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Web site

http://www.gse.upenn.edu/%7Ehornberg/

Biographical information

Nancy H. Hornberger is Professor of Education and Director of Educational Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania , USA , where she also convenes the annual, international Ethnography in Education Research Forum. Professor Hornberger investigates language and education in culturally and linguistically diverse settings, using an approach which combines methods and perspectives from anthropology, linguistics, sociolinguistics, and policy studies. She gives special attention to edu cational policy and practice for indigenous and immigrant language groups, compared across national contexts. Dr. Hornberger's particular focus is on Quechua speaking populations in Perú and Bolivia and Cambodian and Puerto Rican populations in Philadelphia, but she has visited and consulted with scholars, edu cators, and policymakers working with minority language groups in other parts of the world as well, including Brazil, South Africa, Paraguay, New Zealand, India, Mexico, and Sweden. Author of several books and over 100 articles and chapters, her most recent publication is her book Continua of Biliteracy: An Ecological Framework for Educational Policy, Research, and Practice in Multilingual Settings (Multilingual Matters, 2003).

Abstract

The one language-one nation ideology of language policy and national identity is no longer the only available one worldwide. Multilingual language policies which recognize ethnic and linguistic pluralism as resources for nation-building are increasingly in evidence. These policies, many of which envision implementation through bilingual intercultural edu cation, open up new worlds of possibility for oppressed indigenous and immigrant heritage languages and their speakers, transforming former homogenizing and assimilationist policy discourses into discourses about diversity and emancipation. This paper uses the metaphor of ecology of language to explore the ideologies underlying multilingual language policies, and the continua of biliteracy framework as ecological heuristic for situating the challenges faced in implementing them. Specifically, the paper considers community and classroom challenges inherent in implementing these new ideologies, as they are evident in three nations which introduced transformative policies in the early 1990s: post-dictatorship Paraguay 's official recognition of Guarani in 1992, post-apartheid South Africa 's new Constitution of 1993 and Bolivia 's National Education Reform of 1994. The paper concludes with comments on the importance of filling as many ideological and implementational spaces as possible with efforts, such as those described here, in order to keep the multilingual language policy option alive, not only in Bolivia, Paraguay, and South Africa, but in all corners of our multilingual world.