Abstract
ABSTRACTThe operant “one nation – one language” model in Western culture has resulted in linguistic hegemony being almost universally presented as an uncontentious reality. This article accepts Foucault’s challenge to deconstruct this officially sanctioned “truth” by looking at how the educational system in England legitimises the discourse that speaking English is normal, marginalising multilingual practices. Data is drawn from a year-long study of thirty “super-diverse” children in an inner-city school in the north of England. The research presents language portraits in which the children demonstrate they have internalised the rhetoric that English should be spoken in school. These are contrasted with ethnographic observations which provide co-constructed researcher-pupil cartoons representing social interactions in a range of contexts. The illustrations demonstrate how the children challenge the idealisation of English language in school by operating spatial agency in which they seek (and find) opportunities in peripheral and liminal spaces to speak their own language.
Highlights
A considerable body of literature identifies the growing presence of the monolingual ‘English is the language of England’ ideology from a post-structural perspective (Pavlenko and Blackledge, 2001) and analyses how this has filtered into the domain of schools (Leung and Scarino, 2016)
In conclusion, this article draws attention to the extent to which the dominant discourse that ‘speaking English is considered to be superior to all other language practices’ is visible from the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) onwards
The evidence presented in this study demonstrates there is a clear tension between the Nation State’s goal of being a homogenous society, and the reality of social, cultural and linguistic heterogeneity (Grillo, 2005), in super-diverse communities (Vertovec, 2007)
Summary
A considerable body of literature identifies the growing presence of the monolingual ‘English is the language of England’ ideology from a post-structural perspective (Pavlenko and Blackledge, 2001) and analyses how this has filtered into the domain of schools (Leung and Scarino, 2016). There has been limited consideration of how children resist this dominant discourse by subverting the linguistic norms of a classroom and communicating ‘below the radar’ in languages other than English. The article first accepts Foucault’s challenge to deconstruct officially sanctioned ‘truths’ by examining how the educational system in England legitimises the discourse that speaking English is normal, and the extent to which this discourse marginalises multilingual practices. This is followed by an overview of studies that explore children’s strategies to subvert dominant classroom discourses, in particular, by employing spatial agency. The research presented in this paper extends the field of spatial agency by demonstrating how the children use their environment skilfully in order to establish and experiment with their individual identities through their language choices
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