Researching Historical Perspectives on Language, Education and Ideology
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RESEARCHING HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES ON LANGUAGE, EDUCATION AND IDEOLOGY
INTRODUCTION
This article considers research on language ideologies and the relevance of this work for educational contexts. To be sure, the amount of theorizing and empirical investigation on the topic of language ideologies published just over the past several decades is substantial; therefore, I will focus only on particular aspects of this topic which relate to education and the social processes, relations, and especially social hierarchies which are reflected in and produced through ideologies of language. In doing so, I will have to leave out much of the theoretical work from the literatures of anthropology, critical theory, philosophy, political science, sociolinguistics, cultural studies, among other areas that could be cited. As Woolard and Schieffelin (1994, pp. 55–56) point out, ideologies of language ‘are not only about language. Rather, such ideologies envision and enact links of language to group and personal identity, to aesthetics, to morality, and to epistemology.’ Language (and languages) are not simply ‘conveyer belts’ for transmitting information between human interactants; rather, they are complex systems which perform a number of social functions, including signaling who we are (i.e., information about where we were born or raised, how much education we have had, our social skills, the group(s) we wish to be identified with, and so on). One of the primary socializing environments in most societies is formal schooling. Schools are places where young children are taught the ‘correct,’ usually dominant ‘standard,’ language, where they may come into contact with students from different cultural and/or linguistic backgrounds, and in multicultural and multilingual settings, they are likely to begin to develop identities which include an awareness of the relative social status of the language(s) they use (or do not use). If the child’s home language variety is the same as that spoken and written at school, the transition from home to school with regard to linguistic identity is not usually a problem; however, when the home variety is substantially different from the school variety, and the home variety is stigmatized as ‘non standard’ or deficient, the mismatch can lead to problems. The assumption that the ‘standard’ variety of the dominant (often national or regional) language is ‘better’ than, more ‘logical’ than, K. A. King and N.H. Hornberger (eds), Encyclopedia of Language and Education, 2nd Edition Volume 10: Research Methods in Language and Education, 41–54. #2008 Springer Science+Business Media LLC.
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THOMAS RICENTO
and more ‘pure’ than the ‘non standard’ variety is an example of one of the most ubiquitous and powerful language ideologies around the world. E A R LY D E V E L O P M E N T S
Questions surrounding language are almost never exclusively about language, per se. They are very often concerned with identities, both ascribed and achieved, in particular sociohistorical contexts. Scholars have identified the rise
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