In Farr and Song’s article, they discuss the language ideologies of standardization and monolingualism that underlie bilingual education as well as the “English-only” policies that we have her in the United States. But most importantly, they cover how these policies conflict with the reality of the students’ linguistic and identity practices.
In the introduction, the article describes how language policy itself is comprised.”..Not only of the explicit, written, overt, de jure, official and top-down decision-making about language, but also the implicit, unwritten, covert, de facto, grass-roots and unofficial ideas and assumptions’ about language in a particular culture (650).” They then state why the beliefs about language are inseparable from education. The first reason is that language policy often is carried out through mass education. The second is that education itself is conducted through language.
After reading this, I really tried to make sense of the introduction. It really all makes a lot of sense. When people decided something as big as language policy, it involves the official top-down decision-making. But I believe it is near impossible to have a group of people decide something and not immediately make assumptions that relate to their lives. It does not have to even be about the language, but the particular culture the language is part of may have an influence.
The article then goes on to describe what language ideologies actually are. “Representations, whether explicit or implicit that construe the intersection of language and human beings in a social world are what we mean by language ideology.” They also extend this by saying something that I think is the main driving factor behind a person’s language ideology and this is that language ideologies connect the linguistic with the social, and they do so in the interest of a particular, usually powerful, social position. I would them extend this by saying that I believe people may create a language ideology based more on “social and cultural conceptions of personhood, citizenship, morality, quality and value.” In an educational sense, there are two specific ideologies that exist according to this article: the belief in language standardization, and the belief in language monolingualism.
“Language policy involves not only the macro level of national language planning, including determining what language is to be used and learned in school; it also affects language choices at home and in other community sites. Moreover, language policy not only concerns what languages are to be used where, when, and by whom, but also what choices in grammar, vocabulary, genre, and style are appropriate in particular contexts (654).” Language policy and language ideology cannot be separated. A person’s language ideology will greatly influence, or as in the article, “inform” their belief in the language policy at hand. But interestingly enough, language ideology doesn’t determine language policy. There are often many conflicting ideologies within a given policy.
Wiley (2000) argues that the ideology of English monolingualism in the U.S. served two distinct goals of assimilationist policies: deculturation and acculturation. He describes that the policy for Native Americans was based on deculturaltion to subordinate them by removing their languages and cultures, whereas the policy for European immigrants was based on acculturation for their structural incorporation into the dominant society.
We look back at what happened to the Native Americans as a horrible mistake, something that we should learn from, and something that we should have preserved. Many, many years later we are still repaying them and have actually hurt their culture more than helped them. It is a dark part of American history. Shouldn’t we have learned from this? By trying to wipe out an entire population, it backfired and hurt them and us forever. When deciding on language policies, we should keep this in mind. We should realize that the other languages and the cultures that come with it can only enhance our culture and make it more interesting and colorful and won’t hurt it.
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