Proceedings of the - British Association for Applied Linguistics

8
Introduction
31
Are Complex Tenses Really Real?
Martin Edwardes
Re-thinking practices in language policy
research: From ‘policy versus practice’ to
‘policy within practice’
Florence Bonacina-Pugh
The University of Edinburgh
florencebonacina@gmail.com
As the field of language policy (LP) research has recently moved towards
ethnography (e.g. McCarty, 2011), the study of actual language practices
has become a central aspect of LP research. For instance, practices are
analysed to see how policies are implemented or resisted on the ground.
From this standpoint, practices are systematically analysed vis-à-vis the
policy prescribed by language managers. This results in understanding
practices as being separate from policy. In this paper I take a different stand
and, building on Spolsky (2004), I argue that policy needs not be distinct
from practice and that, in fact, there is a policy within practices; what I call
elsewhere a ‘practiced language policy’ (see also Bonacina, 2010;
Submitted).
Data and context
I draw on a corpus of interaction audio-recorded in an induction classroom
for newly-arrived migrant children in France. In the French educational
system, the LP is strictly French monolingual. In order to receive French
language support, newcomers have to attend an induction classroom upon
arrival. As a consequence, induction classrooms are highly heterogeneous
contexts. In the target classroom, pupils were aged between six and twelve
years old and spoke a total of eight different languages.
Policy versus practice
In the corpus under study, some instances of language choice and
alternation acts can be interpreted with reference to the French monolingual
LP prescribed by the educational system. Consider, for instance, extract 8.1
below (key transcription conventions can be found at the end of the paper):