Bilingualism and the Multilingual Turn: Language-as-Resource

Abstract

In the mid-1980s, a young scholar named Richard Ruiz, a Stanford PhD, and assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, published an article in NABE, The Journal for the National Association for Bilingual Education. The article, a theoretical piece, was titled “Orientations in Language Planning.” It was the first to frame language planning in terms of language-as-problem, language-as-right, and language-as-resource in ways that for decades to follow, served as intellectual grist for bilingual educators, bilingual advocates, and language planners.