Language Ideology Change Over Time: Lessons for Language Policy in the U.S. State of Arizona and Beyond

Abstract

In the U.S. state of Arizona, language minority students who are English learners attend schools governed by a restrictive medium of instruction (MOI) language policy (LP). Educators and educational researchers widely agree that effective reforms of this policy are urgently needed (e.g., Arias & Faltis, 2012;Lawton, 2012;Lillie, 2016). Furthermore, several research studies (e.g., D. C. Johnson, 2009;Stritikus, 2003) have shown that the language ideologies held by policy-influential individuals affect the development and implementation of such policies. Thus, Arizona MOI reforms need to be aligned with language ideologies of key stakeholders. To shed light on MOI reform processes in Arizona and internationally, this study resurveyed politically active voters, administrators, and teachers from Fitzsimmons-Doolan (2014) to identify any shifts in their language ideologies between 2010 and 2016, to ascertain how these stakeholders perceive Arizona's educational LP, and to better understand how they relate their language ideologies to their policy perceptions. Results indicate some limited ideological change, key themes of equity, pro-assimilation, and anti-segregation across policy perceptions, and evidence supporting an LP model that moves toward stasis among LP components. The results suggest that efforts to facilitate ideological change grounded in stakeholder experience might be considered in contexts undergoing LP reform.

The Cost of Change: How Ideological Shifts Impact Afghans' Investment in Learning English

“…These can reveal shifts in beliefs about the status and roles of languages in society, especially the acceptance of multilingualism or not in education (Fitzsimmons‐Doolan, 2014). Controlling public language practices is said to enforce language ideologies, which in turn promotes desired language practices (Jaffe, 2011), which explains why new governments often turn to language policy to promote their own ideologies (Fitzsimmons‐Doolan, 2018). The promotion of English as a second language, or over the mother tongue instruction, is said to be accompanied by ideologies that promote English as a form of prestige (Lanza & Woldermariam, 2015), and inevitably, these ideologies that promote English as prestigious, or as economically attractive forms of capital, are usually western in origin (Block, Gray, & Holborow, 2012).…”

Content teachers’ beliefs and attitudes toward working with multilingual learners through integrative approaches

“…Education policies have further marginalized MLs through the monolingual framework (Wiley, 2014;Bacon, 2020) that mandates English-only instruction in many states, shaping teachers' local practices accordingly (Fitzsimmons-Doolan, 2018;Chang-Bacon, 2022). Even bilingual teachers or those who favor bilingualism serve to enact the monolingual practices (Pettit, 2011;García, 2015;Bacon, 2020;Barros et al, 2021;Pontier and Deroo, 2023), inadvertently stigmatizing language practices of non-native speakers of English (Rosa and Burdick, 2016).…”