Language policy Archive

Results in BLC Posts

Lecture by Jose del Valle, March 4, 2009

Everybody’s Usage: The Politics of Grammar in the “Hispanofonia” by Jose del Valle, The Graduate Center, The City University of New York On March 21st, 2007, the Association of Academies of the Spanish Language officially approved the ‘Nueva Gramatica de la Lengua Espanola’.  It is the first approved by all language academies and the first…

Lecture by Elana Shohamy, April 27, 2007

Language Policy in Multilingual Israel: Ideologies, Conflicts, Rights, and Research by Elana Shohamy, (Professor, Tel Aviv University), Graduate School of Education, University of California, Berkeley Language policies, whether on the educational or societal level, are products of political, social, economic, and education ideologies. As such, languages and language policies are used as major symbols of…

Colloquium on U.S. Language Educational Policy, October 21-22, 2005

National Colloquium on U.S. Language Educational Policy by Colloquium sponsored by the UC Consortium for Learning Language and Teaching Fri.Oct.21, 2005: Policies and Practices in Foreign Language Education 9:00-9:30 Opening remarks: Robert Blake, M.R.C. Greenwood, George W. Breslauer 9:30-12:30 Panel: Sally Magnan, Terrence Wiley, June Phillips Moderator: Peter Patrikis 2:00-5:00 Panel: Kees de Bot, Rick…

Lecture by Joseph Lo Bianco, March 8, 2000

Planning Peace and Human Capital: Sri Lankan Language Policy by Joseph Lo Bianco, Chief Executive, Language Australia:  The National Languages and Literacy Institute of Australia, The Australian National University, Canberra The paper will discuss divergent tendencies and initiatives in Sri Lankan language policy.  On the one hand a historically unprecedented policy of national bilingualism involving…

Results in L2 Journal Articles

Critical Pedagogy and L2 Education in the Hemispheric South

Colombia, as other Latin American countries, has not been indifferent to the power of English as the language of business, international communication and academia. Since the end of the 20th century, there has been a great push in the country to promote the teaching of English: language policies have been formulated, ideal levels of proficiency have been established (based on a framework initially designed for European countries), and a national English curriculum for all grade levels has been distributed among schools. The status English has gained competes with that of other foreign languages and more evidently with heritage languages. The field of L2 education in Colombia is experiencing a tension between neoliberal interests of L2 education to support social mobility and the nation’s economic growth and political power (with a focus on linguistic and communicative competence), and alternative academic agendas grounded on the analysis of the influence of social, cultural, and economic factors on L2 teaching and learning, and on learners’ identities. In this article, I use the example of an analysis of L2 education, from a critical pedagogy standpoint, using a Latin American university as a context to depict such a contrast. This University is a place where there is confluence of diverse languages that have different social statuses: English as lingua franca, European and Asian foreign languages, and heritage languages. I argue that critical pedagogy, partly inspired in the work from intellectuals from the Hemispheric South, serves as a framework to guide analyses of power in the relationship between these languages and L1, and the effect of such relations of power on learners’ identities. Also, I contend that by using critical pedagogy in this context, it becomes transformed, nurtured, as it overlaps and dialogues with other knowledges developed in the Hemispheric South.

Space and Language Learning under the Neoliberal Economy

Neoliberalism, as an ideology that valorizes and institutionalizes market-based freedom and individual entrepreneurship, derives from the logic of highly advanced capitalism, and thus must be understood in relation to the material conditions of our capitalist economy. One such material condition is space. However, the intersection of space and neoliberalism ...