Charlotte Selleck
In May 2015 I took up a full time post as a Lecturer in English Language at the University of Worcester.
Prior to this, I successfully completed a Masters in Applied Linguistics at Cardiff University in the Centre for Language and Communication Research (2007). Whilst studying for my Masters I was awarded the Clifford Garwood Prize for outstanding achievement in the field of Applied Linguistics. The following year (2008), in preparation for a PhD, I completed a Post-graduate diploma in Language and Communication research with a distinction. I went onto complete a PhD at Cardiff University (2013), with a full ESRC studentship, under the supervision of Nikolas Coupland and Peter Garrett. My PhD research investigated the interplay of linguistic practices, linguistic representations, language ideologies and social inclusion between students at three related research sites in West Wales. The research was characterised by three principle research methods: ethnographic observational fieldwork, interviews, and audio recordings of spontaneous interaction.
In 2013 I started work as a research assistant on the Peripheral Multilingualism project, a collaborative, international, multi-sited ethnography seeking to identify and explore linguistic, social and ideological characteristics of peripheral multilingualism present across four indigenous and minority language contexts (Sámi, Corsican, Irish and Welsh). Working on the Welsh site, under the guidance of Professor Nikolas Coupland, the project focussed on the creative use of Welsh language, investigating bilingualism as a creative practice exploiting the malleable and often syncretic resources of language. In particular, the research was interested in the tensions that can arise as a result of the complex and changing multilingual processes, practices and experience in today’s communities where different kinds of conceptualisations of language, language boundaries and speakers have a great impact on what counts as a “language,” or who counts as a speaker, and who gets to decide.
In September 2014 I took up a position as a postdoctoral researcher at LANCHART, University of Copenhagen, investigating students' perceptions of different ways of speaking/accent differences within the UK.
Supervisors: Professor Nikolas Coupland and Professor Peter Garrett
Prior to this, I successfully completed a Masters in Applied Linguistics at Cardiff University in the Centre for Language and Communication Research (2007). Whilst studying for my Masters I was awarded the Clifford Garwood Prize for outstanding achievement in the field of Applied Linguistics. The following year (2008), in preparation for a PhD, I completed a Post-graduate diploma in Language and Communication research with a distinction. I went onto complete a PhD at Cardiff University (2013), with a full ESRC studentship, under the supervision of Nikolas Coupland and Peter Garrett. My PhD research investigated the interplay of linguistic practices, linguistic representations, language ideologies and social inclusion between students at three related research sites in West Wales. The research was characterised by three principle research methods: ethnographic observational fieldwork, interviews, and audio recordings of spontaneous interaction.
In 2013 I started work as a research assistant on the Peripheral Multilingualism project, a collaborative, international, multi-sited ethnography seeking to identify and explore linguistic, social and ideological characteristics of peripheral multilingualism present across four indigenous and minority language contexts (Sámi, Corsican, Irish and Welsh). Working on the Welsh site, under the guidance of Professor Nikolas Coupland, the project focussed on the creative use of Welsh language, investigating bilingualism as a creative practice exploiting the malleable and often syncretic resources of language. In particular, the research was interested in the tensions that can arise as a result of the complex and changing multilingual processes, practices and experience in today’s communities where different kinds of conceptualisations of language, language boundaries and speakers have a great impact on what counts as a “language,” or who counts as a speaker, and who gets to decide.
In September 2014 I took up a position as a postdoctoral researcher at LANCHART, University of Copenhagen, investigating students' perceptions of different ways of speaking/accent differences within the UK.
Supervisors: Professor Nikolas Coupland and Professor Peter Garrett
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Papers by Charlotte Selleck
This article reports on an ethnographic study carried out in three interrelated sites: two contrasting secondary schools and a Youth-Club (the principal focus of this article), in an area of southwest Wales. This article highlights the incongruence between the language at home and the language of the school and posits that the relationship between language use at school and in the wider community needs to be problematised and questioned far more than has been done thus far. This study questions whether school-based ideologies and school-based practices are re-negotiated or contested on the margins of education and whether this re-negotiation and contestation plays an important role in whether a young person chooses to use Welsh or English outside of school. It will be argued that recreational spaces, even though loosely connected to schools as institutions, function as more open spaces where institutional ideologies are actively reworked and renegotiated, either through choosing to use English or by mixing and blending different aspects of linguistic resources, or by re-negotiating and questioning which version of Welshness is more valuable, ‘the removed and authentic’ (as seen at the Welsh school) or the ‘new and hybrid’ as seen at the Youth-Club.
Talks by Charlotte Selleck
This study addresses the concept of the ‘new’ or ‘learner’ speaker from the standpoint of a situated, ethnographic analysis, drawing on research that was carried out in two contrasting secondary schools in south-west Wales; an English-medium (EM) school and a designated Welsh-medium (WM) school. This study forms part of a larger ethnographic project investigating the interplay of linguistic practices, linguistic representations, language ideologies and social inclusion between students at these two schools.
The following research questions will be addressed:
What linguistic varieties are capitalized by students at the EM school?
How are new speakers positioned in relation to mobility and the new globalised economy?
The data for this study came from periods of fieldwork carried out between September 2008 and January 2011. This research is characterised by the use of three principal methods: ethnographic observational fieldwork, ethnographic chats, and audio recordings.
It will be argued that students at the English school struggle to position themselves in terms of the national category of being Welsh and that they perceive that a language hierarchy exists, with students at the Welsh school being considered ‘proper’ or ‘fully’ Welsh.
Arguments will be put forward around the ‘duality of anglicisation’ (Williams 1990: 45). It is on the one hand ‘a competitive set of instruments through which English hegemony was established over vast parts of Wales’ (ibid: 45) and therefore perceived as inferior to Welsh by these students when addressing their local needs. That said, it will also be demonstrated that students at the EM school perceive that going to a ‘Welsh’ school doesn’t equip you with the necessary skills to function outside of the immediate locality and that English is a liberating force that permits entry into a wider social order. For students at the EM school not having the necessary or sufficient skills in English is what limits opportunities, rather than not having sufficient competency in Welsh. It emerges that they view English as a form of linguistic capital, a means of escape from parochialism and a demonstration of having embraced the ‘modern’ way of life.
Thus, although there is agreement about the ‘advantages’ of individual bilingualism, primarily for increased employment prospects locally, there are questions about the different ‘advantages’ or ‘disadvantages’ stemming from the different routes to bilingualism. In sum, a tension emerges between language being commodified as a form of capital linked to social mobility and language as an expression of national identity, with the students here questioning ‘what counts as competency, who gets to define what counts as competence, who is interested in acquiring that competence, and what is considered the best way to acquire it’ (Heller 2002: 47).
This presentation will address the following research questions:
1. Is the Welsh language accounted to be an obstacle to social integration for young people within the ‘community’ and into the school environment, or a positive resource?
2. How are the institutional arrangements within this community (or locality) understood by the students? Do school students see themselves operating within language ideological structures? Do students resist or affirm school-based ideologies and school-based practice?
The data for this study came from periods of fieldwork carried out between September 2008 and January 2011. This research is characterised by the use of three principal methods: ethnographic observational fieldwork, ethnographic chats, and audio recordings.
I broadly adopt the dichotomy presented by Blackledge and Creese (2010) – that of ‘flexible’ and ‘separate’ bilingualism (with the former referring to the English-medium school). ‘Flexible’ and ‘Separate’ bilingualism will be discussed in relation to their ideological underpinnings and corresponding institutional arrangements. It will be suggested that students at the English school perceive that there is an open and tolerant approach towards language and identify that, in their terms, they are able to speak ‘whatever you want’. In this sense language is not perceived to be a particularly pressing issue; language is generally not problematised. However, despite an apparent reliance on flexible bilingualism, it will be shown that boundaries continue to be put up around languages and language users resulting in clear divisions between the ‘English’ and ‘Welsh’ students, with ‘first-language Welsh speakers placed in opposition to ‘good learners’ with the later being held in higher regard. Furthermore, it will be argued that students at the English school struggle to position themselves in terms of the national category of being Welsh and the students perceive that a language hierarchy exists, with students at the Welsh school being considered ‘proper’ or ‘fully’ Welsh. That said, it will be demonstrated that students at the English school could easily construe a Welsh identity without the need for Welsh, with their use of Wenglish viewed as one way in which they could negotiate and position themselves within the national category of being Welsh, a kind of coping mechanism.
This study adds to a body of literature on Welsh-medium/bilingual education in Wales and has implications for language policy in Wales. It also addresses wider issues of social inclusion/exclusion.
Multiple methods were used to allow for, and to understand ideology at different levels; multiple methods therefore provided different lenses through which to see language in context. Ethnographic protocols were developed to access students’ orientations to the consequences of language education policies; ‘ethnographic chats’ were employed rather than more conventional ethnographic interviews (Spradley 1979). ‘Ethnographic chats’, were characterised by specific procedural and interactional characteristics of frame and genre, which differentiated them from the ethnographic interview in three principle ways; less control, less involvement from the researcher and more balanced turn taking.
It will be argued that the combination of more structured question-based ethnographic methods with the recordings of ‘live’ and unconstrained social interaction furthered the research presented here in that it allowed for differing perspectives on the same topic, and in many cases the same young people. The question-based ethnographic chats were deployed to elicit evaluative discourse and key ideological stances as well an analysis of reported language practices whereas the naturally occurring speech (characterised by free interaction) evidenced ‘ideologies in action’ (Jaffe 1999a) – what young people actually did. The combination of methods allowed for a richer and more nuanced understanding of the research context as well as allowing for a deeper understanding of the complex cultural and ideological pressures on young people’s engagement with the Welsh language.
The current study seeks to expand upon the remits of educational ethnography to consider sites on the margins of education, ‘liminal moments’ which fall ‘outside of dominant social structure’ (Rampton 1995:20). The present study focuses on a youth-club as a point of convergence between the two schools, drawing pupils from both the ‘Welsh’ and ‘English’ schools. It seeks to establish how interaction at the youth-club betrays different values and ideologies, among broadly the same ‘students’ who featured in the within-school data. It is a space within which the language ideologies of the two contrasting schools are re-negotiated; it is possible to examine how adolescents attempt to ‘resist or affirm’ the ideologies ‘that threatened to dominate their everyday experience’ (Rampton 1995: 20).
Ethnographic research has been carried out in both schools and at the youth club. Through participant observation, ‘key informants’ were identified. ‘Student’s’ everyday routines, at the youth club, were captured using portable recording devices and microphones. There are broadly two main axis on which the data set can be understood, ‘school vs. recreational’ and ‘global vs. local’. They are in some ways overlapping, and in this sense can be understood as fuzzy categories.
The youth-club, broadly speaking, acts as a temporal border zone between school and home (e.g. homework is completed). Whilst ‘school’ is not the over-riding normative institution, the youth-club is quasi-institutional in that vestiges of school identities persist, uniforms, linguistic category labels etc. Thus, ‘out on the street…visibly uniformed, it is about being recognised, about being ‘hailed’ both as a ‘student’ and as a student of this or that school’ (Whelen 2008: 304)
The youth-club is subject to it’s own norms, e.g. popular culture activities are fully legitimised. We see ‘students’ behaving in ways that are more attuned to recreational norms, including norms of talk. The relatively in-frequent free choice of Welsh marks a significant renegotiation/re-alignment, particularly for ‘students’ from the ‘Welsh’ school.
The data allows for a nuanced understanding of the global-local interface, which informs the construction of youth identities. The youth-club simultaneously encourages the ‘students’ to engage with a wider and potentially global popular culture (consequently, English is encountered on a daily basis through audio-visual mass media and various other forms of popular culture) but without losing touch with their local identities and connections. Within the complex bilingual context, the negotiation between global and local is inflected by language choice. Thus, the ‘students’ have to negotiate their relationships with the nationalist ideologies that often characterise Welsh-medium schooling, but also with more global ideologies, mainly mediated by English.
This study adds to our knowledge about Welsh-medium/bilingual education in Wales. It has implications for language education policy and social inclusion/exclusion. Additionally, it will help us better understand ‘multilingual’ Wales.
Blackledge,A. and Creese,A. (2010) Multilingualism. A Critical Perspective. London:Continuum.
Heller,M. (2006). Linguistic Minorities and Modernity. London:Continuum.
Rampton,B. (1995) Crossing, Language and Ethnicity among adolescents. London:Longman.
Whelen,J. (2008) On the margins of Education, or two stories of arriving at school’.Ethnography and Education 3(3),297-312.
RQ1: Is the Welsh Language accounted to be an obstacle to social integration for young in-migrants into society and into the school environment, or a positive resource?
RQ2: What ideologies of language and community are evident in the discourse of different groups? How do these relate to wider language-ideological debates within Wales?
I am carrying out ethnographic research in two secondary schools; a bilingual school (English and Welsh) and a Welsh medium school (Welsh) in south-west Wales. Through participant observation, ‘key informants’, who have attended the schools for differing lengths of time, have been identified. Interviews have been conducted with students and staff.
I will develop arguments in relation to empirical data currently being collected. Current ethnographic observations and interviews highlight the following themes:
•An ideology of preservation (creating an enclave for the Welsh language) vs. an ideology of promotion (promoting the Welsh language and its culture to those who are less familiar with it).
•Sociolinguistic agents (Jaffe 1999:9) vs. linguistic apprentices (Jaffe 1999:9)
•Ideological conflict within schools, and, comparatively, between schools
•Group stereotypes (within and between the schools)
•School spaces as sites for ideological and linguistic control; ‘real bilingualism’ vs. ‘fictive monolingualism’ (Heller 2006:17) and ‘strategies for dealing with de-facto bilingualism’ (Heller 2006:79)
This study adds to our knowledge about Welsh-medium/bilingual education in Wales. It has implications for language education policy and social inclusion/exclusion. Additionally, it will help us better understand ‘multilingual’ Wales.
Heller,M. (2006) Linguistic Minorities and Modernity. London:Continuum.
Jaffe,A. (1999) Ideologies in Action, Language Politics on Corsica. Berlin:Mouton de Gruyter.
This article reports on an ethnographic study carried out in three interrelated sites: two contrasting secondary schools and a Youth-Club (the principal focus of this article), in an area of southwest Wales. This article highlights the incongruence between the language at home and the language of the school and posits that the relationship between language use at school and in the wider community needs to be problematised and questioned far more than has been done thus far. This study questions whether school-based ideologies and school-based practices are re-negotiated or contested on the margins of education and whether this re-negotiation and contestation plays an important role in whether a young person chooses to use Welsh or English outside of school. It will be argued that recreational spaces, even though loosely connected to schools as institutions, function as more open spaces where institutional ideologies are actively reworked and renegotiated, either through choosing to use English or by mixing and blending different aspects of linguistic resources, or by re-negotiating and questioning which version of Welshness is more valuable, ‘the removed and authentic’ (as seen at the Welsh school) or the ‘new and hybrid’ as seen at the Youth-Club.
This study addresses the concept of the ‘new’ or ‘learner’ speaker from the standpoint of a situated, ethnographic analysis, drawing on research that was carried out in two contrasting secondary schools in south-west Wales; an English-medium (EM) school and a designated Welsh-medium (WM) school. This study forms part of a larger ethnographic project investigating the interplay of linguistic practices, linguistic representations, language ideologies and social inclusion between students at these two schools.
The following research questions will be addressed:
What linguistic varieties are capitalized by students at the EM school?
How are new speakers positioned in relation to mobility and the new globalised economy?
The data for this study came from periods of fieldwork carried out between September 2008 and January 2011. This research is characterised by the use of three principal methods: ethnographic observational fieldwork, ethnographic chats, and audio recordings.
It will be argued that students at the English school struggle to position themselves in terms of the national category of being Welsh and that they perceive that a language hierarchy exists, with students at the Welsh school being considered ‘proper’ or ‘fully’ Welsh.
Arguments will be put forward around the ‘duality of anglicisation’ (Williams 1990: 45). It is on the one hand ‘a competitive set of instruments through which English hegemony was established over vast parts of Wales’ (ibid: 45) and therefore perceived as inferior to Welsh by these students when addressing their local needs. That said, it will also be demonstrated that students at the EM school perceive that going to a ‘Welsh’ school doesn’t equip you with the necessary skills to function outside of the immediate locality and that English is a liberating force that permits entry into a wider social order. For students at the EM school not having the necessary or sufficient skills in English is what limits opportunities, rather than not having sufficient competency in Welsh. It emerges that they view English as a form of linguistic capital, a means of escape from parochialism and a demonstration of having embraced the ‘modern’ way of life.
Thus, although there is agreement about the ‘advantages’ of individual bilingualism, primarily for increased employment prospects locally, there are questions about the different ‘advantages’ or ‘disadvantages’ stemming from the different routes to bilingualism. In sum, a tension emerges between language being commodified as a form of capital linked to social mobility and language as an expression of national identity, with the students here questioning ‘what counts as competency, who gets to define what counts as competence, who is interested in acquiring that competence, and what is considered the best way to acquire it’ (Heller 2002: 47).
This presentation will address the following research questions:
1. Is the Welsh language accounted to be an obstacle to social integration for young people within the ‘community’ and into the school environment, or a positive resource?
2. How are the institutional arrangements within this community (or locality) understood by the students? Do school students see themselves operating within language ideological structures? Do students resist or affirm school-based ideologies and school-based practice?
The data for this study came from periods of fieldwork carried out between September 2008 and January 2011. This research is characterised by the use of three principal methods: ethnographic observational fieldwork, ethnographic chats, and audio recordings.
I broadly adopt the dichotomy presented by Blackledge and Creese (2010) – that of ‘flexible’ and ‘separate’ bilingualism (with the former referring to the English-medium school). ‘Flexible’ and ‘Separate’ bilingualism will be discussed in relation to their ideological underpinnings and corresponding institutional arrangements. It will be suggested that students at the English school perceive that there is an open and tolerant approach towards language and identify that, in their terms, they are able to speak ‘whatever you want’. In this sense language is not perceived to be a particularly pressing issue; language is generally not problematised. However, despite an apparent reliance on flexible bilingualism, it will be shown that boundaries continue to be put up around languages and language users resulting in clear divisions between the ‘English’ and ‘Welsh’ students, with ‘first-language Welsh speakers placed in opposition to ‘good learners’ with the later being held in higher regard. Furthermore, it will be argued that students at the English school struggle to position themselves in terms of the national category of being Welsh and the students perceive that a language hierarchy exists, with students at the Welsh school being considered ‘proper’ or ‘fully’ Welsh. That said, it will be demonstrated that students at the English school could easily construe a Welsh identity without the need for Welsh, with their use of Wenglish viewed as one way in which they could negotiate and position themselves within the national category of being Welsh, a kind of coping mechanism.
This study adds to a body of literature on Welsh-medium/bilingual education in Wales and has implications for language policy in Wales. It also addresses wider issues of social inclusion/exclusion.
Multiple methods were used to allow for, and to understand ideology at different levels; multiple methods therefore provided different lenses through which to see language in context. Ethnographic protocols were developed to access students’ orientations to the consequences of language education policies; ‘ethnographic chats’ were employed rather than more conventional ethnographic interviews (Spradley 1979). ‘Ethnographic chats’, were characterised by specific procedural and interactional characteristics of frame and genre, which differentiated them from the ethnographic interview in three principle ways; less control, less involvement from the researcher and more balanced turn taking.
It will be argued that the combination of more structured question-based ethnographic methods with the recordings of ‘live’ and unconstrained social interaction furthered the research presented here in that it allowed for differing perspectives on the same topic, and in many cases the same young people. The question-based ethnographic chats were deployed to elicit evaluative discourse and key ideological stances as well an analysis of reported language practices whereas the naturally occurring speech (characterised by free interaction) evidenced ‘ideologies in action’ (Jaffe 1999a) – what young people actually did. The combination of methods allowed for a richer and more nuanced understanding of the research context as well as allowing for a deeper understanding of the complex cultural and ideological pressures on young people’s engagement with the Welsh language.
The current study seeks to expand upon the remits of educational ethnography to consider sites on the margins of education, ‘liminal moments’ which fall ‘outside of dominant social structure’ (Rampton 1995:20). The present study focuses on a youth-club as a point of convergence between the two schools, drawing pupils from both the ‘Welsh’ and ‘English’ schools. It seeks to establish how interaction at the youth-club betrays different values and ideologies, among broadly the same ‘students’ who featured in the within-school data. It is a space within which the language ideologies of the two contrasting schools are re-negotiated; it is possible to examine how adolescents attempt to ‘resist or affirm’ the ideologies ‘that threatened to dominate their everyday experience’ (Rampton 1995: 20).
Ethnographic research has been carried out in both schools and at the youth club. Through participant observation, ‘key informants’ were identified. ‘Student’s’ everyday routines, at the youth club, were captured using portable recording devices and microphones. There are broadly two main axis on which the data set can be understood, ‘school vs. recreational’ and ‘global vs. local’. They are in some ways overlapping, and in this sense can be understood as fuzzy categories.
The youth-club, broadly speaking, acts as a temporal border zone between school and home (e.g. homework is completed). Whilst ‘school’ is not the over-riding normative institution, the youth-club is quasi-institutional in that vestiges of school identities persist, uniforms, linguistic category labels etc. Thus, ‘out on the street…visibly uniformed, it is about being recognised, about being ‘hailed’ both as a ‘student’ and as a student of this or that school’ (Whelen 2008: 304)
The youth-club is subject to it’s own norms, e.g. popular culture activities are fully legitimised. We see ‘students’ behaving in ways that are more attuned to recreational norms, including norms of talk. The relatively in-frequent free choice of Welsh marks a significant renegotiation/re-alignment, particularly for ‘students’ from the ‘Welsh’ school.
The data allows for a nuanced understanding of the global-local interface, which informs the construction of youth identities. The youth-club simultaneously encourages the ‘students’ to engage with a wider and potentially global popular culture (consequently, English is encountered on a daily basis through audio-visual mass media and various other forms of popular culture) but without losing touch with their local identities and connections. Within the complex bilingual context, the negotiation between global and local is inflected by language choice. Thus, the ‘students’ have to negotiate their relationships with the nationalist ideologies that often characterise Welsh-medium schooling, but also with more global ideologies, mainly mediated by English.
This study adds to our knowledge about Welsh-medium/bilingual education in Wales. It has implications for language education policy and social inclusion/exclusion. Additionally, it will help us better understand ‘multilingual’ Wales.
Blackledge,A. and Creese,A. (2010) Multilingualism. A Critical Perspective. London:Continuum.
Heller,M. (2006). Linguistic Minorities and Modernity. London:Continuum.
Rampton,B. (1995) Crossing, Language and Ethnicity among adolescents. London:Longman.
Whelen,J. (2008) On the margins of Education, or two stories of arriving at school’.Ethnography and Education 3(3),297-312.
RQ1: Is the Welsh Language accounted to be an obstacle to social integration for young in-migrants into society and into the school environment, or a positive resource?
RQ2: What ideologies of language and community are evident in the discourse of different groups? How do these relate to wider language-ideological debates within Wales?
I am carrying out ethnographic research in two secondary schools; a bilingual school (English and Welsh) and a Welsh medium school (Welsh) in south-west Wales. Through participant observation, ‘key informants’, who have attended the schools for differing lengths of time, have been identified. Interviews have been conducted with students and staff.
I will develop arguments in relation to empirical data currently being collected. Current ethnographic observations and interviews highlight the following themes:
•An ideology of preservation (creating an enclave for the Welsh language) vs. an ideology of promotion (promoting the Welsh language and its culture to those who are less familiar with it).
•Sociolinguistic agents (Jaffe 1999:9) vs. linguistic apprentices (Jaffe 1999:9)
•Ideological conflict within schools, and, comparatively, between schools
•Group stereotypes (within and between the schools)
•School spaces as sites for ideological and linguistic control; ‘real bilingualism’ vs. ‘fictive monolingualism’ (Heller 2006:17) and ‘strategies for dealing with de-facto bilingualism’ (Heller 2006:79)
This study adds to our knowledge about Welsh-medium/bilingual education in Wales. It has implications for language education policy and social inclusion/exclusion. Additionally, it will help us better understand ‘multilingual’ Wales.
Heller,M. (2006) Linguistic Minorities and Modernity. London:Continuum.
Jaffe,A. (1999) Ideologies in Action, Language Politics on Corsica. Berlin:Mouton de Gruyter.
The study investigates the complex interplay of linguistic practices, linguistic representations, language ideologies and social inclusion between ‘newly arrived’ students and Welsh students. It identifies how students experience and interpret the language ideological content of their education, both from the ‘local’ students’ perspective and from the perspective of the ‘new-arrivals’.
RQ1: Does the Welsh Language act as a bridge or an obstacle to social integration for young in-migrants into society and into the school environment?
RQ2: What ideologies of language and community are evident in the discourse of ‘local’ and in-migrant groups? How do these relate to wider ideological conflicts within Wales?
I am carrying out ethnographic research in two contrasting schools in West Wales; a bilingual secondary school (English and Welsh) and a Welsh medium secondary school (Welsh only). A series of visits have, and continue to be made to the two schools. I am carrying out participant observation, enabling ‘key informants’ to be identified. ‘Informants’ have attended the schools for differing lengths of time, highlighting the different stages of acculturation. Field notes and audio recordings are made to record the data collected. A series of sociolinguistic interviews have been conducted with students and staff at the two schools. The interviews are being conducted during and following the period of observation, allowing for topics of interest to be explored further.
This in an on-going project. I will be in a position to develop arguments in relation to empirical data currently being collected. Current ethnographic observations and sociolinguistic interviews indicate that the following issues will arise:
• An ideology of preservation (creating an enclave for the Welsh language and thus, protecting the language from the influence of English) vs. An ideology of promotion (promoting the Welsh language and its culture to those who are less familiar or less willing to accept it)
• Sociolinguistic agents (cf. (Jaffe 1999: 9) vs. Linguistic Apprentices (cf Jaffe 1999: 9)
• Ideological conflict within the schools and comparatively, between schools
• Ideological stereotypes (within the schools and between the schools)
• School spaces and the ideological and language control – ‘real bilingualism’ vs. ‘fictive monolingualism’ (re-affirmation of the monolingual ideal) (Heller 2006: 17) and the ‘development of strategies for dealing with de-facto bilingualism’ (Heller 2006: 79)
This study adds to a body of literature on Welsh medium/bilingual education in Wales. It has implications for bilingual and Welsh medium policy in Wales. It also has implications for the wider issues of social inclusion/exclusion and enables a greater understanding of ‘multilingual’ Wales.
Heller, M. (2006) Linguistic Minorities and Modernity. London: Continuum.
Jaffe, A. (1999) Ideologies in Action, Language Politics on Corsica. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.