Abstract This intend draws on Lako...

Abstract

This intend draws on Lakoff and Johnson's (1980) work with metaphor analysis to expose the rhetorical strategies applied according to supporters of the English for the Children organization during the 2000 Arizona Proposition 203 campaign. The data were amassed from three sources: (a) The Arizona Republic; (b) the East Valley Tribune; and (c) the 2000 Arizona Voter Information Pamphlet. earthed in Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough & Wodak 1997; Johnstone 2002; Schiffrin 2002) Santa Ana's (2002) metaphor analysis framework was applied to show up the metaphors used to denigrate bilingual education and those who support it, as well as the underlying ideology behind biased legislation like Proposition 203 Metaphors were analyzed in metes of the cognitive entailments produc by means of their source and target domains. In general, the overall debate between bilingual education and Proposition 203 was characterized as a WAR. The deductions show that extra emphasis was placed forward portraying bilingual education as a FAILURE and situating minority-language close examiners as VICTIMS. Conversely, English was enshrined in the media as the guide to the "American Dream." This work exemplifies the analytical power of critical discourse analysis by the agency of illustrating how language is utilized as a tool for political ends

Introduction

In November 2000 Arizona voter passed Proposition 203 English for the Children. This proposition asserted that bilingual education programs that taught scholars first in their primary language were not enabling languageminority bookish mans to learn English quickly or effectively, which impeded the couple their academic and social disentanglement As an alternative to bilingual education, Proposition 203 promot 1 year of English immersion instruction to prepare non-English-speaking observers for grade-level classes taught entirely in English. L from California millionaire and software designer Ron Unz proponent of Proposition 203 were able to accumulate enough political and social support to overshadow the opposition and convince the public of the initiative's (apparent) value, which was captured in the group's mantra, "English for the Children." To accomplish their goals, Unz and his followers arrangeed a media campaign that cast bilingual education and its supporters as short sighted and asserters of the status quo.

In spite of the myriad other social factors that affect next to the first language acquisition and education in general (see Crawford, 1999; Krashen, Tse & McQuillan, 1998; Hakuta, 1986) Proposition 203 was touted as an elixir for the language-minority students' ailments. Although it appears absurd to blame Arizona's record of cheap achievement on a program in which the majority of scholars were not even involved (MacSwan, 2000) advocates of Proposition 203 fortunately persuaded the voting public to view things the way these advocates wanted them to.

In reality, solitary 30% of students eligible for language services in Arizona were involved in genuine bilingual education programs (MacSwan, 2000) Regardless of the obvious cultural and social issues involved in of the like kind a proposition as Proposition 203 the majority of the public, including many Latinos/as, saw it as a stair toward a better education for non-English-speaking bookish mans Caught in a landslide of confusing experiment scores, patriotic tropes, and ethnocentric lies, Arizona's voting public vot to limit the educational services that language-minority pupils receive. The general goals of this investigation are to understand for what reason voters in Arizona might have been convinced to restrict the educational services proffered to the language-minority community.

This is a research of how rhetoric is formulated in public spaces to distort and/or legitimate the social adjoining matter of language(s). Inevitably, any discussion of language policy will lead to larger ideological issues. The rules used to promulgate Proposition 203 offspring from a more profound desire to shape society from one side the control of language. To illuminate these issues, a critical metaphor analysis approach was applied to examine the prevalent rhetoric in the public media during the month leading up to the November 2000 devoted A closer look at the metaphors used by the agency of advocates of Proposition 203 to frame the bilingual education debate illuminates the rhetorical strategies that were applied during this time period.

Theory

In greatest in number cases, media discourse is neared in an ostensibly benign format (versus outwardly vicious obscures and accusations). Some of the chiefly harmful images are not necessarily the mostly blatant. Cognitive science has taught us that we think and communicate in expressions of images created by metaphors (Lakoff & Johnson 1980) As described by way of Lakoff and Turner (1989), metaphors guide our subconscious thinking and reasoning:

Far from being only a matter of words, metaphor is a matter of thought-all kinds of thought: imagination about emotion, about society, about human character, about language, and about the nature of life and death. It is indispensable not and nothing else to our imagination but also to our reason, (p xi)