needed to reach that goal are an early start with foreign language teaching,
preferably from age four in primary education, and a teaching approach in
which the learning of content and language is integrated (CLIL). Interestingly,
these developments have led to a range of projects on the benefits of an early
start with foreign languages and the effectiveness of the CLIL approach,
which linked up with developments on content based instruction and sheltered
language programs in the United States and Canada.
A special example of the link between national policies and AL is the case
of testing in Israel. Elana Shohamy remembers she just could not sleep due
to the responsibility she felt for a test of spoken Hebrew, which, after its
introduction appeared to have a massive washback effect on language teach-
ing, in the sense that all of a sudden the instruction of language production
became a priority, affecting everything from teacher education to material
design. She also mentions with sadness that the tests were often applied to
people who were to be expelled anyway. Howard Nicholas mentions the
huge contribution to language policy of the late Michael Clyne:“As much as
applied linguistics is a multifaceted term and its relationship to linguistics
contested, Michael Clyne was a central bridging and intellectualfigure.”He also
was the driving force behind the inclusion of language questions in the Australian
national census, which led to similar actions in various other countries.
Though probably not typical of thefield of language policy, Terrence
Wiley sees a lot of what he calls“salt and pepper references”, references that
fit all sizes and topics. Foucault is a favorite in this respect. As mentioned in
Chapter 5, several other informants mention the tendency toward black
boxing, giving stretches of references to support a point while in fact many
of the references either are conceptually and methodologically weak or
hardly related to the point they are supposed to support.
In this analysis the role of institutions and organizations is not treated in
any detail, there are other studies (Catford, Grabe, Kaplan) that did so.
Some people, however, did comment on this. Rosamond Mitchell says:
“There is a great increase in scale of activity, but continuing domination of
thefield by research led institutions in a smallish number of countries.”
Based on lifelong experience, Fred Genesee comments on the relation with
educational authorities:
In education they take language research serious, and educators feel at
least compelled to listen to me because they believe that science has
something useful to say about how first and second languages are
learned. This, in turn, they believe should inform their educational
policies and practices.But dealing with policy makers is different:We often don’t know how to talk with policy makers; we talk to them
as if the only considerations when making decisions are logical–what82 Trends II