Language Ideologies in Canadian Print Newspapers

Vessey, Rachelle

doi:10.1057/978-1-137-53001-1_4

Cited by 7 publications

(23 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…Combined, the references to French alongside English indicate explicit bilingual ideologies whereby the status of the two official languages is naturalized. In contrast, although English is mentioned less frequently, its role is often implied; this normative English basis in Canada is what Vessey (2016) has called "anglonormativity," relating to her findings that monolingualism and predispositions toward English underpin media texts across Canada. Finally, while the cultural contributions of other groups are noted in the document, the languages associated with these groups-if these are mentioned at all-are designated for home use by unspecified individuals.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Jumping Through Hoops in the Canadian Immigration System: A Critical View of the Immigrant's Journey to Citizenship

2022

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Language assessment for citizenship is a ubiquitous enforced and enacted policy in several developed countries (e.g., Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and the Netherlands, to name a few). In this regard, language testers have expressly argued that this practice enacts injustice for and adds hurdles to marginalized immigrant groups (McNamara & Shohamy, 2009; Shohamy, 2009). Nevertheless, language proficiency tests remain a critical, high‐stakes criterion in evaluating immigrants' permanent residence and naturalization applications. To this end, language tests used for immigration and citizenship purposes are often aligned with widely recognized language frameworks such as the Canadian Language Benchmarks (Chen & Flasko, 2020) and the Common European Framework of Reference (Lim, Geranpayeh, Khalifa, & Buckendahl, 2013). In turn, these alignment studies idealize, in subtle ways, new Canadians with language proficiency requirements that would make them worthy of permanent residence or citizenship. Knowledge of society tests plays an essential role in immigrants' journey to citizenship and can also be considered tests of reading proficiency. This study focuses on the enacted Canadian language policy for prospective immigrants and citizens, adopting a corpus‐assisted discourse analytic approach (Taylor & Marchi, 2018) to the study guide for the Canadian citizenship test (Discover Canada: The rights and responsibilities of citizenship). A primary focus is examining how official and nonofficial languages are represented within this document. The findings highlight some of the problematic assumptions that underpin the use of monolingual constructs in tests encountered in the journey to permanent residence and Canadian citizenship.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Jumping Through Hoops in the Canadian Immigration System: A Critical View of the Immigrant's Journey to Citizenship

2022

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“…Total 71 documents were collected (54 from UNESCO and 17 from Ministry of Federal Education and Professional Training website). Using Vessey’s (2013) strategy of core query term (CQT), documents were manually searched for CQT “language”. This step ensured that only the documents that potentially had a discourse on language-in-education were selected for the corpus, while documents that did not contain the word “language” were excluded.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The frequency analysis is meaningful when interpreted as a reflection of the users’ knowledge of discourse norms (Stubbs, 2001). In ideology research, word and phrase frequency may indicate the typicality of topics and how they are discussed (Vessey, 2013). Vessey (2017) argues that high, low, and statistically significant frequency can assist in identifying and exploring ideology in a corpus.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This evaluative polarity is known as semantic prosody or discourse prosody. Similarly, “semantic preference” reveals with which category of other words a search word frequently occurs (Mautner, 2016; Vessey, 2013). For example, Baker (2006) concluded that the term refugees had frequent occurrences with numbers and phrases such as more and more ; therefore, she concluded that the word had a semantic preference of quantification.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Corpus Assisted Critical Discourse Analysis of Pakistan’s Language Education Policy Documents: What are the Existing Language Ideologies?

Khan

Zaki

2022

Sage Open

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Language education policies contain discourses that have language ideologies embedded within them. This study explores the language ideologies in official language education policy documents of Pakistan from 2000 to 2020. Using Corpus Assisted Critical Discourse Analysis techniques, a 1.28 million-word-corpus was generated from 32 policy documents collected from official websites of UNESCO and the Ministry of Federal Education and Professional Training, Pakistan. The corpus analysis of frequency, collocation, and MI significance values were utilized to find out the typicality of topics and semantic preferences, while the concordance analysis revealed discourse prosody around the languages mentioned in the corpus. Moreover, seven documents were downsampled through dispersion plot. Discourse Historical Analysis was carried out on these documents based on discursive strategies of argumentation, predication, and perspectivization with reference to intertextuality and interdiscursivity. The findings show that English and to some extent Urdu occupy the ideological space related to education. The local languages were discussed in positive light, but they were marginalized in educational ideological space. The analysis also showed that the policies had underlying monoglossic ideology that can be seen having tolerance-oriented and expediency-oriented policy ideologies for local languages. This implies that the official policies of Pakistan marginalized the local languages in the discourse of language education. These findings invite policymakers to bring the local languages in the ideological space of education and introduce high level of ideological uniformity, consistency and goal setting for English, Urdu, and local/indigenous languages in the language-in-education policies of Pakistan that matches, captures and promotes the linguistic diversity in Pakistan.

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“…2 Inter alia, our reluctance to do so is based on the fact that there is a growing number of corpusassisted discourse studies which use quantitative corpus-linguistic procedures alongside qualitative data analyses to investigate language ideologies (e.g., Vessey 2016;McEntee-Atalianis & Vessey 2020;Kircher & Kutlu 2023). By contrast, language attitudes have also been studied on the basis of qualitative data (e.g., Hundt et al 2015;Karatsareas 2018;Leimgruber 2019).…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evaluative reactions to minority languages and their varieties: Evidence from new speakers of West Frisian

Kircher¹,

Kutlu²,

Vellinga³

2022

Preprint

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This is the first study to demonstrate a systematic link between (1) attitudes towards minority languages and (2) ideologies regarding the standardised varieties of minority languages that tend to be taught to new speakers – that is, individuals who are acquiring a language outside the home, typically later on in life. A questionnaire was used to elicit new speakers’ (n=264) attitudes towards West Frisian and their ideological evaluations of its standardised variety. The results revealed that status-related attitudes correlate with ideological evaluations in terms of anonymity, and solidarity-related attitudes correlate with ideological evaluations in terms of authenticity. The paper argues that more comprehensive insights can be gained if the different ontological and epistemological positions typically associated with attitudes and ideologies research are reconciled. Moreover, the Frisian context exemplifies the important implications that new speakers’ attitudinal and ideological evaluations have for language planning that aims to promote minority language revitalisation.

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Language Ideologies in Canadian Print Newspapers

Cited by 7 publications

References 27 publications

Jumping Through Hoops in the Canadian Immigration System: A Critical View of the Immigrant's Journey to Citizenship

Jumping Through Hoops in the Canadian Immigration System: A Critical View of the Immigrant's Journey to Citizenship

Corpus Assisted Critical Discourse Analysis of Pakistan’s Language Education Policy Documents: What are the Existing Language Ideologies?

Evaluative reactions to minority languages and their varieties: Evidence from new speakers of West Frisian

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