Language and Power in Post Colonial Schooling

LANGUAGE AND POWER IN
POST-COLONIAL SCHOOLING
Downloaded by 202.69.48.90 at 03:26 16 September 2017
Critiquing the positioning of children from non-dominant groups as linguistically

deficient,this book aims to bridge the gap between theorizing of language in critical
sociolinguistics and approaches to language in education. Carolyn McKinney uses the
lens of linguistic ideologiesteachers and students beliefs about languageto shed light
on the continuing problem of reproduction of linguistic inequality. Framed within global
debates in sociolinguistics and applied linguistics, she examines the case of historically
White schools in South Africa, a post-colonial context where political power has shifted
but where the power of whiteness continues, to provide new insights into the complex
relationships between language and power, and language and subjectivity. Implications for
language curricula and policy in contexts of linguistic diversity are foregrounded.
Providing an accessible overview of the scholarly literature on language ideologies and
language as social practice and resource in multilingual contexts, Language and Power in
Post-Colonial Schooling uses the conceptual tools it presents to analyze classroom interaction
and ethnographic observations from the day-to-day life in case study schools and explores
implications of both the research literature and the analyses of students and teachers dis-
courses and practices for language in education policy and curriculum.
Carolyn McKinney is Associate Professor, Language Education, School of Education,

University of Cape Town, South Africa.
LANGUAGE, CULTURE, AND TEACHING
Sonia Nieto, Series Editor
McKinney
Language and Power in Post-Colonial Schooling: Ideologies in Practice: Crosscurrents
and Complexities in Literacy Classrooms
Fecho/Clifton
Dialoguing across Cultures, Identities, and Learning
Mirra/Garcia/Morrell
Doing Youth Participatory Action Research:Transforming Inquiry with Researchers,
Educators, and Students
Kumagai/Lpez-Snchez/Wu (Eds.)
Multiliteracies in World Language Education
Vasquez
Negotiating Critical Literacies with Young Children: 10th Anniversary Edition, Second
Edition
Janks
Doing Critical Literacy:Texts and Activities for Students and Teachers
Basterra/Trumbull/Solano-Flores (Eds.)
Cultural Validity in Assessment: A Guide for Educators
Chapman/Hobbel (Eds.)
Social Justice Pedagogy across the Curriculum:The Practice of Freedom
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the Language, Culture, and Teaching series.
LANGUAGE AND
POWER IN
POST-COLONIAL
SCHOOLING
Ideologies in Practice
Carolyn McKinney
First published 2017
by Routledge
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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
McKinney, Carolyn, 1973-
Title: Language and power in post-colonial schooling : ideologies in
practice / by Carolyn McKinney.
Description: New York : Routledge, 2017. | Series: Language, culture, and
teaching series | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016008744| ISBN 9781138844063 (hardback) |
ISBN9781138844070 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781315730646 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Linguistic minorities. | Language and education. |
Language policy. | Sociolinguistics.
Classification: LCC P40.5.L56 M35 2017 | DDC 306.44/9dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016008744
ISBN: 978-1-138-84406-3 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-138-84407-0 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-73064-6 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by diacriTech, Chennai
To all children who are marginalized in schools on account of their language

resources, and to those teachers who are determined to change this.
CONTENTS
Foreword by Hilary Janks xi

Prefacexv
Acknowledgementsxix
Introduction 1
1 What Counts as [a] Language? 18
2 What Counts as Language in Education Policy

and Curricula? 42
3 Whose Language Resources Count in Schooling? 63
4 Anglonormativity: Language Ideologies and the

Reproduction of Race 79
5 Positioning Students in an Anglonormative English Class:

Asymmetrical Relations of Knowing 103
6 Hope I: Students Agency in Interrupting

Anglonormativity119
xContents
7 Hope II: Interrupting Anglonormativity Through

Transformative Pedagogies 137
8 Conclusion: Changing What Counts as Legitimate

Language Use in School 161
Index 173
FOREWORD
I have long been an admirer of Carolyn McKinneys work as a critical language

and literacy researcher and educator. Her work is founded on an insightful under-
standing of theory, keen observation in multilingual classrooms and a deep com-
mitment to equity and social justice. Because she is also an excellent mediator of
complex ideas, her writing is compelling. In Language and Power in Post-Colonial
Schooling: Ideologies in Practice we see McKinney as a mythbuster, who makes us
stop and rethink our taken-for-granted beliefs about languages.
Myth, according to Rolande Barthes, turns history into nature (Barthes, 1972,
p. 142). Socially constructed phenomena appear as natural and therefore beyond
question. Here, McKinney attacks myths about language. For example, many of
us take for granted that every language is an autonomous, stable, linguistic system
that is separate from other languages. We ignore the social forces that constituted
them historically, and the ongoing forces that continue to produce them in the
present. McKinney brings us up to date with recent work in critical applied lin-
guistics, sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology that challenges us as readers
to let go of our naturalized belief that languages are distinct entities with clear
boundaries between them. This is a challenge precisely because it unsettles our
views of language per se and in relation to identity, power and access, requiring us
to change our practices. Myths are not innocent and McKinney makes their social
and political effects visible.
McKinney is particularly interested in the relationship between language,
ideology and power in education policy and practice that results in children
from non-dominant linguistic, cultural and class backgrounds being positioned
as a problem in schools. The expectation that they should be proficient in the
dominant language, and are deficient, even deviant, if they are not, results in
the meanings and meaning making resources they bring with them to school
xiiForeword
being excluded. McKinney offers Anglonormativity as a concept to describe the

expectation that children have to develop monolingual fluency in a prestige vari-
ety of English. She contrasts this with a heteroglossic orientation to language and
language practices in schools.
McKinney chooses the term heteroglossia the complex, simultaneous use of
a diverse range of registers, voices, named languages or codes in our daily lives
(Chapter 1) as a broad concept that encompasses a range of terms that signal
complexity, rather than simply the multiplicity, of language and language use.
Itincludes terms such as plurilingualism and plurilingual languaging, metrolin-
gualism and its related practices, translingualism and translanguaging, crossing, and
urban vernaculars. In explaining these terms she provides an overview of research

that has effected a paradigm shift in the understanding of language. Her reference
list provides a valuable guide to readers who want to trace the origins of these
new ideas. This recent work places the emphasis on the linguistic repertoires and
resources that people have for making meaning, rather than on what they lack,
enabling children to take up positions of legitimate language users when they
enter school.
McKinneys introduction of Anglonormativity as an idea is as powerful as the
idea of heteroglossia, particularly when, as McKinney shows, high status vari-
eties are linked to whiteness. In analyzing students discourses about language
McKinney shows how students see white ways of speaking as proper English,
how they stigmatise other varieties which they define racially, and how they
police each others accents. In addition, normativity does not just stop at language
and McKinney shows how teachers select and present knowledge through their
own cultural frames. Students funds of knowledge (Gonzales et al., 2006), often
rooted in very different ways of doing, believing and valuing (Gee, 1990), are dis-
counted. McKinneys data show how classroom discourse is regularly shaped by
teachers white middle-class imaginaries.
If that were all, this would be a very depressing book. In Chapter 6, McKinney
analyses student resistances to linguistic and cultural imposition as evidence that
students have agency and are not simply subjects of educational imposition. Such
resistance disrupts normativity, even if only briefly. They provide glimpses of
students realities for teachers who are prepared to see and to listen. Chapter
7 focuses on transformative pedagogies. In the examples that McKinney gives
we see teachers embracing students plurilingualism, using their students abili-
ties in and across languages in innovative ways. The detailed descriptions of how
teachers use multimodal and plurilingual literacies are not only inspiring but also
instructive, offering an alternative vision of practice for educators to emulate and
build upon.
Recognising that not all languages and language varieties are equally valued
in the linguistic market (Bourdieu, 1991), McKinney knows that it is import-
ant for students to develop proficiency in dominant languages not because
they are better but because they are powerful. At the same time she stresses the
Foreword xiii
importance of polylingual flexibility across a range of different languages and

different varieties needed to move in and across different social and geographical
spaces. Monolingualism, even in an elite language, is a disadvantage in an increas-
ingly diverse world. Most importantly, McKinney argues that translanguaging
pedagogies are a better means for developing competence in a particular language
and for extending competence across students linguistic repertoires.
Because McKinneys teaching and research is based in South Africa, many
of her examples, taken from her own ethnographic data, speak to other post-
colonial contexts. This book is, however, not parochial. Using examples from the
literature, predominantly but not exclusively from the U.S., she provides many
accounts of work with students in the U.S. who speak a non-dominant language
(mainly Spanish) or a non-dominant variety of English (mainly, African American
English). Large flows of people across national boundaries make monolingual
classrooms the exception, not the norm, particularly in urban contexts. Education
has to have a better way of meeting the language needs of all students. McKinney
has opened the way for a more hopeful approach to language education.
In my view, it should be required reading for teachers, testers and policy
makers everywhere. It is time that policy and practice caught up with new and
better knowledge about language.
Hilary Janks
February, 2016
References
Barthes, R. 1972. Mythologies. London: Paladin.
Bourdieu, P. 1991. Language and Symbolic Power (J. B. Thompson, Trans.). Cambridge:
PolityPress.
Gee, J. 1990. Social Linguistics and Literacies. London: Falmer Press.
Gonzales, N., Moll, C. and Amanti, C. (eds.) 2006. Funds of Knowledge:Theorizing Practices in
Households, Communities, and Classrooms. London and New York: Routledge.
PREFACE
Why write this book?

As a teacher and researcher, I have spent many hours observing practices in
schools, as well as talking to young people and teachers. And as a parent, I have
spoken with many parents about the choices they do and do not make as to where
they send their children to school.
Striking in my observations and conversations have been dominant views
of language that value monolingualism in English, and in some cases p articular
racialised varieties of English aligned with whiteness, above any other form of
language use, including multilingualism in local African languages. In one example,
a mother explained to me her husbands insistence that they would not send their
child to the local school down the road because he didnt want his child to speak
like those children. In cases like this, dominant language ideologies discrimi-
nate against English language learners, and also work to keep English-speaking
children monolingual.
For some years now I have been grappling with the disturbing question:
How is it possible that the most valuable resource a child brings to formal schooling,
language, can be consistently recast as a problem?
While English-speaking children from middle-class homes generally have their

language resources celebrated, reinforced and used as indicators of their engage-
ment and intelligence in schooling, children from non-dominant language and
class backgrounds are most often recast as linguistically deficient. The focus is
consistently on what children and young people dont have (e.g. non-standard
varieties of English and/or non-English languages) rather than on the resources
they do have.
xviPreface
The purpose of this book is to expose, and deepen our understanding of, the
way in which beliefs about language profoundly influence childrens access to
quality education around the world.The notion of what language is, and the rela-
tionship between language, society and diversity, has undergone paradigm shifts in
language disciplines such as Sociolinguistics, Linguistic Anthropology and Applied
Linguistics. However I argue that these shifts have made little impact on policy,
curricula and classroom practice in language and literacy education. My aim is to
highlight the implications of these paradigm shifts for language and literacy edu-
cation. In order to do this, I draw on fields of inquiry that are related but often not
brought together within the same study: Bilingualism, TESOL, Multiculturalism,
Sociolinguistics, Language Policy Studies, Applied Linguistics and Linguistic

Anthropology.
I begin the book by reviewing current understandings of language as a
social practice and of diverse language practices. Chapters 13 make a wide and
complex literature on language ideologies, language in use, and language policy
accessible to a broader audience. I also make explicit the implications of this
literature for language and literacy education. In Chapter 3, I explore the connec-
tions between the deficit positioning of African American and Spanish/English
bilingual children in USA schooling with the positioning of Black children in
South African schools.
Understanding beliefs about language and about how people are positioned
on account of their language use helps us to understand how this has come tobe.
Thisis the focus of Chapters 4 and 5.The relationship between language and power
is starkly visible in South Africa, the post-colonial context which is foregrounded
in the book. In a country struggling to emerge from institutionalized racism
and with ever growing inequality, there is enormous hope invested in schooling.
However, more than 20 years into democracy the vast majority of children (who
are also mostly poor and Black) continue to be excluded from meaningful access
to quality education. The relationship between language and power plays a key
role in these complex processes of exclusion. This book draws on research in a
number of schools that were previously reserved for White c hildren during apart-
heid but that are now desegregated, as well as more typical poorly resourced
schools.This research shows overwhelmingly how mastery of English, and in some
cases particular uses of English aligned with White m iddle-class speakers, is contin-
ually privileged as the goal of schooling. I introduce the idea of Anglonormativity to
explain the common expectation that all children should be proficient in English,
and are viewed as deviant or deficient if they are not. In many contexts around
the world including in North America, the UK and Australia, monolingualism in
a high status variety of English is valued far more than multilingualism.
On a more positive note, many children are engaged in practices that disrupt
deficit positioning on account of their language resources. In Chapter 6, I aim to
inspire hope through an analysis of young peoples creative language practices even
in contexts where English monolingualism is enforced. In Chapter 7, I showcase
Preface xvii
innovative examples of language and literacy pedagogy from SouthAfrica and the
USA that do position children as linguistically resourceful, and expose the injus-
tices of language and power to children.
The analyses presented and arguments made in this book are relevant to
contexts of inequality and diversity, and especially relevant in contexts with a
history of institutionalized racism across the Global North and South. I explicitly
draw connections to post-colonial contexts as well as to the USA.
For student readers and teaching purposes, I end Chapters 17 with questions
for further thought and discussion as well as suggestions for further reading on
the topic. The questions are designed to ensure understanding of key theoret-
ical concepts as well as to enable readers to apply such concepts to their own
educational contexts.
Overall, the book aims to inspire change in language policy and curriculum,
assessment practices, learning materials and, particularly, classroom practice.
Myhope is that the book will have some impact on shifting the deficit positioning
of children from non-dominant backgrounds on account of their language
resources.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
There are a number of people I would like to thank for their different roles
in inspiring, supporting and encouraging me to write and complete this book.
Iexpress deep gratitude to Pam Christie, who convinced me that I should write the
book in the first place and who supported me in many different ways throughout
the journey. I feel honored to be publishing this book in Sonia Nietos Language,
Culture and Teaching Series, and am very grateful to Sonia and p ublishing editor
Naomi Silverman, for their enthusiasm and belief in the project right from the
outset and all the way through. I want to acknowledge Hilary Janks, whose critical
literacy work first ignited my interest in language and power, and from whom
Ihave learned so much, as well as Bonny Norton and Theresa Lillis for their inspi-
ration and support. I was incredibly fortunate in having a generous colleague like
Heather Jacklin who offered me a wonderful space to write. My dear colleagues
Pinky Makoe and Rochelle Kapp very generously read and gave critical feedback
on my draft chapters thank you so much!
I thank the University of Cape Town research office, and Mignonne Breier
in particular, for enabling my participation in the Mont Fleur writing retreats
that made writing so pleasurable. I am also grateful to the many Masters and
PhD students with whom I have discussed and debated the ideas in this book.
Iespecially want to acknowledge previous Masters students Alex Marshall,
Laura Layton and Hannah Carrim, who agreed to the use of data from their
research, as well as current graduate students Soraya Abdulatief, Xolisa Guzula
and Robyn Tyler. I am very fortunate to be able to work with such fabulous
people! I would not have completed this book without the support of my ded-
icated colleagues in the Friday Shut Up and Write! Thula Ubhale group, and
Iam immensely grateful to them for making writing a sociable and pleasurable
activity. Last, but of course not least, a huge thank you to my long-suffering
xxAcknowledgements
friends (you know who you are) and family. And a special thank you to Di,
who having been subjected to endless discussions on our mountain runs prob-
ably knows more about the content of the book than anyone else! My partner
John and my children Luka and Noah have been incredibly supportive and
understanding of my absences. Enkosi kakhulu/Baie dankie almal/Ke a leboga/
Muchas Gracias.
I gratefully acknowledge the permission granted for the re-use of material
from the following publications:
Makoe, P and McKinney, C. 2014. Linguistic ideologies in multilingual South African

suburban schools. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 35(7): 116. DOI:
10.1080/01434632.2014.908889 (Taylor & Francis)
Makoe, P. and McKinney, C. 2009. Hybrid discursive practices in a South African multilin-
gual primary classroom: A case study. English Teaching Practice and Critique 8(2): 8095.
(University of Waikato)
Maungedzo, R. and Newfield, D. (eds.). 2005. Thebuwa Poems from Ndofaya Lamula Jubilee
High School Soweto. Johannesburg: Denise Newfield and Wits Multiliteracies Project.
(Sunboys Praise Poem and The Tsonga Me; Thando Tshabalalas Soweto for
YoungFreaks)
McKinney, C. with Carrim, H., Layton, L. and Marshall, A. 2015. What counts as lan-
guagein South African Schooling? Monoglossic ideologies and childrens participation.
AILA Review 28(1): 103126. (John Benjamins)
McKinney, C. 2011. Asymmetrical relations of knowing: Pedagogy, discourse and identity
in a de(re)segregated school. Journal of Education 51: 2951. (UKZN)
McKinney, C. 2010. Schooling in black and white: Assimilationist discourses and subversive
identity performances in a desegregated South African girls school. Race, Ethnicity &
Education 13(2): 191207. (Taylor & Francis)
McKinney, C. 2007. If I speak English does it make me less black anyway? Race and
English in South African desegregated schools. English Academy Review 24(2): 624.
(Taylor & Francis)
McKinney, C. 2014. Moving between ekasi and the suburbs: The mobility of linguis-
tic resources in a South African de(re)segregated school. In Mastin Prinsloo, Chris
Stroud (eds.), Educating for Language and Literacy Diversity. Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave
MacMillan.
Phemba Mfundi Journal 2014 IJenali Yemibhalo Yabantwana Journal of Learner Writing.
EastLondon: Nelson Mandela Institute for Education and Rural Development,
pp.2122.
INTRODUCTION
Sumaya: ok I feel like that like I hardly talk in class because of the way Inormally
speak like Im scared to talk in class because of the way I speak. Ispeak differently
from the way they do the way the rest of them do. (Home language speaker of Cape
Flats English, Cape Town Girls Grade 10)
Sumaya speaks English as a home language, but feels silenced in school because
she speaks a non-dominant variety of English with a non-prestigious accent.
Asit happens, she is a 16-year-old teen attending school in South Africa, but her
predicament is shared by an increasing number of young people in a globaliz-
ing world whose linguistic resources are regarded as different from mainstream
school versions of English, and therefore viewed as inadequate. Sumaya is thus
no different to the vast majority of children around the world, who arrive at
school with an astonishing capacity for meaning-making and an immense curi-
osity about the world around them. However, at school, the form of English she
speaks and her accent mark her as different and other. To erase these feelings of
otherness she retreats into silence.
This problem is not limited to non-mainstream varieties of English. There are
many children whose non-dominant language resources are invisible to teachers
because they are not speakers of the legitimate official language of the school. In
most post-colonial contexts, this language is, of course, English. Children such as
these are often positioned as being without any linguistic resources at all as is
evident in the following comment by the deputy principal of an urban English
medium primary school in Johannesburg, South Africa, who described African
language speaking children coming to his school from rural areas as kids [. . .]
who have basically no language (Makoe, 2007, 66). The consequences of this
are dire for these students. They are deprived of the capacity to be heard (or in
2Introduction
Blommaerts terms [2005], voice) and they are also deprived of the o pportunity
to learn through using familiar linguistic and communicative resources. Children
who speak different forms of English struggle to have their language use
recognized and acknowledged, whether they speak African American English,
or are emergent Spanish/English bilinguals in the USA or African language
speakers in South African schools. Their situation resonates with struggles over
the recognition of language resources in post-colonial contexts worldwide.
This book aims to answer the disturbing question:
How is it possible that the most valuable resource a child brings to formal schooling,
language, can be consistently recast as a problem?
To answer this question, I explore the ways in which language ideologies peoples
beliefs about what language is, as well as what particular uses of language point
to or index are central in shaping whose language resources count in formal
schooling, which languages (and varieties of language) are chosen as languages of
instruction, and how language is taught. For Sumaya, the fact that her variety of
English is not recognized as the legitimate language in her schooling context is
linked to complex relationships of language and power. Language/power relation-
ships enable the language use of dominant groups to be privileged over others,
and for this to be normalized as a matter of course. This book seeks to illuminate
the complex relationships between language and power in schooling, and the
ways in which language is involved in the reproduction of inequality in schools.
I argue that changing the ways in which we understand what language is as well
as what counts as legitimate language resources for learning is a central step in
disrupting the reproduction of inequality.
In this regard, it is important to consider developments in the scholarship on
language and society, which has undergone several paradigm shifts in recent years
(Blommaert and Rampton, 2011). We now understand that languages are not sta-
ble, discrete or bounded entities. English, the name we may give to the resources
Sumaya deploys, exists along a continuum with fuzzy boundaries, and what is rec-
ognized as English in one geographical location may not necessarily be recognized
as such in another (Prinsloo, 2012). In contrast to the mythic view of language as
a stable, and clearly bounded entity, is the reality of diverse language and semiotic
practices in everyday life, where people may draw on resources from more than
one named language and more than one variety or register. Language[s] is cur-
rently understood as a socially, culturally, politically and historically situated set of
resources (Blommaert and Rampton, 2011, Heller, 2007) and as part of a multi-
modal1 repertoire that is used in meaning-making.The recognition of the central-
ity of non-linguistic modes in meaning-making helps us to get to grips with the
embodied nature of meaning-making. These shifts have significant implications
for our understanding of what it means to know [a] language. They also have
challenging implications for the description and analysis of everyday language use
Introduction 3
which increasingly draws on multiple and diverse resources. The complexity of

current language practices in contexts of diversity, and the challenges in capturing
these is indexed by the plethora of new descriptive terms that have recently been
developed such as translanguaging, polylanguaging and metrolingualism (Otsuji
and Pennycook, 2010). Shifts in the study of language and society, including new
languages of description for diverse language in use are the focus of Chapter 1 of
this book.
What is striking in considering these paradigm shifts in the study of language
and society, and of language in use, is that they have had very little impact on the
fields of language education and language in education policy globally (Garcia
and Torres-Guevarra, 2010, May, 2014, Ricento, 2006, Spotti and Kroon, 2015).
More commonly, as succinctly argued in the US context by Celia Genishi and
Anne Haas Dyson, institutions like schools work to suppress the inherent vari-
ability of language by authorizing uniformity (2009, 13). Increasing transnational
and translocal mobility (both physical and virtual through the Internet) makes
individual sociolinguistic flexibility essential for enabling people to communicate
successfully across a range of languages and modes, as well as varieties of a named
language. However, schools around the world, including in South Africa, fre-
quently operate as if all people do or should use one language in the same way.This
ideology of homogenous standard languages also underpins standardized testing
of language and literacy, which proceeds from the assumption that there is a single
best way to speak and to write (Genishi and Dyson, 2009, 12). Needless to say,
this ideology promotes the standard languages and language practices of powerful
groups. Global and national language and literacy testing agendas continue to
impose linguistic uniformity, while the realities of diverse language practices ren-
der such tests invalid. One of the reasons for writing this book is to engage with
these issues, which are taken up in Chapters 2 and 3.
There is much to be learnt about the problems of monolingual ideologies from
language policies in post-apartheid South Africa including the assumption that
monolingualism in a single mainstream variety of a language is the norm. South
Africa has a notorious history of ignoring the resources that Black and non-
middle-class children bring with them to formal schooling and lamenting instead
what the average child does not have/know and cannot do.This is starkly apparent
in relation to learners language resources,2 which are characterized as a problem
either if they are resources other than mainstream English (Makoe, 2007, Makoe
and McKinney 2014) or if they do not approximate the standard pure form of
a language. This applies not only to English, but also in the case of the named
official African languages as well as Afrikaans (Vinjevold, 1999, NEEDU report
2012). This ideological stance is echoed in the denigration of teachers use of
diverse language resources in classrooms, where practices such as the use of more
than one named language in the same space, (e.g. code-switching3) are officially
discouraged. It is also in evidence when the use of English in ways that do not
align with White ways of speaking are stigmatized. Monolingual ideologies have
4Introduction
the effect of maintaining inequalities in schooling and preventing social justice

from being realized for children from non-dominant groups. The discourse of
multilingualism as a problem, I will argue, is the flip side of a powerful discourse
of Anglonormativity that is linked to the global dominance of English, which I will
expand on in Chapter 4 and Chapter 5.
Achieving Social Justice Through Language Education?

Decisions about which language resources should count in schooling, which
languages to use as languages of instruction, and how language should be
taught are key to achieving social justice in education. This argument has been
convincingly made by a number of critical language and literacy researchers
and teachers.4 But there are different and often competing understandings of
social justice and of how best to achieve it in language and literacy education.
Philosopher Nancy Fraser (1995, 2000, 2005, 2008) argues for a complex
three-dimensional approach to social justice that goes beyond the redistri-
bution of resources that are currently grossly unequally distributed. Fraser
acknowledges the ways in which sustained cultural domination (1995, 71)
(such as having to access education through a colonial or unfamiliar language)
and economic disadvantage are deeply entangled and mutually supporting.
Thus in her view [p]eople who are subject to both cultural injustice and
economic injustice need both recognition and redistribution (1995, 74).
Alongside economic redistribution and cultural recognition, Fraser adds the
third key element of political representation, i.e. taking account of who gets to
participate in political decision-making and acknowledging the complexities
of this in an increasingly globalized world (Fraser, 2008).
Frasers approach to social justice has been applied in educational debates
about inequality and achieving social justice through schooling (Keddie, 2012;
Christie, in press) as well as debates on the purpose of schooling. For example, the
redistribution of resources has been related to the need for the redistribution of
powerful knowledge for students from marginalized backgrounds (Zipin, Fataar,
and Brennan, 2015). Some have argued that inequality is reproduced through
schooling because marginalized children (whether on the basis of social class, race,
gender, immigrant status or other) are not given an equal opportunity to access
powerful knowledge (Young, 2008) or powerful literacies (see Delpit, 1988).
However, in thinking about the achievement of social justice through educa-
tion, the need for recognition of non-dominant groups socio-cultural resources
forces us to question the construct of powerful knowledge, and how it is selected
and constructed, as well as whose knowledge is visible and invisible, included or
excluded from official curricula. In Frasers sense, recognition means not only
acknowledging the resources children bring with them to school, but foregrounds
the need to expand what counts as powerful knowledge as well as teaching
children to interrogate relations of power.The notion of recognition also reminds
Introduction 5
us that how we give access to knowledge and language and literacy resources, that
is the pedagogical choices we make, are as important as what resources we give
access to. All children need to be recognized and positioned as legitimate learn-
ers who bring with them valuable resources for learning. The fact that only the
language and literacy resources of dominant groups are recognized as powerful
or legitimate is, however, linked to the problem of representation. In education
policy making, and in the case of the prescribed South African curriculum and its
revisions, a monolingual habitus has informed the approach to language and lit-
eracy in the curriculum. Who informs curriculum decisions, especially in terms
of their own language resources, histories and social class, as well as racial posi-
tionings, matters.
Frasers calls for redistribution and recognition alongside representation resonate
strongly with long-held debates in language and literacy education. Researchers
and teachers have often been divided over the need to provide students with access
to dominant languages and literacies (such as in calls for explicit pedagogy, reading
recovery programs and Australian genre pedagogy) versus the need to acknowl-
edge, and enable children to build on, the frequently marginalized language and
literacy resources that they bring with them to school. Such acknowledgement
entails effectively challenging what counts as powerful language use, thus involv-
ing political representation as well.
There are also approaches to language and literacy education that explicitly
aim at bringing together the seemingly incompatible goals of access to power-
ful forms of language and literacy, i.e. redistribution of powerful resources, and
the recognition of diverse language and literacy resources. We can see the three
goals of redistribution, recognition and representation in synthesis models such as
Hilary Janks model of critical literacy (2010) and the multiliteracies framework
(New London Group, 2000). Janks (2010) argues for
giving students access to powerful varieties of language and literacy (redistri-

bution of resources);
the recognition of marginalized resources and thus the expansion of what
counts as powerful language and literacy use; and
developing students critical ability to interrogate relations of power (prepar-
ing them for political representation).
The multiliteracies framework operates with a similar logic. In my view,

owever, we have not taken seriously enough the need to critique what counts
h
as powerful language use whose language resources are privileged by this and
whose language practices are effectively denied the status of resource. This is
especially problematic given what we know about the inherently equal capacity
for meaning-making of all languages a foundational insight from linguistics.
What continues to be ignored is the arbitrariness, aside from relations of power,
of the selection of a language variety as the standard language. And finally it
6Introduction
ignores the changing linguistic landscape in which being monolingual in a single

language or mainstream variety is increasingly insufficient for meaningful and
active global citizenship.
To summarize so far, my argument in this book is that knowledge about lan-
guage from the language disciplines (sociolinguistics, critical applied linguistics
and linguistic anthropology) needs to be incorporated into language and literacy
education and that the failure to do this directly thwarts attempts to achieve social
justice in education on a large scale. My aim is three-fold:
firstly, to make accessible to language and literacy educators as well as

educational policy makers the paradigm shifts that have been taking place in
the study of language in society (Chapters 1 and 2);
secondly, to show the contradictions between recent conceptualising of
language and language practices and the dominant normative views of

language constructed at the macro level in educational policies and curricula
as well as at the micro level of everyday practice in schools (Chapters 3, 4
and 5); and
thirdly, to show hopeful examples of childrens language and literacy prac-
tices that resist the imposed monolingual norm as well as transformative
pedagogical approaches that position children as linguistically resourceful
(Chapters 6, 7 and 8).
Language and Power

Understanding the relationship between language and power in everyday life in
schools is a key concern of this book. The power of language, and the complex
entanglement of language choices and colonization was first introduced to me
as an undergraduate English studies student reading the seminal text by Kenyan
author Ngug wa Thiongo (1986), Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language
in African Literature, and the debate between Ngug and Nigerian author Chinua
Achebe (1965). Whereas Ngug argued that African experience could only be
rendered through African languages and committed himself to writing in Gikuyu,
Achebe argued for the appropriation and adaptation of English by African writers:
I feel that the English language will be able to carry the weight of my African
experience. But it will have to be a new English, still in full communion with its
ancestral home but altered to suit its new African surroundings (Achebe, 1965,
30). This debate remains foundational to understanding the politics of language
in postcolonial contexts. Ngugs autobiographical narrative of the imposition of
English medium schooling in Kenya by the colonial regime and his punishment
for deviating from speaking English at school is notorious:
one of the most humiliating experiences was to be caught speaking

Gikuyuin the vicinity of the school. The culprit was given corporal
Introduction 7
punishment three to five strokes of the cane on bare buttocks or was

made to carry a metal plate around the neck with inscriptions such asIAM
STUPID or I AM A DONKEY. Sometimes the culprits were fined money
they could hardly afford. And how did the teachers catch the culprits?
Abutton was initially given to one pupil who was supposed to hand it over
to whoever was caught speaking his mother tongue. Whoever had the
button at the end of the day would sing who had given it to him and the
ensuing process would bring out all the culprits of the day. Thus children
were turned into witch-hunters and in the process were being taught the
lucrative value of being a traitor to ones immediate community.
The attitude to English was the opposite; any achievement in spoken or

written English was highly rewarded; prizes, prestige, applause, the ticket to
higher realms. English became the measure of intelligence and ability in the
arts, the sciences and all the other branches of learning. English became the
main determinant of a childs progress up the ladder of formal education ...
(Ngug wa Thiongo, 1986, 1112)
Ngugs disturbing account illustrates language ideologies in practice and the

power of such ideologies in determining the language use that counts as a
resource for learning. Turning children into witch-hunters illuminates colonial
tactics used to enable the subjugated to accede to the dominant language ideology
privileging English only. There can be few examples more stark in showing the
language/power relationship than this subjection of childrens bodies to physical
abuse on account of their language use.
In language and literacy education, understanding the language/power nexus
has been influenced by scholarship in Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), specifi-
cally the work of Norman Fairclough (1989/2001, 1992) and Hilary Janks (1993,
1995, 2010). Fairclough outlines three principles in his conception of discourse or
language as a form of social practice (1989, 20):
all language is part of society, and not somehow external to it;

language is a social process; and
language is a socially conditioned process (1989, 22).
Fairclough resists talking about the relationship between language and society
because in his view, language cannot be separated from the social language
constitutes the social. This aligns with a central insight of post-structuralism,
namely the constitutive force of discourse. In relation to the object of named
languages, colonial linguistics has shown us how the work of missionaries in
codifying language in use in particular geographical areas in Southern Africa con-
structed or invented, to use Makoni and Pennycooks (2007) term, a range of
discrete languages which could be named, for example, isiXhosa and isiZulu.
(This is taken up in Chapter 2.)
8Introduction
Fairclough is drawing on Foucaults argument that discourse is a form of social

practice and that discourse shapes and is in turn shaped by the social, but he
maintains a broadly Marxist analysis of the centrality of social class in relations
of inequality and in a view of power as domination. Accordingly, Faircloughs
critical discourse analyses have tended to focus on elite discourses. Seeking a
more nuanced understanding of how power operates unevenly in the micro-
processes of everyday life, I turned to the tools of linguistic ethnography and fem-
inist post-structuralism. My analysis of language ideologies in practice, students
experiences and the way they are positioned as well as position themselves is
informed by a feminist post-structuralist conception of subjectivity5 and discourse
(Davies, 1989, 1990, 2000; Davies & Harr, 1999; Weedon, 1997). Following a
Foucauldian approach, discourse is not just a descriptor for language in use,
but signals ways of organising meaning that are both linguistic and embodied.
Discourses are practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak
(Foucault, 1972, 49). Discourses both open up and close down possibilities for
meaning-making and understanding, and it is within the discursive systems of
power/knowledge (pouvoir/savoir) [ . . . that we . . . ] take up subject positions
(Pennycook, 1994, 128). Sumayas discourse at the opening of the chapter shows
how she has categorized and constructed herself as different from the norm
in her class, taking up this subject position. Such subjective sense of difference
is linked to discourses circulating in her classroom and school about legitimate
language use. These discourses are in turn connected to broader socio-political
and socio-historical discourses about language
While Sumaya might constitute herself as different from the norm and as
silenced in the classroom, in informal discussion with her peer and myself she
takes up a different positioning and claims her right to speak. This illustrates how
subjectivity (or the sense of oneself) is not unified and fixed, but rather is in
process and discursively constituted in different ways which are sometimes con-
tradictory in different moments (Weedon, 1997, Davies, 2000). Thus subjectivity
can be understood as a conscious site of struggle between competing discourses
in which the individual plays an active role. This struggle, Weedon (1997) argues,
enables individuals to resist being positioned in particular ways and to produce
new meanings from conflicting discourses. Resistance thus conceptualised relies
on Foucauldian notions of power. Key elements of the latter that inform my
understanding of language and power in this book are that power not only oper-
ates as domination, but potentially also
as productive; it is relational and distributed, exercised from innumerable

points (Foucault, 1990, 94)
dependent on a multiplicity of points of resistance (Foucault, 1990, 96)
reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts
itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and
everyday lives (Foucault 1980, 39).
Introduction 9
Sumayas self-silencing shows her internalizing of a deficit discourse on her

language use. This illustrates power reaching into the very grain of her being.
But the body is simultaneously disciplined and a powerful resource in acts of
resistance, even if resistant or otherwise agentic acts often go unnoticed in the
everyday life of schooling. While there is no doubt that schools are often sites
where power is exercised as domination, we can also see in them spaces where
students exercise agency if we look closely. In my analysis of relations of language
and power in a number of South African schools across Chapters 4, 5 and 6, I aim
to trace both the ways in which power is exercised as domination and the ways in
which this is challenged, whether consciously or through students practices that
work to disrupt dominant language/power relations. I show how the school is

a site of multiple and often competing discourses with dominant discourses (and
thus cultural practices) shifting in different spaces.
In addition to Foucault, Bourdieus metaphor of the linguistic marketplace
and of the symbolic power carried by language (1977, 1991) has been central
in understanding the ways in which languages and language practices are selec-
tively valued, and unequally distributed resources (Heller, 2007). Bourdieu has
famously argued that [d]iscourse is a symbolic asset which can receive different
values depending on the market on which it is offered (1977, 651), and points
out that the dominant usage is the usage of the dominant class (1977, 659). This
provides an explanation for how the language practices of the elite come to con-
stitute the mainstream or standard language in a society. Schooling as one of the
most important sites for social reproduction is thus also one of the key sites which
imposes the legitimate forms of discourse and the idea that discourse should be
recognised if and only if it conforms to the legitimate norms (Bourdieu 1977,
650). The market however is not necessarily unified. Different markets within a
society may value different language resources. For example, while British English
may have been exclusively valued in Ngugs experience of colonial schooling, in
the home and the fields Gikuyu remained the legitimate language. Bilingualism
thus became essential. In his analysis of the sociolinguistics of globalization, Jan
Blommaert (2010) has also drawn attention to the uneven mobility of language
resources. Some language resources might have legitimacy in a range of high
status global sites such as transnational business and institutions of higher edu-
cation, as well as more intimate local sites, such as the home, place of worship
and marketplace. In Blommaerts terms, the former set of resources are able to
travel and thus function at a high scale level. The legitimacy of other language
resources remains constrained to the local (or lower scale) level and these are not
able to travel as successfully. Compare for example the use of Mainstream United
States English or MUSE (Lippi-Green, 1996) in a London bank with the use of
Nigerian Pidgin in the same setting.
The importance of relations of power in the process of language learning itself
has been foregrounded by Bonny Nortons (1995, 2013) research on adult immi-
grant language learners in Canada, and by Kelleen Tooheys work on immigrant
10Introduction
childrens language learning (Toohey, 2000), among others. It is now well

established that issues of power and inequality are central to our understanding
of language learning (Norton and McKinney, 2011, 87). Power relations deeply
influence learners access to the target language and to interacting with speakers
of that language, as well as how learners are positioned. A major concern of
thisbook is how students from non-dominant backgrounds, such as Sumaya,
are positioned in relation to their language use, including as learners of standard
formsof language, in this case prestige forms of English.
The power of prestige varieties of English in many schools around the world
is such that, as Janks (2004) has pointed out, schools are adept at teaching chil-
dren the (mis)recognition (Bourdieu, 1991, 62) of English as the only legiti-
mate resource for learning without providing them with meaningful access to
the set of resources named as English, or to the broader curriculum. Children
acquire the language ideologies legitimizing English without gaining meaning-
ful access to English as a resource. At the same time, monolingual ideologies
exclusively recognizing prestige varieties of English teach children to devalue the
non-English languages and non-mainstream varieties of English that that they
bring with them to school, and continue to use on a daily basis. This injustice is
a widespread problem the real language problem in schooling.
What Can We Learn from Language Dynamics in

SouthAfricanSchools?
Present day post-apartheid South Africa has been described as an ontological
hotspot and as a laboratory for social change (Soudien, 2014, 210211). South
Africa is a highly unequal and diverse society that is explicitly grappling with the
deeply ingrained effects of institutionalized racism, and struggling to decolonize.
The South African experience thus provides insights that are illuminating for
contexts of racialised inequality around the world. Aside from the diversity of the
locally born population, South Africa has increasingly become a home (albeit an
often unwelcoming one) for economic migrants and refugees from other parts of
Africa. Extreme inequalities and suspicion of difference as well as institutionalised
racism give South Africa much in common with the USA, Brazil, Australia and
Europe. The way in which the student protest movement #Rhodes Must Fall,6
recently established by students at my own institution, the University of Cape
Town, has resonated on campuses in other parts of the world with student protest
action calling for an end to systemic racism on a number of campuses7 illustrates
the global nature of the dilemmas we face. South Africa thus provides the case of
a post-colonial schooling context for the book. However, I argue that there are a
number of striking parallels between South Africa and the United States, and also
draw on cases from the US context.While the USA is more often cast as imperial
power than post-colonial context, its complex history embodies the dynamics of
both these positions. Particularly illuminating in exploring the case of language
Introduction 11
use in schools in South Africa is the visibility of the ways in which language use
is racialised. In my view, lack of recognition of (mostly Black) childrens linguistic
resources due to the dominance of English in South African schools and in other
post-colonial contexts is a form of racism. South African schools thus provide a
challenging and illuminating context in which to research social justice and social
inequality in language and literacy education.
The tools of linguistic ethnography8 informed all the research projects drawn
on in this book and in each case I will sketch the context necessary to under-
stand what kind of schooling situation is presented. Chapters 4, 5 and 6 all
draw substantially from a research project on Language, Identity, Inclusion and
Exclusion conducted in South African schools that were designated for White
children during apartheid and physically located in historically White suburbs in
Johannesburg and Cape Town. Such schools, one primary and four secondary
schools, all became desegregated post-apartheid. Collectively, these schools pres-
ent a picture of historically White schools in South Africa as a space where the
power of whiteness continues, despite the post-apartheid shift in political power.
Data collection involved fieldworkers (including myself) observing in schools for
two full days of the week for a minimum of two school terms with observation
captured in field notes and video and audio recording as well as group and indi-
vidual interviews and informal conversations with students and teachers. Some
high school students carried digital recorders to capture out of class language
practices. The focus in secondary schools was on the Year 10 students (1516
years old) and in the primary school on Year 1 students (67 years old).
The primary school and three of the secondary schools (one all girls and two
co-ed) were situated in the urban metropolis of Johannesburg, and one all girls
school was situated in Cape Town. The Johannesburg primary and all girls high
school were what Orfield (2004) has described as resegregated, that is they were
attended by Black children only and no longer attracted White students. All of the
schools used English as the language of instruction with English offered as a home
or first language only. While government-funded schools, they all charged fees
and thus would be placed on the elite end of public schooling in South Africa. It is
however important to recognize the huge range that exists even at the elite end of
public schooling in South Africa. The Johannesburg primary and girls-only high
schools charged fees significantly lower than the other schools and only 50% of
students paid fees with the majority coming from working class backgrounds.The
primary school ran a feeding scheme. The two co-ed schools and the Cape Town
girls school on the other hand were far wealthier, serving mainly middle-class and
upper-middle-class students.
Chapter Overview
I turn now to an overview of the chapters to follow. Chapter 1 explores the ques-
tion of what counts as [a] language, or as legitimate language use, in schooling.
12Introduction
Iintroduce the study of language ideologies and give an overview of recent shifts
in our understanding of languages as artefacts or social constructs as well as het-
eroglossic approaches to describing and understanding language in use. Chapter2
extends the conversation on what counts as language with a specific focus on
education policy and curricula in South Africa and post-colonial Anglophone
contexts. I look at the consequences of language policies in schools on childrens
opportunities to participate in learning and in processes of meaning-making in
the classroom. Chapter 3 focuses on whose language resources count in schooling
in the United States and in South Africa. I explore the striking parallels between
the positioning of users of African American language and Spanish/English bilin-
guals or emergent bilinguals, with the positioning of Black children whose home
languages are indigenous to South Africa.
Chapters 46 present an analysis of discourses and language practices in
five historically White, now desegregated schools. In Chapter 4 I introduce
the notion of Anglonormativity to describe the dominant language ideology that
makes proficiency in particular forms of standard English compulsory, and
analyse the ways in which this is racialised and classed. I show how English
monolingualism in a particular prestige variety is continually constructed as
the most prized asset while multilingual repertoires and use of non-prestige
varieties of English are conversely constructed as problems. Chapter 5 presents
an in-depth analysis of one English/Language Arts lesson with Grade 10 girls
illustrating how Anglonormativity further entrenches the power and authority
exercised by the White, middle-class teacher. While the English class is char-
acterised as a contact zone (Pratt, 1991), I show the missed opportunities to
recognize the students experiences and ways of knowing. The case illustrates
the consequences of Anglonormativity and monoglossic positioning of students
in the micro-practices of everyday lessons.
The data analysed in Chapters 4 and 5 shows the injustices of positioning
students as deficient meaning-makers, through invoking Anglonormative and
monolingual ideologies in schools. In contrast to this, in Chapter 6 I fore-
ground students agency in interrupting Anglonormativty through their cre-
ative, heteroglossic language practices. Despite the language regimes of schools,
studentsare frequently able to reposition their officially marginalized resources
in everyday practices of meaning-making. Continuing this theme of hope,
Chapter7presents three cases of transgressive or transformative language and lit-
eracy pedagogies from the USA and South Africa that actively work to reposition
learners as resourceful meaning-makers and to interrogate the unjust relationship
between language and power as it is currently constituted. Finally, Chapter 8
concludes the book, drawing attention to some of the difficulties in implement-
ing transformative language and literacy pedagogies and in challenging domi-
nant language ideologies, but also reminding us of how much has already been
achieved by innovative language and literacy teachers and researchers in many
parts of theworld.
Introduction 13
Conclusion
Throughout the book I am arguing for a paradigm shift in the ways in which
we approach language in education: in language in education policy; in lan-
guage curricula and classrooms; and in language teacher education. This is
central to realizing a social justice agenda which takes seriously the complex
inter-related goals of redistribution, recognition and representation (Fraser,
2008). Dominant monolingual language ideologies I will argue not only posi-
tion multilinguals as deficient meaning-makers but also disadvantage mono-
lingual speakers of powerful languages such as Mainstream United States
English because they keep these children monolingual. In a context where
multilingualism is the norm across the globe, this is increasingly limiting.

In one of my graduate classes exploring language ideologies in schooling, a
student remarked that the implications of surfacing language ideologies and
understanding how they work in language education are that we are not just
asking for a change in the way language is taught a new methodology but
we are asking people to fundamentally change the way that they think about
language. The goal of this book is no less than that.
Notes
1 Multimodality acknowledges that meaning-making draws on a range of representa-
tional resources of which language is only one. It focuses on meaning-making across a
range of modes, e.g. image, gesture, gaze, sound, writing, music and speech (Kress and
van Leeuwen, 2001; Jewitt, 2008).
2 In contrast to this, research which foregrounds childrens language resources includes
Bloch (2002) Janks and Comber (2006), Prinsloo (2004) and Stein (2008).
3 Code-switching is defined as the juxtaposition of elements from two (or more)
languages or dialects. (McCormick, 2001, 447). This definition will be interrogated
in Chapter 1.
4 Notable examples are Alexander (1999), Alim (2010), Corson (1997), Cummins (2000),
Gee (1990), Janks (2010) and Nieto (2010).
5 Subjectivity sense of oneself - here is used to signal what others have termed identity.
Weedon (1997) points out that poststructuralist accounts prefer the term subjectivity as
it signals a move away from the notion of an essentialist, core, or unified sense of self.
6 As described by Wikipedia, Rhodes Must Fall (#RhodesMustFall) is a protest move-
ment that began on 9 March 2015, originally directed against a statue at the University
of Cape Town (UCT) that commemorates Cecil Rhodes.The campaign for the statue's
removal received global attention and led to a wider movement to decolonise educa-
tion across South Africa (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhodes_Must_Fall).
7 Notably, Oriel College in Oxford, UK (www.theguardian.com/education/2015/
dec/22/oxford-students-campaign-cecil-rhodes-statue-oriel-college) and Yale
University, Brown and Princeton in the USA (www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/
01/14/the-trouble-at-yale/?sub_key=5684aeb2677b9).
8 I align with Rampton et al.s definition (2014, 2): Linguistic ethnography generally
holds that to a considerable degree, language and the social world are mutually shap-
ing, and that close analysis of situated language use can provide both fundamental and
14Introduction
distinctive insights into the mechanisms and dynamics of social and cultural production
in everyday activity. Linguistic ethnography is particularly powerful in showing how
processes of structure and agency are entangled at various scale levels and that there
are different kinds of constraining processes that occur at various scales (Wortham
and Rhodes, 2013, 539). Such relations may be resisted individually or collectively at
different scale levels. See also Blommaert and Dong Jie, 2010; Lillis, 2008; Snell, Shaw
and Copland, 2015.
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1
WHAT COUNTS AS [A] LANGUAGE?
While in most schools, language in education policies and educational curricula,

the notion of language is presented as a simple and uncontested phenomenon with
a question like What counts as [a] language? sounding mildly absurd, the object
of study in linguistics and related disciplines of sociolinguistics, linguistic anthro-
pology and historical and applied linguistics has come under fierce debate. In this
chapter I aim to review some of this debate examining how language as phenom-
enon is currently conceptualized in critical applied and sociolinguistics. My ratio-
nale for doing this is the view that how we conceptualize language has profound
consequences for how we teach language in schooling and for childrens access
to quality education through language. It has long been recognized that language
is central to the reproduction of social inequality through schooling (Bourdieu, 1977,
Collins, 2009; Bernstein, 1975; Gee, 1990/1996; Heath, 1984). But exactly how
such inequality is produced and reproduced is an empirical question. As language
and social relations shift with context, so too do such processes of [re]production.
In my view, we need to understand the mechanisms through whichinequality is
reproduced in the micro-workings of daily life in schools as well as the ways in
which it is challenged, if we are to interrupt such [re]production of inequality.
Wecannot understand such micro-workings however without an understanding
of what language is and how it is used to signal or index particular social positions
and values.
Increasingly scholars have drawn attention to the monolingual bias in lin-
guistics and associated disciplines (e.g. Auer, 2007; Canagarajah, 2007; Firth
and Wagner, 1997; 2007; Garcia, 2009; Makoni and Meinhof, 2003; May, 2014;
Pratt, 1991). These have proceeded from the assumption that the ideal or nor-
mal language user has command of only one named language (and frequently
What Counts as [a] Language? 19
command of the set of resources we recognize as English, given that English

speakers are the most likely to be monolingual). We see the legacy of this
assumption in countless terms that are ubiquitous in applied linguistics: first lan-
guage acquisition, second language acquisition, the native speaker, fossilization
and interlanguage. May (2014) has termed the recent shift in applied linguistics
towards taking multilingual speakers and multilingualism as the starting point,
the multilingual turn. In this book I attempt to interrogate the monolingual
assumptions that frequently underlie educational policy, curricula and classroom
practices. If the use of a range of linguistic resources from more than one named
language is the norm among children in the world (Garcia, 2009), then the plu-
rilingual child needs to be considered the norm in language in education policy

and practices. In other words, the linguistic repertoires of the typical child need
to count! A useful place to start in attempting to answer the question of what
counts as (a) language is the field of linguistic or language ideologies.
Language Ideologies
The ways in which people value languages and speakers differently and frequently
position each other differentially in relation to the ways in which they use lan-
guage and the kinds of language they use is largely informed by their beliefs about
language; what particular instances of language use index is similarly informed by
language ideologies. Language ideologies can be defined as
the sets of beliefs, values and cultural frames that continually circulate
in society, informing the ways in which language is conceptualized and
represented as well as how it is used. Such ideologies are constructed
through discourse, that is, systems of power/knowledge (Foucault, 1980).
(Makoe and McKinney, 2014, 659)
As this definition suggests, like ideology more generally, language ideologies go

beyond the ideas that one individual may have in one particular site, referring
rather to a network of beliefs and values that exist across a number of people
and sites. Significantly, Woolard and Schieffelin argue that language ideologies
show a mediating link between social structures and forms of talk (1994, 55).
Languages themselves are ideologically defined, not defined by use or users
(Jrgensen, 2008, 166). The dominant idea of languages as boundaried, stable
systems that exist with or without speakers and that are continuous across a range
of contexts underlying language in education policy and curricula can be seen
as a language ideological construct. Blommaert (2006) draws attention to the
complicity of the discipline of linguistics itself in the cultural construction of
language in general as a stable, contextless individual mental object (512). This
ideology of autonomous, clearly separable and boundaried named languages is
20 What Counts as [a] Language?
central to monolingual or monoglossic ideologies. A number of myths follow

from a monoglossic orientation to language:
Monolingualism, or a high level of proficiency in a single named language,

is the norm.
Nations are made up of speakers of one language: one language, one nation,
one geographical territory (Ricento, 2000).
Linguistic purity is inherently superior, or good language use keeps named
languages separate from each other while deficient language use is mixed.
Bi/multilingualism is understood as multiple monolingualisms, or as equiv-
alent proficiency in two or more named languages, so-called balanced

bilingualism (Grosjean, 1982).
Bi/multilingualism is undesirable/a problem (Ruiz, 1984).
Finally as Ag and Jrgensen (2013) have pointed out, a consequence of the

monolingualism ideology is the belief that every person must have a particularly
close relationship to one language, almost invariably the mother tongue of the
person (2013, 527).
The study of language ideologies has become a well-developed field in lin-
guistic anthropology, beginning with publications in the late 1980s and early
1990s.1 A focus on the ideology of stable named languages and the ideological
processes through which language/s have been constructed has however only
more recently developed in applied linguistics (e.g. Makoni and Meinhof, 2003,
Makoni and Pennycook, 2007) and sociolinguistics (Heller, 2007). Following clas-
sic studies,2 Makoni and Mashiri (2007) draw attention to the colonial construc-
tion or invention, rather than discovery of distinct indigenous African languages
and varieties in Southern Africa. Competing missionary groupings conducted
their own linguistic labour using different orthographies and different infor-
mants to construct several distinct Nguni and Sotho languages amongst others.
As Brutt-Griffler (2006, 38) has pointed out, the individuals responsible for con-
structing standard languages were not linguists, but most often missionaries with
questionable proficiency (at best good second-language proficiency and at worst
virtually no proficiency) in the local language resources.
In South Africa, the colonially constructed indigenous languages were used as
part of a divide and rule strategy amongst Black people, dividing people up according
to one of nine distinct language/ethnic categories (Makoni 1999). Such linguistic
categories continue to live on in post-apartheid South Africa as seen in the eleven
languages that are given official status in the current Constitution and following
from this in language in education policy. Makoni argues that in Southern Africa,
African languages are colonial scripts or colonial inventions (see also Irvine, 2008;
Mhlhasler, 1996 on language/s in the Pacific region). The colonial imposition of
particular versions of African languages (not least as standard languages in education)
(Makoni and Meinhof, 2003) is a stark illustration of the fact that, the existence of
alanguage is always a discursive project rather than an established fact (Woolard and
Schieffelin, 1994, 64), and further that this project serves particular interests.
The fact that language is ideological is not necessarily a problem in itself, but
rather like any social phenomenon, it means that we need to look at the kinds of
ideologies being constructed, and significantly for this book, the effects thereof.3 As
Blommaert (2006) points out one of the essential functions of language is ideolog-
ical (metapragmatic and indexical) framing: providing contextual cues about who
speaks, in what mode, on which topic, and under what circumstances. This ideo-
logical function is central to contextualization procedures (Blommaert 2006, 512).
This means that some kinds of language use are enregistered (Agha, 2003, 2005) as
superior to others, that is, they are viewed as more accurate or precise, purer, more
aesthetically pleasing. Agha explains that he uses the verb to register to mean both
to notice and to record such that processes of e nregisterment signify
processes whereby distinct forms of speech come to be socially recognized

(or enregistered) as indexical of speaker attributes by a population of
language users. (2005, 38)
We can move from this notion of enregisterment to seeing how different kinds
of language use (and different named languages themselves) that are differently
valued index different social values. If a hearer makes an interpretation about
where I come from based on the phonological aspects of my speech and then
makes a judgement about where and how well I have been educated based on
the same evidence, this can only be as a result of the phonological features of my
speech having obtained particular social and cultural values (Agha, 2003). We can
then say that the phonological features of my speech have come to index par-
ticular social values. Silverstein argues that the link between particular linguistic
elements (here the phonological features of my speech) and what they are gen-
erally agreed to point to, or to index, is constructed through ideology: ideology
construes indexicality. Such indexicality does not however operate in an isolated
way clusters of linguistic features are seen to work together to index particular
values. This clustering is what Agha defines as enregisterment.
It should be clear that the notion of language ideologies as taken up
heredrawson a Foucauldian notion of discourse as constitutive of the social, as
practices which systematically form the object of which they speak (Foucault,
1972, 49). I pay attention to the need for deconstruction and continual revisiting
of the discursive objects and subjects that are formed. It is my argument that lan-
guage ideologies are central to the reproduction of social inequality in schooling.
Dominant monolingual ideologies as outlined above inform the language in edu-
cation policy, language curricula and everyday practices in schools and classrooms
of both teachers and students. However, co-present with processes of reproduction
are discursive practices that work to subvert and unsettle dominant discourses and
ideologies. Iwill be exploring both of these in the chapterstocome.
Heteroglossia and Linguistic Repertoires

Accepting that named languages as stable, boundaried phenomena are social
constructs, the products of language ideologies, I go on now to review current
heteroglossic approaches to understanding and describing language and language
practices. Following Bakhtin (1981), heteroglossia can be defined as the complex,
simultaneous use of a diverse range of registers, voices, named languages or codes,
in our daily lives, but it also draws attention to the potential tension between dif-
ferent kinds of registers, and voices (Ivanov, 2000, see also Bailey, 2007). As Ivanov
has argued, heteroglossia is opposed to monoglossia (the dominance of one lan-
guage) [. . .] and to polyglossia (the [monolingual] coexistence of two languages
(Ivanov, 2000, 100, my addition in square brackets). This emphasizes the ways in
which different resources are not necessarily equally valued or distributed, i.e.,
the stratification of linguistic resources as well as value in indexicality. Drawing
on Silversteins (2003) notion of indexical order, Blommaert has argued that
indexical meanings are ordered in the form of stratified complexes, in which
some kinds of indexicality are ranked higher than others (Blommaert, 2005, 73).
Following Foucaults orders of discourse, Blommaert uses the term orders of
indexicality to capture the regular stratification involved in indexicality.
Heteroglossic language practices involving movement across different named
languages have commonly been described in variationist sociolinguistics using
the term code-switching, broadly defined as the juxtaposition of elements
from two (or more) languages or dialects (McCormick, 2001, 447), or as the
alternate use of two or more languages in a single piece of discourse (Myers-
Scotton, 1993).There is a large body of research on the structure and functions of
code-switching in everyday language use (e.g. Auer, 1998; Heller, 1988). In applied
linguistics, code-switching in classrooms has been a research focus, frequently in
post-colonial settings (Ferguson, 2003; Arthur and Martin, 2006; Chimbutane,
2011). Underlying the notion of code-switching as defined above is
the assumption that two or more named languages are identifiable in

thediscourse;
that speakers are drawing on resources from distinct languages; and
that speakers have competence in the individual languages they are
drawingon.
Given the deconstruction of the notion of clearly identifiable and boundaried,

named languages, and the acknowledgement that language is itself an ideological
construction, we can begin to see potential problems with the code-switching par-
adigm.While it is true that it is often possible to identify different named languages
in language use, this is not always the case. Broadly speaking, attempts by socio-
and applied linguists to make sense of the complexity of spontaneous language use
in a very wide range of contexts including in North America, Northern Europe,
sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia have given rise to a range of new languages of
description, such as polylanguaging or polylingual languaging (Jrgensen, 2008;

Jrgensen et al., 2011), metrolingualism and metrolingual multi-tasking (Otsuji
and Pennycook, 2010; Pennycook and Otsuji, 2014), contemporary urban ver-
naculars (Rampton, 2011) and urban vernaculars (Makoni, Brutt-Griffler and
Mashiri, 2007), plurilingualism (Canagarajah 2013a, 2013b) and translanguaging
(Garcia, 2009). In description particularly of heteroglossic practices in writing,
the terms codemeshing (Canagarajah, 2006) and translingualism (Canagarajah,
2013a, 2013b, Horner et al., 2011) have been used. Blommaert (2013, 614) writes
about the epistemological rupture which these terms signal: a move away from
multiplicty and plurality towards complexity. Following Jrgensen et al. (2011),
Blommaert argues that
People learn, acquire, and deploy features, some of which are conventionally
(that is, ideologically) attributed to a language such as Danish, whereas
others are part of recognizable indexical orders such as genres, styles,
registers, jargons, and so forth. Language, thus conceived, is an emergent
indexical order, a non-random arrangement of features that can be enregis-
tered as a conventionally recognizable language X or Y. (2013, 614)
In the table below (Table 1.1) I aim to provide a pathway through the maze
of new terminology describing heteroglossic language practices, highlighting the
origins and definitions of many of these concepts.
TABLE 1.1 Heteroglossic Languages of Description
Polylanguaging The terms polylanguaging and polylingual languaging,

and polylingual drawn from research in multi-ethnic urban Denmark and
languaging urban Northwestern Europe more broadly, were introduced
by Jens Jrgensen and colleagues. Polylanguaging is defined
as capturing situations where Language users employ
whatever linguistic features are at their disposal to achieve their
communicative aims as best they can, regardless of how well
they know the involved languages; this entails that the language
users may know and use the fact that some of the features
are perceived by some speakers as not belonging together
(Jrgensen, 2008, 163).
Metrolingualism The terms metrolingualism and metrolingual multi-tasking,

and metrolingual drawn from research in urban Australian contexts, e.g.markets
multi-tasking in Sydney, were introduced by Alistair Pennycook and
EmiOtsuji (2010, 2014). Metrolingualism is defined as
a product of modern and often urban interaction, describing
the ways in which people of different and mixed backgrounds
use, play with and negotiate identities through language
(Otsuji and Pennycook, 2010, 240).
(continued)
TABLE 1.1 Heteroglossic Languages of Description (continued)
Crossing Emerging from his research in multi-ethnic urban contexts in

the UK, such as in Birmingham and London, Rampton (1995)
coined the term crossing to describe the use of elements of
a language that one does not generally understand and is not
generally associated with in ones speech.
Urban vernaculars Drawn from their research on language practices in urban

African contexts such as Harare, Zimbabwe, Makoni,
Brutt-Griffler and Mashiri introduced the term urban
vernaculars to refer to languages made up of discourse
elements, lexical items, and syntactic forms drawn from a

number of different languages which the speakers do not
necessarily have competence in or identify as individual
languages (Makoni, Brutt-Griffler and Mashiri, 2007, 34).
Translingualism Canagarajah (2013a, 2013b) uses the term translingualism,

referring to a shuttling between languages and a negotiation
of diverse linguistic resources for situated construction of
meaning (2013a, 2). Translingualism is explicitly applied not
only to spoken and written discourse (or words), but includes
many other semiotic resources including symbol systems,
modes and ecologies (ibid.).
Translanguaging Developed from the original Welsh term trawsiethu, the term
translanguaging has been developed by a number of scholars
in the US (e.g. Garcia, 2009; Canagarajah, 2011) and the UK
(e.g. Wei, 2011; Creese and Blackledge, 2010). Translanguaging
refers to an approach to the use of language, bilingualism and
the education of bilinguals that considers the language practices
of bilinguals not as two autonomous language systems as has
been traditionally the case, but as one linguistic repertoire with
features that have been societally constructed as belonging to
two separate languages (Garcia and Wei, 2014 2). It also refers
to specific language practices: the act performed by bilinguals
of accessing different linguistic features or various modes of
what are described as autonomous languages (Garcia, 2009, 141,
my emphasis).
The principle difference between the term code-switching and the range of
terms introduced above is itself ideological in that all of the authors of the terms in
Table 1.1 distance themselves firstly from the notion of named languages as pure
and bounded entities, and secondly from monoglossic orientations to the study of
language in society (Canagarajah, 2007; Bailey, 2007; May, 2014). In language use
described by all of these terms, users of language or languagers (Jrgensen, 2003;
Garcia and Wei, 2014) are understood to draw on whatever resources are avail-
able in their repertoires to make meaning. They are not expected to have equal
competence in the different named languages in these repertoires. They are thus
aligned with critiques of the notion of equivalent competence in more than one
language as signaled by a term like balanced bilinguals (Creese and Blackledge,
2010). In the case of crossing and polylanguaging, speakers may not even know
the named languages they are drawing on and in the case of plurilingualism and
urban vernaculars, languagers may have competence in the fused urban vernac-
ular rather than monolingual competence in the named languages from which
linguistic features are drawn.
There will be discursive practices where it is clearly possible to identity two
(or more) named languages being used simultaneously in the interaction such as
in Extract 1.1 below from a Grade 8 Science lesson where the teacher switches
fromEnglish (the official language of learning and teaching) to isiXhosa (the
shared home language of the learners and teacher) before reading from the
English textbook:
Extract 1.1
Teacher:And then kengoku kuthiwe [now it says] The maggots help
to break down the dead plant or animal material (isiXhosa
italicized) (Probyn2006,399).
But even in cases such as Extract 1.1, identifying the particular languages used
in communicating does not take us very far in understanding how language is
being used for meaning-making in this classroom. Whether one or two or more
named languages is used, our focus needs to be on the meaning that is made and
on how language resources are being used or recruited for meaning-making. In
other cases however, and increasingly with urban vernaculars, the heteroglossic
nature of language use is more complex. Consider Extract 1.2 where a bus con-
ductor is addressing passengers in Harare, Zimbabwe. This example is taken from
Makoniet al. (2007, 37) who describe the language practice of the conductor as
drawing on an amalgam of English, chiChewa and chiShona, which is sometimes
called chiHarare, after the capital city of Zimbabwe where it is used.
Extract 1.2
1. Bus conductor (to passengers): mapassengerz yimani mukiyu,
mosatchita zatchigororo.
[translation: Passengers stand in a line, do not behave like hooligans.]
2. Bus conductor: Pindai tiende muface.
[translation: Get in so that we may leave, my acquaintance.]
Here chiChewa is marked by italics, chiShona in bold italics and English in

bold roman. Makoni et al. point out that the meaning of English words in such
an urban vernacular at times radically differs from their meaning in Standard
English e.g. muface combines the Shona prefix mu with the English noun
face to denote my acquaintance, while mukiyu draws on the English verb

queue and mapassengerz is doubly pluralized with the chiShona prefix ma
and the s/z added to the end of passengerz (Makoni, Brutt-Griffler and Mashiri,
2007). In analyzing language use such as that in Extract 1.2, Makoni et al. do not
use the framework of code-switching, arguing rather that the bus conductor is
using a seamless, or fused urban vernacular. The recontextualising of the bits of
English for example in this extract show the limitations of a definition such as
code-switching.
In their review of heteroglossic languages of description, Pennycook and
Otsuji identify three orientations:
those that are focused on the individual as starting point (albeit a social indi-
vidual), that is, the individual as the locus of linguistic resources, in notions
such as linguistic repertoire (Busch, 2012; Blommaert and Backus, 2011);
those that are focused on movement (trans) and the plurality of linguistic features
(poly), thus moving amongst linguistic resources, in notions such as polylan-
guaging (or polylingual languaging) and translanguaging (code-meshing,
Canagarajah, 2006 could also be included here); and
Pennycook and Otsujis own notion of metrolingual multi-tasking where
they argue that space as the locus of activities and language practices needs
foregrounding, and include the notion of spatial repertoire, i.e the avail-
able and sedimented resources deriving from repeated language prac-
tices of the people involved in sets of activities related to particular places
(Pennycook and Otsuji, 2014, 1645).
All of these terms, linguistic repertoires, polylanguaging, translanguaging and

metrolingualism, do slightly different and necessary work and may be more or
less useful depending on the specific context and/or the specific language prac-
tices one is attempting to capture. In my view, heteroglossia following Bakhtin
(1981) describes an orientation to language as a diverse set of resources that is
highly productive as a descriptive umbrella term for both specific practices such as
code-meshing and poly- and translanguaging as well as notions of contemporary
urban vernaculars and linguistic repertoires. Heteroglossia refers to the potential
in all language use
across a range of domains (e.g. in and out of school);

across geographical spaces (e.g. urban/rural and hybrids); and
across modes, including spoken and written.
The opposition to monoglossia, or unitary approaches to language, fore-

grounds possible tensions amongst linguistic resources and opens the way
for recognition that not all are valued as resources. Finally multiplicity or
heterogeneity is not restricted to the use of named languages or the blending
ofresourcesfromdifferentcodes, but significantly, includes voices, registers and

varieties. Heteroglossia thus provides a multifaceted lens for analysing the com-
plexity of instances of language use across different scale levels in a socio-political
context. Translanguaging, polylanguaging or codemeshing (as examples) then,
can be described as a particular manifestation of heteroglossia or as heteroglossic
practices that draw on or seamlessly blend resources from more than one named
language/code (see also Blackledge and Creese, 2014).
Linguistic Repertoire
Focusing on linguistic repertoire, in contexts which are saturated with mono-

glossic ideologies, and frequently Anglonormative4 ideologies, one can argue for
the need to make visible the resources that individual learners have and aspire
to, such that the individual (though of course the social individual) as the locus
of the repertoire performs a significant strategic function. Busch (2012) and
Blommaert and Backus (2011) develop Gumperzs (1972) notion of the linguis-
tic repertoire, [t]he totality of linguistic resources (i.e. including both invariant
forms and variables) available to members of particular communities (Gumperz,
cited in Blommaert and Backus, 2011, 2). Busch places the notion of linguistic
repertoire within a post-structuralist framework, and following Derrida, draws
our attention to the power of linguistic categorisation as constitutive for
the subject but as also open to a practice of deconstruction (2012, 250). For
Busch, repertoire must be seen as interactional and is characterized in four ways:
(1)languages are understood in relation to one another forming a heteroglossic
whole; (2) meanings attributed to language practices are linked with personal
experiences and life trajectories; (3) speakers participate in varying spaces of
communication, each with its own language regime; and finally (4) the lin-
guistic repertoire is linked both to the history of the individual and his/her future,
pointing both backwards and forwards (2012, 520), including the realms of
imagination and desire.
Blommaert and Backus (2011) draw attention to the ways in which Gumperzs
notion characterizes verbal repertoires attached to speech communities or groups as
well as how repertoire is linked to competence or language knowledge. Despite
the acknowledged complexity in accounting for what constitutes language and
language knowledge, as Blommaert and Backus argue, institutions such as the
European Union common framework and other standardized tests of language
and literacy are predicated on linear and uniform levels of knowledge and
developmental progression (4). They thus draw attention to the ways in which
standardized testing of language and literacy authorizes uniformity, (re)produc-
ing the notion of a unitary standard language, with vastly unequal consequences.
Their expansion of linguistic repertoire takes a usage-based approach to compe-
tence as dynamic as well as seeing repertoires as biographically linked to different
kinds of language learning and individual trajectories such that repertoires are
no longer attached to communities but to individuals (22). Significant for the

purposes of this book, both Busch and Blommaert and Backus re-working of
the notion of linguistic repertoire have social justice motivations that push for
institutional change, such as the desire to make visible the invisible or unrecog-
nized language and literacy resources of children from non-dominant groups and
displaced people (Busch, 2012, 2010), and to unsettle problematic conceptions of
language underlying standardized testing in schooling and beyond (Blommaert
and Backus, 2011).
I will argue that working against the exclusionary effects of monoglossic ideolo-
gies in schooling requires consideration of the individual as locus of a repertoire of
linguistic and other meaning-making resources that includes their past, present and
future trajectories as the more recently developed notion of linguistic repertoire
outlines. It requires consideration of the possibilities for enabling meaning-making
that come from movements across different linguistic resources as well as the use
of integrated or mixed codes. It also requires consideration of what the space of
the classroom enables and disables in relation to childrens language and literacy
practices. Finally, it requires developing teachers and childrens metalinguistic and
sociolinguistic awareness of the ways in which language resources are differentially
distributed and socially valued. The recognition of childrens full linguistic reper-
toires as resources for meaning-making will enable them to take up positions as
knowers, and as legitimate learners from their entry into formal schooling.
A brief example illustrates how monoglossic ideologies that ignore childrens
linguistic repertoires result in the deficit positioning of children. The example is
taken from observation of a class of Grade 1 children (67 year olds) in a relatively
well-resourced school in Cape Town that during apartheid was legally reserved for
White children but now is attended exclusively by Black children who commute
some distance daily to attend the school (in Orfields (2004) terms, a resegregated
school). Mrs West, the teacher, has asked Sipho to stand and tell his morning news in
English. Sipho comes from an isiXhosa speaking home while Mrs West is an English
home language speaker. As Sipho stands, Mrs West comments to the researcher:
Extract 1.3
Mrs. West (to researcher): This is one who couldnt
anything
[referring to Sipho who began the year not speaking English]

(field notes, Carrim, 2013, 65).
In this school, the language of instruction is English only. South African lan-
guage in education and curriculum policy dictates that children must follow the
home language (or first language) curriculum of the language of instruction in
the school, in this case English, regardless of whether they are English language
learners. Using the mode of gesture, Mrs West constructs Sipho as unable to
speak when he began at the school. Here, it is not just the power and privileg-
ing of English that renders childrens non-English linguistic resources invisible. In
addition, it is essentialist and monoglossic conceptions of language that inform
language in education policy, planning and curricula, whether monolingual or
multilingual, following the notion that languages must be kept in separate silos,
that have profoundly inhibiting effects on childrens participation in classrooms
and ultimately their access to quality education. In the case of Sipho, the year 1
child referred to above, teacher knowledge of his linguistic repertoire upon entry
to the school would enable him to be positioned as a speaker, a meaning-maker,

rather than as one who couldnt [speak].
Heteroglossic Approaches to Language in Classrooms

The focus on the plurality of linguistic resources themselves and the practices
of moving amongst them with consciousness or in a seamless system has great
potential in the educational context. Acknowledging linguistic repertoires and
movements amongst different resources as well as aiming to extend such reper-
toires can create spaces in which children are positioned as meaning-makers rather
than as more or less deficient users of a single standard language, or even of two
or three separate standard languages (as in many current multilingual policies).
In pedagogical settings,5 the notions of hybrid language and literacy practices
(Gutirrezet al., 1999a), codemeshing (Canagarajah, 2006) andmost recently
translanguaging (Garcia, 2009; Garcia and Wei, 2014; Creese and Blackledge,
2010) have been gaining currency.
For example Makoe and McKinney (2009), focusing on one first-grade child
who uses her multilingual resources in order to draw her peers into the routines
and meaning-making processes of classroom life, used the notion of hybrid dis-
cursive practices to describe the learners use of a range of linguistic codes as
well as different voices (Bakhtin, 1981). While the language of instruction in the
classroom is English, the teacher is multilingual and the children are almost all
emergent bilinguals and English language learners. In the extract below we see
a child, Tumi, using her resources to mediate the teachers instructions to her
friend Lerato with whom she shared a desk, and who had much less proficiency
in English than she did. At the beginning of the day, the teacher is checking on
students completion of homework tasks.
Extract 1.4
1. Ms Mbuli:honest, who did not do my homework? Tell me before I
6
open your book.

2. Tumi: Lerato did not mam.
3. Ms Mbuli: How do you know Tumi? Were you with her at home?
4. Tumi:She told me. (Tumi looks at Lerato with whom she shares
thedesk.)
O entse homework? (in Sepedi) [Did you do your homework?]
5. Lerato:(Shakes her head moving left to right, indicating that she
didnot.)
Tumi is the first to respond to Ms Mbuli by revealing that Lerato has not done
the work, thus exposing or telling on her friend Lerato in the process. Tumi
here positions herself as the good girl (or good learner) but seems to be inter-
actively positioned by the teacher as a tell-tale. This interpretation is supported

by Ms Mbulis response to Tumi in the gentle reprimand How do you know...
ere you [there]? Tumi responds with a serious and genuine answer, She told
me. Tumi then turns to Lerato and translanguages, using resources from Sepedi
and English to ask her directly, Did you do your homework? Here Tumi reveals
her assumption that Lerato will not have understood the teachers initial ques-
tion (turn 1) in English, and in fact will not have understood the exchange
(turns24) in which she is the topic of conversation. In her question to Lerato,
we hear Tumi appropriating the teachers voice; she does not say, Mam wants
to know if you did your homework which would be closer to a translation, or
quotation (Bakhtin, 1984), of the events, but rather asks the question directly
herself (O entse [Did you . . . ]). Thus we argue that Tumi is not only shifting
linguistic codes, but also taking on the voice of a teacher in this moment.
In the term hybrid discursive practices we drew on and expanded Gutirrez
and colleagues notion of hybrid language and literacy practices, the commin-
gling of . . . different linguistic codes and registers (Gutirrez, Baquedano-Lpez
and Tejeda 1999b, 289) during classroom activities. Gutirrez et al. emphasize that
hybrid language and literacy practices are
not simply codeswitching as the alternation between two language codes.

They are more a systematic, strategic, affiliative, and sense-making process
among those who share the code, as they strive to achieve mutual under-
standing. (Gutirrez, Baquedano-Lpez, Alvarez and Chiu 1999a, 88)
This resonates in Garcias (2009) revitalising of the term translanguaging

referred to as the constant adaptation of linguistic resources in the service of
meaning-making (Garcia and Sylvan, 2011, 385) and earlier defined as the
act performed by bilinguals of accessing different linguistic features or various
modes of what are described as autonomous languages (2009, 141). Of all the
heteroglossic terms discussed in this chapter, translanguaging has had the most
take up and impact in pedagogical settings (e.g. Creese and Blackledge, 2010;
Makalela, 2015; Probyn, 2015).
Garcia and Sylvan (2011; see also Garcia and Wei, 2014) point to the
relationship between translanguaging, languaging and transculturacin:
For Ortiz, transculturacin refers to the complex and multidirectional

process in cultural transformation, as well as to the questioning of the
epistemological purity of disciplines and of the knowing subject. (389)
They link transculturacin to Mignolos notion of border thinking (2000)

or subaltern knowledge. For a number of scholars, monoglot ideologies and
approaches to the study of language are yet another example of colonial construc-
tions and impositions of knowledge (Canagarajah, 2009; Irvine, 2014; Makalela,

2015; Makoni, 1999; Makoni and Mashiri, 2007). In this sense, the critique of
monolingual assumptions in linguistic and applied linguistic research, and the
development of new heteroglossic languages of description, can be aligned with a
goal to decolonize (Mignolo, 2007, 2009) the study of language and of language
use in society. I will expand on this argument in Chapter 2.
In this book, language is conceptualized as a socially, culturally, politically
and historically situated set of resources and as a social practice (Heller, 2007).
Language is understood as heteroglossic and as deeply stratified in use through
processes of indexicality and enregisterment. What I aim to show is how such
stratification means that speakers and writers, language users or languagers, are
continually categorized, and positioned in relation to their language use. When
wethink of the languagers as children in schools, the particular concern of this
book, then we will see that such positioning has profound effects or consequences
for their ability to take up positions of legitimate learners and knowers (Fricker,
2007) in schools.
Constructing Language Boundaries and What it Means

toKnowa Language: Two Examples
The two examples discussed below are taken from research in an all-girls sub-
urban high school in Johannesburg, South Africa where Black students have
replaced White students (thus a resegregated school). I use these examples both to
illustrate the complexity in identifying named languages in language practices of
contemporary urban youth and to show the fuzziness of boundaries between
named languages in practice. The first example concerns my interpretation of the
phrase or bit of language dulakaido (dlka:d7) and my complicity in the con-
struction of the phrase as English during an interview. My first encounter with
this bit of language was through observation of girls playing circle games outside
on the field while they waited for their teacher to arrive with sports equip-
ment. The games involved the girls dancing in a large circle while choral singing
(with call and response as well as rhythmic repetitions) in a range of languages.
Such games are documented as common in the playgrounds of primary schools

in the Johannesburg township Soweto (Harrop-Allin, 2011a, 2011b) and have
been described as epitomis[ing] young urban township culture (Harrop-Allin,
2011a, 2). I had written about the games in my field notes and had the inten-
tion of following up with one of the girls, Grace, who I was going to meet for
an informal interview. In the interview, Grace was joined by a friend and we
discussed the games together. Thus my second encounter was in discussion with
Grace of a game named dulakado which I assumed to be a made-up word
drawing on the resources of Nguni and/or Sotho languages. My third encounter
is in the girls explanation of the game and our co-(re)construction of the game.
My fourth is in writing up my analysis of the interview discussion and addition

of a further reflexive layer to interpretation.
Extract 1.5
How dlka:d became du: laik ai du, or how dlka:d became English
CM:ok. Do you wanna do the other one? [Do you want to explain
the other circle game/song?]
Grace: the second one is eh, is basically . . .
Friend: . . . has lots of things
Grace: ja.8 Ok.
Friend:(inaudible)
CM:yes
Grace: its called Dulakadu (dlka:d)
CM: Dulakadu (dlka:d)
Grace:ja. What we do is we form a big circle and everybody sings and
the person who is in the centre of that circle has to, you know,
eh, dance.
CM:aha
Grace:. . . everybody around the circle is gonna do, they gonna do what
shes doing, the one in the circle.
CM: so, they have to copy the one in the centre?
Grace: ja
CM: the style?
Grace:ja. Then she is gonna go back and then the person she picks has
to go in . . .
CM:ok.
Grace: . . . again and so on.
CM: ok. So, you keep picking different people to come in?
Grace: ja, ja
Friend: . . . (inaudible) lots of things
Grace: lots
CM:and the, the, does, does Dulakadu [dlika:d] mean something

or isit just like eh, du:lika:d? [u: fronted] oh! Oh!
Friend: so, we do whatever they are doing.
CM: oh! Man! Do like I do [du: laik ai du:]
Grace: is it?
CM:ja
Grace: oh my gosh! I didnt know. I thought . . .
Friend: . . . do like I do [du: laik ai du:], do like I do [du: laik ai du:].
Grace: I dont, I dont know. Wow! I just only find out . . . (laughs)
CM: how does the, how does the song go?
Friend:do like I do, ah, and then she says do like I do and then the
people say I do, I do
Grace: oh! do like I do (laughs)
Friend:do like I do, I do, I do. And she does whatever and everyone
does it.
In keeping with the previous game described which was characterized as using
Zulu by the girls, I had named the game described above as dulakado in my field
notes and had assumed that it was a made-up word drawing on the phonological
features of either Zulu or Sotho. At the outset of the interview, the language of
this song was not recognizable as English either to me or Grace (though her friend
does seem aware of this). Arguably it is the language ideology of the interviewer
(myself ) that transforms the term dulakado into the recognizable English phrase
do like I do both for Grace and myself. It is my fronting and lengthening of the
linguistic feature known as the GOOSE vowel when I repeat the beginning of
the phrase du/d as du:, a phonological feature associated with ethnolinguistic
repertoires (Benor, 2010) of white South African Englishes, together with the
context of Graces explanation that the girls do what the person in the centre
of the circle does, that makes the word become recognizable as the English word
do to me. I then convince Grace that this is the English phrase do like I do:
CM:oh! Man! Do like I do [du: laik ai du:]

Grace:is it?
CM:ja [yes]
How to characterize Graces use of the phrase dulakadu has been a puzzle for
me one which heteroglossic approaches to understanding language are helpful
in teasing out but do not necessarily provide the solution to. To begin with we
can see the limitation of naming languages and what counts as examples of a
particular language. What to me and Grace did not count as English did count
as English for Graces friend. However that Grace did not recognize this sign as
English did not prevent her from engaging fully and appropriately in playing the
game which drew on other embodied semiotic and musical resources as well as
linguistic ones to work. Full participation in this game did not require one to
recognize it as using the resources of English.
Graces use of the term dulakadu in the interview could be described as
an example of polylanguaging (rather than code-switching, which implies some
awareness of ones practice in switching across languages).While Jrgensen et al.
gloss polylanguaging as the use of resources associated with different languages
even when the speaker knows very little of these (Jrgensen et al., 2011, 27),
they do not discuss whether the speaker is aware that the features used are asso-
ciated with a particular named language. In a more elaborated explanation of the
polylingual norm, Jrgensen (2008) implies knowledge of language sources:
Language users employ whatever linguistic features are at their disposal to

achieve their communicative aims as best they can, regardless of how well
they know the involved languages; this entails that the language users may
know and use the fact that some of the features are perceived by some
speakers as not belonging together. (Jrgensen, 2008:163)
One can also consider Blommaert and Backus discussion of language compe-
tence where they consider different contexts of language learning more or less
comprehensive, specialized and ephemeral and outline four large categories of
competence along a sliding scale of maximum competence, partial compe-
tence, minimal competence and recognising competence. Blommaert and
Backus point out that we often learn bits of language(s) without being aware
of it (Blommaert and Backus, 2011, 15). We might describe Graces use of the
phrase dlika:d as unacknowledged use of bits of language, but she does not
initially display the recognising competence which Blommaert and Backus
(2011, 17) name as part of the fourth, or most basic level of linguistic compe-
tence. On the other hand, Graces command of English puts her competence far
beyond that of recognizing competence. She is at a monolingually oriented
English medium school, is taught by English speakers and does all her reading
and writing in English. She is well able to recognize the use of English in many
different contexts, but not in this one, even though she explained she had been
playing the game for years. Thus while it is helpful to think about different kinds
of competence, we have to recognize how fluid even categories such as maximum
competence and recognising competence can be. Competence is not something
which can be described once and for all, but may be a case of this bit of language
I recognize and this bit I dont. Dulakado for Grace thus is not really a learned
bit of language; rather it seems to be a bit of language that has been appropriated
and is deployed in a ritualistic way. An English phrase here has been recontextu-
alized as a made up or nonsense word for Grace.
Why does this matter? I use Extract 1.4 as a way of getting us to think about
some of our assumptions and preconceived ideas about the stability of even the
set of resources named as English. It would be dangerous to make the claim that
languages that have not gone through processes of standardization are the ones
that are more likely to be fluid and unboundaried, such as the use of urban
vernaculars like ChiHarare illustrated in Extract 1.2 above (Makoni, B rutt-Grifler
and Mashiri, 2007).
The second example is taken from the same school. In a Year 10 (1516 year
olds) English lesson, one girl, Zweli, was standing at the front of the class and giv-
ing an oral presentation on George Orwells Animal Farm, and mistakenly replaced
the word apples with animals, both pronounced using the phonological fea-
tures associated with White South African Englishes, or with what Mesthrie and
colleagues (2015) have recently termed an upper-middle-class/middle-class vari-
ety of South African English. I was sitting (as observer) at the back of the class
behind her peer Catherine who I noticed quickly correcting her by providing
the word apples using phonological features associated with White Englishes.
Extract 1.6 was the exchange that then followed.
Extract 1.6
Zweli: Oh, sorry apples
Catherine:[laughing] Hayi t -lyt (No, too late) [ in t, fairly back and
not lengthened]
Again here describing Catherines style shift in relation to named languages is prob-
lematic. The phrase Hayi t -lyt could be described as a switch to Zulu in the
word for No, Hayi, followed by a switch back to English using the phonological
features associated with Black South African Englishes that Catherine did not usually
use when speaking English in the classroom (whether in the English class or other
lessons). Since she was correcting Zweli, and taking on a teacher voice in this inter-
action, the use of a shared informal code in the Zulu hayi could be explained as
softening the authoritative position she takes up in relation to her peer. The phrase
could also be described as not a switch between languages but the seamless use of
urban vernacular Zulu (Makoni, Brutt-Griffler and Mashiri, 2007) with the BSAE
accented too late (t -lyt) as part of the phrase. However, whether a switch to
Zulu and Black South African English or to urban Zulu alone, Catherine is clearly
moving away from the linguistic norms expected both by the English teacher and
her peers in this top streamed English lesson. Isuggest in switching to features of
a linguistic repertoire that is commonly only used in informal spaces at the school
(at break times, in the corridor), Catherine softens her earlier move of taking up
a teacher voice, or positioning herself as more powerful, to correct Zweli. Thus in
this incident Catherine is simultaneously indicating her power to show Zweli up in
front of the class by taking on the teachers voice, as well as showing some solidar-
ity with Zweli through the use of urban Zulu and possibly a differently racialized
variety of English. Furthermore, language choice here enables her to distance her
censure from that which would be produced by the English teacher (in English and
using the ethnolinguistic repertoires of White Englishes). Again whether this bit
of language counts as English or not is not particularly important then for the inter-
pretation of the communicative work that it is doing. I draw attention here to the
difficulty of naming languages only to emphasize the point about our assumptions
regarding how easy it should be to classify language use according to the construct
of named languages.That the fuzziness of language boundaries has important impli-
cations too for what it means to know a language was demonstrated in relation to
Graces misrecognition of dulakado as a nonsense word. Jrgensen argues
Since we cannot determine with certainty where one language ends and
the other one begins, it follows that we cannot always be sure to be able
to count languages. We cannot determine exactly which languages an indi-
vidual knows, and consequently we cannot tell how many languages this
person knows. We can, however, observe that there is a wide spectrum of
variation available to any individual, and we can also observe that this spec-
trum is different from person to person. (2008, 165)
In Extracts 1.5 and 1.6 above, the construction of language boundaries has no
relevance to the languagers themselves. They are deploying the semiotic, includ-
ing linguistic, resources at their disposal, or in their representational repertoires
(Pratt, 1991, 36) to successfully participate in the social life of schooling. There
is more focus on linguistic meaning in the conventional sense in Extract 1.6
thanin1.5, but both cases involve engaged participation.
Conclusion
This chapter has introduced and defined the notion of language ideologies and
has argued that these have great impact in [mis]conceptions about language. I have
presented a view of language as a resource and have emphasized the increasing
recognition of the highly heteroglossic nature of language in contrast to dom-
inant monoglossic ideologies that construct individual named languages as dis-
crete and hermetically sealed from each other. Recognition of languages as fluid
and of the complexity of heteroglossic language practices has given rise to a
range of new descriptive terminology such as polylanguaging, metrolingualism
and translanguaging, which are reviewed in this chapter. Discussion has focused
on translanguaging as the descriptive term which has been taken up most widely
in educational settings or for the goals of teaching and learning. The latter part of
the chapter has demonstrated the fuzziness of language boundaries through two
examples of youth language practices in a resegregated suburban school in South
Africa. The reconceptualising of what language is has profound implications for
educational policy and practice, and yet such implications are largely unexplored.
In the next chapter I examine some of these implications in attempting to answer
the question of what counts as a language in educational policy and curricula?
Questions for Discussion and Further Thinking

1. What are language ideologies? Give an example of a language ideology that
is dominant in your context.
2. What is the difference between code-switching as a descriptive term and the
more recently developed descriptive terms defined in Table 1.1?
3. How would you describe the resources in your own linguistic repertoire?
Notes
1 E.g.Woolard and Schieffelin, 1994,Woolard, 1992, see Blommaert, 2006 for an o verview
of development of the field.

2 E.g. those of Harries (1988, 1995). See also Makoni and Meinhof, 2004; Makoni,
Brutt-Griffler and Mashiri, 2007.
3 While my focus in this book is on the educational consequences of particular language
ideologies, the consequences for economic development and citizen participation in
governance in Africa are well documented. See Ali and Alamin Mazruis discussion in
The Power of Babel Language and Governance in the African Experience for a good example.
4 Drawing on the notion of heteronormativity, Anglonormativity refers to the
expectation that people will be and should be proficient in English, and are deficient,
even deviant, if they are not. I develop this argument in Chapter 4.
5 Rather than contexts of urban mobility in which polylanguaging (Jrgensen, 2008),
contemporary urban vernaculars (Rampton, 2011), and metrolingual multi-tasking
(Pennycook and Otsuji, 2014) have been developed.
6 Numbers indicate speaking turns
7 IPA transcription in bold font.
8 The Afrikaans word for yes Ja - is commonly used in South African English with
the same meaning.
Further Reading
Blommaert, J. 2006. Language Ideology. In K. Brown (ed. in chief), Encyclopedia of
Language& Linguistics, Second Edition, volume 6. Oxford: Elsevier, pp. 51022.
Blommaert, J and Rampton, B. 2011. Language and superdiversity. Diversities 13(2): 121.
Busch, B. 2012. The Linguistic Repertoire revisited. Applied Linguistics 33(5): 50323.
Makoni, S. and Pennycook, A. 2007. Disinventing and reconstituting languages.
InS.Makoniand A. Pennycook (eds.), Disinventing and Reconstituting Languages.
Clevedon, Avon: Multilingual Matters, pp. 141.
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60 What Counts as Language in Education?
research is available at www.praesa.org.za/category/recent-posts/publications/

occasional-papers/.
5 Schools may report to department officials and parents that they use English as language of
instruction from Grade 4/year 4 upwards but in classroom practice use c ode-switching/
translanguaging covertly as the de facto language of instruction (see Probyn, 2009).
6 Transcription conventions: upward facing arrow indicates rising intona-
tion;? indicates a question (. . .) indicates audible pause; / indicates overlapping
speech; researcher comments in [square] brackets; where sounds rather than letters
aretranscribed, IPA symbols are used in bold font; underlining indicates emphasis.
L = learners; T = teacher.
Further Reading
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Language, Identity and Education 1(3): 20734.
Heugh, K. 2013. Multilingual education policy in South Africa constrained by theoretical
and historical disconnections. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 33: 21537.
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76 Whose Language Resources Count in School?
Questions for Discussion and Further Thinking

1. How are language use and race intertwined in the US examples of AAL in
schooling?
2. What are some of the implications of monoglossic ideologies for the teaching
of language and literacy in your context?
3. Why are standardized language and literacy assessments a particular problem
for children from non-dominant linguistic backgrounds?
Notes
1 The language use of African Americans has been named in a number of ways:
Ebonics (from the combination of ebony and phonics), Black English, African
American Vernacular English and Black dialect (Ramirez et al., 2006, Introduction);
Black English Vernacular (BEV) (Labov, 1982), as well as Black language (Alim and
Smitherman, 2012) and African American Language or AAL (Paris and Alim, 2014).
I follow the terms used by particular authors when drawing on their work.
2 See www.britishcouncil.rw/programmes/education/language-supportive-textbook-
project-last for details about the Language Supportive Textbooks and Pedagogy project
(LAST) in Rwanda as well as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUqS_WSwEv0.
Further Reading
Genishi, C. and Dyson, A.H. 2009. Children, Language, and Literacy: Diverse Learners in Diverse
Times. Teachers College Press (Language and Literacy Series).
Ramirez, J.D., Wiley, T.G., de Klerk, G., Lee, E., Wright, W.E. 2006. Ebonics: The Urban
Education Debate (2nd edition) Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Wiley, T. and Lukes, M. 1996. English-only and standard English ideologies in the U.S.
TESOL Quarterly, 30(3): 51135.
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100 Anglonormativity
Notes
1 For example, as mentioned in the Introduction, two are girls only and two are co-ed;
schools ranged from relatively elite (with fees of USD 2000 p.a. and almost 100 percent
of families paying fees) to lower middle and working class (with fees of USD 500 and
only 50 percent of families paying fees); of the two girls schools, one was attended only
by Black girls, while the other was still majority White (just over 50 percent).
2 Ethnolinguistic repertoire is defined by Benor (2010, 160) as the fluid set of linguistic
resources that members of an ethic group may use variably as they index their ethnic
identities.
3 For important discussions of heteronormativity, see Warner (1991) and Butler (1990).
4 See McKinney (2007) for a discussion of this in South Africa, and Alim and Reyes
(2011) for parallels in the USA.

5 Makalela (2004, 362) analyses four linguistic forms to argue strongly for the existence
of a distinctive BSAE variety: 1. Extension of progressive aspect to stative verbs, 2.Tense
sequencing, 3. Topic promotion devices and 4. Modality markers. Makalela draws evi-
dence from the Limpopo province, arguing that school teachers use the variety and
reproduce it through the schooling system. In a corpus study of the English use of
university-educated Black presenters on an English community radio station in rural
Limpopo, Makalela (2013) provides further evidence for the development of a BSAE as
a stable local variety of South African English.
6 Sibusiso Clifford Ndlangamandla worked as a researcher on the Language, Identity and
Learning Project. His assistance is gratefully acknowledged.
7 Accent is defined as the system of speech sounds and their combinatorial
possibilities (Simpson, 2001, 293).
8 Bold font indicates international phonetic alphabet, IPA, symbols.
9 Model-C English is used as a descriptor for Black learners drawing on their ethnolin-
guistic repertoire of WSAE.
Further Reading
Dixon, K and Peake, K. 2008 Straight for English: Using school language policy to resist
multilingualism. English Teaching: Practice and Critique 7(1): 7390.
Makoe, P. 2007. Language discourses and identity construction in a multilingual South
African primary school. English Academy Review 24(2): 5570.
References
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Benor, S. 2010. Ethnolinguistic repertoire: shifting the focus in language and ethnicity.
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Anglonormativity 101
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Hope I 135
5 Soweto (South Western Township) is a large urban township on the outskirts of

Johannesburg; townships in South Africa were constructed on the periphery of cities
during apartheid as segregated residential areas for Black people.
6 Top deck refers to a chocolate bar with a top layer of white chocolate and a bottom
layer of brown chocolate.
7 Kasi is a popular term for township, and is derived from lokasie, Afrikaans for
location which was an apartheid term for townships (ekasi in the township or
the township).
8 Ellen Hurst defines tsotsitaal as sharing many features of other African urban youth
languages; for example, it incorporates lexical innovation, metaphor and neologisms,
its origins are in criminal argot, and it is used primarily by male youth in urban centers
possibly as a marker of modernism and being streetwise. It can be considered as a set

of language resources rather than a language in any traditional sense of the term, and
one of the more interesting characteristics of tsotsitaal in South Africa is its existence
in multiple base languages all the official languages in South Africa (11 in total)
have their own accompanying tsotsitaal. Other non-official languages, including mixed
forms of language in highly multi-lingual townships such as Soweto, also have their
variety of tsotsitaal (Hurst 2015, 169).
Further Reading
Busch, B. 2014. Building on heteroglossia and heterogeneity: The experience of a
multilingual classroom. In A. Blackledge and A. Creese (eds.), Heteroglossia as Practice
and Pedagogy. Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 2139.
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136 Hope I
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158 Hope II
of a common male ancestor whose names becomes the clan name. Although people
cannot actually trace their genealogy as far back as the assumed clan founder, members
of a clan share the same clan name and assume they are related to each other. The
clan names is the strongest way of identifying someone, even stronger than a father or
grandfathers surname because it identifies a persons whole family group and forebears.
Traditional law does not allow people of the same clan to marry each other. The late
Nelson Mandelas clan name was Madiba.
4 This is by no means a comprehensive account. See also Manyak (2004, 2008), Creese
and Blackledge (2010) in the UK context and Busch (2014). The edited collection by
Blackledge and Creese (2014) includes a number of examples of inspirational pedagogy;
see also Busch (2010) and Makalela (2015) in the South African context.
5 See also Gutierrez (2008) for an inspirational account of the Migrant Student
Leadership Institute (MSLI) at UCLA, which worked with high school students
fromimmigrant farm worker backgrounds.
Further Reading
Alim, H.S. 2010. Critical Language Awareness. In N. Hornberger and S. McKay (eds.).
Sociolinguistics and Language Education. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, pp. 205231.
Blackledge, A and Creese, A. 2014. (eds.) Heteroglossia as Practice and Pedagogy. Dordrecht:
Springer.
Gutierrez, K., Bien, A., Selland, M., and Pierce, D. 2011. Polylingual and polycultural
learning ecologies: Mediating emergent academic literacies for dual language learners.
Journal of Early Childhood Literacy 11(2): 232261.
Newfield, D. and Maungedzo, R. 2006. Mobilising and modalising poetry in a Soweto
Classroom. English Studies in Africa 49(1): 7193.
References
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revising pedagogies in a resegregated society. Educational Researcher 7: 2431.
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thecultural politics of communication. Journal of Language, Identity and Education
6(2): 161176.
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Sociolinguistics and Language Education. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, pp. 205231.
Alim, H.S and Smitherman, G. 2012. Articulate While Black: Barack Obama, Language and
Race in the U.S. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Blackledge , A. and A.Creese (Eds). 2014. Heteroglossia as Practice and Pedagogy. Dordrecht:
Springer.
Busch, B. 2014. Building on heteroglossia and heterogeneity: The experience of a mul-
tilingual classroom. In A. Blackledge and A. Creese (eds.), Heteroglossia as Practice and
Pedagogy. Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 2139.
Busch, B. 2010. School language profiles: Valorizing linguistic resources in heteroglossic
situations in South Africa. Language and Education 24(4): 28394.
continued. College, Composition and Culture 57(4): 586619.
Hope II 159
Canagarajah, A.S. 2013. Translingual Practice: Global Englishes and Cosmopolitan Relations.
Creese, A. and Blackledge, A., 2010.Translanguaging in the bilingual classroom: A pedagogy
for learning and teaching? The Modern Language Journal, 94(1): 10315.
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Singularities in pluralitiesa. Modern Language Journal 95(3): 385400.

Garcia, O. and Leiva, C. 2014. Theorising and enacting translanguaging for social Justice.
In A. Blackedge and A. Creese (eds.), Heteroglossia as Practice and Pedagogy. Dordrecht:
Springer, pp. 199216.
Garcia, O., Makar, C., Starcevic, M. and Terry, A. 2011. The translanguaging of Latino kin-
dergarteners. In K. Potowski and J. Rothman (eds.), Bilingual Youth: Spanish in English-
Speaking Societies. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, pp. 3355.
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learning ecologies: Mediating emergent academic literacies for dual language learners.
Journal of Early Childhood Literacy 11(2): 23261.
Guzula, X. 2015. Exploring multiliteracies pedagogy and translanguaging practices in the
third space: A case study of an after school literacy club. Unpublished PhD proposal,
University of Cape Town.
Janks, H., with Dixon, K., Ferreira, A., Granville, S., and Newfield, D. 2014. Doing Critical
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Jenkins, J. 2007. English as a Lingua Franca: Attitude and Identity. Oxford: Oxford
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class. Multicultural Perspectives 6(1): 1218.
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160 Hope II
Paris, D. and Alim, H.S. 2014. What are we seeking to sustain through culturally sustaining
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Conclusion 171
language resources as legitimate. Creative trans- and multilingual competence is

not only necessary for critical global citizenship, but is central to producing pow-
erful language users or powerful languagers.
Notes
1 Alim and Smitherman (2012, 197n22) note Wolframs significant contribution to
research on marginalized language varieties and point out that his well-meaning com-
ments here were not at all controversial to the majority of sociolinguists when American
Tongues was produced with some notable exceptions including Geneva Smitherman.
2 I am using decolonial here following Walter Mignolo and others (see Mignolo, 2002,2009)
3 See www.britishcouncil.rw/programmes/education/language-supportive-textbook-
project-last (accessed on 14 September 2015).
4 Heugh writes: The only significant data at hand are from the Pan South African
Language Boards national sociolinguistic survey (PANSALB, 2000), which show,
much to the surprise of many, 88 percent of South Africans over age 15 support both
strong mother tongue education and strong teaching of ESL (my addition: English
Second Language) not only through the school system but also in higher education
(PANSALB, 2000). Only 12 percent support English-only or English-mainly, including
the 9 percent of English speakers at the time of the survey (Heugh, 2013, 226).
References
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Britzman, D., Santiago-Valles, K.A., Jimnez-Muoz, G.M. and Lamash, L.M. 1993.
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LANGUAGE AND POWER IN

Critiquing the positioning of children from non-dominant groups as linguistically

Carolyn McKinney is Associate Professor, Language Education, School of Education,

Visit www.routledge.com/education for additional information on titles in

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or

ISBN: 978-1-138-84406-3 (hbk)

To all children who are marginalized in schools on account of their language

Foreword by Hilary Janks xi

1 What Counts as [a] Language? 18

2 What Counts as Language in Education Policy

3 Whose Language Resources Count in Schooling? 63

4 Anglonormativity: Language Ideologies and the

5 Positioning Students in an Anglonormative English Class:

6 Hope I: Students Agency in Interrupting

7 Hope II: Interrupting Anglonormativity Through

8 Conclusion: Changing What Counts as Legitimate

I have long been an admirer of Carolyn McKinneys work as a critical language

being excluded. McKinney offers Anglonormativity as a concept to describe the

urban vernaculars. In explaining these terms she provides an overview of research

importance of polylingual flexibility across a range of different languages and

Why write this book?

While English-speaking children from middle-class homes generally have their

Sociolinguistics, Language Policy Studies, Applied Linguistics and Linguistic

Makoe, P and McKinney, C. 2014. Linguistic ideologies in multilingual South African

language, can be consistently recast as a problem?

which increasingly draws on multiple and diverse resources. The complexity of

the effect of maintaining inequalities in schooling and preventing social justice

Achieving Social Justice Through Language Education?

giving students access to powerful varieties of language and literacy (redistri-

The multiliteracies framework operates with a similar logic. In my view,

ignores the changing linguistic landscape in which being monolingual in a single

firstly, to make accessible to language and literacy educators as well as

Language and Power

one of the most humiliating experiences was to be caught speaking

punishment three to five strokes of the cane on bare buttocks or was

The attitude to English was the opposite; any achievement in spoken or

Ngugs disturbing account illustrates language ideologies in practice and the

all language is part of society, and not somehow external to it;

Fairclough is drawing on Foucaults argument that discourse is a form of social

as productive; it is relational and distributed, exercised from innumerable

Sumayas self-silencing shows her internalizing of a deficit discourse on her

work to disrupt dominant language/power relations. I show how the school is

childrens language learning (Toohey, 2000), among others. It is now well

What Can We Learn from Language Dynamics in

multilingualism is the norm across the globe, this is increasingly limiting.

Fraser, N. 1995. From redistribution to recognition: dilemmas of justice in a post-socialist

McCormick, K. 2001 Code-switching: Overview. In R. Mesthrie (ed.), Concise Encyclopedia

While in most schools, language in education policies and educational curricula,

command of the set of resources we recognize as English, given that English

rilingual child needs to be considered the norm in language in education policy

As this definition suggests, like ideology more generally, language ideologies go

central to monolingual or monoglossic ideologies. A number of myths follow

Monolingualism, or a high level of proficiency in a single named language,

alent proficiency in two or more named languages, so-called balanced

Finally as Ag and Jrgensen (2013) have pointed out, a consequence of the

processes whereby distinct forms of speech come to be socially recognized

Heteroglossia and Linguistic Repertoires

the assumption that two or more named languages are identifiable in

Given the deconstruction of the notion of clearly identifiable and boundaried,

description, such as polylanguaging or polylingual languaging (Jrgensen, 2008;

Blommaert argues that

TABLE 1.1 Heteroglossic Languages of Description

Polylanguaging The terms polylanguaging and polylingual languaging,

Metrolingualism The terms metrolingualism and metrolingual multi-tasking,

Foreword by Hilary Janks xi

1 What Counts as [a] Language? 18

3 Whose Language Resources Count in Schooling? 63

CM:and the, the, does, does Dulakadu [dlika:d] mean something