Language Policy in Schools

A Resource for Teachers and Administrators

David Corson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 1998
• Print ISBN: 9780805830057
• eBook ISBN: 9781135677121
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Language Policy in Schools provides school administrators and teachers a practical approach for designing a language policy for their school and for dealing with the language issues that confront schools, particularly those operating in settings of linguistic and cultural diversity. It can be used as a text in teacher and administrator preparation programs, graduate programs, and in-service and professional development programs. Special features include:
* a clear, jargon-free writing style that invites careful reading;
* abundant examples that students of education everywhere can learn from--including samples of school language policies developed for real schools by real teacher-researchers;
* questions at the end of each chapter to highlight key points and stimulate informed discussion among pre-service and experienced teachers and administrators; and
* an up-to-date international and cross-cultural biography.

1
Language Policy in Schools

This book tries to offer staff in schools a way of dealing with the language problems that schools meet in settings of linguistic and cultural diversity. School language policies are viewed by many in education as an integral and necessary part of the administration and the curriculum practice of schools. A language policy is a document compiled by the staff of a school, often assisted by other members of the school community, to which the staff members give their assent and commitment. It identifies areas in the school’s scope of operations and program where language problems exist that need the commonly agreed approach offered by a policy. A language policy sets out what the school intends to do about these areas of concern and includes provisions for follow-up, monitoring, and revision of the policy itself in the light of changing circumstances. It is a dynamic action statement that changes along with the dynamic context of a school.

If this definition of the aims and scope of a school language policy is not clear enough, a look at the summary of topics presented in chapter 8 will clarify the range of language problems that a language policy can address. I use the phrase language problems throughout this book, but this does not mean problems in any evaluative sense. The neutral sense of the word problems suggests the normal challenges of life that confront us at every moment of living to which we pose some trial solution as a response. A solution to a problem is something that we test against the real world as a measure of its adequacy. A language policy is very like a solution in this sense: It is a bundle of solutions addressing different problems in different ways, and the whole policy addresses the school’s language problems. Language problems are challenges that can be met in this problem-solving way by providing the solutions set out in a policy. In chapter 4, I discuss policymaking at the school level further.

ORIGIN AND EARLY DEVELOPMENTS

In the 1960s, members of the London Association for the Teaching of English first developed the idea of school language policies. Their work provided the catalyst for action elsewhere. Schools in various places in English-speaking countries began to develop their own language policies, using the original ideas as a reference point. In 1975 the aim and value of language policies received official endorsement in A Language for Life (Department of Education and Science, 1975) which recommended that every school should have an organized policy for language that establishes each teacher’s involvement in language development throughout the years of schooling. It advanced the idea that a language policy is really a school learning policy.

Subsequently, several influential texts addressed the need for a whole-school language policy, especially at high-school level, and they discussed the implementation of such a policy (Marland, 1977; Schools Council, 1980; Torbe, 1980). In the United States, strong arguments were advanced for the idea that the school, rather than wider system entities like boards and ministries, is the key site for educational action and policymaking (Goodlad, 1984). As the idea of developing school language policies spread, practitioners and theorists began to see potential in them for small-scale but important educational reform. For example, Knott (1985) presented ideas for researching pupil language use and discovering the attitudes of high school staff to language issues; Maybin (1985) provided practical approaches for working toward an elementary-school policy for use in multicultural settings. Chapter 3 collates some of these ideas.

Finally, the potential for bringing other important matters under the umbrella of school language policies was recognized (Corson, 1990, 1998). It gradually became evident that the early discussions about language policies made little mention of the social, linguistic, and cultural problems that always confronted schools, but that were disguised by ideologies of assimilation and other forms of bias that were more common at the time. Insofar as they relate always to language issues, these major sociocultural problems add a new and urgent perspective to the more narrow debates about language policy from the 1970s. Chapters 2, 4, 6, and 7 explore many of these problems and suggest critically informed solutions.

LANGUAGE PLANNING

In spite of great advances in language planning in education and in society (Fettes, 1997), researchers in the area of language planning have paid very little attention to the school as the basic setting for language change. Even the rare texts linking language planning with education tend to address education as a societal rather than a local phenomenon (Kennedy, 1983). However, government policies in North America and elsewhere have recently begun to stress the need for school-level planning in language matters (Faltis, 1997), so the actual setting of the school as a site for language planning is now getting much more attention. Developments suggest that the social institutions needed to translate the visions of government policies into strategies for enhancing individual lives already exist throughout societies in the form of their schools (May, 1997b). It seems a very reasonable thing to ask schools to be responsible for much of the working end of language planning, because schools are often the sites where government policies dealing with language matters are actually put to work. Chapters 2 and 4 take this discussion much further.

LANGUAGE IN LEARNING, FACT GATHERING, AND DEVOLUTION

Both the design stage and the implementation stage of a school’s language policy are the responsibility of its teachers and administrators, acting through a policymaking group or departmental subcommittees, or ideally through the participation of the whole school’s staff and its community. As a result, the practical value of the guidelines developed in school language policies will depend on how well ideas about the central role of language in learning are integrated into the training and professional development of the educators themselves.

Every school already has an implicit policy for language and learning. This unwritten policy exists in the tacit practices of its teachers and administrators, and it can be inferred from their interactions with students. Chapters 5, 6, and 7 examine the role of language in learning and its place in intellectual development more generally. The close link between language and these other things confirms that a school’s language policy is really the school’s policy for learning.

Schools need a language and learning policy that is explicit so that it can be more available for reform and improvement. For this kind of planning to proceed, many different approaches to fact gathering are needed in schools if their policies are going to provide practical solutions to local language problems. Gradually the training of teachers in the use of basic language research methods is becoming more common (Hornberger & Corson, 1997). In chapter 3, the discussion of small- and large-scale fact gathering for language policymaking takes this further.

The rise in interest in school language policies coincides with moves in all English-speaking countries to devolve much educational decision making away from central bureaucracies and down to the school level. This has raised new problems for schools, and a groundswell of interest in school policymaking of all kinds has resulted. Chapter 4 interprets these controversial initiatives and shows how the many devolutionary changes in official policies can be used by schools for democratic and emancipatory ends.

GOALS OF A SCHOOL LANGUAGE POLICY

The goals of a language policy are to identify the language problems that the school has, and then to find and agree on solutions to those language problems. Most schools have a philosophy setting out their aims for students, but this is a different set of ideas from a language policy. A philosophy is usually worked out and compiled before any form of policymaking begins. Ideally, participants need to be clear about the school philosophy before they begin the policymaking task. At the very least, they need to know about the school’s aims with respect to its students. But a language policy is a second level of activity. It is concerned less with where the students in a school are going, and more with how they are going to get there. A language policy is an action statement. It answers the question: How are we going to do what we hope to do?

This book recommends that all elementary schools have a language policy. It also recommends that subject departments in high schools have a policy about language. Elementary schools—their teachers and their administrators—need little convincing about the merits of the language policy position. In a decade of working with schools in the design of language policies, the request from elementary schools has always been for information on what to do and how to do it, rather than on why to do it. A language policy is consistent with everything that elementary schools strive to do for their students’ development. But people in high schools sometimes need more convincing of the merits of having a language policy, and there is some organizational reason for this.

Present-day high schools are usually very large bureaucracies. They are multipurpose organizations with a chain of command that can be highly diversified and rather weak. Decision making on curriculum matters in high schools is often controlled by external requirements beyond the direct influence of the school and its teachers. At the same time, though, there is often a good deal of autonomy of decision making within school subject departments. These subject departments in high schools are often as large in staff and in pupil numbers as medium-sized elementary schools.

In large organizations like high schools, policymaking on all but the most routine aspects of management is often best carried out at the level of the small departmental organization. Here people know their needs and can talk about those needs in more than just generalities. They can attempt the trial-and-error approach to policymaking recommended in chapter 4 of this book and not risk too much disruption if the trial does not work out as well as expected. For people working in systems of this kind, a “whole-school” language policy may seem too ambitious and rather less meaningful. For these people, there is much in this book that can be taken up and used by policymakers at the departmental level in the high school.

On the other hand, some language problems in high schools cannot be handled at the departmental level. So high schools often have both kinds of policy: a language policy for a single department, and a unifying language policy for the school as a whole. A policy for a department differs from a school-wide version in concentrating more on matters of pedagogy and evaluation. The whole-school policy picks up problems of external policy that are too urgent and too value-laden for individual departments to address singly without reference to overriding norms decided for the school as a whole. And in the present world of education, these problems often deal with social and cultural diversity.

In later chapters of this book, I present extracts from language policies developed for real schools in contexts of sociocultural and linguistic diversity. Each school is described fully in the text because each school is a unique setting for policymaking. Its problems are shaped and affected by its own context. In the past, the uniqueness of the sociocultural problems that individual schools faced was often disguised by values and ideologies that tried to maintain cultural and linguistic uniformity. In other words, it was disguised by prejudices that are only now beginning to fade. This welcome change in social values presents problems of a new kind for those running schools, especially in North America and in other English-speaking settings. On the one hand, the problems have always existed for many schools and have always been addressed by them to varying degrees. But on the other hand, an upsurge in complex language-related problems has moved the issue of language policy in schools close to the top of the educational agenda.

2
Critical Approaches to Language Planning for Social Justice

This chapter integrates many of the ideas from language planning that are used for language policymaking at national and whole-system levels. I relate those ideas to language policymaking in schools. It is clear that the role of single schools is still largely overlooked in the language planning literature, and this is remarkable because schools appear to be the most basic sites where language planning can be put to work. In their everyday aims and operations, educators are continually refining, changing, and assessing children’s language use. By default, educators are really applied language planners, and language planning of an informal kind is what education does as a major function. In this chapter, I try to bridge this gap between language planning theory and educational practice.

The chapter also argues that a critical approach to language planning is a necessary one for schools to follow. The language issues that teachers and administrators meet are always connected with inequalities and injustices that can easily escape their notice. When school language policies a...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Language Policy in Schools
• 2 Critical Approaches to Language Planning for Social Justice
• 3 Fact Gathering for School Language Policies
• 4 Critical Policymaking
• 5 English as a First Language in the School Curriculum
• 6 Critical Language Awareness in School and Curriculum
• 7 ESL and Minority Languages in School and Curriculum
• 8 Concluding Summary: What a School Language Policy Might Contain
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index