Heteroglossic Practices and Language Ideologies: Combining Heteroglossia with Critical Discourse Studies to Investigate Digital Multilingual Discourses on Language Policies

Abstract

China’s central government has been promoting the use of Putonghua as the standard spoken language for more than half a century, soon after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. In the domain of education, Putonghua is set to be the medium of instruction in schools. This chapter focuses upon the relationship between national language ideologies which underlie the Putonghua Promotion Policy and local language ideologies which feed teachers’ ‘practised language policy’ (Bonacina, Lan Policy 11:213–234, 2012), and aims to reveal how Bakhtin’s notion of heteroglossia (The dialogic imagination: four essay, University of Texas Press, Austin, 2008) can be combined with critical discourse studies to investigate conflicting language ideologies saturated in teachers’ discourses in a multilingual society. This integrated perspective is illustrated by an analysis of a WeChat interview with two primary school teachers on their views on language use in the classroom and their language policy creation and appropriation in Guangzhou, China. Heteroglossia provides insights into the sociopolitical tension in which every utterance is embedded between centripetal forces skewed towards unification of language and centrifugal forces towards decentralisation in language, and it helps understand the stratified diversity in language at both formal and discursive levels (Bailey, Heteroglossia and boundaries. In: Heller M (ed), Bilingualism: a social approach, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, pp. 257–274, 2007; Bailey, Heteroglossia. In: Martin-Jones M, Blackledge A, and Creese A (eds), The Routledge handbook of multilingualism, Routledge, London, pp. 499–507, 2012; Busch, Lang Educ 24(4): 283–294 2010; Busch 2012). Translanguaging (Garcia and Wei, Translanguaging: language, bilingualism, and education, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2014) and discursive strategies (Wodak et al., The discursive construction of national identity, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2009) hence can fit in with the framework of heteroglossia and serve to look into multilingual practices and discourses drawn upon by teachers to present their views which reflect, reproduce, or resist particular language ideologies. This integrated approach contributes to revealing the conflicts between national and local language ideologies, through juxtaposing what it is said and how it is said in teachers’ multilingual discourses on their appropriation, creation, and negotiation of language policies.