Foreign language education is deeply affected by globalization, destabilizing some of the central ideas that have helped form national languages, and, by contrast, foreign languages. This article traces the economic origins of contemporary globalization and the deep communication effects that arise.

Migration of peoples, instantaneous communication technologies, and new modes of imagining relationships in the context of vast flows of population, ideas, goods, and communication mean that teachers of different languages need to make multilingual and multicultural realities, rather than national and foreign ones, central notions in curriculum, teaching, and language choice. Professional dialogue between teachers of English, traditional foreign languages, heritage/community languages, and other categories of language interest are required to foster a new overall understanding of the enterprise of language education, suited to the altered world context of contemporary globalisation.

Dr Joseph Lo Bianco is Professor of Language and Literacy Education, at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, and Immediate Past President, Australian Academy of the Humanities. He has more than 130 publications on language, literacy, culture and identity; in press are Aldo and the Meridian Line, a novel in the Mountain of Su Dongpo series, with T. Hay and Y. Wang and a co-authored volume on Language and Identity in Post-Revolutionary Tunisia. He holds several advisory and research positions in Asia and Europe:

• UNICEF Research Director, Peacebuilding, Language and Ethnicity in Malaysia, Myanmar/Burma and Thailand;
• President of the Tsinghua, Asia Pacific Forum on Translation and Intercultural Studies;
• Academic advisor, National Research Centre for Foreign Language Education at Beijing Foreign Studies University;
• Senior research advisor for LUCIDE, a European Commission project on Languages in Urban Communities, completing in 2014 a 4 year research project on multilingualism at the municipal level in 12 European cities.