Paradigms of Mother tongue Education: Introduction

This edition of L1 is devoted to discussion of debates around paradigms of mother tongue education. In this special issue we have sampled contributions from Belgium, Brazil, Hong Kong and Australia that each take up the kinds of arguments which we have tried to capture in our own chapteron paradigm conflict. Each contribution deals with the polyparadigmatic character of mother tongue education and answers the main question of this issue: MTE paradigms -common? competing? coexisting? In editing this edition, what struck us was the remarkable consistency of the debates across a range of cultures, nationalities and languages.