Legitimizing elite multilingualism: Language policy, language practice and meta-pragmatic awareness in the international school

This project examines the linguistic construction of elite multilingualism in the international school. International schools are expensive and exclusive educational institutions which typically provide transnational education for expat children. In answer to the lack of academic knowledge on how language-based elitism manifests itself in/through concrete language use and on the legitimation of elite multilingualism, this project specifically looks at (i) how language-centered elitism is produced in observable linguistic practices in the school and in its policy-making; and (ii) how a hierarchization of language use is meta-pragmatically legitimized by social actors as a valuable, respectable and justifiable educational asset, in spite of its contributions to social stratification processes and the wider inequities it perpetuates in society at large. For this case study, a linguistic ethnographic and interactional sociolinguistic approach is adopted, which implies the triangulated analysis of a comprehensive dataset including but not limited to interviews, recordings of classroom interaction, policy documents, school signs, pupils' diaries on language use and language portraits. In this way, this project sets out to generate (i) empirically innovative insights on the linguistic construction and legitimation of language-based elitism and, as a result, (ii) a conceptually refined and enriched understanding of language-centered elitism in education.

Keywords:INCLUSIVE EDUCATION, MINORITY LANGUAGE

Disciplines:Discourse studies, Pragmatics, Sociolinguistics

Project type:Collaboration project