Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

16 Part 1: Language and Ideology
accordance with functional attributes of interest. Developed as a method
for characterizing the linguistic features of texts serving various communicative
purposes, it can also then be used to determine degrees of linguistic
similarities and differences between types of texts. These similarities
and differences can, in turn, be interpreted as an indicator of content or
topic similarities, where similar topics are denoted by the same or different
patterns of lexical and grammatical choice.
Key word analysis (Baker, 2006; Johnson & Ensslin, 2006) represents a
subtype of corpus-based approaches that pursues analysis of frequency
of thematically relevant content words (words referring to a specifi c
semantic fi eld; for example in a text on water-related topics, relevant content
words might be boat, ocean or rain; these are contrasted with words
such as of, and and it, which are function words). This is the approach
taken by Fitzsimmons-Doolan (2009) in a corpus-based study of the
degree of relationship, or co-referentiality, between streams of discussion
in the state of Arizona related to two topics relevant to language ideologies,
(1) immigration and (2) language minority education, including
three related subtopics: (a) Offi cial English legislation and practices,
including a 2000 ballot proposition that mandated English as medium of
instruction for K-12 learners, (b) developments in a court case, Flores v.
Arizona, that had been prosecuted in the federal courts since 1992 and at
the time of the research was under appeal and (c) English immersion. The
two corpora for investigation, one for immigration and one for language
minority education, were constructed by collecting articles related to all
the above topics appearing in three newspapers published in the two
largest cities in the state, one from Phoenix, generally characterized as a
conservative political environment, and two from Tucson, usually
described as politically liberal, between 1999 and 2007. These corpora
were then searched to identify the 100 most frequent key terms in each
one, with an expectation that similarity of lexical choice would mean that
newspaper discourse on these two topics was related. Counter to predictions
based on the pluralist position often proposed by applied linguists
and others interested in matters of language rights, there was almost no
overlap in key terms between these two streams of discourse; only six
words (including e.g. Arizona, federal and law/s) overlapped, and those
words had to do with comments on jurisdictional concerns and policy in
general rather than any specifi c aspect of either immigration or language
education. The researcher concludes that this analysis refutes the notion
that coverage of language minority issues and matters related to immigration
represent in any way the same stream of discourse; rather, fi ndings
are consonant with prior empirical research documenting diverse
rationales underlying singular policy directions, a reality demanding
revision of some of the more sweeping pluralist theoretical narratives
and requiring further research.