Browsing by Subject "Language policy"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    “Foreign language activities” in Japanese elementary schools: negotiating teacher roles and identities within a new language education policy
    (2012-12) Horii, Sachiko Yokoi
    In 2008, a new language education policy called "Gaikokugo Katsudou [Foreign Language Activities]" was issued by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sport, Science, and Technology (MEXT) in Japan. Effective 2011, foreign language education became mandatory in all Japanese public elementary schools for the first time. With this dramatic shift in policy, all fifth and sixth graders in public elementary schools must be provided with 35-credit-hours of English activity class per year. This qualitative study documents language policy processes at two elementary schools in Japan--Seto Elementary School , a neighborhood school in a local city area with three Japanese homeroom teachers and Satsuki Laboratory School, an elite, laboratory school in a metro area with a novice, Japanese teacher of English. Drawing on the ethnography of language policy that acknowledges the critical roles that local practitioners play at "the epicenter of the dynamic process of language policy making" (García & Menken, 2010, p. 262), this study examines the core of the policy process, pointing to multiple, local, dynamic, de facto policies that teachers create in their classrooms. In particular, I examine how local teacher identities and their practices interact in class to form their de facto policies. I analyze how the macro-level, socially constructed, imposed, and idealized category of teacher identity in Foreign Language Activities is locally negotiated and reconstructed in teachers' day-to-day discursive practices. My ethnographic and micro-discourse analysis suggests that at Seto Elementary School, the textbook served as a de facto policy that shaped the school's curriculum, lessons, and instruction. The teachers' limited conditions including having absolutely no time to plan lessons with their English-speaking teacher and their low English proficiency were critical factors in their views and practices that did not allow them to explore, access, and make use of their expertise. Although my micro-discourse analysis identified evidence of negotiation in their interpretations and practices of the policy, overall, their exercise of agency remained limited within the top-down policy context. In contrast, at Satsuki Laboratory School, the top-down policy was not dominant but selectively and partially implemented in a teacher's classes. She was given time, space, and language competency to fully exercise her agency in negotiating and recreating the policy while exploring and developing her professional identity and expertise as an English teacher. By providing empirical insight into the dynamic nature of identity construction in interaction, this project reconceptualizes and reconsiders mechanisms of language policy by highlighting the linguistic, cultural, and professional dimensions of local teacher identities in the language policy process.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    There is no nation without a language (Ní tír gan teanga): Language policy and the Irish Dancing Commission
    (2017-01) Farrell, Anna
    This study examines how language is employed to (re)create an Irish national identity through one popular form of non-formal education – Irish dancing. I specifically examine the entangled histories of the Gaelic League and An Coimisiún le Rincí Gaelacha (CLRG), the Irish Dancing Commission dance. Together these two organizations have engaged in an anti-colonial project spanning nearly a century that links the Irish language, dance, and an idealized Irish identity. This year (2016) is the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising, the event that marked the beginning of the successful Irish independence movement. In light of this anniversary, language issues are at the forefront of many peoples’ minds. This dissertation considers to what extent the articulation between language and dance continues in Ireland today, and how the role of language and dance in (re)creating an idealized Irish identity has changed from an anti-colonial project to one that seeks to reify Irish national identity in an era of globalization. Furthermore, I argue for a renewed focus on non-formal education in the field of Comparative and International Development Education, specifically the role that non-formal education can play in identity formation and fomenting language attitudes.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Towards a discourse of inclusion? Tensions between policy and practice in rural Bolivia
    (2015-12) Arnal, Martina
    This multi-leveled case study examines how local actors, such as administrators and professors from higher education institutions, and rural, college students make sense of Bolivian educational policy. The contentious relationship between neo-liberal and anti-neoliberal mechanisms for providing poverty alleviation are being played out in Bolivian higher education, amid diverse youth. This study explores how educational policy, in the context of neocolonialism and globalization, may open up or close implementational spaces (Hornberger & Cassels-Johnson, 2007) for rural college students from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds, across social class, gender and ethnic differences. Through vertical case study and discourse analysis methodologies, this study taps the perspectives of critical stakeholders and ‘youngest policymakers’ (McCarty, T. et al., 2011), within a wider context, highlighting the transversality of global ‘flows’ of policies (Appadurai, 1996) in postcolonial contexts. This study examines ethnic identity and assimilation in a dynamic context where marginalized students are negotiating their own identity (Deaux, 2006) as well as how these disparities are resisted, co-opted, and framed around a higher education context (Arrueta & Avery, 2011; Burman, 2012). The study attempts to examine the perceived role of language education policy in this postcolonial space (Canagarajah, 2011) of tension and possibility. Additionally, this study builds on critical analysis of discourses of language endangerment (Duchêne & Heller, 2007) in a lesser-known context such as Bolivia. Through examination of key ideas within contemporary language policy discourse, linguistic diversity is situated within a wider discourse. Thus, by examining globalizing discourse in a developing society by using an approach that reflects local realities and attempts to “explore how globalizing processes intersect and interconnect people and policies that come into focus at different scales” (Vavrus & Bartlett, 2014, p. 2), this study proposes a novel approach. Unlike past research in this context, this study takes a contextualized approach to examining bi-multilingual, intercultural education in Bolivia in its local, national and global dimensions. This study significantly takes into account the wider historical, political and social spaces that multilingual, intercultural educational policy occupies within Bolivian society.