Language education policy and practice in East and Southeast Asia

Abstract

East and Southeast Asia represents a linguistically and culturally diverse region. For example, more than 700 languages are spoken in Indonesia alone. It is against this backdrop of diversity that the ten countries that comprise Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) have recently signed the ASEAN Charter which, while calling for respect for the region's languages, cultures and religions also officially nominates English as ASEAN's working language. In this article, we examine the language education policies of the region and consider whether the implications of these policies for the maintenance of linguistic and cultural diversity on the one hand and the promotion of English and the respective national languages on the other. As ASEAN is closely connected to the three major countries of China, Japan and South Korea, as indicated by the 'ASEAN +3' forum, we also include these countries here. We stress that, as space forbids an in-depth treatment of the language education policies of each of the 13 countries, we have chosen to describe and discuss in some depth the policies of 5 countries (China, Indonesia, Japan, The Philippines and Vietnam), as these provide a cross-section of language policy contexts and approaches in the region. We add brief notes on the policies of the remaining countries.

Gamification Assisted Language Learning for Japanese Language Using Expert Point Cloud Recognizer

“…On the other hand, some countries use language as one of the main conditions for continuing education and obtaining citizenship and residence [15]. In a study conducted by [16] on language education policy in China, Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines, and Vietnam, one of the countries that rejected internal linguistic diversity was Japan. It is governed by the myth of Japanese identity monoethnicity that is largely derived from the assimilation of Japanese norms that reinforce a monolingual as well as monoculture ideal of the Japanese state itself.…”

The Profile of Primary English Teachers in Indonesia

“…Following the global mainstream, Indonesian EYL practice dated back in the 1980s in which a study reporting parents' strong belief on the needs of children to study English and the unsatisfactory results of the secondary schoolers' English proficiency (Lestari, 2003) led to thoughts to bring English to primary schools. English was introduced to primary school curriculum through Presidential Decree Number 28 Year 1990, (Kirkpatrick & Liddicoat, 2017) which later elevated to become local content subject by the issuing of the Decree of Ministry of Education and Culture Number 060 Year 1993, (Alwasilah, 2013;Hawanti, 2014;Iskandar, 2015;Zein, 2017). The policy implied that schools might choose to teach English to grades 4, 5, and 6 or chose to teach other subjects such as arts, dance, music, or sports more suited to their socio-economic and geographical situation and needs in which the schools are located.…”

Beyond the English Box: Constructing and Communicating Knowledge Through Translingual Practices in the Higher Education Classroom

“…In East Asia, the rising status of English in academia has attracted much research attention in recent years [20,31,33]. As a typical case in this region, Taiwan has seen a sharp increase of EMI courses and programs in the past decade as a way to attract international students, and also Bto improve the English proficiency of the local students through an increasingly internationalized environment^ [24, p. 13].…”