Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

30 Part 1: Language and Ideology
languages (Quechua and Spanish for one; Aymara and Spanish for the
other), but also, notably, of their life-long awareness of the discrimination
experienced by them and others who spoke the minority languages, paralleling
McCarty’s (2002) accounts of the Navajo educators who founded a
pioneering bilingual community school. Through participation in the special
master’s degree program, these two participants and others went
through a process of re-evaluation of the value of their Indigenous languages
and growing recognition that they were becoming far better able
to articulate the local and national value of their bilingualism, important
for external audiences, as well as create curricular opportunities and a
favorable educational environment in which fellow teachers and younger
learners could learn in and through Indigenous languages. As the researchers
observe, the master’s degree program helped these educators identify
and expand ‘layered transnational ideological and implementational
spaces’ (2007: 525) necessary to realize the goals of genuine personal and
societal bilingual education.
Educational Language Ideologies in An Era of Global
Communication
Investigations such as those included here refl ect the dimensions of historicity,
materiality and evidence of reproducibility in actions and artifacts
that Blommaert specifi ed for ideologically driven research. Nevertheless,
it would be too simple to say that educators must attend to sociocultural
context and leave it at that, for all such contexts include considerable internal
variability and particularity even when they seem similar to outsiders
(or unrefl ective insiders). Just as language attitudes differ within speech
communities and change over time, so do the ideologies latent and explicit
in sociocultural contexts. Community language ecologies generate, direct
and constrain language and literacy acquisition, maintenance and ongoing
support. Contact situations even within relatively circumscribed geographic
locations reveal a range of language ideologies that correspond to
other social divisions and refl ect variations in individual, family and other
group experiences. Ideological variation and contestation is the norm,
whether we consider varieties of English, Chinese, Navajo or Spanish, or
the full panoply of contact situations around the world. Furthermore, the
continuing pressures and processes of communication in a globalized era
create access to multiple forms of language inside and outside school settings.
These new forms of communication can refl ect and convey ideologies
with the potential to inspire or alienate learners and teachers.
Educators who appreciate the power, scope and latent contradictions elucidated
here and in other chapters of this book can, as committed individuals
and colleagues, take up the challenge of deconstructing and
reconstructing the linguistic ideologies that surround their efforts. Such