Corpus Assisted Critical Discourse Analysis of Pakistan’s Language Education Policy Documents: What are the Existing Language Ideologies?

Abstract

Language education policies contain discourses that have language ideologies embedded within them. This study explores the language ideologies in official language education policy documents of Pakistan from 2000 to 2020. Using Corpus Assisted Critical Discourse Analysis techniques, a 1.28 million-word-corpus was generated from 32 policy documents collected from official websites of UNESCO and the Ministry of Federal Education and Professional Training, Pakistan. The corpus analysis of frequency, collocation, and MI significance values were utilized to find out the typicality of topics and semantic preferences, while the concordance analysis revealed discourse prosody around the languages mentioned in the corpus. Moreover, seven documents were downsampled through dispersion plot. Discourse Historical Analysis was carried out on these documents based on discursive strategies of argumentation, predication, and perspectivization with reference to intertextuality and interdiscursivity. The findings show that English and to some extent Urdu occupy the ideological space related to education. The local languages were discussed in positive light, but they were marginalized in educational ideological space. The analysis also showed that the policies had underlying monoglossic ideology that can be seen having tolerance-oriented and expediency-oriented policy ideologies for local languages. This implies that the official policies of Pakistan marginalized the local languages in the discourse of language education. These findings invite policymakers to bring the local languages in the ideological space of education and introduce high level of ideological uniformity, consistency and goal setting for English, Urdu, and local/indigenous languages in the language-in-education policies of Pakistan that matches, captures and promotes the linguistic diversity in Pakistan.