Volume 32, Number 1, Spring 2017
Editors-in-Chief: David H. Hanks and Aldo Anzures Tapia
From Student Shyness to Student Voice: Mapping Biliteracy Teaching in Indigenous Contexts (PDF), Nancy H. Hornberger & Frances Kvietok Dueñas
Planning Math Language in the United States, 1650 to 1945 (PDF), Mark C. Lewis
Disability and Language Ideologies in Education Policy (PDF), Jennifer Phuong
Snapshots of Yucatec Maya Language Practices: Language Policy and Planning Activities in the Yucatán Peninsula (PDF), Aldo Anzures Tapia
Policy Barriers to Ainu Language Revitalization in Japan: When Globalization Means English (PDF), David H. Hanks
Editors’ Note (PDF)
From Student Shyness to Student Voice: Mapping Biliteracy Teaching in Indigenous Contexts (PDF)
Nancy H. Hornberger & Frances Kvietok Dueñas
Drawing on an ethnographic monitoring engagement with Kichwa intercultural bilingual educators in the Peruvian Amazon, we argue for ethnographic monitoring (Hymes, 1980) as a method and the continua of biliteracy (Hornberger, 1989, 1990, 2003; Hornberger & Skilton-Sylvester, 2000) as a heuristic for mapping biliteracy teaching in Indigenous contexts of bilingualism. Through our mapping, we uncover tensions in the teaching of majoritized languages in Indigenous contexts of postcoloniality, challenge constructs of student shyness, and propose pedagogies to support the flourishing of student voice in bilingual education.
Planning Math Language in the United States, 1650 to 1945 (PDF)
Mark C. Lewis
Within mathematics education in the United States, educators and scholars have worked to identify ways of using language that students of mathematics must perform. I describe how mathematics educators from 1650–1945 have argued whether or how language is important for learning and doing mathematics. Framing these arguments as a form of language policy and planning, I apply intertextual research methods (Johnson, 2015) and the framework of enregisterment (Agha, 2007) to present explicit and implicit policy and planning for math language as intertextually linked models of linguistic behavior. I also summarize the gradual development of math language alongside wider shifts in the structure and philosophy of education in the United States. While early attention to language and mathematics learning did not produce expectations for student language use, student-regulating models of math language eventually solidified through the context of progressive education scholarship in the early 20th century.
Disability and Language Ideologies in Education Policy (PDF)
Jennifer Phuong
Through policy discourse analysis, this paper explores ideologies around language and disability in U.S. federal education legislation, specifically the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act of 2004 (IDEA) and the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015 (ESSA). This exploration draws from the fields of language planning and policy and disability studies in education, which are both problem-oriented fields that rely on the examination of social problems. In considering disproportionality and discourses of ableism and racism, I argue that de facto language education policy implicit in IDEA and ESSA supports the model of a White, normal, abled student who speaks English. Furthermore, a medical model of disability is implicated in this legislation through psycholinguistic conceptualizations of language. This analysis has implications for future research to intersectionally address ableism in both special education policy and practice and to examine the institutional mechanisms through which students are deemed not normal, including a conflation of the needs of English Language Learners and students with disabilities, as well as the intersection of both.
Snapshots of Yucatec Maya Language Practices: Language Policy and Planning Activities in the Yucatán Peninsula (PDF)
Aldo Anzures Tapia
Metaphors, although many times more poetic than political, have been instrumental in understanding the complexity of language policy and planning (LPP). In this paper, I refer to and compare photographic processing to current LPP activities in Quintana Roo, the newest Mexican state. Based on corpus analyses of policy texts and ethnographic snapshots, this paper investigates how sectors such as health, social development, human rights, and justice employ Indigenous languages in ways that complement but also contradict LPP activities at the national, regional, and state levels. Overall, this research widens the LPP lens by inviting educational researchers to tell more stories behind the pictures, bring the blurred and missing people into the main frame, and redistribute the lighting in more just ways
Policy Barriers to Ainu Language Revitalization in Japan: When Globalization Means English (PDF)
David H. Hanks
For over a century the Ainu language has been threatened with disappearance as a result of language policies imposed by the Japanese following colonization of Ainu Mosir (now known as Hokkaidō), the Indigenous Ainu homeland. With recent legal and political victories, the Ainu have begun to reclaim their Indigenous culture and language within local communities, on the wider national stage, and internationally. However, while Ainu revitalization efforts continue, discourses of globalization in Japan have contributed to a dramatic increase in the status of English-as-a-foreign-language education, eclipsing other foreign and minority languages at all levels. Examining current policies, both de jure and de facto (see, e.g., Johnson, 2013; Schiffman, 1996), this paper explores how the disproportionate focus on English in contemporary Japanese education, reflected in societal and policy discourses regarding language and globalization, may be contributing to the closing down of ideological and implementational spaces (Hornberger, 2002, 2005, 2006; Hornberger & Johnson, 2007) for Ainu language education, thereby negatively impacting the continued revitalization of the Ainu language. The paper concludes by implicating opposing discursive orientations to globalization within Japanese society, and Japanese educational language policy specifically, in the lack of explicit attention to Ainu language revitalization efforts in national policy, and suggests that more critical examination of the role of English in Japanese education is needed if these efforts are to continue to succeed.