Publications

Publication details [#62579]

Martín-Bylund, Anna. 2017. Playing the game and speaking the right language: Language policy and materiality in a bilingual preschool activity. Multilingua 36 (4) : 477–500.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Language as a subject
Place, Publisher
De Gruyter

Annotation

Employing Actor-Network Theory (ANT), this paper examines the material-semiotic relationships between a language policy and a table game activity in a bilingual Spanish-Swedish preschool in Sweden, pointing out that the activity chiefly focuses on two distinct, multilayered, and sometimes opposing interests: to play the game and to speak the right language. The paper reports the interrelation between these interests and how bilingualism appears, transforms and becomes provisionally different in the relations of the actor-network. The MO opens novel roads for grasping different bilingualism constructions as snared with one another in material-semiotic relations, which may elucidate creative potentials in the relations of policy and practice rather than execution.