The Guarani speaker in Paraguayan bilingual education policy: Language policy as metapragmatic discourse.

摘要

Educational language policy is an important tool in the struggle to achieve educational equity for language minority students, and how educators interpret and appropriate policy in schools has much to do with its results. This dissertation analyzes the appropriation of national policy for universal Spanish/Guarani bilingual education in Paraguay, where Guarani and Guarani-speaking students have historically been marginalized in education. As a means of advancing our understanding of how language policy is interpreted, and of understanding how this policy improves education for Guarani-dominant children in Paraguay, I draw upon linguistic anthropological theory to frame language policy text and talk as metapragmatic discourse, or discourse about types of language, people, and activities. I examine how educators made sense of policy in part by making sense of these types---especially of types or models of identity of Guarani speakers---in their contexts of practice. Data were collected through participant observation and field notes, document collection, audio recorded interviews, photographs, and video recorded classroom interaction, and they were analyzed using ethnographic and discourse analytic methods. I compared practices in two communities---one rural and Guarani-dominant and one urban and Spanish-dominant---and showed that two longstanding models of Guarani speaker identity were influential in how teachers interpreted policy. As a result of these appropriations, a model of modern, educated Guarani speaker identity was produced, but Guarani-dominant students' access to it and to the language forms that index it was limited. Thus, despite positively valued use of Guarani in schools, Guarani-dominant students remain marginalized and policy goals for educational equity as yet go unrealized. In addition to offering insight into the practice of Paraguayan policy, this analysis shows that framing language policy as metapragmatic discourse reveals the integral role of social identification in policy appropriation, and it shows that analysis of speech chains and sociolinguistic scales offers a way of seeing connections among contexts of language policy activity and a way of understanding how interpretations of policy remain stable and change across contexts. Finally, this work illuminates avenues for making language policy work more effectively for educational equity.