E-Books →The Politics of English Language Education and Social Inequality

Using a postcolonial lens, the volume explores the raciolinguistics of language hierarchies that results in students from low-income backgrounds losing their mother tongues without acquiring academic fluency in English. Using findings from five major research projects, the book analyzes the specific context of India, where ambiguous language policies have led to uneasy tensions between the colonial language of English, national and state languages, and students' linguistic diversity is mistaken for cognitive deficits when English is the medium of instruction in schools. The authors situate their own professional and personal experiences in their efforts at dismantling postcolonial structures through reflective practice as teacher educators, and present solutions of decolonial resistance to linguistic hierarchies that include critical pedagogical alternatives to bilingual education and opportunities for increased teacher agency.
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