Beginning with the passage of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), language-based educational policy in the United States has shifted toward an emphasis on English language acquisition and away from an emphasis on native language assistance. The English Language Acquisition, Language Enhancement, and Academic Achievement Act clearly mandates English language acquisition as the commanding objective of instructional programming for Limited English Proficiency (LEP) students. This paper addresses a critical question that emerges in light of this shift: Is it possible to develop educational language policies that effectively achieve global competition objectives and civil rights objectives concurrently? Using an ecological systems theory framework for examining education and language, this paper examines the current educational language policies of three globally competitive nations to delineate how each addresses language based social justice and language based civil rights. The policy analysis focuses on relevant literature from applied linguistics, research on multilingualism, and emerging technologies to evaluate educational language policies across the macro-spheres. Recommendations for educational language policies that may be capable of satisfying language based social justice objectives and language based civil rights objectives concurrently are discussed.

The dominant view of the status of knowledge of language is that it is theoretical or what Gilbert Ryle called knowledge-that. Defenders of this thesis may differ among themselves over the precise nature of the knowledge which underlies language, as for example, Michael Dummett and Noam Chomsky differ over the issue of unconscious knowledge; however, they all agree that acquisition, understanding and use of language require that the speaker have access to a theory of language. In this paper, I argue that this view is mistaken. Knowledge of language is properly seen as practical knowledge, knowledge-how. My target is Michael Dummett's treatment of theory of meaning in The Seas of Language. If my argument goes through, underlying assumptions about the nature of cognition as computational must be adjusted to allow for other forms of knowledge, which are arguably more basic, and which underlie knowledge-that.

This analysis examines Arizona's English fluency evaluation initiative, which aims to address the fluency standards for teachers of English Language Learners (ELLs) set forth in the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act. The authors deploy a sociolinguistic framework to consider what components of teachers' language are being evaluated by the policy, illuminating how the policy conflates fluency, accent, and pronunciation. After determining that the initiative does in fact evaluate teachers based on accent, the authors argue that Arizona's unique interpretation of NCLB's fluency standard exceeds Congressional intent and has no foundation in the professional standards for teachers of ELLs as established by either the National Council of Teacher Accreditation (NCATE) or the Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages organization (TESOL). The authors then interrogate the initiative and the evaluation protocol, discussing implications on the development of democratic school communities, language-based discrimination, and the academic experiences of ELLs. Concluding that the initiative and protocol fail to evaluate fluency, threaten democratic school communities, and risk discriminatory practices, the authors recommend that Arizona revoke the initiative and return teachers affected by the policy to the ELL classrooms for which they were initially hired. Educational Policy 27(4) Article

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