Acceso usuarios
Trang Thi Thuy Nguyen
This article examines linguistic discrimination against minority students in Vietnamese mainstream schools, as represented in administrators’, teachers’ and minority students’ experiences and perspectives. The concept of educational linguicism and three manifestations of educational linguicism, namely stigmatisation, glorification and rationalisation, are used as a theoretical lens to gain insights into linguistic discrimination occurring in this context. Semi-structured interviews and informal conversations with the participants are the main data source. Findings suggest that the administrators and teachers (1) stigmatised the value of minority languages as well as the minority students’ practices of their ethnic language (L1) and Vietnamese, (2) glorified the value and position of Vietnamese and English as compared with minority languages, and (3) rationalised the relationship between minority languages and Vietnamese in explaining how learning Vietnamese was necessary for the students’ social integration, development, and mobility. The participants’ linguicist beliefs and practices, which contributed to enacting and mobilising the structural ideologies and discourses nurturing linguicism against minority people, were perhaps unconscious, as they might try to emphasise the capital associated with the glorified languages which minority students could gain. Findings also reveal a tendency to construct internal linguicism among some minority students regarding the value and position of their L1 in Vietnamese society. Implications for reducing educational linguicism are then suggested.
