Metapragmatics in the Ethnography of Language Policy (original) (raw)
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7 Critical ethnography of language policy A semi-confessional tale
The confessional tale (Van Maanen, 2011 ) -in which researchers refl ect on fi eldwork and their research fi ndings in ways that illuminate researcher subjectivity -is a popular genre in ethnographic writing. They are "confessional" because the authors open up about lingering concerns relating to analytical decisions, relationships in the fi eld, or the portrayal of participants. They are almost always written in the fi rst person, directing the attention away from the participants and towards the researcher. Confessional tales are important contributions in the pantheon of ethnographic writings because they reveal precisely what more objectivist accounts obfuscate -how frustrating, diffi cult, and confusing the research process can be, especially when given the benefi t of time and refl ection. I do not want this chapter to be a confessional tale but I agree with Ramanathan ( 2011 ) that it is increasingly crucial for language planning and policy (LPP) scholars to openly question the ethics that motivate our decisions, rendering transparent the typically gauzy façade that shrouds our researching-texting practices. That goal motivates this chapter.
Critical Discourse–Ethnographic Approaches to Language Policy
This chapter focuses on the synergy that researchers in language policy have developed by integrating two other subfields of sociolinguistics: critical discourse analysis and critical ethnography. The chapter begins by discussing the meanings of the three key concepts used in these approaches, albeit sometimes in significantly different ways: critique, ethnography, and discourse. It then examines how these concepts are relevant to contemporary analyses of language policy, focusing particularly on their potential to open new and innovative avenues of research. To demonstrate how an integrated critical discourse and ethnographic approach can be applied in concrete empirical research, the chapter presents an analysis of language policy and practice in the European Union before providing an overview of other relevant studies in the area.
Ethnography of language policy
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While theoretical conceptualizations of language policy have grown increasingly rich, empirical data that test these models are less common. Further, there is little methodological guidance for those who wish to do research on language policy interpretation and appropriation. The ethnography of language policy is proposed as a method which makes macro–micro connections by comparing critical discourse analyses of language policy with ethnographic data collection in some local context. A methodological heuristic is offered to guide data collection and sample data are presented from the School District of Philadelphia. It is argued that critical conceptualizations of educational language policy should be combined with empirical data collection of policy appropriation in educational settings.
Negotiating methodological rich points in the ethnography of language policy
International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 2000
Building on Agar's (1996: 26) notion of rich points as those times in ethnographic research when something happens that the ethnographer doesn't understand, methodological rich points are by extension those points where our assumptions about the way research works and the conceptual tools we have for doing research are inadequate to understand the worlds we are researching. When we pay attention to those points and adjust our research practices accordingly, they become key opportunities to advance our research and our under standings. Drawing for illustrative purposes on ethnographic research on bi lingual intercultural education policy and practice in the Andes carried out by Indigenous students for their Master's theses at the University of San Simoń's Program for Professional Development in Bilingual Intercultural Education for the Andean Region (PROEIB Andes) in Bolivia, I highlight methodological rich points as they emerge across language policy texts, discourses and practices. Framing the methodological rich points in the context of basic questions of re search methodology and ethics, I borrow as organizing rubric the paradigmatic heuristic for sociolinguistic analysis first offered by Fishman (1971: 219) and here adapted to the ethnography of language policy to ask: who researches whom and what, where, how and why?
International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 2013
In this article we examine the theoretical and conceptual history of Language Planning and Policy (LPP) and situate the ethnography of language policy within the historical trajectory of the field. This is offered as a reprise to Ricento’s (2000) overview of the field, in which he examined the theoretical and conceptual contributions up to 2000. We review that piece, focusing on the three major epochs that Ricento identifies, and then examine developments within LPP over the past decade, including theoretical and empirical contributions from ethnographies of language policy.
Ethnography of Language Planning and Policy
Language Teaching, 2018
A decade ago, Hornberger & Johnson proposed that the ethnography of language planning and policy (ELPP) offers a useful way to understand how people create, interpret, and at times resist language policy and planning (LPP). They envisioned ethnographic investigation of layered LPP ideological and implementational spaces, taking up Hornberger’s plea five years earlier for language users, educators, and researchers to fill up and wedge open ideological and implementational spaces for multiple languages, literacies, identities, and practices to flourish and grow rather than dwindle and disappear. With roots going back to the 1980s and 1990s, ethnographic research in LPP had been gathering momentum since the turn of the millennium. This review encompasses selected ethnographic LPP research since 2000, exploring affordances and constraints of this research in yielding comparative and cumulative findings on how people interpret and engage with LPP initiatives. We highlight how common-sens...
Critical discourse analysis and the ethnography of language policy
Critical Discourse Studies, 2011
This article explores the compatibility of ethnography and critical discourse analysis for the study of language policy. A perennial challenge facing the field of language policy is how to make connections between the macro and micro, between macro-level policy texts and discourses and micro-level language use. Hornberger & Johnson (2007) propose the ethnography of language policy as a method for examining language policy processes within and across the multiple layers of policy creation, interpretation, and appropriation. This paper further explores how Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) can be integrated into ethnographic studies of language policy and proposes that the combination of CDA and ethnography is particularly useful for revealing the connections between the multiple layers of policy activity. Based on a 3-year ethnographic study of bilingual education policy and practice in the School District of Philadelphia, this paper examines the intertextual and interdiscursive links between policy texts and discourses to uncover how the recontextualization of macro-level language policy impacts bilingual education.
Introduction: The Practice of Language Policy Research
2015
Applied linguistics is an intellectual space – a transdiscipline – where theories and methods from multiple fields intersect around language issues (Halliday 2001). Language policy, as Spolsky has pointed out, is a “paradigmatic example of applied linguistics in that it must draw on a range of academic fields to develop practical plans to modify language practices and beliefs” as well as to investigate policy processes empirically (Spolsky 2005, 31). Theories and methods are not merely imported from this range of academic fields, but refined and strategically combined in order to conduct research that is problem‐centered, or issue‐focused (Hult 2010a). Specialists in language policy and planning (LPP) have drawn upon a broad constellation of research methods that have roots in diverse disciplines such as anthropology, law, linguistics, political science, social psychology, and sociology (of language), among others, in order to conduct inquiry on problems or issues related to policy ...