ABSTRACT
With roots going back to the 1980s, the ethnography of language policy has gathered significant momentum in the past decade. Canagarajah (2006) charts the rationale, development, and contributions of ethnographic methods in language policy. He highlights the potential of ethnographic research to provide knowledge on specific situations and communities as a starting point for language planning and policy (LPP) model-building, to point to cases of language planning from the bottom up (cf. Hornberger, 1996), and to counteract the unilateral hold of dominant paradigms and ideologies in LPP. He reviews findings of early ethnographic LPP studies which illuminated paradoxical tensions within communities (Hornberger, 1988, on Quechua and bilingual education in Peru) or across LPP levels (Davis, 1994, on multilingual education in Luxembourg), local classroomlevel resistance to official LPP (Canagarajah, 1995, 1997; Heller & Martin-Jones, 2001), the power of community involvement in bilingual education (Freeman, 1998), and the paradoxical unintended consequences (Jaffe, 1999, on Corsica), positive side-effects (King, 2001, on Quichua in Ecuador), or covert underlying motivations (Schiffman, 2003, on Tamil in Singapore) in educational LPP. The present volume comes on the heels of an accelerating trajectory of ethnographic studies of LPP, including three recent international edited volumes on reclaiming the local in language policy (Canagarajah, 2005), imagining multilingual schools (García, Skutnabb-Kangas, & Torres-Guzmán, 2006), and schools saving Indigenous languages (Hornberger, 2008). Other recent work includes, in the UK, Arthur (2004) on the multilingual repertoires of young Somali girls in a community-led Somali literacy course in Liverpool, where policies accord neither recognition nor support to immigrant languages; and Creese (2004) on how the UK policy of mainstreaming bilingual students in English classrooms plays out in the actual classroom practices of six Turkish/English bilingual teachers working alongside subject area mainstream teachers in three London secondary schools. In Tanzania, Blommaert (2005a) accounts for the seemingly contradictory successes and failures of the promotion of Swahili as national language and medium of instruction by casting an ethnographic eye on how linguistic resources are actually employed, while Wedin (2005) sheds light on how Tanzanian language policy and language ideologies play out in five primary
schools of northwest Tanzania, showing how patterns of classroom language use position Swahili and English as high-status languages while devaluing Rumyambo, the local language. In India, Cowie’s (2007) ethnography in an accent training center focuses on staff interpretation and trainee responses to accent training policies aimed at ridding speakers of mother tongue influence, while Ramanathan (2005) carried out an eight-year ethnographic study of English-Gujarati language policies and practices in three higher education institutions in the city of Ahmedabad, exploring how the English-vernacular “divide” stratifies people, but also how people resist and counter such policies and practices (see also Ramanathan, this volume). In the US, Varghese (2004) looks ethnographically at a three-session professional development series for bilingual teachers in a large northeastern city, revealing how contestation of language policy and bilingual teachers’ roles occurs among the teachers and teacher educators themselves, and not only in the wider public debate. Several studies turn ethnographic lenses on how California’s Proposition 227, “English Language Education for Immigrant Children,” passed in 1999, has played out in classrooms, schools, and school districts: Stritikus (2002) and Wiese (2001) analyze the agentive role that teachers played in responding to California’s Proposition 227, sometimes resisting the English-only focus to meet the needs of their classrooms, while Baltodano (2004) explores southern California Latino parents’ changing attitudes toward bilingual education in the wake of Proposition 227 and ensuing discourses equating bilingual education with learning disability. Manyak (2006) shows how the two focal teachers in his study effectively resisted Proposition 227’s monolingual mandate within the limits of their grade 1-2 classrooms, using and explicitly supporting students’ use of Spanish, creating classroom spaces where Spanish was held in equally high esteem with English, and thereby enhancing their students’ biliteracy development; conversely, Olson (2007) finds that the two bilingual grade 2 teachers in her study organized their Spanish language arts instructional units around the state’s English-language SAT-9 assessment test, prioritizing direct instruction and workbook activities over more robust literacy practices (see Combs et al., this volume, for parallel studies of Arizona’s Proposition 203).1
