Exploring New York City elementary school principals’ language ideologies

Abstract

School principals are street-level bureaucrats whose sense-making about language policies makes them de-facto policy makers. In turn, their language policy-making is mediated by their language ideologies and contexts. Using a case study methodological framework, this article explores the language ideologies of 11 New York City elementary school principals with high numbers of Emergent Bilinguals. It attempts to answer Ruiz’ call to make language ideologies clear and obvious in order to provide the level of transparency needed to enlighten the process of language policy creation and practice (Ruiz 1984). Analyses of the participating principals’ narratives revealed the existence of three different language ideologies: Resource Instrumental Mobility (RIM), Resource Integrative Democratic (RID), and Language as a Problem (LAP). This paper is an exploration of the RIM and RID language ideologies, which consider language as a resource, but do so for intrinsically different reasons. Thus, the findings expand on Ruiz’ (1984) Orientations in Language Planning by complicating and providing nuance to the concept of Language-as-Resource.