language policies and TESOL: special issue of TQ

[Harold F. Schiffman]

Call for Abstracts
Special Topic Issue of TESOL Quarterly, Autumn 2007
Language Policies and TESOL: Perspectives from Practice
Edited by Vaidehi Ramanathan and Brian Morgan

TESOL Quarterly announces a call for abstracts for the 2007 special topic
issue on language policies around English (and other languages). This issue
will encourage situated research that explores how English language
policies in all regions of the world and at a variety of levels impact
realities on the ground. Specifically, it will encourage papers that will
probe how policies around English (and minority languages) get translated
into actual practice, including ways in which they sometimes reproduce,
legitimize, and counter social stratifications on the ground, especially
those relating to class, gender, ethnicity, caste, and mother tongue. Some
sites and questions for addressing complexities around the policy-practice
nexus might be:

In classrooms: In what ways do teachers­in K-12, community colleges,
tertiary levels­find themselves having to teach to formal policies and
“standards,” while realizing that they have to find ways of circumventing
policy-related pressures to facilitate effective learning? Do language
policies intersect with issues around gender and ethnicity? Are there
interesting ways that classroom-related issues­including first language
use, teacher-student interactions, evaluation and curricular issues, and
the use of particular pedagogic materials­enact and question particular
language policies, and if so, what are they, and what forms do they take?

In teacher-education programs: In what ways do teacher-education programs
sensitize potential L2 teachers of English to language policy issues around
local languages? How are teachers alerted to some socio-political
dimensions of English language teaching, and what local impact do they have
on issues around assessment and syllabi?  In what ways does making teachers
meta-aware of connections between language policies and their classroom
practice/s enable them to become more sensitive and critical teachers?

In institutional orientations: In what ways do individual institutions
recognize that they need to work with and/or against particular language
policies and the social stratifications they foster in order to reach out
to disadvantaged indigenous and language-minority students? What are some
ways in which institutions actively try to foster L1 development while
simultaneously encouraging the development of English? How do institutions
work around testing issues to both meet ‘standards’ while also countering
them? What are some language policy issues operating in and around
extra-curricular institutions such as tutorials? What is the nature of
English language classes/tutorials in non-western communities and what is
their relationship to state-and nation-wide language policies?

Abstracts should represent previously unpublished work with implications
for a variety of TESOL professionals.  In addition to full-length articles,
we solicit empirical or issue papers for Brief Reports and Summaries and
The Forum. Please send a 600-word abstract for a full-length article, and a
300-word abstract for a brief report or Forum. For all submissions, send
three copies of the abstract without author name(s). On a separate sheet,
include each author’s name, affiliation, mailing address, e-mail address,
telephone and fax numbers, and 50-word biographical statement.

Abstracts are due December 31, 2005. Inquiries can be sent to: Vaidehi
Ramanathan, (<mailto:vramanathan at ucdavis.edu>vramanathan at ucdavis.edu) and
Brian Morgan (bmorgan at yorku.ca)
Abstracts should be mailed to: Vaidehi Ramanathan, Department of
Linguistics, University of California, Davis, CA 95616. USA; Brian Morgan,
Department of Languages, Literatures and Linguistics, York University 4700
Keele St., Toronto, ON, Canada M3J 1P3.