Language policy reviews and critiques

• In Event: Building and sustaining a searchable, open-source database on l1-based multilingual education research

Proposal

The MLE database overall is likely to meet expectations with regard to general areas of inquiry in multilingual education, for example: What is research saying about MLE? How are people evaluating effective MLE policy/practice? And how are student outcomes in MLE being assessed? Like Benson and Wong’s (2015) study, which was able to trace changes in the development discourse on MLE over the twelve-year span of UNESCO Global Monitoring Reports, it is likely that by covering the ten year-span of 2007 to 2017, this database will also reveal to what degree there is scientific convergence with regard to the need for L1-based multilingual education, and how it can be implemented, evaluated and assessed in a range of contexts.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a preliminary analysis of publications from the database categories that we originally coded as reviews and critiques of language policies in specific countries (1,594 publications) or meta-analyses/syntheses of MLE research (118 publications). These categories appear to overlap, with the language policy category serving as a catch-all for articles synthesizing the authors’ own research and/or secondary sources to make arguments about the effectiveness (or not) of language-in-education policies, and the meta-analysis category catching the remaining studies done using secondary sources.

The analysis so far reveals a few large trends in publications about educational language policy. For example, over 50 percent of the them offer detailed laments over the lack of MLE policy or the large gaps between policy and implementation. Many of these cite policies that have been in place for decades but whose implementation has grown weaker over time, due in many cases to the pressures of dominant languages like English or Mandarin (see e.g. de Jong et al., 2016). On a more positive note, a large proportion of the publications link fields like applied linguistics and sociolinguistics to educational development and comparative and international education. For example, the de Jong et al. (2016) article uses Ruiz’s (1984) language-as-resource orientation to examine the positioning of non-dominant and dominant languages across three countries—Taiwan, Pakistan and China.

This paper will describe more of the trends revealed by publications in these categories, which are annotated according to country cases, language names, research focus and key words, and coded according to MLE model, grade levels of L1 use, research methodology and policy type. Some deeper analysis will be done regarding arguments made, geographic areas covered and what the critiques reveal about MLE in policy and practice.

Author

• Carolyn J. (Carol) Benson, Teachers College, Columbia University