Analyzing Language Policy and Social Identification Across Heterogeneous Scales

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 twoscale 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 macroas 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.

The Language Policy of Placement Tests for Newcomer English Learners

“…In this New York case and in many other contexts worldwide, researchers of language policy have examined how the testing mechanism not only enacts but often becomes the default or de facto language policy and education policy, driving curricular decisions and a wide range of educational practices (Shohamy, 2014; Spotti, 2013). The field of language policy (and its subfield, language education policy) increasingly has focused on how particular polices are taken up or enacted by participants in everyday situations (King & De Fina, 2010); this work often requires researchers to engage in discourse analysis or other qualitative research approaches (see Mortimer & Wortham, 2015, for an overview).…”

The policy and policing of language in schools

“…Accordingly, it resonates with the aims of critical literacies and critical applied linguistics more broadly, in 'connecting language to broader political concerns' (Pennycook 2001:10) and tracing how power is distributed across society. All policy levels, decisions, and arbiters are dynamic and heterogenous, taking a wide range of forms that result in unpredictable and multilayered interactions that can change over time (Mortimer & Wortham 2015), and so the 'macro, meso and micro' level distinctions are inevitably simplified and 'convenient' labels rather than denoting delineated boundaries (Johnson 2015:171). Applied to the educational contexts that bear relevance to this article, the first level is the macro-level-national policy in the form of government discourse, curriculum documents, standardised assessments, and marking criteria.…”

Revisiting Americanist Arguments and Rethinking Scale in Linguistic Anthropology

“…A number of special issues (Canagarajah and De Costa 2016; Singh and Spotti 2020; Smith and Thompson 2016; Wortham, 2012), review articles (Blommaert 2015; Enfield 2014; Mortimer and Wortham 2015), and an edited volume (Carr and Lempert 2016) have recently explored the analytic potential of viewing social and interactional events in terms of scale. Linguistic anthropologists (e.g., Carr and Lempert 2016) and sociolinguists (e.g., Blommaert 2007 2015; Blommaert et al 2014; Canagarajah and De Costa 2016; Singh and Spotti 2020) often assign credit to the field of geography for scalar metaphors.…”