Hornberger, Nancy
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Anthropology
Education
Linguistics
Education
Linguistics
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Introduction
Dr. 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 educational policy and practice for indigenous and immigrant language groups, compared across national contexts. Her particular focus is on Quechua speaking populations in Peru and Bolivia and Cambodian and Puerto Rican populations in Philadelphia, but she also studies minority language groups in other parts of the world as well. Dr. Hornberger pursues the answers to two questions in particular in her investigations: 1. What educational approaches best serve language minority children? 2. What policies, programs and circumstances encourage or contribute to minority language maintenance? Dr. Hornberger's areas of specialization include language planning and policy; bilingualism, bilingual education and biliteracy; and the ethnography of communication.
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Publication Authenticity and Unification in Quechua Language Planning(1998) Hornberger, Nancy H; King, Kendall AWith more than ten million speakers and numerous local and regional varieties, the unification and standardization of Quechua/Quichua has been a complicated, politically charged, and lengthy process. In most Andean nations, great strides have been made towards unification of the language in recent decades. However, the process is far from complete, and multiple unresolved issues remain, at both national and local levels. A frequent sticking point in the process is the concern that the authenticity of the language will be lost in the move towards unification. This paper examines the potentially problematic tension between the goals of authenticity and unification. One case examines an orthographic debate which arose in the process of establishing an official orthography for Quechua at the national level in Peru. The second case study moves to the local level and concerns two indigenous communities in Saraguro in the southern Ecuadorian highlands where Spanish predominates but two Quichua varieties co-exist. The final section considers the implications of these debates and tensions for language planning and policy.Publication Portraits of Three Language Activists in Indigenous Language Reclamation(2017-09-01) Hornberger, Nancy HIn an approach inspired by portraiture and ‘history in person,’ this paper portrays three women Indigenous language activists engaged in language reclamation, highlighting the mutually constitutive nature of language and the enduring struggles of Indigenous peoples that are crucibles for forging their identities. Neri Mamani breaks down longstanding language and identity compartmentalisations in Peru by assuming a personal language policy of using Quechua and engaging in Indigenous practices in public, urban, and literate spaces. Nobuhle Hlongwa teaches a university course on language planning through isiZulu medium and is a key figure in advocating for, negotiating, and implementing multilingual language policy at her university and in South Africa. Though discouraged by the politics of language policy, Hanna Outakoski stays in the fray for the sake of Sámi language, as university teacher of Sámi, activist for Sámi at the municipal level, and researcher in a cross-national multilingual literacy assessment of Sámi youth. Though the portraits give only a glimmer of the rich and complex lives, scholarship, and commitment of the three women, they demonstrate the power of individuals in shaping language landscapes, policy, and assessment; and the implementational and ideological paths and spaces for language reclamation opened up as they do so.Publication Negotiating Methodological Rich Points in the Ethnography of Language Policy(2013-01-05) Hornberger, Nancy HBuilding on Agar’s (1996: 26) notion of rich points as those times in ethnographic research when something happens that the ethnographer doesn’t understand, methodological rich points are by extension those points where our assumptions about the way research works and the conceptual tools we have for doing research are inadequate to understand the worlds we are researching. When we pay attention to those points and adjust our research practices accordingly, they become key opportunities to advance our research and our under standings. Drawing for illustrative purposes on ethnographic research on bi lingual intercultural education policy and practice in the Andes carried out by Indigenous students for their Master’s theses at the University of San Simón’s Program for Professional Development in Bilingual Intercultural Education for the Andean Region (PROEIB Andes) in Bolivia, I highlight methodological rich points as they emerge across language policy texts, discourses and practices. Framing the methodological rich points in the context of basic questions of re search methodology and ethics, I borrow as organizing rubric the paradigmatic heuristic for sociolinguistic analysis first offered by Fishman (1971: 219) and here adapted to the ethnography of language policy to ask: who researches whom and what, where, how and why?Publication Language Revitalisation in the Andes: Can the Schools Reverse Language Shift?(1996) Hornberger, Nancy H; King, Kendall AQuechua, often known as the language of the Incas, remains today a vital language with over 10 million speakers in several Andean republics. Nevertheless, census records and sociolinguistic studies document a continuous cross-generational shift from Quechua monolingualism to Spanish monolingualism in the latter half of the twentieth century, at both individual and community levels. An increasing awareness of the potential threat to the language has led to a variety of new initiatives for Quechua revitalization in the 1990s, initiatives which go beyond earlier experimental bilingual education projects designed primarily to provide mother tongue literacy instruction to indigenous children (in transitional or maintenance programs) to larger or more rooted efforts to extend indigenous language and literacy instruction to new speakers as well. Drawing on documents, interviews, and on-site participant observation, this paper will review and comment on two recent such initiatives: Bolivia’s 1994 national educational reform incorporating the provision of bilingual intercultural education on a national scale; and a community-based effort to incorporate Quichua as a second language instruction in a school of the Ecuadorian highlands.Publication Hymes's Linguistics and Ethnography in Education(2009-01-01) Hornberger, Nancy HEducation is one of the arenas in which Hymes has brought his scholarship and politics of advocacy to bear in the world, perhaps most visibly through his University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education deanship (1975–1987), but also through the scope and depth of his writings on linguistics and ethnography in education. Language inequality is an enduring theme of Hymes's work, in relation not only to Native American ethnopoetics, narrative analysis, and linguistic socialization, but also to educational linguistics and ethnography in education. Hymes proposed a vision and a set of ways of doing educational linguistics and ethnography in education—from ethnographic monitoring and ethnography of communication to ethnopoetics of oral narrative and ethnography of language policy—that have inspired and informed researchers for a generation and more.Publication “Until I Became a Professional, I Was Not, Consciously, Indigenous”: One Intercultural Bilingual Educator’s Trajectory in Indigenous Language Revitalization(2014-09-01) Hornberger, Nancy HDrawing from long-term ethnographic research in the Andes, this paper examines one Quechua-speaking Indigenous bilingual educator’s trajectory as she traversed (and traverses) from rural highland communities of southern Peru through development as teacher, teacher educator, researcher, and advocate for Indigenous identity and language revitalization across urban, periurban, and rural spaces. Neri Mamani grew up in highland Peru and at the time I met her in 2005 was a bilingual intercultural education practitioner enrolled in master’s studies at the Program for Professional Development in Bilingual Intercultural Education for the Andean Region (PROEIB-Andes) at the University of San Simón in Cochabamba, Bolivia. Drawing from my ethnographic research at PROEIB that year, situated also within a broader context of my ethnographic research on bilingual education in the Andes across several decades and Neri’s life trajectory across those same decades, this paper analyzes her narrative as it emerged in a 4-hour interview with me. I argue that Neri and her peers’ recognizing, valorizing, and studying the multiple and mobile linguistic, cultural, and intercultural resources at play in their own and others’ professional practices around bilingual intercultural education enable them to co-construct an Indigenous identity that challenges deep-seated social inequalities in their Andean world.Publication Language and Voice(2016-04-16) Hornberger, Nancy HThese resources cannot be neglected much longer without lasting negative effects. While we have introdu ed here the idea of a “resource-language” to talk about cultural and linguistic maintenance, we must see the differences between these and material resources like coal and oil. We can leave the oil in the ground and it will still be there to use in a hundred years; the more we use it, and the more we use it unwisely, the less we have of it later. Just the opposite is true of language and culture. The more we use these, the more we have of them; but the longer we neglect their use, the closer we are to extinguishing them. That has already happened for some languages, and we may be starting to see the consequences. The world will end one day, and the overriding cause is more likely to be a shortage of such human resources as language and culture, which could aid in promoting international understanding, than a shortage of such physical resources as coal and oil. (Richard Ruiz, 1983 Ruiz, R. (1983). Ethnic group interests and the social good: Law and language in education. In W. A. Van Horne (Ed.), Ethnicity, law and the social good (Vol. 2, pp. 49–73). Milwaukee, WI: University of Wisconsin System American Ethnic Studies Coordinating Committee/Urban Corridor Consortium. (Richard Ruiz, 1983, p. 65)Publication On not Taking Language Inequality for Granted: Hymesian Traces in Ethnographic Monitoring of South Africa’s Multilingual Language Policy(2014-09-01) Hornberger, Nancy HSouth African higher education is at a critical juncture in the implementation of South Africa’s multilingual language policy promoting institutional status for nine African languages, English, and Afrikaans. South African scholars, not content merely to comment from the sidelines on the policy, its promise, and challenges, have also engaged in implementation efforts. This article explores two such initiatives, both focusing on the use of African languages in higher education institutions where English is already established as the medium of instruction, and both undertaken with explicit goals of righting South Africa’s longstanding social injustices. I collaborated with colleagues at the University of Limpopo and the University of KwaZulu-Natal to assess current implementation and identify next steps and strategies for achieving truly multilingual teaching, learning, and research at their institutions. Taking up Hymes’ (1980) call for ethnographic monitoring of bilingual education, I sought in each case to jointly describe and analyze current communicative conduct, uncover emergent patterns and meanings in program implementation, and evaluate program and policy in terms of social meanings. I argue that ethnographic monitoring in education offers one means toward not taking language inequality for granted.Publication Opening and Filling up Implementational and Ideological Spaces in Heritage Language Education(2005-01-01) Hornberger, Nancy HPublication Dell H. Hymes: His Scholarship and Legacy in Anthropology and Education(2011-12-16) Hornberger, Nancy HDell Hathaway Hymes, linguistic anthropologist and educational visionary extraordinaire, passed away in November 2009, leaving behind a voluminous scholarship and inspirational legacy in the study of language and inequality, ethnography, sociolinguistics, Native American ethnopoetics, and education. This essay provides a brief account of Hymes's life and scholarly contributions, especially his early and enduring influence in the anthropology of education; and goes on to comment briefly on this AEQ set of essays honoring Hymes.