language-in-education.

Rajend Mesthrie (ed.), Language in South Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2002. Pp. xvii, 485. HB $75.00.

Language in South Africa (LinSA) is a very handsome book, beautifully edited, carefully proofread, and produced on thick paper in elegant fonts. It is in fact the same book, although revised and updated, as Language and social history: Studies in South African sociolinguistics (Mesthrie 1995). Just looking at the two volumes, side by side on my desk, I could write an essay on publishing and face validity. I am happy that this book has found an international publisher, because it deserves wider reading and better promotion (I never saw the first book reviewed or promoted), but the easy conclusion that the book under review is a better book is not necessarily warranted. As the Irish say about their horses, handsome is as handsome does, and both volumes do handsomely indeed.

The two books under review, Motivation in language planning and language policy (MLPP) and Multilingualism and government (M&G), are both about language policy, at least at one level, and both are, or claim to be, based on case studies. That is the end of any similarity between them.

Language Ideologies is a two-volume anthology, published in conjunction with the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) and “designed for educators, administrators, ESL experts, scholars, and all those who are concerned about language as a source and product of discrimination in our schools and society” (Vol. 1, p. xliii)—not that a reader will learn very much about language ideologies, a topic that has surfaced in the 1990s (see Woolard & Schieffelin, 1994; Schieffelin, Woolard, & Kroskrity, 1998). The ideology here refers solely to the ideas and beliefs used by the Official English Movement and English Only to legitimate their interests, “specifically by distortion and dissimulation” (see Eagleton, 1990, p. 30). This ideology is mostly not analyzed but rather labeled with assertions of “hegemony of the dominant culture” and the like, whereas the ideology that motivates this publication is never problematized and barely acknowledged (but see James Cummins's intelligent Foreword to Vol. 1). The result is a curious sense of English Only bashing at the same level as H. L. Mencken's “If English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for you.”

Elizabeth Coelho's Teaching and Learning in Multicultural Schools(TLMS) is a very good book for its kind. Its primary audience is teachers at the primary and secondary level of schools in situations of cultural pluralism, the “multicultural” of the title. Schools are actually rarely multicultural, even if their students represent different cultures in contact, but rather serve as the major instrument of acculturation and assimilation into the dominant ideology. TLMSattempts to counteract this tendency by a valiant attempt of an “account of what is required to teach and learn effectively in multicultural schools” (p. x)! Coelho's ultimate goal is using the schools as agents for change in society, affirming the richness and stimulation to be found in cultural diversity.

Nancy Lemberger's Bilingual education: Teachers' narratives is an interesting book, although probably not to SLA-type scholars. Bilingual education is written “to inform preservice and veteran teachers about the field of bilingual education on a very personal level” (back cover), presumably to be used as a text.

One who has lived soon an entire century must learn to change all her habits, and habits of address surely are not the easiest. What comes simply and naturally in one place is wrong and ill-mannered in another (Former servant-girl, informant KU 2849).

Even an ordinary simple worker has today became aware of the fact that he also is a human being, and that the great machinery would not function if he did not play his part. An old conservative postmaster's wife said once to my mother, who was the simple wife of a worker: ‘I think things now are not the way they should be; the workers' conditions are so good that they dress so well that nowadays one cannot tell the difference between workers and fine folk.’ This utterance from a woman who believed she belonged to the fine folk my mother never forgot, and I myself have also remembered it (Retired railroad worker, informant KU 2768)