Afterword
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Afterword Language policy and planning processes in post-colonial Timor-Leste: struggles and alliances within and across scales Feliciano Chimbutane1 Received: 4 September 2020 / Accepted: 22 September 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract The aim of this Afterword is to foreground and discuss some of the key themes emerging from the four studies in this special issue. I first consider the critical ethnographic approach to language policy and planning adopted in the studies, and the attention to language policy processes unfolding on different scales of social and institutional life. This is followed by my reading of the ways the authors present the different actors creating, appropriating, reframing or resisting national and language-in-education policies in Timor-Leste. The last part is devoted to the analysis of discourses and practices of particular social actors taken here as ‘language policy arbiters’ (Johnson and Johnson in Lang Policy 14(3):221–243, 2015). Keywords Language policy and planning · Language-in-education policies · Postcolonial · Timor-Leste · scales
Introduction This special issue on “Developing language and literacy policy in a global age: The case of Timor-Leste” builds on and extends prior transdisciplinary collaboration, along Global South/Global North lines, between Estêvão Cabral, an East Timorese researcher, who works in the field of political history, and Marilyn Martin-Jones, a sociolinguist, who has a primary interest in multilingualism and language policymaking processes (e.g. Cabral and Martin-Jones 2008, 2018). Here, Cabral and Martin-Jones have managed to assemble a special group of authors who have conducted detailed ethnographic research in Timor-Leste and who provide us with highly relevant and up-to-date critical reflexions on language discourses and processes in * Feliciano Chimbutane [email protected] 1
Faculdade de Letras e Ciências Sociais, Universidade Eduardo Mondlane, Av. Julius Nyerere nr. 3453, Campus Principal, 257, Maputo, Mozambique
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Timor-Leste. They have investigated the processes involved in the reintroduction of the Portuguese language in the country and the design and implementation of a new language-in-education policy after Independence in 2002, with Portuguese and Tetum as co-official languages. Espousing this broad unifying approach, the authors shed light on the language policy processes at work in different sectors of education: In the first article, Ildegrada da Costa Cabral focuses on language policy and classroom practices in primary education; in the second article, Alan Carneiro devotes his attention to language ideologies in teacher training in the context of cooperation between Brazil, Portugal and Timor-Leste; in the third article, Trent Newman focuses on language ideologies and practices underpinning the intellectualisation of Tetum in higher education, and, in the final article, Danielle Boon, Edegar da Conceição Savio, Sjaak Kroon and Jeanne Kurvers focus on language policy and practi
