Hornberger, Nancy

Disciplines

Anthropology
Education
Linguistics

Position

Professor

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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Now showing 1 - 10 of 38

Negotiating Methodological Rich Points in the Ethnography of Language Policy
(2013-01-05) Hornberger, Nancy H
Building 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?
Hymes's Linguistics and Ethnography in Education
(2009-01-01) Hornberger, Nancy H
Education 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.
Portraits of Three Language Activists in Indigenous Language Reclamation
(2017-09-01) Hornberger, Nancy H
In 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.
Sámi Time, Space, and Place: Exploring Teachers’ Metapragmatic Statements on Sámi Language Use, Teaching, and Revitalization in Sápmi
(2015-01-01) Hornberger, Nancy H; Outakoski, Hanna
Late in the evening before a regular school day, the mother of a Sámi family gets a call from her husband working at the reindeer corral saying that the reindeer will be brought in for separation and round-up early in the next morning. In the morning the rest of the family will join the father and other relatives at the reindeer corral and will be working late with the reindeers that day. At school the teachers get the information about the reindeer roundup from those children that are present in the morning, or from Sámi colleagues that have also gone to the corral. That day must, for the most part, be rescheduled at very short notice. The reactions to the changes are varying amongst the staff. The time used for rescheduling and planning the rest of that school day, or the coming couple of days, is not something that any member of the staff is looking forward to, but the attitudes, frustration and values that relate to the unpredictability of everyday life and the peculiarities of this particular cultural context are experienced in many different ways.
Should Quechua Be Used in Puno's Rural Schools?
(1986-04-01) Hornberger, Nancy H
This paper speculates on the possibilities for planning for language maintenance in one particular case. It considers the pros and cons of using Quechua in schools serving Quechua-speaking communities in rural highland Puno, Peru, from the point of view of its bearing on Quechua language maintenance. The paper is based on a two-year ethnographic sociolinguistic study in two communities of Puno. The study compared uses Quechua and Spanish in the communities and their schools, one of which participated in a bilingual education project. It also compared attitudes of community members toward the two languages. The paper draws from the findings of the research in discussing two questions: Can language maintenance be planned?; and Can schools be agents for language maintenance?
Language and Voice
(2016-04-16) Hornberger, Nancy H
These 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)
Revisiting Orientations in Language Planning: Problem, Right, and Resource as an Analytical Heuristic
(2016-01-01) Hult, Francis M; Hornberger, Nancy H
In 1984, Richard Ruiz set forth three orientations to language planning: language as problem, language as right, and language as resource. Since that time, the orientations have only become more powerful, rising to the level of paradigm in the field of language policy and planning (LPP). In this paper, we revisit Ruiz’s orientations. By drawing upon Ruiz’s own work as well as the work of other scholars who have been inspired by him, we unpack the ideas aligned with each orientation in order to reflect upon the application of the three orientations as a heuristic for LPP. In contrast to critiques that the three orientations do not map onto the political reality of policy situations, we argue that they are analytically useful as both etic concepts that can be used by researchers to guide deductive analysis about the values that emerge from messy policy debate and negotiation and as (latent) emic concepts in situations when people express their beliefs about language.
Biliteracy and Schooling for Multilingual Populations
(2002-06-01) Hornberger, Nancy H
Authenticity and Unification in Quechua Language Planning
(1998) Hornberger, Nancy H; King, Kendall A
With 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.
Review of Leanne Hinton, Bringing Our Languages Home: Language Revitalization for Families
(2014-06-01) Hornberger, Nancy H
How does one concretely go about reclaiming a heritage language with no living speakers? or with only a few members of an elder generation of native speakers? How does one do this within a family? an extended family? a school? a community? The authors in this book have tackled these questions in their own lives and share with us their wisdom, strategies, achievements, challenges, and hopes from the vantage point of twenty and more years of experience in these endeavors.