he debate on bilingual education in the U.S.: Language ideology as reflected in the practice of bilingual teachers

Shannon, Sheila M.

doi:10.1515/9783110808049.171

Cited by 21 publications

(13 citation statements)

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“…This region is characterized by Spanish maintenance and use in all areas of life. This contrasts with prevalent language use and attitudes in the rest of the country where the use and development of Spanish is seen as a threat to national identity (Huntington 2004;Shannon 1999).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 83%

Power and place

Achugar¹,

Pessoa²

2009

SiC

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This paper explores the role of Spanish in an academic community in Southwest Texas in order to demonstrate how power, history and place affect linguistic attitudes. The changing status of Spanish from being an index of low wage paying jobs to being a marker of membership in an exclusive academic community serves as a case to investigate how power relations and history interact to shape linguistic attitudes of individuals and groups. Members of the Bilingual Creative Writing Graduate Program at the University of Texas, El Paso, were interviewed to identify the prevalent attitudes towards bilingualism, Spanish in the community and Spanish language users. A discourse analysis of the interviews revealed that participants in this community value Spanish use and bilingualism in the academic context, but have mostly negative attitudes towards local varieties of Spanish and monolingual speakers. This study demonstrates the importance of history, power and place in understanding language attitudes as shared evaluations of language users and uses.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 83%

Power and place

Achugar¹,

Pessoa²

2009

SiC

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“…In the U.S. this ideology has been conflated with nationalism to the extent that maintaining a foreign tongue means being backward or even un-American (Wiley 2000). English is seen as a symbol of national identity, pride, unity, support and devotion typical of nationalistic ideology (Billig 1993in Shannon 1999. Clear illustrations of this conflation of ideologies are the success of Ron Unz' initiatives against bilingual education in California, Arizona and Massachusetts, and the legal case in Tennessee against a Mixtec mother who was ordered by a judge to learn English in six months or lose her parenting rights (Los Angeles Times, February 14, 2005).…”

Section: Dominant Language Ideologies In the Usmentioning

confidence: 99%

Counter-hegemonic language practices and ideologies

Achugar¹

2008

SiC

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This article examines how local norms for Spanish use in a multilingual Southwest Texas border setting respond to and contest dominant monolingual ideologies. The analysis focuses on notions of what languages are legitimate for use in the public sphere in this community and on the benefits of engaging in particular communicative practices. The corpus analyzed comes from interviews with key members of the university (president, program director, professor) and from newspaper articles published in the local newspaper. The article shows how institutional actors from the media and education contest dominant monolingual language ideologies by situating these views historically and connecting them to key conceptual metaphors that encapsulate language ideologies. In doing so, these institutional actors challenge national ideologies that construct monolingualism and standard 'English' as the natural and only option connected to social and economic success, offering Spanish and bilingualism as legitimate alternatives.

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“…One example of this more liberal ideology is the bilingual education movement. However, despite its explicit orientation towards multilingualism in society, the bilingual education movement has effectively supported and maintained the ideology of monolingualism, as it has essentially been a means towards the achievement of English monolingualism (Shannon, 1999). That is, bilingual education programmes have largely been designed to provide linguistic minority students with support until they have suf cient command of English to leave their home and community languages behind.…”

Section: Monolingual Ideologies In Multilingual Statesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Literacy, schooling and ideology in a multilingual state

Blackledge

2001

The Curriculum Journal

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In this article I argue that current government policy for teaching literacy in schools in England is part of a broader ideology of homogeneity which is visible in other dominant‐culture institutions. Despite the multilingual nature of England and its schools, the dominant discourse is one which values English at the expense of other languages, leading to the ‘misrecognition’ (Bourdieu, 1998b: 131), by majority and minority language speakers alike, of English as the sole language of symbolic capital. While the first part of this article outlines the monolingual ideology of current literacy policy in schools in England, and locates this in the context of a similar ideology evident in discourses beyond education, I also suggest that this process of symbolic domination is not inevitable. Schools need not be sites of social and cultural reproduction. They can challenge existing relations of power in society, and put in place structures and practices which question and even reverse the coercive relations between majority‐culture schools and minority‐culture communities and their children. I propose some ways forward in the development of structures which can enable schools to become sites of social and cultural transformation, rather than reproduction.

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he debate on bilingual education in the U.S.: Language ideology as reflected in the practice of bilingual teachers

Cited by 21 publications

References 0 publications

Power and place

Power and place

Counter-hegemonic language practices and ideologies

Literacy, schooling and ideology in a multilingual state

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