Simpson, J. and A. Whiteside (2015) ‘Introduction’. In J. Simpson and A. Whiteside (eds.) Language Learning and Migration: Challenging Agendas in Policy and Practice. London: Routledge. (original) (raw)
Related papers
Language Policy
This paper explores the intersection of new speakers in conditions of globalisation led mobility and it investigates the implications the phenomena may have for language policy making. It first describes two historical phases in language policy development that are closely related to a sociolinguistics of stability. In this, it criticises how present-day language policy is attached to specific time and space constraints whose focus is a by now outdated concept of language and of speaker as its prescriptive objects-thus leading institutional language policies to not being 'in sync' with contemporary new speakers' socio-and geo-political movements and developments. This proposition is illustrated in two case studies, both located in the Netherlands and dealing with the language practices and connected policies of two types of new speakers. The first case deals with the experiences of asylum seekers being engaged with 'techno-literacies'. That is asylum seekers being part of ICT assisted classes for civic integration through the learning of Dutch (new speakers of a new language, learning through new means of language learning). The second case deals with Chinese students who are fully proficient in Dutch, attending language heritage classes for learning Mandarin through book based lessons (new speakers of an old language, learning through old means of language learning). In both cases, the observed language practices and meta-pragmatic judgements of the individual language users elect them as initiators of bottom-up sociolinguistic change that, while offering grassroots solutions for local challenges, also plays a role as local evidence for informing future top-down language policy development.
Language Education Policy and Sociolinguistics: Toward a New Critical Engagement
Language education policies are pivotal in nation-states’ negotiation of a globalizing economy and a diversifying population. But certainly in urban, non-elite schools, where pupils’ linguistic diversity is pronounced, their fixation on language separation and multi-monolingualism produces salient sites of linguistic friction. Much scholarly work has been successfully problematizing this friction, producing an avalanche of criticism and ample calls for a change in schools’ approach to pupils’ primary linguistic skills and mixed language use. This chapter argues that while such calls are pedagogically exciting and justified on principle, a significant number of them reproduce some of the main assumptions behind the policies that they denunciate, or invite problems of their own. Consequently many calls for change may underestimate the difficulties of policy implementation, exaggerate their own effects, and overstate their critical character. This necessitates a reconsideration of the received relation between sociolinguistics and language education policy, and requires that calls for change take a different tack.
The Odd Couple: Diverging Paths in Language Policy and Educational Practices
Perspectives in Education, 2011
This paper examines the divergences between what educational policy calls for in South African schools with regard to language and learning and what takes place in schools. It argues that South African constitutional and education policy statements employ an idea of languages as bound entities and systems, and combine this understanding of languages with discourses on language rights and of language endangerment. An alternative view studied language as practice rather than system. From this perspective the idea of ‘a language’ is a misleading shorthand for a diverse range of language varieties, genres, registers and practices. Such resources are not equally distributed among users of these resources and they carry different social weightings or valuations. This paper argues that the language assumptions in language policy ‘erase’ linguistic complexities and assume a linguistic homogeneity and stability which is inappropriate. A view of language is developed where language operates a...
Language in Society, 2014
A volume entitled Language policy risks promising more than can be delivered, even in a book like this of some 290 pages. The main reason is simply that the scope of language policy studies has extended over the years to include a very wide range of domains and levels: for example, family language policy, language policy in business and commerce, in the military, in religion, in local government, in schools, and in supranational organisations (such as the EU). And such studies take in a very wide range of locations and countries-from New Zealand to Nepal, from South Africa to Singapore. The term language policy also has an ambiguous denotation referring on the one hand to policy-making and planning activity, often but not only the province of politicians, and on the other to a relatively young academic discipline. Given this very wide scope, this book necessarily, and sensibly, has a narrower focus than the title might suggest in that it deals predominantly with language policies in education and in schools, with issues concerning multilingual education for minority groups in the United States featuring prominently. Also, as befits a volume in a series called 'Research and practice in applied linguistics', the book's main focus falls on the academic discipline of language policy studies, on its research methodologies and theoretical frameworks. It can be read, then, as a guide to doing research in the field of language policy in education. The book's overarching argument is that language policy (LP) takes place at a variety of levels-macro, meso, and micro (the onion layers of Ricento & Hornberger's (1996) metaphor), and that actors at these levels enjoy a degree of freedom or agency in creating, interpreting, appropriating, or implementing policy. Thus, language policies may emerge 'bottom-up' as well as 'top-down', with the former in particular often taking an implicit form and becoming manifest in micro-level practices, in classrooms for example. For this reason there is a fairly strong commitment to ethnography in the investigation of LP processes (e.g. those of creation and interpretation) alongside such established approaches as the discourse analysis of policy texts. Based on this foundation, the book is organised ISABELLE BUCHSTALLER, Quotatives: New trends and sociolinguistic implications.
Language, Education and Transnationalism: An Introduction
Trabalhos em Linguística Aplicada, 2019
This special issue of Papers in Applied Linguistics brings together eight articles and an interview that provide a wide range of perspectives on the topic of transnationalism. Much research in applied linguistics highlights the growing importance of globalisation and transnational mobility, but often takes these processes and their effects to be self-evident and self-explanatory (BRIGGS; MCCORMICK & WAY, 2008). As such, this special issue addresses the ways in which transnational movements of populations, linguistic practices, ideology, knowledge and capital shape educational policies and practices related to language. It is concerned with migration, internationalisation of educational provision, student mobility, and global communications. The present text and the majority of the articles that follow are in English, yet each author is inevitably engaged in transidiomatic practices (JACQUEMET, 2005) through work that engages with variations, and mixes of, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Haitian Creole, amongst other linguistic forms. The authors also share a commitment to critical scholarship that promotes democratic schooling and society, questioning the commodification of education and reproduction of oppressive social relations by highlighting issues of power and ideology, including those involved in the geopolitics of north-south relations. Below, we provide some context on the two interrelated types of circulation that will be addressed in the subsequent papers: that of heterogeneous linguistic formations and that of culturally diverse populations. As guest editors, we write from, and into, contrasting locations within these global movements. Brazil is a country with small contemporary migratory movements, but a long and brutal
Language policy and ‘new speakers’: an introduction to the thematic issue
Language Policy, 2019
In recent years, sociolinguistic research on minority languages in Europe, particu-larly in the Galician context, has chiefly contributed both theoretically and empiri-cally to the growing attention given to ‘new speakers’, as well as to the emergence of a European research network in 2013 entitled ‘New Speakers in a multilingual Europe: Opportunities and challenges’ (www.nspk.org.uk). As documented in spe-cial issues and edited volumes, the research activities in the network not only aimed at adding the term ‘new speaker’ to the growing pool of analytical terminology in critically oriented sociolinguistics. Employing ‘new speaker’ as a lens rather than as a clear-cut notion is what we—as editors—had in mind when giving shape to this volume, drawing on discussions during the final phases of the above-mentioned research network. This seemed especially useful because such a broad take on ‘new speakerness’ opens up avenues for comparative research under a common label. In sum, it is certainly worth the effort to continue delving deeper into the notion of ‘new speakers’, and particularly to do that from the perspective of language policy. The articles collected in this thematic issue aim at contributing into that direction.