Adrian Blackledge

Discourse and Power in a Multilingual World

In Discourse and Power in a Multilingual World the discourse of politicians and policy-makers in Britain links languages other than English, and therefore speakers of these languages, with civil disorder and threats to democracy, citizenship and nationhood. These powerful arguments travel along ‘chains of discourse’ until they gain the legitimacy of the state, and are inscribed in law. The particular focus of this volume is on discourse linking ‘race riots’ in England in 2001 with the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002 , which extended legislation to test the English language proficiency of British citizenship applicants. Adrian Blackledge develops a theoretical and methodological framework which draws on critical discourse analysis to reveal the linguistic character of social and cultural processes and structures; on Bakhtin’s notion of the dialogic nature of discourse to demonstrate how voices progressively gain authority; and on Bourdieu’s model of symbolic domination to illuminate the way in which linguistic-minority speakers may be complicit in the misrecognition, or valorisation, of the dominant language.

Multilingualism, Second Language Learning and Gender

This volume presents a comprehensive introduction to the study of second language learning, multilingualism and gender. An impressive array of papers situated within a feminist poststructuralist framework demonstrates how this framework allows for a deeper understanding of second language learning, a number of language contact phenomena, intercultural communication, and critical language pedagogy. The volume has wide appeal to students and scholars in the fields of language and gender, sociolinguistics, SLA, anthropology, and language education.

Heteroglossia as Practice and Pedagogy

This chapter introduces the notion of ‘heteroglossia’ as a means of expanding theoretical orientations to, and understandings of, linguistic diversity. The discussion responds to contemporary debates about multilingualism and proposes that Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia offers a lens through which to view the social, political, and historical implications of language in practice. The chapter refers to the rich theoretical and empirical contributions of the authors of the volume.

Translanguaging and Identity in Educational Settings

ABSTRACT This article reviews recent scholarship in language, identity, and education. It critically reflects on developments in sociolinguistics as researchers have engaged with the dynamics and complexity of communication in superdiverse societies where people from an increased number of territories come into contact with one another, and where people have access to an increased range of online resources for communication. The authors focus in particular on recent scholarship on “translanguaging,” examining research that has viewed identities as socially constructed in interaction and considering the relationship between language and identities in contexts where communication is mobile and complex. This article offers a critical summary of the implications of these developments for education in the 21st century. In order to illustrate these theoretical points, the authors present an empirical example of the performance of language and identity in education from their recent research.

Meaning-Making as Dialogic Process: Official and Carnival Lives in the Language Classroom

This article adopts a Bakhtinian analysis to understand the complexities of discourse in language-learning classrooms. Drawing on empirical data from two of four linked case studies in a larger, ESRC-funded project, we argue that students learning in complementary (also known as community language, supplementary, or heritage language) schools create “second lives” in the classroom. They do this through the use of carnivalesque language, introducing new voices into classroom discourse, using mockery and parody to subvert tradition and authority, and engaging in the language of “grotesque realism.” Students use varieties of parodic language to mock their teacher, to mock each other, to mock notional students as second-language learners, and to mock their schools attempts to transmit reified versions of “cultural heritage.” These creative discourse strategies enable the students to create carnival lives in the classroom that provide alternatives to the official worlds of their teachers. In doing so the students are able to move in and out of official and carnival worlds, making meaning in discourse that is dialogic, as they represent themselves and others in voices that cut across boundaries in complex, creative, sophisticated ways.

“As a Country We Do Expect”: The Further Extension of Language Testing Regimes in the United Kingdom

In recent times debates about language and languages have increasingly become the battleground on which debates about immigration to the United Kingdom (U.K.) are fought. Since 2002 a series of legislative measures has been introduced to ensure that those who wish to become naturalised as citizens of the U.K. or to settle permanently in the U.K. must demonstrate their proficiency in English before they can be awarded such status. In a recent measure, the government proposes that applicants for marriage visas to gain entry to the U.K. to join their spouses will be required to demonstrate their English language proficiency in order to be granted leave to enter the country. The legislation to impose language tests, and the debates surrounding it, have frequently referred to the importance of requiring “spouses” to demonstrate their English language proficiency in order to ensure social cohesion and national unity. As this argument is recontextualised it becomes a universal point-of-view, or doxa (Bourdieu, 1998a), an argument that does not need to be stated because it has been stated before and is uncontested. In this article I focus in particular on the argument that language tests are required to deal with the perceived threat to social cohesion posed by immigrant spouses who lack English proficiency.

Imagining a Monocultural Community: Racialization of Cultural Practice in Educational Discourse

In recent times reports into incidents of racist violence in Britain identified a prevailing institutionalized racism and social segregation (Cantle, 2002; MacPherson, 1999). In this article I present an analysis of authoritative educational discourse in the form of school inspection reports, focusing on a single issue: the cultural practice of minority ethnic families visiting their heritage country. Using critical discourse analysis, I suggest that the discourse of the inspection reports racializes the cultural practices of the Asian minority, defining them as the alien and foreign. In this discourse an uncontested, common-sense discourse emerges, which blames minority families for the presupposed harm done to their childrens education by visits to the heritage country. I conclude that such cultural practices become an emblem of difference, whereas the dominant ideology in official discourse is one of homogenization. This discourse implies that for minority ethnic families to be part of the imagined community of successful learners in Britain, this cultural practice will have to stop.

The Magical Frontier between the Dominant and the Dominated: Sociolinguistics and Social Justice in a Multilingual World

Research in multilingual societies often attends to the micro level of linguistic interactions, as linguistic minority speakers negotiate their way through a majoritylanguage world. However, this research does not always engage with the social, political and historical contexts that produce and reproduce the conditions within which some linguistic resources have less currency than others. Methodological approaches must be able to make visible those hegemonic discourses that construct discriminatory language ideologies. In multilingual states those who either refuse, or are unable to conform to the dominant ideology are marginalised, denied access to symbolic resources and, often, excluded. A good deal of research has identified the difficulties that linguistic minorities can face in gaining entry to domains of power. Rather less research has identified the ways in which such domains are constructed, and their borders reinforced. Too little is still known about the countless acts of recognition and misrecognition that produce and reproduce what Pierre Bourdieu called the ‘magical frontier between the dominant and the dominated’. These magical frontiers become an issue of social justice when some are excluded and denied access to domains of power. When linguistic analysis is used to understand the ways in which public and political discourse creates the conditions in which minority languages are devalued, everybody wins except those who seek to discriminate against linguistic minority speakers.

The racialization of language in British political discourse

In the summer of 2001 there were violent disturbances on the streets of towns and cities in the north of England. These disturbances, popularly described in the British media as ‘race riots’, principally involved young British Asian men, young White British men, and the police. In November 2002 the Nationality, Immigration, and Asylum Act was granted Royal Assent, and passed into British law, introducing legislation which required spouses of British citizens to demonstrate their proficiency in English when applying for British citizenship. This paper provides an analysis of the racialization of language in political discourse which linked the violence on the streets of northern England with the argument for extended citizenship language testing. The paper concludes that this discourse is recontextualized and transformed in increasingly legitimate contexts, gaining authority as it travels, until it is enshrined in the least negotiable domain of all – the law.

Translanguaging and the body

ABSTRACT This article reports communicative interactions with a focus on the body as a dimension of the semiotic repertoire. The research context is a four-year, multi-site linguistic ethnography which investigates how people communicate in superdiverse cities in the UK. In the setting of a butcher’s stall in a city market we consider three interactions at a particular market stall between butchers and their customers. In the first, gesture is deployed as a resource by both an English butcher’s assistant and his customer. In the second, we examine the body as a resource in the semiotic repertoire of a Chinese butcher as he negotiates a faux haggling interaction with East European customers. In the third example, also recorded as field notes, a Chinese woman employs a ‘Chinese’ gesture to represent the number of pieces of offal she wishes to purchase from an English butcher’s assistant. Each of the examples was recorded during an extended period of ethnographic field work in Birmingham Bull Ring market. Through detailed analysis of these interactions we argue that when people’s biographical and linguistic histories barely overlap, they translanguage through the deployment of wide-ranging semiotic repertoires.