Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

170 Part 2: Language and Society
In electorally open societies, both voice and vote procedures grant citizens
infl uence over the direction of most kinds of public policy, despite the
excessive power of some interests, unequal access to and infl uence in various
mass media and prospects of manipulation and misrepresentation.
A more open understanding of LP opens space for practitioner refl ection
and teacher voices, invited into policy conversations. This will demand
recognition of the experiential immediacy and knowledge produced by the
acts of negotiating languages/literacies in the course of teaching. Teacher
narratives and accounts of language development and socialisation expose
the role of teaching as latent policy making. In many settings today, there is a
notable absence of the voice of the authentic experience of LP in action, and
this constitutes a de facto withdrawal of legitimacy from public policy.
However, the teacher voice as the prime example of enacted LP must be
joined to the voice and interests of researchers, policy experts and communities
as the main collection of interests involved. The pooled perspectives
of these categories of policy interest would produce more democratic
practices of LP formulation. Teachers’ unique proximity to language development
and language problems should considerably increase their credibility
and prominence in debates about language as a public resource.
Teacher perspectives can lend authenticity, experience, immediacy and
validated encounter, the fl avour of enacted LP. Teachers can enter LP conversations
as practitioners and performers of ongoing language socialisation
and policy, rather than recipients of mandates from outside.
Public texts of policy are the solidifi ed and already decided form of LP.
Public debate is the ongoing, discursive consideration of future LP. In their
performance role, teachers enact past policy and make continuing LP in
activities of language development and socialisation. An activity-centred
approach to LP allows analysts to conceptualise the processes of planned
language change in a richer depiction of how language use intersects with
teaching and how these shape the directions of the code and content of
language. In turn this will allow practitioners greater points of intervention
in public debates about language rights and opportunities, implications
of multilingualism and the communication effects of new
technologies. All these acknowledge the wider range of roles teachers and
teaching play and contribute towards a more just and democratic kind of
LP. The new kind of LP imagined here also expands the number of agents
involved and the modes of participation various players can have in LP.
These should not obscure the reality that organised interests constrain
more democratic language futures as the forces against language rights in
times of anxiety are many and powerful. These forces often seek to convert
teachers, and teaching, simply into instruments of policy implementation,
constrained by assessment regimes, tight syllabus designs, and
employment practices that limit teachers’ autonomy and professional
responsiveness.