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Introduction
Bernard Spolsky retired in 2000 from the Department of English Language and Literature, Bar Ilan University. Bernard does research in language policy and management. His current project is 'Rethinking language policy."
Current institution
Additional affiliations
September 2006 - August 2016
September 2000 - May 2016
September 1968 - August 1980
Education
May 2008 - June 2008
August 1962 - July 1966
February 1952 - November 1952
University of New Zealand
Field of study
- English
Publications
Publications (216)
In a theory of language policy, managers are individuals or institutions with authority to require others to change their language practices or beliefs. Advocates are individuals or institutions who want the same result, but lacking any power to enforce, can only try to persuade. Language academies can be managers or advocates. Standardization is o...
Over the past 30 years, the term “criticality” has become increasingly common in studies of educational and applied linguistics. Derived originally from the work of the Frankfurt School and widened by the linguistic turn in the writing of Habermas, the first linguistic sub-field was Critical Discourse Analysis, proposed by British scholars. In 1990...
Drawing on four decades of research, the book traces on earlier models and offers an expanded and updated theory of language policy and management. The book surveys the language practices and planning efforts of individuals, families, private and public institutions, local and national advocates and managers, and regional and national governments....
Managers and managing agencies assume that they have authority to changes the language practices and belief of others; advocates and advocacy groups realise they need to persuade others to change. Examples from India are cited. Language academies are usually advocates; the Quechua Academy proved to be quite unsuccessful, and the Hebrew Language Aca...
The paper starts with signs that Cooper and I found in the Old City of Jerusalem. It describes how the term Linguistic Landscape was applied to the recollections of francophone high school students of the signs they had seen. It traces the many collections of photos employing digital cameras and cell-phones, and research that was derived from these...
The paper starts with signs that Cooper and I found in the Old City of Jerusalem. It describes how the term Linguistic Landscape was applied to the recollections of francophone high school students of the signs they had seen. It traces the many collections of photos employing digital cameras and cell-phones, and research that was derived from these...
Report for the NZ Ministry of Education on Samoan Language Education
Emerging as an important field in the 21st century, family language policy brings forth core challenges of language ideologies, practices, maintenance, shifts, losses and transmission at the micro-level unit of the society. This special, first-ever bilingual French-English volume illustrates a range of issues exploring immigrant and transnational f...
Earlier, I proposed that language policy could usefully be analyzed as consisting of three independent but interconnected components, language practices, language beliefs or ideologies, and language management. It was also argued that failure to recognize that language policy can exist in other domains and at other levels than the nation-state, ran...
Earlier studies showed the value of seeing language policy as consisting of three independent but interconnected components, language practices, language beliefs, and language management. Failure to recognize that language policy can also exist at other levels than the nation-state, ranging from the family to international organizations, was one of...
French colonies were created for the benefit not of the indigenous conquered peoples but of the home country. Their borders were set for political convenience and produced a jumble of ethnicities, languages, and cultures. Exploitation came first, and there was generally no attempt to find a workable educational solution to the local diversity. Duri...
By the middle of the twentieth century, the field of language education had moved from suggesting new methods to considering the implications of linguistics and in particular psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics to the task of developing proficiency in additional languages. Later developments in language policy, considering not just actual langua...
Drawing its examples from published research and from the author’s own experience, the chapter presents various stages of a research project in language education policy: establishing the current policy, asking why this policy was selected, investigating the implementation of the policy, and evaluating the policy and suggesting alternatives and imp...
Although some thirty years ago I saw language testing as made up of three successive periods, each an advance over the last, I am now less optimistic. Rather, I see it as developed as part of a long history of examinations, starting with the Imperial Chinese system and moving from the selection among an elite to an effort to control mass education...
In studying language policy, it is not enough to look at central government management, but also at the influence of managers at levels ranging from the family to international organizations. Actual cases reveal that there are also non-linguistic forces such as demography, war, civil strife, and economic breakdowns which have major effects. This pa...
Drawing its examples from published research and from the author’s own experience, the chapter presents various stages of a research project in language education policy: establishing the current policy, asking why this policy was selected, investigating the implementation of the policy, and evaluating the policy and suggesting alternatives and imp...
By the middle of the twentieth century, the field of language education had moved from suggesting new methods to considering the implications of linguistics and in particular psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics to the task of developing proficiency in additional languages. Later developments in language policy, considering not just actual langua...
Academic biographies seldom go into details about motivation, but in the case of Joshua Fishman, we have his statement that much of his career was directed by the question posed to him by his father, “What did you do for Yiddish today?” Answering this question did not just lead to his personal decision to speak Yiddish with his wife and children, b...
By the middle of the twentieth century, the field of language education had moved from suggesting new methods to considering the implications of linguistics and in particular psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics to the task of developing proficiency in additional languages. Later developments in language policy, considering not just actual langua...
Until quite recently, the term Diaspora (usually with the capital) meant the dispersion
of the Jews in many parts of the world. Now, it is recognized that many other groups
have built communities distant from their homeland, such as Overseas Chinese, South
Asians, Romani, Armenians, Syrian and Palestinian Arabs. To explore the effect of
exile on la...
Although some thirty years ago I saw language testing as made up of three successive periods, each an advance over the last, I am now less optimistic. Rather, I see it as developed as part of a long history of examinations, starting with the Imperial Chinese system and moving from the selection among an elite to an effort to control mass education...
Drawing its examples from published research and from the author’s own experience, the chapter presents various stages of a research project in language education policy: establishing the current policy, asking why this policy was selected, investigating the implementation of the policy, and evaluating the policy and suggesting alternatives and imp...
Chinese translation of Language Management
Since the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, language management has been a central activity of the party and government, interrupted during the years of the Cultural Revolution. It has focused on the spread of Putonghua as a national language, the simplification of the script, and the auxiliary use of Pinyin. Associated has b...
Language beliefs and ideologies constitute a central component of a theory of language policy. The other interrelated but independent components are the language practices of the community being studied and language management. This chapter explores the relationship between beliefs and management, especially with reference to efforts to manage (pre...
Historical sociolinguistics is a comparatively new area of research, investigating difficult questions about language varieties and choices in speech and writing. Jewish historical sociolinguistics is rich in unanswered questions: when does a language become 'Jewish'? What was the origin of Yiddish? How much Hebrew did the average Jew know over the...
To understand the varying influence of ethical considerations on language testing, it helps to note the weight assigned to each of the participants involved, namely the test user (usually also owner), the test writer (usually paid by the owner), and the test taker. Each has different interests: The user wants the most efficient way of assigning an...
The author discusses some psycho linguistic conditions for second language learning based on a preference rr ode! in linguistics. The outcome of second language learning depends on a number of conditions. Second language learning takes place in a social context, and social conditions determine a learner's attitudes. These attitudes are twofold in n...
Introducing a pioneering series of studies of family language policy and management, this paper points out that classic language policy dealt almost entirely with the nation-state, although it did recognise the critical role of the family in determining natural intergenerational transmission of a variety. After arguing for the need to look at each...
This chapter provides commentary on the other contributions to the volume. In addition, reflections are offered about future
directions and prospects for the field of educational linguistics. It is suggested that effective language educational management
must go beyond facts and data in order to communicate effectively to policymakers and the gener...
The goal of this article is to make research on English language teaching and learning published locally in Israel more widely available. Given that so many Israeli researchers are internationally trained and maintain wide connections, it necessarily omits much important work that appears in European and US journals. It focuses on shorter studies,...
While mainstream theoretical linguists following Chomsky continue to hunt for what is universal and innate in some of the world's 6,912 remaining languages, there are others who seek, as Harrison does, evidence of uncommon knowledge, divergent ways of organizing linguistically terms for species, time, space, number, kinds of talk, and other concept...
The boundaries between sacred and profane language are not fixed. One of the most famous international language management actions of recent years was the decision of Vatican II to permit conducting the mass in the vernacular rather than in the traditional Latin, thus moving a large number of modern languages into the sacred category. Fishman (2002...
Language policy is all about choices. If you are bilingual or plurilingual, you have to choose which language to use. Even if you speak only one language, you have choices of dialects and styles. Some of these choices are the result of management, reflecting conscious and explicit efforts by language managers to control the choices. This book prese...
GarcíaOfelia, PeltzRakhniel, SchiffmanHarold, & FishmanGella Schweid, Language loyalty, continuity and change: Joshua A. Fishman's contributions to international sociolinguistics. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2006. Pp. xii, 180. Hb $89.95, Pb $34.95. HornbergerNancy & PützMartin (eds.), Language loyalty, language planning and language revita...
The Handbook of Educational Linguistics is a dynamic, scientifically grounded overview revealing the complexity of this growing field while remaining accessible for students, researchers, language educators, curriculum developers, and educational policy makers. A single volume overview of educational linguistics, written by leading specialists in i...
What is the role of schools in the loss of indigenous languages? A study 25 years ago of prospects for the survival of Navajo placed most of the blame for the spread of English on increasing access to schools. Reconsidering that evidence and recent developments, the central role of the introduction of Western schooling is seen still to be highly re...
The challenge in the title that I have been assigned is daunting; if only I still had the chutzpa that I had 30 years ago when I happily divided the history of language testing into three periods (Spolsky,
1977)! Since then, having actually spent many months some 20 years later studying the history of the field (Spolsky,
1995b), I am much less co...
The Permanent International Committee of Linguists (Comité International Permanent des Linguistes, CIPL) has organized the 18th Congress of Linguists in Seoul (July 21-26, 2008), in close collaboration with the Linguistic Society of Korea. In this book one finds the invited talks which address hot topics in various subdisciplines presented by outst...
In studies of the loss of Indigenous languages, the common villain is the government or missionary school, an alien transplant that weakens local culture and moves rapidly to proclaim the greater worth of the conquering or colonial or national language. In my own studies, I have traced two such cases — the effect of schools on the shift from Māori...
The volume brings together leading experts from a range of disciplines to create a broad perspective on the study of style and variation in spoken language. The book discusses key approaches to stylistic variation, including such issues as attention paid to speech, audience design, identity construction, the corpus study of register, genre, distinc...
An elderly student of language testing recalls some of the events in his career, attempting to relate them to current issues, and touching on such topics as overall language proficiency, the cloze and the noise test, the social responsibility of language testers, the development of industrial language testing, the danger of scales, and the value of...
Bernard Spolsky is Professor emeritus, former Dean of Humanities, and founding director of the Language Policy Research Center at Bar-Ilan University; editor-in-chief of Language Policy; and author of many books and articles on applied and educational linguistics, language testing and sociolinguistics, and language policy.
The language policy of a speech community consists of the commonly agreed-upon set of choices of language items or language varieties and the ideologies associated with those choices. It can be found in language practices and beliefs or in formal policy decisions such as laws, constitutions, or regulations. Language management, planning, and cultiv...
A major difference between first and second language acquisition is in the degree of variation in the levels of proficiency attained by learners. Among the factors proposed to account for this variation are method, age, aptitude and attitude. In a typical language learning situation, there are a number of people whose attitude to each other can be...
The study of language in its social environment has grown significantly over the past forty years, and now covers most languages and areas of the world. Sociolinguistics examines the relation between language and society, between the uses of language and the social structures in which the users of language live. Sociolinguists employ a variety of d...
