Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

22 Part 1: Language and Ideology
The effect of contending language ideologies and their infl uences on
the language choices made by children are outlined in Volk and Angelova’s
(2007) study of fi rst-graders’ peer interactions in a dual-language program.
It is worth remarking that the school where the study was conducted
was in only its second year of implementation of the fi rst dual language
program in the state, and that this program was designed to create an
environment where the use of Spanish had a central and crucial academic
role. The design refl ected this, for students spent part of each day in two
classrooms, one taught in English and the other in Spanish, and were
expected to participate in whole-class and small-group activities in both.
These researchers investigated the peer interactions of four girls, two
English dominant and two Spanish dominant on school entry.
Their fi ndings showed that even these comparatively young children
could articulate their (occasionally contradictory) beliefs about language,
that they reported liking both languages, and that they were extremely
sensitive to both the overall dominance of English and the school’s efforts
to imbue Spanish with cultural capital as a medium of instruction. Still,
choice of language for peer activities appeared to be done almost automatically
when students were in the English classroom, while in the
Spanish classroom (where use of Spanish should, similarly, have been the
automatic default because of the program’s design and philosophy), children
often tried to negotiate language choice. Doing so had two effects: it
soon became apparent that students needed overt reminders to use
Spanish, so the teacher appointed one child to be the ‘Spanish police’
during small group work; and it sometimes sidetracked coverage of academic
content as the English speakers tried to get their peers to use English
despite being in the classroom meant to develop Spanish as an academic
language.
Furthermore, the children’s own comments along with the classroom
observations revealed that the students’ ideological constructions of the
two languages were very much emergent phenomena, changing with
their developing language abilities and situational constraints and in
response to their ongoing involvement in the dual-language program.
This insight provides a critical caution to educators interested in language
ideologies as determinants of behavior: ideologies of students (and, we
might surmise, teachers also), although unquestionably affected by the
status of languages in the society at large, are malleable to some degree, so
that the types of interactions and the communicative successes and failures
experienced in school settings can and will contribute to revisions in
an individual’s (and, in this case, to an entire educational program’s) commitment
to using and mastering the languages of import in the environment.
Moreover, it must be remembered that the children showed
heterogeneity in attitudes and behaviors (as was also true with the
Turkish–German children and young adults studied by Queen (2003) and