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Analyzing Language Policy and Social Identification Across Heterogeneous Scales

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 March 2015

Katherine S. Mortimer  and
Stanton Wortham
Katherine S. Mortimer
Affiliation:
University of Texas at El Pasoksmortimer@utep.edu
Stanton Wortham
Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvaniastantonw@gse.upenn.edu
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Abstract

Attempts to improve education often change how language is used in schools. Many such efforts aim to include minoritized students by more fully including their languages. These are often met with resistance not so much about language but more about identity. Thus processes of social identification are implicated in efforts to change language in education. If we are to understand how identity and language policy interconnect, we must analyze how stability and change are produced in each. This requires attention to macro-level patterns and to micro-level practices. But a two-scale account—micro instantiation of macro categories and micro changes shaping macro structures—does not adequately explain identity and language policy. This article focuses on educational language policy implementation, how language use and social identification change in an evolving policy context. We argue that change and stability in language policy implementation must be explained with reference to heterogeneous resources from multiple timescales—beyond micro and macro—as these resources establish and change social identities. We review recent research using multiple timescales to understand social processes like identification and policy implementation, and we illustrate the use of such a scalar account to describe the social identification of one student in a sixth grade classroom in Paraguay in the midst of a major national educational language policy change. We show how a person's identification as a new kind of minority language speaker involved heterogeneous resources from various spatiotemporal scales. We argue that analysis of the heterogeneous resources involved in social identification is essential to understanding the role that these processes play in cultural, pedagogical, and language change.

Type
Research Article
Information
Annual Review of Applied Linguistics , Volume 35 , March 2015 , pp. 160 - 172
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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References

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Blommaert, J. (2010). The sociolinguistics of globalization. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

In this volume, Blommaert describes and illustrates concepts useful to the understanding of sociocultural practices at multiple scales. Building on earlier work, he articulates a theory of sociolinguistic scales, or hierarchically ordered spatiotemporal scales, and shows how various sociolinguistic resources such as accents, hybrid varieties, and “bits of language” are indexically linked to higher or lower scales and how their deployment in interaction comes to produce power in interaction.

Canagarajah, S. (2013). Translingual practices: Global Englishes and cosmopolitan relations. New York: Routledge.

In conversation with Blommaert (2010) and others, Canagarajah lays out in this volume a theory of language use that draws on both historical practices of multilingual communities and multilingual practices of contemporary highly mobile communities. He argues for a view of language use as a repertoire of heterogenous practices, and he highlights the always-negotiated nature of indexical relationships between these practices and scales of higher and lower power or value. Canagarajah's emphasis on contingency and negotiation of indexicality is important for understanding how scales come to be relevant in social identification.

Johnson, D. C. (2009). Ethnography of language policy. Language Policy, 8, 139–159.

This article offers a clear articulation of how ethnographic methods are employed in the study of language policy to make connections between macro and micro levels of language policy activity. As a heuristic for guiding ethnographic work on language policy, Johnson suggests that such studies should account for the agents, goals, processes, discourses, and sociohistorical contexts of policy.

Wortham, S. (2012). Beyond macro and micro in the linguistic anthropology of education. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 43, 128–137.

The introduction to a special issue, this article summarizes developments in linguistic anthropology and educational research leading up to a call for more complex accounts of social identification than those that rely on macro and micro levels alone. Articles in the issue itself provide further illustrations of such accounts.

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