Dual-Language Planning at Oyster Bilingual School: "It's Much More Than Language"

This article describes how Oyster Bilingual School's two-way Spanish-English language plan functions in its sociopolitical context. Language planning and implementation at Oyster Bilingual School constitute a dynamic, multilevel, multidirectional process in which language minority and language majority members of the Oyster community collaborate in their efforts to define bilingualism and cultural pluralism as resources to be developed. The Spanish-English language plan is one part of a larger identity plan that aims to promote social change by socializing children differently from the way children are socialized in mainstream U.S. educational discourse. In addition, the ethnographic/discourse analytic approach presented can be applied in investigating how other language plans function in their sociopolitical contexts.