In French Immersion Ideologies in Canada, Sylvie Roy gives voice to people who have experiences with French immersion programs in Alberta, Canada. Using a sociolinguistics for change approach, she interprets questions related to language ideologies, as well as reasons people learn French as an additional language and why some students are asked to learn English first. She also reflects on what it means to become or to be bilingual or multilingual in a globalized world. Roy discusses teachers’ and learners’ linguistic and cultural practices and examines transculturality for the future. By questioning concepts that recur in participants’ narratives, this book explores how power is reproduced, who is marginalized in the process, and what can be done to deconstruct ideologies about learning and teaching French in Canada and in the world. Roy demonstrates complex issues related to the French language and their consequences for learners, parents, teachers, and administrators.

The authors explore some of the ways in which standardization, ideology and linguistics are interrelated. Through a number of case studies they show how concepts such as grammaticality and structural change covertly rely on a false conceptualization of language, one that derives ultimately from standardization.

Is the study of language ideologically neutral? If so, is this study objective and autonomous? One of the most cherished assumptions of modern academic linguistics is that the study of language is, or should be, ideologically neutral. This professed ideological neutrality goes hand-in-hand with claims of scientific objectivity and explanatory autonomy. Ideologies of Language counters these claims and assumptions by demonstrating not only their descriptive inaccuracy but also their conceptual incoherence.

The coming together of linguistics and sociology in the 1960's, most notably via the work of William Labov, marked a revolution in the study of language and provided a paradigm for the understanding of variation and change. Labovian quantitative methods have been employed successfully in North America, the UK, Scandinavia and New Zealand, but have had surprisingly little resonance in France, a country which poses many challenges to orthodox sociolinguistic thinking. Why, for example, does a nation with unexceptional scores on income distribution and social mobility show an exceptionally high degree of linguistic levelling, that is, the elimination of marked regional or local speech forms? And why does French appear to abound in 'hyperstyle' variables, which show greater variation on the stylistic than on the social dimension, in defiance of a well-established theory than such variables should not occur? This volume brings together leading variationist sociolinguists and sociologists from both sides of the Channel to ask: what makes France'exceptional'? In addressing this question, variationists have been forced to reassess the accepted interdisciplinary consensus, and to ask, as sociolinguistics has come of age, whether concepts and definitions have been transposed in a way which meaningfully preserves their original sense and, crucially, takes account of recent developments in sociology. Sociologists, for their part, have focused on the largely neglected area of language variation and its implications for social theory. Their findings therefore transcend the case study of a particularly enigmatic country to raise important theoretical questions for both disciplines.

This book focuses on how sign language ideologies influence, manifest in, and are challenged by communicative practices. Sign languages are minority languages using the visual-gestural and tactile modalities, whose affordances are very different from those of spoken languages using the auditory-oral modality.

Introduces teachers & future teachers of foreign langs. to what they need to know & understand about lang, lang attitudes, lang practices, lang rights, lang policy, and related issues. Brings together foreign lang ed and critical pedagogy. Designed for

Discourse and Social Media is a unique and timely collection that breaks ground on how discourse scholars, coming from a range of disciplinary perspectives, can critically analyse different social media, including YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and News. The book fills a gap in the market for a multi-disciplinary collection for analysing the discourse of social media. In providing a thorough review of the field to date, the opening chapter considers some of the common and divergent interests and priorities that exist in social media discourse analysis. It also discusses the wider methodological and theoretical implications which social media analysis brings to the process of discourse analysis, as new forms of connections and communication call us to re-think the static models that we have been using. The rest of the collection draws on different traditions in discourse studies, including Critical Discourse Analysis, Sociolinguistics, Pragmatics, Foucaultian analysis and Multimodality, to bring several unique approaches to critically analysing social media from a discourse perspective. Each ground-breaking chapter shows how different forms of social media data can best be selected, analysed, and dealt with critically. As a whole, Discourse and Social Media provides a go-to resource for social media scholars, as well as graduate students. The book is a significant contribution to the development of the field at this present shifting time. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Multicultural Discourses.