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Is public discourse about language policy really public discourse about immigration? A corpus-based study

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Abstract

The pluralist narrative of language policies suggests that language policies are influenced by public perceptions of immigrants (Darder 2004; González 2000; Pavlenko 2002; Valdés 1997). This paper investigates the relationship between newspaper discourse about language policies and newspaper discourse about immigration. It asks how much key, lexical overlap exists between the discourses. This study compared Arizona newspaper corpora representing discourse about language policies and discourse about immigration to evaluate the degree of similarity in discourses. Keyword analysis, identifying unusually frequent words, was used to assess the degree of important semantic overlap across topic-based corpora. Four topic-based corpora were constructed from the newspapers published between January 1999 and October 2007. Surprisingly, little key, lexical overlap was found between language policy corpora and immigration corpora. In light of the findings, advantages and limitations of various methodologies for language policy questions are discussed—corpus-based methods in particular.

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Abbreviations

U.S.:

United States

AZ:

Arizona

ELLs:

English language learners

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Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Dr. Douglas Biber for his guidance on the study design. Dr. Mary McGroarty, Stephen Doolan, and the Language Policy reviewers also provided thoughtful comments and feedback on subsequent drafts for which the author is extremely grateful.

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  1. English Department, Applied Linguistics Program, Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, AZ, USA

    Shannon Fitzsimmons-Doolan

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  1. Shannon Fitzsimmons-Doolan
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Correspondence to Shannon Fitzsimmons-Doolan.

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Fitzsimmons-Doolan, S. Is public discourse about language policy really public discourse about immigration? A corpus-based study. Lang Policy 8, 377–402 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10993-009-9147-6

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