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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 1025

Part of Session 176: Re-thinking language policy and practice in urban education (Other abstracts in this session)

Legitimizing multiple languages in a French induction classroom: the role of the ‘practiced language policy’.

Authors: Bonacina-Pugh, Florence
Submitted by: Bonacina, Florence (The University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom)

This paper aims to shed light on what seems at first to be a series of “conflicts and tensions” between policy and practice (Li Wei and Martin, 2009) in an induction classroom for newly-arrived immigrant children in a primary school in France. Despite the strict French monolingual “declared language policy” (Shohamy, 2006: 68) of France’s educational system, more than seven languages are used in interaction in this classroom. Surprisingly, these multilingual practices are interpreted by all the classroom participants as legitimate and acceptable, and are even, at times, licensed by the teacher. The question arises therefore as to how do these classroom participants come to legitimize and accept the use of multiple languages in interaction when these same languages are not legitimized by surrounding discourses and policies. In answer to this question (which has also been raised in other contexts such as Creese and Blackledge, 2010: 113), I argue that, in this classroom, multilingual practices are legitimized by the emergence of a multilingual “practiced language policy” (see mainly Bonacina, 2010 and Forthcoming). A Conversation Analysis of a few extracts drawn from a corpus of interaction audio-recorded in the target classroom will show how the classroom participants indeed orient towards a policy within practices, and will give an insight on what this multilingual practiced language policy consists of. Ultimately, this paper contributes to the ‘re-thinking of language policy and practice’ in language policy research as it illustrates the idea that policy and practice need not be seen as distinct and that, in fact, a policy exists within practices themselves (Spolsky, 2004). It further argues that orientation to a multilingual practiced language policy is what enables speakers to legitimize multilingual classroom practices.  

Bonacina, F. Forthcoming. Researching ‘practiced language policies’: Insights from Conversation Analysis. Language Policy.

Bonacina, F. 2010. A Conversation Analytic approach to ‘practiced language policies’: the case of an induction classroom for newly arrived immigrant children in France. Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation. The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK.

Creese, A. and Blackledge, A. 2010. Translanguaging in the bilingual classroom: A pedagogy for learning and teaching? The Modern Language Journal 94: 103-115.

Li Wei and Martin, P. 2009. Conflicts and tensions in classroom codeswitching: An introduction. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 12 (2): 117-122.

Shohamy, E. 2006. Language Policy: Hidden agendas and new approaches. New York: Routledge.

Spolsky, B. 2004. Language Policy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.