Localising linguistic citizenship in England

TY - JOUR

T1 - Localising linguistic citizenship in England

AU - Rampton, Ben

AU - Cooke, Melanie

AU - Bryers, Dermot

AU - Winstanley, Becky

AU - Leung, Constant

AU - Tomei, Anthony

AU - Holmes, Sam

PY - 2024/4/6

Y1 - 2024/4/6

N2 - What’s the relevance of ‘Linguistic Citizenship’ (LC), a concept developed in southern Africa, to language education in England? LC is committed to democratic participation and voice, to linguistic diversity and the value of sociolinguistic understanding (Stroud 2001), and it provides a framework for contesting lin- guistic conditions in England, where vernacular multilingualism faces monolingual language education policies and an officially ‘hostile environment for migrants’. In fact, LC lines up with four sources of opposition to this: civil society and small-scale community organisations cultivating heritage language multilingualism; experience of system-wide ‘hospitality to diversity’ in education in England in the 1970s & 1980s; c.50 years of linguistics research in Britain; and universities themselves. Drawing on LC’s pedigree in sociolinguistics, we then turn to the Hub for Education & Language Diversity, a collab- oration between King’s and non-profit language organisations which approaches LC as a multi-dimen- sional programme of language development. This includes BA & MA classes; teacher training (with resonant concepts like ‘diasporic local’); and efforts to broaden ideas about university ‘impact’. Overall, Linguistic Citizenship invites us to reassess the lie of the land in language education, and suggests an array of practical but principled initiatives at different points of the language teaching/university interface.

AB - What’s the relevance of ‘Linguistic Citizenship’ (LC), a concept developed in southern Africa, to language education in England? LC is committed to democratic participation and voice, to linguistic diversity and the value of sociolinguistic understanding (Stroud 2001), and it provides a framework for contesting lin- guistic conditions in England, where vernacular multilingualism faces monolingual language education policies and an officially ‘hostile environment for migrants’. In fact, LC lines up with four sources of opposition to this: civil society and small-scale community organisations cultivating heritage language multilingualism; experience of system-wide ‘hospitality to diversity’ in education in England in the 1970s & 1980s; c.50 years of linguistics research in Britain; and universities themselves. Drawing on LC’s pedigree in sociolinguistics, we then turn to the Hub for Education & Language Diversity, a collab- oration between King’s and non-profit language organisations which approaches LC as a multi-dimen- sional programme of language development. This includes BA & MA classes; teacher training (with resonant concepts like ‘diasporic local’); and efforts to broaden ideas about university ‘impact’. Overall, Linguistic Citizenship invites us to reassess the lie of the land in language education, and suggests an array of practical but principled initiatives at different points of the language teaching/university interface.

KW - Linguistic citizenship

KW - multilingualism

KW - language education

M3 - Article

SN - 0261-4448

VL - 57

SP - 215

EP - 228

JO - Language Teaching

JF - Language Teaching

IS - 2

M1 - https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261444823000241

ER -