Mela Sarkar, McGill University
With this second special issue devoted to papers that would have been presented at the LPP (“Multidisciplinary Approaches in Language Policy and Planning”) conference 2020, had our planning process, like so much else, not been steamrollered by the global COVID-19 pandemic, we finally wave goodbye to a three-year-long engagement with LPP conference organization and J-BILD guest editorship.
Because we had to cancel LPP2020, both the papers in this special issue were in fact presented at LPP2021, well over a year ago. That was the occasion of the first all-online edition of LPP; as readers may recall, it was all rather experimental at the time. Thankfully, LPP2021, hosted at McGill University and chaired by Amir Kalan and myself, was successful beyond our hopes, and gave us the courage to proceed with the planning of a hybrid version of the conference in 2022. We discovered in short order that planning a hybrid conference in fact means planning and putting on not one but two conferences—one all online, the other all in-person—and then also figuring out ways in which participants at each can interact in as natural a manner as possible. With the help of a large team of helpers, we managed to pull it off, as readers may see from the BILD blog post that resulted. The official conference website will remain active for the foreseeable future.
Readers interested in the future of the Multidisciplinary Approaches in Language Policy and Planning conference are requested to check the conference website from time to time for updates. At the moment, we are in negotiations with possible future hosts for the conference, and are reasonably certain that LPP, if it continues, will move to a biennial model. It will therefore no longer be the annual conference that many of us have known for nearly ten years. We learned a tremendous amount from three years of planning and running the conference (or not running it!), and are grateful for the extraordinarily supportive relationships with reviewers, authors, session chairs, graduate student helpers, and of course the McGill-based team—augmented by volunteers from all over the globe—that sustained us throughout. Many thanks to all for their hard work over one, two, or in some cases three full years.
Many thanks as well to J-BILD for graciously agreeing to give our LPP authors the space to publish the papers you see here, as well as the papers in the first special issue.
Article Summaries
As in the first of these special issues, our LPP/J-BILD authors take us to corners of the world very distant from our Canadian home base as they explore questions of language policy in education.
Research Studies
In “The secret handshake of Dutch: How the Dutch have systematically denied access to their language in the Caribbean,” Terri Bakker paints a disturbing portrait of the effects of old-school colonial mentality on the education of today’s children in a part of the Dutch Antilles that may be unfamiliar to our readers. Bakker’s forthright approach to analyzing language policy in education for the islands of Saba and St. Eustatius is thought-provoking and may, it is to be hoped, lead to further inquiries into a situation that seems to be calling out for reform.
Innocent Fasse Mbouya and Alain Takam also put the case for pedagogical reform in “Towards the introduction of the teaching of technical English in technical education in Cameroon: Pre-requisites and prospects.” This window into curriculum planning in Cameroon, part of a larger project investigating the delivery of technical education in that country, will give readers valuable insight into the more pressing needs of a key educational sector in an African context where English as a language of education occupies a somewhat ambiguous status and where better policy and practices around English for Specific Purposes (ESP) is clearly much needed. Both these papers are very much policy papers, thus rounding off our engagement with our LPP authors with a good solid period.
