Language and Power in Post-Colonial Schooling

Ideologies in Practice

Carolyn McKinney

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138844063
• eBook ISBN: 9781317549598
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Education General
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Critiquing the positioning of children from non-dominant groups as linguistically deficient, this book aims to bridge the gap between theorizing of language in critical sociolinguistics and approaches to language in education. Carolyn McKinney uses the lens of linguistic ideologies—teachers' and students' beliefs about language—to shed light on the continuing problem of reproduction of linguistic inequality. Framed within global debates in sociolinguistics and applied linguistics, she examines the case of historically white schools in South Africa, a post-colonial context where political power has shifted but where the power of whiteness continues, to provide new insights into the complex relationships between language and power, and language and subjectivity. Implications for language curricula and policy in contexts of linguistic diversity are foregrounded.

Providing an accessible overview of the scholarly literature on language ideologies and language as social practice and resource in multilingual contexts, Language and Power in Post-Colonial Schooling uses the conceptual tools it presents to analyze classroom interaction and ethnographic observations from the day-to-day life in case study schools and explores implications of both the research literature and the analyses of students' and teachers' discourses and practices for language in education policy and curriculum.

1

WHAT COUNTS AS [A] LANGUAGE?

While in most schools, language in education policies and educational curricula, the notion of language is presented as a simple and uncontested phenomenon with a question like “What counts as [a] language?” sounding mildly absurd, the object of study in linguistics and related disciplines of sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology and historical and applied linguistics has come under fierce debate. In this chapter I aim to review some of this debate examining how language as phenomenon is currently conceptualized in critical applied and sociolinguistics. My rationale for doing this is the view that how we conceptualize language has profound consequences for how we teach language in schooling and for children’s access to quality education through language. It has long been recognized that language is central to the reproduction of social inequality through schooling (Bourdieu, 1977, Collins, 2009; Bernstein, 1975; Gee, 1990/1996; Heath, 1984). But exactly how such inequality is produced and reproduced is an empirical question. As language and social relations shift with context, so too do such processes of [re]production. In my view, we need to understand the mechanisms through which inequality is reproduced in the micro-workings of daily life in schools as well as the ways in which it is challenged, if we are to interrupt such [re]production of inequality. We cannot understand such micro-workings however without an understanding of what language is and how it is used to signal or index particular social positions and values.

Increasingly scholars have drawn attention to the monolingual bias in linguistics and associated disciplines (e.g. Auer, 2007; Canagarajah, 2007; Firth and Wagner, 1997; 2007; Garcia, 2009; Makoni and Meinhof, 2003; May, 2014; Pratt, 1991). These have proceeded from the assumption that the ideal or normal language user has command of only one named language (and frequently command of the set of resources we recognize as English, given that English speakers are the most likely to be monolingual). We see the legacy of this assumption in countless terms that are ubiquitous in applied linguistics: first language acquisition, second language acquisition, the native speaker, fossilization and interlanguage. May (2014) has termed the recent shift in applied linguistics towards taking multilingual speakers and multilingualism as the starting point, the “multilingual turn”. In this book I attempt to interrogate the monolingual assumptions that frequently underlie educational policy, curricula and classroom practices. If the use of a range of linguistic resources from more than one named language is the norm among children in the world (Garcia, 2009), then the plurilingual child needs to be considered the norm in language in education policy and practices. In other words, the linguistic repertoires of the typical child need to count! A useful place to start in attempting to answer the question of what counts as (a) language is the field of linguistic or language ideologies.

Language Ideologies

The ways in which people value languages and speakers differently and frequently position each other differentially in relation to the ways in which they use language and the kinds of language they use is largely informed by their beliefs about language; what particular instances of language use index is similarly informed by language ideologies. Language ideologies can be defined as

the sets of beliefs, values and cultural frames that continually circulate in society, informing the ways in which language is conceptualized and represented as well as how it is used. Such ideologies are constructed through discourse, that is, systems of power/knowledge (Foucault, 1980). (Makoe and McKinney, 2014, 659)

As this definition suggests, like ideology more generally, language ideologies go beyond the ideas that one individual may have in one particular site, referring rather to a network of beliefs and values that exist across a number of people and sites. Significantly, Woolard and Schieffelin argue that language ideologies show “a mediating link between social structures and forms of talk” (1994, 55). Languages themselves “are ideologically defined, not defined by use or users” (Jørgensen, 2008, 166). The dominant idea of languages as boundaried, stable systems that exist with or without speakers and that are continuous across a range of contexts underlying language in education policy and curricula can be seen as a language ideological construct. Blommaert (2006) draws attention to the complicity of the discipline of linguistics itself in “the cultural construction of language in general as a stable, contextless individual mental object” (512). This ideology of autonomous, clearly separable and boundaried named languages is central to monolingual or monoglossic ideologies. A number of myths follow from a monoglossic orientation to language:

•Monolingualism, or a high level of proficiency in a single named language, is the norm.

•Nations are made up of speakers of one language: one language, one nation, one geographical territory (Ricento, 2000).

•Linguistic purity is inherently superior, or good language use keeps named languages separate from each other while deficient language use is mixed.

•Bi/multilingualism is understood as multiple monolingualisms, or as equivalent proficiency in two or more named languages, so-called “balanced bilingualism” (Grosjean, 1982).

•Bi/multilingualism is undesirable/a problem (Ruiz, 1984).

Finally as Ag and Jørgensen (2013) have pointed out, a “consequence of the monolingualism ideology is the belief that every person must have a particularly close relationship to one language, almost invariably the ‘mother tongue’ of the person” (2013, 527).

The study of language ideologies has become a well-developed field in linguistic anthropology, beginning with publications in the late 1980s and early 1990s.¹ A focus on the ideology of stable named languages and the ideological processes through which language/s have been constructed has however only more recently developed in applied linguistics (e.g. Makoni and Meinhof, 2003, Makoni and Pennycook, 2007) and sociolinguistics (Heller, 2007). Following classic studies,² Makoni and Mashiri (2007) draw attention to the colonial construction or invention, rather than discovery of distinct “indigenous” African languages and varieties in Southern Africa. Competing missionary groupings conducted their own linguistic labour using different orthographies and different “informants” to construct several distinct Nguni and Sotho languages amongst others. As Brutt-Griffler (2006, 38) has pointed out, the individuals responsible for constructing standard languages were not linguists, but most often missionaries with questionable proficiency (at best good second-language proficiency and at worst virtually no proficiency) in the local language resources.

In South Africa, the colonially constructed indigenous languages were used as part of a divide and rule strategy amongst Black people, dividing people up according to one of nine “distinct” language/ethnic categories (Makoni 1999). Such linguistic categories continue to live on in post-apartheid South Africa as seen in the eleven languages that are given official status in the current Constitution and following from this in language in education policy. Makoni argues that in Southern Africa, African languages are “colonial scripts” or colonial inventions (see also Irvine, 2008; Mühlhaüsler, 1996 on language/s in the Pacific region). The colonial imposition of particular versions of African languages (not least as standard languages in education) (Makoni and Meinhof, 2003) is a stark illustration of the fact that, “the existence of a language is always a discursive project rather than an established fact” (Woolard and Schieffelin, 1994, 64), and further that this project serves particular interests.

The fact that language is ideological is not necessarily a problem in itself, but rather like any social phenomenon, it means that we need to look at the kinds of ideologies being constructed, and significantly for this book, the effects thereof.³ As Blommaert (2006) points out “one of the essential functions of language is ideological (metapragmatic and indexical) framing: providing contextual cues about who speaks, in what mode, on which topic, and under what circumstances. This ideological function is central to contextualization procedures” (Blommaert 2006, 512). This means that some kinds of language use are enregistered (Agha, 2003, 2005) as superior to others, that is, they are viewed as more accurate or precise, purer, more aesthetically pleasing. Agha explains that he uses the verb “to register” to mean both “to notice” and “to record” such that processes of enregisterment signify

processes whereby distinct forms of speech come to be socially recognized (or enregistered) as indexical of speaker attributes by a population of language users (2005, 38).

We can move from this notion of enregisterment to seeing how different kinds of language use (and different named languages themselves) that are differently valued index different social values. If a hearer makes an interpretation about where I come from based on the phonological aspects of my speech and then makes a judgement about where and how well I have been educated based on the same evidence, this can only be as a result of the phonological features of my speech having obtained particular social and cultural values (Agha, 2003). We can then say that the phonological features of my speech have come to index particular social values. Silverstein argues that the link between particular linguistic elements (here the phonological features of my speech) and what they are generally agreed to point to, or to index, is constructed through ideology: ideology construes indexicality. Such indexicality does not however operate in an isolated way – clusters of linguistic features are seen to work together to index particular values. This clustering is what Agha defines as “enregisterment”.

It should be clear that the notion of language ideologies as taken up here draws on a Foucauldian notion of discourse as constitutive of the social, as “practices which systematically form the object of which they speak” (Foucault, 1972, 49). I pay attention to the need for deconstruction and continual revisiting of the discursive objects and subjects that are fo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgement
• Introduction
• 1 What Counts As [A] Language?
• 2 What Counts as Language in Education Policy and Curricula?
• 3 Whose Language Resources Count in Schooling?
• 4 Anglonormativity: Language Ideologies and the Reproduction of Race
• 5 Positioning Students in an Anglonormative English Class: Asymmetrical Relations of Knowing
• 6 Hope I: Students’ Agency in Interrupting Anglonormativity
• 7 Hope II: Interrupting Anglonormativity Through Transformative Pedagogies
• 8 Conclusion: Changing What Counts as Legitimate Language Use in School
• Index