Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

24 Part 1: Language and Ideology
Teacher language choice is the focus of Shannon’s (1999) discussion.
Based on ethnographic data gathered in a large southwestern school district
that had been legally enjoined to provide bilingual instruction, most
parents tolerated a situation in which little or no Spanish was actually
used in classrooms. This circumstance affected teacher selection – teachers
with minimal Spanish profi ciency were assigned to bilingual classrooms –
and to instructional processes, which gravitated heavily toward English.
Additionally, she describes a sample practicum lesson in which a bilingual
teacher trainee in a 5th grade classroom conducted a Spanish-only small
group activity somewhat by accident. The trainee subsequently realized
that it had been more effective than the dual-language delivery she had
previously attempted but would, at the same time, require far more deliberate
concentration on use of Spanish for academic purposes than the
master teacher ever modeled. Shannon analyzes this situation as a refl ection
of the societal hegemony of English, a far more pervasive infl uence
than the district’s offi cial ostensibly bilingual language policy in setting
socially constructed parameters for teacher language choices.
Ideologies underlying teaching tasks and materials
Curricular materials, as evidence and models of certain language ideologies,
have also been the focus of recent ideologically informed studies.
These projects may address curricular content, language used in curricular
documents or both. One example of change in curricular content is the
report of an elective class in Chicana literature at a university in a small
city on the Texas–Mexico border in an area where even the local high
school curriculum included few Hispanic authors (Mermann-Joswiak &
Sullivan, 2005). Among other goals, the course instructors (who were also
the researchers) planned the class to expose enrolled students, mostly
Mexican-American but including Euro-Americans, to works of contemporary
authors not typically found in the local secondary school curricula. In
their course projects, students selected poems, participated and analyzed
a local community event and developed a brief survey about languagerelated
opinions. They were then required to share the works with community
members outside the course and bring community responses back
to the course for discussion.
Relevant for this chapter is the fi nding that engagement with these
multiple forms of content and analysis had two effects: it elicited individual
reactions that were personal, often stronger, more expressive and
opinionated than what might be found in more traditional classes; and
importantly, it demonstrated that neither the enrolled students nor the
community members shared a uniform ideological approach to the activities
and their interpretation. Notably, the more numerous Mexican-
American students were not unanimous in their reactions or analyses, but