Since the scope of language policy has expanded beyond its once exclusive focus on top-down structural forces, our analyses of policy texts should embrace complexity, dynamicity and hybridity and shift toward 'ethnography of text' focussing on how fragments of policy texts are imbued with context-specific meanings.
[method sub-strad] Much of contemporary language policy scholarship is characterised by its strong commitment to social critique, that is, the demystification of social injustices, and by the attention it pays to agency in the policy process. This has had a particularly pronounced effect in methodology, as critical ethnographic approaches have become the norm rather than the exception in language policy research. In this talk, I will argue that, since this evolution has led to the scope of the field being expanded beyond its once exclusive focus on top-down structural forces, a rethink of how we approach the analysis of the texts associated with mediating policy is also needed. I will argue that our analytical toolkits must be expanded beyond 'text analysis', a methodological framework which, owing to its grounding in structuralist linguistics, approaches each text as a homogeneous and largely static unit of meaning. Instead, our analyses should seek to uncover the heteroglossia (plurality of voices) and polyphony (plurality of ideologies) that characterise both the policy text, as a product of struggle and negotiation between different actors, and the discourse around it, where the meaningfulness of particular textual fragments is continuously renegotiated. I argue that attention to such complexity, dynamicity and hybridity should be seen as constituting a broader movement away from 'text analysis' and toward 'ethnography of text', focusing on identifying how the social actions mediated by policy texts imbue particular textual fragments with context-specific sets of meanings. In this talk, I will draw on recent research on the use of the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) in language policy in Asia to illustrate why a 'ethnography of text' approach is needed to describe the disparate meanings this broadly used policy instrument attains at different scales.
