Language Policy And Social Reproduction

During the nineteenth century Irish-speaking communities declined almost to the point of extinction. But in 1922 the new Irish state launched a broad strategy to re-establish Irish as a national language. This book is about that policy and its impact over the last seventy years. Ó Riagáin focuses on the evolving structure of bilingualism in Ireland but he is more centrally concerned with the process of bilingual reproduction. His analysis is based on a series of language surveys conducted between 1973 and 1993. In Part I he reviews the evolution of language policy and the main theoretical perspectives emerging in Irish research. In Part II he is concerned with the position of the Irish language in the residual Irish-speaking areas, and in Part III with the present position of the Irish language in the English-speaking areas. He examines the role of policy in education, in the public sector, and in the forming of Irish-speaking networks. He argues that the various dimensions of Irish language policy have been heavily conditioned by the way the Irish economy and, in turn, Irish society has developed since independence. He concludes in Part IV with a discussion of current issues within Irish language policy.

This book emerged out of contributions to a bilingual conference that was organised at the Institut du Monde Anglophone and the Bibliothque Sainte-Barbe in Paris on December 5 and 6, 2008. The conference was entitled "Indigenous Minority Languages in Ireland: A Comparative Perspective," translated into French as: "Les langues regionales et minoritaires en Irlande: Perspectives croisies."

This book takes a theoretically informed look at British education policy over the last sixty years when secondary schooling for all children became an established fact for the first time. Comprehensive schools largely replaced a system based on academic selection. Now, under choice and competition policies, all schools are subject to the rigours of local education markets. What impact did each of these successive policy frameworks have on structures of opportunities for families and their children? How and to what extent was the experience of secondary school students shaped and what influenced the qualifications they obtained and their life chances after schooling? The authors locate their work within two broad strands in the sociology of education. Basil Bernstein’s work on the realisation of power and control in and through pedagogic discourse and social reproduction provides a theoretical framework for exploring the character of and continuities and change in education and training policies. The book is an important contribution to debates about the extent to which education is a force for change in class divided societies. The authors also set out to re-establish social class at the centre of educational analysis at a time when emphasis has been on identity and identity formation, arguing for their interdependence. This book will be an important resource for students, policy analysts and policymakers wishing to think through and understand the longer term impact of programmes that have shaped secondary schooling in Britain and elsewhere.

The book examines the changing relationship between minority languages and language policy and planning in the context of globalization, through an examination of the Irish language context. It demonstrates how localized practices are involved in the refashioning of the value of the Irish language.

The theories of social reproduction are highly complicated, and they have various quantification problems. By introducing the Triptych Model of Social Class Reproduction, which can be applied in different cultures and societies, this book resolves this issue by providing a rich and easy-to-grasp understanding of these theories. It discusses various issues with the Marxian conception of social reproduction, class measurement challenges, and advanced equations of social practice. Further, it substantiates the practice of social reproduction in quantitative research in the domains of language, family, ethnicity, and indigenous culture.

In this memorial volume for A. Ronald Walton, cutting-edge scholars interrelate two normally separate domains: the formation of language policy and the improvement of language teaching. Bernard Spolsky, Elana Shohamy, Joshua Fishman, and Kees de Bot address theoretical aspects of national language policy. John Trim relates the historical development of the Council of Europe’s international language policy. Richard Lambert, Ronald Walton, Richard Brecht, and Xueying Wang deal with structural issues in language instruction in the United States. Eleanor Jorden, Galal Walker, Myriam Met, and Gilbert Merkx discuss the special problems of providing instruction in the non-Western languages. And Michael Long, Ross Steele, Ralph Ginsberg and Laura Miller are concerned with specific pedagogical issues: task-based language teaching, the role of culture in language instruction, and what is learned during study abroad. These articles stand both as definitive statements on their individual topics and, taken together, as a fresh amalgamation of policy and pedagogy.

This volume examines the historical context, current state of and future prospects for broadcasting in minority languages, taking Irish and Breton as case studies. Practitioners and academics from a variety of disciplines come together to identify and debate the key issues that will mean success or failure for minority language broadcasting in the new millennium.

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