Book Review of Developing Multilingual Education Policies:Theory,Research and Practice Edited by Michal Tannenbaum,and Elana Shohamy,London&New York:Routledge,2023,PP.208,$135.ISBN:978-0-367-61989-3(hbk)

In the book review,the author introduced the latest theoretical and practical endeavors by Isreali scholars to tackle challenges posed by multilingualism.Michal Tannenbaum and Elena Shohamy conducted a comprehensive examination of the Isreali social and educational context,setting the stage for their proposal of a new multilingual policy.The new multilingual education policy has been formulated on the basis of extensive domestic and overseas research and empirical investigation,it is expected to be offer some insights into promoting multilingualism and social justice in both Isreal and the world.

English Teachers’ Beliefs About Multilingual Awareness in L3 Learning and Their Teaching Practice in Chinese EFL Context

Teachers’ beliefs toward multilingual awareness in target language learning play a significant role in shaping learners’ attitudes to language awareness, affect learners’ linguistic behavior and teachers’ teaching practice. Therefore, the present study was aimed to explore English teachers’ beliefs about Inner Mongolian university students’ multilingual awareness in L3 learning and their teaching practice in Chinese EFL context. One hundred English teachers from six universities in Inner Mongolia, China, participated in this investigation. The data was collected through a questionnaire and teacher interviews. The results indicate that English teachers hold positive attitudes to multilingual awareness in general;however, there are belief differences between Mongolian and Han teachers;there exist discrepancies between English teachers’ beliefs about multilingual awareness and their teaching practice, and social-cultural environment, family language policy,teacher identity, learning experience, teaching materials, and, more importantly, teachers’ lack of awareness of fostering learners’ multilingual awareness lead to the discrepancies. The present research highlights the necessity of raising teacher awareness of cultivating multilingual awareness in future teacher development and emphasizes the significance of exploring the potential cognitive advantages of multilingualism in promoting L3 learning and developing English learners’ multilingual competence in the EFL context in China.

Multilingual Sentiment Mining System to Prognosticate Governance

In the age of the internet,social media are connecting us all at the tip of our fingers.People are linkedthrough different social media.The social network,Twitter,allows people to tweet their thoughts on any particular event or a specific political body which provides us with a diverse range of political insights.This paper serves the purpose of text processing of a multilingual dataset including Urdu,English,and Roman Urdu.Explore machine learning solutions for sentiment analysis and train models,collect the data on government from Twitter,apply sentiment analysis,and provide a python library that classifies text sentiment.Training data contained tweets in three languages:English:200k,Urdu:200k and Roman Urdu:11k.Five different classification models are applied to determine sentiments,and eventually,the use of ensemble technique to move forward with the acquired results is explored.The Logistic Regression model performed best with an accuracy of 75%,followed by the Linear Support Vector classifier and Stochastic Gradient Descent model,both having 74%accuracy.Lastly,Multinomial Naïve Bayes and Complement Naïve Bayes models both achieved 73%accuracy.

Generating a multilingual taxonomy based on multilingual terminology clustering

Taxonomy denotes the hierarchical structure of a knowledge organization system. It has important applications in knowledge navigation, semantic annotation and semantic search. It is a useful instrument to study the multilingual taxonomy generated automatically under the dynamic information environment in which massive amounts of information are processed and found. Multilingual taxonomy is the core component of the multilingual thesaurus or ontology. This paper presents two methods of bilingual generated taxonomy: Cross-language terminology clustering and mixed-language based terminology clustering. According to our experimental results of terminology clustering related to four specific subject domains, we found that if the parallel corpus is used to cluster multilingual terminologies, the method of using mixed-language based terminology clustering outperforms that of using the cross-language terminology clustering.

Investigation of Automatic Speech Recognition Systems via the Multilingual Deep Neural Network Modeling Methods for a Very Low-Resource Language, Chaha

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) is vital for very low-resource languages for mitigating the extinction trouble. Chaha is one of the low-resource languages, which suffers from the problem of resource insufficiency and some of its phonological, morphological, and orthographic features challenge the development and initiatives in the area of ASR. By considering these challenges, this study is the first endeavor, which analyzed the characteristics of the language, prepared speech corpus, and developed different ASR systems. A small 3-hour read speech corpus was prepared and transcribed. Different basic and rounded phone unit-based speech recognizers were explored using multilingual deep neural network (DNN) modeling methods. The experimental results demonstrated that all the basic phone and rounded phone unit-based multilingual models outperformed the corresponding unilingual models with the relative performance improvements of 5.47% to 19.87% and 5.74% to 16.77%, respectively. The rounded phone unit-based multilingual models outperformed the equivalent basic phone unit-based models with relative performance improvements of 0.95% to 4.98%. Overall, we discovered that multilingual DNN modeling methods are profoundly effective to develop Chaha speech recognizers. Both the basic and rounded phone acoustic units are convenient to build Chaha ASR system. However, the rounded phone unit-based models are superior in performance and faster in recognition speed over the corresponding basic phone unit-based models. Hence, the rounded phone units are the most suitable acoustic units to develop Chaha ASR systems.

Learning from Ourselves——Incorporating “multilingual competence” in L2 users' learning trajectories

Inspired by a Chinese notion of "无为而治", this paper tends to stresses the nature of language learners, who always bring in their multilingual competence in their language learning process. Based on a thorough presentation about the nature of language learners, this paper also provides constructive teaching implications for future actual teaching practices.

Towards a multilingual, multimedia and multimodal digital library platform

The China-US Million Book Digital Library Project （Million Book Project） is an intemational cooperation program between China and the US. However, one million digitized books are considered not to be the ultimate goal of the project, but a first step towards universal access to human knowledge. In particular, there are four challenges about the new way to analyze, process, operate, visualize and interact with digital media resource in this library. To tackle these challenges, North China Centre of Million Book Project （in Chinese Academy of Sciences） has initiated several innovative research projects in areas such as multimedia content analysis and retrieval, bilingual services, multimodal information presentation, and knowledge-based organization and services. In this keynote speech, we simply review our work in these areas, and argue that by technological cooperation with these innovation research topics, the project will develop a top-level digital library platform for the million book library.

A Cloud Service Model for Multilingual Home-School Communications

In this paper, we present a cloud service model of multilingual home-school communications （MHSC） with the Drupal framework to provide a friendly learning environment for the students from transnational marriages. The transnational marriage is a phenomenon with ever-increasing in Taiwan and around the world. For a student who has a transnational foreign mother, home-school communication is often an obstacle because the foreign mother has language difficulty understanding the delivered messages in the communication book from teachers. In order to improve parent-teacher communications for the transnational families, we designed and constructed the cloud service platform with online multilingual communications and translation service functions, such that teachers can prepare different sheets of multilingual messages for home-school communication books and foreign mothers can read the messages from the teachers in their native languages through the web interface.

Character Development in a Multilingual International School and Its Use of Self-Assessment Tools

This article describes a multiyear initiative of a multilingual multicultural international school that has come to adopt and internalize character development as part of its identity.That is,character education has been treated as a central tenet and core value that permeates the school and binds the community.It has not been regarded as a supplemental or enhancement project,but rather integral to the general educational program.Built from a principled framework with sound theoretical backing,the infusion of character education at this international school has resulted in the crafting of new standards and the introduction of teacher and student self-assessment tools.In that vein,in this article,we share how the school has come to embrace character development and has forged personalized ways for stakeholders,including teachers and multilingual learners,to engage in improving teaching and learning.

Research on the Students’Attitudes Towards Multilingualism:Li Minority Students in Hainan

Recent research has emphasized that attitude is key to language learners’learning outcomes.More specifically,language learners’feelings about languages and language learning may affect their study behavior and willingness to engage with a second or foreign language.Few studies on language attitudes have been conducted with ethnic minority groups in China.As such,influencing factors(e.g.,gender,language proficiency)have not gained sufficient attention.The present study aims to explore language attitudes,especially towards multilingualism,among members of the Li minority group in Hainan,China.First,we conceptualized and validated a questionnaire on attitudes towards multilingualism.Exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis verified the survey’s validity.Then,we examined how selected sociodemographic variables(e.g.,gender and language proficiency)influenced students’attitudes towards multilingualism.Hierarchical regression was performed to ascertain the contribution of each predictor variable to learners’attitudes towards multilingualism.Results revealed no significant relationship between gender and language attitudes but found a significant impact of students’language proficiency level on their attitudes towards multilingualism.Implications for minority students’multilingual learning were discussed based on the findings.

A Multilingual Approach to Languages and Literacy Education： What Can Synthesising Theories, Research, and Practice Achieve？

This paper reports on seven years of collaborative research with the Department for Education and Child Development. The longitudinal study examines the impact ofa multilingual literacy approach as it has been applied in the teaching of French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish across 12 different schools in South Australia. The move to introduce the study of additional languages in Australian primary schools has yet to establish wide-ranging and on-going student engagement and often fails to progress students beyond simple pragmatic language use. It is argued that a new approach integrates languages in daily classroom literacy practices can redress this situation： a multilingual literacy approach. The theoretical framework that drives this approach draws from the notions of universality and transfer that are established in the literature. A critical realist paradigm provided a framework for integrating research methods： employing contingency theory and pragmatic methods of philosophy also ensured that values and hermeneutics were not sidelined in the explanation of the study＇s acts and outcomes. This longitudinal study demonstrates that when the aforementioned theoretical notions bridge the research-practice divide and are adopted into daily classroom teaching and learning activities, there is a qualitative and quantitative improvement in students＇ literacy learning

Multilingualism and the Choice of a Language for Anglophone Education in Cameroon

This paper seeks to do three things： （1） examine the linguistic situation of Cameroon; （2） identify the language（s） used in education; and （3） discuss whether in the light of the social linguistic evidence, the current choice of language for education （English） is well motivated. The methodology employed is a socio-lin some randomly selected urban centers in Cameroon for example, Buea, Bamenda, Kumba, guistic survey of etc.. The results suggest among other things： （1） that Cameroon is a highly multilingual country with over 280 home languages and （2） that while English is the language for Anglophone education, Pidgin English is actually the predominant language and the first language for most Anglophones. Based on these findings, the author proposes Pidgin English as the choice language for early education in Anglophone Cameroon （the southwest and northwest regions）. Pidgin English is the only language which expresses Cameroonian reality. It is spoken by more than 70% of the population. It is the only language that is not associated with a particular tribe, religion, or with a specific colonial government.

An Ethnographic Study:The Role of“Play”in the Development of English Listening and Speaking Ability of Two Chinese Children in a Multilingual Setting

Much scholarship on“play”activities has focused on enhancing children’s learning processes and developing interest towards learning second language[1].Many of these studies,however,adopt the survey to conduct their study.This study explored how“play with local kids”activities effect the development of English speaking and listening of two Chinese children in the Philippines,employing an ethnographically based approach to observe the two participants playing with local kids,which lasted about 4 months.The findings of the study revealed that“play”activities can not only help young children have a better understanding of their English conversations,and make them have more confidence to speak English,but also inspire them to speak English in such environment.In view of the results,it is obvious that“play with local kids”is a very good way for young children to acquire a second language in a multilingual setting.It is strongly recommended that language researchers and teachers should pay more attention and do more research on the relationship between“play”and second language acquisition.

Multilingual Practices and Multiple Contestations in the Linguistic Landscape of Selected Towns in Oromia:A geosemiotic perspective

This study analyzed a linguistic landscape,which is a relatively recent development in sociolinguistic research committed to the investigation of the visual manifestations of the relationships observed between language or semiosis and society in the public space.There has been less attention on the semiotic interpretations in the public environments despite the ubiquitous nature of such signs in Ethiopia.This study intends to fill this gap through Semiotic Landscape research.By means of mixed methods,qualitative and quantitative,it aims to discover the contestations in the Linguistic Landscape(LL,henceforth)of selected urban environments in Oromia.The study employed a theoretical concept of geosemiotics from social semiotics as an analytical tool.Visual data consisting of 1275 photographs of signs were collected from the main streets of Adama,Jimma and Sebeta towns from different domains of sign using bodies.Besides,data were collected through in-depth interviews with major LL actors,selected based on purposive sampling technique.The analysis demonstrated that some top-down and most of bottom-up signs showed varieties of multilingual practices,contestations,identity constructions and other related social concerns.The absence of a clear policy on language use on signs at both federal and regional levels has resulted in contestations.

The Belt and Road Initiative:Multilingual Opportunities and Linguistic Challenges for Guangxi,China

The Belt and Road Initiative(BRI)is to construct a large unified market,to make full use of both international and domestic markets,and to enhance the mutual understanding and trust of member nations of Association of Southeast Asian Nations(ASEAN)through cultural exchange,people-to-people ties and integration.Geographically adjacent to ASEAN countries and is close to India and Bangladesh in South Asia,Thailand and Cambodia in Southeast Asia,Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region of China is a key littoral or southern gateway for China’s BRI.Foreign language planning is an essential element for the social development of a country economically and culturally.By reviewing the implementation of the foreign language policy in Guangxi,I analyzed the multilingual opportunities and linguistic challenges in the region,which shares the cross-border languages with its neighboring countries in the multi-ethnic and multi-lingual community,to reveal the sociological meaning of the foreign language policy beyond its linguistic meaning,and propose an English-plus multilingual policy approach toward the ASEAN countries to meet the current needs of communications associated with the BRI.

A Comparative Study of Multilingualism in the Linguistic Landscapes of Zhongyang Street, Harbin at Different Periods

This paper compares the multilingualism in the linguistic landscapes of Zhongyang Street in the beginning of the 20th century(before 1932)and now.The distribution of languages is discussed with Russian being dominant in the first period and sim plified Chinese being dominant now.The connection between societal factors and the multilingualism are also discussed in the as pects of politics,demography,business,tourism,globalization,etc.Results show that while the multilingualism of the past was more a result of different ethnic groups living together and competition between different ethnicities in business,today’s is more for communication and tourism purposes.

Is There a Conflict between Englishisation and Multilingualism in the Process of the Expansion of Global Trade from the Organisations’ Perspective?

It is undoubted that language,as an intermediate,plays an important role in today’s trading.Collins(1994)also supported this view that language smooths the process of trading and even contributes to the growth of global trading.This study will thus investigate how two opposite language phenomena,Englishisation and multilingualism,boost or hinder companies from conducting their business.We used secondary research and questionnaires distributed to employees in multinational corporations.We found that multilingualism tends to be the trend in future global trading and the company tends to apply languages used by countries with higher trading volumes.This work explains that language professionals are still highly demanded by society.

Implications of Research into Multilingualism and Translanguaging: A Report

It is often assumed that foreign language pedagogy and first language pedagogy are two homogeneous and independentsystems.However,there is a growing awareness that second or foreign language teaching should not be easily distinguished with theassistance of the fist language of the learners.This article reports on research that question the challenges and advantages to multi-lingualism and translanguaging.It sets out to describe flexible implications to language teaching and learning in bilingual or multi-lingual context.

A Brief Introduction of EU Language Policy——Multilingualism and its Negative Implications

Recently, a rise in attention of Brexit has come to the public. The UK and European Union would both have an enormouamount of influence mutually. One of the important issues raised by the European Union(EU) is also deserved to cope with, namely language policy. In this paper, I develop an analysis aimed at presenting the basis introduction of multilingualism and its negative effectduring the implementary process. The paper focuses on the current language policy—how does the multilingualism work and some challenges confronted by EU language official institution, whether maintaining or abandoning the present form of institutional multilingualism or not to keep balance between promoting diversity and achieving efficiency.

U.S.Preservice Teachers Learning With Multilingual Learners in Korea Through Educational Technology:Bringing Heteroglossic and Global Approaches to TESOL Teacher Education

Purpose This study aimed to explore how educational technology influenced a preparatory teacher education program using heteroglossic and global approaches.Design/Approach/Methods The researchers drew upon the theoretical framework of multilingual digital storytelling(MDST),which emphasizes the intercultural awareness attributes of multilingual learners(MLs)and takes a heteroglossic perspective in linguistic pedagogy.This qualitative case study examined the experiences of 11 U.S.-based preservice teachers(PSTs)and 12 MLs elementary students in Korea in the MDST project of a TESOL methods course.Findings The findings showed that PSTs and MLs enhanced their appreciation for educational technology,multilingualism,and intercultural awareness.Although the project aimed to decenter English as a hegemonic language,both PSTs and MLs maintained traditional discourses that privileged English over MLs’home language and targeted literacy correctness in written English only,moving away from the heterogeneous goals of the course project.PSTs and MLs also faced challenges in navigating technological tools,which negatively affected their perception of the project.Originality/Value This study contributes to heteroglossic approaches in preparatory TESOL teacher education programs and improves the understanding of challenges in educational technology use for global multilingual exchanges to promote global citizenship.