: [UPPER CASE]: {Cat: {dog ‘Abu is ..’: BB: ^: /lif/:
Teacher Pupil Pupils English Malay <English glosses> [COMMENTARY ON WHAT IS HAPPENING IN THE CLASSROOM] Overlapping speech Indicates reading from the textbook or other resource Chalkboard Indicates raised intonation from the teacher where teacher expects pupils to orally ‘fill in the blank’ Phonological representation (where necessary)
N.B. All names that appear in the text are pseudonyms.
Talk Around Text: Literacy Practices, Cultural Identity and Authority in a Corsican Bilingual Classroom Alexandra Jaffe Department of Linguistics, California State, Long Beach, USA This paper examines literacy practices in a Corsican bilingual classroom, focusing on the way that pedagogical practices attribute authentic and powerful identities to both the minority language and to learners. This involves meeting two sometimes conflicting goals: (1) fostering an intimate and authentic sense of cultural ownership of the Corsican language among children who are largely French-dominant; and (2) creating symbolic and functional parity between Corsican and French in the broader context of the Corsican language revitalisation agenda. The analysis of Corsican literacy instruction in a Corsican bilingual school shows that these dual goals are addressed through practices that involve the collective, collaborative production of texts (intimacy function) which are treated as authoritative in the class (power/parity function). These micro-level practices are replicated in the overall patterning of literacy work in the two languages of the classroom, where there is virtual parity in the amount of literacy work done in the two languages, but in which Corsican is the subject of less individual work and rigorous evaluation.
Introduction In bilingual classrooms, there is an implicit curriculum that is conveyed to students through the way that pedagogical and social functions are distributed across the two languages of the school. This analysis focuses on literacy practices in a Corsican bilingual classroom, drawing on both transcriptions of videotaped classroom interaction around texts and ethnographic observations. The implicit curriculum, in this instance, is intimately connected to key isssues of cultural/linguistic identity and power in a context of minority language revitalisation. As such, it is about the management of both ‘sameness’ and ‘difference’ with respect to dominant and minority cultures and languages. The approach taken in this analysis follows a tradition of ethnographic research on literacy and on language practices in multilingual educational settings. It assumes that both talk and literacy practices are key forms of social action through which ‘people negotiate, accept and sometimes challenge their roles and identities’ (Barton, 1998: 41). This linguistic ‘structuration’ of social life is centrally concerned with relations of power. These power relations can be ‘maintained, contested or modified’ as linguistic and cultural difference is used as a ‘resource for constructing, levelling, contesting and blurring boundaries’ (Heller & Martin-Jones, 2001: 4). Another central premise of the research analysed here is that literacy practices are not just practices that ‘belong’ to pre-existing ‘speech communities’. Rather, they are constitutive of community: of identities and relationships. This is in keeping with the idea that social identities and power relations are indexed and thus reproduced in language practices (see Ochs, 1992; Wortham, 2003), and with Gee’s (1991) notion of, discourses as socially constructed ways of structuring knowledge and relationships. Texts are embedded in social processes of production, distribution and consumption 42 Literacy Practices in a Corsican Bilingual Classroom
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(Fairclough, 1992). They attribute particular subject positions to their readers (Barton, 1998: 60) whom they construct as ‘particular kinds of linguistic and social beings’ (Kress, 1989: 39). In the analysis that follows, I look at the different statuses and relationships that are produced in classroom literacy practices; in particular, how linguistic identity, authenticity and authority are created and distributed across verbal and written genres, across different languages, and across different social actors. A word needs to be said about the particular significance of studying literacy practices in contexts of minority language shift and revitalisation. First of all, literacy in and of itself is a potent symbol of ‘languageness’ for languages whose claims to be discrete and authoritative codes are recent and, often, tenuous. Creating orthographies, writing grammars and dictionaries, and producing documents in high-status public domains almost always occupies a central place in minority language planning. Literacy activities in schools can thus be seen as sites of social production and reproduction of models of minority language authority. When teachers teach minority language literacy, they engage their pupils in particular kinds of individual and collective stances towards the very image of the minority language as an authoritative code. These enacted stances are constitutive of both the students’ individual and collective cultural identities, and of the identity and status of the minority language itself. Literacy practices are also indices of the complexities of linguistic and cultural identification for people whose lives and definitions of self are shaped by both minority and dominant cultures. This is because models of minority language literacy are invariably defined in reference to dominant language literate histories and practices. This ‘reference’ may take the form of accommodation, resistance, or, as the data below reveals, of a complex mixture of the two. The sketch of the ethnographic context of Corsican bilingual schooling below reveals that it embodies a central tension, which is how to promote Corsican simultaneously as a language of power and foster an intimate and ‘authentic’ relationship between the language and its Corsican learners. My thesis is that these dual goals emerge and are at least partially accomplished in classroom ‘talk around texts’ in which the texts have both an authoritative and a collaborative dimension.
Ethnographic Context Bilingual education on Corsica has been in place in Corsica only since 1996, although it has been high on language activists’ agendas since the mid-1970s. However, historically there have been two kinds of obstacles to the implementation of bilingual schooling: (1) French educational policy, and (2) popular attitudes and political positioning on the island itself. Until 1975, the only French provision for the teaching of minority languages on a three-hour per week basis – the Loi Deixonne – did not apply to Corsican. It took a major political push and a petition drive by Scola Corsa, a Corsican linguistic association, to get Corsican included under the provisions of this law. In the mid-1980s, the Ministry of Education authorised a small number of experimental sites for a bilingual programme labelled ‘le corse intégré‘ – that is, instruction that integrated Corsican into the teaching of subject matter rather than limiting it to a second language
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role. Although these sites were quite successful, government support for these methods was not extended beyond the three-year experimental period. From the late 1980s to the mid-1990s, the issue of bilingual education was subsumed under a wider public and political debate over whether or not Corsican should be made compulsory in the schools. Then, and now, public and political sentiment was very mixed. Opponents of compulsory Corsican education argued that the value of Corsican lay in the fact that it was not imposed (like French) but rather, chosen freely by the community. While there were many competing viewpoints in the public debate, the lack of overwhelming grass-roots support for compulsory Corsican education effectively blocked several language officialisation bills in the Corsican Regional Assembly. This had the effect of putting a chill on the development of Corsican language education in general and on bilingual education in particular. In 1994, under a relatively liberal government and Education Minister, new directives on minority language instruction included a provision for the establishment of bilingual schools where there was parental support. Members of the Corsican Academy in charge of Corsican language and culture (some of whom had been early practitioners or supporters of le corse intégré in the 1980s) seized the opportunity to set up a handful of bilingual sites. This was typically done in schools with highly motivated Corsican-speaking teachers who were already using a substantial amount of Corsican in their classes. Both these teachers and the Academy administrators held meetings with parents in order to create a favourable climate for parental support of the bilingual schools. The village school where I conducted a year of ethnographic fieldwork was one of the first three schools to begin bilingual instruction in 1996. Since then, the Corsican academy has expanded its bilingual sites to 17, with a goal of having one bilingual primary school feeding each of the island’s 29 middle schools (colleges). Teachers and administrators involved in Corsican bilingual education view it as a chance to reverse (or remedy) the language shift from Corsican to French that accelerated since World War Two. Whereas many children today have grandparents whose first language was Corsican, the first language of almost all Corsican children is now French. Among the 27 students in the village school I studied, only four had learned Corsican in the home before, or simultaneously with, French. So bilingual schools on Corsica are not about serving existing bilinguals but about creating bilinguals from largely monolingual French pupils. Since these schools are key institutional agents in the effort to revitalise Corsican among young speakers, their pedagogical agendas operate at a number of different levels. With respect to the students, they are an effort to provide a context of partial immersion in the minority language to compensate for the dominance of French in the society outside the school, and in order to facilitate the children’s Corsican language acquisition. In the school described here, at least 50% of the school week was devoted to Corsican-medium instruction. If policy had permitted, the teachers would have made the first three years of school (for children aged 3 to 5) total Corsican immersion. Moreover, the use of French and Corsican was evenly distributed across the school day, the school
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week and across all classroom subjects (with the exception of French grammar and spelling). In addition, there is a strong implicit curriculum that is devoted to promoting children’s appreciation of and identification with Corsican as a language of cultural heritage. There is a built-in tension in this dual focus, since the shortfalls of linguistic competence addressed by language-learning activities implicitly undermine children’s claims to authentic ownership of the minority language (Jaffe, 2001). Bilingual schools on Corsica are also important sites for the assertion of political and symbolic parity of Corsican and French. One of the audiences for this message is the children, who will be the first generation of Corsicans to go through a school system in which French is not the only language of authority. These schools are also seen by teachers and administrators as social laboratories that put this message of parity on display for parents and a wider Corsican public which does not unanimously agree on the value of Corsican–French bilingualism, or that Corsican should have an official role in public and institutional life. As we have seen, these schools are not grass-roots efforts; they are examples of top-down (or mid-level down) language planning. Corsican literacy is thus an important medium for achieving parity with French, and this political framework encourages teachers to strive for equivalence in the way they teach Corsican reading and writing skills. Teachers in the school I studied sought this equivalence in a number of ways: by introducing reading and writing in Corsican simultaneously with French, by having the children produce the same text genres (summaries, reports, letters, scripts) in the two languages, and by translating French pedagogical materials into Corsican in support of a variety of classroom activities. At the same time, institutional and parental pressure undervalues Corsican literacy and places enormous emphasis on French literacy. Coupled with the teachers’ cultural agenda – which is to promote the children’s identification with Corsican as a language of cultural heritage – these pressures translate into a desire for differentiation of Corsican and French literacy practices. This differentiation, as I will argue below, lies in the way that Corsican literacy, in contrast to French, is always mediated by oral and collective practice.
Corsican Literacy: A Story in the Classroom: The Tiger, the Brahman and the Jackal Early in spring of 2000, the teacher had read the 10 children in her class of 2nd to 5th graders (ages 7–11) an Indian folktale, written in French, entitled The Tiger, the Brahman and the Jackal. In this story, the Brahman takes pity on a tiger trapped in a cage, and, after making the tiger promise not to eat him, lets him free. The tiger prepares to go back on his promise, but the Brahman convinces him to get advice from five passers-by, all animals, who act as a sort of jury. In March, when I began taping this class, the teacher had begun prompting the students to retell the story in Corsican, using Corsican characters and a Corsican setting. The Brahman became a monk, the tiger a bear, and the jackal, a fox. The story was also earmarked as the source for the end-of-year play, which meant that it was ultimately to undergo a transformation of genre.
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During these sessions, the teacher engaged the children in a process of collective composition that characterised much of her literacy work in both Corsican and French. This took the form of an intensive oral preparation for writing in which she guided the children in the crafting of a sentence that, once ‘perfected’, was written on the board (either by her or by a student secretary). The day’s work on a particular text was either copied by all the students into their notebooks, or written down by the teacher or the student secretary. Finished texts (or important segments of texts) were either neatly handwritten or typed on a computer, photocopied and distributed back to the whole group. When the activity turned to writing dialogue for the end-of-year play, the created texts became scripts that were passed out to all the children and then memorised. The following analysis draws on transcripts from two consecutive days of group literacy sessions on this text to focus on the way that authority is ascribed to texts and persons in classroom interaction. These sessions took place about a week after the very first day of work on this story. Apparently, the teacher had been the only person to write down the text that had been created that day, and she had forgotten to bring it to class. Lesson 1: Performing a previously crafted text In the first five minutes of the lesson I videotaped (that took place before the interaction reported in the transcript below), the teacher announced that she was going to spend ‘just five minutes’ to recapitulate, with the children, where they had got to in their retelling of the story the last time they had worked on it over a week ago. ‘We must,’ she said, ‘revisit the story a bit because we have forgotten it’, and explained that she would ‘make them reflect a bit on what we wrote the last time.’ As I have mentioned, there was no written record of that work before either the teacher’s or the children’s eyes, so they were all in the same position of recalling it from memory. The teacher went on to elicit the Corsican title, the names of the Corsican characters, factual information about the bear’s cage, and the key elements of the plot so far: that the bear was put in a cage by shepherds because he had been eating their sheep and goats. Up to this point, then, the previous text was evoked through oral summary. It was clear that this summarising required fidelity to both the original story plot and to the beginning of the adaptation begun the week before. But if we look at Excerpt I, we see that the teacher takes issue not with basic plot elements, but with nuances of choice between near synonyms. Excerpt I, therefore, represents a shift in evaluative criteria from a general fidelity to story plot and character to something far more specific. That is, the teacher’s evaluative moves in this sequence define legitimate classroom talk not just as knowing the previously crafted text, but as reciting it verbatim.
Excerpt I: Shift to ‘doing the text’ verbatim 1 Vanina: 2 Teacher: 3 Vanina:
Innò … ‘tempi fà,’ No….’long ago,’ Allora, ti ricordi, ‘tempi fà…’ So, you remember, ‘long ago…’ Tempi fà, cuandu l’animali sapianu parlà, Long ago, when the animals knew how to speak,
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4 Teacher:
Ah, l’avianu fattu cusì, eh. Ah, they had done it like that, eh. 5 Vanina: Iè. Yes. 6 Others: No No. 7 Teacher: Tempi fà, in u tempu induve [l’animali sapianu parlà, Long ago, when the [animals knew how to speak, 8 Chorus: [l’animali sapianu parlà, [animals knew how to speak 9 Vanina: U frate, chì passava The monk, who was passing 10 Teacher: Chì, nò. Who, no 11 Lucie: viaghjava was travelling 12 Teacher: Andava, nè? Was going, right? 13 Vanina: [chì andava d’un paese à [Who was going from one village to 14 Lucie: [chì andava d’un paese à [Who was going from one village to 15 Ghjuvan: Di paese in paese From village to village 16 Vanina: D’un paese à l’altru From one village to the other 17 Teacher: (to Ghjuvan) No, no no. No no no. 18 Vanina: D’un paese à l’altru From one village to the other 19 Teacher: Chì andava, era una pruposta, ma emu fattu una curreziò dopu, eh. ‘Chi andava d’un Who went, it was a proposal, but we corrected it after, eh? ‘Who was going from one 20 paese à l’altru.’ village to the other.’ The teacher’s uptake of Vanina’s formulaic opening ‘Tempi fà’ [‘Long ago’] on line 2 did a number of things. First, the ‘you remember’, and the repetition of ‘long ago’, authenticated Vanina’s words as words from a text. The pause after the repeated ‘long ago’ invited the child to continue to recite, verbatim, the rest of the sentence from the previously written text. Vanina took up this invitation on the following line (3) to the teacher’s approval but to some student dissent (line 6). On line 7, the teacher repeated, verbatim, the whole recited sentence, firmly enshrining it as correct. The authentication value of this move can be seen by the fact that the other children chimed in, as a chorus, on the last part of the sentence (line 8). From this point on, classroom talk in this sequence was effectively defined as reciting the written text. This definition of talk as oral
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performance of a remembered text excluded a number of other possibilities, including paraphrasing and rephrasing of previously made choices. So, for example, we find a debate over near synonyms on lines 9 to 11, where Vanina used the verb ‘passava’ [was passing], Lucie proposed ‘viaghjava’ [was travelling] and both were rejected by the teacher on the grounds that they had originally used ‘andava’ [was going ] (line 12). Vanina and Lucie conceded, repeating the teacher’s choice in chorus on lines 13 and 14. A similar discussion can be seen on the following lines, where Ghjuvan said that the monk went ‘di paese in paese’ [from village to village] (line 15). He was corrected by Vanina, who said it was ‘d’un paese à l’altru’ [from one village to another] (line 16), which was ratified by the teacher in lines 19–20 where she made the agenda – a verbatim account of the text – explicit. The teacher’s comment in lines 19–20, ‘era una pruposta, ma emu fattu una curreziò dopu’ [that was a proposal, but we changed it afterwards] – also reveals something else: that one of the sources of authority of the prior text was the fact that it was a product of collective negotiation and revision. The teacher presented the text almost as if it were a contract, that once drafted, could not subsequently be challenged without undermining the authority of the group. This was also made explicit in the exchange in Excerpt II, in which Vanina attempted to embellish the bear’s lines in a dialogue with the monk, and the teacher dismissed her suggestion because it attempted to change a text which was already ‘fixed’ through previous collective work:
Excerpt II: Vanina’s embellishment 1 Vanina:
E, chì sti pastori, ùn hanu micca messu acqua indè a mo gabbia.’ ‘And as these shepherds didn’t put any water in my cage,’ 2 Teacher: L’avemu scrittu què? Did we write that? 3 Ghjuvan: No. No. (children’s laughter) 4 Teacher: L’ai aghjustu ch’avà, que, eh, m’arricordu eh. Perchè mi pare chì ùn emu micca ammintuvatu You just added that right now, he. I remember eh? Because it seems to me that we didn’t mention 5 l’astru ghjornu, ùn emu manc’appena detta. Iè, allora, chì risponde u frate tandu? it the other day, we didn’t even say it at all. Yes, so what did the monk reply at then? The collaborative nature of the previous text was also repeatedly invoked throughout this sequence by the systematic use of the first person plural verbs and pronouns to describe textual choices. The text was one that ‘we’ wrote; the details were those that ‘we’ remembered, the Corsican characters were ones that ‘we’ selected. The teacher even included me in this ‘we’ with the rhetorical question on line 3 in Excerpt III:
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Excerpt III: Ethnographer as audience 1 Teacher 2 Child: 3 Teacher:
4 Child: 5 Teacher:
6
a volpe, eh? A volpe. Ci simu? the fox, eh? The fox. Is everyone following? Iè Yes. Eh, allora, emu sceltu dinò, Alexandra, ti n’arricordi? Emu sceltu dinò euh, And so we also chose, Alexandra, do you remember, we also chose SHHHH SHHHH i cinqui persunaggi chì, eh, hanu à dà u so parè nantu à u fattu chì, in fattu, eh, euhhh, u The five characters that, uh, are to give their opinion on the fact, that in fact, eh, um, our nostru orsu qui nantu à u raccontu, era in una gabbia o no? bear here in the story, was he in a cage or no?
On two other occasions, the teacher actually excluded herself from her account of textual production, attributing it to the children alone. One of these concerned the choice of a donkey over a cow as a character in the story. Following a brief debate among the children about which was chosen, she tells them it was the donkey. ‘I don’t know why’, she said, ‘you liked, you preferred the donkey’ (my emphasis). Thus we can argue that both the transposition of the original story into local context and the teacher’s pronoun use are forms of what Hanks calls ‘indexical grounding’ that both create a ‘here and now’ at the moment of speech – the classroom talk – and project it back historically to the moment of production (see Hanks, 1987: 682). In this case, the indexical grounding emphasises children as authors and children as members of two communities: (1) the classroom and (2) the wider Corsican culture. However, the authority of the collectively elaborated text was not accepted without challenge by all the students, nor was it the only kind of authority invoked in this sequence. We can see this in one exchange in particular between the teacher and the very vocal Vanina, who tried on several occasions to exercise retroactive stylistic authority over the text. In one case, she corrected Ghjuvan’s use of the adjective ‘tamantu’ [huge] to describe the bear, telling him: ‘emu dettu, tremendu [we said ‘tremendous’]. The teacher corrected her, saying that it was in fact ‘huge’. This exchange was exactly like the one we saw in Excerpt II concerning the verb of motion and the use of ‘from one village to another’. In all of these cases, the issue is accuracy, and the source of authority is the prior text. However, in Excerpt IV, the teacher’s reaction (lines 11–12) to Vanina telling Francè that the bear did not want to ‘à cercà appena d’acqua’ [go and look for a little water] but wanted to ‘andà à beie’ [go and drink] is of a different nature. It was not framed as an issue of accuracy, since the teacher did not identify either one of the sentences as ‘correct’. In fact, her sarcasm actually undermined the principles of accuracy that she used before in the adjudication of the verbatim account. What seemed to be at issue was Vanina’s right to adjudicate and perhaps, the frequency with which she assumed this prerogative. Her frequent, dominant voice in the class-
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room, while welcome as a creative force, also challenged the ideal of democratic, cooperative work among peers and perhaps, the teacher’s authority.
Excerpt IV: Sarcasm and Vanina’s authority 1 Teacher:
Micca sempre Vanina per piacè. Iè. Not always Vanina please. Yes. 2 Francè: O Frate, apri, apre a ga…apremi a O Monk, you open, open the ca…open for me the 3 Vanina: Apri Open 4 Francè: a gabbia per anda à cerca the cage to go and look 5 Vanina: = à cerca =and look 6 Francè: =à cercà appena d’acqua =and look for a little water. 7 Teacher: Ghjera dinù per cercà appena acqua? So it was also to look for some water? 8 Vanina: Non...per andà à beie. No…to go and drink. 9 Teacher: Anche eh, [o no… Also, eh, [oh no… 10 Vanina: [Oh….là là! [Oh…la la! 11 Teacher: O no, ùn hè micca per andà à cercà l’acqua, ghje per andà à beie Oh no, it was not to look for some water, it was to go and drink 12 è è….tamanta sfarenze! and and …what a big difference! This exchange raises questions about the distribution of power in the practice of collaborative textual production, which I explore in the following section. Lesson 2: Collaborative writing in action Here I turn to the next class period I taped, in which we see the collaborative writing process in action. As in the previous session, the teacher began the class by recalling what had been written to date. This time, however, she did so by reading aloud from the text she had in her hands. The teacher’s delivery as she read the dialogue was animated and dramatic. It was the kind of crafted performance that could be done on a finished text, a known text. And in this class, it was a style of reading that I never heard during the collaborative writing process. In this respect, we can view the performance of the text as constitutive of the text’s status as finished and authoritative. The teacher’s reading also anticipated the text’s intended use as the basis for a play: with it, the teacher began a practice of modelling of theatrical delivery that became more pronounced as the end of the year, and the school play, drew closer. Additionally, specific aspects of her delivery – for example, the use of pauses before the bits of dialogue – called to mind a style associated with the reading of well-known fables and
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fairytales. In this respect, it framed the text as being as well-known, and as shared as other stories in this genre. This translated, at least for one child, Ghjuvan, into an invitation to chime in with the teacher. His joining in on the end of her sentences three times in quick succession (lines 16–23) calls forth laughter and an explicit remark from the teacher at the end of Excerpt V, beginning on line 26.
Excerpt V: The teacher’s reading: Ghjuvan chimes in 1 Teacher: 2 3 4
5 6 7 Lucie:
L’orsu strida è dice, The bear yelled out, saying, ‘O Frà, fammi sorte di sta gabbia per piacè!’ ‘O Monk, get me out of this cage please!’ ‘O orsu, s’o ti cappiu, mi manghi!’ ‘O Bear, if I let you out, you will eat me!’ ‘A poi crede quessa? Mancu a pensalla, eh? Ch’o possi fà una cosa simula. Lasciami esce ‘You can believe that? Don’t even think it, eh? That I could do such a thing. Let me out solu un minutu, chì mi morgu di sete.’ just a minute, as I’m dying of thirst’ U frate, apri a porte di a gabbia, The monk opened the door of the cage.
Apre, ghjè apri o apre? Open. Is it ‘open’ or ‘opened’? 8 Teacher: Apri. mm. Opened, mm. 9 Lucie: Apri. Opened. 10 Teacher: Vale a di chì emu sceltu u tempu, eh? U passatu, apri, That is to say we chose the tense, eh? The past, opened. 11 Vanina: Apri. Opened. 12 Teacher: Apre u prisente, eh? Open is the present, eh? 13 Lucie: Apri Opened. 14 Teacher: Una volta libaru, l’orsu si lampò nantu à collu di u frate per manghjassilu sanu sanu. U Once he was free, the bear threw himself on the monk’s neck to eat him all up. The 15 frate, impauritu, si misse à mughjà. ‘O quell’orsu! ai .fattu una prumessa, d’un monk, terrified, started to cry out: ‘O Bear! You made a promise, not to 16 manghjami micca. Ciò chè tu faci un hè ne ghjustu ne [onestu.’ eat me. What you are doing is neither just nor [honest’ 17 Ghjuvan: [onestu.’ [honest.’
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18 Teacher:
‘Iè chì ghjè ghjustu è onestu, è ancu ch’ellu ùn n’hè, o ancu s’ellu ùn era, t’aghju …à Yes it is too just and honest and even if it weren’t, or even if isn’t or wasn’t, I am going to 19 [manghja [eat you 20 Ghjuvan: [manghjà [eat you 21 Teacher: listessu. U frate prigò tantu è tantu l’orsu, chì ellu, fù d’accunsente per dumandà u so pare anyway. The monk begged and begged so much that the bear finally agreed to ask the opinion 22 à i cinqui primi persone, ch’elli avianu da [scuntrà. of the first five people that they would [meet. 23 Ghjuvan: [ scuntrà. [meet. 24 Teacher: Va bè. Ava emu eh? Aghju un papagliatu in quantu à me, chì ripete à fine cù me, ai intesu? Good. We have, eh? I think I have a parrot repeating the end with me, did you hear? 25 Child: Qu’est ce qu’il a dit? What did he say? 26 Teacher: Il termine en même temps que moi. He’s finishing at the same time as I am. Following the teacher’s reading, the session revolved around the formulation of the response of the Arbuste (a strawberry bush that is the first character encountered by the bear and the monk) to the monk’s question: ‘Do you think it’s just and honest that he is going to eat me after I let him out of his cage?’ In Excerpt VI, the teacher established the parameters of the Arbuste’s response, by asking the children questions that evoked the basic lines of the already established plot, with a particular focus on the Arbuste’s alignment with the bear, its attitude toward the monk, and the human behaviours that motivated this attitude.
Excerpt VI: Establishing focus: Motives and relationships 1 Teacher: 2 Child: 3 Teacher: 4 Children: 5 Teacher: 6 Child:
Allora, l’albitru sapete chì hà da esse, ha da esse d’accunsentu cù So, the bush, you know that it is going to be in agreement with Shht Shhh u frate, the monk, Non, non No, no. O hà à dà ragiò à u:: um, Or will it agree with the u::um A The
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7 Vanina:
A l’orsu the bear 8 Teacher: A l’orsu. With the bear. 9 Ghjuvan: Hà à dà ragiò à l’orsu It’s going to agree with the bear. 10 Teacher: Hà à dà ragiò à l’orsu. Perchè? It’s going to agree with the bear. Why? 11 Ghjuvan: Euh, ghjè perchè, euh, l’omu Um, it’s because, um, man 12 Vanina: Pierrette, on avait eh la Pierrette (the teacher) we had, um the 13 Teacher: Lascialu, poi lascialu dì qualcosa? Let him, can you let him say something? 14 Ghjuvan: (…) (…) 15 Teacher: Vale à dì chì ellu, eh, That is to say that man, um 16 Ghjuvan: Perchè l’omu mette focu à Because man starts fires at 17 Teacher: Ah, l’omu li mette focu Oh, man lights him on fire 18 Vanina: Non No 19 Teacher: Vale à dì, hà da pruvà à spiegà perchè ellu hà di piglià a fratesa di l’orsu. So in other words, he has to explain why he is taking the side of the bear. 20 Child: l’orsu. The bear 21 Teacher: Un hà micca à piglià a fratesa di u frate He isn’t going to take the monk’s side. The introductory work in this excerpt oriented the rest of the discussion to the exact nature of the bush’s grievances against mankind. This discussion – and its outcome (a line of dialogue for the Arbuste) – is a combination of teacher directiveness and the collective negotiation invoked by the teacher in the previous lesson. This negotiation takes place both between students and between the teacher and the students. We can see student debate in Excerpt VII, where (starting on line 7) Ghjuvan and then Lucie proposed the adjective ‘gattivu’ [bad] to describe humans, Vanina countered twice with ‘cruellu’ [cruel] and the teacher settled the matter by saying that they could use ‘bad’ once – implying that ‘cruel’ was to be used elsewhere in the text (as in fact it was).
Excerpt VII: Student debate 1 Teacher:
A statine, quandu vene l’estate, tandu si scurda di tuttu l’omu è mi zinga
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2 Children: 3 Teacher: 4 Vanina: 5 Teacher: 6
7 Ghjuvan: 8 Teacher: 9 Lucie: 10 Vanina: 11 Lucie: 12 Teacher:
In summer, when summertime comes, then man forgets everything and sets me on =focu =fire E mi zinga focu. E tandu, è mi zing, hà dà dì, and sets me on fire. And then, and they set me, he’s going to say, (…) razza assai (…) (….) a very (….) race/species. Non, ùn so micca ubbliga, no emu micca, ùn va micca, ‘l’omi,’ una frasa, emu à ripiglià stu, stu puntu quì . No, I’m not obliged, no, we didn’t, that isn’t right, ‘men,’ a sentence, we are going to revisit this, this particular point. L’omu hè gattiv, eh non. He’s a bad species? oh, no. Hè una razza gattiva? He’s a bad race? Non, ‘l’omu hè gattivu assai.’ No, ‘man is very bad.’ L’omu hè cruellu. Man is cruel. L’omu hè gattivu assai. Man is very bad. Pudemu mette una volta ‘hè gattivu assai,’ dopu hà dà dì dunque, hà da prupone? We can put one time, ‘he is very bad,’ then, what will it say, what will it propose?
In Excerpt VIII, we also see teacher–student debate. The teacher had proposed a stretch of authoritative oral text – the penultimate step before writing it on the board – based on some of the issues raised just a few minutes before by Vanina. Vanina however, objected to the attribution of agency implied by the teacher’s choice. That is, she wanted the blame for the animals’ behavior to be attributed more explicitly to their human owners, the shepherds. On lines 6–7 the teacher conceded that this was an important distinction, and began to revise the oral presentation in preparation for a new proposal for writing. The teacher also elaborated and refined the point, positioning the bush’s grievance as being against mankind in general rather than about shepherds in particular, a point she reiterated later in the lesson, and which she incorporated into the final line of dialogue assigned to the bush.
Excerpt VIII: Concession and elaboration 1 Teacher:
2
Pudemu piglià que: ‘D’inguernu, i pastori, euh, ….passate di a pecure è e capre, OK. So. We can take this: ‘In winter, the shepherds, euh (…) the passage of the sheep and manghjanu i, i baghi rossi. goats, eat the, the red berries.’
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3 Vanina:
Non, mais eux! No, but them! 4 Teacher: A i pastori, Oh, the shepherds. 5 Vanina: Oui. Yes. 6 Teacher: Prufittanu. Eccu. Ah, d’accordu eh. Chi l’omi, vale a dì cusì eh, ne vole à l’omu di modu Take advantage. That’s it. Oh, right, eh. That men, that is to say that it has it out for 7 generale eh? Allora, perchè chì d’inguernu, eh, di dicembre mankind in a general way, eh? So it’s because in winter, in December 8 Ghjuvan: i pastori The shepherds 9 Teacher: l’omi, micca solu i pastori, Men, not just shepherds, 10 Francè: L’omi Men 11 Teacher: L’omi, eh, Men, eh, 12 Ghjuvan: eh eh 13 Teacher: Si campanu cù Profit from my 14 Child: I mo frutti. My fruits 15 Teacher: I mo frutti, i mo baghi rossi, eh? Ne facenu My fruits, my red berries, eh? From them, they make 16 Child: A cunfittura Jam 17 Teacher: Eccu, cunfittura..E dinò… Right, jam and also… If we look at this concession and elaboration with respect to some other instances where the teacher exercised authority, I would argue that they are all in keeping with the teacher’s pedagogical agenda, and criteria of effective narrative and dialogue established throughout this learning event. For example, she twice insisted that the children refer to the fruits of the bush by the phrase ‘baghi rossi’ [red berries] rather than generically as ‘fruits’. In another discussion, of how men exploit these very fruits to make a variety of products, she disqualified one child’s suggestion of ‘honey’ as a product on the grounds that honey was never made exclusively from this particular plant. These two kinds of corrections implicitly set up the skilled representation of precise distinctions of different ‘characters’ and their perspectives as a key criterion of good narrative. The issue of agency raised by Vanina in the last excerpt is therefore pertinent, since it more precisely reflects the opposition between the animal (and in this case, plant) world and humankind that is established by the original story. In fact, the teacher made this principle – consistency with the original structure of the Indian folk-
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tale – explicit, telling the students that ‘We are going to put, not “men” but “man” which is what the other characters in the story said, eh? “Man” means man in general eh?’ The final text produced from this session also incorporated another grievance on the part of the bush – that people set it on fire – proposed by Ghjuvan in excerpt VI and momentarily overshadowed by Vanina’s passionate interjection. As in the case of her selection of ‘bad’ over ‘cruel’, this is an example of the teacher ensuring that children other than the most vocal contributed to the final product. To summarise, in the process of textual production, the teacher played an authoritative role, both in the way that she defined a good narrative, and in the way she defined appropriate participation as shared, relatively equally distributed and democratic. This definition of participation mitigated her authoritative role, and made room for joint authorship that was the product of negotiation between the teacher and the students and between students and their peers.
Comparison and Contrast with French Literacy Work There are many similarities in the ways in which the children in this class did literacy work in Corsican and French. In both languages, they did a great deal of collective oral preparation for writing. In the excerpts above, we have seen the teacher’s attention to lexical precision, and to form and delivery in children’s spoken language. The same attention was applied to student writing in Corsican, with spelling corrections made on the spot (as the student secretary wrote on the board) as well as when the texts were recopied by hand or at the typewriter. The way these corrections were made took for granted both a high level of competence in reading (knowledge of the ‘rules’ of Corsican spelling) and a high level of oral competence. They were indistinguishable, in this respect, from the way that the teacher corrected children when they misspelled French words. Yet there were also subtle differences in the status of French vs. Corsican literacy work. First of all, almost all Corsican texts used in the class were presented to the children orally. During the year 2000, only one professionally printed Corsican language book was handed out to the children, and this was only after it was first read aloud. That is, the children never encountered a Corsican text first as a written product, and they did almost no silent or individual reading of such texts. In contrast, they were regularly assigned French language books. These were read at home, and they had to write book reports on them in French. French texts and worksheets were also given out in class for individual, rather than collective work. Moreover, there was a difference in the way that individual competence was judged in French as compared to Corsican. Despite the fact that the teacher did a great deal of correcting of Corsican oral and written production at all stages of the process, this correction was almost always done on children who volunteered to speak during group work. Student secretaries (who sometimes wrote the texts-in-elaboration on the board and thus put their spelling skills in Corsican on display) were also self-selected. Children with less competence or confidence in Corsican were only forced to repeat a Corsican sentence that had either just been spoken, or which had been worked and reworked many times. In the case of writing, they could passively copy what had been written on the board. They were never forced to volunteer. It is true that the norm of
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self-selection in classroom interaction in this class also allowed children to avoid heavy participation in French. However, in French, they were regularly forced to demonstrate their individual knowledge. Moreover, at the end of the year, they had to pass written tests in French, but were assigned a grade in Corsican based on the teacher’s global evaluation of their ability. Thus it would be fair to say that Corsican literacy work was a form of ‘safetalk’ that backgrounded problems of competence in the language of lesser proficiency (Arthur, 2001; Hornberger & Chick, 2001). Despite a shared attention to form in French and Corsican, there were also differences in the way that spelling and grammar were treated in one language vs. the other. Points of Corsican spelling and grammar were taught formally and explicitly, much the way French spelling and grammar were presented. Yet, this formalisation was done less frequently in Corsican than in French, and it was usually closely tied to work being done on a particular text. Overall, Corsican grammar had a much less visible role than French grammar as an autonomous subject. (This can be seen by looking in the children’s class notebooks, where the volume of French grammar worksheets, exercises and tables was three times greater than similar exercises in Corsican.)
Conclusions I would like to conclude by reflecting on some of the implications of these practices for how Corsican and French are positioned with respect to each other, as well as how the children’s relationship to these two languages is constructed. As I have shown, language practices surrounding the production and recitation of Corsican texts treat children as competent writers/authors and speakers who are able to propose, debate and sometimes judge appropriate or good literary usage in Corsican. It is in fact the case that active participation in both of these activity structures demands a fairly high level of Corsican competence: it is out of the reach of novice language learners or semi-speakers. In fact, even the brief excerpts from the transcripts presented here show that discussion was dominated by a handful of children and many children did not talk at all during this class period. This is not an intended outcome of these teaching practices. Rather, it is a consequence of pedagogical choices made in the context of the tension I mentioned in the introduction between teaching basic language skills and symbolically validating the children’s linguistic and cultural authenticity. The latter takes place, in this classroom, somewhat at the expense of the former, and relies heavily on the presence of a few older, more fully bilingual children like Vanina. That is, the teacher’s curriculum revolves around meeting a variety of academic goals in Corsican, rather than teaching Corsican as a second language. This approach to the curriculum has symbolic and political importance, since it creates functional parity between Corsican and French. At the same time, I would also argue that the literacy practices I have described also help to mitigate the very same tension between language learning and linguistic identification/ authenticity. This is indirectly accomplished by (and helps to explain) the attribution of authority to the collectively produced texts which is so conspicuous in the first session described above. That is, I think
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that in the secondary activity of recalling the original text or reading completed texts out loud, some symbolic ownership and competence is transferred to the children who aren’t strong participants in the composition process. The collective, oral summarising and recitation of the jointly created text illustrated in both class periods puts teacher-approved language into the mouth of even the weakest student as authentically ‘theirs’. I think that this is the significance of the choral chiming in that we see in Excerpt I, and with Ghjuvan in Excerpt V. The original text can be seen as a ‘primary genre’ (Bakhtin, 1986) that, when reproduced in a secondary genre (here, the oral performance of a text) carries the authority and authenticity of the original context in much the same way as reported speech (see Hanks, 1987). The ‘safetexts’ of the Corsican classroom are thus more productive than the safetalk practices in dominant languages described by Arthur (2001), Bunyi (2001) and Hornberger and Chick (2001) in that they provide rather than block access to valued ways of speaking in minority languages that are in turn protected from the constraints of the dominant economic and cultural markets. These texts are vehicles for the transmission of ideologically and politically grounded ideas about relationships between learners and language and in this case, safeguard learners’ claims on cultural ownership of the minority language. Nor are the texts merely ‘safe’. They are also authoritative, and my claim is that the authoritativeness of the prior text also stands in for the problems of competence in a context of language shift and revitalisation. From this perspective, the teacher’s repeated use of the first person plural not only emphasises collaborative practice in the class, but also functions to culturally and linguistically authenticate the children’s ownership of the minority language. Both the collaboratively produced text, and the teacher’s authoritative interventions in the talk around it can be considered a form of what O’Connor and Michaels (1993) call ‘revoicing’: a form of teacher scaffolding in which the teacher expands and recontextualises children’s utterances in a way that aligns the children’s contributions with higher level instructional goals that the children may not be able to meet on their own. O’Connor and Michaels make the point that even though the teacher’s voice and framework for understanding is the dominant one, these practices interactionally ascribe some agency – and therefore legitimacy – to the children in the wider discourse of learning. In summary, not only are texts ‘mediated’ by bilingual practices in this school (Heller & Martin-Jones, 2001: 26; Martin, 1999), but bilingual practices and identities are mediated by texts and the talk around them. Creating authoritative texts in Corsican – and creating an authoritative status for Corsican orthography – also play a significant role in the wider sociolinguistic arena, creating functional and therefore symbolic parity of the two languages in the curriculum. This is particularly important in the context of French linguistic culture, a culture which is largely accepted at face value on Corsica, and in which the notion of a single correct standard has enormous authority, both inside and outside the school system. It is also important because the application of this very same notion of a single correct standard for Corsican remains highly contested in both academic and public circles on the island. In this school, the pursuit of parity also includes working on the same written genres in both languages, with attention to the same formal and stylistic features.
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In the case of this particular story, the teacher used it to introduce the simple past in Corsican (see discussion of the word ‘apri’ or ‘opened’ in lines 7–14 of Excerpt V), a narrative tense that she had explored quite extensively in French. The choice of this tense is significant with respect to parity because it is almost exclusively used in writing, and anything more than a passing familiarity with this tense in either language is not acquired in the home or on the streets: it is only acquired in the academic context. To teach it is to position Corsican as a language with the same range of literary genres as French. It is also to validate the kind of language learning and competencies that children in bilingual schools are in the process of acquiring, and which have not typically been highly valued in popular discourse, which has tended to define ‘authentic’ forms of Corsican language competence purely in terms of the oral traditions mastered by previous generations of speakers. At the same time, I think that the intensive oral preparation for, and oral performance of Corsican texts also acknowledges this heavy cultural emphasis on the oral tradition. And finally, I would like to return to the collaborative dimension of textual production, and how it accomplishes the implicit curriculum of linguistic identification through differentiation from French. That is, while the teacher also uses collaborative writing extensively in French, the children also read, write and get evaluated individually and privately in that language. In contrast, Corsican texts are almost never created, presented or read individually. In fact, most of the Corsican textual material used in class is also created in class, and so in this sense, Corsican literacy is framed and experienced as an intimate, collective possession. This intimacy does not, as we have seen in student responses to my interview questions, always compensate for the dominance of French in many of the children’s homes, in their reading of the curriculum, and in the wider society. But it does create, within the classroom, the potential for students to acquire an identification with Corsican as a privileged language of identity and heritage at the same time as they come to view it as a legitimate, authoritative code. Correspondence Any correspondence should be directed to Dr Alexandra Jaffe, Department of Linguistics, California State University, Long Beach, 1250 Bellflower Boulevard, Long Beach, CA 90713, USA ([email protected]). Notes 1. This research was supported by the National Science Foundation and the Spencer Foundation. 2. Transcription conventions: (a) latching indicated by = (b) simultaneous speech by left brackets: [ [ (c) Corsican is in regular typeface and French is in boldface. (d) unintelligible speech (…) (e) lengthening indicated by double colons :: (f) … = pause/unfinished sentence or word 3. In the case of the adaptation of this story, the teacher had set a goal of turning it into the school play over a period of three months. To carry the lesson forward at this pace, she could not and did not call on the younger and weaker Corsican speakers in the class during the most intensive phases of composition.
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References Arthur, J. (2001) Codeswitching and collusion: Classroom interaction in Botswana primary schools. In M. Heller and M. Martin-Jones (eds) Voices of Authority: Education and Linguistic Difference (pp. 57–76). Westport, CT: Ablex Publishers. Bakhtin, M.M. (1986) The problem of speech genres. In V. McGee, trans. M. Holquist and C. Emerson (eds) Speech Genres and Other Essays (pp. 60–102). Austin: University of Texas Press. Barton, D. (1998) Literacy. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers. Bunyi, G. (2001) Language and educational inequity in primary classrooms in Kenya. In M. Heller and M. Martin-Jones (eds) Voices of Authority: Education and Linguistic Difference (pp. 77–100). Westport, CT: Ablex Publishers. Fairclough, N. (1992) Discourse and Social Change. London: Polity Press. Gee, J.(1991) Social Linguistics and Literacies. London: Falmer Press. Hanks, W. (1987) Discourse Genres in a Theory of Practice. American Ethnologist 14 (4), 668–692. Heller, M. and Martin-Jones, M. (2001) Introduction: Symbolic domination, education and linguistic difference. In M. Heller and M. Martin-Jones (eds) Voices of Authority: Education and Linguistic Difference (pp. 1–28). Westport, CT: Ablex Publishers. Hornberger, N. and Chick, J.K. (2001) Co-constructing school safetime: Safetalk practices in Peruvian and South African classrooms. In M. Heller and M. Martin-Jones (eds) Voices of Authority: Education and Linguistic Difference (pp. 31–56). Westport, CT: Ablex Publishers. Jaffe, A. (2001) Authority and authenticity: Corsican discourse on bilingual education. In M. Heller and M. Martin-Jones (eds) Voices of Authority: Education and Linguistic Difference (pp. 269–296). Westport, CT: Ablex Publishers. Kress, G. (1989) Linguistic Processes in Sociocultural Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Martin, P. (1999) Bilingual unpacking of monolingual texts in two primary classrooms in Brunei Darussalam. Language and Education 3 (1), 38–58. Ochs, E. (1992) Indexing gender. In A. Duranti and C. Goodwin (eds) Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon (pp. 335–358). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. O’Connor, M. and Michaels, S. (1993) Aligning academic task and participation status through revoicing: Analysis of a classroom discourse strategy. Anthropology and Education Quarterly 24 (4), 318–335. Wortham, S. (2003) Linguistic anthropology of education: An introduction. In S. Wortham and B. Rymes (eds) Linguistic Anthropology of Education (pp. 1–30). Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey.
Language, Ethnicity and the Mediation of Allegations of Racism: Negotiating Diversity and Sameness in Multilingual School Discourses Angela Creese School of Education, University of Birmingham, UK This paper looks at the construction of two bilingual English as an additional language (EAL) teachers’ positionings during a two-day student staged protest against a perceived racist incident in a London secondary school. It examines how these bilingual teachers’ ethnicity and language resources in Turkish and English are employed by the school to (re)produce a discourse of diversity which attempts to level out difference. It looks at how the bilingual EAL teachers manage their multiple roles within this institutional discourse through the foregrounding and backgrounding of ethnicity, language, knowledge production, and ‘self’ in several school contexts throughout the two-day event and beyond. The data for this study come from two student-produced texts. The first of these texts accuses the school of racism while the second, by a different group of students, refutes the claims made in the earlier text. Analysis is extended beyond these texts to look at the interactions which happen around them within the school community. Through an ethnography of communication, the paper shows how the bilingual teachers mediate, negotiate and action identification positionings towards and away from the dominant discourse of institutional sameness. It finds that these bilingual teachers both collude with and challenge this discourse.
The paper makes its core concern the linguistic, ethnic and institutional identifications and positionings which occur around an alleged racist incident within a London secondary school. The aim is to look at how English and Turkish are used by their speakers during this event to take up differing positions around the accusation made by one group of Turkish speaking Kurdish background students that the school is racist and treats its students from different ethnicities differently and unjustly. Using the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of the ethnography of communication (Hymes, 1968, 1974) and Haugen’s ecology of language (1972) an argument will be developed to show how both languages, Turkish and English, are used by the school to undermine this accusation of racism. We will see that Turkish does temporarily win more institutional support and increase its functional use in the school but it does so only to endorse a more dominant institutional discourse. This institutional school discourse is one of equal opportunities. I will show how the school uses this discourse to structure its response to the student demonstration.
Introduction In his paper on ecology of language, Haugen (1972: 337) presents 10 questions to be asked when considering how languages interrelate with their environment. Four of these will be considered in this paper which takes as its broad context a culturally and linguistically diverse London secondary school called Skonnington.1 Haugen’s questions are: 61 Language, Ethnicity, Racism – Negociating School Discourse
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Who are the users of the language? What are its domains of use? What kind of institutional support has the language won? What are the attitudes of its users towards the language in terms of intimacy and status, leading to personal identification? These questions are used heuristically to consider how different languages and their speakers are held in complex relations with one another as the event unfolds. They are useful tools in an analysis which attempts to show how a shifting context allows participants multiple identification positionings but also how societal and institutional discourses impact on which of these identifications come to dominant discursively. The specifics of these questions are dealt with in the latter part of this paper. First, there is a presentation of the theoretical and methodological framework used in the construction of ideas presented here. Second, the ethnographic data of the communicative event itself is presented along with an interpretive commentary. Finally, after a discussion of language ecology within the school, there is also an argument developed which looks at the school’s dominant discourse of equal opportunities critically. • • • •
The School Community Central to the arguments presented in this paper, which concern the processes and activities leading to the privileging of a particular school discourse, is the notion of school as a community. Below I draw on three views of community. The first view of community is of ‘communities of practice’ (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998) in which children are inducted into the school community through engagement with adults and the importance of joint participation for the less experienced participants in increasing their expertise in the performance of community activities (including discursive practices). The second view is of communities as ideological. Blommaert and Verschueren (1998: 25) define ideology as ‘any constellation of fundamental or commonsensical, and often normative ideas and attitudes related to some aspect(s) of social reality’. This gathering of ideas and attitudes plays an important role in constituting and maintaining group identities. Blommaert and Verschueren show how ‘ideological webs determine which arguments will appeal to a group and provide the groundwork of their thinking and identity’ (1998: 25). Ideologies are politicised and are supported by discourses which are legitimated by institutions differently. Work in this vein has looked at the role schools play in privileging particular ideologies and discourse and what is at stake when particular pedagogies and ways-of-speaking in class are foregrounded (Heller & Martin-Jones, 2001; Roberts & Sarangi, 2001). We will use this literature to reach an understanding of the privileging of particular ideologies and discourses within Skonnington School. A third view on ‘community’ sees the school as a speech community. Hymes defines a speech community as sharing the norms and rules of speaking for the conduct and interpretation of speech (1972: 54). Much has developed since Hymes spoke of ‘rules and norms’ of speaking (see Erickson, 1996; Kress, 2000) and there is now a recognition that communities and their ways of speaking are not static but constantly in flux. However, what Hymes’ work continues to offer
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is a way into understanding community practices through its particular emphasis on emic and local perspectives of participants’ language and literacy practices. That is, it allows for a focus on how patterns of language-in-use play a part in constituting communities. The concepts ‘communities of practice’, ‘ideology’ and ‘speech community’ provide a way of understanding ethnicity, language and learning as locally situated, but as also shaped by historical, ideological and cultural perspectives. When I use the word community, I have in mind several layers: ethnic and linguistic communities, school communities, pedagogic and classroom communities. In each instance I intend a view of community which is resilient but flexible and which provides the individual and group extended opportunities to negotiate their differences. The speech community and its social context must be the starting point for any analysis of language-in-use (Hymes, 1968). As Haugen (1972) also points out, a language has no life of its own apart from those who use it. My emphasis here then is not on what functions languages perform within the school but how the participants use their language(s) to perform different functions. The speakers of Turkish and English (and all the other languages in the school) are members of the school community and are actively involved in its social enterprises whether they are maintaining, transforming or contesting them. What is of interest then, is not the status of the language as such but the way the languages are put to use by the speakers of the languages in this particular speech community. We will see that it is neither English nor Turkish per se which is the symbolic arbitrator of power but rather a particular school discourse which is carried by speakers of either or both languages to carry the day. Moreover, it is only through studying the micro context for the minutia of interactions as participants actually voice them that we can understand how local discourses are influenced by and influence societal level educational discourses. In this paper, I will also show how societal discourses (Billig, 1988; Gee, 1999) at policy level impact on local discourses at the school level and vice versa. Participants within the school community are shown handling and making sense of the contradictory and ideological dilemmas they face as their allegiance to different positions is continuously negotiated. Moreover, it is important to point out that when I speak of a school discourse ‘dominating’ other discourses and eventually silencing them, the view of domination being developed is linked to a view of power as everywhere and always with us (Wenger, 1998). This view of power is agentive in the sense that it shows how community members participate in ideological debates and societal discourses (Billig, 1988; Gee, 1999; Giddens, 1993) but it also avoids simplistic dichotomies of the powerful and powerless. I aim to show how one discourse in the school does come to dominate others. However, this discourse is not usually associated with hegemony (Gramsci, 1971) in the sense that it sets out to endorse the elite’s agenda against a powerless minority. Rather it is a discourse which equates itself with fighting for the powerless through a respected tradition of equal opportunities. And yet, part of what I wish to show in this paper is how this equal opportunity discourse comes to dominate and ends up playing a hegemonic role as members of the school community position themselves around its ideological base. In making the arguments in this paper, I wish to make two points about the
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complexity of the data. The first is there are no clear goodies and baddies in the scenario which I describe below. We are not looking for someone to blame here. The second is that having considered how a particular school discourse comes to dominate events, there is a need to reflect upon how these equal opportunity policies can adversely affect how diversity and difference are seen within the school. This last point is taken up in the final discussion section of this paper.
Skonnington School and its Turkish-speaking Students The school is in an economically poor and richly diverse part of London. The school is a lively mixture of colours, cultures, languages and difference housed in an old and rather bleak Victorian building on the side of a busy road. It is a single sex girls’ school, with over 90% of the students being listed as having English as an additional language (EAL). The largest linguistic minority during the data collection period2 was Turkish speaking. The Turkish-speaking minority consist of an older, more established Turkish Cypriot community and newer Turkish/Kurdish speaking refugees. Both have settled in the same areas of London. The more recent group has come to Britain as political refugees caught in the cross-fire of the Turkish Government’s battle with the separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a left-wing Kurdish revolutionary group fighting for an independent Kurdistan. Those seen as promoting or even supporting any form of Kurdish autonomy or rights within Turkey are dealt with extremely harshly by the Turkish state (see Amnesty International reports indexes: EUR 44/87/95 and EUR 44/80/95; Refugee Council Factsheet, 1995). Since the late 1980s and increasingly so in the 1990s, large numbers of Turks and Turkish/Kurdish speaking Kurds from mainland Turkey have arrived. The group tends to be highly politicised (Campbell, 1994). However, very little research exists on the Turkish speaking communities in London (IOE, 1999; Ladbury, 1977; Mehmet Ali, 1991). We now move to look at how a particular incident in the school impacted on the school community. Below I briefly discuss the methodology used in the paper before going on to give an account of the incident. This consists of two student-produced texts distributed to passers-by and visitors to the school and ethnographic fieldnotes written up as analytic vignettes of the two-day event (Erickson, 1990). After the data has been presented I return to Haugen’s earlier highlighted questions to discuss how issues of community context, power and wider educational debates impact on language ecology within the school.
Methodology The primary methodology and analytical framework used for this paper was the ethnography of communication (Hornberger, 1994, 1995; Hymes, 1968, 1974; Saville-Troike, 1996). The ethnography of communication gives the researcher the opportunity to understand and explain the perspectives of the research participants. This paper draws on data from a three school study in which I was a participant observer over one academic year. I spent on average three days a week over 10 weeks in each school. Entry to the research site was through the permission of the English as Additional Language (EAL) coordinator within each school. The
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three research schools were chosen because they fulfilled two criteria: the largest linguistic minority were Turkish speaking and they employed at least one bilingual Turkish-speaking Teacher.3 In Skonnington School, two of the four EAL teachers were Turkish speaking and from Cypriot backgrounds. I accompanied each of the four language specialists through their working day and spent just over two weeks with each of them. The two Turkish-speaking teachers referred to in this paper have been renamed as Unal Hakan and Dilek Zengin. Mr Hakan was head of EAL in the school. Ms Zengin was a science teacher paid via EAL money to support students’ learning and language development. I now turn to reporting the incident itself.
Institutional Racism or Equal Opportunities? On 12th October, 1994, at 8.45 am I entered Skonnington School as I had done for the previous five weeks to collect data for the ethnographic study I was conducting on the relationships, roles and talk of English as an Additional Language (EAL) teachers and the mainstream subject curriculum teachers with whom they worked. However, this day was immediately different. It started with a demonstration of 20–25 bilingual (Kurdish) Turkish/English-speaking girls from the school who were outside the school gates with banners and a loudhailer saying ‘Black and White Unite Against Racism’ and ‘Beep your Horn if you are Against Racism’. The girls were also distributing the following text to passers-by and to teachers who had gone out to speak to them. Text One (Spelling as in the original) WE WANT TEACHERS NOT TO DIVIDE US BUT TO GIVE BETTER EDUCATION On 11 October a group of students started arguing with the other groups of Turkish and Kurdish students. They all forced them to get into a room and blackmailed, so that they don’t tell the teachers about this. There wasn’t a good reason for this. But only prejudice. That is not the first time its happened, it continues for years and years in our school. Also we are aware of that the students in schools of Borough X are facing the same problems. And attacks on the students is not the only problem in our school. Briefly the problems we are facing are; 1. When there is a complain about the foods we get, what staff tell is if the food is cleaner in your country then go back to your own country. 2. Some of our teachers e.g. the English teacher Miss X is insulting the students especially refugees. 3. The teachers in Skonnington school and other schools are treating to the students depending on their nationalities. While the other students get rid of everything, some students especially Turkish and Kurdish students are being blame. 4. By this they are trying to divide the students into aparts. We know that all the problems that we are facing can be solved. The teachers and the management of the school do not want to solve the problems deliberately. The students have nothing to attack each other. We only want to study
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and be educated in better methods. Students should be united against all other problems we are facing in our school. But the school management is avoiding this by dividing the students in spite of their nationalities. We don’t want our teachers to divide us, we just want better education. We don’t want racism in our schools, we want to unite with all black and white students. That is why we are having the boycout in our school and our demands are as follows. 1. We don’t want any racist teachers in our school, especially, Mrs X. 2. We don’t want teachers and managements to divide students by their nationalities. 3. we want them to consider all the complaints that we have e.g. foods, bullying. 4. Our only demand is to have friendly and egual education for all students Later in the day, this was followed by a second text, written by a different group of girls, African Caribbean, who were contesting the writers of Text One’s account. This text was distributed to students and teachers within the school community and also to the local BBC network who had arrived at lunch time. Text Two (Spelling, bold and capitalisation as in the original) STOP FOOLING AROUND Due to recent letters that have been received by the students outside of Skonnington that are against your silly boycott we feel that you are making a mockery out of yourselves. Nothing will be resolved if you carry on acting like immature little 5 year olds. This is only to make you see what fools you are. Some of us think that you are right to appeal against your rights but not in this manner. By holding up banners and posters saying that ‘black and white unite’ has no meaning because most of the people or students like each other and have no means for racism so we all think by what you are doing is wrong. You are making our school reputation go down and you are hurting alot of peoples feelings by what you are doing although you might have already noticed. Maybe what you are doing is right but you have no feelings and consideration of what other people think of you. Many turkish and kurdish people are not protesting because they feel that nothing will not be resolved and that they also think it is wrong. We gather that some people are racist but a fact is that everybody in a way is racist and that includes all of the kurdish and turkish people. Fair enough we admit some of the students can be rascist but that does not allow you to bring any of the teachers into it and by doing that you have made things worse. STUDENTS THAT CARE !!! It is clear from even an initial reading that the writers of Texts One and Two present the school community and teachers very differently in the two accounts.
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Text One constructs the teachers as being racist and divisive. Teachers • insult refugees; • treat students differently depending on their national backgrounds; • single out Turkish and Kurdish pupils for blame; • divide students against one another; • let problems go unsolved and do not follow up complaints. On the other hand Text Two constructs the teachers as victims. They • have been hurt; • are having their reputation damaged; • are the same as anyone else. In Text One the writers present themselves as united with the rest of the student community. Students • should not attack one another; • are united in their need for better and fairer education. In Text Two, however, the writers present the student writers of Text One as different from the rest of the student community. They are • silly, immature, like 5 year olds, fools, wrong, hurtful; • not supported by other Turkish and Kurdish-speaking students; • have no feelings and show no consideration. Discussion of the two texts What is apparent in Text One from the beginning are claims of ethnic difference and how different groups of students are treated differently within the school. The girls are fighting against the ‘establishment’. In the text there are clear elements of intertextuality (Fairclough, 1995; Gee, 1999). One idea of Bakhtin’s work (1986) is the notion of ‘appropriation’ as people learn how to do things in a language they borrow. Text One reads as a political manifesto in which the unfair treatment of different ethnic groups is central. However, there is also reference to the students’ more recent experiences and discourse at the school with their mention in the last line of Text One of equal opportunities and their expectations that all ‘nationalities’ be treated the same. As newly arrived political refugees from rural south-east Turkey where their families may have been involved in political struggle, these students may have had first-hand experience of fighting for their political and human rights. This history they bring to their school where it meets a common educational discourse of equal opportunities. However, the writers of Text One do not yet ‘own’ this discourse (Cameron, 1997) and the ones they do own, as we will see, are rendered too difficult for the school to consider. The writers of Text Two, on the other hand, do own the equal opportunities discourse and see their message taken up and endorsed by the school. This group of students builds upon the notion of a school community to which both teachers and students belong. You are making our school reputation go down and you are hurting alot of peoples feelings by what you are doing although you might have already noticed.
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The writers of Text Two position the majority of students and teachers as being within the same community. For them, it is the writers of Text One who are now outside this community. The writers of Text Two are attempting to isolate these students, not only from their ethnic group who they aspire to represent but also from the rest of the school community. Like the writers of Text One, this text is a map of the writers’ previous social experiences and histories. It endorses the school’s discourse of equal opportunities and wider societal attitudes towards equality, and distances itself from a discourse of challenge put forth in Text One. The student writers of Text Two use a discourse very unlike the political manifesto of Text One. Rather they appear more to be writing a letter to a media editor of some kind. Indeed the BBC was one of their intended audiences because at the time of writing the girls knew they would be visiting the school. Moreover, little is made of difference of any kind within the school. Ethnicity is played down as are differences between teachers and students. Ethnicity is mentioned inasmuch as to claim that the dissonant group is not representing the Turkish/Kurdish group. It is shared agendas which are constructed here with racism attributed to everyone rather than a particular group. My next step in the analysis is to consider how different participants within the school took up positions around the demonstration, and I ask two questions to achieve this. • What interpretations and identifications do different participants take up in the school around the student demonstration of text one (in varying degrees I had access to the head teacher, teachers and students)? • How do these interpretations impact on the role Turkish and English played in the school and on their speakers? Legitimate and non-legitimate protests In the production of Text Two, the school had a clearly preferred message for the outside world. This message presented the school as a community in which all its participants were treated equally around issues of learning, discipline, procedure, ethnicity and race. It was this message, via Text Two, which was handed to the local BBC network when the camera crew turned up just after lunch. The headteacher herself was advised by the local educational officers not to speak to the BBC film crew. However, she did arrange for the writers of Text Two to speak with the press. I was not present at this meeting. In the final eventuality the local BBC current affairs programme did not run this news. Despite the fact that the head had avoided a direct commentary with the media, she had gone some way to effectively managing the kind of messages which the outside world would hear about the school, given the rather uncomfortable accusations made by the student writers of Text One. The work which went into producing a united community discourse was thus partially orchestrated by the headteacher and senior managers; but this is only partly true. Their position was not simply ‘imposed’ from above on the rest of the school community but also emerged from the teachers and the students themselves to differing degrees. The writers of Text Two, many of the teachers and indeed even the writers of Text One recognised the discourse of equal opportuni-
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ties as being an important ideology in the school community. I wish to argue that it was participation in this discourse rather than expertise, allegiance or heritage of a particular language (Leung, et al., 1997; Rampton, 1990) that saw the students of Text One as (temporarily at least) outside the school ‘community’. That is, the discourse of equal opportunities held more allegiance than whether students or staff spoke Turkish or not. Below we look at two further instances of data which show the complexity of participants’ differing identification positionings throughout the event. The first are fieldnotes from a Year 10 geography class. The second instance of data is a vignette of a staff meeting held the day after the demonstration. Year 10, Geography During the first morning of the demonstration I attended, as usual, the Year 10 geography class. This class was in the unusual position of being supported by both the bilingual teacher, Mr Hakan, and another EAL teacher, Mr Noble, during different timetable periods. This was because of the high number of EAL/bilingual students in the class needing support. Some of the girls from this class were taking part in the demonstration. Below are my written-up fieldnotes from that morning. Geography, year 10, 12.10.1994 – 9.40 am I go to the geography class but there are no teachers there and very few students. Mr Hakan is contacting parents of the demonstrating girls while the geography teacher, Mr Scott, has gone outside to talk to the girls and is trying to persuade them to come back in. I listen to one student speaking Turkish with Ayse, a newly arrived and early bilingual Cypriot Turkish speaking girl. This is the first time I have heard Ayse’s interactant – Jasmine, speak Turkish. She is not known to the EAL staff as she is fully proficient in English and does not need their learning and language support. She usually sits at the front of the class away from the other EAL students. She and Ayse are talking about the demonstrators. In Turkish they ask each other if the girls outside had told them about the demonstration. It appears they were not told anything. They both say ‘it has nothing to do with them’ and ‘they don’t want anything to do with it’. The class is very much changed. The few students in there are not doing any work and there is a lot of discussion about what is going on outside. At 9.40 two of the girls who have been demonstrating outside return to class along with the two teachers, Mr Scott and Mr Hakan. The teachers get the class started on their work. Mr Hakan tries to settle the two returnees and help them with their work. However, they are angry with him and do not want his help. They respond much more warmly to me. He is seen as the enemy. However, they are slow to work and spend a lot of time arguing with the Ayse and Jasmin mentioned above. Their exchanges are angry. After class, I hear that the police were called in to frighten the demonstrators but he turned up on his bike and this didn’t have the intended effect! I wish to make three points from this vignette. The first is that the event itself brought out a speaker of Turkish in this class not known to the school. Moreover, it allowed this bilingual speaker of Turkish and English to use her Turkish in
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ways beyond the usual ‘language support’ for curriculum learning and all the deficit associations that often and unfairly go with this function. The second point to be made is that it appears that the Cypriot Turkish speaking girls were not involved in the organisation or implementation of the demonstration which appeared to be under the ownership of one particular group of Turkish speaking Kurdish girls. The third point to be made is that using Turkish with the Turkish speaking bilingual teacher for learning purposes in this class was rejected by the two girls who had returned to class from the demonstration. There are a number of possible reasons for this. Mr Hakan was clearly engaged in doing the work of the school in phoning their parents and therefore was acting against the demonstrators’ objectives. Moreover, like the Cypriot girls they were arguing with, Mr Hakan was from the same background and did not have the same inheritance of Turkish that these girls had. This may have been particularly relevant as throughout the class Turkish was being used by different Turkish heritages to both endorse or reject the primary message put out by the girls demonstrating. We now go on to look at how the event was perceived by another set of participants in the school community – the headteachers and teaching staff. Staff meeting During and following the demonstration, the head teacher held a series of ad hoc and emergency staff meetings. One of these is reported in detail below. Fieldnotes, 13th October. The whole staff is assembled and school is to start late. The headteacher narrates the incident. A lot is made about the reputation of the school. She talks about the successes of the school; names some ‘Turkish’ girls who have been successful; and what a good reputation the school has for integrating all races. She explains there have been racist incidents in other schools in the borough but not in this school. She thanks the staff repeatedly for their support and says she does not want to see staff turn against one another. After she has finished speaking several teachers are selected to give their opinions. She starts with Mr Hakan and Miss Zengin. Both bilingual teachers support the Head’s arguments that the group of girls were organised by outside groups; that there is a girl who has been trouble ever since she arrived, agitating the others. Both the bilingual teachers support the school’s line that the girls, even if they have grievances should have gone through the regular channels. The majority of teachers who speak, say that girls should be disciplined, that they were lying if they say they did not know about the anti racist policy. The teachers react angrily to the girls’ accusation that the teachers treat the Afro Caribbean girls differently from the Turkish girls because, they the teachers, are afraid of confrontation. The physical education teacher is really angry and says, ‘that’s a load of rubbish.’ In the main it is only those who are taking the same line as the headteacher’s who speak out. Only one teacher offers an alternative view when he says that ‘we’ the teachers should admire the girls for demonstrating, because we have all done this in our lives, ‘After all they wouldn’t be able to do this in Turkey.’ While he is speaking, the teacher accused of
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racism gets up and walks out. He continues saying that we must look into the comment that the girls don’t know about the anti racist statement. He is the only teacher to take a different line. Following his comment there is uncomfortable silence. The meeting is near the end and the head teacher tells her teachers she will keep them fully informed. This vignette makes salient some of the interpretations made by the head and her teaching staff towards the accusations made in Text One. The headteacher develops three arguments against the girls’ behaviour. One theme that the students of Text One had raised was the lack of follow-up by staff of their grievances when racist incidents occurred. The headteacher does not address this directly, but she (and her teachers) are adamant that the students themselves have not followed the correct procedures. This was central to the head as it allowed her to show the school as having equal measures for all when dealing with racism. There seems to be little awareness that the students might not have followed normal procedure because of their frustrations in the past or that the school had not been successful in making its procedures known. Related to the discussion of procedures is the second theme the head develops which is the description of the girls as rude and heavily influenced by outsiders. This interpretation of the girls’ behaviour is similar to that made by the students in Text Two. The demonstrators are presented as foolish and easily influenced by others. They are stripped of their intentions to make claims and demands. The girls are presented as outside of the school community because of their rudeness and lack of willingness to play by the school’s rules. A third theme apparent in the fieldnotes is the reaction to accusations of racism and the argument that teachers treat different ethnic groups differently in the school. Teachers are outraged by this suggestion and a discussion about the feasibility of this cannot even be developed in the staff meeting – such is the anger it creates. The general consensus is that all groups are treated equally and in the same way within the school. The interpretations the head and the majority of teachers choose to take up around the event are parallel to those developed by the student writers of Text Two. Both the staff meeting and Text Two develop a position of shared and equal agendas. Diversity is celebrated in the same way, with each ‘multi’ culture treated as if it were equal and the same. Only those teachers who are seen to be central in supporting this discourse are recruited to help in its endorsement. Some teachers are silenced either because their views are considered to be too dangerous or not seen to be relevant. The two bilingual teachers were seen as central to supporting the school’s central message and were actively recruited during the staff meeting to lend their voices to the headteacher’s.
Recognising and Endorsing Difference During and in the aftermath of the demonstration, the two bilingual Turkish speaking teachers were called out of the classrooms to help the headteacher contact and meet parents of the girls who had been demonstrating. From my fieldnotes, I have the following extract:
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12th October Mr Hakan is frantically translating letters, being called to phone parents and talk to them when they arrive. Miss Zengin is also taken out of the science class which she has been covering. She is also talking to parents. The two teachers were exhausted by the time the weekend arrived. The school had made use of the linguistic and knowledge resources which no other teachers in the school were able to offer. During this incident, knowledge of Turkish and English within the school was extremely important. That is, linguistic knowledge of a community language rose over other more usual dominant knowledges and temporarily changed the knowledge hierarchy in the school (Luke & Luke, 1999; Martin-Jones & Heller, 1996). For the headteacher, it was the bilingual EAL teachers’ expertise in Turkish that was the single most important knowledge in helping the school deal with the demonstration and disseminate the equal opportunities message. This linguistic expertise was unproblematically used by the head. As long as the bilingual teachers spoke Turkish, she had access to a group of parents she would not normally have been able to reach. For her, the differences in cultural, political, social, economic, historic, age and knowledge backgrounds between the bilingual EAL teachers and the student demonstrators were immaterial – language as a resource to communicate the school’s agenda was paramount. However, these complexities were apparent to the bilingual teachers, the students and their parents. The two bilingual EAL teachers did not share the same inheritance of Turkish that the students demonstrating did. As mentioned earlier, the girls were a group of refugees from Turkey whose recent and family histories involved a struggle against the Turkish state for linguistic rights and demands for greater Kurdish independence. This history meant a very different affiliation towards Turkish than Unal Hakan and Dilek Zengin had, coming themselves from Cypriot Turkish backgrounds. However, despite these differences, the bilingual teachers and students also shared similarities in their awareness of linguistic and cultural differences. The teachers’ own ethnic and linguistic complexities meant they understood the dangers of simplifying all Turkish speakers into an unproblematic ‘idealised Turkish native-speaker’ category (Leung et al., 1997; Rampton, 1990). And whereas the intricacies of this knowledge did not seem to feature in the school’s use of the bilingual teachers, it did with the bilingual teachers themselves who used this awareness in the day-to-day teaching of their bilingual pupils. The two bilingual teachers chose to endorse certain issues around the school’s collective response to dealing with a potentially explosive issue. In doing so, they stood alongside other teachers in the school to legitimate the central response to the girls’ demonstration. For example, they endorsed the head’s account of the students’ rudeness and lack of procedure following. They were vocal in the staff meeting and throughout the two-day incident in arguing that the girls should be treated the same as everyone else in enforcing school rules and disciplinary matters. However, they were silent in the staff room when the discussion turned to differential treatment of different ethnic groups within the school by teachers. It is hard to know what they thought. It is certainly clear that within the atmosphere of the staff meeting reported upon above, it would have been difficult for
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a any teacher to argue that teachers did treat the students from different ethnic groups differently around behaviour issues. It would have been difficult too to argue against a discourse of equal opportunity and in favour of the differential treatment of different minority linguistic and ethnic groups within the school. In the discussion which follows I take up some of these possibilities. However, before doing this, I return to the questions Haugen asked with a view to understanding how the event impacted on Turkish and its speakers within the school.
Discussion Below I take each of the four questions posed by Haugen and stated at the beginning of this paper. Haugen (1972: 325) defines language ecology as the study of interactions between any given language and its environment. I use his questions to show the complexity of the context in capturing how languages and their speakers interact within one particular event within the school. Who are the users of the language? There are many different languages in use within this school. Of the minority languages, Turkish has the highest profile, not only because it is used by the largest minority but also because the school has employed two Turkish speaking bilingual teachers. One of these has a middle management position within the school. It was usual therefore to hear Turkish being used around the school. However, of particular interest during this event was how speakers of Turkish not known to the EAL staff, because they did not need language support, emerged as bilingual speakers of both Turkish and English. The event itself created opportunities for some speakers of Turkish to use their bilingualism in the school in new ways. Whereas it appears to be the case that minority languages are used predominantly by the school as a means to learning the curriculum in English, this event provided students with the possibility to use Turkish to express opinion beyond curriculum learning. Moreover, Turkish was used not only to endorse what the girls demonstrating were doing; it was also used to articulate against it. Similarly the use of English took on the same flexibility and was used to both articulate against and lend support to the demonstrators. We have seen how in one class English was preferred to Turkish by the two returning demonstrators as a means of distancing themselves from the help the Turkish speaking teacher usually gave them who, because of his role in helping the school, appeared to be positioned as a traitor to their cause. What are its domains of use? During the event, Turkish certainly expanded its use within the school. It continued to be used in the classroom for support in curriculum learning and it continued to be used for pastoral purposes as students were inducted into the school. During the event, however, it was used by the headteacher at the institutional level to write to parents requesting they attend the school for meetings, narrate the school’s version of events and talk to the parents (and students) once they arrived at the school. Moreover, as also mentioned above, the event itself seem to expand Turkish beyond a support role. A minority language usually
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restricted to particular domains and uses, Turkish expanded its repertoire during the two-day event. What kind of institutional support has the language won? Although Turkish expanded its functions within the school, this was only temporary. The institution gave support to Turkish as a means to extend the school’s central message. Moreover, those who did not take up this line, either in English or Turkish, were temporarily seen as being outside the school’s ideological community. Turkish was recruited by the school to implement wider educational discourses within and beyond the school. What are the attitudes of its users towards the language in terms of intimacy and status, leading to personal identification? Haugen uses status to mean association with power and influence in the social group and intimacy in the sense of being associated with solidarity, shared values, friendship, love, that is those contacts established through common family and group life (1972: 327). This event shows how complex the participants’ identification positionings were with regard to ethnicity, linguistic affiliations and what it meant to be a member of the school community. The teachers and students all took up positions around ‘Turkish’ during the event. We can see that expertises and heritages not known about by the bilingual staff emerged; we can see that the Turkish speakers themselves affiliated themselves to the language in different ways as the events unfolded. Moreover, we see that the staff and students who could not speak Turkish also took up positions about and around the language and its users. One view of Turkish which continued to dominate within the school was of the language stripped of its cultural and historical roots. This meant that the school showed little understanding of differences within and between the Turkish speaking communities. The headteacher’s main concern was to use Turkish to convey the school message. There appeared to be a real danger that all Turkish speaking students be painted with the same brush. This meant that Turkish mainlanders, Turkish/Kurdish refugees and Turkish Cypriot islanders were all grouped together as one Turkish speaking whole. One danger of this simplification is that the school would never understand why and how this particular group of girls chose to demonstrate in this way.
Sameness and Difference The writers of Text One accuse the school of treating certain groups of students differently and unfairly. However, could it not also be argued that the girls were not treated differently enough? The pursuit of equity in education has been guided and enhanced by a discussion of equality of opportunity. But this movement has often produced analyses of educational practices which consider one category of inequality at a time (Daniels et al., 2001). The question becomes one of how we should recognise and respond to difference in an equitable manner. It may well be that we should seek to establish new forms of difference rather than impose sameness. Evans (2001) suggests that to treat people equally is not necessaryily to treat them in exactly the same manner. On the contrary, to
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treat people as equals may require that they not be treated the same way. However, it is essential that they be treated fairly. Perhaps it is equity that should be the starting point rather than equality. Solstad (1994 in Daniels et al., 2001) argues that rather than dealing with equity from a centralised position, the principle of equity may be referenced to diversity, and realised in particular settings, regions and localities. Inclusive education is based on ‘difference’ as a usual part of any classroom environment (Ballard, 1995; Norwich, 1996). If this is so, we must beware of off the peg approaches to pedagogy and learning which are supposedly suitable for all students. We need to continue our empirical and ethnographic work into local school communities and cultures to understand what kind of situated responses might serve each school’s participants most usefully so that all students, even those most ‘different’, can be included. Correspondence Any correspondence should be directed to Dr Angela Creese, School of Education, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham, B15 2TT, UK ([email protected]). Notes 1. The name of this school is fictitious. 2. Data was collected during the 1994 academic year. 3. Part of the larger study was to look at how the roles of bilingual EAL and non-bilingual EAL teachers differed in class alongside the curriculum subject teacher. Turkish speaking teachers were chosen as I speak some Turkish and was able to follow their bilingual interactions with Turkish speaking students in class. 4. According to the girls demonstrating outside, the ‘group of students’ with whom they were arguing were African Caribbean and it was also this group of girls which the demonstrating girls felt were being given preferential treatment by the teachers.
References Amnesty International (1995) Turkey: Unfulfilled promise of reform. September. AI Index: EUR 44/87/95. Amnesty International (1995) Turkey: Families of ‘disappeared’ subjected to brutal treatment. September. AI: EUR 44/80/95 Bakhtin, M.M. (1986) The problem of speech genres. In V. McGee, M. Holquist and C. Emerson (eds) Speech Genres and Other Essays (pp. 60–102). Austin: University of Texas Press. Ballard, K. (1995) Inclusion, paradigms, power and participation. In C. Clark, A. Dyson and A. Millward (eds) Towards Inclusive Schools? (pp. 1–15). London: David Fulton Publishers. Billig, M. (ed.) (1988) Ideological Dilemmas. London: Sage. Blommaert, J. and Verschueren, J. (1998) Debating Diversity: Analysing the Discourse of Tolerance. London: Routledge. Cameron, D. (1997) Performing gender identity: Young men’s talk and the construction of heterosexual masculinity. In S. Johnson and U.H. Meinhoff (eds) Language and Masculinity. Oxford: Blackwell. Campbell, D. ( December 31, 1994) Kurds campaigner escapes shooting. The Guardian (p. 3). Daniels, H., Creese, A., Hey, V., Leonard, D. and Smith, M. (2001) Gender and learning: Equity, equality and pedagogy. Support for Learning 16 (3), 112–116. Erickson, F. (1990) Qualitative Methods. In R.L. Linn and F. Erickson (eds) Research in Teaching and Learning (Vol. 2). New York: MacMillan. Erickson, F. (1996) Ethnographic microanalysis. In S.L. McKay and N.H. Hornberger (eds)
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Sociolinguistics and Language Teaching (pp. 283–306). New York: Cambridge University Press. Evans, P. (2001) In W. Hutmacher,N. Bottani and D. Cochrane (eds) In Pursuit of Equity. Kluwer. Fairclough, N. (1995) Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Longman. Gee, J.P. (1999) An Introduction to Discourse Analysis. London: Routledge. Giddens, A. (1993) Domination and power. In P. Cassell (ed.) The Giddens Reader (pp. 212–283). Basingstoke: Macmillan. Gramsci, A. (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks. New York International. Haugen, E. (1972) The ecology of language. In A.S. Dill (ed.) Essays by Einar Haugen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Heller, M. and Martin-Jones, M. (2001) Voices of Authority: Education and Linguistic Difference. Westport, CT: Ablex Publishers. IOE (Institute of Education) (1999) Turkish Cypriot children in London schools: A report for the Turkish Cypriot Forum. International Centre for Intercultural Studies and the Culture, Communication and Societies Group. Hornberger, N. (1994) Literacy and language planning. Language and Education 8, 75–86. Hornberger, N.H. (1995) Ethnography in linguistic perspective: Understanding school processes. Language and Education 9 (4), 233–248. Hymes, D. (1968) The ethnography of speaking. In J. Fishman (ed.) Readings in the Sociology of Language (pp. 99–138). The Hague: Moulton. Hymes, D. (1972) On communicative competence. In J.B. Pride and J. Holmes (eds) Sociolinguistics (pp. 269–293). Harmondsworth: Penguin. Hymes, D. (1974) Foundations in Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Approach. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Kress, G. (2000) Multimodality. In B. Cope and M. Kalantzis (eds) Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures (pp. 182–202). London: Routledge. Ladbury, S. (1977) The Turkish Cypriots: ethnic relations in London and Cyprus. Between Two Cultures. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Lave, J. and Wenger, E. (1991) Situated Learning; Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Leung, C., Harris, R. and Rampton, B. (1997) The idealized native speaker, reified ethnicities and classroom realities. TESOL Quarterly 31, 543–556. Luke, A. and Luke, C. (1999) Pedagogy. In B. Spolsky (ed.) Concise Encyclopaedia of Educational Linguistics (pp. 332–336). Elsevier: Amsterdam. Martin-Jones, M. and Heller, M. (1996) Introduction to the special issues on education in multilingual settings: Discourse, identities, and power. Linguistics and Education 8, 3–16. Mehmet Ali, A. (1991) The Turkish speech community. Multilingualism in the British Isles Vol. 1 (pp. 202–213). London: Longman. Norwich, B. (1996) Special needs education, inclusive education or just education for all? Institute of Education, University of London, Inaugural Lecture. Rampton, B. (1990) Displacing the ‘native speaker’: Expertise, affiliation and inheritance. ELT Journal 44 (9), 503–527 Refugee Council (January, 1995) Kurds: Turkish Kurdish refugees in the UK/Kurds in Turkey. Refugee Council Factsheet. Refugee Council (1995) Persecuted at home: Destitute in the UK: Don’t put asylum seekers out on the streets. Flyer, Refugee Council. Roberts, C. and Sarangi, S. (2001) ‘Like you’re living two lives in one go’: Negotiating different social conditions for classroom learning in a further education context in Britain. In M. Heller and M. Martin-Jones (eds) Voices of Authority: Education and Linguistic Difference (pp. 171–193). Westport, CT: Ablex Publishers. Saville-Troike, M. (1996) The ethnography of communication. In S.L. McKay and N.H. Hornberger (eds) Sociolinguistics and Language Teaching (pp. 351–382). New York: Cambridge University Press. Wenger, E. (1998) Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Constructing Discursive Practices in School and Community: Bilingualism, Gender and Power Deirdre Martin School of Education, University of Birmingham, UK In England one of the key national determinates is English monolingualism which is reflected in an English-only educational system. Drawing on the framework of legitimate discursive practices and languages (Nic Craith, 2000) English is perceived as the language of government and power and awarded legitimacy, while languages spoken by minority groups have no official legitimacy and are not recognised as legitimate languages for learning or schooling. Thus, schools are potential sites of contestation for issues of structure and agency around language diversity where linguistic minority learners construct their languages in their social and discursive practices. This paper explores how bilingual children manage their cultural and linguistic capital (Bourdieu, 1977) by colluding with, and contesting, the structures of language and power in school (Martin-Jones & Heller, 1996). An important gender perspective emerges in the children’s discursive strategies in constructing languages in school.
Introduction This paper addresses the question: how are young bilingual informants positioned and how do they position themselves and others through discursive strategies within structures of languages, gender and schooling? The paper draws on two theoretical approaches, Bourdieu, and Martin-Jones and Heller, to understand the nature of language and power relations in a specific historical location in a particular institutional setting. The study examines three sets of transcribed texts from group interviews in English with 10 young Panjabi Sikh pupils at the end of their primary school career, as they reflect on their local social and discursive practices in school. Through their reported experiences it is possible to see their understanding of how their languages are legitimised in different power relations with peers and teachers, as well as the way their perceptions and discursive strategies are gendered. The literature underpinning the theoretical approach is reviewed and the methodology discussed, including the participants and procedures for the data collection. Excerpts from the data are discussed which highlight the main issues reflecting collusion and contestation in gendered discourse. The paper argues that bilingual children demonstrate agency in manipulating their languages differently across settings of school and home, and that they collude with, and contest, the English-only language structures in school differently in their discourse strategies according to gender. Further, a methodological question is raised about the controversial relationship between Bourdieu’s notions of habitus and homology, where homology can be taken to mean transformation and change (structure and agency) within the constraints of group/community practices. The discursive practices of the bilingual children throw light on a range of possible transforming practices 77 Constructing Discursive Practices in School and Community
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within their Panjabi community both at home and in school – which respond to real and potential external conditions, as well as gender. Consequently, these practices of change allow us to ask new questions about the pre-disposing conditions which facilitate and constrain transformation and change in bilingual communities.
Theoretical Approaches The main theoretical issues underpinning the paper concern Bourdieu’s notions of linguistic and cultural capital, and habitus, the notion of the legitimacies of languages, and the issue of how structure and agency are played out in collusion and contestation within relationships of power through social and discursive practices. Bourdieu (1977) argues that all members of society have cultural and linguistic capital. He uses an economic metaphor to talk about the resources of implicit learning as ‘currency’ which ‘buys’ into the ‘market place’ of education and formal schooling. Within the notion of culture would be beliefs, attitudes towards authority, work practices and social practices, and ‘cultural capital’ would be the acquisition of beliefs, attitudes and so forth which ‘buy’ into the higher echelons of power in society. Language includes abilities to use formal and elaborated codes and standard forms and registers, and an inability or failure to use these is perceived as lack of ‘linguistic capital’ and consequently language impoverishment. Bourdieu draws attention to the way in which schools and schooling have social and discursive practices which ‘draw unevenly’ on the cultural and discursive practices of pupils such that schools select and reject from the cultures and languages of pupils. In this way particular practices and patterns of behaviour are valued in schools concerning authority, work practices, and also language use. This study applies Bourdieu’s ideas to looking at how the school in the study ‘draws unevenly’ on the bilingual pupils’ cultures and languages. In later work, Bourdieu’s (1990) discussion of ‘habitus’ explores the relationship between the individual dispositions of individual members of the group with the ‘set of embodied dispositions’ of the group. ‘The key point for Bourdieu is that habitus is both shaped by and also shapes the objective social and cultural conditions which surround it’ (May, 1999: 28). May goes on to note that Bourdieu challenges the nature of the relationship of agency/structure, arguing that habitus is both a product of early socialisation as well as being continually modified by individuals’ experience of the outside world (May, 1999: 29). Bourdieu recognises the tension between individual action and group mores. In many instances, individual practices will conform to those of the group. He argues that: the practices of the members of same group … are always more and better harmonised than the agents know or wish … The singular habitus of the members of the same [group] are united in a relation of homology, that is, of diversity within homogeneity reflecting the diversity with homogeneity characteristic of their social conditions of reproduction. (Bourdieu, 1990: 59–60)
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Bourdieu’s notion of habitus and its role in the agency/structure debate is controversial. By arguing that the relation between individual practices and group practices is one of habitus and homology, he is arguing that any transformation or change promoted by individuals will be constrained by, and fall within, practices acceptable to the group in order to maintain the group. This study examines his position in two ways which reflect individual change but may violate homology: at the level of language practice [linguistic capital] in the Panjabi-heritage community, as well as constructing linguistic capital in the classroom between boys and girls. An important issue in this discussion is the notion of legitimacy of languages.
Legitimacy of Language Legitimacy of social structures, such as language practices or political groupings, can be understood along horizontal and vertical axes (Nic Craith, 2000). Horizontally, a structure, such as language, is legitimised by the local community at a non-governmental level by being awarded values and recognition by the community. Vertically, social structures, including language, are awarded legitimacy if they ‘fit in’ and by their nearness/neatness of fit to the values of the higher agency, such as government. From the vertical axis, a key dimension in England is the state legitimacy of English. This is played out in the institutional structure of the English education system legitimising English only and not recognising the legitimacy of community languages, such as Panjabi, as a medium of learning in school. One aspect of this study shows that in this particular Panjabi/English community, there are challenges to the recognition of the legitimacy of Panjabi not only vertically from the school but also from within the Panjabi community itself. Martin-Jones and Heller (1996) argue that language ideologies legitimise discursive practices at the societal level, at institutional and professional levels, and at personal interactional levels. They argue that discussions of legitimacy of languages and discursive practices in England are set within the socio-political context of a country which has monolingualism as one of its key national determinates/markers. Thus the study of language practices in England entails the exploration of the social construction of language values between dominant and subordinated language communities. This study looks at one example of the personal interactional order to throw light on the relationship between the three orders (levels), looking at the particular discourse structures across peer groups and teachers. The focus is on the gendered discursive construction of language legitimacy between peers and between children and teachers, that is, within symmetrical and asymmetrical power relations. Martin-Jones and Heller (1996: 4) identify two perspectives for examining agency in language practices in different sites: collusion and contestation. From one perspective, through their discursive practices, participants may support and maintain the language–power relations of the dominant group, that is, they choose to communicate in the dominant language. From an alternative perspective, participants may challenge and contest the legitimacy of discursive practices, that is English, and its symbolic order and domination, by using so-called non-legitimate discursive practices, that is, other languages. In this study gender
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seems to be an important fault line along which informants chose to contest or collude with coercive power structures in schooling. The discussion in this paper explores, through the children’s reflections of their local discursive practices (in their transcribed interviews), how they collude and/or contest the legitimacy of their languages through their discursive practices in institutional sites, namely in the local Panjabi community and in English school, and the role of gender in their construction of languages.
Methodology This paper presents an aspect of a case study of a group of bilingual learners in an English primary school. The data reported here are from a survey by interview of reflections, views and beliefs about the discursive practices, chiefly in school, of the bilingual children. The section presents discussion of the participants, the settings, data collection procedures, and identifies the rationale for the categories of data analysis. The data are presented and discussed in a subsequent section. Participants The homogeneity of bilingual and linguistic minority groups is often problematised (e.g. Runnymede Trust, 2000: 27–35). The range of social distribution of linguistic minority groups was discussed by Skutnabb-Kangas (1984). Rassool (2000) revisits this description and draws a more political analysis concerning social exclusion. He argues that there are the linguistic minorities of the laissez-faire cosmopolitan class who are the ‘super rich’ and excluded by their ‘exclusivity’ while by contrast some linguistic minorities are socially excluded because they are part of the underclass identified by poverty. The linguistic minority community in this study is in the latter group. This community in the West Midlands of England is one of the poorest in the UK, according to health statistics. It is an established community where most adults come from the same area in Panjab, practise Sikhism and most of the children are first and second generation British born. The presence of the Panjabi community is highly visible in the neighbourhood through shops for Panjabi food, books and clothes, as well as restaurants, a community centre and a Gurdwara temple on the high street. There are signs in both Panjabi Gurmuki script and English. The area also has a transplanted community from Sylhet province in Bangladesh which arrived over the last fifteen years. This small study follows on from a larger study conducted five years previously, which included asking children from the Panjabi/English community about their perceptions of their bilingualism (Martin & Stuart-Smith, 1998). In the present study six boys and four girls (10 participants in total) were chosen because they were part of the cohort in the earlier study. In the current study they were all 11 years old and in the final year of the same primary school. They were interviewed in school in three groups: a group of three boys, a group of three girls and a group of four children, three boys and a girl. They were interviewed in both English and Panjabi, although only the English interview is reported here. One level of Bourdieu’s (1990) notion of habitus concerns ‘material’ embodiment of dispositions, which in the case of linguistic minority communities could
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include attitudes to dress, customary practices and language (May, 1999). This seemed to be evident in the participants and there were indications of gendered ‘embodied dispositions’. All the girls wore traditional pyjama kamis, while the boys wore clothes similar to their English monolingual peers, and three of the six boys wore their hair in the traditional Sikh top knot. We can draw from this that even within this small sample there are suggestions of complexity concerning the notion of habitus at the level of individual dispositions, along gender lines, within this Panjabi community. While there are indications of cohesion around dress within the community, there are also indications of fragmentation and difference. Data collection The headteacher agreed to support the study, and those children who wanted to and whose parents gave consent were interviewed. Each of the three group interviews took place in a small, quiet room usually used for withdrawal group work for pupils with English as an Additional Language (EAL) or special educational needs (SEN). In the English interview, the children took it in turns to read out questions which were written on cards placed in the middle of the table, around which the children were seated, and then to discuss them. The researcher’s role was to encourage and prompt discussion, which was tape recorded. The questions (in the Appendix) are formulated to try to capture the children’s reflections on present experiences as well as on potential future trajectories of discursive and social practices. The interview format was structured and sought information and reflection concerning specific practices from the children. There was opportunity within the format for the children to extend the discussion as they wished. The children were interviewed in small groups. This has the advantage of promoting discussion among themselves and generating contrasting perspectives among the children (Breakwell, 1990). On the other hand, there can be a tendency in group interviews for children to move towards consensus views (Lewis, 1992). While there is some evidence of this in the data there is also evidence of independent thinking and voice. Since the children were interviewed in each language, i.e. twice, they were not interviewed again in either language, although this is good practice, particularly when working with children because of the rich reflective and iterative data produced. The study did not plan to follow up reported accounts of discursive practices with classroom observations or home visits. Despite being involved as a professional practitioner and researcher with the neighbourhood and school over a period of 20 years, I was an ‘outsider’ in the process of the children’s reflection on their discursive practices. Further, when I asked them, few of the children remembered me from the previous study. Sites: School and community There are two geographical sites referred to in the transcribed texts of the children’s reflections of their social and discursive practices: school and home. The institutional site – their English school – is the site of contestation for the children’s non-legitimate language. Bourdieu (1977) argues that education is one of the most important institutional sites where the hegemony of language–power relations is (re)produced. The texts reflect the children’s (re)production of the
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dominant educational ideologies in the English school and also to a much lesser extent (re)produced in their perspectives of Panjabi school, as well as in the home. The other geographical site referred to in the children’s texts is the Panjabi community realised in the home and Panjabi school. The children also include India and the diaspora, as part of their discursive practice as ‘distant communities’ – which are part of the discourse of globalisation, of which diaspora would form a part. These children, unlike many of their monolingual English peers, have access to ‘global’ discursive and social practices.
Data Presentation and Analysis The discussion is located within the framework of the children’s agency demonstrated in their social and discursive practices within the structure of the school’s legitimate language. The data are presented in terms of certain theoretical issues concerning legitimacies of the children’s two languages within the community and in school. There is a particular focus on the discursive strategies employed by the children in negotiation with authority, in learning and in solidarity groups. Excerpts are taken from the transcribed interviews, and the children have pseudonyms for confidentiality purposes. The researcher is ‘D’; the girls are Ravinder (R), Kuldip (K), Surinder (Sur), Talwant (T), and the boys are Gorvinder (G), Sukdip (S), Jagdip (J), Ekvinder (E), Rajinder (Raj), Talvinder (Tal). Language legitimacy within the community In this study, Panjabi has legitimacy among its own community of speakers, who are identified by living in a particular neighbourhood, wearing particular clothes, practising a particular religion, Sikhism, and practising and learning/teaching the language and literacy in the Temple. The children reflected the legitimacy of Panjabi by saying that at home they spoke with their parents and grandparents in Panjabi although they often spoke to their siblings in both Panjabi and English. Many of them saw advantages to learning Panjabi literacy skills: some instrumental benefits, such as getting a better job with more money. One boy, Gorvinder, was highly motivated and had begun to teach himself. For some, Panjabi is also legitimated through its diasporic role, maintaining links with other Panjabi Sikh communities in the diaspora as well as with Panjab State in India, such as by writing letters for their parents and grandparents, and communicating with India. Sur: If you’re on holiday and your mum can’t understand English you could write to her in Panjabi. T: If you go to India you don’t have to write in English you can write back to them in Panjabi so they can write back and they can read and understand. Contesting legitimacy of Panjabi within the community Significantly, the legitimacy of Panjabi is contested within the community. There are some members of the Panjabi-heritage community – in the same neighbourhood identifiable by dress and religion – who do not maintain the Panjabi language, or attend Panjabi classes, suggesting that at some level they
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contest its legitimacy. Panjabi classes are voluntarily attended and for the children in this study are held outside the school, either in the Temple or elsewhere, and in their own time. Only five of the children had attended Panjabi language and literacy classes held in the Temple, and only two of them continued to attend. They gave a number of reasons for not attending: football classes clashed with Panjabi classes, bullying, cramped classes, not feeling they were progressing, and feeling that Panjabi was ‘hard’. Three girls referred to it competing with school work – they had just completed the national standard assessments for the end of primary school (Standard Assessment Tests Key Stage 2) and one girl had taken the exam for the grammar school. Three of the boys referred to being made to go by their parents. Two boys talked about being forced to watch Indian films about Sikhism by their parents. Thus, at one level, there seem to be logistical reasons which prevent the children from attending Panjabi classes, yet these data also suggest that there seem to be issues concerning perceived relevance to their lives by themselves and possibly their parents. Within the group of 10 children interviewed, there were two girls, Ravinder and Kuldip, who did not speak much Panjabi at home with parents or siblings and possibly only spoke Panjabi with grandparents. Several children, as discussed above, admitted that they did not have technical literacy skills in Panjabi Gurmuki (the written form of Sikh Panjabi). They perceived that there was limited use and limited legitimacy for Panjabi language practices, again echoing the notion of relevance of discursive practices in Panjabi. (A) D: J: D: J: (B) T:
what language do you talk to your mum in and your dad? English no Panjabi? No I always talk to my mum in Panjabi she can understand English but she can’t speak it so I talk to her in Panjabi. My dad I talk to him in English D: ever in Panjabi? T: no not often D: but he can speak Panjabi? T: yes he speaks it but it’s not very often that we speak in Panjabi Sur I talk to my mum and dad in English. Sometimes my mum talks to me in Panjabi as well (C) Talking about speaking with siblings D: and is that the same with your brothers and sisters? Your mum always talks … Sur: yes we always talk in English K: [reading from card] at home which language is easier for you to speak to your brothers and sisters in? For me It’s definitely English (D) D: and you speak to them in both? [languages] K: I talk to them in English
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How about you? I talk to them in English so the only person you speak to in Panjabi is your grandparents yes miss what about you Ravinder? miss, I don’t know writing no? nor reading would you like to? I don’t think so why not? because I don’t normally read and write in Panjabi but at school you just write in English so it’s not as though I have to write The contestation of discursive practices in Panjabi in the community is recognised by some of the informants: Sur: … because some people that don’t speak Panjabi … it’s happened already T: because the people around them mainly speak English so if your grandad, your grandma and your mum and dad just speak to you in English you’d probably start forgetting it [Panjabi] But some children are aware that they are carrying discursive practices in Panjabi from home to school, as in this excerpt referring to discursive practices in school with two friends in the interview: Sur: [in school] I speak in English mainly but to these two I speak sometimes in Panjabi The data cited above come from the early part of the interviews, where questions elicited factual rather than reflective data. Later in the interviews, questions encourage more speculative reflections which yielded data from some of the children suggesting an alternative perspective. Another way of understanding the children’s resistance to going to Panjabi classes is that they construct the Panjabi/English community as a community of discursive practices which depend on people speaking the languages rather than learning them in classes. Both boys and girls believe that languages are just ‘picked up’ by talking to people in the family and community. They perceive that discursive practices in Panjabi are learnt socially. There is no need for formal teaching. S: That’s how you actually learn Panjabi by people around you speaking it. That’s how I learned it when I was small. Like my grandad spoke it, my grandma and my mum … I would forget it if nobody around me speaks Panjabi. I would absolutely forget it if I could not speak to anyone in Panjabi T: you don’t need to go to Panjabi school to learn Panjabi, people around you can teach you. That’s how I learnt it. I didn’t go to Panjabi school much. I learnt it off the people around me D: R: D: R: (E) D: R: D: R: D: R: D: R:
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you just pick it [Panjabi] up by chatting with your granny and your grandma They also associate religion with the maintenance of Panjabi. The children affirm that Panjabi is located physically and ideologically in the temples. Panjabi will continue to be ‘taught’ or maintained in the temples: R: in Smethwick there’s quite a lot of Indians and like temples so people come to learn Panjabi here This perception awards Panjabi the authority of a ‘higher agency’, that is religion, and in that sense Panjabi operates along a vertical axis of legitimacy (Nic Craith, 2000) within the Panjabi community. In fact, this view reflects the intimate ideological relationship between Sikhism and Indian Panjabi. The Sikh religion is a key marker in constructing Panjabi Sikh identity at personal and political levels. It is one of the fundamental determiners of the ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson, 1991) of Sikhs in India and in the diaspora. Yet this fundamental relationship between religion and community identity could be contested. When asked to consider trajectories involving living in an area with no Sikh temples, some children were willing to hypothesise that without temples they could go to churches and ‘worship God in new ways’. This suggests that for some children at least they were willing to imagine diversity concerning one of the central markers of the Panjabi Sikh community in Smethwick, which would challenge the ‘homology’ of the Panjabi community. When faced with the prospect of not speaking Panjabi, most of the children were dismayed and constructed themselves as committed to trying to maintain Panjabi. They construct themselves as needing to be bilingual, in Panjabi and English. English is necessary for education and for living in England, their ‘home country’. On the other hand, Panjabi is necessary ‘if they go to India’. They also construct Panjabi as an ‘in’-group dimension to their community. Several did not wish to extend it to their English friends and particularly not to their English teachers, who would then be able to understand their secrets. For one boy using Panjabi was a way of managing racism from his monolingual English neighbours. Gr:
Summary Along the horizontal axis the legitimacy of Panjabi is widely recognised in the community according to the reflections from the children. However, there is evidence to suggest that the legitimacy of aspects of Panjabi language and literacy practices are contested by some of the children and adults and even resisted by many of the children. While many children construct a vertical axis of legitimacy for Panjabi derived from the Sikh religion, they construct their own language practices in community and construct formalised practices – in classes – as fossilised, unnecessary and largely irrelevant to their own practices. In their homes and community the children, both boys and girls, reflect similar constructions of their language practices. They are bilingual and continually draw on their linguistic and cultural resources to support and extend the discursive practices of their bilingual Panjabi family. Both their languages are legitimised within the community. These constructs for managing diverse discursive practices in
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community contrast with the children’s discursive practices and constructs of legitimate language in school.
School: Legitimacy of English and Non-legitimacy of Panjabi From the vertical axis, a key dimension in England is the state legitimacy of English. This is played out in the institutional structure of English school legitimising only English and not recognising the legitimacy of community languages, such as Panjabi. The informants recognised the legitimacy of English and the non-legitimacy of Panjabi in their primary school: D: what do you think the teachers think when they hear you speak Panjabi? Sur: sometimes they don’t hear me speak Panjabi because most of it is quiet and I’m disallowed so T: Say if the teacher did hear me talking Panjabi they wouldn’t because we normally talk when no teachers are around What is of central importance is that despite knowing the legitimacy of English and the non-legitimacy of Panjabi in school, the children continued to negotiate their relationships with their peers through both languages. In finding interstices (Martin-Jones & Heller, 1996) in the structures of language use, the children demonstrate their agency. In the children’s reflections gender casts an important perspective on the nature of the agency and how it is played out across languages in different sites with their peers. In the following discussion, the data is interpreted in terms of three issues concerning how languages are used to negotiate relationships with peers in spaces around authority and subverting authority, around languages for learning, and around creating ‘in’ and ‘out’ groups. Negotiating with authority through languages Both boys and girls used the spaces in the structures of language use which appear around teacher authority and the domination of English to negotiate similar and different relationships with their peers. One obvious interstice in the structure of discursive practices in schools is the geographical location of discursive practices, such as classroom and playground. The geographical site for speaking offers spaces for the children to collude with or contest the domination of English. There were at least two sites where languages were used differently. For example, reflecting on language in class, both boys and girls said they used English: Sur: mainly English in class G: in class it’s always English However, when the site changed to the playground, there were spaces for using other languages: E: I talk to my friends in class in English, if we’re in the playground sometimes we talk in Panjabi Clearly, the authority of the teacher was less keenly felt by the bilingual children in the playground, which allowed them to engage in non-legitimate discursive practices. Yet, even in the classroom, children found spaces to contest
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English and use the non-legitimate discourse. When the class teacher is absent boys and girls use Panjabi. The girls reflected: D: you said mainly English has there been a couple of times when you might speak Panjabi? [in class] T: when the teacher has gone to photograph [photocopy] something And the boys: S: I speak English most of the time but when the teacher is out of the classroom I speak Panjabi However, the girls go on: T: But then we got like some boys are silly in our class and we just start talking in Panjabi we say like ‘be quiet’ D: why do you say that in Panjabi? T: It just comes out. And because no one actually listens to ‘shut up’ no one actually does listen to that so if you say it in a different language it actually attracts attention Here it seems that the boys continue to contest both the class rules and the legitimacy of English in the classroom when the teacher is absent. In contrast, the girls appropriate the authority but not the language of the teacher. They use Panjabi, the non-legitimate language, to establish order in the classroom within their group. Thus codeswitching, as a form of ‘attracting attention’ is used to negotiate authority and order through the non-legitimate classroom language. This example illustrates Gumperz’s (1982) interpretation of ‘the symbolic distinction between “we” vs. “they” embodied in the choice of codes’ between the minority language and the dominant language (Romaine, 1989: 151). More reflexively, both boys and girls are aware of the construction that Panjabi is used to insult teachers and other English monolingual children in the class. However, it seems that the boys, more than the girls, perceive that teachers are more likely to construct this idea about use of Panjabi in class. It is difficult to decipher the extent to which the boys may be aggressively using Panjabi in this way and thus positioning themselves subversively. Alternatively, the boys could be being positioned by what they perceive to be the teachers’ negative constructs of the use of the non-legitimate language in class. Negotiating learning through languages When asked to reflect on if and how they used their non-legitimate language in aspects of learning, the girls seem to have a construct which disengages Panjabi from learning. For example, they are not convinced about engaging Panjabi for problem solving: D: do you talk to yourselves if you got stuck on a problem and you need to say do you know the answer to this? T: like sometimes when I’m stuck on a question sometimes I talk English but sometimes I talk Panjabi D: do you ever do that Ravinder? R: I talk in English when I’m quietly talking in class … I mainly talk in
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English because not many people are very good at Panjabi – the ones I talk to. They can speak Panjabi but they’re not very good at it so they like mainly to talk English so I talk in English as well. T: they probably could understand you but they couldn’t give the answer back in Panjabi R: they can give me an answer but not very good ones The girls seem to have constructed a negative association between language proficiency and thinking skills where the legitimacy of Panjabi is contested. That is, Panjabi cannot be used for formal learning in class. This construct colludes with societal and institutional (i.e. the school’s) beliefs about Panjabi. In contrast, the boys said they did talk to each other in Panjabi to help solve problems, namely in maths and in science. They constructed this behaviour as the teachers thinking they were cheating: Raj: they probably think that we were talking about the answers, telling each other One group of boys said that they were moved for the Standard Assessment Tests (SAT), to sit beside the teacher to inhibit their talking. These tests are important to pupils and to the school. Results will determine funding to the school, and its reputation. Thus, the boys created spaces to negotiate their learning in the non-legitimate language in a way that the girls did not. Further, where the girls seemed to collude with the constructs of symbolic superiority of English, the boys were prepared to provoke negative constructions and intervention from the teachers for using the non-legitimate language in their learning. Creating ‘in’ and ‘out’ groups Heller (1999) writes about the advantages of using the minority language in school as being a structure and mechanism for establishing and defining the ‘in’-ness of the linguistic minority group and the ‘out’-ness of the non- speakers of the minority language. That is, a sense of solidarity among individuals towards the group, around the practice of language. This is demonstrated in the reflections of the informants by speaking in Panjabi and establishing solidarity, such as helping each other with problem solving in class, sharing secrets, gossiping and ‘just for fun’. Constructs of ‘in’-group around Panjabi language are largely based around negotiating intimacy with peers. Both boys and girls talk about secrets and gossip in Panjabi. Thus they establish privacy either among themselves or from those English peers they are talking about, and establish intimacy and friendship with their Panjabi peers. Sur: Like if you’re telling a secret and you don’t want the other people to know G: We speak sometimes Panjabi, if it’s like a secret and the other people don’t know The informants also reflect a confident ‘in’-group construct around Panjabi, where they feel they need not explain or ‘be ashamed’ of speaking in Panjabi in
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front of their English friends. There are echoes again of Gumperz’s (1982) symbolic distinction realised in the two codes. Some boys construct a tension about speaking Panjabi in front of English friends, because on the one hand they are excluded and may think they are being talked about but on the other hand they are friends. J: If I’m talking about them I just like talk in English about something else so they don’t know what I’m talking about Both boys and girls reflect on the anxiety which may be caused in their white monolingual peers when they spoke in Panjabi. However, the girls seem more aware of this and spent more time reflecting on it. Sur: They want to know what you are talking about because like they might think that you are talking about them The girls constructed themselves as a privileged group, because they have access to both language communities, in contrast to their English monolingual peers who do not. In effect they construct the English peer group as excluded: T: Yes you know what they are saying so you don’t feel like ‘ha ha they are talking about me’ However, even though the girls are aware that their monolingual peers may want them to speak in English only, they feel no obligation to include them. The boys have similar constructs towards their monolingual English peers, but they also construct violence from monolingual peers as an outcome of excluding them and reflect on codeswitching to include them: G: If they think you are talking about them and then ask you they just come and smash you in the face or something J: If they were tough I would start speaking English slowly but if I can I’d speak in Panjabi T: I’d still carry on speaking because they can’t make me stop speaking Both boys and girls have constructs which include white monolingual friends in language ‘crossing’ (Rampton, 1995). Here the boys are talking about their friend Alex: G: He knows Panjabi J: We learn him sometimes G: He just carries on with us when we say something in Panjabi he just says it after just for fun Summary This interpretation of the data has identified the sites of influence of gender on the discursive practices of the bilingual children at school. Gender seems to influence the children to position themselves differently particularly in their discursive practices of the non-legitimate language, Panjabi. Significantly, the boys reflect a stronger negative construct of using Panjabi than the girls, imagining constructs of cheating and potential violence in the minds of their teachers and peers. This is a strong response and suggests that substantial stress and anxiety
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are aroused by living in a context, such as the school, where discursive practices are so clearly and uncompromisingly legitimised. It would seem from the data that boys feel the need to disclose these tensions more than girls do. The influence of gender is not so obvious in the children’s reflections concerning constructs of ‘in’-ness around discursive practices in Panjabi. Nearly all the children expressed feelings of solidarity in their discursive practices in Panjabi. One exception was the girl in the group with three boys, who felt that her Panjabi was not as proficient as the others and she rarely used it in school. She did not join in some of the discussion around this issue. The data suggest that boys and girls felt that within their ‘in’-group of discursive practice in Panjabi there was room for inclusion of some non-Panjabi friends, but no obligation to include them. This suggests a sense of agency and power in the users of Panjabi discursive practices despite the regulatory structure of legitimate and non-legitimate languages in which they function in school.
Conclusions The question driving this paper is: how are young bilingual informants positioned and how do they position themselves and others through discursive strategies within structures of legitimate language, gender and schooling? In school and in English the children seem to be manipulating language as a social process to collude or contest structures, making themselves agentive in coercive power structures around language in English school. Borrowing from Bourdieu, school does not use children’s linguistic capital but they can use it at home. Thus, in school they seem to use their non-legitimate language subversively, as a source of power to undermine dominant power structures, of those in positions of power, such as with teachers and bullying peers. While girls also contest English and construct spaces for using Panjabi, they seem to do so differently from boys. In the home and Panjabi/English community, excluding the Panjabi school, the children do not offer constructions of language and power, and subversive language practices. They construct themselves as facilitators – across generations, such as mother or grandparent can’t speak English so they speak Panjabi to them or translate for them – across multilingual literacies (writing letters) across the diaspora. Thus they are not so much manipulating languages but drawing on them as linguistic resources (capital) to support and extend communication. In both home and school these children construct themselves as agentive bilingual language users. In addition, in English school boys and girls construct their language agency differently. Finally, the tension which Bourdieu (1990) recognises in the notion of habitus, between individual action and group values, beliefs and practices, finds support in the data in this study. First, the discursive practices of certain individuals and families within the Panjabi-heritage community who chose to speak English and not Panjabi seem to offer evidence of a violation to the relation of homology, within the transplanted Panjabi community. That is, the transformation or change promoted by individuals which should be constrained by, and fall within, practices acceptable to the group in order to maintain the group, go beyond the
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constraints. Thus, the trajectory of this practice may challenge and ultimately change the homogeneity of the Panjabi community. Second, the constructions of languages and linguistic capital in class between girls and boys also seem to offer evidence of a relation of homology, but where the trajectory of practice and their construction of languages is considerably less clear because of the agency of the boys and girls within the structure of the group. It is worth acknowledging that the conclusions need to be interpreted bearing in mind the small scale of the study. Further research is needed. Nonetheless, we can wonder if the changes in the homogeneity of discursive practices in the Panjabi community are driven as much by external factors, such as the legitimacy of English and the non-legitimacy of Panjabi and the associated notion of more cultural capital accruing to the more legitimate discursive practice, as they are by internal struggle within the community itself, through generational differences and gender towards discursive practices in community and school. Correspondence Any correspondence should be directed to Dr Deirdre Martin, School of Education, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2TT, UK ([email protected]). References Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Bourdieu, P. (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bourdieu, P. (1990) The Logic of Practice. Cambridge: Polity Press. Breakwell, G. (1990) Interviewing. London: Routledge/BPS. Gumperz, J.J. (1982) Discourse Strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heller, M. (1999) Linguistic Minorities and Modernity: A Sociolinguistic Ethnography. London: Blackwell. Lewis, A. (1992) Group child interviews. British Educational Research Journal 18, 413–421. Martin, D. and Stuart-Smith, J. (1998) Exploring bilingual children’s perceptions of being bilingual and biliterate: Implications for educational provision. British Journal of Sociology of Education 19 (2), 237–254. Martin-Jones, M. and Heller, M. (1996) Introduction to the special issues on education in multilingual settings: Discourse, identities and power. Part 1: Constructing legitimacy. Linguistics and Education 8, 3–16. May, S. (ed.) (1999) Critical Multiculturalism: Rethinking Multicultural and Antiracist Education. London: Falmer Press. Nic Craith, M. (2000) Contested identities and the quest for legitimacy. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 21 (5), 399– 413. Rampton, B. (1995) Crossing: Language and Ethnicity Among Adolescents. London: Longman. Rassool, N. (2000) Uncommon languages: The challenges and possibilities of minority language rights. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 21 (5), 386–398. Romaine, S. (1989) Bilingualism. Oxford: Blackwell. Runnymede Trust (2000) The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain (The Parekh Report). London: Profile Books. Skutnabb-Kangas, T. (1984) Bilingualism or Not. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
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Appendix Group interview and discussion The questions are printed on cards which are picked and read by the children in turn. Q1. Do you go to Panjabi class? Where? What do you think of it? Is it nice, or difficult? Do you know how to read and write in Panjabi? What’s good about reading and writing in Panjabi? What’s not so good about reading and writing in Panjabi? Q2. When you talk with your teacher in Panjabi class what language do you talk in? In school what language do you talk to the teachers in? Do you talk to any of the grown-ups in Panjabi? Who? When? Q3. At home, what language do you talk to your granny and granddad in? What language do you talk to your mum in? And to your dad? Q4. At home, which language is it easier for you to talk to your brothers and sisters in? In your street, which language is it easier for you to talk to your friends in? Q5. What languages do you talk to your friends in school – in the classroom? in the playground? Q6. What do you think the teachers think when they hear you speak Panjabi? Q7. Let’s imagine that you are talking with a friend and there are other English children and people nearby who can hear you. How do you feel when they hear you speaking: in Panjabi? in English? Q8. In some places in the world Panjabi people don’t speak Panjabi anymore. They only speak English. Do you think that could happen here in Smethwick? Q9. Imagine that this could happen, that everyone in Smethwick only speaks English, how would you feel? what would happen? Q10.When you are grown-up, adults, and have children, you are a daddy or a mummy, what language or languages will you teach them? Why?
‘Baro Afkaaga Hooyo!’ A Case Study of Somali Literacy Teaching in Liverpool Jo Arthur Edge Hill University College, Ormskirk, UK This paper is based on an ethnographic research project in an urban neighbourhood of Liverpool. The aim of the study is to build an understanding of the communicative and symbolic roles of languages and literacies in the Liverpool Somali community, which forms part of a Somali diaspora within Britain and beyond. The role of literacy in the Somali community is of particular interest in the context of a vigorous oral tradition and of the relatively recent introduction of a writing system for Somali in 1972. Somali literacy lessons for young girls were observed as part of the research. Focusing particularly on bilingual classroom talk during one of these lessons, the paper discusses the shaping of participants’ language practices, in relation on the one hand to their experience of the communicative use of Somali in different social domains, and on the other hand, to different values associated with languages in their repertoire. Data concerning language values have been gathered in the community using interviews and a questionnaire. The paper considers the potential role of Somali literacy – and literacy teaching – in developing the sense of their cultural and linguistic identity which young people have in this community.
Introduction Community schools are important contexts for linguistic and cultural reproduction in minority communities in the UK. Already in its pioneering survey published in 1985, the Linguistic Minorities Project (LMP) observed that ‘mother tongue classes provide an institutional focus not just for the maintenance of language skills but also for their transmission from one generation to the next’ (p. 264). This role for community schooling remains relevant, and can indeed be seen as increasingly urgent, in the contemporary context of an education system which is ever more ‘strongly oriented towards English monolingualism’ (Li Wei, 1994: 58). Communicative use of languages other than English in mainstream school classrooms occurs mainly informally among bilingual learners. Where it is officially sanctioned, and where bilingual teachers or classroom assistants are employed, bilingual interaction between teachers and learners offers transitional support, for the youngest primary school children or for children newly arrived in the country, on their way to coping independently in the monolingual English mainstream. Clearly, such arrangements – the marginalisation or exclusion of community languages from mainstream schools and classrooms – are likely to hinder rather than encourage the maintenance, not only of minority language skills but also of the cultural values associated with those languages. Marginalisation – a majority rather than a minority perspective – is, indeed, reflected in the undifferentiated use of the term ‘mother tongue’ to refer to languages which serve a wide range of communicative and symbolic roles in the lives of members of minority communities. Such languages may or may not be the first language to be acquired, or the main language of the home. They may be national languages of countries of origin, languages of religious heritage or scriptural languages (LMP, 1985: 223–224). In view of this diversity, and of the fact 93 Somali Literacy Teaching in Liverpool
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that community provision for their reproduction can be traced back over decades, for example to the 1970s in the case of Chinese ‘weekend schools’ (Li Wei, 1994), it is perhaps surprising that community schooling has not been more often and more closely investigated by researchers. A notable exception is Li Wei’s 1993 case study of Chinese community classes in Newcastle. The main focus in this account is on explaining, in terms of the language and social networks of parents, the different levels of fluency in Cantonese among children attending the school. However, the study also offers qualitative insights into the attitudes of the British-born children who attend the classes and the concerns of their parents, who perceived with some alarm that the social behaviour of their children was increasingly anglicised. The role of the community school in contributing to social and cultural reproduction – rather than merely linguistic reproduction – is signalled. The teaching of Chinese literacy is central to this role: ‘In communities such as the Chinese where written language becomes a symbol of traditional culture, a reduction or loss of ability to read and write their ethnic language may take on a particular social significance for their members’ (Li Wei, 1993: 207). More recent research attention given to community schooling further highlights the importance of literacy. Examples are Edwards and Nwenmely’s (2001) study of the teaching of Kwéyòl in London and Gurnah’s (2001) account of the teaching of Yemeni and other community languages in Sheffield. This research development can be linked to the growth in the UK of the ‘new’ literacy studies, originating in Street’s (e.g. 1984) theorisation of an ideologically differentiated view of literacies, and drawing on Hornberger’s (e.g. 1994) continua model of biliteracy. Underpinned by these theoretical perspectives, there is a move towards ethnographic research approaches which, as Saxena (2001) points out, are able to take account of wider social forces, including the role of racism, in shaping language practices, both spoken and written, and the cultural values attached to them. This paper is based on an ethnographic study which investigates language and literacy among Somali speakers, a minority group in Liverpool, England. The study addresses a number of broad research questions relating to inter-generational variation in language practices and values, and to the construction of new British Somali identities by young people in the community. In addition, the research design responds to a need identified by Martin-Jones (1991: 53) for ‘micro-level studies of language in use’. A Somali community school is a key research site and it is here that micro-ethnographic observation of literacy lessons for young teenage girls has taken place, accompanied by audioand video-recording. The research design is triangulated. Further data have been gathered in the form of interviews with students and their teachers concerning their motivation for participation in the course and their views on the progress they have made. In addition, the students have completed weekly diaries about their experience of the course and of Somali literacy practices in daily life. This paper includes a transcribed extract from one of the literacy lessons. However, before presenting and discussing the extract, in the next section of the paper I describe the broader research setting. The account which I offer of the Somali community in urban Liverpool includes historical contextualisation, in terms of the origins of the community and its patterns of migration, as well as
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information about its present socio-economic circumstances. This is followed by a more detailed description of the micro-context of the community school, explaining the genesis of the literacy course, and introducing the participants.
The Liverpool Somali Community Origins and patterns of migration The Republic of Somalia, on the eastern horn of Africa, was created in 1960, when the areas under colonial administration, respectively, by Britain in the north and by Italy in the south became independent and were subsequently joined. The nomadic lifestyle of the majority of the inhabitants of the region perhaps goes some way to explain a tradition of seamanship among Somali males, as a result of which they were already to be found in British ports, including Liverpool, in the second half of the 19th century. Up until the 1950s the Somali presence in these ports remained largely transient. However, the seamen formed a point of contact for increased settlement in the period after independence and this extended to other British cities, chiefly Manchester, Sheffield and London, where the largest Somali community in Britain is to be found in Tower Hamlets. From the 1980s when resistance grew to the military regime of Siyad Barre, and particularly after the outbreak of civil war in 1988, the Somali communities in Britain were the destination of refugees fleeing the violence and destruction which overtook the country. These refugees are part of a wider Somali diaspora which has resulted in substantial communities in neighbouring Kenya and the Arab League states of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, in Germany, Norway and Sweden in Europe, and as far distant as Canada. There are no reliable statistics on the present-day size of the Liverpool Somali community. Estimates range widely: from 3000 to 5000 individuals, living in some 300 to 600 households. Even in the absence of exact figures it is clear that the proportion of young people in the community is very high: an unpublished 1991 survey puts this at 42% in the 0 to 19 year age group. The Liverpool environment Despite the presence of the longest-standing black community in the country, their experience remains one of extreme residential segregation within the Toxteth area, more commonly known locally by its postcode, Liverpool 8. Like other black people in Liverpool, Somalis have also settled here and, even within this area, most families live in just two wards, Granby and Abercromby, described by one observer as ‘surely one of the most grim and depressing neighbourhoods in Britain’ (Stokes, 2000: 4). Small (1991: 515) concludes that Liverpool black people are the victims of ‘extensive and entrenched segregation, including residential, employment, educational and social segregation’. The lack of support accorded to Liverpool Somalis can also be traced to the ‘colour-blind’ local governance of Liverpool (Small, 1991): ‘Whether we are looking at education, employment, health or crime there is no routine monitoring and analysis of the Somali community, or other communities, by the public authorities’ (Stokes, 2000: 7). This failure means that there is no data base which allows for appropriate responses to the experience and needs of black people in Liverpool, including Somalis, in any of these areas. The rate of unemployment in the Somali commu-
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nity is of especial concern: in the absence of more recent statistics it is worth noting that a survey conducted in 1991 concludes that the rate of unemployment in the community was over 70%. This rate was ten times the national average at that time and four times the Liverpool average. The community thus lives in intense poverty and is heavily dependent on state benefits where these, depending on the immigration status of individuals, are payable. In the next section I shall have more to say about the educational experience of Somali children. From the points I have made in this section it seems appropriate to conclude that the Liverpool Somali community is ‘in deep distress’ (Stokes, 2000: 19). Among the more positive aspects of the community’s experience are self-help initiatives, such as the ‘Baro Afkaaga Hooyo!’ Literacy Course, which is the focus of the next section. A description of the course, its genesis and the participants will serve as an introduction to a transcribed extract from one of the lessons which were observed during the research project.
The ‘Baro Afkaaga Hooyo!’ Literacy Course ‘Baro afkaaga hooyo!’ means, in Somali, ‘learn (or study) your language (or your mother tongue)’. It is the name chosen by the teachers of an introductory literacy course which ran for 10 weeks in early 2000. The lessons took place in a disused primary school which had been made available to the community for other after-school classes. In this ‘homework club’ lessons in maths, English and science were offered through the medium of English. Those few classes in Somali Language and Culture provided for youngsters prior to the ‘Afkaaga Hooyo!’ literacy course tended to focus on learning about Islam and the Islamic way of life. In addition, children attend Qur’anic classes in order to learn the scriptural language of Islam, classical Arabic. The ‘Baro Afkaaga Hooyo!’ course was designed and taught by two members of the community, one a male community worker who is also a writer of Somali fiction and poetry, and the other a female trained nurse and health worker, who has also worked as an interpreter and a bilingual support teacher in Liverpool primary schools. The students were 10 girls aged 11 or 12. Although many more young people were keen to attend the course, the size of the accommodation limited numbers. In deciding to teach only girls, the teachers reasoned firstly that a single sex group would avoid any concerns that might be raised by parents, in this Moslem community, over mixed provision for girls and boys. The decision that the group should be girls-only was then based on the teachers’ view that girls would be more highly motivated and better-behaved than boys. The teachers felt that this was important in ensuring that members of the community would view the course as a success. The course was intended as a pilot project, and its success might convince the community to support further courses, including courses for boys. The lesson extract which follows occurred towards the end of Lesson Three of the course. It centres on a badge – a sticky label with the Somali words printed on it saying ‘Kamaan cabsan dhakhtarka maanta’. This can be translated into English as ‘I was brave (literally not afraid) for the doctor today’. The student had received the badge – rather in the way children sometimes receive a congratulatory badge when they visit the dentist – after taking a blood test. The experience
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had been unusual in that there are normally no Somali-speaking doctors available to the community. The blood tests were in fact being conducted for research purposes by a Somali-speaking doctor visiting at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. The extract begins as the student approaches the teacher with her badge. The talk in the classroom focuses first of all on the words on the badge, which are spelt out by the students and written on the board by the teacher. It is only after this that it emerges that not all the students understand what the sentence means. In the less structured sequence which then follows the teacher offers some explanation of the blood testing programme, and there is some discussion among the students. Finally the teacher gets the students ‘on task’ again by asking them to write up their diaries with some comments about the lesson that day. Extract from Lesson Three1 S1: [to teacher] eeg look T:
haa:: kamaan cabsan dhakhtarka maanta . this is very good . ok:: I was not afraid of the doctor today ma markii dhiigga lagaa qaadayay baa? . this is good is this when you had your blood taken?
S2: [to student 1] where did you get that? S1: (
)
T:
akhriya bal hadda? [goes to board] can you all read?
S:
kamaan cabsan maanta dhakhtar I was not afraid today doctor
T:
kamaan cabsan . bal korka ka-dheh? [writes first letter on the board] I was not afraid can you read it?
SS: [spelling in Somali] ka T:
ka . haye k ok
The sequence continues for some time with the students giving the Somali letter names as the teacher writes them on the board, occasionally correcting the students where they use English letter names. The teacher also reads aloud each whole word which has been spelt out and written on the board. When the whole sentence has been gone through in this way, however, she is interrupted as she reads it aloud. T: S: T:
very good . kamaan
{cabsan dhakhtarka maanta {what does it mean?
what does it mean? what does it mean? [points to each word on the board] kamaan cabsan dhakhtarka maanta . I was not afraid of the doctor today kamaan baqan dhakhtarka maanta . markii dhiigga laga qaadayay buu dhaktarku soo siiyay .
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. I was not frightened of the doctor today it was given to her by the doctor at the blood test kamaan cabsan dakhtarka maanta I was not afraid of the doctor today S:
(
T:
dhakhtarki dhiigga qaadayay . dhiig baa layska qaaday lagu ogaanayo bilaa dhiigga . the doctor who was taking the blood there was a blood test to check for anaemia berrito wuxuu ka jiraa … [to student showing her work] that’s good . haa tomorrow it will be yes
S:
I haven’t got it
S:
why? what’s it for?
T:
it’s . jooniska iyo dhiigla’aanta iyo baa layska qaadayaa . it is good . the tests are for hepatitis and anaemia . hooyadiin u sheega oo waxa tidhaahdaa na-gee . tell your mothers to take you there khamiista wuxuu ka-jiraa Princes Park Health Centre on Thursday they’re testing at Princes Park Health Centre
S:
what time?
T:
what time? {I think from 9
S: T:
)
{I don’t have meningitis aroorta siddeeda ilaa iyo lixda . I would like to get … I will also … tomorrow from 8 till 6 anna waa layga soo qaaday . amba waa laygu soo dhejiyay kamaan baqan dhakhtarka maanta . haa I had mine a few days ago I had the badge that says I was not afraid of the doctor yes haye dhammeeya . ma dhammayseen dairiyigii? yaa dhammeeyay oo fariida? ok finish have you finished your diaries? who is clever and has finished?
Discussion In the following discussion I take bilingual language practices which were observed, in this and other lessons, as a starting point, suggesting what they reveal about the bilingualism of the girls in the group. I then raise some questions around the aims and possible outcomes of the course, in terms of Somali literacy on the one hand, and fluency in spoken Somali on the other hand. Next I’ll broaden the discussion in order to explore the communicative purposes and the symbolic value which are associated with Somali in this minority language community in a British urban context. My conclusion will, I hope, offer a constructive view of the potential of literacy teaching initiatives in this community. Bilingual language practices The lesson extract illustrates an asymmetry in language choice which was characteristic of the spoken discourse observed throughout the course: the teachers predominantly used Somali and the students English. Furthermore, the students were not observed to use Somali to each other, except to repeat part of
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the lesson content, for example in order to confirm for a neighbour the Somali spelling of a word. This pattern of language choice by the students might well be expected in an educational context which, although ‘after-school’, closely replicates the environment of mainstream school classrooms so strongly associated, in the daily experience of the students, with exclusive use of English. However, in the wider research study a similar asymmetrical pattern of language choice by adults and children was both observed to be common in households visited and confirmed in interviews. As the mother of one of the literacy course students commented of her daughter: ‘If she knows you speak English she wouldn’t speak to you in Somali’. (Here, as elsewhere in the paper, interview extracts are cited in their original language, and a translation into English is provided for extracts in Somali.) Instances occur throughout the data of switches by students from Somali to English, of the kind which have been described by Nussbaum (1990) as self-facilitative, since they allow speakers to continue to participate in the discourse. Hetero-facilitative switching, in Nussbaum’s terms, responds to the language proficiencies or preferences of conversation partners. In addressing students both teachers used switching of this type, again from Somali to English, as an intercomprehension strategy, as does the teacher throughout the extract from Lesson 3. The handouts which accompanied the weekly lessons similarly made concessions to the students’ limited ability to read Somali, since headings and instructions tended to be given in English. For example, Figure 1 shows how one handout begins. None of the students had experienced schooling or formal literacy learning at any stage of their lives in any other than an English-speaking environment. For them education is an English language domain. Similarly, they are used to encounters associated with health care, such as visits to doctors’ surgeries, being conducted in English. The screening for hepatitis which was being carried out in the community by a Somali doctor – and the badge in Somali which he gave the children – thus ran counter to their expectations of language use for such events. However, the response of one student to the badge slogan – ‘What does it mean?’ – reveals that she (as well as others in the group) were not merely surprised by the use of Somali: they did not understand the slogan. The notion of domains of language use, and of differential proficiencies related to those SOMALI LITERACY Lesson Three Creating Words – Four or more letters Bas + baas = Basbaas Ber + bera = Berbera Bir + qaab = Birqaab etc.
Figure 1 An example of a handout
Tutor: A..... S.....
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domains, does not offer an adequate explanation of the bilingualism of these young speakers. If that were so, we might expect to be able to assume the home and family as a domain of Somali language use. The reality is much more complex, and includes the incursion of English into Somali homes. For example, a diary entry by one student, whose parents are fluent and literate in both Somali and English contained a wish: ‘I’d like to learn household objects in Somali’. For these girls becoming literate in Somali was not, therefore, and could not be, a matter of transferring language knowledge from the spoken to the written mode. It is useful to examine the learning which the girls were accomplishing from two different perspectives. I’ll consider firstly communicative use of Somali and then the symbolic value attached to Somali. Somali oracy through literacy? The initial decision to offer a course in Somali literacy, as opposed to one focusing on spoken proficiency, was made by the two volunteer teachers, who felt that their skills and experience equipped them better for literacy teaching. However, week by week the lessons provided models and opportunities for spoken Somali: as one of the teachers put it, ‘we encourage [the students] to speak Somali while we’re teaching’. The same teacher commented mid-way through the 10-week course: ‘I can see some children are progressing even when it comes to, you know, the spoken side of the language’. The lessons thus offered an indirect approach to improving the students’ spoken fluency, with the advantage of avoiding a challenge to the perception, in their own eyes or in those of others, that they are ‘native speakers’ of Somali. This seems important in view of questionnaire responses and interview data in which these students and other young people in the community repeatedly identified Somali as ‘my language’ or ‘our language’, making statements such as ‘I need to learn it because it is my language’. As a result many felt strongly motivated to improve their knowledge of the language, not merely for communicative purposes – ‘so I can speak with my parents’ – but also for affective reasons, as in the view of the young person who claimed ‘it’s shameful not to know your own language’. In terms of their limited active use of Somali, it may be appropriate to categorise these young people as ‘marginal members’ (Dorian, 1982) of the Somali speech community. Their sense of shared identity or solidarity within their peer group is not primarily or habitually expressed through the communicative use of Somali, and it is therefore problematic to describe Somali as their ‘we-code’ in Gumperz’s (1982) terms. However, as has been observed to be the case among young members of certain other minority language communities elsewhere in Europe (Gardner-Chloros, 1997), in claiming the language of their parents and community as their own, they express a strong sense of their symbolic attachment to it. When asked why they wanted to attend Somali lessons several students also expressed concern about being able to pass the language on to their own children in the future. This concern can be viewed within the context of a widely shared sense across the community that language shift is in progress. In interviews adult members of the community commented on ‘weakening’ of the Somali spoken by the younger generation, as in the following extract:
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Maya afsoomaligooda waxa aad iyo aad xitaa kan soomaliya ka yimi iyo kan halka ku dhashay afsoomaligoodu waa dayacan yihiin waa labeeb, labeeb na waa waxa layskuudaray isku jiir. (No their Somali is very, even for the one who came from Somalia and the one who was born here, weak and diluted, diluted in the sense that it has been added or mixed.) This development, another interviewee reported, ‘really worries me because I’ve seen many problems in the community where … the children and the parents cannot understand each other’. It was, furthermore, clear that members of the community saw the loss of Somali as part of a wider cultural shift: Haa way ilaawayaan , bikows may arag dhul lagu dhigo ama kaljarkii hore lagu qabanayo, laakiin waxaan jeclaan lahayn in had iyo jeer labaro dhaqoonkoodii. (Yes, they will forget because they haven’t seen a place to learn Somali language, a place to hold their culture.) Many adults in the community use the term ‘fish and chips’ to describe youngsters they perceive to have become – or to be becoming – assimilated to the cultural norms of the dominant English-speaking society. The ‘Baro Afkaaga Hooyo!’ teachers showed understanding for the situation of such young people, one of them pointing out: You know the host culture is more dominant than the Somali language. I mean television controls everything and it’s quite difficult for them to associate themselves with Somali culture when they know very little about it. This teacher saw the language focus of the course as an appropriate way to address the problem: I think the language will give them a platform … to actually find out both the language and the culture. However, the explicit focus of the course was specifically on literacy. Mentioned above is the teachers’ rationale for this in terms of the skills they felt they could bring to the design and delivery of the course. More importantly, the focus on literacy accorded with wishes expressed by students (as well as other young people who would have liked to attend the course but could not be accommodated). In interviews adult members of the community frequently mentioned literacy as having a useful role to play in responding to the threat they perceived to Somali language and culture, as in the statement: Waxa kaliya oo ay af soomaali ku hadli karaan haddii loo sameeyo iskuul, macalimiin, qoraal iyo akhrisba la baro. (They can only speak the Somali language if they have a school and teachers who will teach them to read and write.) It is to the role of Somali literacy, in communicative and in symbolic terms, that I now turn. Somali literacy: communicative purposes and symbolic value The spoken rather than the written word is of central importance in traditional Somali society, both communicatively and symbolically. It is the vehicle of an
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oral tradition of poetry recitation and story-telling which is the main source of entertainment and which also instructs succeeding generations in clan values, genealogy and history. In the 20th century, radio broadcasts have augmented the geographical range of this oral medium of information and entertainment. However, the interpersonal exchange of news retains its salience as a social practice in rural and urban Somali-speaking communities, both in Somalia and elsewhere. The conventional greeting of one Somali to another remains ‘Is ka warran?’ – ‘What news do you have?’ In contrast to the many centuries of Somali oral tradition, the now agreed writing system for Somali, using a modified Roman alphabet, was introduced only in 1972. Schoolbooks were then printed so that Somali could be used as the official language of primary education. There also followed a country-wide mass adult literacy campaign, involving the suspension of the studies of secondary school students so that they could travel to even the remotest areas as instructors. Unfortunately, the campaign was cut short by the drought which occurred in 1973, when campaign workers were redirected to drought relief. In the longer term, the potential of the campaign for increasing the literacy rate among Somali speakers has been negated by the disruptive effects of the war years which began in 1977. Reliable figures are not available, but in 1983 Adam estimated a 60% literacy rate in Somalia, while the Ethnologue database now gives a figure of between 24% and 40%. Writing more recently, Kahin estimated in 1997 that approximately 25% of adult Somalis in the UK can be considered literate. So, for example, a majority of members of the Liverpool Somali community cannot read for themselves leaflets produced in Somali by the City Council Social Services. Few other reading materials, such as books, are available. In interviews some of the ‘Baro Afkaaga Hooyo!’ students reported the reading of letters from Somalia in their homes and the writing of replies. Other Somali literacy events were, however, seldom observed. The prospects, for the students, of putting their new literacy skills into practice after the course, by communicative use of Somali reading or writing, did not seem great. The strong motivation they expressed for participating in the course would therefore not seem to correspond to instrumental benefits, in Gardner and Lambert’s (1972) terms, given also that Somali language skills have little value in the UK employment marketplace. Instead the students’ motivation would seem to be integrative, reflecting a need to identify with and be a full member of the community. I shall now discuss several ways in which learning on the course responded to this need, and I’ll do so by proposing three incidents or events which might be considered significant. (1) Magacaa? (What’s your name?) One of the first tasks the girls carried out, in the very first lesson, was writing their names on the covers of the diaries they would make entries in every week. For some this turned out to be an opportunity to find out how their name is written in Somali; for others it was the first occasion they had used the written Somali form of their name in an educational context. For example, Asha wrote her name as Caasha, and Hamda wrote hers as Xamda. One student diary entry for that week read: ‘I was taught how to say my name and write it in Somali and it was a great experience for doing that’. This ‘re-naming’ can be seen as symbolically
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significant, given that personal names are so closely bound up with our sense of personal identity (Skutnabb-Kangas, 2000).
(2) The history of literacy in Somali A second teaching and learning event, in a later lesson, focused on the introduction of the Somali script in 1972 and the mass literacy campaign that followed. This unplanned event arose because one of the teachers had brought in a Somali reading book (loaned to her by an older member of the community) which had been used in primary schools in Somalia in the 1970s. The discussion revealed that the girls knew very little about the introduction of Somali literacy, which of course forms part of their cultural heritage. They also lacked a historical explanation for the rarity of Somali literacy practices which they were able to observe in daily life, as evidenced in the diaries they kept during the course. This might well have implications for the status which they perceive Somali to have, particularly in the context of a society in which printed English is ubiquitous. (3) Somali language within Islamic culture A third and final event I wish to comment on here did not, in fact, take place during a lesson but during one of the group interviews with students which were conducted as part of the research study. Asked ‘Do you know of some books in Somali?’, one student replied ‘We can get them from the Olive Tree’. Here she was referring to an Islamic shop in Liverpool city centre which does not, however, as her teacher was able to point out, sell any books in Somali. The association which the student made between Somali culture and Islam is one which was made strongly in interviews with adult members of the community. In Smolicz’s (1981) terms, religion can be seen as a core value of this minority community, central to the preservation of its cultural heritage. At the heart of the Islamic way of life is the Qur’an, and it is significant that the language of the Qur’an is Classical Arabic, to which is accorded the highest status. Paramount attention is therefore given, by Somali Moslems, like Moslems of other language groups, to the formal learning of Qur’anic Arabic. Thus it can be observed that, before the ‘Baro Afkaaga Hooyo!’ literacy course, those few classes in Somali Language and Culture which were provided for youngsters in the Liverpool Somali community tended to focus on learning about Islam and the Islamic way of life. Within an Islamic value system Somali – a secular language of recent written origin and with little written literary tradition – perhaps inevitably risks marginalisation. The experience of the ‘Baro Afkaaga Hooyo!’ course as a whole, with opportunities for discussion such as the one concerning the Olive Tree shop, drew the students’ attention to the distinctiveness of Somali language and culture within the overarching heritage of Islam.
Conclusion The experience of language learning which the ‘Baro Afkaaga Hooyo!’ students brought with them to the course corresponds to what Ruiz (1984) described as language-as-problem. In the mainstream schools they attend children from the Somali community are perceived to have a language problem in that they lack skills in English. However, special provision – and funding – for English language support in Liverpool schools is inadequate and has been
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progressively cut back over recent years. Where it is provided, it is overwhelmingly likely to be monolingual in both its aims and its strategies, with the learners’ first language viewed, albeit implicitly, as a hindrance to effective learning of the socially dominant school language. The lack of bilingual classroom support in Liverpool schools for children of Somali heritage – and indeed, other non-English backgrounds – is clear evidence of the marginalisation of these learners’ home and community languages (Lawlor, 1999). Lambert (1977) describes the probable outcomes of such situations as subtractive bilingualism, since the individual incurs a loss, whether linguistic, cultural or psychological. The further link made by Cummins (1986) between subtractive bilingualism and poor educational achievement is taken up by Oliver and Purdie (1998: 208) when they argue that ‘bicultural ambivalence may account partially for minority students’ failure to achieve academically’. Statistics on the actual educational achievement of Liverpool Somali children are not available, due to the failure of Liverpool Education Department to implement ethnic monitoring procedures properly. It is, however, undisputed that these levels of achievement, for example at GCSE, are so unsatisfactory as to be viewed as ‘alarming’ (Stokes, 2000: 19). An extreme lack of confidence in the public education provided is reflected in the statement of one Somali parent: ‘To be honest, I don’t know why we bother to send our children to school’ (Stokes, 2000: 18). The disaffection of the children themselves can be adduced from increasing numbers of exclusions from schools (Stokes, 2000: 20). Romaine (1995: 223) reminds us that ‘usually a community undergoing [language] shift is embattled on a number of other fronts, and language preservation may receive low priority’. However, while the macro-social determinants of language shift may be beyond the control of the community, as Li Wei (1993) points out in his study of Chinese community schooling in Newcastle, there is increasing research documentation of local struggles by people from minority groups, both individually and collectively, against social, economic and educational inequality. For example, Gurnah (2001) offers an account of the work of the Association of Sheffield Community Language Schools, including the contribution of such schooling to ‘the affirmation of distinctive cultural identities and to the building of learners’ self-confidence’. Similarly, Edwards and Nwenmely (2001: 98) argue that Kwéyòl literacy classes for adults in London provide ‘a practical course of action for those conscious of the links between the language, national identity and pride’. Set against a failure of language planning by dominant agencies and institutions on behalf of minority communities, such initiatives represent, as Hornberger (2001: 364) has argued in the case of indigenous literacies in the US, ‘language planning from the bottom up, as an avenue for cultural expression, and as a door of opportunity for the disempowered’. The ‘Baro Afkaaga Hooyo!’ Somali literacy course has opened up debate within the Somali-speaking community in Liverpool over the role of such provision in the education of its young people and in the reproduction of the Somali language. On the level of individual students it has also contributed to their knowledge about their cultural inheritance as well as giving them a positive experience of the communicative use of Somali in a learning context. As one student put it in her diary: ‘We read this Somali story. O boy I was excited’.
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Correspondence Any correspondence should be directed to Jo Arthur, Department of English, Edge Hill University College, Ormskirk, Lancashire, L39 4QP, UK ([email protected]). Note 1. Transcription conventions Participants: T = teacher S1, S2 etc. = student 1, student 2 etc S = unidentified student SS = several students speaking at once Conventions: Somali in plain font English in bold font English translation of Somali (on line below) in italics ( ) = inaudible speech . = short pause … = an unfinished utterance ? = rising/questioning intonation { = onset of simultaneous speech by more than one speaker { :: = lengthening of syllable [ ] = contextual information
References Adam, H.M. (1983) Language, national consciousness and identity - the Somali experience. In I.M. Lewis (ed.) Nationalism and Self Determination in the Horn of Africa (pp. 31–42). London: Ithaca Press. Cummins, J. (1986) Empowering minority students: A framework for intervention. Harvard Educational Review 56 (1), 18–36. Dorian, N. (1982) Defining the speech community to include its working margins. In S. Romaine (ed.) Sociolinguistic Variation in Speech Communities (pp. 25–33). London: Edward Arnold. Edwards, V. and Nwenmely, H. (2001) Language, literacy and world view. In M. Martin-Jones and K. Jones (eds) Multilingual Literacies: Reading and Writing in Different Worlds (pp. 91–102). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Gardner, R. and Lambert, W.E. (1972) Attitudes and Motivation in Second Language Learning. Rowley, MA: Newbury House. Gardner-Chloros, P. (1997) Vernacular Literacy in New Minority Settings in Europe. In A. Tabouret-Keller, R.B. Le Page, P. Gardner-Chloros and G. Varro (eds) Vernacular Literacy: A Re-Evaluation (pp. 189–221). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Gumperz, J.J. (1982) Discourse Strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gurnah, A. (2001) Languages and literacies for autonomy. In M. Martin-Jones and K. Jones (eds) Multilingual Literacies: Reading and Writing in Different Worlds (pp. 233–245). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Hornberger, N.H. (1994) Continua of biliteracy. In B.M. Ferdman, R. Weber and A.G. Ramírez (eds) Literacy across Languages and Cultures (pp. 103–139). New York: SUNY Press. Hornberger, N.H. (2001) Multilingual literacies, literacy practices, and the continua of biliteracy. In M. Martin-Jones and K. Jones (eds) Multilingual Literacies: Reading and Writing in Different Worlds (pp. 353–367). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Kahin, M.H. (1997) Educating Somali Children in Britain. London: Trentham Books. Lambert, W.E. (1977) The effects of bilingualism on the individual: Cognitive and
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socio-cultural consequences. In P. Hornby (ed.) Bilingualism. Psychological, Social and Educational Implications. New York: Academic Press. Lawlor, F. (1999) The social and educational problems of Somali children between 11 and 16 years old in the Liverpool 8 area. MA Dissertion, University of Liverpool. Linguistic Minorities Project (1985) The Other Languages of England. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Li Wei (1993) Mother tongue maintenance in a Chinese community school in Newcastle upon Tyne: Developing a social network perspective. Language and Education 7 (3), 199–215. Li Wei (1994) Three Generations, Two Languages, One Family. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Martin-Jones, M. (1991) Sociolinguistic Surveys as a source of evidence in the study of bilingualism: A critical assessment of survey work conducted among linguistic minorities in three British cities. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 90, 37–55. Nussbaum, L. (1990) Plurilingualism in foreign language classrooms in Catalonia. In Papers from the Workshop on the Impact and Consequences of Code-Switching. Strasbourg: ESF Network on Code-Switching and Language Contact. Oliver, R. and Purdie, N. (1998) The attitudes of bilingual children to their languages. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 19 (3), 199–213. Romaine, S. (1995) Bilingualism. Oxford: Blackwell. Ruiz, R. (1984) Orientations in Language Planning. NABE Journal 8 (2), 15–34. Saxena, M. (2001) Taking account of history and culture in community-based research on multilingual literacy. In M. Martin-Jones and K. Jones (eds) Multilingual Literacies: Reading and Writing in Different Worlds (pp. 275–298). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Skutnabb-Kangas, T. (2000) Linguistic Genocide in Education or Worldwide Diversity and Human Rights? Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Small, S. (1991) Racialised relations in Liverpool: A contemporary anomaly. New Community 17 (4), 511–537. Smolicz, J.J. (1981) Languages as a core value of culture. In H. Baetens-Beardsmore (ed.) Elements of Bilingual Theory. Brussels: Vrije Universiteit. Stokes, P. (2000) The Somali Community in Liverpool. A Report for a Commission of Enquiry. Birmingham: Foundation for Civil Society. Street, B. (1984) Literacy in Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bilingual Resources and ‘Funds of Knowledge’ for Teaching and Learning in Multi-ethnic Classrooms in Britain Marilyn Martin-Jones School of Education and Lifelong Learning, University of Wales Aberystwyth, Wales
Mukul Saxena Department of English Language and Applied Linguistics, Universiti Brunei Darussalam, Brunei Darussalam This paper is based on an ethnographic project carried out in primary classrooms in the North West of England. The focus of the project was on ways in which the ‘roles’ of new bilingual classroom assistants were being defined through the organisational practices and communicative routines of daily life in these classrooms (practices and routines primarily orchestrated by monolingual class teachers). We looked at these classroom processes by incorporating insights from classroom observation, from participants’ own accounts and from our own analyses of audio and video-recordings of different types of teaching/learning events. We present an account of bilingual teaching/learning events in which the bilingual assistants were able to use the children’s home or community language and draw on ‘funds of knowledge’ (Moll et al., 1992) associated with worlds beyond the school. In our analysis of these events, we focus in particular on: ways in which they drew on the bilingual resources within their communicative repertoire in negotiating their relationship with the children; ways in which they linked home and school contexts for learning; and verbal and non-verbal ways in which knowledge of the world beyond the school was contextualised in classroom discourse.
Introduction The particular form of educational provision we are concerned with in this paper is that which has come to be known in Britain as ‘bilingual support’. This is special provision that has been developed since the mid-1980s, for bilingual learners from minority ethnic groups, primarily in multilingual urban areas of England, Wales and Scotland. The organisation of this provision varies from school to school, but generally speaking, it involves occasional use of the learners’ home or community language, along with English, in the mainstream classroom context and in a range of teaching/learning events across the curriculum. Bilingual support is generally provided in the early years of primary education and is overtly transitional in its goals; that is, the learners’ home language is used to facilitate the transition to monolingual English-medium education. As this relatively new (and minimal) form of bilingual education has been developed, a new category of educational practitioner has been created. Since the mid-1980s, bilingual adults from local linguistic minority groups have been appointed by schools and local education authorities (LEAs) as ‘bilingual aides’ or ‘bilingual classroom assistants’. For some, this has meant official recognition for a role they have already assumed on a voluntary basis. The language backgrounds of bilingual classroom assistants are diverse and 107 Bilingual Resources and ‘Funds of Knowledge’
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generally reflect the sociolinguistic make-up of the local population and the linguistic minority groups represented there. Bilingual classroom assistants now work in schools in many urban areas of Britain. Speakers of different languages of Asian and African origin, such as Panjabi, Gujarati, Urdu, Sylheti, Bengali, Cantonese and Somali, are involved in developing this form of educational provision. In the mid-1980s, the development of bilingual support was endorsed by the authors of the Swann Report (DES, 1985). The Swann Committee explicitly rejected the idea of developing bilingual education programmes (along North American lines) because they felt that the establishment of distinct forms of educational provision for learners from linguistic minority groups would result in segregation or marginalisation. However, they came out in favour of bilingual support, provided that it was organised within the mainstream classroom. One specific recommendation of the Swann Committee was that each school with a large intake of bilingual learners from minority ethnic groups should have a ‘bilingual resource’; someone who could ‘help with the transitional1 needs of the non-English speaking children starting school’ (DES, 1985: 407). The Committee also gave examples of the types of people who might take on the role of ‘bilingual resource’. These included bilingual staff already appointed to a school (e.g. a bilingual teacher, a non-teaching assistant or a nursery nurse); bilingual parents or even older children from local secondary schools involved in community service programmes or child-care courses. The role of the person acting as a ‘bilingual resource’ was defined as follows: We would see such a resource as providing a degree of continuity between the home and school environment by offering psychological and social support for the child, as well as being able to explain simple educational concepts in a child’s mother tongue, if the need arises, but always working within the mainstream classroom and alongside the class teacher. (DES, 1985: 407, italics added) In the concluding section of this paper, we will return to the specific terms employed in the Swann Report (and in many LEA and school policies) to define the nature and purpose of bilingual support. Here, we will just note that, since the mid-1980s, there has been a distinct trend nationally towards the appointment of bilingual classroom assistants by schools and LEAs. For the most part, the bilinguals who have been appointed occupy low status positions that have become increasingly precarious as funding has been cut back. In the 1990s, as severe cuts were made in local budgets we also saw fully qualified bilingual teachers being re-deployed into bilingual support work. Ever since this particular form of educational provision began to be implemented there has been considerable variation in the way in which the role of bilingual support staff has been defined, from one LEA to another, and from one school to another. In order to gain insights into the processes involved in the construction of this new category of staffing in local educational sites, we undertook a three-year research project in one LEA in the North West of England in the early 1990s2. Over three years, we documented in detail the ways in which a local bilingual assistant scheme was being implemented at school and classroom level. The scheme was initiated in 1989 and it committed the LEA to creating the
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equivalent of 40 full-time posts for bilingual classroom assistants. All those appointed were women of South Asian descent and, between them, they spoke a range of languages, including Bengali, Sylheti, Panjabi, Pashtu, Gujarati and Urdu. Because our research project began just after the new bilingual assistant scheme had been initiated, we were able to chart the very early stages of implementation. We did this in two main ways: (1) Soon after the launch of the scheme, we conducted a survey of all the bilingual classroom assistants who had been appointed across the five districts of the LEA. This survey was then followed up by in-depth interviews with a sample of those surveyed and by audio-recorded discussions with local district teams of bilingual classroom assistants. (2) After this, our time was devoted primarily to observation, audio and video-recording of bilingual teaching/ learning events in classrooms where bilingual assistants were working and to observation of training sessions organised for the bilingual assistants at local district level. We also conducted a series of in-depth interviews with the educational practitioners most closely involved in the implementation of the scheme. We found that even within this one LEA, there was substantial variation, from district to district, and from school to school, in the way in which the role of the bilingual classroom assistants was being defined. For example, in many schools, the bilingual assistants were assigned to several classes and worked with different class teachers. Only a minority (15%) worked in just one class (Martin-Jones et al., 1992; Martin-Jones & Saxena, 1989). Those who were assigned to one class not only had more time to establish a relationship with the learners, they were also able to build a working partnership with the class teacher and participate in the planning of teaching/ learning activities. During our observations in the classroom context, we found that there were two broad ways in which bilingual support was organised: the bilingual assistants were either asked to work on their own with small groups of bilingual learners or they worked ‘alongside’ the class teacher, with the class as a whole. In some classes, the bilingual assistants worked in both these ways. In others, one particular way of working predominated. In our earlier work (Martin-Jones & Saxena, 1995, 1996 [2001]), we provided detailed accounts of bilingual teaching/learning events where monolingual class teachers and bilingual classroom assistants were working ‘alongside’ the class teacher, an arrangement sometimes referred to in the literature as ‘tandem teaching’ (Bourne, 1989: 148; Ellis, 1985: 16). We showed how, in this kind of teaching/learning event, the bilingual assistants were positioned as interpreters of the ‘words’ of the class teachers, primarily because the class teachers retained control over the turn-taking and generally orchestrated the teaching/learning activities. They assumed the main speaking rights and allocated turns at talk to the bilingual classroom assistants. In different classrooms and in different types of teaching/learning activities, this discursive positioning clearly constrained the bilingual assistants’ use of the children’s home language (Panjabi) as a medium of teaching/learning and limited the scope of their contribution to classroom conversations. In this paper, we want to focus on those moments in the classes we observed and recorded when the bilingual assistants were able to use the children’s home or community language in relatively open-ended exchanges with the children. For the most part, these moments occurred in teaching/learning events when
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they were working alone with the children or when, in working ‘alongside’ the class teacher or ‘alongside’ other support staff, they were able to make spontaneous contributions to the ongoing talk rather than waiting for turns to be allocated to them. In these types of teaching/learning events, where the participant structures were different, the bilingual assistants drew on the resources in their verbal and non-verbal repertoires in subtle and complex ways as they negotiated their classroom relationships with the children and as they attempted to make links for them between home and school-based contexts for learning. The insights gleaned from this part of our research are presented below. In our account, we draw on the ethnographic data we gathered over three years of fieldwork in reception classes in eight schools in this LEA. We also draw on our analysis of transcripts of teaching/learning events audio and video-recorded in three of these classes. We begin, in the next section, by introducing those participating in these teaching/learning events.
Three Bilingual Assistants and Three Reception Classes The three bilingual assistants Each of the bilingual classroom assistants introduced here was a native speaker of Panjabi, who had family ties with Pakistan. In our account, each one has been given a fictitious name in order to preserve confidentiality. Mrs Anwar, the bilingual assistant in Class A, was a woman in her late thirties who had received all of her education in Pakistan before moving to Britain. She spoke Panjabi, Urdu and English (with a Pakistani accent). She also read and wrote both English and Urdu with ease and fluency. She had already been working in the class for a year when we began our observations and, during this time, had got to know some of the families in the local neighbourhood. She did not live in this neighbourhood herself but travelled to the school every day from a town nearby. Miss Khan, the bilingual assistant in Class B, was a younger woman (in her early twenties) who had spent most of her life in Blackburn. She lived in the local neighbourhood and had actually attended the same school when she was a child. She had brothers and sisters who were the same age as the children she was working with and she knew several of the children’s families. She spoke English with a Lancashire accent. She also had a fluent command of spoken Panjabi and Urdu. English was her strongest language of literacy, though she was able to read and write some Urdu. Mrs Malik, the bilingual assistant in Class C, was in her mid-thirties and had received some of her education in Pakistan and some in Britain. Before taking up her post as a bilingual assistant, she had completed a science degree at a British university as a mature student. A couple of years after our research project came to an end, we heard that she had gone on to do a PGCE course at a local university and had attained qualified teacher status. Mrs Malik spoke English with a slight Lancashire accent. She also spoke Panjabi and Urdu and could read and write English and Urdu with ease and fluency. She had lived for some years in the neighbourhood where the school was located and knew several of the children’s families.
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The children in the three classes Most of the children in Classes A, B and C spoke Panjabi at home. Most of the children in Classes A and B were of Pakistani origin. Most of the children in Class C were of Indian origin. In all three classes, there were also a small number of children who spoke Gujarati at home. All these children were from Gujarati Muslim households and understood some Urdu, in addition to Gujarati. Urdu was used as a lingua franca by members of their families in a range of local community contexts, such as local mosques or community language classes.
Doing Bilingual Support Work: Drawing on Bilingual Resources and ‘Funds of Knowledge’ in the Classroom Negotiating classroom relationships: The use of different contextualisation cues One salient aspect of the day-to-day practice of the bilingual classroom assistants in the three classrooms we observed was their preference for using Panjabi or Urdu when addressing individual children. They used these languages on and off-task, in the classroom and in the playground, during and in-between different types of teaching/learning activities. The three women differed slightly in the extent to which they used the languages, with Mrs Anwar and Mrs Malik using Panjabi and Urdu more often than Miss Khan, the younger bilingual assistant. Mrs Anwar had also developed a further distinctive pattern of language choice: she occasionally switched from Panjabi into Urdu when she was addressing particular children, such as those who spoke mostly Gujarati or Urdu at home. To illustrate this last point, we present and discuss two extracts from a transcript of a bilingual teaching/learning event recorded in Class A. Switching from Panjabi to Urdu: Specifying a particular addressee Mrs Anwar worked primarily with two groups of children in this class. In one of the groups, there was a boy called Suhail. His family had moved to Britain from Karachi, unlike the families of other children, who had their origins in one of the regions of Panjab. Suhail’s parents spoke Urdu at home. Urdu is the most commonly spoken language in the urban context of Karachi. Mrs Anwar knew about Suhail’s home background (she had mentioned this to us during one of our visits to this class) and often switched to Urdu when speaking to him directly. Extracts 1 and 2 below illustrate this recurring pattern of codeswitching. The interactions with the other children in the group took place in Panjabi. The switches into Urdu, accompanied by the use of Suhail’s name and a change of eye gaze direction signalled quite clearly that Suhail was the addressee. They also served as indices of Mrs Anwar’s knowledge of his home language environment. The two extracts below are taken from a primary science activity built around the topic ‘lights’. The class had just completed a series of activities focusing on traffic lights, and the purpose of this teaching/learning event was to focus on ‘electricity and electric lighting’. We have described this episode in considerable detail elsewhere (Martin-Jones & Saxena, 1996: 2001). Here, we focus on two moments when Mrs Anwar switched into Urdu while addressing Suhail. Extract 1 is taken from the beginning of the teaching/learning event. At this point, Mrs
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Anwar was working alone with the children and preparing the ground for a teaching/learning activity that was to be conducted ‘in tandem’ with the class teacher (with Mrs Anwar acting as the ‘interpreter’ of the class teacher’s utterances in English). In this extract, we see that Mrs Anwar was focusing the children’s attention on the theme of ‘light’. After a couple of classroom management utterances, she began the teaching/learning activity (line 2) with the discourse marker acchaa (okay) and continued in Panjabi until she turned to address Suhail (line 6). As she addressed him, she reiterated in Urdu what she had just said in Panjabi, with a slight change of wording. Suhail answered in English (line 7), and then Mrs Anwar responded in Urdu and English (line 8), incorporating his language choice and her own in her response.
Extract 1 1
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ BA: audar nuu kynuu muu kar reyaae. eddar nuu mere val nuu Why are you facing that way? This way, look towards ~ muu karnaae. saare jane eddar.. acchaa subaa kii <E> learn me. This way, everybody. OK, what did we learn in the
kittaa sii subaa kii banaayaa sii assii. kii banaayaa sii morning? What did we do in the morning? What did we do? LL: <E> light 5
BA: light
banaayii sii. acchaa. huN assii kii sikkhaange. aaj We made light. OK, what are we going to learn now? Today, what kii assii sikhNaa hun.. abii kyaa siikhenge Suhail do we have to learn now? What are we going to learn now Suhail? L1: <E> circle ~
BA: nahii abhii ham siikhenge <E> light. light No, just now we will learn {about} light. Extract 2 is taken from the same teaching/learning event. A few moments later, Mrs Anwar took a long turn where she oriented the children to the teaching/learning activity related to ‘electricity and electric lighting’ that they were about to embark on. In line 4, we see that the turn ended with a classroom management utterance addressed to Suhail in Urdu and with a question that was addressed to him about the colours of the traffic lights they had been looking at earlier.
Extract 2 1 BA:
ãkkhaã vand kariye. te anheraa ho=. aaj Mrs T dassegii: If we close our eyes, it {becomes=} dark. Mrs T will ~ saanuu ke <E> light
jeRii heggii aa. o kis taraã bal dii tell us how the light comes on,
aa. kis taraã bujdii aa.. taar kii hondii aa.. <E> [vallab] how it goes off, what a wire is, {and} what
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kii hondaa e. hum .. Suhail Thiik se baiThoo.. a bulb is. OK? Suhail sit properly. 5
aaj hamne kaunse? rang siikhete .. subhaa kaun kaun? se What colours did we learn today? What colours <E> colour dekhete? did we see in the morning?
What we see in the two extracts is a very specific use of codeswitching as a contextualisation cue: as a means of addressing individual children and, in this case, as a subtle means of classroom control. Here and elsewhere in the teaching/learning events we recorded, Mrs Anwar’s language choices and codeswitching practices, and those of the other two bilingual classroom assistants, reflected an intimate knowledge of the children’s language preferences and experiences. Using culturally-specific cues: Verbal and non-verbal communication When speaking Panjabi or Urdu, the bilingual classroom assistants had an interactional style that was characterised by the use of culturally-specific cues. These were, for the most part, verbal and non-verbal cues that signalled closeness and endearment. They included non-verbal cues such as gestures and head movements as well as grammatical and lexical choices. For example, Mrs Anwar made frequent use of terms of endearment such as beTe (literally – ‘my child’) and Miss Khan used the most intimate second person pronoun tu (‘you’ – singular), drawing on a distinction in the Panjabi pronoun system that is not available in English. These features of the talk exchanged between the bilingual assistants and the bilingual children were strikingly similar to those that have been documented in other very different educational contexts. There is now a well-established tradition of micro-ethnographic research on classroom processes in bilingual education settings that has drawn attention to the cultural congruences (or incongruences) observable in the classroom conversations that unfold between bilingual adults and bilingual children with a shared cultural heritage. One example of an early study in an urban context, with teachers and learners of migrant origin, is that carried out by Cazden et al. (1980). This was a study based in a bilingual education programme for children of Mexican–American origin in Chicago. In this study, the main aim of the investigators was to provide a detailed account of the interactional styles of two successful bilingual teachers, both Mexican–American. Whilst there were differences between the teachers in their approach to classroom organisation, there were also similarities in the ways in which they managed classroom interactions. According to Cazden et al. (1980), when speaking Spanish the teachers adopted a culturally-specific style which conveyed ‘cariño’ (affection). This was manifested in particular constellations of verbal and non-verbal cues that included use of terms of address that were familiar to the children, and frequent use of diminutives and non-verbal expressions of ‘cariño’. The major difference between the context in which our study was being carried out and the one reported here was that the bilingual adults participating
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in our study lacked the status of the Mexican–American teachers in the Chicago study and had far fewer opportunities to draw on the linguistic resources in their communicative repertoire and on their knowledge of the cultural practices familiar to the children in their classroom conversations with them. Linking home and school contexts for learning As we began to examine the transcripts of the bilingual teaching/learning events we had observed and recorded, we became aware of another aspect of the day-to-day practice of the bilingual classroom assistants in these three classes. We found that, in their classroom conversations with the bilingual children, on and off-task, the three bilingual assistants made references to local people and local community settings and evoked cultural practices that the children were familiar with from these settings. For the most part, these were spontaneous references to learning contexts outside school, in the children’s homes and local neighbourhoods. These were contexts that were also familiar to the bilingual assistants since, as we have already indicated, they knew local families and Miss Khan and Mrs Malik actually lived in the same neighbourhood as most of the children they worked with. Below, we consider three episodes from three different teaching/learning events, one from each of the classrooms, where the bilingual classroom assistants made references, either verbally or non-verbally, to forms of knowledge and practical activities associated with the children’s households or with worlds beyond the school.
Cooking chapattis The first episode is from a teaching/learning event in Class A. Mrs Anwar was working with a small group of bilingual children ‘alongside’ the teacher of English as an Additional Language (EAL). They were getting ready to make chapattis (or roTiis) with the children. This cookery session was linked to other primary science work they were doing in that classroom. In this particular event, the participant structures were such that Mrs Anwar was able to take the floor from time to time and make spontaneous contributions without waiting for a turn to be allocated to her. Most of Mrs Anwar’s contributions to the conversation that unfolded around this activity were in Panjabi, with occasional switches to English on single lexical items. One of the purposes of the activity was to familiarise the children with the use of scales for weighing different ingredients. The event began with a listing and labelling, in Panjabi and in English, of all the ingredients needed and the utensils to be used. When Mrs Anwar drew attention to the weighing scales, it became clear that there were children in the group who were not familiar with this particular kitchen utensil. We see in line 1 of Extract 3 below that, speaking in Panjabi, Mrs Anwar tried to get the learners to provide a label for this utensil. No response was forthcoming so, after a brief pause, she provided an English label herself. As she did this, several individual learners answered in Panjabi in rapid succession and volunteered the English word ‘clock’ (lines 2–5). Mrs Anwar then provided an explanation in Panjabi (lines 6–12), referring to the ways in which scales are used in cooking and drawing the children’s attention to the needle in the dial on the scales.
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Extract 3 1
BA: aa! kii? heggaa.. <E> weighing scale What is this? L1: clock
hegii e It is a clock. L2:+ /e ( This
) hegaa/ is
BA:+ edde vic edde vic= in it in it 5
L3: e <E> clock
hegaa naã It is a clock, isn’t it? L4: e <E> clock
e It is a clock. BA: edde utte <E> number
dittaa hoyaa e kinnaa:: aaTTaa leNaa e The number{s} given on this tell us how much flour to take, te kinnaa:: <E> flour
paauNaa. kinnaa <E> butter how much flour we have to put in, how much butter to put in. ~
panaauNaa hai OK? 10
L6: (
)=
BA haã e dekh edde utte jed paavaange naa eddaã <E> move Yes, watch! When we put this in this way, the needle
hoegii <E> needle..
eddii <E> needle
es traa will move. Its needle will move <E> move
hoegii.. in this way. Immediately after this, Mrs Anwar went on to evoke non-verbally for the bilingual children a practice that was familiar to them: that of measuring out flour in fistfuls when making roTiis (or chapattis) in the traditional manner. She thus made an explicit link between the children’s knowledge of practical household activities associated with the preparation of food and practices associated with school science activities such as the weighing procedures being introduced through this cookery activity.
A story about Baisaakhii (the Sikh New Year) In addition to evoking the practical skills and knowledge of different members of the children’s households, the bilingual assistants also drew on their own and the children’s knowledge of specific cultural practices. The following example is taken from a teaching/learning event in Class C. Here, Mrs Malik was working alone with a small group of children and was engaged in a story-telling activity. She had chosen a book written in English that had a religious theme. The
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story was about a young Panjabi boy and the story line was woven around a series of events relating to the celebration of Baisaakhii (the Sikh New Year) by the boy’s family. Mrs Malik was herself a practising Muslim, but she told us later that she had chosen this story because two of the Panjabi-speaking children in the group, Gurdin and Lakhvir, had parents who were Sikhs. A third child in the group was a Gujarati-speaking girl from a Muslim household and the fourth was a monolingual English-speaking boy. The story-telling event was conducted primarily in English, though Mrs Malik codeswitched into Panjabi on several occasions when she was addressing the two Panjabi-speaking children. As well as reading aloud in English the written version of the story, she paused from time to time to discuss the illustrations with the children. During these moments, she made reference to specific cultural practices that she knew were familiar to individual children. For example, in Extract 4, we see that she made an explicit link between the world depicted in the illustrations in the story book and the world of one of the children. At this point in the story-telling event, she was talking about a picture of a Sikh man putting on his turban, with his son standing by watching. After drawing the children’s attention to this picture, she asked them to find the word to describe what the boy’s father was putting on his head (lines 4 and 5). One child provided the expected answer: ‘turban’. Then, Mrs Malik asked for an equivalent word in Panjabi: pag (line 9). As she did this, her eye gaze moved towards Lakhvir and she mentioned that Lakhvir’s father wore a turban (line 10). She then went on to ask Lakhvir a few questions about the colours of the turbans he wore (lines 12–15).
Extract 4 1
BA: hum? do you know what you call .. L1: hair hair BA: yes.. he’s got hair but he’s wearing something on top
e What kii paayaa <E> dad
ne? Joti de <E> dad
ne kii is dad wearing? What is Joti’s dad
5
paayaa sar de utte? wearing on his head? L1: (
)
BA: <E> um? turban um L1: turban! BA: what do you call a turban? do you know?
pag <E> um
pag Turban. turban 10
<E> I know Lakhvir’s dad wears one
huna thay doesn’t he? L1: <E> yes (
)
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BA:
tere <E> dad
keRii <E> colour
dii pag paande? What colour turban does your dad wear? L2: <E> blue BA: and any other colour?
kii hor <E> colour
de <E> I What other colour? 15
think I’ve seen him wear a white one as well
A few moments later, in the same teaching/learning event, Mrs Malik drew the learners’ attention to a picture of people engaged in an act of worship at a Gurudhwara. At this point, she was speaking primarily in Panjabi. In Extract 5 below, we can see that, in talking about this picture with the children, she made an explicit link between the holy book of Sikhism (the Granth Sahib) portrayed in the pictures in the storybook and other holy books. She did this by appealing to the knowledge and experience of Najmin, the Gujarati Muslim child in the group. Mrs Malik switched into English as she addressed Najmin (line 5). The co-occurrence of contextualisation cues here (the use of the child’s name, the change of eye gaze direction and the codeswitch) marked quite clearly a change of addressee. In this and other ways, Mrs Malik attempted to anchor the world of the storybook to worlds likely to be familiar to the children as the event unfolded. She also highlighted the existence of a ‘holy book’ in the two religious traditions and drew attention to the ways in which such books are used in actual religious observance.
Extract 5 1
BA: <E> what’s this?
ethe kii hunda? baDDii <E> book What is happening here? The big book
ya huna othe e Granth Sahib kende <E> the holy book over there is called the Granth Sahib L1: that’s the church man [English-speaking boy] … BA: pataa te granthi jere o <E/P> bookich
jojo kuch likhyaa naa and the Priest reads all that is written
5
o sab kucch das raye <E> Najmin do you have a holy book in the book. L2: I do!
A story about two snowmen Our third example also comes from a story-telling event, this time in Class B. Extract 6 below shows a brief exchange that took place in Panjabi between Miss Khan and a group of children about smoking pipes and cigarettes. This exchange then prompted one child to share what she knew about one of her cousins’ smoking habits with this bilingual assistant. The exchange occurred half-way through a story-telling event in which the class teacher and the bilingual assistant were working ‘in tandem’. Miss Khan was telling a story, in Panjabi, about two boys building two snowmen (a fat and a thin one). From time to time, Miss Khan’s narration was interrupted by the class teacher. The teacher did this by reproduc-
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ing the images from the storybook in sketches on the board and by asking questions in English about these images.
Extract 6 1
CT: and what did the thin snowman have? L1: (
I know?
) glasses
BA: no
enoõ … enoõ {points to book} e What’s this (called)? This CT: <E> (not glasses) 5
L2: (
)
BA:
e this L3: ([Tailifoon]) BA: enoõ aaxde ne <E> pipe
jeRe <E> [sigrat]
hunde, naa? This is called a pipe. Do you know cigarettes? ik hundaa .. e jeRaa lakRii {BA mimes action of There’s a- this- that’s made of wood. 10
holding a pipe, filling with tobacco, and smoking pipe} daa banyaa hundaa e . ede vic tabako paãde naa? fer onoõ <E> They put tobacco in it, then they light light
karde, naa? taã fer enoõ piinde naa? <E> [sigrat] it. And then they smoke it .. cigarettes
( ) piinde <E> [sigrat] ( {Some people} smoke cigarettes
)
aa This is called
<E> pipe <E> aaxde. kii e? a pipe. What is it? 15
LL: <E> pipe … pipe … a pipe L4: (
)
BA: ( ) [sigrat]
piinde? {Some people} smoke cigarettes L5: <E> do you know my cousin (
)
BA: he’s got a pipe? 20
L5: he’s not got a pipe he’s got … he .. he (smokes cigarettes) everyday BA: he smokes everyday? CT: shall we give one to this snowman then?
At the point in this story telling event depicted in Extract 6, the class teacher had just drawn a picture of a snowman with a pipe in his mouth. She then asked:
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‘And what did the thin snowman have?’ (line 1). The children were unable to answer her question, although they made a couple of good guesses: one child offered ‘glasses’ (line 2) and another attempted to say ‘telephone’ (line 7). At this point, Miss Khan took the floor in Panjabi to help the children to interpret this particular detail in the image sketched on the board (line 8). She first explained what a pipe is and indicated how it is different from cigarettes (lines 8–12) and then got the learners to rehearse the pronunciation of the word ‘pipe’ (lines 14 and 15). When discussing this event with us later, Miss Khan said she had realised that the children were not familiar with the practice of putting pipes in the mouths of snowmen and were also unlikely to have seen anyone in their immediate family smoking a pipe. In line 19, we see that one child volunteered information about a cousin of hers who smoked cigarettes. The bilingual assistant understood the significance of the child’s contribution because smoking was frowned upon in the local Muslim community. The significance of the child’s point was however missed by the class teacher who assumed the floor again, cutting across this exchange between the learner and the bilingual assistant and re-directing everyone’s attention to the sketches on the board.
Bilingual Resources? Or Resourceful Bilingual Practitioners? We have presented here a few telling examples of the ways in which three of the bilingual assistants who participated in our project negotiated their relationships with the bilingual children and made links between home, community and school-based contexts for learning. As we have seen, these links were contextualised in different ways: through explicit cultural references, through particular kinds of codeswitching, through the use of culturally specific cues and also non-verbally. In Extracts 4, 5 and 6, we saw that the links between home and school-based contexts for learning were brought out at moments when the bilingual assistants were acting as mediators of verbal and visual texts that the children were encountering at school. In fact, in both cases, the texts had been specially designed for use in multi-ethnic classrooms. Bilingual classroom assistants such as these are uniquely placed to make links for children who share a cultural heritage similar to their own. They are able to build on the forms of knowledge and the cultural capital that children bring from home in ways in which few monolingual class teachers are able to do. Yet, from our earlier work (Martin-Jones & Saxena 1995, 1996), we are aware that bilingual assistants have relatively few opportunities to engage in such classroom conversations with the children and even fewer opportunities to plan for such conversations. Over a decade and a half after the initial endorsement of bilingual support in the Swann Report, there is still a great deal of uncertainty in educational circles about the specific nature and purpose of this particular form of educational provision. In official discourse about bilingual support, from the Swann Report to LEA and school policy documents, there has been a blurring of the different connotations of the term ‘resource’. The term can have three main connotations: (1) ‘resource’ can mean ‘a supply or source of aid; … something resorted to in time of need’ (Collins Concise Dictionary, 1984: 980); (2) ‘resources’ (in the plural) can refer to sources of wealth (economic or cultural); and (3) when used to
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describe the qualities of a person, as in the phrase ‘a person of resource’, then the term can have connotations such as capability, initiative and ingenuity. Similar meanings are evoked by the use of the adjective ‘resourceful’. In the original Swann definition of the role of a ‘bilingual resource’, the first of these connotations is clearly most salient. This view of the role of a bilingual classroom assistant still persists and when translated into practice results in the positioning of the bilingual assistant as a ‘resource’ for the class teacher, as someone who is able to relieve the teacher of the burden of dealing with children who are still at a relatively early stage in the learning of English. There is ample evidence in our project data of bilingual assistants providing this kind of support for teachers. But, as we have tried to show in this paper, there is also some evidence of them providing valuable support for learners, by making links between home and school-based contexts for learning. The bilingual assistants who participated in our project were resourceful bilingual practitioners who drew on the communicative resources available to them in subtle and diverse ways in supporting the learning of the bilingual children in their care. These resources included the languages and literacies within their communicative repertoire. They also included knowledge of local cultural and religious practices and knowledge of the practical skills that are deployed in the cycles of everyday life in children’s households. As Luis Moll and his colleagues in Arizona (Moll, 1992; Moll et al., 1992) have observed, such ‘funds of knowledge’ have a far greater relevance to work in multi-ethnic classrooms than token displays of ‘culture’ and folklore. Correspondence Any correspondence should be directed to Professor Marilyn Martin-Jones, School of Education and Lifelong Learning, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, Old College, Aberystwyth, Ceredigon SY23 2AX ([email protected]). Notes 1. The term ‘transitional’ appears to have been used here to refer to children’s transition from home to school, rather than to ‘transitional bilingual education’. However, as pointed out in the first paragraph of this paper, bilingual support is a minimal form of transitional bilingual education, involving only occasional use of the learners’ home or community language. 2. This research project was entitled: ‘Bilingual resources in primary classroom interaction’ and it was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) from 1989 to 1992. Funding was provided as part of a broader ESRC initiative on ‘Education for a Multicultural Society’. Our colleagues in the research team were David Barton and Roz Ivani
.
References Bourne, J. (1989) Moving into the Mainstream: LEA Provision for Bilingual Pupils. Windsor, Berkshire: NFER-Nelson. Cazden, C.B., Carrasco, R., Maldonado-Guzman, A.A. and Erickson, F. (1980) The contribution of ethnographic research to bicultural, bilingual education. In J.E. Alatis (ed.) Current Issues in Bilingual Education. (Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics). Washington D.C: Georgetown University Press. Department of Education and Science (DES) (1985) Education for All (The Swann Report). London: HMSO. Ellis, R. (1985) Policy and provision for ESL in schools. In C. Brumfit, R. Ellis and J. Levine
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(eds) English as a Second Language in the United Kingdom (pp. 1–24). (ELT Documents: 121). Oxford: Pergamon Press, in association with the British Council. Martin-Jones, M. and Saxena, M. (1989) Developing a partnership with bilingual classroom assistants. Working Paper Number 16, Centre for Language in Social Life, Lancaster University. Martin-Jones, M. et al. (1992) Bilingual Resources in Primary Classroom Interaction. End of award report, ESRC Project, X204252001, August 1992. Working Paper Number 53, Centre for Language in Social Life, Lancaster University. Martin-Jones, M. and Saxena, M. (1995) Supporting or containing bilingualism? Policies, power asymmetries, and pedagogic practices in mainstream primary classrooms. In J. Tollefson (ed.) Power and Inequality in Language Education (pp. 73 –90). Cambridge University Press: Cambridge. Martin-Jones, M. and Saxena, M. (1996) Turn-taking, power asymmetries, and the positioning of bilingual participants in classroom discourse. Linguistics and Education 8 (1), 105 –123. Also in Heller, M. and Martin-Jones, M. (eds) (2001) Voices of Authority: Education and Linguistic Difference (pp. 117–138). Westport, CT: Ablex Publishing. Moll, L. (1992) Bilingual classroom studies and community analysis: Some recent trends. Educational Researcher 21 (2), 20–24. Moll, L., Amanti, C., Neff, D. and Gonzalez, N. (1992) Funds of knowledge for teaching: Using a qualitative approach to connect homes and classrooms. Theory into Practice 31 (2), 132–141. The New Collins Concise Dictionary of the English Language (1982) London: Collins.
Transcription conventions (Devised by Mukul Saxena) Character format ITALICS
translation of Panjabi/Urdu into English
NORMAL
transcription for English utterances
BOLD
transcription for P/U utterances
UPPER CASE
indicates louder speech than usual
CAPITAL LETTERS
initial capitals (only used for proper names, language names, place names, titles and months/days of the week)
Symbols <
>
marks the beginning of an utterance in a different language, i.e. a code switch, e.g. marks the beginning of an utterance in Urdu <E> marks the beginning of an utterance in English
indicates (a) that the utterance could be in either language (b) that there is a word internal switch i.e. across morpheme boundaries
(
)
indicates unclear item. Sometimes an attempt was made to transcribe the item, e.g. (let him speak); (bo::laa); empty brackets indicate completely unintelligible stretches and their approximate length.
{
}
(a) curly brackets in the line of speech represent additional
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information, such as non-verbal actions, e.g. {hesitation}; or comments about the utterance transcribed, e.g. Regional language variants like ‘rollin{g}’. (b) curly brackets in the line of translation are used to mark a literal gloss, additional words or the researcher’s comments. [
]
marks phonetic transcription
Representation of simultaneous speech /
/
indicates that two people are speaking simultaneously, but only one can be heard, the one whose utterance has been transcribed.
//
//
indicates that more than two people are speaking simultaneously, but only one can be heard. This speaker’s utterance has been transcribed.
L1:+or L2:+ or BA:+
indicates that two (or more) people start speaking at exactly the same time and can be heard clearly. Their utterances have been transcribed on different lines. The plus sign represents the simultaneity.
Representation of other features =
indicates that the turn continues below, at the next identical symbol, or is interrupted by other participant(s).
…
pause: the number of dots indicates the relative length of each pause.
Bo::la
one or more colons indicate marked lengthening of the preceding sound.
Question
rising intonation
!
emphasis: marked prominence through pitch or increase in volume
Participants L1,L2 (etc.)
learners identified, but not by name
LL
several learners or all learners simultaneously
BA
bilingual assistant
CT
class teacher
Foreign-born Teachers in the Multilingual Classroom in Sweden: The Role of Attitudes to Foreign Accent Sally Boyd Department of Linguistics, Göteborg University, Sweden The teaching profession is of particular interest as a testing ground for questions of the role of attitudes to foreign accented speech in a multilingual society, that is in virtually all societies. The school is a central institution of the nation state, and the goal of the school is to socialise young people to be productive, informed citizens and members of the local community. This paper will report on some results of a series of modified matched-guise tests measuring the attitudes of school principals, pupils and other judges in Sweden towards foreign-born teachers’ language proficiency and suitability to teach in the Swedish school. The results indicate that all groups of judges are quite accurate in their judgements of degree of accentedness. Prosodic deviations seem not to play a more major role than segmental deviations in determining these judgements, contrary to our expectations. Listeners’ judgements of grammatical correctness and of lexical richness did not, however, match more objective measures of these aspects of the speakers’ proficiency. Rather, the degree of accentedness plays an important role in determining listeners’ judgements both of these and other aspects of language proficiency and of suitability to work as a teacher.
Introduction Previous studies of attitudes to non-mainstream speech have documented how negative attitudes block access to different employment opportunities for members of various minority communities. The teaching profession is of particular interest as a testing ground for questions of the role of attitudes to foreign accented speech in a multilingual society, that is, in virtually all societies. The school is a central institution of the nation state, whose goal is to socialise young people to be productive, informed citizens and members of the local community. Often the goal, especially in traditional nation states such as Sweden, stated or unstated, has been to iron out differences among teachers and pupils in the school. The goal of conformity and uniformity of outcome has also usually included language. Thus the school is a central institution which promotes what Milroy and Milroy (1999) call the standard language ideology. With the aim of teaching children the standardised written language, many schools overshoot the goal and demand a standardised spoken language also, among both students and teachers. As all of us who have attended school can attest, the standard language ideology is an important implicit and explicit part of the message of most teachers and school leaders in the past as well as and in the present: those who cannot or choose not to express themselves in accordance with the norms of the standard language are considered to be illogical (Labov, 1972), unintelligent and unworthy of our attention and consideration (Milroy & Milroy, 1999). The standard language ideology then comes into play in many other arenas of public life, particularly in areas of working life where language is salient. The school is an unusually language-intensive workplace. Language skills are 123 Foreign-born Teachers in Sweden
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explicitly taught to students, thus language is a goal of much of the activity in the school. At the same time, language is the means to achieve both this goal and other instructional goals. The school is an environment virtually saturated with language, both written and oral. Even instruction in ‘practical’ subjects such as physical education, handicrafts and music is dependent on linguistic interaction both in speech and writing. Thus it is justifiable that the school leadership place high demands on the linguistic skills of every teacher employed there. These demands should, however, be reasonable, and related to the type of pedagogical activity teachers are engaged in. By this I mean that assessments of language skills should not primarily be related to standard language norms, but rather to broader pedagogical goals. The purpose of this paper is to report on some studies of the extent to which negative attitudes toward foreign accented Swedish can affect the assessments of the professional skills of foreign-born teachers made by school principals, teacher trainers and pupils. One set of studies is a series of matched guise tests using audio and video test material where the judges included school principals and teacher trainers. Another study reported on here is a series of informal discussions with high school students based on the video test material.
The Labour Market for Foreign-born Teachers in Sweden During the 1990s It has been difficult in recent years for teachers coming to Sweden as immigrants and refugees to continue to practise their professions. During the 1980s and 1990s, recruiting policies in the public sector became less regulated, and more subjective. The local school head was given more freedom to choose whom she or he wished to hire to teach in a particular school, which increased the risk of discrimination. In the first half of the 1990s Sweden was hit by a recession which affected persons of foreign origin particularly hard, even those with academic education. Unemployment was significantly higher for foreign-born than for native-born people, even those with university training, such as teachers. At the same time, bilingual programmes in schools were sharply cut or discontinued altogether, which further decreased the demand for teachers with other than Swedish backgrounds. Towards the end of the 1990s, the economy improved and a shortage of certain categories of teacher arose, but still the rates of unemployment among foreign-born persons, including the well-educated, remained high. Several universities, in co-operation with county employment boards, tried to alleviate this situation by starting special supplementary educational programmes so that teachers who had been trained in other countries could enter the labour market in Sweden, thus decreasing both unemployment and the shortage of teachers.
Research Aims and Questions An interdisciplinary research group1 was formed during the mid-1990s in order to investigate some possible sources of difficulties foreign-born teachers have in obtaining positions as teachers and later in retaining a good position or advancing in the profession. Members of this group conducted both a general assessment of the criteria used in teacher recruiting (Bredänge et al., 1998) and an
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evaluation of the two-year supplementary educational programme for foreign teachers at Göteborg University (Bredänge, 1998). Subsequently, the linguists within the group continued to study various aspects of the attitudes to teachers’ foreign-accented Swedish in the Swedish school. This was done by means of a series of naturalistic matched guise tests. This paper will report on the results of a few of the tests we have done and of a follow-up study of pupils’ attitudes towards foreign teachers’ language proficiency and pedagogical skill. The results reported on in this paper relate to the following research questions: (1) Does the perceived degree of foreign accent co-vary with attitudes towards a speaker’s language skill in general, and towards her professional skill, as has been found in other studies (Lippi-Green, 1994, 1997)? (2) What is the relationship between perceived foreign accent and measured foreign accent? What measure of foreign accent approximates perceived foreign accent best? What is the relationship between judgements of other aspects of language proficiency and measurements of these aspects? (3) Do different groups of relevant judges evaluate accents, pedagogical skill and professional suitability in the same way?
Judgements of Foreign Accent as Related to Judgements of Other Language Skills and Professional Skill In one of our studies, school principals and teacher trainers judged five foreign-born teachers based on four one-minute clips of actual classroom interaction in ordinary Swedish (monolingual) classrooms. Particularly in this study, authenticity was aimed at, rather than the uniformity demanded in controlled experiments. In part because so few foreign-born teachers were actually working actively, the five teachers chosen for the study represented a variety of backgrounds, had worked for different lengths of time and taught different subjects to pupils of different ages. Background information about them is summarised in Table 1. Authenticity was also aimed at when we selected the groups to judge the Table 1 Background characteristics of teachers in video material No. years Subject teaching taught in Sweden currently
Erica
First Age of Length No. years language arrival of stay teaching in in (years) Sweden country (years) of origin Hungarian 24 8 0
1
Greta
Russian
32
5
8
3
Maud
Spanish
24
10
1
3
Nora
Farsi
25
10
1
2
Ulla
Russian
45
4
24
2
Pseudonym
Grade level taught currently
Math/Sci High school Math/Sci High school All Upper elem. Math/Sci Lower elem. Art Junior high school
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teachers. School prinicpals were asked to participate as judges, as they have the primary responsibility for hiring new teachers and for promoting those who are already employed. Teacher trainers were also asked to judge the video material, as this group is important as gate-keepers for entry into the teaching profession. Finally, a group of high school pupils were consulted in a follow-up study. The results of this follow-up study will be presented later in the paper. In the study based on adult judges, several tape-recorded interviews were first carried out prior to the modified matched guise test in order to investigate the normal procedures for hiring teaching staff in Göteborg area schools. This was done to ascertain what criteria were considered important in the hiring process. In this way we could ensure that the dimensions on which the teachers were judged were considered relevant by those making the judgements (Bredänge et al., 1998). In the test itself, 54 teacher trainers and school principals were asked to rate the teachers on a number of scales, including five judgements regarding the teachers’ pedagogical skill, six judgements of various aspects of their language proficiency and one global measure of their suitability to teach in the subject and with the pupils depicted in the video clips. The scales used for the judgements of pedagogical skill reflected the criteria the principals in our interview series had mentioned as important when hiring new teaching staff. We followed up the modified matched guise tests by an informal discussion with the principals and teacher trainers about the test, about the training and recruiting of foreign-born teachers, language proficiency demands in the teaching profession, and so on. The dimensions of pedagogical skill that the adult judges were asked to make judgements on concerned the extent to which the teacher: • had good contact with students; • captured students’ interests; • showed a high level of self-confidence; • created a good atmosphere in the classroom; • enjoyed the respect of the students. The results of this part of the test showed first of all that the principals and teacher trainers experienced difficulties in judging these aspects of the teachers’ pedagogical skills based on the material shown in the clips. These difficulties were also brought up in informal discussions subsequent to the tests. The judgements on these dimensions varied very little from each other. The teachers we called Maud, Erica and, to some extent, Nora, had a certain tendency to be judged more positively than the teachers we have called Greta and Ulla, but the differences were very small. Greta actually received the highest mean judgement on one of the pedagogical dimensions. There was, however, rarely if ever a significant difference in mean judgements of the teachers on these scales. On the other hand, a clearer picture emerged when the results of language proficiency were examined. These dimensions included judgements of the teachers’: • understandability; • pronunciation (degree of accentedness); • grammatical correctness; • precision and variation in word choice;
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• fluency; • ability to adapt to the pupils’ level of language development. As shown in Table 2, on all six of the language proficiency scales, the teacher we called Erica received the most positive mean judgement, followed by Maud, followed by the other three teachers, in varying order. The order of Ericafollowed-by-Maud was consistent, but the difference between them was statistically significant2 (to the 5% level) only for pronunciation. The rank order of mean judgements among the three remaining teachers varied quite a bit, and there were rarely significant differences among these three, but in all cases except two, the difference between the group of teachers Ulla, Greta and Nora and the pair of teachers Erica and Maud was highly significant (to the 0.1% level). Table 2 Mean judgements on dimensions of language proficiency for five teachers in video test material Pseudonym/first Understandlanguage ability
Pronunci- Grammati- Word cal choice ation correctness
Fluency
Erica/Hungarian Maud/Spanish Nora/Farsi Greta/Russian Ulla/Russian
1.7 2.0 2.4 2.8 3.0
1.8 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.6
1.6 1.6 2.1 2.2 2.4
1.8 2.0 2.8 2.7 2.7
2.1 2.2 2.9 2.5 2.8
Adaptation to pupils’ level 2.0 2.1 2.6 2.4 2.6
Note: 1 = most positive, 4 = most negative judgements
For the dimension of teacher suitability, the teachers we call Erica and Maud also received the most positive mean judgements. The difference between Erica and the three remaining teachers’ mean scores was significant (5% level), while the difference between Erica’s and Maud’s mean scores was very close to being significant (slightly above the 5% level). There was no significant difference between the other three teachers’ mean scores of teacher suitability. In other words, the pattern that emerged from the analysis of the six language proficiency variables was similar to the one for the judgements of teacher suitability. A similar comparison was made in another of our studies between judgements of accentedness and judgements of teacher suitability. The judgements made in this study were based on brief audio recordings of the spontaneous speech of eight women with varying foreign backgrounds. The judges were teachers and students at the university, including teachers and students of linguistics and of Swedish as a second language. The results of this comparison are shown in Table 3. The similarity of the results for the judgements of language proficiency and the results for teacher suitability is striking, especially in view of the fact that the judgements on the pedagogical dimensions were so inconclusive. We must keep in mind that these results are based on a small number of speakers (5 in one study and 8 in the other) and that the content and context of recordings is different for each recording. Nevertheless, it is remarkable that such consistent results could Note: Low numbers = least accent, most suitable
be obtained for one set of dimensions (language proficiency) and not for another (pedagogy, see discussion above).
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Table 3 Judgements of the speakers ranked according to degree of foreign accent and teacher suitability. (Audio only) Speaker/L1 Jas/Somali Sil/German Hen/Dutch Nos/Farsi Mar/Finnish Gil/Spanish Bog/Polish Kry/Polish
Foreign accent 1.5 2.2 2.8 2.8 3.0 3.0 3.9 4.1
Teacher suitability 1.5 1.7 1.9 2.0 2.1 2.3 2.6 2.6
Two questions arise based on the results presented so far: (1) Why do the judgements of the different aspects of language proficiency match across the board (when the judgements of pedagogical skill were so inconclusive)? (2) Why do these judgements also match the judgement of teacher suitability? One possible explanation for these findings is that one or two teachers are in fact most advanced in all aspects of language proficiency, and that the judges are capable of assessing this accurately, based on the material in the recordings. Another possibility is that the judgements of one particular aspect of language proficiency is influencing that of all the others. A third possibility is that another factor is influencing all the judgements, for example, stereotypical attitudes towards speakers of each respective first language. These questions will be addressed in the following section.
Judgements and Measures of Language Proficiency In order to address the first of these two questions, we went on to compare perceived accent and measured accent, using a number of accentedness measures. These studies revealed that the judges’ perceptions of degree of accent corresponded rather accurately to the total number of phonetic deviations in the material in relation to the total length of the material, which varied for each teacher.3 This is at least true if we look at the rank order among the teachers. (See Table 4.) These results confirm the results of an experimental study made in Stockholm, in which speakers with varying degrees of accents read a text. In that study also, judgements of naive native speakers of Swedish matched measurements of the total number of deviations from a norm of L1 Swedish pronunciation (Cunningham-Andersson & Engstrand, 1989). Our results seem to indicate that native speakers can rapidly and fairly accurately judge degree of accent, if this is defined as the number of phonetic deviations from ‘L1 Swedish’. Contrary to our expectations, the total number of phonetic deviations from L1 Swedish turned out to have the best match with perceived accentedness. We had expected certain types of deviation to carry heavier weight in listeners’ judgements of accentedness than others. In some related studies (van Bezoojin & Gooshen, 1999; Magen 1998) and in many text-
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Table 4 Hierarchy of judgements of prounciation and number of deviations occurring per 100 words in samples to be judged. No. of judges = 54 Teacher/L1
Mean for judgements of pronunciation (1= best; 4 = worst) 1.7 2.0 2.4 2.7 3.0
Erica/Hungarian Maud/Spanish Nora/Farsi Greta/Russian Ulla/Russian
Teacher/L1
Deviations occurring per 100 words in sample
Erica/Hungarian Maud/Spanish Nora/Farsi Greta/Russian Ulla/Russian
17 28 30 51 51
books of Swedish as a second language (e.g. Bannert, 1990), phonotactics and prosody (including stress and accent at the word and sentence levels) are given more prominence as ‘keys’ to ‘good pronunciation’. Segmental deviations are accorded a secondary importance. In our studies, all of these aspects seem to play an equally important role (see Table 5). Segmental and phonotactic deviations in fact match judgements of accentedness better than the number of prosodic deviations (Boyd et al., 1999). Table 5 Number of deviations of specified type per 100 words
Vowels Consonants ‘Idiosyncratic’ segments Total segments Prosody Phonotactics
Erica 9.5 2.8 1.4
Maud 9.7 1.3 2.3
Nora 11.5 3 3
Greta 15.5 5.3 6.8
Ulla 12.4 9.7 15.3
13.7
13.3
17.5
27.6
37.4
7 0
12 0
16.6 4.1
23 2
12.9 3.4
Note: Positively evaluated teachers towards left, negatively towards right of table)
In the next phase of our study, we went on to measure the grammatical correctness and lexical richness of the teachers’ production in our video clips. My co-worker Åsa Abelin counted the number of grammatical deviations (in relation to an intuitive native-speaker norm for spontaneous speech) in each excerpt and we related this figure to the length of each excerpt. A comparison of this calculation and the mean judgements of grammatical correctness are shown in Table 6. This comparison shows that the hierarchy of judgements of grammatical correctness do not match the hierarchy of grammatical errors made as well as the judgements and measurement of accentedness did. The teacher who made no errors in the recorded excerpt, Maud, was not judged more positively than Erica, who made some (admittedly few) errors. Ulla, who received a somewhat negative judgement of grammatical correctness, made as few errors as Erica, who received the most positive judgement. Judges do not seem to be able to judge grammatical correctness with as great an accuracy as accentedness. A similar picture emerges when the judgements of lexical variation are
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Table 6 Comparison of judgements of grammatical correctness and number of grammatical errors per 100 words. Video test material Teacher
Erica Maud Ulla Greta Nora
Mean of judgements of grammatical correctness 1.8 2.0 2.6 2.6 2.8
Teacher
Maud Ulla Erica Greta Nora
Grammatical errors per 100 words of speech 0 2.1 2.1 3.0 3.1
compared with a measurement of lexical richness. Lexical richness was measured by taking a large number of random samples of a specified number of words (in this case 250) in the transcriptions of each teacher’s production in the recorded excerpts. A type-token ratio was calculated on each of these samples and an average number of different tokens was arrived at, based on all the random samples taken. A comparison of this calculation and the judgements of lexical variation is presented in Table 7. Table 7 Comparison of judgements of vocabulary variation and calculation of lexical richness. Video test material Teacher
Erica Maud Greta Ulla Nora
Mean for judgements of vocabulary 2.1 2.2 2.5 2.8 2.9
Teacher
Maud Greta Ulla Nora Erica
Lexical richness in average corpus of 250 words 151 129 127 118 106
Here again, the judges do not seem able to make as accurate judgements as we saw for accentedness. Erica, who is judged to have the most varied vocabulary, in fact is shown to vary her vocabulary the least of the teachers in the test material. In the previous section, we saw that the judgements for all six dimensions of language proficiency were quite similar, and that these judgements were similar to the judgement of teacher suitability. The same teachers, Erica and Maud, were judged most positively on all dimensions, while the other three were consistently judged more negatively. The results in this section suggest that the first two teachers do not in fact excel in all aspects of language proficiency, as compared with the other three teachers. At least for the dimensions of grammatical correctness and lexical variation, other teachers equalled these two, or surpassed them. Thus it would seem to be the case either that one of the dimensions of language proficiency is influencing the judgements on the other dimensions or that another variable is influencing all the judgements. Previous studies of language attitudes might lead us to believe that general, stereotypical attitudes towards speakers of the respective first languages represented in our study might influence judgements on other dimensions. However, there are two reasons why we have rejected this as a possible explanation.
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First, if general attitudes towards speakers of Russian, Spanish or Farsi are influencing the judgements of language proficiency and teacher suitability, why do these attitudes not seem to affect the judgements on the pedagogical dimensions, discussed above? It would seem at least as likely for general attitudes towards speaker groups to influence judgements of pedagogical skill as judgements of language proficiency. Second, we have reason to doubt the extent to which the first languages of these speakers could be accurately identified by our judges. This doubt arose in our preliminary studies using audio material, mentioned above. In the audio tests, we asked other groups of judges to try to identify the L1 of the eight speakers speaking Swedish as a second language. It turned out to be extremely difficult for the judges to do so accurately (see Table 8), even though these judges included students and teachers of general linguistics and of Swedish as a second language. Table 8 Percentage of correct and incorrect identifications of L1 of a speaker on audios test tape. Eight teachers with Swedish as a second language. Spontaneous speech in teaching (or teaching-like) situations Right Close Wrong Don’t know
Polish 1 16.7 13.3 46.7 23.3
Farsi Spanish Finnish German Dutch Polish 2 Somali Total 20.0 46.7 80.0 66.7 6.7 6.7 3.3 30.8 0 0 0 0 6.7 20.0 0 5.0 60.0 26.7 6.7 30.0 50.0 46.7 56.7 40.4 20.0 26.7 13.3 3.3 36.7 26.7 40.0 23.8
The only L1’s that could be accurately identified in these tests were German and Finnish. Both of these languages are spoken in neighbouring countries with a long history of contact with Sweden. We also have evidence that the foreign accents of persons speaking two other well-known ‘school’ languages, French and English, as L1 can also be accurately identified by Swedes. Foreign accents of persons with L1’s other than these four languages have proven to be difficult to identify for native speakers of Swedish. Even phoneticians attending a phonetics conference in Göteborg in 1999 were no better than the other judges at correctly identifying the L1 of the speakers in our audio material. None of the teachers portrayed in our video material had L1’s which we believe could be easily identified. Therefore, we do not think that stereotyped attitudes towards speakers of in this case Hungarian, Farsi or Russian played a role in the judgements in our tests. However, such stereotyped attitudes may have played a role if any of the teachers had more easily identified L1 accents. One reason for the difficulties different groups of judges had in identifying the first languages of speakers of languages other than these four probably has to do with Sweden’s relatively short history as a country with a substantial proportion of migrants in its population. This population is also unusually varied in terms of the migrants’ country of origin, which makes the task of learning to identify different accents more difficult. If even these more qualified judges cannot identify the first language of a foreign speaker accurately, it would seem unlikely that more relevant judges – principals and teacher trainers – could do so. It also seems unlikely that attitudes towards speakers of a
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particular language (besides the four mentioned above) would play a very great role in other judgements. Stereotyped attitudes seem to play a more important role for attitudes in contexts where the history of migration or language contact is longer, the number of L1 groups is smaller, for example in the US and Canada (Lippi-Green, 1997). The conclusion we draw, therefore, from our study is that the principals’ and teacher trainers’ judgements of accentedness, which turned out to be quite accurate, are influencing judgements of other aspects of language proficiency and of teacher suitability. Our results are thus in line with those reported by Lippi-Green for various communities of both monolingual and bilingual nonmainstream speakers in the United States (1994, 1997). What she calls ‘language trait focused’ discrimination seems to be at work when school principals and teacher trainers evaluate the suitability of foreign-born teachers to teach in Swedish schools. In the next section, I present the views of another group of relevant judges – pupils.
Pupils’ Views of Foreign Teachers A final study which was made within the project was that of the attitudes pupils have to teachers who speak Swedish with a foreign accent. We visited one class at each of six high schools in different parts of metropolitan Göteborg and showed part of our video material as the basis for an open discussion with the pupils. The classes we visited varied in terms of the proportion of students who had foreign background themselves. One class consisted primarily of newly arrived refugee students. Another class included only one or two students with one parent who had foreign background, while the rest of the class were monolingual Swedes with native Swedish parents. Other classes we visited fell between these two extremes. The pupils were asked to comment on the teachers portrayed and to relate their own experiences of having foreigners as teachers. We began by asking them about pedagogical skill, went on to talk about the teachers’ language proficiency and then we asked them whether or not they would like to have each teacher portrayed as their teacher. Finally we asked them about their own experiences of having foreign teachers in school. Since the students were not asked to fill in the questionnaire indicating their reactions to the video-tapes of the teachers (as the principals and teacher trainers had done), the results of this series of informal discussions cannot be directly compared with the results of our more controlled studies described above. However, since our previous studies using questionnaires were always followed up by an informal discussion, some tentative comparisons can be made. In both cases, extensive handwritten notes were taken by two of us, which were expanded and compared afterwards. One reaction we noted among all those who took part in the study, both adults and young people, was that language was given the blame for virtually all problems of communication or pedagogy which concerned teachers with foreign background. If Swedish teachers had problems with their classes, they were ‘insufficiently trained’ or had ‘too little experience’. If a foreign teacher had problems, it was attributed to inadequate proficiency in Swedish.
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Many were also concerned about other people’s (negative) reactions to the foreign teachers. The pupils were worried about the possibility that the foreign teachers would be bullied or kidded about their accents. The principals and teacher trainers expressed doubts about the teachers’ ability to handle difficult situations with a ‘limited’ language. Many principals were worried about foreign teachers’, when confronted with a difficult situation, falling back on old habits acquired in more authoritarian school environments in their countries of origin. One major difference between the attitudes of the pupils compared to that of the principals and teacher trainers was that the pupils’ attitudes were far more varied. There was no strong consensus on which teacher in the video film was the best pedagogue, for example. Rather, different students had different opinions to a greater extent than among the adult judges. Many of the pupils also mentioned the fact that listeners become accustomed to an accent when they have heard it often. Even if a teacher’s deviant pronunciation makes a strong impression the first few times the pupils meet them, after a while other impressions take over and accent does not play such a major role, they claimed. This opinion was expressed only by a very few of the school principals or teacher trainers. But perhaps this difference is not so surprising, as the pupils have grown up in a multicultural society to a far greater extent than the adults. Although the number of foreign teachers working in the high schools is relatively small, many of the pupils had some experience with at least one teacher with foreign background. Few if any of the adult judges had first-hand experience of having a foreign-born teacher themselves. The attitudes expressed by the pupils with bilingual backgrounds did not differ all that much from those who were monolingual in Swedish. One difference we noted, however, was that the pupils who had the most limited Swedish themselves emphasised the importance of the teachers’ language skills the most. The classes which were clearly dominated by monolingual Swedish students were those who were most accepting of teachers who spoke Swedish with a foreign accent. There can be a number of possible reasons for this observation. One is that the pupils who themselves are grappling with the beginning stages of Swedish as a second language feel the strongest need of good native language models. Particularly the pupils who had most recently arrived in Sweden wanted to have only native Swedes as teachers. The students in the predominantly monolingual Swedish classes were more open to the possible advantages of ethnic diversity among teachers and felt more confident about their own skills in Swedish. These classes included the most ambitious, high-achieving and well-adjusted students we met, however. It may simply be the case that they were more skilled at ‘reading’ our reactions and our own preferences during the discussion than the pupils in the other classes. The school principals and teacher trainers did not show such a strong tendency, however, to express ‘politically correct’ attitudes. In fact, even when we questioned school principals directly about diversity in the staff at school, they expressed an interest in diversity in age, gender, free time interests and other qualities, but rarely in ethnic background (Bredänge et al., 1998).
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Conclusion We conclude that judgements of accentedness and of language proficiency play an important role in the exclusion of foreigners from qualified employment, in Swedish schools as elsewhere. Our results indicate that deviations in pronunciation seem to influence judgements of other aspects of language proficiency. These judgements are then generalised further to professional competence. Interestingly, as noted in studies in the US (Lippi-Green, 1994, 1997; Sato, 1991), there is little reluctance on the part of gatekeepers to admit to using language proficiency as a reason for excluding foreigners from employment. This was also the case for the judges in our study, both young people and adults. Our results indicate first of all that far more time ought to be spent working on pronunciation in the second language classroom. There is already a written language bias in many classrooms. Not only does spoken language need to play a greater role, but in particular, pronunciation skills. Here (judging from our tentative findings) it is equally important to teach and practise segmental as prosodic aspects of pronunciation. Secondly and more importantly, gatekeepers such as employers and educators must be made aware of the fact that foreign accent plays an important role in forming our first impressions of a person’s competence and suitability for a qualified position. When we judge a person’s professional competence in a faceto-face interaction, our judgements of accentedness may actually be quite accurate ones. The injustice arises when we allow this judgement to play an inordinately major role in determining our judgements of their language proficiency as a whole and of their professional competence. We all have problems seeing beyond a foreign accent and finding, in many cases, a competent person. I believe that, in many cases, these judgements are made in a spirit of goodwill. If that is the case, it ought to be possible to educate at least more benevolent gate-keepers to be more accepting of language variation and foreign accents. Correspondence Any correspondence should be directed to Dr Sally Boyd, Department of Linguistics, Göteberg University, Box 200, SE-403 Göteborg, Sweden (sally@ ling.gu.se). Notes 1. My research group has included Åsa Abelin and Beatriz Dorriots at the Department of linguistics, and Gunlög Bredänge at the Department of Education, Göteborg University. We gratefully acknowledge support for our research from the Institute for Swedish as a second language and the Social Science Faculty of the University. 2. The figures in Table 2 are the result of an analysis of variance (ANOVA), as are the results in the remaining tables in the paper. A Fisher PLSD post hoc test was used to investigate the level of significance of the difference between different pairs of teachers in the video material. 3. The transcription and counts of phonetic deviations were made by Åsa Abelin, a trained phonetician and native speaker of Swedish. She made her analysis in relation to a variable norm for spoken L1 Swedish. The analysis was made without prior knowledge of the judgements of the school principals and teacher trainers.
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References Bannert, R. (1990) På väg mot svenskt uttal. Lund: Studentlitteratur. Boyd, S., Abelin, Å. and Dorriots, B. (1999) Attitudes to foreign accent. In Proceedings Fonetik 1999. Gothenburg Papers in Theoretical Linguistics 81. Göteborg: Department of Linguistics, Göteborg University. van Bezooijin, R. and Gooshen, C. (1999) Identification of language varieties: The contribution of different linguistic levels. Language and Social Psychology 18 (1), 31–48. Bredänge, G. (1998) Hur har det gått? Utvärdering och uppföljning av kompletterande utbildningssatsningar för lärare med utländsk lärarexamen och yrkeserfarenhet i hemlandet. Report from Department of Education 1998:10. Göteborg: Department of Education, Göteborg University. Bredänge, G., Boyd, S. and Dorriots, B. (1998) Kriterier för bedömning av utländsk lärare som utövar sitt yrke i det svenska skolväsendet. Reports from Department of Education. 1998:09. Mölndal: Department of Education, Göteborg Univeristy. Cunningham-Andersson, U. and Engstrand, O. (1989) Perceived strength and identity of foreign accent in Swedish. PERILUS X: 65–86. Stockholm: Department of Linguistics. Labov, W. (1972) The logic of non-standard English. In Language in the Inner City (pp. 201–240). Philadelphia:Univeristy of Pennsylvania Press. Lippi-Green, R. (1994) Accent, standard language ideology and discriminatory pretext in the courts. Language in Society 23, 163–198. Lippi-Green, R. (1997) English with an Accent. Language, Ideology and Discrimination in the United States. London: Routledge. Magen, H.S. (1998) The perception of foreign-accented speech. Journal of Phonetics 26 (4), 381–400. Milroy, J. and Milroy, L. (1999) Authority in Language. Investigating Standard English (3rd edn). London: Routledge. Sato, C. (1991) Sociolinguistic variation and language attitudes in Hawai’i. In J. Cheshire (ed.) English Around the World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Afterword: Ecology and Ideology in Multilingual Classrooms Nancy H. Hornberger Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania, USA
The present volume represents the first time, to my knowledge, that an ecological approach to multilingual classroom interaction has been foregrounded in a published collection of papers. Elsewhere, I have written about the ecology of language as a metaphor for the ideologies underlying multilingual language policy and practice, in which languages are understood to (1) evolve, grow, change, live, and die in an eco-system along with other languages (language evolution); (2) interact with their sociopolitical, economic, and cultural environments (language environment); and (3) become endangered if there is inadequate environmental support for them vis-à-vis other languages in the eco-system (language endangerment); and I suggest that central to the language ecology movement, as for other ecology movements, is that it is about not only studying and describing those potential losses, but also counteracting them (Hornberger, 2002). The papers collected here exemplify and elucidate the ecological approach as I have characterised it above. Not only do they describe and study multilingual interaction in the classroom (language evolution), but they also take into account the interrelationships among the languages, their speakers, and other factors in the environment (language environment). Further, the authors seek to uncover underlying ideologies that pervade language choice and language policy, with the goal of proactively pulling apart, and undermining, perceived natural language orders (i.e. counteracting language endangerment). The multilingual classrooms studied here are located in contexts as diverse and dispersed as village primary schools on the islands of Borneo and Corsica, urban primary schools of the US and the UK, and secondary-level public or community schools of Liverpool, London and Göteborg. The authors offer us a glimpse into a wide array of multilingual classrooms and afford us opportunity to identify similarities and differences across the classrooms and the ecological and ideological relationships they reflect. Several of the papers are based on rich, in-depth ethnography that affords insider views of, for example: the language and literacy experiences and ideologies of Cambodian girls in Philadelphia or Somali girls in Liverpool; or the marginalisation, low status, and dedicated hard work of bilingual support teachers working with Turkish-speaking families in a London secondary school or with Panjabi and Urdu-speaking families in primary schools of Northwest England. Repeatedly as I read the detailed ethnographic descriptions and verbatim transcripts of multilingual classroom interaction, I encountered moments that resonated vividly with my own ethnographic observations in multilingual classrooms of Peru, Philadelphia and elsewhere. Peter Martin’s description of the frequent problems with pronunciation and understanding he observed on Brunei evoked for 136 Afterword
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me my own observations of the same in classrooms of highland Quechua communities of Puno, Peru (Hornberger, 1989). Ellen Skilton-Sylvester’s portrayal of Ms Eakins’ culturally relevant pedagogy achieved through congruence of her policies and practices with Khmer ideas of teacher–student relations, even though Khmer language and content are not brought into the classroom, recalls for me the power of parental expectations for the school to teach the language of power and to do so in the ‘traditional’ way, in both highland Andean indigenous communities and South African black communities (Hornberger, 1988, 2002). Likewise, Alexandra Jaffe’s portrayal of the Corsican teacher’s emphasis on precision as a characteristic of good narrative echoed my own analysis of Ms McKinney’s good teaching for bilingual literacy with her Southeast Asian 4th graders in Philadelphia (Hornberger, 1990). Her description of Corsican children’s bilingual practices and identities being mediated by texts and the talk around them as they learn Corsican as their second language, recalled to me my recent visits to Maori immersion classrooms where the teaching of kaupapa Maori ‘Maori philosophy’, or Maori way of life, is as important or more important than the teaching of Maori language (Hornberger, forthcoming). Other scenes recalled multilingual classrooms I have come to know through my students’ ethnographic research. Jo Arthur’s example of asymmetrical language choice in the Somali community literacy class, where teachers use Somali and their teen-aged students use English in classroom interaction, brings to mind Korean heritage language classes in the US, a context where, as Pak (2003) suggests, MT (mother tongue) is L2 (second language), and teachers and students continuously negotiate and renegotiate their identities and positionings relative to Korean language and culture. Angela Creese’s fieldnote about the two Turkish students’ rejecting the Turkish bilingual aide’s help on classwork after returning to the classroom on the morning of the demonstration recalls for me Cahnmann’s description of the shifting terrain of war and reimagination in one bilingual classroom in Puerto Rican Philadelphia and of student and teacher positionings within that terrain (Cahnmann, 2001). The scenes described in Angela Creese’s and Ellen Skilton-Sylvester’s work are after all very familiar to me anyway, since they were both my students too. In what follows, I recapitulate some highlights from each of the papers, grouped under the three ecological themes mentioned above. In doing so, I hope to point to themes and examples that not only capture the immediate reality of the scenes described herein, but also convey a larger picture of the value and potential of multilingual classroom interaction, both for children’s learning and for counteracting language endangerment around the world. I do not pretend to take an unbiased position on either of these goals: I am unabashedly in favour of education for all children in every corner of the world, and likewise support the promotion and development of every language on earth. In my view, the papers here provide, in richly documented detail, considerable grounds for both caution and hope as we strive toward those ends.
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Language Evolution in the Multilingual Classroom: Positioning, Colluding and Contesting A number of the papers demonstrate how different languages are positioned differently in the classroom. Skilton-Sylvester speaks in terms of teachers’ language policies and ideologies of additive and subtractive bilingualism and shows how one Philadelphia teacher is able to support her Cambodian and other Southeast Asian students’ bilingualism even though she doesn’t speak Khmer or the other languages; while another teacher, though biliterate in Khmer and English, does not utilise these resources in his classroom and instead seeks to model English use for his pupils at all times (and two other teachers exclude use of Khmer in the classroom). Creese observes that staff and students in one London secondary school position three different groups of Turkish speakers with quite different histories – Turkish mainlanders, Turkish–Cypriot islanders, and Turkish/Kurdish refugees – as one Turkish speaking whole, to the detriment of their understanding why one particular group of (Turkish/Kurdish) students demonstrated against racism in the school. Not just languages, but accents, can be positioned; and not only pupils’ language, but teachers’ too. Sally Boyd shows, by a series of matched guise investigations and participant observation in six high school classrooms, that judgements (by employers and by pupils) of teachers’ foreign-accented Swedish are generalised to judgements of overall Swedish language proficiency, and beyond that to teachers’ professional competence, positioning foreign-accented teachers as less competent and less desirable for employment. Both P. Martin and Jaffe show how texts are used to position languages, teachers, and learners in the multilingual classroom. In the Brunei classroom, English text is the authoritative participant and the teacher acts as mediator and guardian of the text, using Bahasa Melayu as support. In the Corsican classroom, although the teacher also positions texts as authoritative and herself as mediator, these are mitigated by her emphasis on collective, collaborative production of texts and her commitment to a democratic participation structure which seeks to ensure that all children, not only the most vocal, contribute to the final text product. Furthermore, in her classroom, the two languages used are positioned differently, in that her students’ L2 Corsican literacy is always mediated by oral and collective practice, while French literacy is not. An interesting contrast between the Brunei and Corsican cases is that while on Brunei, classroom practice appears to collude with the positioning of a language of wider communication, English, as dominant; in the Corsican case, classroom practice – and Corsican policy – contests the dominant language positioning and seeks to promote Corsican as a language of power. Then, too, gender and culture play a role in positioning students and teachers in relation to their languages. For example, Deirdre Martin reports that while the Panjabi speaking boys and girls she interviewed at one English primary school clearly recognise English as the language for the classroom but use Panjabi when the teacher is absent, there is a difference between the boys and girls in that the boys contest both class rules and the legitimacy of English during the teacher’s absence, while girls are more likely to appropriate the authority, if not the language, of the teacher, attempting to keep order in the classroom through the use of Panjabi. Other differences she found in the positioning of Panjabi by boys
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and girls were that girls, but not boys, have a construct which disengages Panjabi from learning; and that boys, but not girls, construct a tension around speaking Panjabi in front of their English friends. Here, too, some practices depicted collude with dominant positionings (as above), while others contest them (cf. Martin-Jones & Heller, 1996; Heller & Martin-Jones, 2001). In their portrayal of three South Asian bilingual assistants (or aides) in multilingual primary classrooms of Northwest England, Marilyn Martin-Jones and Mukul Saxena highlight the ways in which incorporating cultural funds of knowledge positions the aides in relation to their students. Specifically, they describe how the aides negotiate relationships with students using Urdu and Panjabi; further, their switch to Urdu or Panjabi when addressing individual children is accompanied by a culturally-specific interactional style. In addition, they give several examples of how the aides make references to local people and local community settings and evoke cultural practices that children are familiar with, to the enhancement of the children’s learning. Similarly, Arthur, in her description of community school literacy lessons for Somali teenage girls in Liverpool, provides examples of three literacy events with symbolic meaning (renaming, history of Somali script, Somali language and Islamic culture) and argues that the class contests the marginalisation of Somali language and literacy by contributing to the girls’ knowledge of their cultural inheritance and giving them a positive experience of the communicative use of Somali. These latter examples, and the example of the first Philadelphia teacher above, contest the traditional positioning of native language and culture outside the classroom, instead bringing them in, as resources for learning.
Language Environment and the Multilingual Classroom: Community Funds of Knowledge as Resource or Problem? Some resourceful mainstream teachers find ways to bring community funds of knowledge into the classroom but, in most cases, that knowledge is closely circumscribed within the school and, even more often, community languages and knowledge are marginalised from the school altogether. Martin-Jones and Saxena showed us three ‘resourceful’ ‘bilingual resource’ teachers (bilingual assistants or aides) who draw on available communicative resources, including languages and literacies, knowledge of local cultural and religious practices (Sikh New Year; non-smoking practices) and of practical skills deployed in everyday life (cooking chapattis); yet we saw too that these aides, and those in Creese’s London secondary school, occupy marginalised, low status positions in their schools. Creese also shows us how a student-organised demonstration against racism in the school brings to the fore an institutional school discourse of equal opportunity, which somewhat paradoxically has an adverse effect on how diversity and difference are seen within the school. In this context, community languages are seen, not as a resource, but as a communication hurdle to be surmounted; the headteacher recruits the bilingual aides’ knowledge of the Turkish language in getting letters out to Turkish parents about the demonstration, but the goal is not to engage in dialogue with Turkish parents (in Turkish), but to communicate the school’s discourse of equal opportunity and denial of institutional racism. In several of the papers, community languages are not only marginalised, but
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completely absent from the mainstream schools: Panjabi in England (D. Martin), Somali in Liverpool (Arthur), Cambodian in two of the four Philadelphia teachers’ classrooms (Skilton-Sylvester); and perhaps most strikingly in the case of Brunei, where the three community languages – Dusun, Iban, and Penan – are totally absent from the classroom, while the children have their lessons in English and Malay, two languages they do not know (P. Martin). On Corsica, too, children have 50% of their lessons in Corsican, a language they don’t speak when they arrive at school; in this case, though, immersion in the L2 is precisely a case of reclaiming community funds of knowledge in the school, and so fits a different profile from those above. Indeed, the endangered situation of the Corsican language represents a possible, undesirable endpoint of a process in progress in several of the other cases, namely the erosion of community languages by dominant languages of wider communication such as English and French. Arthur notes the incursion of English into Somali homes. D. Martin finds evidence that though Panjabi has both horizontal and vertical legitimacy in the community (since children speak it with their parents and grandparents and because of its association with the Sikh religion), that legitimacy is being questioned in some contexts, for example in young people’s failure to attend language and literacy classes at the Temple. Skilton-Sylvester tells us that Ms Menon emphasises American language and culture exclusively and feels her students speak their native languages too much at home. In all these cases, community languages are not only absent from the school, but also under threat from dominant languages in the community. Community schools are, of course, the exception. These schools, such as the one described in Arthur’s paper, by definition foster community languages and cultures. Arthur argues that the community school plays a role not only in linguistic reproduction, but also social and cultural reproduction; and further, that the fostering of cultural resources, including literacy, provide an indirect means of promoting (oral) linguistic resources as well. Finally, these papers give evidence that despite the prohibition or exclusion of community languages from mainstream schools, the languages find their way into the schools nonetheless. D. Martin reports that the Panjabi children she interviewed negotiate their relationships with peers through both languages, and not English only. Skilton-Sylvester reports that, though Mr Bnom restricts his own use of Khmer in class, he believes it is sometimes valuable for his students to speak to each other in Khmer. P. Martin begins his paper with a telling instance of Bruneian students’ collaboratively constructed trilingual translation of a Malay sentence from their lesson into their three community languages.
Language Endangerment: Policy, Ideology, and Re-sourcing P. Martin goes on, however, to show that the above instance of trilingual community language use in the classroom runs counter to both Brunei policy and the teacher’s normal practices, both of which recognise Malay and English as resources – with English preferred and Malay as support – while marginalising Iban, Dusun or Penan. Similarly, the papers by Martin-Jones and Saxena, Creese, D. Martin, and Arthur make clear that the use of community languages in British classrooms is at best in the role of support, but not as a preferred resource; the
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British policy known as ‘bilingual support’ is meant to provide a degree of continuity for the child from community to school, but is an overtly transitional policy, seeking explicitly to avoid bilingual education (Martin-Jones & Saxena). Skilton-Sylvester makes reference to English-only initiatives in the US which have already undermined decades of bilingual education practice in California and Arizona and threaten to do the same in Massachusetts, and I would add, at the national level under the recent No Child Left Behind Act. Such policies are undergirded, in turn, by standard language ideologies (S. Boyd). Skilton-Sylvester briefly sketches the ideologies characterising American linguistic culture: a prevailing language-as-problem orientation, an emphasis on subtractive bilingualism, a questioning of immigrant and refugee rights to native languages, and a narrow view of languages other than English (or whatever dominant language) as useful only for pragmatic, instrumental purposes. These policies and ideologies, and the power relationships they uphold, are deeply embedded in historical, political, and socioeconomic realities, such as those alluded to in this volume in papers as diverse as Arthur’s description of the diasporic Somali community in Liverpool, the longest-standing black community in England, as one ‘in deep distress’, characterised by extreme residential, employment, educational, and social segregation, and an unemployment rate over 70%, at one extreme; the unemployment of foreign-born teachers in Sweden, at the other; and, somewhere in the middle, Creese’s story of the community’s Turkish language being recruited by the school to undermine (possibly well-founded) accusations of anti-Turkish racism in the school. The weight of monolingual language education policies, standard language ideologies, and historical forces of racism and poverty is clearly toward endangerment and extinction of community languages, in every case. Facing that reality, these papers yet offer hope that these policies and ideologies can be reversed, at both micro and macro levels. Boyd suggests that gatekeepers must be made aware of the unwarranted role that judgements of accentedness and language proficiency play in the exclusion of foreigners from qualified employment in Swedish schools; she believes that in many cases the judgements are made ‘in a spirit of goodwill’ and that gatekeepers are capable of changing their practices, once informed. Certainly, change at the level of individual practice is to be encouraged, and, as the papers here abundantly show, resourceful teachers – and learners – find ways to subvert monolingual language policies and employ a range of multilingual language practices. Yet, as Skilton-Sylvester argues, macro-level policies and ideologies are so entangled with teachers’ policies and ideologies at the micro level that educators need to be involved at both levels, if a truly additive perspective is to be possible. She goes on to suggest that engagement at the macro level means working with parents, communities, and policymakers to illustrate the ways that bilingual (or multilingual) instruction benefits students’ learning, as well as advocating for adequate funding and professional development for teachers. These are indeed the minimal requirements for a language education policy that would be truly supportive of multilingual learners and community (minority, heritage, ethnic) languages. The Corsican case offers an example where policy has only recently, after decades of debate and struggle, recognised Corsican language as medium of
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instruction; and bilingual schooling has been established. Through Jaffe’s eyes and ears, we saw how one teacher’s practices aimed toward creating symbolic and functional parity between Corsican and French are on the one hand enabled by the broader policy context of Corsican revitalisation and on the other challenged by the French-dominant children’s everyday life in a community largely lacking an intimate and authentic sense of cultural ownership of the Corsican language. To meet this challenge at the micro level, the teacher draws on collective, collaborative text production practices that make resources of the children’s oral and literacy skills to build their Corsican language and literacy; it is a matter of what Pippa Stein (forthcoming) has called ‘re-sourcing resources’, that is, a process of acknowledging what ‘historically disadvantaged’ students have lost or may be in the process of losing, while simultaneously articulating and recovering the resources they bring to the classroom. There are myriad examples throughout the papers collected here, from the Somali community school which re-sources Somali literacy for a group of teen-age girls, thereby improving their spoken Somali as well, to the Philadelphia teacher who re-sources her Khmer students’ knowledge about Khmer language and culture as input for their life timeline project and for her own learning, to the bilingual aide who re-sources codeswitching as a contextualisation cue in addressing individual children in the classroom. It is these concrete and detailed examples of multilingual classroom interaction, and the ideologies they embody, which, for me, offer most hope for the future ecology of languages in our world. Correspondence Any correspondence should be directed to Professor Nancy Hornberger, Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania, 3700 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6216, USA ([email protected]). References Cahnmann, M. (2001) Shifting metaphors: Of war and reimagination in the bilingual classroom. Unpublished Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. Heller, M. and Martin-Jones, M. (eds) (2001) Voices of Authority: Education and Linguistic Difference. Westport, CT: Ablex Publishers. Hornberger, N.H. (1988) Bilingual Education and Language Maintenance: A Southern Peruvian Quechua Case. Berlin: Mouton. Hornberger, N.H. (1989) Pupil participation and teacher techniques: Criteria for success in a Peruvian bilingual education program for Quechua children. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 77, 35–53. Hornberger, N.H. (1990) Creating successful learning contexts for bilingual literacy. Teachers College Record 92 (2), 212–229. Hornberger, N.H. (2002) Multilingual language policies and the continua of biliteracy: An ecological approach. Language Policy 1 (1), 27–51. Hornberger, N.H. (forthcoming) Multilingualism-as-resource and the ecology of language: Three cases of language education reform. TESOLANZ. Martin-Jones, M. and Heller, M. (1996) Introduction to the special issues on education in multilingual settings: Discourse, identities, and power. Linguistics and Education 8 (1), 3–16. Pak, H.R. (2003) When MT is L2: The Korean church school as a context for cultural identity. In N.H. Hornberger (ed.) Continua of Biliteracy: An Ecological Framework for Educational Policy, Research, and Practice in Multilingual Settings. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters. Stein, P. (forthcoming). Re-sourcing resources: Pedagogy, history and loss in a Johannesburg classroom. In M. Hawkins (ed.) Social/Cultural Approaches to Language Learning, Teaching, and Teacher Education. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.
