ABSTRACT
This chapter examines power within language policy processes: who has the right, or is positioned as having the right, to control the creation, interpretation, and appropriation of language policy? Critical approaches (Tollefson, 2006) have focused on the use of macro language policy to marginalize minority languages and minority language users, while ethnographic work (Hornberger & Johnson, 2007, 2011) has tended to focus on the power of agents (e.g., teachers) in language policy processes. This chapter offers a balance between these two approaches. Although the ability of macro policies and discourses to hegemonically constrain language use in schools and communities is an accepted tenet within the field, how this works is not always well documented. What is required is a multi-layered analysis, focusing in particular on how language policies are interpreted in different ways across different contexts, with appropriation influenced by local policies, discourses, and ideologies. In a discussion of language policy layering, Blommaert (in press) notes the “number of hegemonies that co-occur in a social event … with macro-hegemonies (e.g., the official language policy) playing into and against meso-and micro-hegemonies (e.g., one’s own ways of organizing practices, or more local pressures on performance).” This chapter examines these “local pressures”: how particular elements in speech events position certain educational agents as experts, or arbiters, of language policy while, at the same time, marginalizing others as mere receivers or implementers of policy.
