Re-thinking practices in language policy research: From 'policy versus practice' to 'policy within practice' (original) (raw)
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Language Policy, 2012
Policy' has traditionally been conceptualised as a notion separate from that of 'practice'. In fact, language practices were usually analysed with a view to evaluate whether a policy is being implemented or resisted to. Recently, however, Spolsky (2004 has argued that policy and practice need not be seen as distinct and that there is a policy within language practices themselves. In this paper, I propose to call the policy found at the level of practices a 'practiced language policy'. The aim of this paper is to explore further this new conceptualisation of language policy and to propose an approach to research it. I argue that Conversation Analysis in its broad sense (that is, including Sequential Analysis and Membership Categorisation Analysis) can be an efficient tool to discover practiced language policies and give an illustration of this argument drawing on a case study of an induction classroom for newly-arrived immigrant children in France.
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 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.
This paper revisits the notion of ‘legitimate language’ (e.g. Bourdieu 1977) as it relates to multilingualism in educational contexts. Since Heller (1996) developed the notion of ‘legitimate language’ to encompass issues of language choice, there has been a consensus that a legitimate language is a language that is appropriate in a given situation. However, a crucial issue remains to be addressed, namely that of knowing what benchmark do classroom participants use to know when a language is appropriate, that is, legitimate or not. To address this issue, this paper takes as an example the case of an induction classroom for newly-arrived immigrant children in France where multiple languages have been observed. A Conversation Analysis of a set of audio-recorded interactions reveals that whilst languages other than French are not legitimized by top-down language policies and ideologies held at the societal and institutional levels, they are nevertheless seen as legitimate according to the local “practiced language policy” (Bonacina-Pugh 2012). This paper thus argues for a multi-layered understanding of legitimacy and shows how in the classroom under study, and possibly in other multilingual classrooms, practiced language policies play a key role in the legitimization of multilingual language practices.
Between language policy and linguistic reality
Pragmatics. Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA), 2009
This paper focuses on a relatively new and much discussed phenomenon on Flemish television: The practice of intralingual subtitling of Dutch, i.e. Dutch subtitling of native speakers of (varieties of) Dutch. Our study investigates the linguistic determinants of intralingual subtitling and subsequently confronts actual subtitling practice with viewer needs. The analyses reveal a striking inconsistency between intralingual subtitling practice in fiction versus non-fiction programs. This appears to be symptomatic of a tension between the official language policy in Flanders and present day linguistic reality. As such, subtitling practice subtly reflects the existence of shifting linguistic norms in Flanders.