Literacy and language planning

Abstract

In a world which is simultaneously coming together as a global society while it splinters apart into ever smaller ethnically‐defined pieces, the two‐faced potential of literacy to both open and bar doors of opportunity becomes increasingly evident. Nowhere are these tensions more evident than in multilingual nations, where literacy development faces the challenge of attending to a multilingual population, many of whom do not speak the country's official language. A persistent model of literacy development has been that of national literacy; competing models include mother tongue literacy, multiple literacies, local literacies, and biliteracies, all of which have in common notions of a variety and diversity of literacies, reflective and constitutive of specific contexts and identities. Given such a model of literacy, the question for literacy developers becomes: which literacies to develop for what purpose? Language planning offers a way of outlining options and identifying different literacies and their different goals and uses, which may be useful for literacy planning. Offered here is a framework which integrates two decades of language planning scholarship, categorising 22 language planning goals in terms of the intersections between three types (status, corpus, and acquisition) and two approaches (policy and cultivation) of language planning.