This paper summarizes current theoretical and practical issues of second language learning and teaching in the national curricula of three countries—Singapore, Malaysia, and Brunei Darussalam. One unifying feature of these three countries in ASEAN (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations) is the fact that they are multilingual communities with a vast range of complex linguistic and cultural traditions. A second is that they represent parallel cases of countries in which English has played an internal role historically. A third is that these countries all have Malay as the national language (albeit, in Singapore, with a large Chinese majority and with English as an important working language—Malay is not as widely used). A fourth is that bilingualism is a language policy, whether publicly advocated or implicitly sanctioned.

Hungary is a small landlocked country in Central Europe with a population of over ten million. The official language, and the mother tongue of the vast majority of the population, is Hungarian. Belonging to the Uralic language family, Hungarian is unrelated to any other European language except Finnish. In order to minimize the effects of their linguistic isolation, Hungarians have always attached great importance to the learning of foreign languages.

There is a slowly growing number of countries like Australia (Lo Bianco 1987) which have a formally developed national language policy, or like the Netherlands (van Els 1992a) which have fully articulated foreign language teaching policies. Other countries, like New Zealand (Waite 1992) and Finland (Takala 1992), are now attempting to develop such policies. In most countries, however, it is commonly the case that the foreign language policy has grown haphazardly and can be found only implicitly in a complex set of uncoordinated policies and practices. This latter description is true of Israel.

Interest in the phenomena of bilingualism and second language learning among both researchers and policy-makers has continued to grow during the past five years. The continued salience of these phenomena is due in part to the rapid growth in cultural and linguistic diversity in industrialized societies brought about by increased immigration and refugee resettlement programs. Policy-makers are naturally concerned to maximize the efficiency and effectiveness of programs that teach the dominant societal language(s) to both children and adults.

Magnet schools have had a significant influence on second language learning in the last two decades. Designed to reduce racial isolation by attracting students to a desegregated setting, magnet schools offer an attractive option for parents willing to consider alternatives to their neighborhood school. Since the 1970s and continuing through today, school systems have found that second language programs are an effective means of drawing parents and their children to new school settings. As a result, language magnets have proliferated and have had a profound impact on language instruction throughout the U.S.

The American economy is changing and, according to popular wisdom and policy-level discussions, so is the skill profile of successful workers (see, for example, Naisbitt and Aburdene 1990, Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce [CSAW] 1990, Hudson Institute 1987). A hallmark of most discussions of the skills needed by workers is the emphasis on communication, including abilities to ask questions, clarify concerns, and solve problems cooperatively through discussion with others (Council of Chief State School Officers [CCSSO] 1991: 21, CSAW 1990: 69).

Although estimates of the number of language minority students in U.S. schools vary, there is consensus that the numbers are increasing dramatically. In 1980, there were 24 million language minority individuals living in the United States, including nearly 8 million school-age children and 2.6 million children under age five, one or both of whose parents spoke a language other than English at home (Waggoner 1992). Of the school age children, an estimated 3–5 million had limited English proficiency. Between 1980 and 1990, according to the U.S. Census, the Asian-American population more than doubled and the Hispanic-American population increased by more than 50 percent. Many major metro-politan school districts report a student population speaking more than 60 or 70 different languages, and in one of these, Los Angeles, more than 50 percent of the school age population is language minority.

Cooperative learning is designed to engage learners actively in the learning process. Through inquiry and interaction with peers in small groups, learners work together towards a common goal. As a major movement within the broad context of the educational mainstream, cooperative learning has specific relevance for literacy and language learning. Communicative approaches to second/foreign language teaching can effectively draw on the principles and characteristics of cooperative learning to make language teaching and learning more effective. This joining of communicative instructional approaches with cooperative learning should be effective whether applied to the second/foreign language classroom or to the sheltered classroom integrating language learning with content-area learning.

Christie (1992), in the previous year's volume of the Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, reviewed literacy initiatives in Australia which drew on systemic functional linguistics, focusing on three themes: differences between speech and writing, written genres, and the study of spoken language. This paper is designed to complement her review, highlighting ongoing research within the same general theoretical framework, and focusing on the general question of modeling context in educational linguistics.

Second language (L2) learning strategies are specific actions, behaviors, steps, or techniques that students employ—often consciously—to improve their own progress in internalizing, storing, retrieving, and using the L2 (Oxford 1990b, after Rigney 1978). Strategies are the tools for active, self-directed involvement that is necessary for developing L2 communicative ability (O'Malley and Chamot 1990, Wenden 1991, Wenden and Rubin 1987). Hundreds of L2 learning strategies exist and many are well recognized and used regularly by students. In a given class of students, for example, Lázló will seek out conversation partners. Iike will group words to be learned and then label each group. Marijke will give herself encouragement through positive self-talk before getting up to give a speech in the target language.

To provide the most effective instruction possible, teachers of a second language (L2) should learn to identify and comprehend significant individual differences in their students. Many excellent teachers have learned to do some of this intuitively, but explicit understanding of individual-difference dimensions can enhance the work of all teachers. Among the most important such variations are differences associated with nine factors: aptitude, motivation, anxiety, selfesteem, tolerance of ambiguity, risk-taking, language learning styles, age, and gender. All of these variables and many more have been shown to be related to L2 learning in various ways. In fact, Gradman and Hanania (1991) identify 22 individual-difference variables that can affect success in learning a new language.

One very active research tradition in the field of second language acquisition (SLA) attempts to establish causal relationships between environmental factors and learning. These include the type and quantity of input, instruction and feedback, and the interactional context of learning (Larsen-Freeman and Long 1991). A second very influential line of research and theory in SLA that came to fruition during the 1980s investigates the possible role of universal grammar (UG) in SLA (Eubank 1991b, White 1989). In the Chomskyan tradition, UG refers not to properties of language as the external object of learning but to innate properties of mind that direct the course of primary language acquisition. One question asked within this tradition has been whether or not second language learners still “have access” to UG, but it is assumed that UG principles are not accessible to learner awareness for any kind of conscious analysis of input. It is possible that SLA is the result of UG (a deep internal factor) acting upon input (an external factor), as proposed by White (1989), but what seems to be left out of such an account is the role of the learner's conscious mental processes.

The last two decades in applied linguistics—which roughly coincide with the evolution of the communicative approach in language teaching—have seen the development of a number of language teaching innovations, including the notional/functional syllabus, the process syllabus, the Natural Approach, the procedural syllabus, and task-based language teaching. All of these proposals have contributed in important ways to an understanding of theoretical issues related to designing innovative language syllabuses. But it is only rather recently that applied linguists have begun to investigate the problems associated with implementing these innovations.

Following definitions by Havelock and Huberman (1978) and Nicholls (1983), innovation can be defined as a deliberate effort, perceived as new and intended to bring about improvement. As such, innovation is distinguished from change which is any difference that occurs between Time one and Time two. What is crucial in innovation is that it is change involving human intervention.

Since human agency is involved, innovation can be viewed from many angles: individual, social, organizational, political, technological, and historical. Not surprisingly, much attention has been given to the technological aspects of innovation, among which can be included language pedagogy.

All of the issues dealt with in the preceding sections of this volume clearly carry with them implications for language teaching and call for a reconsideration of the teacher role, the nature of pedagogic competence which such a role requires, and how people might be most effectively prepared to enact it. In the case of national curricula, as discussed in Section 1 of this volume, whatever proposals are made at the macro-level of educational policy depend for their effectiveness on the interpretation by teachers at a micro-level of pedagogic practice and their abilities to carry out the proposals. So whatever is proposed for language education as policy carries clear implications for language teacher education as well. This might seem to be all too self-evident, but it is easy to cite instances where policy decisions have been made and proposals imposed without taking such implications into account.