A Study Of The U.S.Language Education Policy In Obama Era

The United States is ever regarded as an immigrant country,and immigrants from all over the world have brought abundant language and cultural resources.With education showing political and ideological trend,the diversity and complexity of language has made the American language education policy a competitive field for stakeholders concerned.In order for American nationals to establish and maintain the American language and culture identity with the WASP(White Anglo-Saxon Protestants)feature as the mainstream,and to carry forward the American spirits and values,the previous governments have adopted the monolingual education with English as the only teaching language since the founding of the nation.Although some states ever chose the bilingual education driven by multicultural ideology,the fundamental purpose was still to help ethnic minorities much quicker to assimilate and internalize the mainstream American culture and values.Under the critical discourse analysis framework of James Paul Gee,this study,from the perspective of neoliberalism,with the qualitative and quantitative research method combined,analyzes the American language policy in Obama Era based on the critical discourse analysis on Obama's speeches and tries to reveal the neoliberal values in Obama's education reform,showing the education reform in Obama Era still follows the market consumption logic which pursues the market-oriented education,school's enterpristation,and student's productization,and the superficial education equality obscured the language education inequality for language minorities.Therefore,the language education policy with WASP culture as the main teaching content under the guidance of neoliberalism cannot change the educational inequality in the United States,but aggravate the conflict between the ethnic groups,making the racial and ethnic division and discrimination more and more serious.This study consists of the following six parts: the first chapter is the introduction,introducing the background,significance of the study and research questions;the second chapter is the literature review,this part shows the innovative idea proposed in this study based on the review of relevant researches home and abroad;the third chapter is the theory adopted by the study,including language education policy theory,neoliberalism theory and critical discourse analysis theory;the fourth chapter is the detailed introduction of the history of American language education policy and the ideological drive of each language education policy;the fifth chapter is the main part of this study,analyzing Obama's related speeches under the framework of J.P.Gee' s critical discourse analysis theory,and through above analysis summarizes the politic,economic,cultural impacts of Obama' s language education policy;the last chapter points out the limitation of this study,and the prospects for the future study.