Kathryn A. Davis

Prem Phyak

Engaged Language Policy and Practices re-envisions language policy and planning as an engaged approach, drawing on and portraying theoretical and educational equity perspectives. It calls for the right to language policy-making in which all concerned—communities, parents, students, educators, and advocates—collectively imagine new strategies for resisting global neoliberal marginalization of home languages and cultural identities. This book subsequently emphasizes the means by which engaged dialectic processes can inform and clarify language policy-making decisions that promote equity. In other words, rather than descriptions of outcomes, the authors emphasize the need to detail the means by which local/regional actors resist and transform inequitable policies. These descriptions of processes thereby provide all actors with ideological, pedagogical, and equity policy tools that can inform situated school and community policy-making. This book depicts ways in which engaged language policy embodies the intersection of critical inquiry, participant involvement, and ongoing engaged language planning processes. It further offers an alternative to the traditional top-down approach to language education policy-making. Engaged Language Policy and Practices is essential reading for scholars, teachers, students, communities, and others concerned with worldwide language and identity equity.

Engaged Language Policy and Practices

This volume begins by locating critical inquiry within the epistemological and methodological history of second language study. Subsequent chapters portray researcher-participant exploration of identity and agency while challenging inequitable policies and practices. Research on internationalization, Englishization, and/or transborder migration address language policies and knowledge production at universities in Hong Kong, Standard English and Singlish controversies in Singapore, media portrayals of the English as an Official Language movement in South Korea, transnational advocacy in Japan, and Nicaraguan/Costa Rican South to South migration. Transnational locations of identity and agency are fore-fronted in narrative descriptions of Korean heritage language learners, a discursive journey from East Timor to Hawaii, and a reclaimed life history by a Chinese peasant woman. Labor union and GLBT legal work illustrate discourses that can hinder or facilitate agency and change. Hawaiian educators advocate for indigenous self-determination through revealing the political and social meanings of research. California educators describe struggles at the front-lines of resistance to policies and practices harmful to marginalized children. A Participatory Action Research (PAR) project portrays how Latina youth in the U.S. “resist wounding inscriptions” of the intersecting emotional and physical violence of homes, communities, and anti-immigrant policies and attitudes. Promoting agency through drawing on diversity resources is modeled in a bilingual undergraduate PAR project. The volume as a whole provides a model for critical research that explores the multifaceted and evolving nature of language identities while placing those traditionally known as participants at the center of agency and advocacy.

Kathryn A. Davis

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