Abstract
This paper examines competing values evident in research about language education. The paper begins by focusing on the explicit juxtaposition in language education research between viewing language as a resource and language as a right. This part of the paper is historical in that it traces the emergence of resource-oriented discourses to the demise of broad civil rights movements in North America in the late 1970s/early 1980s. The paper then turns to more recent critiques of language rights within language education research. These critiques are rooted in post-structural approaches to understanding language that, in general, reject rights as tied to a modernist past. Part of the complication in identifying the values within this research is that its authors explicitly frame their research in social-justice terms. The paper does not seek to question these authors’ intentions, but rather to get beyond claims to social justice to clarify for what purposes and on whose behalf we conduct language education research.
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Notes
- 1.
In Canada, education is the domain of its ten provinces and three territories, not the federal government. Funding for schools is distributed to both public and Catholic school boards, as well as to separate Anglophone and Francophone boards in most provinces. In Ontario, there are four separate types of government-funded boards: Anglophone public, Anglophone Catholic, Francophone Catholic, and Francophone public (listed in order of total student enrolments).
- 2.
Immersion programs use the target language almost exclusively to teach the full curriculum, versus learning the language as a subject for 50 or 60 min at a time. Some models stay 100% in the target language across the grades, while others begin to introduce the national/official language back into the curriculum in the upper grades (see Baker 2011).
- 3.
See https://www.tcdsb.org/programsservices/schoolprogramsk12/internationallanguages/Pages/default.aspx for more information.
- 4.
“N.o.s.” indicates the respondent listed “Chinese” without further specifying a language or dialect.
- 5.
For example the German school in Manila uses German as the medium of instruction for the program it offers to children of German nationals.
- 6.
For example, English is used as medium of instruction irrespective of where the school is located or what students’ language profile is.
- 7.
For example, the United World College chain of international schools uses English as the medium of instruction, and then teaches the respective national/official language where the school is located to non-native speakers. See Fee et al. 2014 for a discussion of International Baccalaureate schools, some of which use multiple languages as medium of instruction.
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Bale, J. (2018). Competing Values Within Language Education Research. In: Smeyers, P., Depaepe, M. (eds) Educational Research: Ethics, Social Justice, and Funding Dynamics. Educational Research, vol 10. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73921-2_7
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