Plenary Speakers
 

Nancy Hornberger, University of Pennsylvania
Multilingual education policy and practice: Ten certainties

Ethnic diversity and inequality, intercultural communication and contact, and global political and economic interdependence are acknowledged realities in today’s world. Multilingual education, too, is a fact of life, and though there are a great variety of contexts, models, contents, and developmental trajectories in multilingual education policy and practice, it is possible to discern continuities that characterize successful multilingual education wherever it is found. My emphasis here is on what we know and are sure of, analytically formulated as ten certainties and illustrated by empirical research: 1) national language education policy opens up ideological and implementational spaces; 2) top-down policy is not enough; there must also be bottom-up support from communities and educators; 3) ecological language policy takes into account power relations between languages and pushes for multilingual uses in all sectors of society; 4) language status planning and language corpus planning go hand in hand; 5) allocation and sequencing of languages must be adapted to linguistic, cultural, and societal goals in each context; 6) communicative means encompass multimodality as well as multilingualism; 7) classroom practices can foster transfer of linguistic skills along and across the continua of biliteracy; and multilingual education is at its best when it 8) reclaims local knowledges; 9) revitalizes indigenous epistemologies; and 10) reaffirms the identities of all participants.

Nancy H. Hornberger is Professor of Education at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. A graduate of Harvard University (B.A. cum laude, 1972), New York University (M.A., 1973), and University of Wisconsin-Madison (Ph.D., 1985), Professor Hornberger investigates multilingual language and education policy and practice, combining methods and perspectives from anthropology, linguistics, sociolinguistics, and policy studies. Her special focus is comparative work on indigenous and immigrant heritage language education, grounded in her in-depth and long-term experience in Andean South America and urban Philadelphia, USA. Three-time Fulbright Senior Specialist Awardee, to Paraguay, New Zealand, and South Africa, Hornberger has also served as consultant under the U.S. Department of State, UNICEF and the United Nations Development Program and has taught, lectured, and advised on multilingualism and education throughout the world. Author/editor of two dozen books and over 100 articles and chapters, she has recently published Continua of Biliteracy: An Ecological Framework for Educational Policy, Research, and Practice in Multilingual Settings (Multilingual Matters, 2003), Can Schools Save Indigenous Languages? Policy and Practice on Four Continents (Palgrave Macmillan), and the Encyclopedia of Language and Education (Springer).

Email: nancyh@gse.upenn.edu

Web URL: http://www.gse.upenn.edu/~hornberg/