Terrence G. Wiley

Against the Undertow: Language-Minority Education Policy and Politics in the “Age of Accountability”:

This article reviews historical and contemporary policies, ideologies, and educational prescriptions for language-minority students. It notes language and literacy policies historically have been used as instruments of social control and that racism and linguistic intolerance have often been closely linked with antecedents in the colonial and early nationalist periods as well as in nativist thought of the 19th century. The article concludes that the contemporary Englishonly and antibilingual education movements share features reminiscent of the restrictionism of earlier periods. The article next assesses policies of the federal and state governments in accommodating language-minority students. urrent debates over appropriate assessment of language-minority students are backgrounded against the history of the testing movement. Recent research on high-stakes testing is reviewed with the conclusion that it is not improving the quality of teaching and learning and appears to be having a negative effect for language-minority students.

Diversity, Super-Diversity, and Monolingual Language Ideology in the United States Tolerance or Intolerance?

E new demographic shift and economic or social change bring seemingly new issues into popular and political focus—questions, debates, and policies about the role of language in education and society and the recent claims that transnational migrations and globalization are resulting in unprecedented forms of ethnolinguisic “super-diversity.” This chapter addresses issues related to language diversity, policy, and politics within the U.S. context and notes recent trends and future projections. The first section takes as a point of departure a seemingly simple question from a popular television game show to illustrate some of the complexity in posing seemingly simple historical questions. The second major section considers how ethno-racial labeling and linguistic diversity have been constructed through time in U.S. Census data and considers their implications for claims regarding the allegedly unprecedented superdiversity of the present. The third part addresses how English became dominant during the colonial period, thereby establishing its position as the common language prior to the American Revolutions. The fourth section revisits issues and themes addressed in some of my work on the history of language policy, politics, rights, and ideologies (Ovando & Wiley, 2007; Wiley, 1998, 1999a, 1999b, 2005, 2007, 2010, 2013a, 2013b; Wiley & Lukes, 1996). In particular, it focuses on the evolution of English-only ideology and how it became hegemonic during the World War I era. This final section is largely based on Wiley (2000) as it looks in relation to language policies in the United States at the differential impact of language policies on various ethnolinguistic groups in the United States.

THE FOREIGN LANGUAGE “CRISIS” IN THE UNITED STATES: ARE HERITAGE AND COMMUNITY LANGUAGES THE REMEDY?

Recent national security concerns and global trade interests have led many to claim that there is a foreign language “crisis” in the US. Some argue that heritage and community language (HL-CL) speakers in the US constitute a resource waiting to be tapped to solve this crisis. This article addresses the issue of whether heritage and community language speakers can or should be exploited to ameliorate this perceived crisis. To address these issues, the paper considers the demographic context of language diversity in the US and how it relates to languages being taught. It analyzes the ideological nature of the discourse about language diversity in the US and reviews the historical position of HLs-CLs. The paper considers current challenges to promoting HLs-CLs given the condition of language teaching. Last, it explores future prospects for promoting community languages in the US and the extent to which HLs-CLs might help to expand foreign language (FL) instruction within the post 9/11 context.

Language policy and teacher preparation: The implications of a restrictive language policy on teacher preparation

Abstract Applied linguistics, with its sub-domains of language planning and policy can make significant contributions to language teaching. In order to explore this issue, the authors focus on the contested arena of language minority instruction in the United States. Attention is given specifically to the state of Arizona, where, recently, its educational policies have captured national and even international attention. Of particular concern is Arizonas implementation of a restrictive language policy for the instruction of English Language Learners (ELLs). The authors present a framework for reviewing the relationship between language policies and teacher preparation. Applying this framework to Arizonas teacher preparation for ELLs, we find that the state sanctioned curriculum transmitted a deficit view of students who speak a language other than English and provided prospective teachers with few alternative approaches for their instruction. In response this outcome, the authors recommend that applied linguistics content needs to be embedded within teacher preparation.

Language Policy, Politics, and Diversity in Education.

R of Research in Education: Vol. 38, Language Policy, Politics, and Diversity in Education explores the role of educational language policies in promoting education as a human right. There are an estimated nearly 7,000 living languages in the world. Yet, despite the extent of language diversity, only a small number of the world’s languages are used as mediums of instruction. Even in English-dominant countries, such as the United States, it is important to understand the role of educational language policies (ELPs) in promoting educational access through the dominant language, and its impact on educational equity, achievement, and students’ sense of identity. The United Nations Declaration on Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic Minorities, Article 4 (1991) affirms, “States should take appropriate measures so that, whenever possible, persons belonging to National or Ethnic minorities may have adequate opportunities to learn their mother tongue or to have instruction in their mother tongue” (cited in Spring, 2000, p. 31). Presently and historically, a growing minority of children in the United States and a majority in many countries around the world attend schools where there is a difference between the language or variety of language spoken at home and the language of instruction in school. As a result, to learn in school, language minorities must learn the language of schooling, which requires some type of accommodation (Wiley, 2013).

Constructing and Deconstructing “Illegal” Children

This article considers the implications and impact of the reactionary construct of “illegal children” within the context of language minority educational language policies. It analyzes the shift to the right in political discourse related to education and human rights. The article revisits important United States Supreme Court case, Plyler v. Doe (1982), which established the educational rights of migrant children. Next, it focuses on the U.S. national immigration debate and provides examples of the dehumanizing discourse assault on the educational rights of language minority children. The article provides a critical analysis of far right labeling of immigrants and their children and the strategic use of discourse to influence political perceptions of educational policy.

Editors' Introduction: Language, Identity, and Education and the Challenges of Monoculturalism and Globalization

This new quarterly journal seeks to provide a forum to address the intersection of issues of language, identity, and education. Unprecedented globalization and market integration are creating extraordinary challenges to local cultures, languages, and ways of living, which make a forum such as this timely. Amidst mounting rhetoric for monoculturalist and monolingualist remedies to the alleged challenges presented by cultural and linguistic diversity, critical academics, educators, and policy makers are becoming increasingly skeptical of these panaceas. Many excellent discipline-based journals address aspects of language, identity, and education. This new journal brings together research and critical studies that focus on the intersection of all three. Haas (1992)definedmonoculturalismas“thepracticeofcatering to thedominant ormainstreamculture,providingsecond-class treatmentornospecialconsideration at all to persons of non-mainstream cultures” (p. 161). Monoculturalism, and monolingualism as a dimension of it, is typically cloaked in “universalistic” guises prescribed as sociopolitical and educational solutions to the dreaded pluralism that is cast as the enemy of civil unity in the contemporary nation-state. As May (1999) observed,

The Common Core State Standards and the Great Divide

This article contextualizes recent developments around issues of language and the new Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in terms of the classic distinction between literates and non-literates in the Great Divide debate. Using a social practices perspective to frame the issues, the authors argue that the CCSS reiterate the debate, and reflect an autonomous, deficit orientation. The authors argue that the deficit orientation embedded in language-related proposals around the CCSS hold negative consequences for policy and practice. The authors note the absence of critical engagement of these issues in the CCSS literature, and review major criticisms of the construct of academic language, a cornerstone of the new standards.

Discontinuities in Heritage and Community Language Education: Challenges for Educational Language Policies

Cross-national comparisons can be helpful in informing educational practices and policies. This small sampling of papers on heritage languages in Australia and the USA begins to demonstrate some of the challenges in addressing the range of issues affecting heritage/community language education. Nancy Hornberger’s continua of biliteracy provides a useful heuristic for analysing continuities and discontinuities across a wide panorama of language and literacy domains while linking them on common axes. In this commentary, reflecting on the articles presented, I will stress some of the challenges and discontinuities as community language (CL) and heritage language (HL) education develop as more specialised fields of inquiry (see UCLA, 2000). There are a number of similarities between the USA and Australia in terms of language diversity. Both are Anglophone-majority countries; both have immigrant and indigenous language minority populations. The policy climate in Australia has been somewhat more open to promoting multilingualism than in the USA, although as Baldauf (this volume) notes, a number of issues persist related to the status of CLs/HLs, resources and teacher training. Like the USA, Australia has some anti-immigrant/pro-English sentiment, which has affected language and literacy policies. Australia and the USA are experiencing declines in the number of speakers of historically noteworthy European immigrant languages such as Italian, German and Greek; however, both have growing numbers of speakers of less commonly taught languages such as Mandarin, Vietnamese and Arabic (see Baldauf, Table 1, this volume). Last, both countries have histories of discriminatory treatment toward indigenous populations (see Nicholls, this volume), but both have acknowledged the need for some level of indigenous language promotion in recent years. However, neither country has made this a priority, and with the closure of federally funded bilingual education programmes in the Northern Territory in 1998, prospects for language maintenance and revitalisation in Australia weigh heavily on local communities (Nicholls, this volume). Similarly, the withdrawal of support for bilingual education has been accompanied by weak TESL in the Northern Territories (Nicholls, this volume), and English

Editors' Introduction: Language Rights and Educational Access at the Crossroads, Past and Present

Two significantly different perspectives on linguistic rights and educational equity are presented in this issue. First, Skutnabb-Kangas presents a pessimistic, contemporary assessment of the implementation of language rights in education. She asks, “Can a human rights ... approach to language planning and policy promote educational equity for diverse student populations?” (p. 179). Skutnabb-Kangas answers this question by assessing the extent to which various nations have ratified linguistic human rights declarations and whether they have made both claims of and actual progress toward implementing them. She sees the failure to make progress as culminating in “linguistic and cultural genocide.” As Skutnabb-Kangas notes, the notion of language rights in education is not new. For example, in 1953, a UNESCO declaration held that every child should have a right to achieve literacy in his or her mother tongue. Elsewhere, Skutnabb-Kangas (1995) put forth her own model for a declaration of children’s linguistic human rights based on three principles: