Review of Issues in Language Planning and Literacy (original) (raw)
Related papers
Language Planning and Policy: Negotiating with Global Actors in Local Contexts
University of Colombo Review, 2021
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
The aim of the paper is to present the development of language planning from the perspective of the central current of western sociolinguistics, i.e. sociolinguistics from the Anglo-American world, in which the concept of language planning was born (as surprising as this statement may be for researchers from post-communist countries). Following Neustupný (2006), the author distinguishes between four historical types of language planning: “pre-modern”, “early modern”, “modern” and “post-modern”. More or less developed theories of language planning are also characteristic for these types. Language planning as an academic discipline has existed for about fifty years and at least two periods can be distinguished within it: “classic language planning” of the 1960s and 1970s, oriented above all toward the modernization of so-called third world countries, and the newer “ecology paradigm”, emerging from the critique of the previous period and supporting the plurality and diversity of languages in the spirit of postmodernism. The author devotes particular attention to the “Reversing Language Shift” model (Fishman, 1991), the “Catherine Wheel” model (Strubell, 1999) and Language Management Theory (Jernudd – Neustupný, 1987). The last of these theories places language planning in a broader communicative and sociocultural context than the previous theories of language planning, and it can be expected that, due to its constructive features, its significance will grow.
Current Issues in Language Planning
Racialization and English learning: the experiences of Nepali secondary school students in Hong Kong, 2022
This paper reports on an inquiry that explored how a group of Nepali secondary school students discursively reconstructed and interpreted their English learning in Hong Kong. In the study we collected data from 30 participants through participatory observation, in-depth unstructured interview and taking field notes in two secondary schools. The analysis of the data revealed that the participants generally interpreted learning English as an essential means to construct the racial images they identified with, and otherwise resist being racialized in and outside school. The findings suggest that the participants tended to construct English as their mother tongue with an anti-racist stance. These findings offer insights into the role of racialization in language learners' learning of English and their pursuit of desirable identities in postcolonial contexts like Hong Kong. They also imply the need to design and adopt an appropriate pedagogy to redress the inequitable distribution of educational resources for minority language learners.