CFP: Special Issue – Language Education Policy and Semiotics

Call for papers
Special Issue proposed to the International Journal
Language and Semiotic Studies (LASS)

Language Education Policy
and Semiotics

This special issue of Language and Semiotic Studies (LASS) opens the field of semiotics to Language Education Policy, in collaboration with the International Network for Language Education Policy Studies (INLEPS), an association of scholars and researchers.

Language Education Policy (LEP) is the process through which the ideals, goals, and contents of a language policy can be realized in education practices. Two 2019 meetings are organized that support the concepts proposed in the special issue: on October 3-5 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Wisconsin (USA) with the collaboration of Prof. Qi SHEN, from Tongji University in Shanghai, and Prof. Jun Wang at Soochow University, Suzhou, in China, and on December 17-20 in Mumbai organized by Prof. Shivaji Sargar at the University of Mumbai, in India.

Conceptual Foundations. We are looking for chapters that give some semiotic grounding to Language Education Policy studies. Language policies express ideological processes. Their analysis reveals the perceptions of realities or semiotic affordances proper to certain sociocultural contexts. Language policies further their ideologies by defining and disseminating the values of policymakers.
Policy discourses and curricula reveal the ideological framing of the constructs that they encode and create, project, enact, and enforce aspects such as language status, power and rights through projective texts generated to forward and describe the contexts of their enactments.

Rationale for the Special Issue
Because Language Education Policies are related to status, ideology, and vision of what society should be and traditions of thoughts, such semiotic issues are complex, quickly evolving, submitted to trends and political views, and they need to be studied thoroughly.
Language Education Policy is a burgeoning field of scholarship that grounds its legitimation on broad frameworks such as Language Policy, Education Policy, semiotic affordances, curriculum building, language hegemony and dialectal linguicism. Language policies have semiotic implications, are related to social and cultural capital. Their mode of constructing knowledge meets growing societal interests in both the local and global forms that manifest meaningful forces in the way languages are treated.

This call for papers invites submissions that take an overview of the field of Language Education Policy as it manifests in classrooms with teachers and students, analyzing the emergence and gradual formation of the current context of technologically rich classrooms, the state of the field and multimodal visions for possible futures. It encourages submissions that utilize various aspects of semiotics to analyze Language Education Policies in action.

A semiotic orientation is proposed to motivate language education curricula where teachers transform the school cultures into constructive learning communities that value glocal cultures and languages.

Semiotically informed practices can help repair the contextual, psychological, ideological and social fabric of human lives and societies impacted by misconceptions based on language ideologies and language status that lead to miscommunication, discrimination, social divisions, violence, war, and human struggle throughout both developed and developing countries. The field needs semiotic arguments that support such endeavor, demonstrations based on philosophical foundations, documents and empirical evidence.

Guidelines
Please present your paper in such a way that its content is informative and self-contained and can be used in courses on Language Education Policy and Semiotic Studies. The relevant literature should be reviewed thoroughly and each paper should be well grounded theoretically with a clear semiotic framework. The topic or case exploration should be original, instructive and compelling. Illustrations and figures are welcome. If you are not sure about whether your proposal would fit this format, please contact the Guest Editor for advice: ftochon@education.wisc.edu

Papers must present innovative ways to orient the field of Language Education Policy semiotically towards the goal of cultivating distinctiveness, valuing languages & indigenous knowledge, and communication building locally, nation-wide and internationally. The main text of each manuscript, exclusive of figures, tables, references, and/or appendices, should not exceed 18-20 double-spaced pages (approximately 6,500 words).

The submission deadline for the abstract is September 15, 2019.
– average number of articles per issue: 7-8
– average length of each essay: 18-20 pages, 6,000-7,000 words
Full paper submission: January 15, 2020

Download the complete CFP for more information: Call for Papers LEP & Semiotics