scholarly journals Policy Mechanisms of the Standard Language Ideology in England’s Education System

Author(s):  
Ian Cushing
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hyeseung Jeong ◽  
Stephanie Lindemann ◽  
Julia Forsberg

English phonetics and phonology often focus on improving learners’ pronunciation. However, phonological processing is ‘a two-way street’ involving both speaker and listener. Thus, pronunciation instruction in this globalized time needs to be complemented with ways to help listeners understand a wide range of accents, thereby challenging the native speakerism and standard language ideology of more traditional English teaching. In this paper, we share our experiences of promoting listener abilities in university courses in Sweden and the US, two very different teaching contexts. In Sweden, Jeong takes a truly phonetic approach, starting from students’ own pronunciations rather than a ‘standard’ model, and focuses on ability to comprehend diverse accents. In the US, Lindemann uses native-speaking students’ complaints about supposedly incomprehensible instructors, not as justification for further training of instructors who are already proficient English users, but as an opportunity to offer listener training to the students. Put together, these experiences provide a basis for reflection on the teaching of L2 phonetics and pronunciation in other languages such as Swedish, and the benefits of shifting some of the focus from speaker to listener in order to begin to overcome native speakerism and standard language ideology.


2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Lucek

The current paper aims to address how one English-medium school functions from the different perspectives within the school: the principal, student/teacher classroom interaction and the students. This approach allows us to see the power differential of the different stakeholders in a school and how iconisation, fractal recursivity, and erasure affect teenagers in Dublin. This paper presents interview data with a principal and the students in a secondary school. Taking a qualitative approach to these data, I show that standard language ideology is linked with economic disadvantage. The school principal’s approach to identifying, problematising and seeking to eliminate certain types of nonstandard language in the school reflects a standard language ideology and is consistent with a raciolinguistic approach to linguistic discrimination. The data suggest that the students themselves take a more nuanced approach.


English Today ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 18-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hielke Vriesendorp

In the previous issue of English Today, Lukač (2016) discusses the increasingly important role of online language authorities for users of the internet who are looking for usage advice. However, prescriptivism also reaches these users when they are not actively looking for it. They encounter advice in newsfeeds in different social media, such as Twitter and Facebook, and some of them join online groups to discuss usage problems. The standard language ideology seems to have established itself firmly on these new platforms, adapting itself in the process. Articles on usage shared on social media are almost without exception in the form of lists with eye-catching ‘clickbaity’ titles (e.g. ‘7 Grammar Mistakes That Make You Look Dumb’), and their most important topics differ strongly from those of traditional prescriptivism.


2017 ◽  
Vol 46 (5) ◽  
pp. 649-669 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephanie Lindemann ◽  
Katherine Moran

AbstractThis study investigates how the descriptor ‘broken English’ is used to construct speakers as nonnative within standard language ideology. In-depth analysis of examples found through WebCorp, used to search US websites, and the Corpus of Contemporary American English found that the term was largely used to refer to comprehensible English identified as nonnative. Users of such English were constructed as Other, usually highly negatively. The rarer cases of more positive descriptions referred to encounters outside English-speaking countries, consistent with monolingualist ideology, and when used for a more distantly superior person, made them more attractive through greater apparent accessibility. Four mechanisms are discussed by which use of the term naturalizes ideologies. Crucially, its ambiguity promotes slippage between ‘neutral’ and negative uses, allowing any English identified as nonnative to be characterized as ‘broken’, slipping into ‘not English’, with such descriptions treated as an acceptable way to identify nonnative speakers as public menace. (Standard language ideology, ideology of nativeness, monolingualist ideology, Othering, corpus-informed research)*


Linguistics ◽  
2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robin Straaijer

The term standardization is generally used within linguistics to refer to the process of bringing about a standard language. This process brings to a language a uniformity and consistent norm and form of writing and speaking, and the promotion of uniformity and consistency usually entails the reduction or elimination of variation. On a social level, the standard language is usually identified as the variety with highest prestige. Outside the linguistic community, the standard language—particularly the written mode—is usually considered an integral part of national (or supraregional) identity, being seen as the most widely used variety of the language, the official variety of the language, the national language, or even just as the language of that nation. The standard language is also seen as the most correct variety, what is called the “standard-bearing” component of standardization, which is its example-function that also paves the way to language purism. Linguists, however, usually see the standard variety of a particular language as one among many dialects of that language, and often find it difficult to define what the standard is, partly because it is generally held that “standard language” is an ideology rather than a concrete reality. The sources mentioned in this article are both ones that discuss language standardization fairly straightforwardly as a process, as well as those that discuss the concepts of standardization and the standard language ideology. In addition, it contains references for sources that discuss standard languages and language standards. Many of these sources often also deal, either directly or indirectly, with linguistic prescriptivism (see the separate Oxford Bibliographies in Linguistics article “Linguistic Prescriptivism”). It has been argued that language standardization as it is has come to be defined is a particularly Western phenomenon. Most of the readily available literature about standardization has been published in English, and most of this literature deals with European languages, and particularly with the English language. Consequently, despite efforts to avoid it, and partly because of the European concept of standard languages, associated with nation-building, this article has an inevitable Eurocentric bias.


2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (6) ◽  
pp. 812-830
Author(s):  
Kay Richardson

Abstract Back in 2009, the Labour British Prime Minister Gordon Brown was attacked for “bad spelling” in a condolence letter written personally by him to the mother of a soldier who died in combat, and publicised by The Sun newspaper. “Spelling” here acts as a leveller of hierarchical differences in the national political culture, with ruler and subject both publicly disciplined by the same standard language ideology. Previous research on orthography as social practice has tended to focus on deliberate manipulation of fixed spellings; this article extends the approach to unconventional spellings that have come about ‘by mistake’, and also widens it, to consider aspects of orthography other than spelling, focusing on the look of the Prime Minister’s handwriting. At issue, semiotically, are meanings such as ‘the personal touch’ and ‘respect’.


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