Language-in-education Policies

The Discursive Construction of Intercultural Relations

Anthony J. Liddicoat

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781847699169
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Lingüística

This book examines the ideological underpinnings of language-in-education policies that explicitly focus on adding a new language to the learners' existing repertoire. It examines policies for foreign languages, immigrant languages, indigenous languages and external language spread. Each of these contexts provides for different possible relationships between the language learner and the target language group and shows how in different polities different understandings influence how policy is designed. The book develops a theoretical account of language policies as discursive constructions of ideological positions and explicates how ideologies are developed through an examination of case studies from a range of countries. Each chapter in this book takes the form of a series of three in-depth case studies in which policies relating to a particular area of language-in-education policy are examined. Each case examines the language of policy texts from a critical perspective to deconstruct how intercultural relationships are projected.

1 Introduction: Language-in-education Policy, Discourse and the Intercultural

Ricento (2006) argues that language policies exist in some form in all societal domains. It is in the domain of education, however, that such policies often have the most impact on the members of a society. Language policies for education play an important role in the ways in which a society articulates and plans for the futures of its members. These policies are sometimes explicitly articulated in official documents but may often exist in more covert forms underlying the assumptions and practices of language use and language learning in educational contexts. Policies deal with what is valued in a society and so language policies represent articulations of the beliefs and attitudes of a society about the value of languages and their use. This book examines the ways in which such beliefs and attitudes are articulated in policy. In order to do so, it focuses on a subset of language policies – those concerned with the teaching and learning of non-official additional languages. These educational policies are aimed at expanding the linguistic repertoires of the members of a society, for some specific valued future end use. They therefore articulate beliefs and attitudes about the nature of interactions between diverse linguistic and cultural groups. That is, they are concerned with issues of intercultural communication and construct these issues through the ideologies present in the societies involved.

Language Planning and Language Policy

Language policy exists in relation to language planning and each constitutes a different sphere of activity in the decision-making process around language. Kaplan and Baldauf (2003) note that although ‘language planning’ and ‘language policy’ are often used as synonyms, they represent different forms of activity, with language planning being the preparatory work which leads to the formulation of language policy. The implementation of a language policy also includes language planning work to organise activities and approaches. Thus, planning and policy are in interrelationship at various points.

Language planning is a deliberate effort to influence the function, structure or acquisition of languages or language varieties within a speech community (Kaplan & Baldauf, 1997). It involves intervening in the linguistic ecologies of a society, with the aim of influencing its future linguistic practices. It has become conventional to identify four core areas of activity in language planning (Kaplan & Baldauf, 1997):

• Status planning – language planning activities that relate to the selection of languages to perform particular functions in a society and the varieties of languages which will be used. It is concerned with questions external to the language itself. The most commonly investigated dimension of status planning is the selection of official languages, but status planning also involves decisions about other aspects of language use, such as languages for school learning (van Els, 2005), languages as media of instruction (Tollefson & Tsui, 2004) and languages for religious purposes (Liddicoat, 2012).

• Corpus planning – language planning activities relating to the form of a language. Corpus planning relates to decision-making regarding the standardisation and codification of a language, including its orthography, syntax and lexicon – termed graphisation, grammatication and lexication by Haugen (1983) – and the development of new linguistic resources to enable the language to be used in new domains or to achieve other social goals (linguistic purism, gender-neutral language, etc.) (Liddicoat, 2005a).

• Prestige or image planning – language planning activities relating to the ways in which particular language or language varieties are perceived and valued by a community, including promotional activities and language spread programmes (Ager, 2005a, 2005b; Haarmann, 1990).

• Language-in-education or acquisition planning – language planning activities relating to the teaching and learning of languages, especially at school. These activities include the development of literacy, the acquisition of additional languages and language maintenance programmes (Baldauf & Kaplan, 2005). Language-in-education planning often overlaps with other areas of planning as it can involve activities relating to other forms of language planning.

Language policy, as the outcome of language planning, typically involves the work of governments, or of other authorities, and consists of the choices made about languages and their relationship to social life (e.g. Djité, 1994). It is the formalisation of decision-making about language in the form of laws, regulations, statements of process and procedure through which a language plan will be implemented. Djité (1994) argues that language policy consists of processes both at the level of society and at the level of language. At the societal level, he allocates to language policy the identification of relevant problems, the formulation of alternatives to address these problems and choosing from among these alternatives. He argues that the language level involves the processes of articulating linguistic norms which a community will use.

Language policies operate in societies not simply as political collectivities but as speech communities – groups of people sharing common expectations and norms about language (Spolsky, 2004). It is a speech community that provides a context in which language policy operates. Spolsky (2004) identifies three components of language policy in any speech community:

• language practices – the languages that a speech community selects as parts of its linguistic repertoire and the ways in which these are used;

• language beliefs or ideology – the beliefs the speech community has about languages and their use;

• specific efforts made to modify or influence the practices of the speech community.

The model presented here is one in which language policy is seen as something far broader than policy as policy document: it is a series of behavioural and attitudinal responses to language, which may be articulated explicitly or implicitly (Kaplan, 1991; Sayers, 1996). Language policy is therefore conceived as a pervasive feature of societies rather than simply as an action of government, in that it is predicated on society as a whole, not just those who have authority in society. Language policies are relevant in any group context in which some form of norm about language use exists and language policy contexts can range from the macro-level of government through a meso-level of authorities and institutions to a micro-level of community organisations and even individuals (Baldauf, 2005b, 2006, 2008; Liddicoat & Baldauf, 2008).

The most obvious manifestation of policy is in the form of governmental, or other institutional, documents which record aims, objectives and procedures for achieving some future directed outcome. However, Spolsky (2004) makes the point that language policy does not exist simply in the form of official documents such as language laws, legal records or regulations. Official policy documents are simply the most obvious manifestation of language policy. Language policy also exists in less tangible and less codified forms. Such documents form only part of the policy process, which involves the production of texts, the texts themselves, their ongoing revision and the processes of implementation (Taylor et al., 1997). Lo Bianco (2005) also argues that the discourses which surround the development and articulation of policy are also a central part of the policy process. Language policies can exist in strong forms even without being articulated in documentary form. Language policy documents are therefore only a part of the overall language policy of a society. Nonetheless, language policy texts are useful examples of a particular class of ideological production. This is because they function within their ideological and discursive ecologies in particular ways to shape the ways languages are used and understood. In particular, they are interventions into the language ecology that seek to shape that ecology to particular ends by mobilising the resources of the state for language objectives. That is, they constitute part of the ideological state apparatus (Althusser, 1976). Further, they are explicit, tangible and authoritative statements of policy positions.

Spolsky’s (2004) model suggests that language policy has both behavioural and ideational dimensions. The behavioural dimension comprises two different types of activity – practices and attempts to modify practices – while the ideational dimension consists of beliefs, that is, of ideology. In reality, the behavioural and the ideational are interrelated, as a community’s language practices are influenced by beliefs and ideologies about languages, and in turn practices influence and reproduce these ideologies and beliefs. Schiffman (1996) brings the ideational and the behavioural together as the context from which language policy grows and argues that language policy is ultimately grounded in linguistic culture, which he defines as ‘the set of behaviours, assumptions, cultural forms, prejudices, folk belief systems, attitudes, stereotypes, ways of thinking about language, and religio-historical circumstances associated with a particular language’ (p. 5). Language policy is therefore inherently contextualised in language ideologies.

Schiffman (1996) makes the point that the beliefs a speech community has about languages in general and its own language in particular are shaped at least in part by the beliefs the speech community has about specific other languages – that is, a speech community has ideologies about language, about its own language and about other languages, which are interrelated through language policy. Language ideologies are systems of beliefs about the nature of language, how language works and how it should work, and are consequential for linguistic practices and judgements about them (Cameron, 2006). Language ideologies are not simply beliefs about language itself but, as Verscheuren (2008) argues, are beliefs about the nature of linguistic communication. Such ideologies construct the ways in which the language of a speech community is understood and used and also how it is positioned in relation to other languages, including those spoken in the same society.

Speech communities are located within language ecologies (Haugen, 1972; Mühlhäusler, 2000), in which the various languages present are in mutually influencing relationships. Moreover, these ecologies are not ecologies of equal members but rather are subject to hierarchies of prestige. That is, some languages are more successful in their ecologies than others. Bourdieu (1982) has argued that languages are used in a market setting in which all languages present are attributed value and different languages are valued differently. The more desirable a linguistic practice is in its marketplace, the greater the value assigned to it and the greater the accrued symbolic capital which comes from mastery of that practice. Bourdieu maintained that different ways of speaking are ultimately measured against the practices of the dominant group in the social space which constitutes the linguistic marketplace. This means that in any society, the language variety of the dominant group will have more value and prestige than other varieties. These hierarchical differences between languages are not trivial, as they are bound up with ideological and cultural constructions, which attribute greater value to large, successful, dominant languages and lesser value to smaller, minority languages. These differences of value influence what gets planned in the language ecology, what needs to be planned and the reactions accorded to particular interventions in language.

Shohamy (2007) also notes that language ideologies are not separate from the political ideologies which exist within society and that beliefs about language may be influenced by other ideological constructs. That is, languages are integrated into a broad framework of beliefs about the world because language is not easily separable from other aspects of the social and political world. In particular, language plays a central role in the construction of nations as imagined communities (Anderson, 1991) by providing an important reference point for and index of national identity. The ways in which national identities are understood and the ways in which languages are implicated in this understanding therefore have the capacity to shape both societal attitudes and beliefs about language varieties and how a polity deals with the languages within its territory.

Language Policies and Education

Language is one of the fundamental dimensions of education and government policies for education often include reference to language issues. The relationship between language policy and planning and education is complex, as education is both something that is the object of work in language planning and policy and also a mechanism through which language planning and policy goals are achieved. For example, policies resulting from status planning or corpus planning may be implemented through teaching – the language(s) designated as the official language(s) of a society may be used as the medium of instruction or the linguistic forms developed through corpus planning may be disseminated through schooling. Such activities can be considered as the educational dimension of other forms of language planning and policy – what Haugen (1983) refers to as the implementation aspect. These activities are primarily related not to the planning of education but to the use of education for other language goals. Language policy will also specifically apply to the scope of education, shaping the teaching and learning of languages within the educational sector, especially in school education – that is, language-in-education policies. Such policies frame the language issues that will be addressed through education and the linguistic resources that education is designed to develop.

Language-in-education policies, as Kaplan and Baldauf (1997) note, are a form of human resource development planning. They operate to develop language capabilities that the society identifies as important for social, economic and other objectives. Such policies articulate which languages will be developed through education as part of the linguistic repertoire of the society and the purposes for which those languages will be developed. In this way, policies project an imagined future linguistic situation and make provisions to bring this into existence. They may also serve a nation-building function, not only in terms of developing human resources, but also as symbolic reinforcements of the existing imagined community (Anderson, 1991) embodied in the polity.

Models of language-in-education policy have tended to focus on those dimensions of education which the policies address. For example, Kaplan and Baldauf (1997, 2003) have described six such dimensions:

• access – policies regarding which languages are to be studied and the levels of education at which they will be studied;

• personnel – policies regarding teacher recruitment, professional learning and standards;

• curriculum and community – policies regarding what will be taught and how the teaching will be organised, including the specification of outcomes and assessment instruments;

• methods and materials – policies regarding prescriptions of methodology and set texts for language study;

• resourcing – policies regarding the level of funding for languages in the education system;

• evaluation – policies regarding how the impact of language-in-education policy will be measured and how the effectiveness of policy implementation will be gauged.

These dimensions are all within the education system itself and what can be called the mechanics of providing languages in schooling. They comprise a series of areas of activity which language-in-education policies may address and which may apply in a broad range of language planning contexts.

Language-in-education policies cover many language teaching and learning practices. The primary focus, however, is the teaching and learning of the official language(s). Beyond that, such policies vary in their scope and emphasis and can be typologised as follows:

• official language education policies;

• foreign language education policies;

• minority language education policies;

• external language spread policies.

Official language education policies

In polities where there is an official language and this language is the majority language, language-in-education policy typically deals with the acquisition of literacy in the official language by those who already speak it (Liddicoat, 2007b). This may be accompanied by educational work to effect ‘dialect levelling’ where there is social or geographical variation in language use (Williamson & Hardman, 1997). Policies relating to the teaching and learning of official languages may also address the acquisition of the official language as an additional language where there is a perception that a significant population (indigenous minorities or immigrants) do not speak it. In officially multilingual societies, language-in-education policies typically envisage the teaching of literacy in at least one of the languages as a first language, together with (additionally) the acquisition of one or more official languages. For example, education policies in predominantly English-speaking Canada often require students to study French for some period of their schooling (Early, 2008).

Foreign language education policies

Most societies have policies about the teaching and learning of additional languages in the education system. These typically concern the learning of languages not normally spoken by members of the society and for which the normal mode of acquisition is through the education system. In many cases, these are the official languages of other polities.

There is a common distinction made in the educational literature between foreign language learning and second language learning, on the basis of a sociolinguistic distinction between the two. Littlewood (1984) frames this distinction in the following terms: second language learning involves the learning of a language which has social functions in the community where it is learnt, whereas a foreign language has no established functions in the learners’ community and is learnt primarily for communication outside one’s own community. Littlewood’s definition therefore emphasises the communicative goal of language learning in the two contexts – community internal and community external (see also Saville-Troike, 2006).

Where the second language is the official language of the learners’ community, for example, in the case of an immigrant learning the language of the host country, the linguistic and sociolinguistic contexts for learning that language can be considerably different from the learning of a foreign language. With the learning of a minority language, the situation is different again. For example, Chinese is the largest minority language spoken in Australia, and therefore if non-Chinese children learn it they are still learning a language which has social functions within the Australian community.¹ Nonetheless, many Australian learners of Chinese have no contact with that langua...