BOOK REVIEW Anthony J. Liddicoat (ed): Issues in Language Planning and Literacy Multilingual Matters, Clevedon, UK, 2007, ix + 271 pp, Hb $69.95, ISBN 978-1853599774 Peter Ignatius De Costa Received: 9 January 2008 / Accepted: 21 October 2008 / Published online: 21 November 2008 Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2008 This edited collection by Liddicoat explores the complexities and social consequences of literacy by revisiting the ‘ideological’ model of literacy (Street 1984). Such a model conceptualizes literacy as a social practice, and seeks to empower users of a language and challenge the status quo. This is established in the introductory chapter by Liddicoat who observes: ‘‘Language planning for literacy is a strategic site for contestations about what literacy is and what it means to be literate’’ (p. 23). In the chapters that follow, the reader is led to see how language planning for literacy is a social and political enterprise, which includes and excludes certain populations. The volume contains 15 chapters which appear to be divided into two parts. The first set of papers is concerned with literacy in majority national languages. Muthwii’s chapter about the impact of choosing English as the only official language and language of instruction in Kenya examines how many Kenyans are excluded from participating in important discourses due to their lack of mastery of English, while Cray and Currie’s analysis of a literacy program for Canadian immigrants demonstrates how the teaching of discrete English as a second language macroskills in lieu of emphasizing social literacy prevents these learners from becoming literate members of Canadian society. This theme of exclusion resonates in Ramanathan’s study of English-based and vernacular-based education in two schools in India where different pedagogical goals for English literacy lead to different education tracks. However, unlike the previous two chapters, one is encouraged by the acts of resistance enacted by the teachers in the schools as they engage vernacular resources to bridge the English and vernacular divide. What stands out in this study is Ramanathan’s adoption of a grounded, bottom-up approach to studying how language planning is negotiated at the classroom level, which has come to define language planning in recent years (e.g., Canagarajah P. I. De Costa (&) University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA e-mail: decosta@wisc.edu 123 Lang Policy (2009) 8:295–297 DOI 10.1007/s10993-008-9117-4