STUDYING LANGUAGE CHOICE
المؤلف:
Tara Goldstein
المصدر:
Teaching and Learning in a Multilingual School
الجزء والصفحة:
P11-C1
2025-09-22
307
STUDYING LANGUAGE CHOICE
Language-choice research involves finding out what makes people in multi-lingual settings choose to use one language over another. The study of language choice has been undertaken by sociolinguists, sociologists, social psychologists, and anthropologists. My own work draws on the work undertaken by interactionist sociolinguists Monica Heller, Angel Lin, Marilyn Martin-Jones, Bonny Norton, and Mukul Saxena. These researchers have made use of anthropological research perspectives and traditions and have linked people's individual language choice decisions to their goals and roles in life and larger historical, economic, political, and educational events.1
As will be seen; in discussing the relationship between language choice, identity, and the political economy, I follow these researchers and draw upon the economic metaphors found in the work of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu has theorized that people make choices about what languages to use in particular kinds of "markets," which he defines as places where different kinds of resources or "capital" are distributed. Markets allow one form of capital to be converted into another. "Linguistic capital" can be cashed in for educational qualifications or "cultural capital," which, in turn, can be cashed in for lucrative jobs or "economic capital." Bourdieu sees markets as sites of struggle in which individuals seek to maintain or alter the distribution of the forms of capital specific to it. At Northside, the struggle was over what linguistic resources could or should be used to access cultural capital (school knowledge and educational qualifications). In order to maintain the forms of capital specific to a particular market (for example, the need to use English to obtain school knowledge and educational qualifications at Northside), Bourdieu suggests that all participants have to have a total and unconditional "investment" in the market and in the way different forms of capital are distributed. Bonny Norton has theorized that ESOL learners can experience ambivalence around their investment in English2 and at Northside this ambivalence resulted in linguistic dilemmas for students and contributed to the school's struggle over language practices.
As discussed earlier in the discussion of the survey undertaken in Hong Kong, people assess the market conditions in which their linguistic products will be received and valued by others. This assessment can constrain the way they speak or the way the think they ought to speak. Some linguistic products are more highly valued than others and are endowed with what Bourdieu calls a "legitimacy" that other linguistic products are not. The official languages of Canada are French and English and, in Bourdieu's words, it is the role of Canadian schools to "legitimize" and "impose" these official languages on students. Although the Language for Learning Policy legitimized the use of languages other than English to help students access and produce school knowledge, English was the official language of instruction and assessment at Northside and there were a multitude of ways that teachers and students constructed its legitimacy. However, because markets are always the sites of struggle and places where people experience ambivalence around their investment in English, there were also moments when the legitimacy of English was contested because of the value associated with the use of other languages. Critical education theorist Jim Cummins has talked about these moments as opportunities to challenge "coercive relations of power" in the classroom and work toward "collaborative relations of power."3
1 See, for example, Heller (1988a, 1988b, 1994, 1995, 1999, 2001); Heller and Martin-Jones (2001); Lin (2001); Martin Jones (1995); Martin-Jones (1995); Saxena (2001); Norton (2000): and Norton Peirce (1995).
2 See Norton (2000) and Norton Peirce (1995) for further discussion on ambivalence and Bourdieu's notion of investment. Also see Judith Butler (1999) for a discussion on ambivalence and Bourdieu's notion of "habitus," those "embodied rituals of everydayness" that motivate or incline [language] practices in the market.
3 See Cummins (1996).
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