ABSTRACT
This chapter argues for ethnographic research on language policy, with reference to one particular sociolinguistic and historical context: language revitalization in Wales. Wales is often cited as an example of successful language revitalization, and research across the humanities and social sciences has highlighted the role played by education in this process. Historians have traced the broad shifts in the status and value of the language since the mid-20th century, identifying the key roles played by different social actors and agencies during critical moments of change (e.g., Evans, 2000). Geographers have made productive and extensive use of language data from the ten-yearly census to track the distribution of Welsh speakers across different regions of Wales and to document significant increases, in recent decades, in the reporting of knowledge of Welsh among younger respondents (e.g., Aitchison & Carter, 2004; Colin Williams, 2000). Sociologists working from a critical perspective have analyzed the social, institutional, and ideological conditions for language reproduction in different regions of Wales (e.g., Williams & Morris, 2000). Educationalists and language planners have engaged in detailed analyses of the constraints on language policy implementation and on the development of bilingual and Welshmedium education in particular local sites, in different sectors of education, and in particular areas of the curriculum (e.g., Baker & Jones, 2000; D. V. Jones, 2000; Lewis, 2008; Roberts & Williams, 2003; Stevens, 1996; Cen Williams, 2000). Social psychologists and sociolinguists have documented shifts in language attitudes and ethnolinguistic vitality and, most recently, have provided illuminating insight into the ways in which new Welsh speakers, who are acquiring Welsh at school, orient to and use the language (e.g., Coupland et al., 2005; Musk, 2006). The disciplinary scope of research undertaken thus far in Wales is impressive, but what is striking is that there is no established tradition of ethnographic research related to bilingual and Welsh-medium education. While there has been rigorous and insightful ethnographic research in other areas of Welsh social life – for example, Kathryn Jones’s (2000a) study of the literacy practices of farmers in North East Wales – ethnographic research in educational settings has been slow to develop. This stands in sharp contrast to the situation of other regional languages in Europe, such as Catalan and Corsican, where ethnographic and
discourse analytic research (e.g., Jaffe, 1999, 2007, this volume; Cots & Nussbaum, 1999; Nussbaum, 1990; Vila i Moreno, 1996) has made a significant contribution to our understanding of the particularities of the language revitalization processes that have been unfolding in education in recent decades in those contexts. We know from the research in Catalonia and Corsica, and, indeed, from two decades of ethnographic research on language education in other minority language and Indigenous settings in Africa, North and South America, and New Zealand (e.g., Heller, 2006; Hornberger, 1988; Hornberger & Chick, 2001; King, 2001; May, 2004; McCarty, 2002) that ethnography, combined with close analysis of everyday talk, enables us to capture the specific local ways in which language policies and new forms of language education are made and remade, by teachers and students, in the daily routines of educational life. Ethnography also gives us insights into the ways in which particular policies or language programs are interpreted by teachers, students, and parents, and how these understandings guide their actions. In addition, once a particular language policy has been implemented, ethnography can illuminate the consequences for those most closely involved. As Canagarajah (2006) has noted, ethnography reveals “the ways in which what is on paper shapes everyday life and interpersonal relations” (p. 158). Thus, as well as documenting and analyzing the broad shifts in language policy in Wales and the changing patterns of Welsh language acquisition and use, we also need to narrow our research lens and move closer to local processes of language revitalization and how it is played out in different sites. Along with other contributors to this volume, I emphasize the need to view the making of language policies and the implementation of different arrangements for language education as situated social and cultural practices – as McCarty (2004) puts it, “as modes of human interaction, negotiation, and production mediated by relations of power” (2004, p. 72). Through this contribution to the volume, I also emphasize that the social and cultural practices associated with changes in language policy and forms of language education provision involve a range of literacy practices, in different languages and increasingly diverse ways of using and producing texts. I therefore argue for giving closer scrutiny to the bilingual or multilingual literacy practices that come into play in language revitalization contexts, and to the new ways of reading, writing, and using texts that can be observed in such contexts. By presenting ethnographic research that I recently conducted in a bilingual education context in Wales, I will illustrate what I see as the advantages that accrue from incorporating a literacy dimension into our studies of language revitalization.
