Proceedings of the - British Association for Applied Linguistics

33
Are Complex Tenses Really Real?
Martin Edwardes
medium. Clearly, this choice of medium is not in line with the French
monolingual LP of the school. If these two pupils had been orienting
towards the LP of the school, then only the use of French would have been
seen as normative and the use of Spanish would have been oriented to as
deviant. Crucially, the fact that a Spanish medium is seen as normative
indicates that the two pupils do not orient towards the LP of the school.
Rather, they orient towards another policy according to which the use of
Spanish is allowed. I argue that this other policy ought to be found within
practices and have called it elsewhere a ‘practiced language policy’ (see
also Bonacina, 2010; Submitted).
In brief, this paper set out to show that language choice practices in the
classroom cannot be interpreted systematically with regards to the LP
prescribed by the school. Sometimes, classroom participants use mediums
of interaction different than the one prescribed by the school policy without
it being seen as inappropriate. This indicates that they orient to another
policy (a practiced language policy) according to which the use of these
other mediums are appropriate. Therefore, I argue that in LP research,
practices should not be seen simply as a place where top-down policies are
either implemented or resisted but also as a place where new policies can
be found, that may differ from the policy prescribed by language managers.
Key transcription conventions
Black font Talk uttered in French
Black bold font Talk uttered in a language other than French
Grey font English translation of talk uttered in French
Grey bold font English translation of talk uttered in a language other
than French
References
F. Bonacina (Under rev). Researching ‘practiced language policies’: Insights from
Conversation Analysis. Language Policy.
F. Bonacina (2010). A Conversation Analytic approach to practiced language policies:
The example of an induction classroom for newly-arrived children in France.
Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh,
United-Kingdom.
F. Bonacina & J. Gafaranga (2011). ‘Medium of instruction’ vs. ‘medium of
classroom interaction’: Language choice in a French complementary school