Language Planning and Policy: Negotiating with Global Actors in Local Contexts

Although language is a crucial concern at all levels of education in plurilingual communities, the processes of language planning and policy in institutions of higher education in Sri Lanka have received less attention than at the secondary school level. The objective of this article is to address this gap by examining an intervention by a global actor in English language teaching at the Faculty of Arts, University of Colombo, from the perspectives of goals, outcomes, and underlying ideologies. While it is not always possible to resist top-down policy directives from external actors who wield both financial and institutional power, this article argues that negotiation and navigation are possible, provided that the local actors are prepared to claim agency and power at micro levels of planning and implementation