Educational Linguistics

1. EDUCATIONAL LINGUISTICS
LANGUAGE EDUCATION POLICY
AND MANAGEMENT-PART 2
Fulda Karaazmak

2. Implementing Language Diversity Policy
Community-based decision making
• Local response to any national-level language policy
determines the success of the policy.
• Which one is more important in minority language
communities, local decisions or the nationally mandated
policy?
• What about a community where language use
characterizes the identity of that community?

3. • Contexts of language-use decisions:
• The influence of local institutions, whether they are
indigenous institutions (e.g., traditional leadership) or
nationally organized institutions with local representation
(e.g., schools, government, national or international
NGOs).
• The historical, sociocultural, and economic environment of
a community
• The perspective of members of the community’s elite
(Prah, 1995)

4. • Community responses to national language policy
• Where national policy is antagonistic to cultivation of local
language: informal, oral use.
• Supportive national policy can energize national
institutions to promote the local language in education,
local government etc.
• National language policy that is permissive, but not
accompanied by resources or implementation plans: the
most complex one.

5. Cultivation process in local communities
• The linguistic processes in local language cultivation are
linguistic analysis, orthography development, expansion
of the lexicon, production of dictionaries, and other
aspects of corpus planning.
• Advocacy processes: Local perceptions of the
appropriateness of the language can be influenced by
positive example of locally esteemed people or
institutions.

6. • Pedagogical processes:
• raising awareness among community members of the uses of the
written language
• providing opportunities for literacy learning in both formal and non-
formal educational contexts
• the production of literature in the local language
• For successful local language cultivation;
• The effect of a local committe
• Universities and other national and international institutions

7. Case study: Cameroon
• Cameroon: two official languages (English and French), an
English-based Pidgin, and up to 248 distinct Cameroonian
languages (Breton and Fohtung, 1991).
• In early national language policy, both English and French were
the official languages and Cameroonian languages were
ignored.
• However, such official neglect of Cameroonian languages has
not lessened their use.
• The University of Yaounde also took a leading role in language
cultivation efforts: the establishment of a Cameroonian national
alphabet in 1979 (Tadadjeu & Sadembuo, 1979).

8. • Operational Research Project for the Teaching of Cameroonian
Languages, a national-level project: the goal is the development of
local Cameroonian languages for use in formal mother tongue
education.
• The local communities’ desire to see their languages developed has
resulted in organized, ongoing language cultivation efforts. Such local
cultivation efforts can only be successful with the active support of the
universities and language development NGOs.

9. Case study: Papua New Guinea
• National language planning: the roles of Tok Pisin and Hiri
Motu, two Pidgin languages, and English as languages of
official functions.
• Local languages, of which there are more than 800
(Gordon, 2005), only came into focus for national
development policy during the last decade.
• “Tok Ples” (“Talk Place,” or local language) schools were
developed to support the use of local languages for initial
literacy and basic education.

10. • In 1989, the “Literacy and Awareness Program”
legislation: “a child should learn to read and write in
his/her own language” (Litteral, 1999a).
• The initial language of instruction in formal education
should be the vernacular languages.
• The development of Tok Ples education in Papua New
Guinea is an example of how minority language
cultivation can be facilitated through the efforts of national
and provincial governments, NGOs and local
communities.

11. 20: Ecological Language Education Policy
• Since the 1990s the ecology of language has emerged as
increasingly important to language policy and planning
(LPP) researchers as they seek to investigate
relationships between societal multilingualism and
individual language choices.

12. • The ecology of language, or ecolinguistics, encompasses
environmental discourse analysis, language and
biocultural diversity, and societal multilingualism.
• The ecology of language focuses on a language’s
“interaction with other languages in the minds of bi- and
multilingual speakers . . .” as well as “its interaction with
the society” (Haugen, 1972: 325).

13. Contributions of Language Ecology to the Study
of Educational Language Planning and Policy
• language planning is divided into three major types:
• corpus planning relating to language form,
• status planning relating to language function,
• acquisition planning relating to language learners and users (Cooper,
1989; Kaplan & Baldauf, 1997).
• Muhlhausler, proposes an ecological approach to language
planning.
• With respect to status planning, the primary objective should be
“equitable status for a maximum number of diverse languages”
(Muhlhausler, 2000: 331).

14. • With respect to corpus planning, for Muhlhausler,
ecological language planning should serve to develop
linguistic environments by fostering linguistic diversity.
• Effect on the schools: Educational policies that emphasize
equitable multilingualism can permit all students’
languages to become valuable resources for themselves
and their communities.

15. • Phillipson and Skutnabb-Kangas (1996) suggest that the
relationship between language policies and the spread of
English throughout the globe can be understood most
usefully in terms of either a diffusion of English paradigm
or an ecology of languages paradigm.
• Diffusion of English is associated with factors such as
capitalism; monolingualism; Americanization; and
linguistic, cultural, and media imperialism (Phillipson &
Skutnabb-Kangas, 1996: 436).

16. • In contrast, the ecology of languages paradigm, as
Skutnabb-Kangas (2000: 657) further elaborates,
associates English with factors that favor linguistic
equality.
• For example:
1 multilingualism and linguistic diversity;
2 promotion of additive foreign/second language learning;
3 equality in communication;

17.  The ecology of language is an integrated
conceptual approach to examining multilingualism
in society and in LPP.
• General data-gathering questions:
• How are relationships among different languages reflected in policy
documents?
• How do language policies relate to individual experiences with language
use and beliefs about language(s)?
• How do language policies relate to sociolinguistic circumstances ‘on the
ground’?
• general guiding analytical questions:
• How do language policies at multiple levels of social organization
interact?
• Do policies promote equitable multilingualism?

18. Example of an Ecological Approach to
Educational Language Policy: Sweden
• Hult (2007) presents an ethnographic, discourse analytic
study of multilingual language education policy, focusing
on the impact of ELT in Sweden.
• Hult uses a combination of ethnographic sociolinguistics
and critical discourse analysis to explore how the English
language and ELT are positioned with respect to
multilingualism in policy texts.

19. • Sweden has a long LPP history of situating Swedish as
the national language (Teleman, 2002, 2003).
• Since the 1960s: in favor of promoting linguistic diversity
(Boyd, 2001).
• Both the special status of Swedish as well as wider
multilingualism are useful.
• Lastly, the richly multilingual language education policies
needed to achieve more equitable societies in today’s
inevitably intercultural world

20. 21: Education for Speakers
of Endangered Languages
• “About 97% of the world’s people speak about 4% of the
world’s languages; and conversely, about 96% of the
world’s languages are spoken by about 3% of the world’
people.
• What can be the result? Extinction of some languages?

21. • A language is endangered “when its speakers cease to
use it, use it in an increasingly reduced number of
communicative domains, and cease to pass it on from
one generation to the next” (UNESCO, 2003a: 2).
• According to Krauss (1992),
• moribund languages are no longer being learned by children;
• endangered languages are those which, though still being learned
by children, will cease to be learned by children during the coming
century;
• and safe languages are neither moribund nor endangered.

22. Why Should We Be Concerned about
Endangered Languages?
• Must acquisition of the LWC come at the price of the
mother tongue?
• Kenneth Hale, who spoke more than 75 languages, put it
this way: “When you lose a language, you lose a culture,
intellectual wealth, a work of art.” (The Economist,
November 3, 2001, pp. 89-105).
• Efforts to resist language loss are important for personal
and communal well-being, self-determination, and cultural
survival (Romero-Little & McCarty, 2006: 5).

23. Why Are Languages Endangered?
• “The fate of all languages is the result of the social and
political environment, above all of power relations” (p.
179).
• Because minority and indigenous languages are often
viewed as obstacles to those in power, they are easily
targets of attack.
• What can be «Linguistic genocide»?

24. The role of schooling in language extinction
• Language education policies for Native Americans
exemplify the role of colonial schooling.
• In eradicating Indigenous/minority languages the US
Commissioner of Indian Affairs wrote in 1887; “[s]chools
should be established which children should be required
to attend; their barbarous dialects should be blotted out ..”
(Crawford, 1992: 48).
• “No Indian Talk” was the first rule in federal Indian
schools, and infractions were brutally punished (Spack,
2002: 24).

25. Submersion education of Indigenous peoples and
minorities today
• If an alien dominant language is used as the only medium
of instruction, the language is not likely to survive
because Indigenous and minority students educated
through an alien language are not likely to pass on their
mother tongue to their children and grandchildren.

26. • Submersion approaches: the dominant language is
learned at the cost of the mother tongue.
• What can be the results?
• It can cause serious harm and can result in low school
achievement, over-representation in remedial tracks,
underemployment, youth and other criminality, alcoholism,
suicide, and mental illness (Lomawaima & McCarty, 2006;
see Magga et al., 2005)
• In contrast, in additive teaching, a dominant language is
added to the child’s linguistic repertoire while the mother
tongue is maintained and developed.

27. What Is Being Done to Counter Language
Endangerment?
• International efforts
• international human and minority rights regarding language
choice and use
• National language policies
• In Norway Sweden and Finland, the Saami Language Act: The
legislation is designed to secure the right of Saami-speaking
citizens to communicate and receive information in Saami.
• In the US, the 1990/1992 Native American Languages Act
(NALA) reversed two centuries of federal language policy by
vowing to “preserve, protect, and promote the rights . . . of
Native Americans to use, practice, and develop Native
American languages,” including in federal Indian schools.

28. • Grass roots initiatives
• Two of the most impressive grass roots language revitalization
efforts are Maori and Hawaiian. The language users were
socially isolated and elderly.
• Indigenous-language immersion programs were sparked by
grass roots ethnic revival movements.
• Bilingual/immersion education programs produced significant
numbers of new child speakers, and demonstrated academic
gains for indigenous students.
• These grass roots initiatives stand as powerful exemplars of
Indigenous self-determination and language rights.

29. • The role of states
• The role of (non-Indigenous/non-minority) international
• Organizations
• The role of Indigenous peoples and Indigenous/minority
• Organizations
• The role of researchers
• Even in recent documents it is often envisaged that outsiders do
most of the research needed not only for documenting but also for
maintaining the languages.

30. • It is equally important to stop linguistic genocide.
• All languages have the same potential and are equal, the
mother tongue is central to all learning processes, and
everyone should have the right and opportunity to learn to
read and write her/his own language as well as at least
one national and one international language.

31. 22: The Impact of English
on the School Curriculum
• Up until the beginning of the twentieth century, English was
seldom represented as a legitimate curricular subject in
schools.
• Before the twentieth century: teaching German or French
rather than English as foreign languages
• English has emerged as the first “global language” in history,
which is “now a factor that needs to be taken into account in its
language policy by any nation-state” (Spolsky, 2004: 91).
• English is currently the dominant or official language in over 75
territories, and it is widely taught as the most important foreign
language in primary and secondary schools across diverse
countries (Cha, 1991; Crystal, 2003).

34. Conclusion
• The worldwide expansion of English education during the
recent period symbolically reflects the wider institutional
dynamics of the modern international system where the
increasingly consolidated world society has formulated
various rationales and theories, both in “scientific” fashion,
that function as legitimating accounts of the importance of
English as a core component of curricular contents.
• Also, the rise of the United States as an unchallengeable
superpower after World War II has also consolidated the
legitimate status of English as the most predominant
language for international communication.

35. • With these world-cultural influences combined, the effects
of English education extend not merely to its contribution
to substantive local or national needs, but rather to its
institutional impact on our cognition by which English is
conceived as a “taken-for-granted” component of world
curriculum models.