Language policing and the discourse of English normativity: Asian migrant youth in Australian schools

This article examines language policing as experienced by Asian migrant youth in Australian schools and the discourse of English normativity underlying such policing practices. Drawing on a Foucauldian perspective and using interview data, it investigates how these young people's English competence and language manners were policed by the school system, their teachers and their peers. Findings suggest that the participants' certain levels of English proficiency and ways of speaking were believed to deviate from the normativity of ‘qualified’ English, of English-only, or of ‘correct’ and ‘unaccented’ English, and they were expected to ‘fix’ their language issues to be accepted into the school community or seen as a normal school member. These three ideas of normativity informed the institutional and individual language policing actors to perform their technologies of domination, where they claimed authority to intervene in the students' language learning and practices. The enactment of language policing as encountered by the participants was enabled under conditions of a broader architecture of linguistic assimilationist governmentality in which linguistic minorities have long been marginalised.