Abstract Summary
Use of fluid language practices in classroom discourse in the Global South is often contrasted with monoglossic policies. Using a Decolonial lens this paper focuses on the impact of language ideologies on literacy practices and written text production of emergent bilingual children, inviting us to re-imagine possibilities for schooled literacy.
Abstract :
The understanding of language as socially, culturally, politically and historically situated sets of resources (Heller, 2007; Blommaert and Rampton, 2011), and as part of a multimodal repertoire for meaning-making is no longer novel. However, this heteroglossic view of language has had little impact on officially sanctioned language and literacy practices in education, whether at the level of language policy and curricula, learning materials or classroom pedagogy. Framed by Decolonial theory, this presentation explores how certain kinds of normativity, including the notion of ‘pure’, fixed, named languages and of Anglonormativity, or the expectation that children should be proficent in a standardised version of English and are deficient if not, shape officially sanctioned language and literacy policy and pedagogy. While far from legitimized, the widespread use of fluid language practices in classroom discourse in the Global South is well documented. Less explored is the impact of language ideologies on literacy practices and written text production. Using the tools of linguistic ethnography, I focus on the literacy practices emergent bilingual children are engaged with firstly in a formal classroom setting, and secondly in an out of school holiday programme. The tensions between translanguaging, or fluid, heterogenous language and literacy practices and fixed, monoglossic norms are explored in the pedagogical practices and written texts produced in these different sites. The paper considers the possibilities for unravelling of colonial, monoglossic approaches to language in education policy that continue to shape school language policy and sanctioned literacy practices. Finally, it addresses the question of what a decolonial approach to language in education policy might look like.
