*The Encyclopedia is a necessary reference set for every university and college library in the world that serves a faculty or school of education. *The Encyclopedia has more than 250 contributors drawn from numerous countries. Its reviews present information and authoritative insights that are relevant to every country and to every language. *Each volume contains about 20-30 reviews. For some topics, teams of contributors have worked to produce a single review. *Each state-of-the-art review has about 4000 words of text and follows a similar structure. *Most contributors give coverage of early developments in their topic, major contributions, work in progress, problems and difficulties, and future directions

*The aim of the reviews is to give readers access to the international literature and research on each topic. *The text of each review is followed by a reference list containing about 30 key references mentioned in the text. This Encyclopedia is a necessary reference set for every university and college library in the world that serves a faculty or school of education. The Encyclopedia aims to speak to a prospective readership that is multinational, and to do so as unambiguously as possible. Because each book-size volume deals with a discrete and important subject in language and education, these state-of-the-art volumes also offer highly authoritative course textbooks in the areas suggested by their titles.

The more than 250 scholars contributing to the Encyclopedia hail from all continents of our globe and from 41 countries; they represent a great diversity of linguistic, cultural, and disciplinary traditions. For all that, what is most impressive about the contributions gathered here is the unity of purpose and outlook they express with regard to the central role of language as both vehicle and mediator of educational processes and to the need for continued and deepening research into the limits and possibilities that implies.