On language ideology and education policies: A conversation with Thomas Ricento

Thank you for this opportunity to chat with you. First, please do tell us a bit more about your current work. What are you working on at the moment? What is a particular question that drives you right now?

What I am working on right now is a project that began more than 20 years ago, which has resulted in several publications along the way, but which now is coming together in a book. It has to do with my interest in the construction of American identity, the notion of Americanism and ideologies, and the processes that lend themselves to discourse and historical-social analysis, with implications for languages and language policies. I think most importantly, I want to answer questions like, “Who counts as an American? Why?” This inquiry goes back to the early colonial period up to the present day. And I am interested in how and why ideologies develop, why certain beliefs of various types persist, and why other counter-beliefs have a harder time seeing the light of day.

In particular, I am looking at discourses from the sciences, sociology, linguistics, religion, history, and anthropology to see what these particular tropes or narratives are. I have always been fascinated in this topic as an American, and as an Italian American, although that is kind of an ancillary aspect of this. When did the concept of “American” gain currency in the United States and to whom did this label apply? In what ways and for what purposes have the definitions of Americanness changed over time? Why do certain ethnicities persist in the American imaginary while others disappear? What makes certain “types” of people less American than others? So, I think it is a very important topic, which affects our current politics to a great extent. And I am very interested and tuned into current American politics and global politics. So, I think it is an important question to investigate.

My particular background, skills, and degrees in political science and graduate degrees in applied linguistics, along with my interest in history all come together in a kind of hybrid, interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary way, which is why I say it is a kind of daunting task to try to answer these questions, but I have got to try. So, that is what I am doing. It motivates me, during these very interesting times that we are living through in the United States, particularly the last 6 or 7 years. But it goes way back in American history. So, that is what I am working on right now.

What impact did the universities you attended have on your career path? What made you pursue a career in your field? What is the best piece of advice that received in the earlier stages of your career?

Of course, these are complex questions that we try to reconstruct retrospectively. A lot of times, how we understand the past is where we are in the present. But having said that as a caveat, I would say that my undergraduate training in liberal arts, with a political science major and a Spanish minor, was crucially important in my intellectual development. I think that had a very important impact on how I came to do what I have been doing for the last 30+ years. I read widely in philosophy and history, sociology, literature, and economics. That made me curious about a lot of different things. It was not clear when I graduated what I would do and how I would use the knowledge I had acquired.

But some years later, after I had been involved in various other kinds of activities—including teaching ESL in Boston in the early 1970s—I came to the University of Southern California, and I found that linguistics had things in it that appealed to my interest and love of language and culture, and also my interest in exploring the revolution in linguistics, which was really in full flower at that time in the 1980s. I studied generative linguistics with some of the leading MIT-trained linguists, as well as studying sociolinguistics with Elinor Ochs, which provided a kind of a counter-balanced, counter-argument to generative linguistics. So, I got to see that tension early on in my training. I also studied applied linguistics and second language acquisition theory with Stephen Krashen. I studied Universal Grammar with Bernard Comrie, generative phonology with Larry Hyman, and generative syntax with Osvaldo Jaeggli. I also had a course in language policy with Robert Kaplan. So, it was very interesting training.

On the one hand, you had this very heavily theoretical linguistics approach from a particular perspective, which was counter-balanced by a Hymesian kind of ethnography of speaking approach. So, it was kind of like “Am I going to be a theoretical linguist or an ethnographer?” It was kind of confusing. So, I ended up going to the University of California, Los Angeles for my PhD because their program in applied linguistics gave me the freedom to study almost anything I wanted to and develop my own program of research. That training at the University of California, Los Angeles had a profound impact, in particular, because I had a lot of freedom to explore areas which included theoretical and functional linguistics, but which also included cross-cultural psychology, anthropology, literary theory, and contextual analysis. I also took courses in language testing, research design, and statistics. So, I was really loaded up with a lot of methodological tools.

My dissertation was titled Aspects of coherence in Japanese and English expository prose. So, you can see I have come a long way from that kind of work to the work that I think I have been known for, which is in language ideology, language and identity, language and politics, language and political economy, and so on. But that training informed me in many ways on how to ask questions, and what questions are worth asking. And of course, I studied with some of the most brilliant people working at that time. So, it was really an unbelievably rich experience and preparation for my academic career.

When did you first develop an interest in language policies and ideologies? What particular experiences have helped you carve out your own niche?

It is kind of interesting because I only had one course in language policy with Robert Kaplan in a summer session. That is the only course I ever had that was titled Language Policy. And this is good for readers of this journal to hear because there are many ways to enter into a field or subfield. In that course, I read widely in the existing literature, so I got some sense of the field; but at that time, I was probably more interested in discourse analysis. And I was not really thinking of language policy as something that I would do. But I learned a lot from Robert Kaplan. He was a good mentor. One of the important things I learned was how to become a more careful scholar and researcher, and that you have to earn the claims that you profess in your published research.

It had more to do with methodology and approach to doing research than it did with content in language policy. But to get specifically to my current interests, my undergraduate training was in political science, and I have always been very interested in politics. Language policy—the combination of language and policy—brought together language and politics that was a natural fit, given my training and interests. It seemed to be a kind of natural evolution to get into that. Also, not many people were doing it when I was in graduate school. So, I kind of had to create my own path, and it was difficult in the beginning to find a voice or to decide what kinds of questions were worthwhile asking, and how I could bring my skillset to answer those questions.

So, I think it took me several years—4 or 5 years—before I even published what I would consider to be my first sort of significant research in Unpeeling the Onion (Ricento & Hornberger, 1996), the article that appeared in the special topic issue of TESOL Quarterly in 1996, which is cited a lot. But when people read that, my colleagues from UCLA said, “Tom, I had no idea that you were really doing language policy.” And I said, “Well, I didn’t either until I started doing it!” So maybe that is a message of hope for people who are not sure exactly what their area of research will be. Sometimes you have to make your own way and have the courage to try and explore topics that you are very interested in.

What do you consider to be your proudest career achievement so far? How did the idea for this project come about?

Well, I think there are a few things. I mean, I think any research professor would say that they are proud of the impact they may have had on the students that they have mentored and worked with, as undergraduates or graduates. So, I have to certainly say that has been something I am proud of. In terms of publications or other activities, I would say that the establishment of the Multidisciplinary Approaches in Language Policy and Planning Conference at the University of Calgary in 2012 was something I am proud of. It is still running a decade later. I felt it was important to have a forum that focused on things that come under the rubric of language policy and planning. And, as you know, there are a lot of aspects of language and policy. Some people consider it to be more applied, some people consider it to be more sociolinguistic, some people consider it to be more political, and so on. But the great thing about that conference for me was that it brought together people from around the world, specifically focusing on various areas and aspects of language policy. I think the first 5 years that I ran the conference in Calgary, we had on average people from 35 different countries attend each year, making professional connections with other researchers, and attending plenary talks by well-known scholars. It was also socially a great experience. People went on excursions to the Canadian Rockies; for many people, it was their first time in Canada. So, the social aspect is very important in the sense that you often only read the articles of scholars, but getting to meet the authors face to face, and talk to them at meals and during conference breaks, is something different. I think that sort of experience is essential, especially for younger scholars, to get a sense of the field and who is doing what and to get to talk to people. I think those contacts are invaluable. So, I am proud of that.

I would say another thing that is an important scholarly contribution is the four-volume Routledge collection, which is called Language policy and planning: Critical concepts in linguistics that I edited. It is in the major work series published by Routledge in 2016. I am proud of that because I collaborated with an advisory group of five well-known people in the field, and we went through all the literature basically from the 1950s up until the time of the publication to try to tease out the major threads, major publications, major contributions by major scholars that define the field of language policy and planning. I know it is not easy to buy that set because it is quite expensive, and mostly in libraries. But, to me, it was an opportunity to take stock of the field and to say, “These seem to be the works, the ideas, the concepts that have helped shape and define the field over a period of maybe 60 years.”

And, I guess another thing I am proud of is the research project, for which I was the principal investigator at the University of Calgary, called Linguistic and cultural barriers to refugees’ access to medical and social services in Calgary from 2009 to 2011. It resulted in many presentations and publications, including a book published in 2021 by Palgrave Macmillan, which is titled Refugees in Canada: On the loss of social and cultural capital. I am proud of it because it exposed issues in the resettlement programs in Calgary that are not well known to the general public, and which need to be addressed and fixed if Canada is to live up to its claim of being a multicultural nation that respects diversity, but which has had difficulty in figuring out how to accommodate or include that diversity through its policies with regard to resettlement, and also, and importantly, with regard to language programs in English for refugees and immigrants, which are just not adequate in allowing highly skilled professionals to reenter their professions, for which they are credentialed and trained in other countries, into the Canadian workforce. So, I think this is something I hope can have some impact on policy in Canada, and also in other advanced industrial countries, where the same sorts of problems exist today.

I would like to ask more about your recent book Refugees in Canada: On the loss of social and cultural capital. Can you tell us about a particular chapter or section of your book that you feel is particularly significant, and why?

Sure. I think the chapter that deals with the Martinez family (Chapter 4) reveals some very important facts about the challenges that refugees face in integrating into Canadian life. I guess if you were to ask me what stands out most, it is that the focus in resettlement is on the refugees’ deficiencies in English while ignoring ways in which their native language—Spanish—could be valued and serve as a basis for transitioning into living in the Province of Alberta—and, how that deficit approach impacted their ability to integrate into mainstream anglophone Canadian society on their own terms as highly educated professionals with a strong desire to contribute to their adopted country in the professions for which they were qualified with decades of experience. For example, Fernando, who is a highly skilled neonatal surgeon from Medellín, Colombia, was hard-pressed to get a job as a janitor in Calgary. He had to lie on his resume and in interviews and say that he was only a high school graduate to be hired for low-skill jobs. He made many attempts to get into a position to qualify for a medical residency, despite the fact that he had already had residencies in Colombia, and he was fully board certified in his specialties; but in Canada, they make you redo a residency, which is very difficult to get, very expensive, and delays your ability to get a medical license, which is not even guaranteed at that point. So given the frustrations—I detail those in the chapter—with regard to English language training, as well as trying to gain licensure from the medical societies in Canada, Fernando ended up enrolling in a one-year course that qualified him for employment as a pharmacy technician. Becoming a nurse would have been too expensive and time-consuming.

So, here is a pediatric surgeon who is now a pharmacy technician in a major drugstore chain in Calgary, with a salary that is a tiny fraction of what he would have earned as a physician. It is, I think, kind of shocking to understand what that sort of demotion does to his personal life and his family life, and it is also hard to imagine. But what was amazing, too, was his perseverance and his ability to overcome, to the best extent he could, his situation. And this situation is not uncommon. It is faced by many refugees and immigrants who are underemployed or employed in totally different fields, which is a kind of sad thing, and also a waste of the cultural capital that could benefit Canadian society. It is an underutilization of human resources that many of the refugees that we worked with in the project bring with them to Canada, but that is not recognized or valued in part because these refugees do not have Canadian work experience, which disqualifies them from many job opportunities. So, it was a kind of a wake-up call for me. And, I hope our research will have some impact on policymakers; but I think, at the very least, it will be useful for advocates who are pressing for reforms in resettlement policies, and in particular, in the way in which English language training programs could be modified to meet the needs of professionally trained immigrants and refugees to enable them to resume their careers in Canada.

What is missing from language policy research? What else would you be excited to see happening?

A lot of research that is called language policy research is done by political scientists, political philosophers, and political theorists. So, these comments are directed particularly within those disciplinary domains. I think there is a real gulf between what is happening in political theory and what is happening in more empirically based, conceptually based language policy research. Coming from the perspective of political theory, there tends to be a very orthodox, positivistic approach that is not interested in how language is a politically, socially, economically, and historically situated phenomenon. Research based on the political side of language policy that aims to characterize normative or desirable states of affairs with regard to why language X should have official status while language Y does not or should not deserve official recognition, often misses the point that historical, social, and/or economic factors tend to render such normative arguments as affirmations of the status quo, rather than questioning how the status quo came to be in the first place.

So, I think we need more research that is critical and empirical from the folks who approach language policy matters from a political philosophy perspective. There is some work that is more critical, but I think there needs to be more of it. There is a need to show why certain economic and social conditions tend to favor particular languages and not others; even when such preferences may appear to be in the service of social inclusion, they often are in opposition to such inclusion. An example of this phenomenon is my 2005 article Problems with the “language-as-resource” discourse in the promotion of heritage languages in the U.S.A. published in the Journal of Sociolinguistics. I think we need more research using techniques of critical discourse analysis given the importance and role of ideology in the promotion and defense of language policy regimes, whether at the governmental, institutional, or local level. Some of the most interesting current research uses ethnographic approaches with discourse analytic methods. An example of this work is in a book forthcoming from Cambridge University Press by Katherine S. Flowers (in press) titled Making English official: Writing and resisting local language policies. This book is a good example of how to investigate the development of and resistance to local language policies.

You clearly have a distinguished career and are still active in the field. How do you stay current and continue to make contributions to your field as a professor emeritus? What other contributions would you like to make through your scholarship? Can you discuss any upcoming projects or initiatives that you are particularly excited about?

Of course, I keep up with the literature by reading journal articles, books, and so on, and I review articles for publication in various scholarly journals. I also review book proposals for publishers. I am the co-author of a paper that will be presented at the 20th AILA World Congress in 2023 in Lyon, France with Kashif Raza, who is a doctoral student at the University of Calgary. The research with regard to refugees in Canada that I mentioned was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2021. That was after I retired at the end of 2017. Another book that came out during my emeritus professor status is Language politics and policies: Perspectives from Canada and the United States, which was published in 2019 by Cambridge University Press. It was based on papers that were presented at a conference in Banff, Alberta, which I organized in 2017.

I also have chapters in books that have been published since I officially retired. One is in a volume—which I would recommend to your readers—titled Language ethics, edited by Yael Peled and Daniel M. Weinstock, published by McGill-Queens University Press in 2020. These are examples of some of the things I have been occupied with as an emeritus professor. In terms of upcoming projects, I have already mentioned the book I am working on. I am frequently asked to do things, to contribute to volumes, to edit volumes, and so on, but at this point, I am focused on the project I described earlier in the interview. It is a project that began more than 20 years ago, for which I have collected a lot of data, read a lot, and photo-copied materials from archival repositories in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Missouri, and the Bancroft Library at UC, Berkeley. There have been publications along the way, including book chapters and an article The discursive construction of Americanism published in 2003 in Discourse and Society, that provides a good idea of the methods that I am using and some of my findings.

After more than three decades devoted to research on language ideologies and policies, what advice would you give current doctoral students or early-career scholars just starting out in the field?

All advice should be taken with many grains of salt. Ultimately, each person has to make their own decisions on what suits their needs and interests. So, I can reflect on basically what has served me and my career rather than to say that this is what other people should do. I would say . . . “Do not be afraid to question orthodoxy.” There is a tendency in graduate education to follow the leader, to be an acolyte to a famous person. I guess, in my case, I tend to be open-minded and skeptical about received knowledge. It does not mean I reject it, but I question it. Do not assume your views or understandings on matters of language are not subject to revision, even radical change. That is a good way to be, I think.

I would say . . . “Read widely and deeply.” I think there is a tendency for graduate students or young scholars to have a certain amount of knowledge about a particular area or topic which they get from a book or an article without really understanding it in a deep way. I think the answer is . . . It takes time to become knowledgeable and to feel that you have enough of a deep understanding of a topic or an area to be able to say something that you can reasonably defend. So, you have to have patience, and you have to read a lot, and you have to read widely.

And again, to reiterate, always be critical and open-minded at the same time, which is sometimes difficult to do. But if your goal is to help, if your goal is to change the minds of people who may disagree with you, you have to know both sides or multiple sides of any issue or argument. So, you cannot just read stuff that supports your point of view. You have to read things that oppose your point of view or that are critical. You have to imagine an audience who is going to read this. Imagine a reader who might say, “Well, that is ridiculous! The author obviously does not know this other perspective that is well-documented in the literature, etc.” So, you have got to be prepared for what critics might say about what you think and mean. There is no substitute for deep and thorough questioning of all sides of an issue.

Another thing that was important for me was to seek out colleagues who could provide constructive feedback on my work. That is invaluable. I think one of the most important things that helped me advance was to send things that I had written to friends and colleagues whom I respected and who gave me their frank comments and criticism. And you should seek out and hold close to you people who are willing to provide good, solid critiques of your work, not just people who are going to say, “This is wonderful and great!” So, I owe a lot and a big debt of gratitude to many people along the way, many of whom I mention in my acknowledgments in my books and articles. So, pay attention to their comments and criticisms that make your work better, and you will get greater confidence in what you have to say.

Finally, write about topics that interest you personally, not about what you think would be a good topic or something that is in fashion. Because you are going to do a better job if you care about what you are doing. Also, you are going to spend a lot of time and energy with the material, and you better not get bored with it. You have to keep your motivation up, you have to care, and you have to answer the question, “Does this research matter? Why?” There is research I read that may be pretty well done, but I often say, “So what? What difference does this make? What does it add to our knowledge? Why should anyone want to care about that?” So, the first thing is your research questions should be posed because you care about the questions that you are posing. And first and foremost, your research should satisfy your own curiosity and not satisfy the interests of others whose interests may not be particularly relevant to your own interests. So, do not be afraid to establish your own voice. Even if that can pose some risks, you have got to take risks if the research is going to be worthwhile and, ultimately—and hopefully—make a difference in the world.