ARTICLE SUMMARY OFLANGUAGE PLANNING IN HIGHER EDUCATION BY SABIHA MANSOOR

(CHAPTER 1)

The first chapter of the article deals with the concept of language planning and policies. In order to understand the concept, the author defines the terms, concept as well as typologies used in the language planning.

Language planning can be simplified as long term strategy that consists of decision on the teaching, laws, regulation, rules, belief, alteration, function and use of language by the society in order to solve communication problem or specific goals by considering the importance of the language as a whole.

Language planning is done at macro and micro level. At macro level, the government is involved where it deals with the complex issues and goals regarding the language whereas the institutions and schools engaged with the policy at the micro level where the implementation is done.

Language policy plays a different card from language policy because it is not a form of specific academic discipline. It concerns about on the decision to favour or discourage the use of a particular language or set of languages. This is done through the constitutional clause, parliamentary enactments and judicial interpretation.

Language planning is vital for countries’ national identities. This involved selecting a language for national unification, which required a standardized orthography, lexicon and syntax .Language policy and planning involves the government, as well as non-governmental sectors and educational sectors.

The overall model of language planning process suggests that status (selection of language and implementation) and corpus (linguistic decision) planning are the approaches that define planning process. Another factor that affects the efficiency of these two approaches in the impact of language planning is prestige planning. Besides, there are two situations in language planning which are the ‘top down’ and ‘bottom up’. The top down situation is when the planning starts from the authority (influential people / government) who make the planning without any consultation from the target group. In contrast, the ‘bottom up’ situation works in the opposite direction by taking consideration of the target group through sociolinguistic survey.

Language change in language planning can be achieved through education. Thus, language-in-education planning is vital as it identify the target population, determine the teacher supply, deciding the syllabus, dealing with method and materials, identification of available resources to support language programme and the assessment or evaluation to measure students’ success in accepting the language . In language planning effort, there are preplanning stage, data collection stage, report writing stage, policy formation stage, implementation stage and evaluation stage. Language-in-education planning occurs between the report writing and policy formation stage which make it useful to language planners to determine the successfulness of the language planning.

Prepared byABD FATTAH BIN JAMALUDDIN (P55402)