Linguistics Colloquium: Yasuko Kanno
Dr. Kanno is an Assistant Professor of TESOL/Applied Linguistics in the Department of English, University of Washington
| What | Colloquium |
|---|---|
| When |
2007-10-10 02:10 PM
2007-10-10 03:30 PM
October 10, 2007 from 02:10 pm to 03:30 pm |
| Where | 53A Olson Hall |
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Imagined Communities and Unequal Access to Bilingualism: A Critical Ethnography of Bilingual Education in Japan
This presentation reports on a critical ethnography of bilingual education in Japan. I analyze the policies and practices of five schools that serve large numbers of bilingual children: an English language immersion school, a Chinese ethnic school, an international school, and two public schools. Drawing on the concept of imagined communities and Bourdieu’s theory of cultural reproduction, I argue that schools provide unequal access to bilingualism by envisioning different imagined communities for students of different socioeconomic classes and socializing them into these stratified imagined communities. While additive bilingualism in two socially prestigious languages is aggressively promoted for upper-middle-class students, immigrant and refugee children are subtly coerced to lose their first language in preference for society’s dominant language. At the same time, I also argue that schools are capable of acting as an agent of social change. If educators consciously resist socializing their students into their assumed futures and instead align their practices with alternative imagined communities in which their students will participate as able and respected members, schools can play a powerful role in breaking the reproductive cycle.
WECOL 2008 to be held at UC Davis