Session Information
31 SES 16 A, Risk or Opportunity – A Question of Perspective? Language and Education in Transnational School Careers Part 1
Symposium
Contribution
Within discourses on education and transnationalism, much importance has been given to language, both for the educational success of migrants and for their transition into certain fields of the labour market. However, the monolingual orientation of most educational institutions does not only (re)construct inequalities between languages, but also between individuals and groups labelled as ‘native speakers’ or as ‘non-natives’ – regardless of the effective linguistic command of the individuals (Davies 2003; Flores/Rosa 2015). Moreover, the ideological construction of particular language practices as signs of particular identities (Flores/Rosa 2018) represents a risk for minoritized students whose multilingualism is frequently seen as deficient. This paper will examine how university students construct their language biographies against the background of language ideologies (Mar-Molinero/Stevenson 2006), what experiences they made in different educational institutions in regard to language(s), and how they changed their positions concerning language(s) in their biographies. It will focus on the experiences of linguistically minoritized soon-to-be academics who – at the time of data collection – were enrolled in teacher training programmes in Austria and aspire a career as German teachers. The following questions will be addressed: • What power relations and experiences of risk do linguistically minoritized students experience in institutions of education? • How does the institutionalized knowledge about language(s) interact with the biographical knowledge of the students? • Which strategies do the students develop to modify, resist and/or transform language ideologies? Empirically, the study is based on a data set of twelve biographical narrative interviews (Schütze 1983) with university students of different linguistic backgrounds. The analysis was achieved by contrastive comparisons between different cases (Charmaz 2011). The findings show that language biographies in migration societies cannot be understood as detached from linguistic spaces which have been relevant for the subjects or their family members during their migration (Thoma 2018). Thus, the language biographies have a transnational and a transgenerational dimension. The paper will conclude with suggestions that situate the positioning of minoritized students in educational institutions within broader societal and political contexts.
References
Charmaz, Kathy C. (2011): Den Standpunkt verändern: Methoden der konstruktivistischen Grounded Theory. In: Mey, Günter/Mruck, Katja (Eds.): Grounded Theory Reader, Springer VS, 181–205. Davies, Alan (2003): The Native Speaker: Myth and Reality, Multilingual Matters. Flores, Nelson/Rosa, Jonathan (2015): Undoing Appropriateness: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and Language Diversity in Education. Harvard Educational Review 85, 149–171. Flores, Nelson/Rosa, Jonathan (2019) Bringing Race into Second Language Acquisition. In: Modern Language Journal 103 (Supplement 2019), 145-151. Mar-Molinero, Clare/Stevenson, Patrick (Eds.): Language Ideologies, Policies and Practices. Language and the Future of Europe, Palgrave Macmillan, 147–161. Schütze, Fritz (1983): Biographieforschung und narratives Interview. In: Neue Praxis. Kritische Zeitschrift für Sozialarbeit und Sozialpädagogik 13/3, 283–293. Thoma, Nadja (2018): Sprachbiographien in der Migrationsgesellschaft. Eine rekonstruktive Studie zu Studienverläufen von Germanistikstudent*innen, transcript.
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