Language and Power in Post-Colonial Schooling ─ Ideologies in Practice

Around the world, children from non-dominant groups who speak minority languages, including the majority of children in Anglophone post-colonial contexts, are recast as linguistically deficient. This injustice is reflected in the fields of sociolinguistics and applied linguistics where recent paradigm shifts highlight historical monolingual biases, and where new understandings of linguistic diversity and inequality have had little impact in education. This book uses the lens of linguistic ideologies—teachers’ and students’ beliefs about language—to shed light on the continuing problem of reproduction of linguistic inequality. Framed within global debates in sociolinguistics and applied linguistics, it uses the case of historically white schools in South Africa, a post-colonial context where political power has shifted but where the power of whiteness continues, to provide new insights into the complex relationships between language and power, language and subjectivity. Implications for language curricula and policy in contexts of linguistic diversity are foregrounded.

Carolyn Wendy McKinney is Senior Lecturer, Language Education, School of Education, University of Cape Town, South Africa.