Christopher Stroud

African Mother-Tongue Programmes and the Politics of Language: Linguistic Citizenship versus Linguistic Human Rights.

Discourse around educational language provisions for indigenous language minorities in developing contexts customarily focuses on aspects such as the technical, pedagogical or economic provisions made for them. However, there is evidence that one of the most important considerations in the success or failure of bilingual programmes is the extent to which marginal language communities participate in the design and implementation of their own language provisions. Reframing the problem in these terms means highlighting the role for democracy and equity, and ultimately the importance of distribution of power and economy in mother-tongue programmes. This suggests the need to develop a radically different conception and policy of multilingual schooling based on an approach to resource distribution in a politics of identity framework. In this paper, I propose a notion of linguistic citizenship as a way of capturing how issues of language may be accorded a central place on the arena of education and politics. The notion offers both sociopolitical and theoretical rationales for an integrative view of language policy and planning in the context of education, combining an academic and social analysis of language political issues that support a transformative approach to issues of language and democracy.

Postmodernist Perspectives on Local Languages: African Mother-Tongue Education in Times of Globalisation.

Globalisation carries a number of implications for developing communities. Although the extended use of African vernaculars would be one way for these communities to counteract some of the more negative effects of globalisation, educational uses of local languages are not the panacea they are thought to be. In fact, the way that local languages are managed and provided for in education tends more to reinforce the negative effects of globalisation than facilitate the promotion of local values, often directly contributing to a marginalisation of these languages and their speakers. The paper analyses some of the ways in which language-in-education policies have attempted to come to grips with this problem, employing Bourdieus notion of legitimate language to provide a theoretical perspective. An analysis of how communities use language shows that indigenous languages coexist with metropolitan languages in complex configurations of speech practices. The paper argues that these practices should suggest a rethinking of the purpose, function and methodology of teaching languages in developing African contexts, building on the ways that local communities themselves use multilingualism to address power relationships inherent in the local–global configuration. The paper concludes with some implications that this stance holds for selected issues related to schooling.

Anxiety and Identity in the Language Classroom

While ELT has long recognized the need to address student anxiety in language learning situations, it has all too often assumed that such anxiety is primarily competence-based. Consequently, there has been insufficient recognition of the fact that identity-based anxiety, too, can have significant effects on language learning in the classroom. In this paper, we discuss some examples of identity-based anxiety, and argue that it requires a different approach to language teaching. We propose one such possible approach, which we call ‘double-crossing’.

Multilingual signage : A multimodal approach to discourses of consumption in a South African township

The paper explores how global commercial discourses and the politics of aspiration in post-apartheid South Africa may be seen as contributing to the restructuring of spaces of multilingualism and the refiguring of indexical values of English and South African languages. The analysis takes its point of departure in how late-modern lifestyles, identities, aspirations and imaginations are represented across local and transnational commercial signage in the Western Cape township of Khayelitsha, focusing in particular on how different languages are multimodally constituted and differentially represented in two different sub-genres of commercial billboards. We suggest that new late-modern multimodal representations of identity, and the way multilingual resources are configured into new repertoires and genres of subjectivity, may be one important factor in how social transformation is mediated in changing perceptions and practices of language, while simultaneously and paradoxically reinforcing traditional conceptions of cultural authenticity and self-representation.

High Proficiency in Markets of Performance: A Sociocultural Approach to Nativelikeness.

High-proficiency second language (L2) learners challenge much theory and methodology in contemporary sociolinguistic and L2 acquisition research, which suggests the need for honest interdisciplinarity when working in the interstices of style, stylization, and advanced acquisition processes. When to consider fluent and highly competent speakers of a language to be language learners in ways relevant to SLA theory is a fraught and contentious issue. This study suggests that highly fluent multilinguals provide key data on notions of nativelikeness and near-nativelikeness that are of value for understanding processes of acquisition and use. It suggests that relative judgments of nativelikeness are interactionally accomplished (membership) categorizations made on the basis of specific linguistic features relative to particular linguistic markets. The data for the study are taken from a unique population-namely, young people from multilingual family backgrounds, born and raised in Sweden, all of whom ethnically self-identify as Assyrian-Syrian but whose repertoires are complexly multilingual. All participants are generally perceived to be native speakers of Swedish on a daily basis. Nevertheless, at certain moments, these young people are reclassified as near-native or native-like. The study analyzes their narrative accounts of metalinguistic reflexivity from occasions and interactional moments when they are classified as nonstandard speakers and, therefore, near-natives or learners. The findings suggest the necessity of revisiting notions of nativelikeness and account for the phenomenon in terms of register, voice, and identity relative to different symbolic and linguistic markets.

Multilingualism remixed: Sampling, braggadocio and the stylisation of local voice

Among the many challenges posed by contexts of social transformation and extensive mobility is the question of how multilingual voice may carry across media, modalities and context. In this paper, we suggest that one approach to this complex problem may be to look at multilingual voice from a sociolinguistic perspective of performance. Our focus here is thus on how marginalised voices on the periphery of Cape Town become mainstreamed within the city’s hip-hop community. Specifically, we ask how emcees sample local varieties of language, texts and registers to stage their particular stylisation of voice. By way of conclusion, we make brief recommendations with respect to the study of multilingualism in South Africa and how the stylisation of local voices in Cape Town hip-hop could inform studies on multilingual policy and planning.

Introduction: Political Economies of Literacy in Multilingual South-east Asia

The paradigm shift from viewing literacy as a technological tool to one where it is treated as a form of social practice (cf. Street, 1984) allows for the recognition of (1) the role of literacy in the mediation of social change and (2) the effect of social changes on the nature of literacy. As a set of practices ‘embedded in political relations, ideological practices and symbolic meaning structures’ (Rockhill, 1993: 162), literacy in one or more languages is one prime semiotic means by which social orders are constituted, represented and transformed. One topical area of interest therefore concerns the role that literacy plays as a site of contestation, where the acquisition of different literacies in different languages is an important arena for the constitution and distribution of, and access to, social, economic and cultural capital. Investigations into this area can also serve to reveal how everyday interactions and perceptions of literacy are related to the sociolinguistic positioning of the speaker, as for individual speakers (and their communities) literacy may well be available as a resource for the management of identity. That is, individuals position self and other variably with respect to, and by means of, different literacies. However, the practice, representation and ‘sponsorship’ (Brandt, 1995, 2001) of literacy are clearly contingent upon the specific sociopolitical context. From having been considered a moral right and imperative historically, literacy today in many societies is a capital investment and a force in production. With changing societal functions, transformations and shifts follow in the institutions that grant access to literacy and in the way literacy is socialised. For example, it is arguably the case that the importance of the church, family and school for earlier literacy socialisation is rapidly being superseded by the sponsorship of corporate and private institutions. As a result, the learning of literacy practices is either highly dependent upon the individual’s position in the production process, or a by-product of consumerism, thus blurring the boundaries between learning and consuming (Brandt, 2001). One consequence of this is that the meanings and functions of locally situated literacies are often hegemonically reinterpreted in terms of economies of value (Blommaert, 2003). As a result of globalisation processes, literacy

Multilingualism Remixed: Sampling, Braggadocio and the Stylisation of Local Voice

Among the many challenges posed by contexts of social transformation and extensive mobility is the question of how multilingual voice may carry across media, modalities and context. In this article, we suggest that one approach to this complex problem may be to look at multilingual voice from a sociolinguistic perspective of performance. Our focus here is thus on how marginalised voices on the periphery of Cape Town become mainstreamed within the citys hip-hop community. Specifically, we ask how emcees sample local varieties of language, texts and registers to stage their particular stylisation of voice. By way of conclusion, we make brief recommendations with respect to the study of multilingualism in South Africa and how the stylisation of local voices in Cape Town hip-hop could inform studies on multilingual policy and planning.

Does active participation in health enhance health outcomes and health care delivery systems

In 2000 a Committee of the United Nations Economic and Social Council recognised health as essential for exercising all other rights (Djite 2008). The World Health Organization (1998) also sees health as a vital resource for enabling citizens to lead individually, socially and economically productive lives. However health is one space where the opportunities to participate and exercise voice is directed by the provision of health resources and material. Now in late modernity health has become a goal for citizens to work towards or they risk suffering from chronic illness and premature death (Cockerham 2005). The procurement of health has also shifted from the state as the provider of equitable health care to all citizens to a commodity that can be purchased in an expanding health market place (Kickbusch 2004). If health has become the responsibility of the citizen, issues of health literacy, multimodal access to information and multilingualism need to be considered. This research report focuses on work produced as part of the first author’s doctoral project, exploring the phenomenon of consumption of health resources for health citizenship in the private health insurance industry. Based on data collected from 75 participants through an electronic questionnaire, as well as different genres of information utilised for health promotion, the project investigated how the construction of information and the multimodal tools used by two leading South African health insurers influenced the consumers’ health subjectivity. Data collected showed the importance of multilingual information, health literacy and multimodal tools for enabling participation and voice among consumers. In addition, the consumers proposed more accessible information and better designed newsletters and web sites to help them with information seeking for health knowledge and health citizenship.

Diversities, affinities and diasporas: a southern lens and methodology for understanding multilingualisms

ABSTRACT We frame multilingualisms through a growing interest in a linguistics and sociology of the ‘south’ and acknowledge earlier contributions of linguists in Africa, the Américas and Asia who have engaged with human mobility, linguistic contact and consequential ecologies that alter over time and space. Recently, conversations of multilingualism have drifted in two directions. Southern conversations have become intertwined with ‘de-colonial theory’, and with ‘southern’ theory, thinking and epistemologies. In these, ‘southern’ is regarded as a metaphor for marginality, coloniality and entanglements of the geopolitical north and south. Northern debates that receive traction appear to focus on recent ‘re-awakenings’ in Europe and North America that mis-remember southern experiences of linguistic diversity. We provide a contextual backdrop for articles in this issue that illustrate intelligences of multilingualisms and the linguistic citizenship of southern people. In these, southern multilingualisms are revealed as phenomena, rather than as a phenomenon defined usually in English. The intention is to suggest a third direction of mutual advantage in rethinking the social imaginary in relation to communality, entanglements and interconnectivities of both South and North.