Chinese Language Policy and Uyghur Youth: Examining Language Policies and Language Ideologies

Author(s):  
Yawen Han ◽  
David Cassels Johnson
Author(s):  
Qing Zhang

This chapter discusses language policies in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), including the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR since 1997) and Taiwan. The term “Greater China” refers to these three territories. Contemporary language policies in the region are driven by the need for, and play a vital role in, building a unified modern nation-state. The discussion notes that language policy is informed and shaped by language ideologies and attitudes, as well as by sociohistorical, geopolitical, and economic considerations. All three territories have witnessed drastic socioeconomic and political change since the last two decades of the twentieth century. Such transformations have undoubtedly left their impact on their languages and language policies.


2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 425-450 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Cushing

ABSTRACTThis study investigates cases of language ‘policing’ as educational language policies, and the way that these are represented across different policy levels. Focusing on UK schools and using discursive approaches to language policy as a theoretical framework, I critically examine the motivations and justifications that institutions provide for designing and implementing policies whereby nonstandardised forms are ‘banned’, and how these are reported in metalinguistic discourse. Drawing on a range of data including media discourse, policy documents, teacher interviews and linguistic landscapes, I textually trace how educational language policies (re)produce prescriptive and linguicist ideologies, often using metaphors of crime, and often using language as a proxy for social factors such as academic achievement, employability, and standards. Overall, I argue that micro- and meso-level language policies are a partial product of the linguistic conservatism as found within current macro-level educational policy. (Language policy, language policing, schools, language ideologies)*


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Ballinger ◽  
Melanie Brouillard ◽  
Alexa Ahooja ◽  
Ruth Kircher ◽  
Linda Polka ◽  
...  

The current paper describes a study that sought to determine the beliefs, practices, and needs of parents living in Montreal, Quebec, who were raising their children bi/multilingually. The parents (N = 27) participated in a total of nine focus group and individual interviews in which they discussed their family language policies (language ideologies, practices, and actions taken to maintain a language). Through rounds of deductive and inductive coding and analysis, family language policies regarding English and/or French were compared with policies regarding heritage languages. The participants’ family language policies were further examined in light of Quebec’s official language policy of interculturalism. Findings indicate a complex co-existence of family and official language policy in which parents both support Quebec’s official language policy by converging towards French as a common public language and questioning the policy’s stance on official institutional support for heritage languages.


Author(s):  
Taisa Pinetti Passoni

English without Borders (EwB) is a Brazilian government-sponsored Program created to enhance linguistic proficiency of potential candidates for outward mobility. Assuming that language ideologies embody as well as are embodied by language policies, this paper aims at examining the native-speakerism ideology. It draws on texts comprising instances of enactment and interpretations of EwB in addition to evidences posed by decisions arising from its implementation to examine how native-speakerism is positioned through the Program. Building on critical language policy approach, it employs critical discourse analysis resources to investigate how native-speakerism is challenged or reinforced by the agenda implemented by EwB. Evidences point to the overlapping of deconstructing and corroborating perspectives, especially regarding local interpretations posed by the Language Center coordinators whose considerations about the linguistic diversity of English are marked by ambivalent thoughts on the issue. The coexistence of such tensions indicates the pervasive nature of native-speakerism concerning English in Brazil.


Author(s):  
Andrew Linn ◽  
Anastasiya Bezborodova ◽  
Saida Radjabzade

AbstractThis article presents a practical project to develop a language policy for an English-Medium-Instruction university in Uzbekistan. Although the university is de facto English-only, it presents a complex language ecology, which in turn has led to confusion and disagreement about language use on campus. The project team investigated the experience, views and attitudes of over a thousand people, including faculty, students, administrative and maintenance staff, in order to arrive at a proposed policy which would serve the whole community, based on the principle of tolerance and pragmatism. After outlining the relevant language and educational context and setting out the methods and approach of the underpinning research project, the article goes on to present the key findings. One of the striking findings was an appetite for control and regulation of language behaviours. Language policies in Higher Education invariably fall down at the implementation stage because of a lack of will to follow through on their principles and their specific guidelines. Language policy in international business on the other hand is characterised by a control stage invariably lacking in language planning in education. Uzbekistan is a polity used to control measures following from policy implementation. The article concludes by suggesting that Higher Education in Central Asia may stand a better chance of seeing through language policies around English-Medium Instruction than, for example, in northern Europe, based on the tension between tolerance on the one hand and control on the other.


2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 366-385 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Cassels Johnson ◽  
Crissa Stephens ◽  
Stephanie Gugliemo Lynch

Abstract This article examines reactions to the changing linguistic ecology in the U.S. state of Iowa, which is experiencing a demographic phenomenon often referred to as the New Latino Diaspora (NLD) (Hamann et al., 2002). We first examine the historical processes and social structures that link current language policy initiatives within Iowa to local and national nativism. We then analyze public policies and texts to reveal how language ideologies circulate across diverse texts and contexts, forming discourses that shape the experiences of Latin@s in Iowa.


2011 ◽  
Vol 2011 ◽  
pp. 1-7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ahmad Nazari

This paper is an attempt to analyse one of the documents which may affect the classroom activities of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers, namely teachers' guides. It also explores the context at which the document is aimed and critiques how EFL teachers are advised to teach as well as how EFL is taught. As such, the paper stands where critical discourse analysis and language policy come together in the study of language policies in education. The teachers' guide chosen and the analysis carried out here are not necessarily concerned with their representativeness and typicality but with the opportunity they provide to the researchers and teachers to learn about such language policy documents and how language and language teaching objectives are represented in them. The issues raised in this paper will have relevance to the EFL teachers' guides and EFL education in other contexts, as these issues are likely to be true of other EFL milieux.


Multilingua ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-168
Author(s):  
Juan Jiménez-Salcedo

Abstract This article analyzes the legislation of the two territories that have the most advanced legal framework regarding language policies towards Catalan: Andorra and Catalonia. The study of the legislation in relation to contexts of social and institutional use shows how this legal framework is not sufficient to change Catalan from being a minoritized language, since the phenomenon of minoritization is innate to the ecosystem in which languages develop. This ecosystem is conditioned by the presence of Castilian as a lingua franca on both sides of the border between Andorra and Catalonia. In the case of Andorra, its status as a cross-border microstate makes it a plurilingual space with Castilian as a socially cross-cutting language; moreover, the fact that until recently there was no network of state schools hindered Catalan language normalisation efforts. Catalonia, on the other hand, is an even more complex example on account of how the implementation of llengua pròpia policy contradicts the constitutional control the Spanish state exercises on this.


Author(s):  
Vincent Kan ◽  
Bob Adamson

Francis of Education (print)/1474-8479 (online) Article 2010 Language in education debates in Hong Kong focus on the role and status of English (as the former colonial language and an important means for international communication); Cantonese, the mother tongue of the majority of the population; and Putonghua, the national language of China. This paper examines the language policy formulated in 1997–1998, and finds that it radically departed from previous policies by mandating the use of Cantonese as the medium of instruction in secondary schools. The paper then analyses two subsequent policy revisions and concludes that, while the tonal emphasis on mother-tongue education has remained, the policy revisions have reversed the language policy to previous practices that emphasised the importance of English.


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