Exploring New York City elementary school principals’ language ideologies

Abstract

School principals are street-level bureaucrats whose sense-making about language policies makes them de-facto policy makers. In turn, their language policy-making is mediated by their language ideologies and contexts. Using a case study methodological framework, this article explores the language ideologies of 11 New York City elementary school principals with high numbers of Emergent Bilinguals. It attempts to answer Ruiz’ call to make language ideologies clear and obvious in order to provide the level of transparency needed to enlighten the process of language policy creation and practice (Ruiz 1984). Analyses of the participating principals’ narratives revealed the existence of three different language ideologies: Resource Instrumental Mobility (RIM), Resource Integrative Democratic (RID), and Language as a Problem (LAP). This paper is an exploration of the RIM and RID language ideologies, which consider language as a resource, but do so for intrinsically different reasons. Thus, the findings expand on Ruiz’ (1984) Orientations in Language Planning by complicating and providing nuance to the concept of Language-as-Resource.

Keywords:

• Language policy and planning
• bilingual education
• language ideology
• language-as-resource
• interpretive case study

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 All names are pseudonyms in order to protect the identity of participants.

Additional information

Funding

This research was conducted as partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development of New York University. There were no external funding sources supporting this research.