Book review: The Manifold Nature of Bilingual Education

Badwan, Khawla ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1808-724X (2022) Book review: The Manifold Nature of Bilingual Education. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 25 (8). pp. 3129-3131. ISSN 1367-0050

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Abstract

Bilingualism continues to spark educational debates in many contexts around the world. While some types of bilingualism have been promoted in capitalist and neoliberal agendas as a valuable commodity in markets that are increasingly reliant on knowledge economy and communication services, bilingualism is still perceived as an educational challenge in systems that have been primarily designed with monolingual mind-sets. It is estimated that almost half of the world’s population is bilingual (Grosjean, 2021); however, bilingual individuals are expected to conform to monolingual norms that expect a bilingual to be a sum of two monolinguals (as proposed by Grosjean, 1989), equally proficient and masterful in two languages. In this well-written, wide-ranging volume, Quindós, Izquierdo and Eisenrich (2020) present an academic collection of integrity and depth, using a comprehensive approach to understanding bilingualism in a range of formal and informal educational settings.