Abstract
This chapter reviews early, major, and recent developments in thinking about language education and culture and identifies prospects for future research and practice. In the past, language education was often targeted at Indigenous and immigrant peoples as a way to eradicate perceived “undesirable” cultural practices and weaken the bonds of cultural or ethnic identity. Approaches to language education premised on assimilationist political agendas resulted in widespread linguistic and cultural genocide among minority groups. Later, differences in language background were connected perniciously with so-called cultural deficits and used as a justification for language “reeducation.” More recently, the fields of anthropology, educational research, and applied linguistics have confronted the challenge of rethinking language education as a means of affirming and sustaining culture and helping language learners forge intercultural connections. This work is complicated by the fact that traditional understandings of language and culture are no longer tenable in a postcolonial, globalizing world where it is not always a straightforward matter to define what is meant by “culture” across social contexts or what the object of “language education” should be. Emerging research foregrounds the hybridity of cultural and linguistic practice in educational settings, with particular attention to learner agency, language education as a site for contesting social ideologies and beliefs, and newly flexible conceptions of linguistic competence. This research also deals with the difficulties of pursuing culturally sustaining language education in schools and minority language communities that are operating with the constraints of restrictive top-down language policies.
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O’Connor, B.H., González, N. (2017). Language Education and Culture. In: McCarty, T., May, S. (eds) Language Policy and Political Issues in Education. Encyclopedia of Language and Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02344-1_5
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