Markets of Academic Language: Producing Governable Subjects Through Systemic-Functional Linguistics

• In Event: 66.034 - Rethinking and Undoing Academic Language

Abstract

Systemic-functional linguistics has been proposed as a methodological approach for describing the characteristics of academic language (Schleppegrell, 2004). In recent years, this approach has received increasing attention as the Common Core State Standards, which advocates a functional approach to language, has been adopted by most states (Moore & Schleppegrell, 2014). While this approach offers many tools for teachers in analyzing the language of textbooks, school assignments, and other academic registers, it leaves unchallenged the larger political and economic realities that shape what constitutes the “language of schooling” (Schleppegrell, 2004).

This paper uses Bourdieu's concept of the linguistic market (Bourdieu, 1991) to examine these larger political and economic realities. Specifically, it examines the ways that systemic-functional linguistics reproduces a language-as-entity paradigm (Park & Wee, 2012) that abstracts the complex language practices that exist in schools into a static language of schooling--academic language. This abstraction then allows for the creation of a unified linguistic market that marks certain language practices as more valuable and others as not valuable.

The paper then uses Foucault’s concept of governmentality (Foucault, 2007) to analyze the subject positions that are produced within this unified linguistic market. Extending on this work, the paper argues that the subject position that lies at the core of systemic-functional linguistics was produced as part of nation-state/colonial governmentality where rigid borders exist between different uses of language and where crossing these borders is sanctioned. While emerging within a specific socio-historical context that has historically and continues to marginalize language-minoritized populations in the US, this subject position is represented as a universal necessity for being an educated citizen of modern society.

This paper is not intended to be a critique of systemic-functional linguistics in a traditional sense. Instead, it proposes to use a critical reading of systemic-functional linguistics as a point of entry for examining the complex relationship between hegemonic language ideologies of schooling and social reproduction. The goal is to use the newfound understanding offered by this critical reading to develop a new approach to language education research that explicitly situates dominant conceptions of language within the larger political economy and explicitly examines their complicity in subject formation and governmentality.

Bourdieu, P. (1991). Language and symbolic power. New York: Polity Press.

Foucault, M. (2007). Security, territory, population: Lectures at the Collége de France
1977-1978. New York: Picador.

Moore, J. & Schleppegrell, M. (2014). Using a functional linguistics metalanguage to support
academic language development in the English Language Arts. Linguistics and
Education, 26, 92-105.

Park, J. & Wee, L. (2012). Markets of English: Linguistic capital and language policy in a
globalizing world. New York: Routledge.

Schleppergrell, M. (2004). The language of schooling: A functional linguistics perspective.
New York: Routledge.

Author

• Nelson Flores, University of Pennsylvania