Language Planning and Policy: Recent Trends, Future Directions

A Summary of "Language Planning and Policy: Recent Trends, Future Directions"

Summarized by: Reem Asiri (434820875)

     Language policy and planning (LPP) is defined as planning meant to influence the ways of speaking or literacy practices within a society. It only began to form as a discipline in the late 1960s. A framework by Baldauf (2005) takes a goal orientation to the four activity types (status planning, corpus planning, language-in-education planning, and prestige planning). Awareness of such goals may be overt or covert, and may occur at several different levels. The four possible general developments are levels of language planning, covert language planning, who are the planners and what are their roles?, and planning for compulsory early foreign language learning.

     There are four aspects related to the status planning of second languages (their status for their own communicative purposes, their role as second languages, their role as immigrant or ethnic minority languages, and the degree to which promotion of second language impacts on language rights). Corpus planning is the activity area more dependent on linguistic input for its methodology, but it is shaped by status planning decisions, its output contributes in a major way to language-in-education planning and it may contribute to the prestige that a language has in the community. Language-in-education policy and planning is known as acquisition policy. There are seven key language-in-education policy (access policy, personnel policy, curriculum policy, methodology and materials policy, resourcing policy, community policy, and evaluation policy) and four key language in education planning (language maintenance, language reacquisition, foreign/ second language learning, language shift). Prestige or image planning is not a well developed area. There are three activities that underlie prestige planning (image or prestige seems to be related to ethnic identity and the promotion of a language, image seems to be used to describe a method of implementing and manipulating language policy, image has something to do with motive and the activities of language planners, and the communities they plan for.

     Issues of minority language rights (MLR) are referred to as linguistic human rights. This approach contrasts with the apolitical, ahistorical and technicist paradigm. The research issues are language shift and loss; language ecology; nationalism, minoritization, and historical constructionism; language replacement and social mobility; linguistic human rights; tolerance- and promotion-oriented language rights; and developments in international and national law. However, there are possible futures suggested by Tollefson (2002) like a focus on exploitive LPP contexts, the role of local legal frameworks, linking political theory to LPP, more direct work with sociology, the role of discourse and political leaders, a greater focus on language on social identity and power, a move from a macro focus to micro issues, and a greater focus on language rights for linguistic minorities.