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Language Ideologies at Oak
Abstract
Building upon the observations and the assertions made in these previous chapters, this chapter examines the standard English language ideology the immigrant students had to negotiate at Oak. The chapter starts with an investigation of the linguistic practices that were valued and denigrated at Oak and the language ideologies which were embedded in them. These ideologies, as I will illustrate, were sustained through a tight language management policy that favored standard English. Following this discussion, I examine the investments of my focal students in learning English and explore how they negotiated the school’s monoglot standard English ideology (Silverstein, Monoglot ‘standard’ in America: Standardization and metaphors of linguistic hegemony. In D. Brennis & R. H. S. Macaulay (Eds.), The matrix of language: Contemporary linguistic anthropology (pp. 284–306). Boulder: Westview Press, 1998). The chapter closes with a call to view these students as social actors who had to balance structural language ideological forces while attempting to exercise a sense of agency.
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Language learning and teaching happens in a social context but, until recently, applied linguists have focused more on the language than on the context. That is not surprising given the rigor, sophistication, and cultural heritage of language studies. But what we know about social context and how language and context mutually and reciprocally constitute each other has not been of prime concern for applied linguists. That is changing, thanks largely to research in linguistic anthropology that has led to the development of Practice Theory. Practice is anything people do and discursive practices are what people do through language, but practice theorists are primarily interested in the relationship between social forces and individual agency or how, through discursive practices, people reproduce preexisting social values and how those values are resisted and transformed. Considering language learning and teaching as discursive practice thus emphasizes the relationship between these activities and the social values of learners and teachers, and how learning or teaching a language positions learners and teachers politically.
In this talk I provide illustrations of how ordinary practices of language learning, teaching, and assessment, although unique and crafted locally, are at the same time profoundly influenced by social and political processes that arise far beyond the immediate horizon of the interaction.
This article locates Norton's foundational work on identity and investment within the social turn of applied linguistics. It discusses its historical impetus and theoretical anchors, and it illustrates how these ideas have been taken up in recent scholarship. In response to the demands of the new world order, spurred by technology and characterized by mobility, it proposes a comprehensive model of investment, which occurs at the intersection of identity, ideology, and capital. The model recognizes that the spaces in which language acquisition and socialization take place have become increasingly deterritorialized and unbounded, and the systemic patterns of control more invisible. This calls for new questions, analyses, and theories of identity. The model addresses the needs of learners who navigate their way through online and offline contexts and perform identities that have become more fluid and complex. As such, it proposes a more comprehensive and critical examination of the relationship between identity, investment, and language learning. Drawing on two case studies of a female language learner in rural Uganda and a male language learner in urban Canada, the model illustrates how structure and agency, operating across time and space, can accord or refuse learners the power to speak.
This article tells a story of four classrooms situated in different socioeconomic backgrounds. Drawing on the theoretical notions of cultural capital, habitus, symbolic violence, and creative, discursive agency as analytic tools, the story focuses on the classroom dilemmas in which students and teachers found themselves as well as the creative, discursive strategies they used to cope with these dilemmas. The implications of their strategies are discussed with reference to whether the students and teachers were doing-English-lessons in the reproduction or in the transformation of the students' social worlds.
IntroductionIntended Uses of Language TestsConsequences and Fairness of DecisionsDefining the Aspects of Language Ability to be AssessedAre Language Assessments Gate-Keepers or Door-Openers?
This paper describes the cultural semantics of internet courses in American accent. Such courses are offered by corporate
providers to specific groups of customers: people in search of success in the globalized business environment. The core of
such courses is an order of indexicality which stresses uniformity and homogeneity, producing an invisible accent that replaces
existing ‹foreign’ (i.e. authentic, biographic) accents. It is a new form of commodified dialectology, which differs quite
substantially from common state and academic attitudes towards dialects and accents. The procedures used by such private providers
are instances of language policing aimed at the infinitely small stuff of language: pronunciation. They show the interplay
of different institutional actors in producing language norms within a globalized environment, and they raise issues of subjectivity
and agency.
Human language has changed in the age of globalization: no longer tied to stable and resident communities, it moves across the globe, and it changes in the process. The world has become a complex 'web' of villages, towns, neighbourhoods and settlements connected by material and symbolic ties in often unpredictable ways. This phenomenon requires us to revise our understanding of linguistic communication. In The Sociolinguistics of Globalization Jan Blommaert constructs a theory of changing language in a changing society, reconsidering locality, repertoires, competence, history and sociolinguistic inequality. • There is great interest in the issue of globalization and this book will appeal to scholars and students in linguistics, sociolinguistics, applied linguistics and anthropology • Richly illustrated with examples from around the globe • Presents a profound revision of sociolinguistic work in the area of linguistic communication
This book is the first to explore the constitution of language learner agency by drawing on performativity theory, an approach that remains on the periphery of second language research. Though many scholars have drawn on poststructuralism to theorize learner identity in non-essentialist terms, most have treated agency as an essential feature that belongs to or inheres in individuals. By contrast, this work promotes a view of learner agency as inherently social and as performatively constituted in discursive practice. In developing a performativity approach to learner agency, it builds on the work of Vygotsky and Bakhtin along with research on 'agency of spaces' and language ideologies. Through the study of discourses produced in interviews, this work explores how immigrant small business owners co-construct their theories of agency, in relation to language learning and use. The analysis focuses on three discursive constructs produced in the interview talk–subject-predicate constructs, evaluative stance, and reported speech–and investigates their discursive effects in mobilizing ideologically normative, performatively realized agentive selves.
The English language is spreading across the world, and so too is hip-hop culture: both are being altered, developed, reinterpreted, reclaimed. This timely book explores the relationship between global Englishes (the spread and use of diverse forms of English within processes of globalization) and transcultural flows (the movements, changes and reuses of cultural forms in disparate contexts). This wide-ranging study focuses on the ways English is embedded in other linguistic contexts, including those of East Asia, Australia, West Africa and the Pacific Islands. Drawing on transgressive and performative theory, Pennycook looks at how global Englishes, transcultural flows and pedagogy are interconnected in ways that oblige us to rethink language and culture within the contemporary world. Global Englishes and Transcultural Flows is a valuable resource to applied linguists, sociolinguists, and students on cultural studies, English language studies, TEFL and TESOL courses.
The study of teenagers in the classroom, and how they interact with one another and their teachers, can tell us a great deal about late-modern society. In this revealing account, Ben Rampton presents the extensive sociolinguistic research he carried out in an inner-city high school. Through his vivid analysis of classroom talk, he offers answers to some important questions: does social class still count for young people, or is it in demise? Are traditional authority relationships in schools being undermined? How is this affected by popular media culture? His study, which provides numerous transcripts and three extensive case studies, introduces a way of perceiving established ideas in sociolinguistics, such as identity, insecurity, the orderliness of classroom talk, and the experience of learning at school. In doing so, Rampton shows how work in sociolinguistics can contribute to some major debates in sociology, anthropology, cultural studies and education.
Language is closely linked to our social relationships and is the medium through which we participate in a variety of social activities. This fascinating study explores the important role of language in various aspects of our social life, such as identity, gender relations, class, kinship, status, and hierarchies. Drawing on data from over thirty different languages and societies, it shows how language is more than simply a form of social action; it is also an effective tool with which we formulate models of social life and conduct. These models - or particular forms of social behaviour - are linked to the classification of 'types' of action or actor, and are passed 'reflexively' from person to person, and from generation to generation. Providing a unified way of accounting for a variety of social phenomena, this book will be welcomed by all those interested in the interaction between language, culture, and society.
Policies concerning language use are increasingly tested in an age of frequent migration and cultural synthesis. With conflicting factors and changing political climates influencing the policy-makers, Elana Shohamy considers the effects that these policies have on the real people involved. Using examples from the US and UK, she shows how language policies are promoted and imposed, overtly and covertly, across different countries and in different contexts. Concluding with arguments for a more democratic and open approach to language policy and planning, the final note is one of optimism, suggesting strategies for resistance to language attrition and ways to protect the linguistic rights of groups and individuals.
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 presents a specific theory of language management. Bernard Spolsky reviews research on the family, religion, the workplace, the media, schools, legal and health institutions, the military and government. Also discussed are language activists, international organisations, and human rights relative to language, and the book concludes with a review of language managers and management agencies. A model is developed that recognises the complexity of language management, makes sense of the various forces involved, and clarifies why it is such a difficult enterprise.
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This article presents the results of an investigation into the place of English in the curriculum in several countries in the Asia-Pacific region. The study indicates that the emergence of English as a global language is having considerable impact on policies and practices in all countries surveyed. However, it also reveals significant problems, including confusion and inconsistency, at the level of policy, particularly regarding the issue of age of initial instruction, inequity regarding access to effective language instruction, inadequately trained and skilled teachers, and a disjunction between curriculum rhetoric and pedagogical reality.
This engaging 2005 introduction offers a critical approach to discourse, written by an expert uniquely placed to cover the subject for a variety of disciplines. Organised along thematic lines, the book begins with an outline of the basic principles, moving on to examine the methods and theory of CDA (critical discourse analysis). It covers topics such as text and context, language and inequality, choice and determination, history and process, ideology and identity. Blommaert focuses on how language can offer a crucial understanding of wider aspects of power relations, arguing that critical discourse analysis should specifically be an analysis of the 'effects' of power, what power does to people, groups and societies, and how this impact comes about. Clearly argued, this concise introduction will be welcomed by students and researchers in a variety of disciplines involved in the study of discourse, including linguistics, linguistic anthropology and the sociology of language.
The articles in this special issue argue that entextualization - the process by which circulable texts are produced by extracting discourse from its original context and reifying it as a bounded object - is an indispensable mechanism for the construction of institutional authority. More specifically, they demonstrate that one particular mode of entextualization, that involving the inscription of speech into writing, plays an especially important role in modern institutions, as the transfixing power of the written record endows the institution with an enormous advantage in presenting itself as an authoritative voice that can define, describe, and discipline its subjects. The contributors to this special issue illustrate the role of entextualization in the consolidation of institutional power through the critical analysis of linguistic representation within three key institutions - the law, the media, and the academy - in a variety of languages and cultures in North America, Europe, and Asia.
While Kachru's Three Circles model of World Englishes (Kachru 1985, 1986; Kachru and Nelson 1996) has been highly influential in highlighting the changing distribution and functions of English, it has also been criticized
for its inability to account for the heterogeneity and dynamics of English-using communities, and for perpetuating the very
inequalities and dichotomies that it aims to combat. By combining Bourdieu's (1984, 1986, 1990) notion of linguistic markets with the insights of the model's critics, this article deconstructs the Three Circles model
by reinterpreting it as a model for the system of ideological forces that delimit local creativity and utility of English
in the world. Such a reinterpretation can be a useful way of explicating the performativity of English in different sociolinguistic
communities around the world, foregrounding dominant assumptions about the prevailing structure of the global linguistic market.
The concept of indexical order is introduced, necessary to any empirical investigation of the inherently dialectical facts of indexicality. Indexical order is central to analyzing how semiotic agents access macro-sociological plane categories and concepts as values in the indexable realm of the micro-contextual. Through such access their relational identities are presupposed and creatively (trans)formed in interaction. We work through several classic examples of indexicality well-known in the literature of sociolinguistics, the clarification of which can be enhanced by using the concept of indexical order, viz., ‘T/V’ deference-indexicality, speech levels, indexically significant variation in phonetics informed by a standard phonological register. We conclude with an analysis of identity-commoditizing indexical overlays such as the American English register here dubbed “oinoglossia,” ‘wine talk’.
Standards, codification and sociolinguistic realism: The English language in the outer circle
- B B Kachru
- BB Kachru
The cognitive value of literate talk in small-group classroom discourse
- J Clegg
Is English a first or second language in Singapore
- J A Foley
Local literacies and global literacy
- C Wallace
Teaching language: From grammar to grammaring
- D Larsen-Freeman
Agency, language learning and multilingual spaces
- E R Miller
- ER Miller
Ethnography, linguistics, narrative inequality: Toward an understanding of voice
- D H Hymes
- DH Hymes
Evolving identities: The English language in Singapore and Malaysia
- J A Foley
- JA Foley