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.