Family Language Policy by Christina Higgins
International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 2019
Introduction to the special issue on the Dynamics of Heritage in Language Family Policy
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Multilingual discourse analysis by Christina Higgins
This paper investigates whether the production of social media content itself can resemiotize lan... more This paper investigates whether the production of social media content itself can resemiotize languages that have been marginalized in a more positive light. To that end, and based on our ongoing interest in analyzing the sociolinguistics of languages which have been devalued and stigmatized (Higgins, 2015; Higgins et al., 2012; Higgins & Furukawa, 2012), we analyzed YouTube videos about Pidgin (Hawai‘i Creole) and Konglish (Korean English) to see whether and to what degree the platform of social media might provide new affordances for representing, and even valorizing, sociolinguistic diversity by studying how video producers (dis)identify with mainstream metapragmatic messages, or ideological statements about language.
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This paper analyzes interactions that took place during a set of workshops involving biomedical d... more This paper analyzes interactions that took place during a set of workshops involving biomedical doctors and indigenous healers in northern Tanzania which promoted the use of indigenous knowledge in public health education and training. Such workshops are needed since, despite their success in treating patients for a number of health problems, healers are still misrepresented in the media and in wider society and are often confused with witchdoc-tors. In the context of inequality, then, the purpose of the workshops was to encourage the participants to learn from one another and to find ways to collaborate so that they could better treat patients in their area. The analysis assesses the efforts of the non-governmental organization that organized the workshops to create a culture of inclusion and equality among the doctors. The analysis shows how both parties are first legitimated through narratives of equality in the official discourse of the workshops. Subsequently, however, the healers are delegitimized in their interactions with the biomedical doctors through unequal forms of address and through the conflation of indigenous healing with witchcraft. The analysis shows how inequality in discursive practices is a key site for enduring struggles over symbolic power, even in contexts where equality is explicitly on the agenda.
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Multilingua, 2015
This article discusses how stylization sheds light on the role of authenticity as an increasingly... more This article discusses how stylization sheds light on the role of authenticity as an increasingly relevant concept in sociolinguistics. Building on research on style, crossing, and mock language use (Coupland 2001, 2007; Chun 2004, 2009; Rampton 1995, 2006), the article demonstrates how multilingual stylization provides speakers with a wider range of resources for navigating and negotiating borders and identities. Stylization is increasingly important since modernist linkages between language and the categories of nation and ethnicity still exert authority over how authenticity is ascribed. At the same time, transcultural flows offer speakers more opportunity to cross and challenge borders linguistically. When speakers begin to stylize one another’s languages, however, the thorny issue of interpretation arises since stylized speech can be understood as mocking the speakers of the language being stylized. While studies of dialect stylization have explored these issues for over a decade, research on multilingual stylization is less developed. Accordingly, this special issue examines the role that authenticity plays in the production and interpretation of stylization. A continuum of stylization is presented that places mocking on one end (to refer to stylization that leads to insult) and style on the other (to represent acts of identity), while keeping open the possibility that all acts of stylization can ultimately be understood as acts of identity, given the right framings and stances expressed by the speakers.
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Multilingua, 2012
This article analyzes four Hollywood films set in Hawai‘i to shed light on how particular languag... more This article analyzes four Hollywood films set in Hawai‘i to shed light on how particular languages and language varieties style (Auer 2007; Coupland 2007) Local/Hawaiian and mainland U.S. characters as certain kinds of people. Through an analysis of films featuring haole (‘white, outsider’) male protagonists who are on various journeys in Hawai‘i, we analyze how cultural difference is constructed through divergent language choice, mock languages, and acts of linguistic bridging by quasi-Local characters. We draw upon Communication Accommodation Theory (Giles & Coupland 1991) to explain how linguistic divergence establishes dichotomous charac- terizations through language choice and other non-accommodating behav- iors. As our analysis shows, Hollywood styling perpetuates Orientalist dis- courses (Said 1978) about ‘whiteness’ and ‘nativeness’ by dichotomizing Local and Hawaiian people, and by characterizing Local characters as largely antagonistic toward outsiders. At the same time, the films attempt to avoid too close a linkage to colonialist discourses by establishing quasi- Local haole characters as linguistic ‘buffers’ who act as conduits for Ha- waiian worldviews and Local knowledge, and who are styled linguistically as partially Local through their knowledge of Hawai‘i Creole and Hawaiian.
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Language in Society, 2007
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Pragmatics, 2007
This article examines how a group of Tanzanian journalists co-construct their identities as membe... more This article examines how a group of Tanzanian journalists co-construct their identities as members of the same culture by producing talk that aligns them with several shared membership categories (Sacks 1972, 1979, 1992). The speakers propose and subsequently reaffirm, resist, or transform the categories ‘Westernized’ and ‘ethnically marked’ in order to align or realign themselves as co-members of the same group of white collar workers. In the first excerpt, the participants critique Tanzanian youth who dress like rap singers, providing turn-by-turn slots for co-affiliation, thereby establishing an intercultural difference between themselves and their fellow Tanzanians who adopt Western ways uncritically. In this excerpt, the participants employ interculturality for affiliative positioning by drawing a boundary between themselves and those Tanzanians whom they identify as ‘outsiders’ through their talk. The disjunction between the two groups is accomplished through codeswitching, shared humor, and pronoun usage. The second excerpt demonstrates how the recently-established shared insider identity is re-analyzed by the group when one of the participants in the office is constructed as uncooperative, and his ethnicity is named as the source of his inability to work with his colleagues in a suitable manner. Thus, his status as an ‘outsider’ becomes made real through explicit categorization of him as a non-member due to the interculturality of ethnic difference. This participant resists the ethnification (Day 1998) he receives, however, and through this resistance, he succeeds in reintegrating himself into the group. This reintegration is accomplished through affiliative language structures including codeswitching, teasing, and the nomination of new shared categories by the ethnified participant. My analysis provides further documentation that interculturality is a continuously dynamic production of identities-in-practice (Antaki and Widdicombe 1998), rather than a consequence of fixed social characteristics.
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Globalization and semiotic landscapes by Christina Higgins
This chapter discusses the spatial turn that emerged in the humanities and the social sciences in... more This chapter discusses the spatial turn that emerged in the humanities and the social sciences in the 1970s and discusses what it can offer to the study of language, migration, and mobility. The main purpose of this chapter is examine recent work in applied linguistics that has engaged with the view of language practices as spatial practices and to consider how this view reframes lines of inquiry in language and migration.
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Englishes in Changing Multilingual Spaces (R. Tupas, Ed.), 2015
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Language choice and linguistic & cultural hybridity at the global-local interface (Rubdy & Alsagoff, Eds.), 2013
This chapter argues that linguistic and cultural hybridities in multilingual societies require ne... more This chapter argues that linguistic and cultural hybridities in multilingual societies require new ways of conceptualizing language use. Rather than compartmentalizing languages and varieties into various domains under the rubric of diglossia (Ferguson, 1959), the concept of scapes (Appadurai, 1990) more accurately demonstrates how the meanings and uses of linguistic and cultural hybridities emerge and transform in the current era of globalization. Intersecting flows of people, technology, images, and information across boundaries create opportunities for hybrid languages and cultures to emerge, and the result is an ever-increasing range of local, global, and hybrid identity options for speakers. In this chapter, I explore how intersecting scapes produce linguistic and cultural hybridities by examining how multilinguals in East Africa reterritorialize global, west-based forms of English in their local contexts. Drawing on data from the mediascapes of hip hop and advertising, I show that rather than simply adapting English to fit local purposes, East Africans exploit the multivocality (Higgins, 2009) of the language to simultaneously index the local and the global. I then show that these multivocal forms are subject to further transformation through the process of reterritorialization by demonstrating how multivocal hip hop language has been made to fit into the contexts of a national political campaign in Kenya and HIV/AIDS prevention in Tanzania. The relocation of hybrid languages transforms the linguistic landscapes of these new domains, and in the process, alters the former meanings as well.
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Globalization and identity by Christina Higgins
This chapter examines how late modernity encourages new approaches to language education as a res... more This chapter examines how late modernity encourages new approaches to language education as a result of increased degrees of mobility, transnationalism, and neoliberalism. As many societies become detraditionalized, links between languages, cultures, and places are no longer in reciprocal relationships. Instead, the learning and teaching of languages is increasingly related to diasporic affiliations, intercultural identities, global cosmopolitanism, and translingual practices, all of which challenge modernist visions of language. Research reveals that language learners who are embedded in transnational and diasporic flows often invest in language practices that are not conventionally valued in the realm of education, including language associated with popular culture and truncated communicative repertoires, rather than national, standardized varieties of languages. Heritage language learners contest monolithic representations of their heritage languages as located in their parents’ or grandparents’ countries of origin, and learners of English as an international language who study in center nations challenge native-speaker norms. On the other hand, Indigenous language educators and learners express a strong attachment to place as a means of self-preservation and local epistemologies in the face of globalization. The chapter ends with a brief discussion of neoliberalism in language education, noting that despite the potential emancipatory nature of late modernity, flows are still characterized by inequities since they are still governed by the Global North and enacted in ways that perpetuate center-periphery disparities reminiscent of earlier periods of modernity.
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The Routledge Handbook of Language and Identity
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Language Teaching, 2015
This paper examines how flows of people, media, money, technology, and ideologies move through th... more This paper examines how flows of people, media, money, technology, and ideologies move through the world, with attention to how these SCAPES (Appadurai 1990, 1996, 2013) shape identity construction among language learners, both in and out of classrooms. After illustrating intersecting scapes in sociolinguistic terms, I explore the relevance of these ideas to identity formation among language learners, using three case studies. First, I examine the mediascape of hip hop in the ideoscape of education in Hong Kong, where an ELT Rap curriculum was designed for working class students in a low-banded secondary school. Next, I discuss how the confluence of transnationals and cosmopolitan urban residents in Tanzania provides a range of identity options for learners of Swahili that challenge nation-state-based associations of language. Finally, I consider how learners’ engagement in anime and manga from the mediascape is taken up in an introductory university-level Japanese language classroom in Hawai’i. These examples demonstrate how individuals are increasingly learning and using additional languages in the contexts of cultural me ́ lange and new identity zones.
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Identity formation in globalizing contexts: Language learning in the new millennium
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Critical approaches to language in education by Christina Higgins
This article explores the identities of a group of elementary teachers who participated in a prof... more This article explores the identities of a group of elementary teachers who participated in a professional development (PD) project on multilingual language learners. 1 We study how the participating teachers drew on different aspects of their identities to respond to encouragement to increase their attention to students' diverse multilingual repertoires in classroom practices. Drawing on research that has sought to open up more spaces for multilingualism in North American, English-medium schooling, the teachers were invited to create multilingual print environments (Lotherington, 2013), use group work to increase oral participation among multilingual learners, invite students to take on the role of 'language teacher' (Cary, 2008), and encourage students to author multilingual identity texts (Cummins & Early, 2010). As the teachers grappled with these ideas, we collected data in the form of classroom observation notes, interviews, assignments, and WebCT posts. Using Gee's (2001) framework for identity, our analysis sheds light on how the teachers enacted their professional identities as they worked to put the PD concepts and recommendations into practice. Our analysis reveals how the teachers' own linguistic histories strongly shaped their views about multilingualism in schools, but it also demonstrates that a formally sanctioned opportunity to experiment with multilingual pedagogies opened up new spaces for critical self-reflection about the links among languages, teachers' identities, and academic engagement for multilingual learners. IN THIS ARTICLE, WE ANALYZE TEACHER identities to better understand the varied responses by elementary school teachers to a professional development (PD) program carried out in Honolulu, Hawai'i that sought to broaden their professional knowledge of how to serve their multilingual language learners. While the PD project had a wide scope, including teaching about key aspects of second language learning, pedagogical strategies, and assessment, the program regularly encouraged the participating teachers to make
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In this chapter, I want to discuss how my own professional identity as a sociolinguist and discou... more In this chapter, I want to discuss how my own professional identity as a sociolinguist and discourse analyst shapes how I teach students in my US-based university, most of whom are graduate students who have been or intend to become English language teachers in EFL contexts such as Japan and Korea.
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Linguistics and Education, 2012
This article discusses a documentary film project1 produced by high school students in Hawai‘i th... more This article discusses a documentary film project1 produced by high school students in Hawai‘i that investigated the value of Pidgin (Hawai‘i Creole) in schools and society, and which ultimately aimed to address the problem of linguicism (Skutnabb-Kangas, 1990). The project was carried out within a critical language awareness framework that treated students as knowledge producers and which provided them with the opportunity to use their own communities and languages as repositories of knowledge and as sites for learning about the relationship between language and society. Through exploring the meanings and values of their language, the students produced a documentary that ended up challenging many of their own assumptions about Pidgin, and which revealed the importance of translingual practices (Pennycook, 2007). This article draws on material from the documentary and interviews with the students to illustrate how the students’ views towards Pidgin changed during the course of the project, with a particular focus on the language’s legitimacy. The results suggest that a students- as-knowledge-producers approach may offer more potential to challenge linguicism than many contrastive analysis approaches currently being used. By treating non-mainstream languages as subject matter in their own right, without reference or comparison to the dominant language, we argue that these languages earn more respect and acknowledgment in school settings and beyond.
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Creole Language Library, 2010
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Family Language Policy by Christina Higgins
Multilingual discourse analysis by Christina Higgins
Globalization and semiotic landscapes by Christina Higgins
Globalization and identity by Christina Higgins
Critical approaches to language in education by Christina Higgins