The study, conducted by Barbara Riman and Mojca Medvešek of the Institute for Ethnic Studies in Ljubljana, draws on an online survey of eighteen teachers of Slovene in Croatia carried out in April 2021, at the height of pandemic restrictions, together with a retrospective follow-up questionnaire completed by eight of those teachers in 2026. Because only around twenty teachers of Slovene were active in Croatia during the 2020/21 school year, the 2021 sample captured a large proportion of the entire professional population, although most respondents taught supplementary, extracurricular classes rather than lessons embedded in the regular school system. The authors deliberately treat the 2026 responses not as a second measurement point but as a qualitative lens through which the immediate pandemic-era findings can be reinterpreted with hindsight.

The sociolinguistic context explains why the stakes were so high. The number of Croatian residents reporting Slovene as their mother tongue fell from 19,341 in 1991 to 7,620 in 2021, a decline that points to a narrowing base of potential speakers and to weakened intergenerational transmission. Previous studies have documented that Croatian predominates in family communication among many children and young people learning Slovene, and that opportunities to use Slovene in public life in Croatia are limited. In the theoretical framework of the study, drawing on Joshua Fishman’s work on reversing language shift, institutional support alone cannot sustain a language once it has receded from everyday family and community use—but where such use is fragile, organised instruction may become one of the few structured settings in which learners regularly hear and speak the language.

Slovene instruction in Croatia takes several institutionally distinct forms, and the pandemic treated them unevenly. Slovene Language and Culture is taught under the so-called Model C within Croatian primary and secondary schools, and university-level Slovene programmes operate in Zagreb, Zadar and Rijeka; both could plug into existing school and university digital platforms when teaching moved online. By contrast, supplementary Slovene language and culture classes, funded by the Republic of Slovenia and usually hosted on the premises of Slovene cultural associations, depended on physical access to those premises, on local organisational capacity, and on sustained family engagement. A further extracurricular programme in Varaždin County relies on teachers commuting from Slovenian schools across the border, making it acutely sensitive to border restrictions and the closure of school buildings. Indicative figures for the 2020/21 school year suggest that supplementary classes involved 287 learners, Model C instruction 221, and the Varaždin programme 217—substantial numbers for a small minority community.

The survey data reveal a striking paradox. Twelve of sixteen teachers reported that their Slovene instruction was included in official pandemic education measures, and most judged those measures favourably or neutrally. Yet in 2020 not a single respondent taught fully in person: ten taught partly in person and partly remotely, and five taught entirely remotely, with exclusive remote delivery lasting up to twelve weeks for four teachers, between twelve and eighteen weeks for four more, and more than twenty-four weeks for three. At the time of the survey in April 2021, eight teachers were still teaching in hybrid mode and seven entirely online. Instruction had formally survived—but, as the authors put it, formal continuation did not amount to stable, interaction-rich contact with the language.

The pedagogical consequences were most visible in spoken interaction. Nine of sixteen teachers said they could not achieve their set teaching objectives under the adapted modes, and of the fifteen who assessed learning outcomes during remote instruction, only two judged that the majority of their students had achieved the expected learning standards; nine said students reached only the minimum standards, and three could not assess them at all. In the 2026 follow-up, teachers explained why. One noted that in-person classes offered more room for playful activities—joking, laughing, singing and dancing—making lessons more dynamic, while another observed that motivational games over Zoom simply did not have the same effect as classroom activities. A third teacher summarised the underlying principle: language learning is most successful through contact between speakers. For younger learners in particular, remote formats reduced immediate teacher support, spontaneous interaction and real-time feedback—the very mechanisms through which a minority language becomes audible and usable.

Participation itself proved fragile, and the reasons were social rather than technological. Seven of fifteen teachers estimated that roughly three quarters of their learners participated regularly in remote lessons, four estimated about half, and four estimated fewer than half; not one teacher said all learners participated. The most widely endorsed explanation for non-participation was a lack of a supportive environment at home, cited by nine of fifteen teachers, while lack of interest was not seen as the dominant factor. Parental help, teachers reported, depended on parents’ own knowledge of Slovene, their time and their energy—and was unevenly distributed across families. One teacher was unequivocal in the follow-up: during the pandemic, organised lessons were her learners’ only contact with Slovene, because very few of them spoke the language at home. Another reported that for almost all of her secondary-school students, the class was their sole regular exposure to the language.

The pandemic also severed the informal channels that normally reinforce classroom learning. Teachers described how restrictions on movement cut learners off from Slovene-speaking relatives, from peers, and from leisure activities in Slovenia, slowing progress even among children who had previously used the language with grandparents or family across the border. Teachers themselves compensated with considerable additional labour: twelve of fifteen prepared their own teaching materials, eleven adapted materials from other sources to their learners’ proficiency levels, and most maintained contact through messages and individual instructions. In the retrospective accounts, remote teaching depended not on any single platform but on a broader infrastructure—equipment, internet connectivity, institutional approval, collegial networks and, in some cases, teachers personally covering the cost of internet access. Ten of the eighteen surveyed teachers worked on contractual arrangements rather than permanent employment, underscoring how precarious the professional base of this instruction already was.

Perhaps surprisingly, the 2026 follow-up found no uniform, lasting collapse in interest. Several teachers reported no long-term changes in enrolment or motivation, attributing fluctuations to the changing interests of successive student cohorts rather than to the pandemic, and some pandemic-era adaptations persisted productively: closer collaboration and material exchange among teachers, new digital resources, online consultations that suit adult learners by removing travel barriers, and published teaching materials originally developed for remote instruction. Yet the authors caution against reading this as resilience. They conceptualise the pattern as structural fragility: organised instruction can continue on paper even as the institutional, organisational, pedagogical, social and communicative conditions that make it a genuine space of language contact are disrupted. The finding is not that learners’ competence declined—the study measured no proficiency tests—but that the infrastructure of exposure proved vulnerable precisely where it mattered most.

The implications reach well beyond the Slovene community in Croatia. Wherever a minority language has weakened intergenerational transmission, the classroom may be the last regular venue in which children encounter it, and crisis planning for minority-language education must therefore address the practical conditions of continuity: access to teaching spaces or digital channels, stable teacher employment, coordination across borders, quality materials, and support for families. Legal recognition, the authors note, is a necessary but insufficient guarantee—Croatia’s minority-language legislation and the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages provide a framework, but the pandemic showed that effectiveness depends on implementation. The resilience of minority-language schooling in a crisis, the study concludes, rests not on the mere possibility of remote delivery but on the wider institutional, community and communicative scaffolding that keeps a language present in learners’ lives—even, and especially, when the classroom door closes.

Subject of Research: The continuity and fragility of organised Slovene minority-language instruction in Croatia during the COVID-19 pandemic

Article Title: Organised instruction as a fragile space of minority-language contact: Slovene in Croatia during the COVID-19 pandemic

Article References: Organised instruction as a fragile space of minority-language contact: Slovene in Croatia during the COVID-19 pandemic. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2026.1950848

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/feduc.2026.1950848

Keywords: minority languages, Slovene in Croatia, COVID-19 pandemic, language maintenance, heritage-language education, intergenerational transmission, remote instruction, language policy, supplementary classes, sociolinguistics, teacher survey, structural fragility

The study adopts a narrative literature review methodology, drawing together a deliberately heterogeneous body of evidence. Sources were selected for their relevance to two research questions: how policy choices, didactic practices and sociocultural attitudes shape the current position of French as a foreign language, and what implications the findings hold for improving its teaching. Priority was given to publications from 2019 onwards, reflecting ongoing educational reforms, though older seminal works were retained for historical context. The analysis proceeded through thematic clustering, organising recurring themes into historical-institutional, pedagogical and sociocultural dimensions, while keeping a careful distinction between descriptive synthesis, interpretative analysis and normative recommendations.

That historical context turns out to be essential for understanding the present. French has been present in written documents in the region since the twelfth century, when the Flemish elite gradually gallicised. Dutch re-emerged as the language of economic life in the fourteenth century, French regained prominence under Burgundian and Habsburg rule in the seventeenth, and its dominance receded again by the late nineteenth century under pressure from the Flemish Movement, which championed Dutch. The result is a language that is no longer taken for granted in Flemish education but must be continually legitimised against English and other rivals. Belgium’s federal structure compounds the difficulty: three language communities each run their own education system, producing divergent curricula, teacher qualification requirements and reform trajectories, while the principle of linguistic territoriality limits opportunities for natural exposure to French in Flanders.

French remains compulsory in large parts of the Flemish curriculum, in both primary and secondary schooling, but the number of instructional hours varies across schools and recent trends show a reduction in French hours in favour of English or STEM subjects. For a long time French functioned as the default second language in Flanders; it is now positioned as a foreign language after English, which has become the first foreign language taught. A key structural turning point came with a 2004 decree making French compulsory from the third grade of primary education, replacing a patchwork in which schools chose whether and when to offer it. Language awareness and language initiation programmes, designed to build positive attitudes toward multilingualism through early, low-stakes exposure, exist but remain optional and unevenly implemented, limiting their systemic impact.

One of the most striking findings concerns the informal dominance of English. Empirical research indicates that pupils at the end of primary education often possess a larger English vocabulary than a French one, despite receiving no formal instruction in English, a pattern attributed to the saturation of media and digital environments with English content. Teacher preparation compounds the problem in the other direction. Survey data and advice from the Flemish Education Council show that many primary-school teachers feel uncertain speaking French in class, roughly one third hesitate to use it orally, which pushes classroom practice toward written skills, grammar and spelling at the expense of spoken communication. Many student teachers begin training at A2 level on the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, functional but insufficient for confident, spontaneous classroom use, while a B1 level is generally considered necessary.

In secondary education, a major obstacle to evaluating French is the absence of systematic, large-scale assessment data. Unlike several neighbouring countries, Flanders has no standardised language tests for French; the recently introduced centralised tests cover only Dutch and mathematics. Insights therefore rest on teacher testimonies, interviews with teacher trainers, education reports and small-scale classroom studies. Across these sources a consistent pattern emerges: since the early 2000s, curricular reforms have prioritised communicative language teaching, with a task-oriented approach as the dominant reference point, emphasising functional language use and authentic interaction. This stands in tension with knowledge-based approaches foregrounding explicit grammar and vocabulary instruction. In practice, teachers report that the task-oriented approach is sometimes applied narrowly, with strong emphasis on oral interaction but insufficient systematic vocabulary development and grammatical support. A case study comparing three teachers found that a French-speaking teacher adopted a more traditional, knowledge-oriented method while two Dutch-speaking colleagues followed a communicative, orally oriented one, illustrating how background and training produce divergent practices within the same framework.

Motivation is the other persistent fault line. A systematic investigation by the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, drawing on Gardner and Lambert’s distinction between instrumental motivation, learning a language for practical purposes, and integrative motivation, reflecting interest in the language and its speakers, found that pupils expressed slightly more positive attitudes toward English, though their attitude toward French was not negative. French was perceived as more difficult and less trendy, while English was associated with youth culture; pupils reported frequent listening to English-language music and rare consumption of French-language media. Instrumental motivation was slightly stronger for French, given its status as a national language. Nearly twenty years later, a partial replication study among 62 pupils from six schools in the Bruges region largely confirmed these results: the gap had not diminished, pupils preferred English as a school subject and would continue learning it even if optional, far less so for French, and anxiety levels were higher when learning French. Similar patterns have been observed in the Netherlands and Germany, suggesting a broader European shift rather than a purely local phenomenon.

Higher education mirrors these difficulties. Studies point to heterogeneous linguistic profiles among students entering French language programmes, with some lacking expected grammatical accuracy or lexical breadth. Concerns gained visibility in 2019 when forty-two French lecturers from fourteen Flemish colleges and universities published a petition highlighting a widening gap between students’ entry level and the competences required for French language degrees, triggering national press coverage. Enrolment data from Flemish universities between 2013 and 2021 show French consistently ranked third, after English and Dutch and roughly on par with Spanish, attracting a specialised cohort often motivated by careers in education, translation, international relations or public administration. Meanwhile the teaching profession itself faces strain: recruitment for modern foreign language teachers in the United Kingdom reached only 43 percent of government targets in 2024, OECD data indicate similar shortages in Germany, and in Flanders lateral entry into teaching is rising, with second-career teachers sometimes appointed without full qualifications and reporting they feel less prepared.

Recent initiatives offer partial remedies. The Flemish Language Platform, established in 2019 by representatives of multiple universities and later joined by teachers from outside academia, coordinates action in support of Dutch, modern foreign languages and classical languages. CLIL, or Content and Language Integrated Learning, in which a non-language subject is taught through a foreign language, was long avoided in Flanders due to concerns about Frenchification but was officially authorised in 2014. Its implementation remains limited to secondary education and is not systematically integrated across grades: in 2021, 137 Flemish schools offered CLIL, 76 using French as the medium of instruction and 113 using English. Research suggests CLIL can boost motivation and language outcomes, though effects depend on programme design, teacher expertise and continuity. Technological change adds a new variable, as AI tools that generate exercises, feedback and translations complicate traditional assessment, with research noting that distinguishing student-produced from AI-generated output is becoming harder.

The review’s broader argument is that the stakes extend well beyond the classroom. Analyses of vacancy descriptions from the Flemish public employment service show that solid command of French remains a requirement for a substantial proportion of job profiles, more frequently than English in several sectors, and employers’ organisations such as VOKA, VBO and Unizo have endorsed the Language Plan, expressing concern about declining French proficiency among young graduates. The OECD reports that around two in five vacancies registered with the Brussels public employment service require both French and Dutch. There is also an equity dimension: foreign-language proficiency is shaped by exposure beyond school, and participation in extracurricular activities is socially differentiated, so if formal opportunities decline, wealthier families may compensate through paid language camps and immersion courses, widening socioeconomic disparities. The review recommends system-wide proficiency monitoring aligned with CEFR benchmarks, balanced didactic approaches integrating communication with systematic grammar and vocabulary support, strengthened teacher education prioritising oral French, and greater curricular coherence across educational networks. Structural proposals under debate, including making French optional in primary teacher training or reconfiguring qualifications across school phases, each carry trade-offs. What emerges clearly is that no single cause explains French’s predicament in Flanders, and no single fix will resolve it; coordinated, evidence-informed action across institutions is what the evidence demands.

Subject of Research: The status and teaching of French as a foreign language in Flemish education policy and practice

Article Title: French as a foreign language in Flemish education policy and practice

Article References: Verroens, F. (2026). French as a foreign language in Flemish education policy and practice. Discover Education, 5(1), Article 987. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44217-026-02191-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44217-026-02191-5

Keywords: French language education, Flanders, language policy, foreign language pedagogy, multilingualism, teacher training, learner motivation, CLIL, English dominance, Belgium, CEFR, language assessment

The study, led by Shahazwan Mat Yusoff, set out to answer a question that most previous Malaysian CEFR research had left unexplored. Earlier studies had documented that teachers generally hold positive views of the framework while struggling with training gaps, workload, materials, and student proficiency. What remained poorly understood was the cognitive and pedagogical process in between: how teachers actually make sense of the reform and translate it into daily decisions about tasks, scaffolding, and assessment. Drawing on the sensemaking tradition in education research, the authors argue that teachers do not simply receive policy messages and execute them. Instead, they interpret, select, modify, and sometimes quietly transform reform ideas according to their professional knowledge, beliefs, and the realities of their classrooms.

To capture this process, the researchers conducted semi-structured interviews with ten ESL teachers drawn from three government secondary schools, deliberately balanced between five novice teachers with fewer than five years of experience and five senior teachers with more than ten. Each interview lasted between thirty and forty-five minutes, and the transcripts were analysed thematically using both deductive codes derived from the research questions and inductive codes that emerged from the data itself. The team followed Braun and Clarke’s six-phase thematic analysis, strengthened by member checking with four participants, peer checking, and an audit trail of coding decisions. Ethical approval came from the Universiti Malaya Research Ethics Committee, and all participants gave written informed consent.

The first major finding is both encouraging and sobering. Teachers overwhelmingly viewed the CEFR as a useful, structured framework that brought clearer organisation to their lessons than the older KBSM syllabus. One novice teacher described it simply as more organised than what came before. Yet beneath this acceptance lay a striking unevenness in conceptual understanding. Some participants appeared to understand the CEFR mainly as a syllabus guide or textbook structure rather than as a proficiency-based framework for describing learner ability. A senior teacher captured the tension directly, noting that the real challenge was getting teachers to understand that the framework exists to describe what students can do. The distinction matters because a teacher can dutifully use CEFR-aligned materials while still interpreting the reform procedurally, missing its deeper purpose of informing judgements about learner progression and communicative task design.

The second finding shows how classroom realities became the crucible in which the reform was tested and reshaped. Teachers reported negotiating the CEFR against a cluster of practical constraints: limited instructional time, low and mixed learner proficiency, unfamiliar cultural content, and relentless examination pressure. Time emerged as one of the most immediate pressures, with one teacher admitting that restrictions forced the skipping of complementary skills within the prescribed lesson structure. Learner proficiency posed an even thornier problem. As one senior teacher explained, even in non-rural areas the number of students with low language capability and limited real-world knowledge was worrisome, and the end of ability streaming meant classrooms now contained a wide mix of levels. A single CEFR-aligned task could be trivial for some students and impenetrable for others, making implementation dependent on each teacher’s diagnostic judgement.

Cultural relevance added another layer of negotiation. Some teachers found that CEFR-aligned materials included topics, particularly around culture, that students simply could not relate to, dampening comprehension and participation. Meanwhile, the tension between communicative ideals and assessment demands produced genuine professional dilemmas. One senior teacher described having to decide whether to focus on a CEFR-based lesson or on the necessities of an upcoming examination, noting that the two are sometimes contradictory. The authors interpret these accounts not as evidence of teacher resistance but as contextual negotiation: teachers incorporated constraints into their pedagogical decision-making, simplifying tasks, localising content, and selectively implementing curriculum components. This supports the view, articulated in earlier scholarship, that Malaysia’s adoption of the CEFR is a case of global policy borrowing that must be reinterpreted within local educational and linguistic conditions.

The third finding, and perhaps the most provocative, concerns the difference between novice and senior teachers. Both groups recognised the need to adapt lessons to student needs, but the nature and specificity of their reported adaptations diverged sharply. Novice teachers tended to describe adaptation in broad, activity-focused terms: picking activities students could manage, adjusting question difficulty to proficiency levels, and relating lesson contexts to students’ lives. Senior teachers, by contrast, reported a considerably richer repertoire. One described first assessing the class’s proficiency profile, then designing activities to cater to the majority while scheduling personal intervention sessions for struggling learners. Another outlined differentiation strategies designed to challenge higher-level students while allowing lower-proficiency students to push themselves. Senior teachers’ accounts extended beyond task modification into scaffolding, motivation, targeted intervention, and support for low-anxiety communicative participation.

The authors are careful about what this comparison does and does not establish. Because the study relied on interviews rather than classroom observation, the findings describe differences in teachers’ reported adaptive repertoires, not directly observed differences in practice. The study does not claim that senior teachers are automatically better implementers of the CEFR. What it does suggest is that professional experience may shape the range and specificity of the strategies teachers can draw upon when negotiating learner diversity. This aligns with international research showing that experienced EFL teachers demonstrate stronger knowledge of scaffolding strategies, including the linguistic, affective, and metacognitive support that helps low-proficiency learners participate in communicative activities that would otherwise defeat them.

From these three strands, the researchers build a broader conceptual argument they call adaptive professionalism. Rather than treating adaptation as an add-on technique applied after the curriculum has been delivered, adaptive professionalism positions teachers as active interpreters of reform who use professional judgement to make global expectations workable in particular classrooms. The concept weaves together sensemaking theory, language teacher cognition research, and work on teacher agency, which holds that teachers’ capacity to act is shaped by the interaction of professional competence, structural conditions, and professional purposes. In this framing, the CEFR provides a common reference point, but it is teachers’ sensemaking and judgement that determine how its principles are understood and enacted. Implementation, in other words, is better understood as contextual negotiation than as policy transfer.

The practical implications are significant for Malaysia and for any education system importing an international framework. The findings suggest that professional development must move beyond familiarising teachers with CEFR terminology and descriptors. Teachers need opportunities to connect proficiency descriptors with actual learner performance, communicative task design, assessment decisions, and classroom progression, so that acceptance deepens into genuine conceptual understanding. They also need support in developing the adaptive repertoire that mixed-proficiency classrooms demand: scaffolding, differentiation, localisation of materials, and low-anxiety support for reluctant speakers. The authors acknowledge the study’s limitations, including its small sample from a single district and its reliance on self-reported practice, and they call for future research incorporating classroom observations, lesson artefacts, and student perspectives across rural and urban, high- and lower-performing settings. But the core message is already clear. Curriculum reform does not succeed on the strength of its design documents. It succeeds, or stalls, in the moment-to-moment interpretive work of teachers who must decide, lesson by lesson, what a global framework means for the specific students sitting in front of them.

Subject of Research: Teacher sensemaking and adaptive enactment of the CEFR-aligned English curriculum in Malaysian secondary ESL classrooms

Article Title: Teacher sensemaking and adaptive enactment of curriculum reform based on the CEFR in Malaysian secondary ESL classrooms

Article References: Mat Yusoff, S., Mohamad Marzaini, A. F., Ahamat, M. I., Abdullah, M. R., Seyapalan, E. D., & Ali Huddin, M. R. (2026). Teacher sensemaking and adaptive enactment of curriculum reform based on the CEFR in Malaysian secondary ESL classrooms. Discover Education, 5(1), Article 1152. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44217-026-02305-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44217-026-02305-z

Keywords: CEFR, ESL teachers, curriculum reform, teacher sensemaking, Malaysia, qualitative case study, scaffolding, differentiation, language policy, communicative language teaching, novice and senior teachers, adaptive professionalism

While full English-medium instruction has been studied extensively since the early 2000s, partial EMI has remained under-theorised despite being widespread. Scholars use overlapping labels such as hybrid, soft, or parallel-language education, often without clear pedagogical definition. Warnby and Bylund define partial EMI precisely: in predominantly non-English settings, it refers to instruction where English is used selectively and required for specific components, is not itself the object of teaching, and yet constitutes a condition for participation. In the Swedish context they examine, this might mean compulsory English-language textbooks within otherwise Swedish-medium courses, or lectures delivered in English while the programme is framed as national-language education. The English components may be explicit, but the linguistic and participatory demands they create often remain tacit.

To understand why this matters, the researchers turned to two established psychological frameworks. Lazarus and Folkman’s transactional model of stress and coping, first published in 1984, defines stress as the product of cognitive appraisal—how individuals interpret demands relative to their coping resources. Primary appraisal concerns whether an encounter is construed as threat, challenge, or harm and loss, while secondary appraisal concerns perceived coping options. Nicholson’s 1990 transition cycle adds a temporal dimension, describing adjustment to new roles through four phases: preparation, encounter, adjustment, and stabilisation. By combining these frameworks, the authors link moment-to-moment appraisal of English-medium demands to longer trajectories of adaptation, showing why adjustment may stall or be repeatedly reactivated across courses.

The conceptual argument is illustrated through four retrospective interview accounts from novice students in Swedish higher education, all pseudonymous and all recruited from a previous upper-secondary research project. Each participant had passed English 6, the final compulsory English course for university eligibility in Sweden, and had completed the optional English 7 course—representing the maximum school-based preparation for academic English available in the country. All were enrolled in Swedish-medium university programmes with selected components in English and were in their second to fourth semester. Semi-structured interviews of roughly thirty minutes were conducted in Swedish in spring 2023, transcribed, and translated into English for analysis through a theory-informed interpretive reading.

The accounts reveal striking patterns of appraisal. Moa, a first-year engineering student, repeatedly described English academic readings as a wall of text, saying it felt like a leap or a shock. Although she had performed well in English at school, university texts seemed fundamentally unmanageable—a dual appraisal of threat, through perceived overload, and harm or loss, through the destabilisation of previously assumed academic competence. Alicia, a first-year medical student, described a clash between the casual English texts of upper-secondary school and the dense, abstract language of university material, a failed expectancy that prompted reappraisal of her own preparedness. Einar, a civil engineering student, recalled that the biggest shock was that many lectures were in English, and that he eventually stopped attending a statistics course because he simply could not understand anything.

Perhaps most striking is the case of Leia, a social science student whose threat appraisal arose before she even enrolled. After previewing the English-language literature of a programme she had been accepted to, she felt overwhelmed and withdrew, recalling that she tried to get into the reading but it just did not work. In the researchers’ reading, this anticipatory withdrawal occurred in the preparation phase of Nicholson’s cycle, showing that English-medium demands can become consequential before formal entry to university. Leia’s decision illustrates how tacit language expectations may affect perceived access to higher education itself—not through exclusion at the gate, but through unequal conditions that surface only once students attempt to participate.

The students’ coping efforts fell into four overlapping forms. The first was adapting through effort: Leia allocated twice as much time for English readings, Alicia turned to Google Translate and Swedish-language notes when lectures proved insufficient, and Moa abandoned linear reading in favour of selecting passages, highlighting, and translating key terms. The second was avoiding and withdrawing: Einar substituted English lectures with self-study, online tutorials, and YouTube lectures, while Moa described moments of nearly giving up when sentence after sentence defied comprehension. The third was reframing, enduring, and improvising: Einar spoke of fighting his way through material until it stuck, and Leia gradually moved from translating individual words to investigating how concepts were used across disciplinary texts. The fourth was seeking recognition and informal solidarity—peer conversations that reframed English difficulty as shared rather than a personal failing, and appeals to instructors for acknowledgement.

Recognition emerged as a decisive but uneven factor. Alicia described lecturers whose slides included small Swedish translations of key terms alongside others who offered no help at all, noting that many lecturers spoke only English, making questions difficult to ask. Einar appreciated a glossary provided in his first mathematics course but noted its absence later, and argued that the most important thing was that examiners acknowledge that the demands are difficult and new. In the researchers’ analysis, such sporadic support points to fragile adjustment sustained by piecemeal aids, and to institutional silence around English-medium difficulty at programme level. When recognition depends on individual goodwill, coping remains fragile and unevenly distributed.

The study’s central contribution is conceptual rather than empirical. First, it sharpens the definition of partial EMI by framing selective English demands as participation conditions within national-language programmes. Second, it reframes familiar practices—translation, selective reading, lecture avoidance, peer reliance—as appraisal-linked coping responses rather than isolated study strategies. Third, it conceptualises participation in partial EMI as recursive rather than linear: each new English-language text, lecture, or assessment can reactivate earlier appraisals, complicating movement from encounter to adjustment and stabilisation. Moa’s complaint that students must learn two things when they should only have to learn one captures the double burden, as linguistic demands divert time, energy, and strength away from disciplinary content itself.

The equity implications reach beyond Sweden. In a country where widening participation and formal equality of access are central policy goals, the authors argue that inequity may emerge less through exclusion at entry than through unequal conditions for participation after enrolment. When English appears selectively without consistent institutional recognition, responsibility for adaptation shifts onto individual students, and prior access to academic English shapes how easily they adjust—turning partial EMI into a hidden curriculum. The researchers stress that their argument is not for lowering English requirements or making university easy, but for making selective English-medium demands visible from admission onwards, scaffolding them across the curriculum through explicit reading guidance, glossaries, and bilingual terminology support, and institutionalising recognition so that support does not depend on individual lecturers. Resilience, they conclude, cannot be the foundation of programme design: if institutions wish to benefit from English-medium resources, they must also accept responsibility for the demands these create. The authors note that their contribution is conceptual, based on four illustrative accounts, and call for future research across institutional contexts, comparisons with self-selected full-EMI programmes, and longitudinal follow-up of how scaffolding responsibilities are distributed in multilingual higher education.

Subject of Research: Partial English-medium instruction as a tacit participation condition shaping student appraisal, coping, and transition in higher education

Article Title: Partial English-medium instruction as a participation condition: appraisal, coping, and transition in higher education

Article References: Warnby, M., & Bylund, J. (2026). Partial English-medium instruction as a participation condition: appraisal, coping, and transition in higher education. Higher Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-026-01766-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10734-026-01766-3

Keywords: English-medium instruction, partial EMI, higher education, student transition, stress and coping, cognitive appraisal, equity, multilingualism, academic reading, hidden curriculum, Swedish higher education, language policy

The policy at the center of the study is Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education, known as MTB-MLE, which was embedded in the Enhanced Basic Education Act of 2013, Republic Act No. 10533. The reform required that the language children speak at home serve as the medium of instruction from kindergarten through the early grades, a design consistent with a large body of international research showing that first-language instruction facilitates meaningful and lifelong learning. Evidence cited in the study includes the well-known Lubuagan case study by Walter and Dekker, which documented measurable learning gains when Kankanaey children were taught in their own language. Yet by 2025, the Department of Education had issued a memorandum discontinuing the use of the mother tongue as the medium of instruction in kindergarten to grade 3, allowing only optional implementation in monolingual classes, and amending the very sections of the 2013 law that had mandated it. Republic Act No. 12027, recorded by the Supreme Court’s e-library in October 2024, formalized the rollback.

What makes the study distinctive is its insistence that this sequence of events cannot be understood through the language of implementation failure alone. Perez-Amurao and Nelmida argue that implementation gaps, the practical difficulties of training teachers, producing materials, and assessing learners in more than a hundred Philippine languages, were reframed by political actors as policy failure. That reframing, they contend, was the crucial move. Once a policy is publicly defined as having failed on its own terms, its rollback appears not as a political choice but as an administrative necessity. The researchers describe this process as lawfare, the use of legal instruments and legislative maneuvering to produce colossal effects on language communities, and they show how congressional records and education commission reports circulated data that reshaped the perceived value of the mother tongues themselves.

The theoretical core of the paper is a refined construct of linguistic depoliticization. In the authors’ account, depoliticization occurs when decisions about language are stripped of their visible political content and presented as technocratic matters, even as they remain deeply embedded in power dynamics. The Philippines’ national language acts, examined through critical discourse analysis in the tradition of Norman Fairclough, reveal recurring patterns of ambivalence: proclamations celebrating linguistic diversity coexisting with executive orders, such as Executive Order No. 335 of 1988, that directed government offices toward the exclusive use of Filipino in official transactions. This ambivalence, the study argues, is not accidental. It reflects the interests of actors whose political legacies favor a narrow, centralized linguistic order, and it echoes what other scholars have called the misuses of essentialism in language policy-making, where languages are reduced to symbols of unity rather than treated as living media of thought.

The stakes of this analysis are framed in unusually strong moral language. Drawing on the literature of cultural genocide, including work by Lawrence Kingston and Robert van Krieken on the destruction of identity among indigenous peoples, the authors argue that the absence of a coherent national language policy infringes on linguistic human rights and produces cultural genocide through linguistic genocide, the deliberate destruction of cultural identity achieved by attacking the languages in which that identity is carried. The Philippines is home to more than a hundred languages, most of them spoken by communities with no institutional protection, and the study situates the country’s obligations within an extensive framework of international instruments: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and the 1996 Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights adopted in Barcelona.

The researchers’ methodological approach is worth examining because it demonstrates how policy histories can be reconstructed from official texts. Document analysis, as described in the methodological literature the authors cite, allows researchers to treat laws, memoranda, and commission reports as evidence of both stated intent and unstated assumption. Critical discourse analysis then interrogates how those texts frame problems, assign blame, and legitimize action. Applied to the Philippine record, the method surfaces a striking pattern: the same institutions that documented the challenges of implementing MTB-MLE also produced the evaluative data that justified abandoning it. Implementation-generated data circulating within policy institutions, the study finds, progressively reshaped the value of the mother tongues, recasting them as obstacles to learning rather than as resources for it. The rollback of 2024 and 2025 thus appears in the record not as a sudden reversal but as the endpoint of a long discursive campaign.

The study also situates the rollback within a broader pattern of democratic retrogression in the Philippines. The authors connect the language policy trajectory to the country’s recent political history, including the radical populism associated with Rodrigo Duterte and the Marcosian revisionism documented by historians such as Francisco Jayme Guiang, in which myth-making reshapes collective memory. In such an environment, they suggest, language policy becomes another arena in which historical narratives and national identity are contested and rewritten. The ambivalence of the state toward its own linguistic diversity mirrors a wider ambivalence toward pluralism itself. Democratic retrogression, on this reading, is not only a matter of institutions and elections; it is inscribed in the languages children are permitted to learn in, and therefore in whose knowledge counts as legitimate.

The human consequences are concrete. Millions of Filipino learners, the study notes, continue to be denied inclusive and culturally responsive education. The evidence base for the pedagogical value of mother tongue instruction in the Philippine context is substantial, ranging from the Lubuagan experiment to studies of classroom implementation by public elementary teachers in Masbate and analyses of how language ideologies shape policy implementation published in Asia-Pacific Education Researcher in 2025. Against this backdrop, the discontinuation of mandatory mother tongue instruction in the earliest grades represents, in the authors’ framing, a policy choice that prioritizes political convenience over documented learning outcomes. Recent economic research, including a 2025 National Bureau of Economic Research working paper on the long shadow of early education in the Philippines, underscores how consequential early-grade learning conditions are for lifetime outcomes, adding an economic dimension to what the authors frame primarily as a rights question.

The paper does not stop at diagnosis. It calls for greater accountability among policymakers and advocates for institutional safeguards that would insulate linguistic inclusivity and cultural revitalization from the oscillations of electoral politics. Such safeguards, the study implies, would need to address the structural conditions that allowed the rollback to proceed: the concentration of policy authority, the vulnerability of implementation data to political reframing, and the absence of enforceable rights for linguistic minorities. The Second Congressional Commission on Education, whose reports the authors analyzed, represents one of the few institutional mechanisms capable of sustained scrutiny, but the study suggests that commissions alone cannot substitute for binding legal protection of learners’ linguistic rights.

Ultimately, the study’s contribution lies in naming a phenomenon that is easy to miss: the quiet depoliticization of decisions that are, in substance, profoundly political. When a multilingual democracy rolls back the right of children to learn in their own languages, the move is typically narrated as pragmatism, as a response to logistics or test scores. Perez-Amurao and Nelmida’s analysis of the Philippine record argues that this narration is itself the mechanism, a discursive shield behind which political legacies and actors’ interests operate. By reconstructing the full chain from national language acts through implementation data to the 2024 and 2025 policy reversal, the study offers a template for examining similar rollbacks elsewhere, and it issues a warning that resonates beyond the Philippines: languages do not die only through prohibition and punishment. They can also be killed by memoranda, reframed statistics, and the slow administrative erosion of the right to be taught in the words one first learned to think in.

Subject of Research: The politics of language-in-education policy and the rollback of mother tongue-based multilingual education in the Philippines

Article Title: Philippine linguistic genocide, depoliticization, and policy rollback

Article References: Philippine linguistic genocide, depoliticization, and policy rollback. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01680-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01680-6

Keywords: language policy, MTB-MLE, Philippines, linguistic genocide, cultural genocide, linguistic depoliticization, mother tongue education, policy rollback, critical discourse analysis, linguistic human rights, multilingual education, educational equity

The tension is rooted in the deliberately decentralised design of post-apartheid schooling. South Africa’s public education system operates on a dual-management model that splits authority between the State, acting through provincial education departments, and School Governing Bodies composed largely of parents and community members. The idea was democratic participation: decisions about a school’s character, language of instruction, and intake should rest as close as possible to the people affected. But that same autonomy has repeatedly been exercised in ways that restrict access, producing mistrust between principals and governing bodies and, more troublingly, excluding learners from schools altogether.

Victoria’s study, a qualitative doctrinal analysis of statutes, Constitutional Court jurisprudence and scholarly literature, is framed by two theoretical lenses. The first is transformative constitutionalism, the influential idea articulated by legal scholar Karl Klare that the South African Constitution is not merely a legal document but a long-term project of dismantling apartheid’s structural injustices and building a substantively equal society. The second is administrative justice, which demands that all exercises of public power be lawful, rational and procedurally fair. Together, these frameworks supply both a normative test — what school governance ought to achieve — and a procedural test — how governance power ought to be exercised.

The study’s first analytical theme characterises Section 5(5) as a statutory shield. The provision states that, subject to the Act and applicable provincial law, the admission policy of a public school is determined by its governing body, while Section 6(2) grants parallel authority over language policy. Grounded in the principle of subsidiarity, these powers position governing bodies as fiduciaries of their local communities, entrusted with managing class sizes, infrastructure and pedagogical character. Yet Victoria argues that this authority is delegated administrative power, not institutional sovereignty. Governing bodies are administrative actors bound by constitutional norms, and their policies must not infringe learners’ rights or undermine systemic objectives of access and equity.

In practice, however, the study finds that many governing bodies have interpreted Section 5(5) as conferring near-absolute discretion. The most visible flashpoints are capacity determinations and language policies. Schools frequently assert the authority to set maximum enrolment thresholds based on classroom space or teacher-pupil ratios, excluding additional learners even when no viable alternatives exist. Language policies, particularly single-medium instruction at historically privileged schools, have been defended as essential to cultural identity and educational quality. Victoria’s analysis is careful here: such considerations are not inherently illegitimate, but formally neutral policies can produce exclusionary outcomes when applied within unequal social contexts, functioning as barriers along socio-economic and racial lines.

Against this shield, the study sets what it calls the constitutional sword. Section 29(1(a)) guarantees a basic education that is immediately realisable — unlike many socio-economic rights, it is not subject to progressive realisation and imposes a direct, unqualified obligation on the State. Read with Section 28(2), which declares that a child’s best interests are of paramount importance in every matter concerning the child, the right demands that all governance decisions be evaluated by their actual impact on learner access, inclusion and educational quality. This shifts the legal paradigm from formal equality, under which all learners are equally free to apply, to substantive equality, which interrogates whether learners in practice enjoy equitable access given systemic disparities in resources, geography and historical privilege.

The friction becomes most concrete in the so-called full school argument. Governing bodies frame capacity as a pedagogical and managerial threshold beyond which educational quality suffers; the State must read capacity in light of its positive constitutional obligation to place every learner, particularly amid classroom shortages and unplaced children. The study also documents disputes in which provincial Heads of Department have overridden governing body decisions without prior consultation, raising their own administrative-law concerns about procedural fairness and rationality. Language policy intensifies the collision: the issue, Victoria stresses, is not the legitimacy of language as a pedagogical tool but its deployment in ways that reinforce structural inequality.

Two Constitutional Court judgments anchor the doctrinal resolution. In MEC for Education, Gauteng v Rivonia Primary School, the Court held that a governing body’s admission policy is constitutionally conditioned, not absolute, and that the State may intervene where its implementation unjustifiably limits access — but the Head of Department’s power is itself constrained by legality, rationality and procedural fairness, and requires meaningful consultation rather than unilateral decree. In Head of Department, Mpumalanga Department of Education v Hoërskool Ermelo, the Court upheld state intervention against an Afrikaans-only policy maintained despite clear demand for English-medium instruction, rejecting language policy as a smoke-screen for exclusion. Subsequent jurisprudence, including FEDSAS v MEC for Education, Gauteng, reinforces that governing body authority is derivative, conditional and constitutionally bounded.

From these threads Victoria weaves her central conceptual contribution: a reconceptualisation of school governance as cooperative governance rather than institutional hierarchy. Governing bodies retain their statutory role as primary policy-makers, their proximity enabling contextually informed decisions, while the State bears the ultimate obligation to ensure no learner is denied access — an obligation that authorises intervention but demands structured, substantive consultation and reciprocal support, including resources, educators and infrastructure where schools are required to admit more learners. Capacity, in this model, cannot be a rigid self-determined threshold, and the study proposes that national or provincial guidelines standardise how capacity is determined and applied so it cannot serve as a mechanism of exclusion.

The study’s ultimate verdict is learner-centred: every governance decision, whether taken by a school community or a provincial department, must be measured against its impact on a child’s access to and experience of education. Victoria acknowledges that the enduring challenge lies not in clarifying the legal position, which is now well established, but in ensuring its consistent and equitable implementation across diverse schooling environments — and she calls for empirical research on consultation processes, admission practices and comparative governance across provinces. In a nation where education remains both a site of historical exclusion and the primary engine of social mobility, the finding lands with force: policy may shape the school, but paramountcy belongs to the child.

Subject of Research: The constitutional limits of school governing bodies' admission and language policy powers in South Africa

Article Title: Policy vs. paramountcy: mapping the friction between Section 5(5) of SASA and Section 29 of the South African constitution

Article References: Victoria, M. L. (2026). Policy vs. paramountcy: mapping the friction between Section 5(5) of SASA and Section 29 of the South African constitution. SN Social Sciences, 6(10), Article 448. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01732-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01732-x

Keywords: South African Schools Act, right to basic education, transformative constitutionalism, administrative justice, cooperative governance, substantive equality, school governing bodies, language policy, admission policy, Constitutional Court, best interests of the child, education law

The authors ground their analysis in three theoretical traditions that have gained considerable traction in decolonial scholarship. Decolonial thought interrogates the coloniality of knowledge, the idea that political independence did not dismantle the underlying hierarchies of what counts as legitimate expertise. Postcolonial theory examines how those hierarchies persist in institutions, languages, and credentialing systems long after formal rule ends. Ubuntu philosophy, rooted in southern African thought and often summarized as the principle that a person is a person through other persons, offers a relational ethic in which knowledge is communal, contextual, and bound to collective wellbeing rather than individual accumulation. Together, these frameworks provide the analytical lens through which the researchers read decades of literature on African education, asking not only what is taught but whose knowledge is authorized to appear in the curriculum at all.

Methodologically, the study is a systematic analysis of literature rather than a new empirical survey, a design choice that carries both strengths and constraints. By aggregating peer-reviewed findings across five national contexts, the authors can identify patterns that no single-country study could reveal, such as the recurring gap between policy rhetoric and classroom practice. The trade-off is that the review inherits the limitations of its source material: uneven documentation, variable definitions of what constitutes indigenous knowledge, and the persistent underreporting of oral traditions that resist easy codification. The authors are candid about this gap, noting that existing literature frequently celebrates the value of IKS in the abstract while failing to investigate its practical integration within the varied contexts across the continent. Their review is explicitly an attempt to move the conversation from principle to implementation.

What the analysis found is a consistent architecture of obstruction. Five barriers recur across the case countries with striking regularity. The first is the persistence of Eurocentric curricula, in which African history, science, and ecology appear, if at all, as footnotes to a European narrative. The second is language: instruction delivered in English, French, or Arabic often severs children from the languages in which their communities encode agricultural, medicinal, and ecological knowledge. The third is institutional resistance, as universities and ministries built on colonial templates treat indigenous epistemologies as folklore rather than scholarship. The fourth is inadequate policy support, with governments issuing symbolic endorsements of local knowledge without budget lines, teacher training, or assessment reform to back them. The fifth is the challenge of meeting global academic standards, a structural bind in which internationally benchmarked examinations and accreditation regimes penalize curricula that deviate from metropolitan norms.

Against this bleak backdrop, the case findings offer concrete evidence that integration can work. Ghana’s mother-tongue education initiatives, which deliver early literacy instruction in local languages rather than English, have yielded measurable improvements in reading outcomes while strengthening children’s connection to community knowledge. The mechanism is well understood in literacy research: phonological awareness and comprehension develop fastest in a language a child already speaks, so mother-tongue instruction is not a sentimental concession but a cognitive advantage. South Africa’s formal IKS policy frameworks, among the most developed on the continent, have created institutional channels through which indigenous knowledge can be documented, protected, and incorporated into research and teaching, with reported gains in cultural identity alongside academic outcomes. These are not peripheral experiments; they are national-scale demonstrations that decolonized curricula can be both culturally grounded and pedagogically effective.

The Kenyan and Tanzanian cases illustrate a different dynamic, one in which policy ambition collides with implementation reality. Both countries have experimented with incorporating local content and languages into schooling, yet the review documents how examination pressure, teacher shortages, and centralized curriculum control repeatedly pull practice back toward the colonial-era default. In the North African comparative sub-case of Morocco and Algeria, the picture is complicated by the region’s layered linguistic history, where Amazigh indigenous knowledge and language have had to negotiate space within education systems dominated by Arabic and French legacies. The comparison underscores a key analytical point of the study: there is no single African template for decolonizing education. The colonial encounter differed profoundly across the continent, and so must the pathways out of it.

From these findings the authors derive a three-part prescription. First, localized curriculum reform: national curricula should be redesigned so that indigenous ecological knowledge, oral histories, and local problem-solving traditions are treated as core content rather than enrichment material. Second, community-driven teacher training: because most teachers were themselves educated within colonial epistemologies, professional development must be co-designed with elders, knowledge holders, and local communities rather than imposed from ministry headquarters. Third, national legislation to institutionalize IKS, giving indigenous knowledge the same legal and structural protection that formal disciplines enjoy. The argument here is essentially institutional: without statutory anchoring, IKS integration remains hostage to political cycles and administrative discretion, vulnerable to reversal with each change of government.

The implications extend well beyond the five countries studied. Education for sustainable development has become a global policy orthodoxy, enshrined in United Nations frameworks and national strategies alike, yet the review suggests that sustainability education imported wholesale from external models risks reproducing the very epistemic dependencies it claims to overcome. Indigenous knowledge systems, by contrast, often encode precisely the relational, place-based understanding of ecosystems that sustainability science now champions, from rotational farming practices to community water governance. The study’s contribution is to show that recognizing this is not enough; the mechanisms of schooling, including language policy, teacher certification, assessment design, and legislative frameworks, must be restructured to carry that knowledge. Sustainability, in this reading, is as much an epistemological project as an environmental one.

For policymakers and development practitioners, the review functions as both a diagnosis and a roadmap. Its evidence base, drawn from published literature rather than new fieldwork, means that the reported outcomes, such as improved literacy in Ghana and strengthened cultural identity in South Africa, should be read as promising signals warranting rigorous longitudinal evaluation rather than settled proof. The authors themselves frame the findings as significant implications for those seeking to build culturally grounded and socially relevant education systems across post-colonial Africa, a formulation that invites further empirical testing. What the study establishes firmly is the shape of the problem: five interlocking barriers, documented across multiple national contexts, that will not dissolve through goodwill or symbolic policy alone.

The deeper stakes of the research are captured in its attention to post-colonial identity. Education does not merely transmit skills; it tells young people who they are and whose knowledge matters. When a Kenyan student learns ecology only through European case studies, or a Ghanaian child is punished for speaking her mother tongue at school, the curriculum performs a quiet erasure that no amount of technical training can offset. The review’s most consequential argument may be that sustainable education and epistemic justice are inseparable: a system that devalues the knowledge of the communities it serves will struggle to secure their trust, participation, or long-term engagement. Reimagining African education through decolonial pathways, the authors suggest, is therefore not a retreat from global standards but a demand that those standards make room for the intellectual traditions of the continent’s own people, and a demonstration, through cases from Accra to Cape Town, that when they do, learning improves.

Subject of Research: Integration of Indigenous Knowledge Systems into sustainable education reform in post-colonial Africa

Article Title: Reimagining sustainable education in Africa through decolonial pathways and indigenous knowledge systems

Article References: Shah, N., Akram, H., & Abdelrady, A. H. (2026). Reimagining sustainable education in Africa through decolonial pathways and indigenous knowledge systems. Discover Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43621-026-04596-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43621-026-04596-6

Keywords: Indigenous Knowledge Systems, decolonisation, African education, sustainable education, education for sustainable development, postcolonial theory, Ubuntu philosophy, curriculum reform, mother-tongue education, Ghana, South Africa, language policy