Fostering Dialogue about the Nation Linguistic Diversity and Language Needs
Rhetoric and composition scholars can make a significant contribution to the present debate by promoting students’ active learning about how the national security language policy debate might play out in the lived experiences of people in their communities. Primary research projects can promote writing as a means for students to explore the language diversity of their community and to identify ways in which local or national language policies do or do not build on it. Such projects can advance the university’s mission to prepare students for civic life while also enabling them to understand the significance of the national security language policy and to gain the facility and adeptness to engage public debates about Calvin Klein Jeans linguistic diversity.
For example, students in an Advanced Composition course can conduct primary research in which they explore the region’s linguistic diversity and examine language policy issues that affect local heritage language communities. The MLA Language Map can help students gain a tangible sense of the linguistic composition of their communities. The online map draws on 2000 U.S. Census data gathered in response to the question, “Does this person speak a language other than English at home” (“The MLA Language Map”). By consulting the Map, students could determine the number of speakers of specific languages who live in the particular state, county, city, town, or zip code where they go to school. These data could, in turn, support community-based research projects in which students explore the spaces where speakers of a specific language can and cannot use that language in public. Students could conduct interviews to learn about how the local government uses census data in deciding what resources, if any, to make available for linguistic minority populations. They could also build on these interviews by researching the cost to taxpayers of making these resources available and, equally significant, the cost to communities when such resources are not made available. This research could serve as the basis for a feasibility report or proposal for new technologies, new hiring practices, or new educational programs that better serve the needs of these communities and that promote opportunities for the voices of non-English speakers to be heard in local public spheres.
These types of research projects can provide a way into discussing the national security language policy debate because they prompt questions concerning how we, as a community or as a nation, define our “critical” language needs. Through these class explorations, teachers can pose questions about the terms on which various groups in society can participate in public debates about our language problems, and they can encourage students to reflect on how they conceive of the linguistic and cultural diversity of “the community” when they write about public issues. These projects can also help students strategize and debate how the university should or should not connect to these language communities. Through such discussions, students not only critically engage the current language policy debate, but they also begin to reflect on the university’s mission and consider how educational institutions might build a greater public commitment to language learning. Bringing the community’s or the nation’s linguistic diversity into the writing classroom serves as one means by which language arts scholars can work to foster what linguist and Australian policymaker Joseph Lo Bianco, calls “a way of talking about linguistic diversity in positive terms”.
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