This special issue brings together papers that discuss how teachers deliberate competing institut... more This special issue brings together papers that discuss how teachers deliberate competing institutional, pedagogical and language ideological imperatives in the multilingual classroom. It does so because research on language-in-education policy often singles out teachers who resist and transform monolingual policies, or those who ignore pupils’ multilingual resources. Such accounts usefully highlight the possibility of change or the need for intervention. But they risk overlooking the many occasions where teachers waver between both types of conduct to reconcile contrary views on language, teaching, and learning. This issue argues that teacher behaviour must be explained in relation to these contrary views rather than to one of their component parts. Thus, it puts the lens, among other things, on teachers who implement monolingual policies without disregarding the value of multilingualism; on those who take up linguistic authority in congenial fashion; or on those who respect pupils’ linguistic repertoires while setting out to improve their skills in named languages. This introduction discusses some broad tendencies in earlier work on language-in-education policy, the chronic nature of contradictions in class and the ambivalence it invites, before presenting the different contributions of the issue.
In this article I address the fact that influential strands in socio-and applied linguistics advo... more In this article I address the fact that influential strands in socio-and applied linguistics advocate heteroglossic policies in education and other monolin-gually organised domains without extending this heteroglossia to public debate about language policy. Often this occurs by presenting linguistic diversity to relevant stakeholders as natural and real, or as the only option on account of its proven effectiveness. I argue that this strategy removes options from the debate by framing it as a scientific rather than political one, that it confronts stakeholders with academic pressure and blame, and that this may diminish scholars' impact on policy making. Using examples from research on translanguaging, repertoires, and linguistic citizenship, I will suggest that scholars may be more effective in contexts of value conflict when their knowledge serves to expand rather than reduce the range of alternatives for stakeholders. Focusing on education I will then explore how we may reclaim language policy from an evidence-based discourse and address matters of value besides matters of fact.
This chapter takes critical stock of such terms as 'polylingualism', 'metrolingualism' and 'trans... more This chapter takes critical stock of such terms as 'polylingualism', 'metrolingualism' and 'translanguaging' to question perceptions around linguistic fixity and fluidity. It discusses the provenance and pertinence of these terms against the backdrop of earlier language contact research, pointing out the difficulties caused by their ongoing semantic inflation. It addresses the epistemic and political affordances of claims that the facts of linguistic fluidity must take absolute precedence over the fiction of fixed, bounded languages. And it critiques the status of fluid language as a more natural language practice, and in turn, its greater potential for social transformation. We argue that linguistic fixity and fluidity must be approached as mutually presupposing, that this invites dilemmas in everyday life and academia, and that sociolinguists should pay close attention to the way both types of linguistic practice open up or close down avenues for social transformation.
Many studies in recent years identify and discuss Dutch ethnolects. Generally this work takes lin... more Many studies in recent years identify and discuss Dutch ethnolects. Generally this work takes linguistic phenomena as directly reflective of speakers' ethnic identity. But if ethnicity is an inherent speaker feature, the absence of white ethnolect descriptions is difficult to explain. In this paper, therefore, I wish to judge the appeal of the notion of ethnolect against its usefulness for explaining language use. I argue that ethnolect can usefully label everyday ethnicisations of language, but that such evaluations generally compress a more complex reality in which so-called ethnolectal features are recruited for other purposes than (un)marking one's ascribed ethnicity. Crucial to unpacking this reality is the distinction of an intermediary step, the construction of interactional stance, between the use of linguistic features and their association with common-sense identity categories.
Teachers' opinions about pupils' home languages are often in tune with official language policy. ... more Teachers' opinions about pupils' home languages are often in tune with official language policy. Also in Flanders (Belgium), survey and case-study research frequently demonstrates teachers' negative attitudes towards pupils' non-standard and non-Dutch home languages. This chapter however reports on ethnographic research at an ethnically mixed Brussels secondary school where at least one teacher could be observed valorizing his pupils' home languages in and out of class. These valorizations facilitated a positive classroom climate, but they were also indebted to longer-standing representations of language and thus embedded in larger stratification patterns. Pending structural changes, I suggest this is the fate of much behaviour at school that negotiates the current language political status quo. Careful attention to these negotiations is vital for understanding contemporary education.
Language education policies are pivotal in nation-states’ negotiation of a globalizing economy an... more Language education policies are pivotal in nation-states’ negotiation of a globalizing economy and a diversifying population. But certainly in urban, non-elite schools, where pupils’ linguistic diversity is pronounced, their fixation on language separation and multi-monolingualism produces salient sites of linguistic friction. Much scholarly work has been successfully problematizing this friction, producing an avalanche of criticism and ample calls for a change in schools’ approach to pupils’ primary linguistic skills and mixed language use. This chapter argues that while such calls are pedagogically exciting and justified on principle, a significant number of them reproduce some of the main assumptions behind the policies that they denunciate, or invite problems of their own. Consequently many calls for change may underestimate the difficulties of policy implementation, exaggerate their own effects, and overstate their critical character. This necessitates a reconsideration of the received relation between sociolinguistics and language education policy, and requires that calls for change take a different tack.
Sociolinguists are deeply politically committed to (dis)fluency. They have generally seen it as t... more Sociolinguists are deeply politically committed to (dis)fluency. They have generally seen it as their task to revise popular wisdom on the presumed disfluency of nonstandard, accented, or multilingual speakers and to demonstrate regularity and competence where deficit is presumed. I argue that this revision has its merits but is not immune to reconsideration for its natu-ralization of cultural ideas that value fluency and its promise of modernization through sociolinguistic knowledge. After addressing the limitations of this literature, I review works that explore alternative conceptualizations of (dis)fluency. I build on these to argue that rather than being an inherent characteristic of particular linguistic forms, (dis)fluency depends on relationships between these forms and their evaluation by speakers with competing perspectives and different positions in the social arrangements they so help to reproduce.
This special issue brings together papers that discuss how teachers deliberate competing institut... more This special issue brings together papers that discuss how teachers deliberate competing institutional, pedagogical and language ideological imperatives in the multilingual classroom. It does so because research on language-in-education policy often singles out teachers who resist and transform monolingual policies, or those who ignore pupils’ multilingual resources. Such accounts usefully highlight the possibility of change or the need for intervention. But they risk overlooking the many occasions where teachers waver between both types of conduct to reconcile contrary views on language, teaching, and learning. This issue argues that teacher behaviour must be explained in relation to these contrary views rather than to one of their component parts. Thus, it puts the lens, among other things, on teachers who implement monolingual policies without disregarding the value of multilingualism; on those who take up linguistic authority in congenial fashion; or on those who respect pupils’ linguistic repertoires while setting out to improve their skills in named languages. This introduction discusses some broad tendencies in earlier work on language-in-education policy, the chronic nature of contradictions in class and the ambivalence it invites, before presenting the different contributions of the issue.
In this article I address the fact that influential strands in socio-and applied linguistics advo... more In this article I address the fact that influential strands in socio-and applied linguistics advocate heteroglossic policies in education and other monolin-gually organised domains without extending this heteroglossia to public debate about language policy. Often this occurs by presenting linguistic diversity to relevant stakeholders as natural and real, or as the only option on account of its proven effectiveness. I argue that this strategy removes options from the debate by framing it as a scientific rather than political one, that it confronts stakeholders with academic pressure and blame, and that this may diminish scholars' impact on policy making. Using examples from research on translanguaging, repertoires, and linguistic citizenship, I will suggest that scholars may be more effective in contexts of value conflict when their knowledge serves to expand rather than reduce the range of alternatives for stakeholders. Focusing on education I will then explore how we may reclaim language policy from an evidence-based discourse and address matters of value besides matters of fact.
This chapter takes critical stock of such terms as 'polylingualism', 'metrolingualism' and 'trans... more This chapter takes critical stock of such terms as 'polylingualism', 'metrolingualism' and 'translanguaging' to question perceptions around linguistic fixity and fluidity. It discusses the provenance and pertinence of these terms against the backdrop of earlier language contact research, pointing out the difficulties caused by their ongoing semantic inflation. It addresses the epistemic and political affordances of claims that the facts of linguistic fluidity must take absolute precedence over the fiction of fixed, bounded languages. And it critiques the status of fluid language as a more natural language practice, and in turn, its greater potential for social transformation. We argue that linguistic fixity and fluidity must be approached as mutually presupposing, that this invites dilemmas in everyday life and academia, and that sociolinguists should pay close attention to the way both types of linguistic practice open up or close down avenues for social transformation.
Many studies in recent years identify and discuss Dutch ethnolects. Generally this work takes lin... more Many studies in recent years identify and discuss Dutch ethnolects. Generally this work takes linguistic phenomena as directly reflective of speakers' ethnic identity. But if ethnicity is an inherent speaker feature, the absence of white ethnolect descriptions is difficult to explain. In this paper, therefore, I wish to judge the appeal of the notion of ethnolect against its usefulness for explaining language use. I argue that ethnolect can usefully label everyday ethnicisations of language, but that such evaluations generally compress a more complex reality in which so-called ethnolectal features are recruited for other purposes than (un)marking one's ascribed ethnicity. Crucial to unpacking this reality is the distinction of an intermediary step, the construction of interactional stance, between the use of linguistic features and their association with common-sense identity categories.
Teachers' opinions about pupils' home languages are often in tune with official language policy. ... more Teachers' opinions about pupils' home languages are often in tune with official language policy. Also in Flanders (Belgium), survey and case-study research frequently demonstrates teachers' negative attitudes towards pupils' non-standard and non-Dutch home languages. This chapter however reports on ethnographic research at an ethnically mixed Brussels secondary school where at least one teacher could be observed valorizing his pupils' home languages in and out of class. These valorizations facilitated a positive classroom climate, but they were also indebted to longer-standing representations of language and thus embedded in larger stratification patterns. Pending structural changes, I suggest this is the fate of much behaviour at school that negotiates the current language political status quo. Careful attention to these negotiations is vital for understanding contemporary education.
Language education policies are pivotal in nation-states’ negotiation of a globalizing economy an... more Language education policies are pivotal in nation-states’ negotiation of a globalizing economy and a diversifying population. But certainly in urban, non-elite schools, where pupils’ linguistic diversity is pronounced, their fixation on language separation and multi-monolingualism produces salient sites of linguistic friction. Much scholarly work has been successfully problematizing this friction, producing an avalanche of criticism and ample calls for a change in schools’ approach to pupils’ primary linguistic skills and mixed language use. This chapter argues that while such calls are pedagogically exciting and justified on principle, a significant number of them reproduce some of the main assumptions behind the policies that they denunciate, or invite problems of their own. Consequently many calls for change may underestimate the difficulties of policy implementation, exaggerate their own effects, and overstate their critical character. This necessitates a reconsideration of the received relation between sociolinguistics and language education policy, and requires that calls for change take a different tack.
Sociolinguists are deeply politically committed to (dis)fluency. They have generally seen it as t... more Sociolinguists are deeply politically committed to (dis)fluency. They have generally seen it as their task to revise popular wisdom on the presumed disfluency of nonstandard, accented, or multilingual speakers and to demonstrate regularity and competence where deficit is presumed. I argue that this revision has its merits but is not immune to reconsideration for its natu-ralization of cultural ideas that value fluency and its promise of modernization through sociolinguistic knowledge. After addressing the limitations of this literature, I review works that explore alternative conceptualizations of (dis)fluency. I build on these to argue that rather than being an inherent characteristic of particular linguistic forms, (dis)fluency depends on relationships between these forms and their evaluation by speakers with competing perspectives and different positions in the social arrangements they so help to reproduce.
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