Conference Agenda

A lengthy educational research history documents the devastating impacts of subtractive language policies, both explicit and implicit, on language minority students, families, and communities, often rendering their languages, cultures, voices, and strengths invisible and silenced. This paper addresses the U.S. context where a mostly de facto language policy operates in schools, often resulting in the effective eradication of children’s languages and cultures. Even when more additive policies emerge, as with the California English Learner Roadmap, individual districts and schools are not required to abide by its provisions. The adoption of policies that are supportive of multilingualism is dependent on decisions made at local levels, and even when local policy makers are supportive of multilingual education, there’s often an incomplete understanding of the critical role of home language in healthy identity development.

This paper addresses this issue through an experiential lens, relying on first-person accounts of the impacts of subtractive language policies on the social, emotional, academic, and linguistic identity development of three generations of informants and on published testimonies of others. These accounts affirm the resulting pervasive and long-lasting negative impacts that one informant characterized as “brutal linguistic and cultural amputations” that no amount of good intentions on the part of well-meaning educators can fully repair. As reported by informants, these harms, often invisible to the outside observer, permeate their lives and the manner in which their identities unfold, to the detriment not only of the individuals themselves, but their families and communities as well. The emerging implications for how these policies can and should be transformed, especially as they impact schooling, point to the need for more humane approaches co-designed by those who will be most impacted by them and grounded in the significant research on the role of language and culture in healthy identity development.

Written language policies in schools and educational organisations are not yet the norm in most countries, but most educational institutions have an implicit language policy that drives decisions about how languages are used and which languages are formally taught and assessed (Helot & O Laoire, 2011). In many English medium schools, a policy exists that outlines provisions for students learning the school language (EAL/ELL), but is not inclusive of other languages. This is a deficit perspective on languages, focusing on what students don’t have rather than what they do have. We need to move past seeing our role as supporting students in learning the language of instruction to supporting them in becoming successful bi/multilinguals. This requires a shift away from policies that leave minority/immigrant languages outside the school to an approach in which schools embrace their role as advocates for languages. In 2022, a new fully inclusive Language Policy for Education was launched across Bailiwick of Jersey. The policy was developed to improve the structure and provisions across the Island for multilingual learners with EAL, including stronger provision for EAL and support for home/heritage languages, and to improve access to wider language learning, including explicit support for Jèrriais, the Island’s critically endangered indigenous language. Although newly launched, there has already been substantial change in the sector around assessment and reporting of provisions for EAL, as well as the promotion of multilingualism as a value across education and more widely. This paper will outline the collaborative process undertaken to develop the policy, and report on a research project run over the 2023-2024 academic year which is tracking changes in practice in schools.

Helot, C., & O Laoire, M. (2011). Language Policy for the Multilingual Classroom: Pedagogy of the possible. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.

Since the introduction of raciolinguistics as a lens to study the ideologies through which English language teachers are racialized, researchers have explored how these ideologies impact language teacher employment, identity, relationships with students and colleagues, and the field of language teaching in general (Kubota & Lin, 2006). This presentation will share examples of raciolinguistic ideologies about Pakistani English language teachers, the expression of these ideologies in educational settings, and the initiatives taken by another Pakistani teacher (the presenter) at a higher education institute to confront them. As an autobiography, the study is based upon a conversation that took place between an English language learner (ELL) and her instructor (the presenter), the raciolinguistic ideologies that characterized the conversation and how it became the basis of language awareness activities during the language course to confront ideologies of language, race and ethnicity. The ELL was upset with her daughter’s Pakistani teacher’s English accent and the potential impact this accent may have on the student’s daughter’s English accent. As an autobiography of a foreign language teacher and her identity construction as an NNEST in an English as a foreign language (EFL) context, the presenter will discuss how raciolinguistic ideologies shaped EFL learners’ perceptions about NNESTs and the impact these may have for foreign language teachers teaching English in an EFL setting. Additionally, the presenter will also share experiences of confronting such ideologies through lessons, tasks and discussions that were informed by English as a lingua franca (ELF)-aware teaching and learning, two-way multilingual turn in TESOL, and research on English language teaching in the context where this conversation took place. The examples presented in this presentation may assist NNESTs, researchers, teacher educators, and policymakers to confront dichotomous ideologies of language, race and ethnicity in different contexts where issues of raciolinguistics are experienced by EFL instructors.