National Language Policy to Develop Multilingualism in More U.S. Citizens
Speaking before the 2006 U.S. University Presidents’ Summit on International Education, President George W. Bush unveiled the National Security Language Initiative (NSLI), which put $114 million toward efforts to improve language education as a means to secure the nation. This initiative aims to expand the number of Americans mastering what military and intelligence officials have labeled “critical-need” languages, particularly Arabic, Chinese, Russian, Hindi, and Farsi. Throughout his speech, President Bush talked about foreign language education as a means to protect the United States in the short-term by “defeating [terrorists] in foreign battlefields so they don’t strike us here at home.” He also talked about how foreign language education could protect us in the long-term by helping “defeat this notion about our bullying concept of freedom,” because learning the languages of other countries and cultures can be a way “to reach out to somebody” and let that person “know that I’m interested in not only how you talk but how you live.”
President Bush’s National Security Language Initiative is one piece of an emerging, post-September 11, national language policy that proposes to develop multilingualism in more U.S. citizens. In one way, the policy challenges Official English legislation, because it proposes that students learn to communicate in multiple languages rather than in Standard English alone. In other respects, however, the policy is based on troubling notions about language, identity, and the pedagogical aims of language arts teaching. Given that the policy stands to influence language arts education, students’ literacy practices, and their conceptions of civic action, scholars in the English language arts need to situate it on their disciplinary map and, working in concert with their colleagues in foreign languages, respond to it in ways that reflect the field’s pedagogical and political commitments. The field has already developed theoretical and pedagogical frameworks for promoting multilingualism in the United States, but these frameworks were constructed as challenges to government policies and teaching practices that would make English the language of Discount Merrell Shoes communication in the U.S. public sphere and in its classrooms.
For example, the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) published the National Language Policy in 1988 as a counterstatement to the English Only movement. This policy called for English language arts scholars to work toward all U.S. citizens learning multiple languages as a means to “unify diverse American communities” and “enlarge our view of what is human” (Conference). More recently, scholars such as Bruce Horner, John Trimbur, A. Suresh Canagarajah, Min-Zhan Lu, Gail Hawisher and Cynthia Selfe, Paul Kei Matsuda, and Anis Bawarshi have challenged the implicit policy informing U.S. composition instruction that Cheap Merrell Shoes students should work toward writing proficiency in the English language only.
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