Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 June 2020
Tracing applied linguists’ interests in language policy and planning (LPP) as reflected in the pages of the Annual Review of Applied Linguistics since its founding in 1980, I focus on the emergence of, and current boom in, ethnographic LPP research. I draw on the ethnographic concept of ideological and implementational LPP spaces as scalar, layered policies and practices influencing each other, mutually reinforcing, wedging, and transforming ideology through implementation and vice versa. Doing so highlights how the perennial policy-practice gap is given nuance through exploration of the intertwining dynamics of top-down/bottom-up language planning activities and processes, monoglossic/heteroglossic language ideologies and practices, potential equality/actual inequality of languages, and critical/transformative research paradigms in LPP.
When we were both new assistant professors in Educational Linguistics at Penn in the mid-1980s, Tere Pica came back from a meeting of the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) reporting to me that language policy and planning (LPP) was a hot topic there. Little did we know then that I would find myself honored in the following decades to give two AAAL plenary talks on my ethnographic LPP work (Hornberger, 1998, 2009b). I mention these personally meaningful reflections as samples of AAAL's longtime support for and leadership in LPP scholarship – including the present retrospective and prospective look at ethnography of LPP in the Annual Review of Applied Linguistics and in our field. I am immensely grateful for all of it.