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Language, Power and Pedagogy
Chapter
1: Issues and Contexts
Komotini, Greece, October 2, 1999: Power Relations Past
and Present
My feelings yesterday were almost surreal as I listened to
Howard Smith of the University of Texas at San Antonio describe the history of
educational oppression experienced by African American children in the United
States. What was I doing sitting in an auditorium in the province of Thrace,
near Turkey, at a conference focused on the education of the Muslim minorities
in Greece, listening to the ugly history of racism on the other side of the
globe, and how its residues still persist?
Today, I listened to Daphna Bassewitch Ginzburg and Anwar
Dawod from Israel present Jewish and Palestinian perspectives on two different
attempts to heal the wounds of the past (and present) through education.
Both described settings at the preschool (Daphna) and elementary school
(Anwar) where Jewish and Palestinian children are being educated together in the
same classrooms, with the same curriculum, and using both Arabic and Hebrew as
languages of instruction. I was
struck by the courage of educators in these schools who saw education as a means
of transforming the future rather than reproducing the past.
Maria del Socorro Leandro, Director of Bilingual Programs
in the Edgewood School District in San Antonio, Texas, also spoke of the two-way
bilingual immersion program in Edgewood that brings together English-dominant
and Spanish-dominant students in the same classrooms with the goal of promoting
fluent bilingualism and biliteracy for both groups of students. Here again was
testimony about reclaiming dignity and voice from a people who had experienced
subordination for more than 150 years. Educators who remembered the very recent
past, up to the late 1960s, when Mexican-Americans were treated as an inferior
species by all institutions of society, were using the power of language and
education to repudiate that past and evoke a very different future.
Too often, the conflicts of the past pervade the classrooms
of the present. This was illustrated vividly when Anna Frangoudaki and Thalia
Dragonas of the University of Athens, organizers of the conference and directors
of the project on the education of the Muslim minorities, spoke yesterday about
the history of education in Thrace and the goals of their project. The
Turkish-speaking population of Thrace became Greek citizens in May 1920 when
western Thrace became part of Greece. The 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, which was
referred to many times during the conference, still governs the education of the
Muslim minorities in Greece. It provides for a separate education for the Muslim
minorities with Turkish textbooks to be developed by the Turkish government.
However, use of these textbooks is subject to approval by the Greek government.
The curriculum in the Muslim minority schools is divided in two: half of the
subjects are taught by Greek teachers and half by Turkish teachers. The school
principal comes from the minority group and the vice-principal from the
majority. The vast majority (99%) of the Muslim minority attend these segregated
schools and have no contact with non-Muslim students until at least the age of
12 when they finish elementary school. More than 7,000 students attend 300
minority schools, many of them in isolated mountainous areas.
The situation is complicated by the fact that among the
Muslim minorities are small groups of Roma communities speaking the Roma
language as well as Pomak communities who speak a Slavic dialect related to
Bulgarian. Although their language is not Turkish, their education is viewed by
the Turkish minority and by the Turkish government as being regulated by the
Treaty of Lausanne as a result of their Muslim religion. Originally, this
interpretation of the Treaty was also encouraged by the Greek government.
Consequently, these groups attend the Turkish/Greek medium minority schools and
learn through two languages which are not their mother tongues. The mutual
suspicion that has characterized relations with the Greek government and Greek
communities of Thrace, together with pressure from the more powerful Turkish
minority, has resulted in a bizarre situation where many Pomaks deny that they
speak a different language and claim Turkish as their home language.
For the past 70 years, it seems
that the Muslim minority children in Thrace have been pawns to be sacrificed in
a struggle for historical righteousness. Turkish textbooks prepared by the
Turkish government have been rejected by the Greek government on the grounds
that they were full of anti-Greek propaganda. Turkish textbooks prepared in the
early 1990s by the Greek government were burned by the Turkish community because
they violated the Treaty of Lausanne. Many Greek teachers have approached their
duty of “teaching the enemy” with a feeling of hostility to the language,
culture, and traditions that children bring to school. Their expectations for
student success have been extremely low and thus it was not difficult to
rationalize the minimal literacy skills attained by the Muslim children in Greek
(and even Turkish) as being due to their inherent inferiority. Contact between
Greek and Muslim teachers in the school has tended to be minimal and
characterized by the same hostility and suspicion.
The project that Anna Frangoudaki and Thalia Dragonas spoke
about was funded by the European Union and has initiated extensive professional
development for teachers in the minority schools over the previous two years. It
has also developed attractive and culturally-sensitive teaching materials for
use in teaching during the Greek part of the day. Not the least of its
achievements has been to bring Greek and Muslim teachers into constructive
dialogue, perhaps for the first time ever, regarding ways of improving the
education of minority children. This conference itself seemed to represent a
huge step forward. It was endorsed by both the “majority” and “minority”
Primary Schools Teachers Associations in Thrace and the auditorium was filled
with teachers from both communities,. The droning repetitious discourses of past
hatreds were at least temporarily set aside, although their echoes could
occasionally be heard in the reflections and recommendations of participants.
We started this morning at 9.30 and continued through the
day until almost 9.00 in the evening. At
the end of the conference, the auditorium was almost as packed as it was earlier
in the day. My own intellectual and
physical stamina exhausted, I remember thinking that I could imagine few
settings in North America where educators or any other profession would give up
their weekend for almost 12 straight hours of lectures and often passionate
discussion. The devastating earthquakes that had struck both Turkey and Greece
in the weeks prior to the conference, and the mutual assistance given by each
country to the other, perhaps had contributed to shaking up old ways of
thinking. Expansion of imaginative horizons could perhaps also be read into the
rapt attention paid to accounts from both the United States and Israel of
similarly conflictual and oppressive social relations, and the possibility that
educators could transform these coercive social relations into collaborative
ones. Even if this collaborative transformation were to occur only within the
microcosm of the school, or in the interactions of individual educators with
their students, it would nevertheless constitute what Noam Chomsky (1987) called
“the threat of a good example.” When schools and individual educators refuse to play their
preordained part in the social order, education becomes dangerous. The
discourses of national and religious identity, and the historical myths that
sustain them, risk implosion when contact and dialogue replace isolation and
monologue. When two languages are used in the school to affirm the experiences
and cultures of the students and communities who speak those languages, this in
itself challenges the discourse of superiority and devaluation that
characterizes social relations between these communities in the wider society.
To create a future we need to rupture the past.
Northern Ireland comes to mind and the half-truths of
history into which I was socialized as a child.
It is not surprising to hear Thalia Dragonas speak of the
change in attitudes towards the project among some officials in the Greek
Ministry of Education—initial support and enthusiasm have been replaced by
ambivalence and concern. Enemies have their place—they are essential to
national identity. If education transforms enemies into colleagues, is it
serving the interests of our society or undermining its strength?
Ironically, the Muslim children in Thrace have received a
bilingual education for the past 70 years, illustrating the fact that language
of instruction itself is only surface structure. Coercive power relations can be
expressed as effectively through two languages as through one. Change in the
deep structure will come only when educators walk into their classrooms burdened
not by the anger of the past and the disdain of the present, but with their own
identities focused on transforming the social futures towards which their
students are traveling.
Victims and victimizers: Turkish minority children in
Thrace caught in the crossfire of historical antagonisms, but at least with
access to mother tongue instruction (however inadequate) and no prohibition on
private use of Turkish; Kurdish children in Turkey still denied access to mother
tongue instruction in any form and restrictions even on private use of Kurdish:
The only ban on the Kurdish
language that has been lifted [by new legislation passed in 1991] is that on
private use, provided it does not fall under the other paragraphs. Thus, Kurds
are now allowed to speak Kurdish in their homes and sing Kurdish love songs in
their gardens, but if a Kurdish child complains to a parent in a private garden,
while picking beans, about not being allowed to speak Kurdish during the breaks
in school, this act is still a terrorist crime. (Hassanpour, Skutnabb-Kangas,
& Chyet, 1996: 371)
Earlier today, during one of the breaks, I spoke with a
young man who was teaching in a Pomak village. He had come from another part of
Greece and had not been socialized into the immediacy of hostile relations
between Christians and Muslims that many Greeks in Thrace had experienced.
He described his frustration at his inability to connect with his
students early in the year. Teaching the prescribed curriculum was going
nowhere. Things began to change
when he discarded the curriculum and asked his students to teach him some of
their language. In my terms, he moved from transmission of a prescribed
curriculum rooted in a coercive power structure to an attempt to establish
genuine human relationships with his students and their parents. His efforts
were so successful that the community assumed that he must be a Muslim. When he
demonstrated to them that he was in fact Christian (by showing them the cross he
carried on a chain around his neck), the community was angry and rejected him.
The teacher contemplated resigning and leaving the community but after further
discussion the community asked him to stay.
This teacher’s experience brought to mind a quotation
from Oscar Wilde which suggests that educators have both the responsibility, and
the opportunity, to refuse complicity in the punishments inflicted by society on
children, as demonstrated by this Greek teacher in a remote area of Thrace:
A child can understand a
punishment inflicted by an individual, such as a parent or guardian, and bear it
with a certain amount of acquiescence. What it cannot understand is a punishment
inflicted by society. <1>
Tokyo, August 1-5, 1999: Measured Words and Dissenting Voices
Several items in the media caught my eye on this the first
day of the International Applied Linguistics (AILA) Congress. An article in the
Airport Limousine magazine which I had picked up the previous day en route from
Narita airport was entitled “Japan’s Baby Bust: Young and Old Alike Feeling
the Pinch” (Odani, 1999). It outlined the mostly bleak economic consequences
of the drop in Japan’s birthrate to 1.4 births per woman, far below the 2.1
births required to sustain the population at its current level. Rapid
constriction in all levels of education is predicted as fewer young people come
to school and go to university. Without a dramatic increase in fertility (which
is highly unlikely) or massive increases in immigration (which is currently
negligible—foreigners account for only 1% of the Japanese population), the
economy will shrink and make it difficult to maintain social services to the
rapidly increasing elderly population (aged 65+) which will make up 20% of
Japan’s population by 2005. Two days later, the Asahi Evening News
elaborated on these trends (Kristof, 1999), pointing out that the working-age
population of Japan will drop by about 650,000 a year over the next 50 years.
Dramatically increase immigration or face economic decline?
Stark choices for a nation accustomed to viewing itself as homogenous and proud
of it (leaving aside some blips on the homogeneity screen resulting from groups
such as the Ainu, Koreans, and Burakumin [Maher & Yashiro, 1995]). To
increase immigration in such a way that immigrants would want to settle and
boost the population would entail significant social changes:
reduce widespread discrimination against foreigners, implement effective
Japanese L2 language learning programs, and possibly bilingual education in
immigrant languages, and generally adjust a social and educational system to
promote equity and academic advancement for second language learners. Not simple
to do, or even to contemplate, because we are talking about fundamental changes
to the culture and power structure of the society.
These issues are just beginning to appear on the horizon of
public consciousness and, to its credit, the Japanese government has initiated
research to address the educational issues faced by the inevitability of
increasing diversity. Preliminary
results from a large-scale study involving approximately 9,000 teachers, 800
parents, and 1,000 children from Portuguese-, Chinese-, Spanish-, and
Vietnamese-speaking backgrounds led by Professor Suzuki Nishihara of Tokyo
Women’s Christian University were reported at the AILA Congress. Among the
findings reported by Professor Toshio Okazaki (1999) is a significant positive
relationship between parental attitudes favoring active maintenance of their
children’s home language and both L1 maintenance and L2 acquisition. A
positive relationship or interdependence between L1 and L2 emerges after the L1
has reached a certain level of development. In other words, contrary to the
views of many Japanese (and North American) educators, active promotion of the
first language in the home appears to benefit not only development of L1 but
also the L2.
The importance for families of L1 maintenance and the
challenges involved in achieving this goal were apparent in a news clip in the
August 1 Asahi Evening News. This article reported
the retirement of the Buffalo Sabres’ Dominik Hasek, five-time choice
as the National Hockey League’s best goalie, and quoted him as follows:
We want our kids to go back to the
Czech Republic and share a Czech background. Every year he (9-year-old son) has
more problems to speak Czech. ...The longer we stay in the United States, the
harder it will be for our kids. (Asahi Evening News, August 1, 1999: 5)
Obviously, affluence and privilege alone can’t buy L1
maintenance in the face of the massive power of the dominant language in the
environment.
I frequently hear sad anecdotes from international students
enrolled in the University of Toronto about how their elementary school children
are rejecting the home language and culture. After just two years in Canada,
many children refuse to use the first language in the home and want to anglicize
their names in order to belong to the culture of the school and peer group. I
very rarely hear stories of how teachers communicate strong affirmative messages
to students about the value of knowing additional languages. In the vacuum
created by the absence of any proactive validation of their linguistic talents
and accomplishments, bilingual students’ identities become infested with
shame. A psychological phenomenon, to be sure; but also sociological.
Pre-service teacher education programs across North America typically regard
knowledge about linguistic and cultural diversity as appropriate for
“additional qualification” courses rather than as part of the core knowledge
base that all teachers should possess. As the discussions about assessment and
pedagogy in Chapters 6 and 10 make clear, the contradictions that derive from
viewing the generic student as monolingual, monocultural, white, middle-class,
and heterosexual are becoming embarrassingly evident.
Dominik Hasek’s predicament, and that of millions of
other minority language parents around the globe, reminds me of the incident
that happened a few years ago in Amarillo, Texas, where State District Judge,
Samuel Kiser, ordered a bilingual Mexican-American mother (Marta Laureano)
involved in a child custody dispute to refrain from speaking Spanish to her
daughter. If you are from a group that has historically been subordinated rather
than a Hockey superstar, even the home is not a safe haven for the mother
tongue. The judge told Laureano that she was “abusing” her five-year old
daughter by speaking Spanish to her and ordered Laureano to speak only English
at home. The father of the child, Timothy Garcia, who was seeking unsupervised
visitation rights with his daughter, had complained that she was not proficient
in English. As reported in Maclean's magazine (September 11, 1995: 13):
In court, Kiser told Laureano that
she was relegating her daughter "to the position of housemaid." After
a public outcry, Kiser backed down - a little. He apologized to housekeepers
everywhere, "since we entrust our personal possessions and our families'
welfare to these hardworking people." But otherwise, Kiser stood by his
statements. Excerpts from his comments:
"If
she starts first grade with the other children and cannot even speak the
language that the teachers and others speak, and she's a full-blooded American
citizen, you're abusing that child and you're relegating her to the position of
housemaid. Now, get this straight: you start speaking English to that child,
because if she doesn't do good [sic] in school, then I can remove her because
it's not in her best interest to be ignorant.
"You are real big about
talking about what's best for your daughter, but you won't even teach a
five-year-old child how to speak English. And then you expect her to go off to
school and educate herself and be able to learn how to make a living. Now that
is bordering on abuse."
Despite Judge Kiser’s ruling, few in Texas would
contemplate imposing legal prohibitions on the use of Spanish outside of school
(although its status within schools is not entirely secure). The situation of
Mexican-Americans in Texas is a far cry from that of Kurds in Turkey. However,
Judge Kiser inadvertently reminds us that only 30 years ago, any use of Spanish
in the schools by teachers would result in a $100 fine, and students caught
speaking Spanish would usually be physically punished or humiliated.
Is promoting bilingualism in the home child abuse, or is it
child abuse to punish children for being bilingual? To what extent is it child
abuse to send new teachers into classrooms (in multilingual cities such as
Toronto, London, or New York) with minimal or no preparation on how to teach
academic content to students who are in the process of learning English and
whose cultural background differs significantly from that assumed by all of the
structures of schooling (e.g. curriculum, assessment, and teacher preparation)?
I wonder if Judge Kiser would be interested in reading
about the multilingual accomplishments of developmentally disabled adolescents
in Kenya in an article written in 1996 by Jamie Candelaria-Greene, a special
educator and student teacher supervisor from California. Candelaria-Greene
documents the fact that these mentally handicapped students attending Jacaranda
School in Nairobi
were speaking an average of three
languages at similar fluency rates. ... Thus, students spoke English as a second
or third language as well as they might speak Kiswahili, Gujerati, or Kikuyu. As
an instructor in both countries, I found that the Kenyan students, with Down
Syndrome for example, demonstrated receptive and expressive language proficiency
in their third language (English) equivalent to that of the US monolingual
English students with Down Syndrome. (1996: 550)
In rural areas, the children’s L1 (tribal language) would
be used in the home and for the development of literacy skills in lower
elementary classes. Kiswahili (the national language) would be used for initial
instruction in lower elementary classes in mixed language areas where it serves
as the lingua franca. English (the official language) is used for academic
instruction from upper elementary on and there is also exposure through
television and other media outlets.
Candelaria-Greene contrasts the favorable multilingual
environment for children in Kenya with the fact that special education
programming for similar children in the U.S. is usually through English only.
She notes that “school professionals know little to nothing about their
[limited English proficient] students’ language use patterns in the home
communities” (1996: 560). Judge Kiser might be interested to know that “not
once in two years [in Kenya] did I hear anyone blame academic failure or
inappropriate behavior on the fact that a student’s family spoke a second
language at home or that the student came from another tribe” (p. 560). She
goes on to conclude that where “multilingualism and the various cultures they
represent are valued by the society, and where there is a continued expectation
and need for multilingualism to continue, students can and do manage second
languages as well as they handle their first language, regardless of
handicapping condition” (p. 560).
While in Tokyo, I read in a special August supplement to
the Asahi Evening News, produced for the AILA congress, an article
entitled Learning New Methods to Swim in English Ocean. The article
discusses efforts to improve what many Japanese regard as the country’s dismal
record in learning English. The article reports, for example, that despite its
relative affluence, Japan ranks 150th out of 165 nations in TOEFL
(Test of English as a Foreign Language) results and languishes near the bottom
of Asian countries, performing little better than North Korea. The author
concludes that “without a command of English, Japan is being left behind by
the rest of the world” (Hiraoka, 1999: 3).
Statements such as this might evoke a heated response from those who advocate a
more critical perspective on the spread of English (see for example the articles
in TESOL Quarterly, 33:3, Autumn 1999, edited by Alistair Pennycook, as
well as Pennycook, 1998, and Phillipson, 1992, 1999).
Hiraoka raises the issue of what we mean by proficiency in
English and how conceptions of proficiency relate to language pedagogy:
Today, two types of English are
taught in Japan—entrance-exam English, and conversational English. When these
two streams are brought together, the Japanese will at last be poised to join
the world community. (1999: 3)
Again, I cringe at the assumption that knowledge of English
is the passport to “join the world community.” However, the claim that what
is assessed will determine what is taught and learned resonates with my
perception of what is increasingly happening in ESL contexts in Britain and
North America. As system-wide assessment schemes are introduced into more and
more jurisdictions in the name of accountability, the tension is increasingly
apparent between, on the one hand, performance
assessments that reflect the full range of curriculum objectives (including
critical thinking and creative writing) but which are costly and time-consuming
to administer in a reliable way on a large-scale, and, on the other hand,
standardized tests that are reliable and efficient to administer, but which
typically reflect only a narrow band of easy-to-test curriculum objectives. Into
this mix of unresolved issues, throw the rapid increase in linguistic diversity,
with many students still in the process of learning the language of instruction
and of testing, and you have a set of very high-stakes headaches for the czars
of educational quality control.
The issues are surprisingly similar on both sides of the
Atlantic, reflecting another aspect of globalization or, perhaps global
homogenization. The May 28, 1999 Times Educational Supplement reported
that refugee and immigrant children arriving in Britain with little or no
English would be given “two years’ freedom from curriculum tests”
(Jackson, 1999: 1) under proposals being considered by government ministers.
These children would no longer be counted in their school’s test
results thereby addressing an issue which was described as “a major cause of
complaint for many inner-city schools” (1999: 1). The report goes on to note
that there are half a million pupils in England who do not speak English as
their first language and the proposed change “would give a considerable boost
to schools’ placing in league tables” (1999: 1), the system of publishing
the rankings of schools as a means of identifying “failing” schools and
exerting pressures for improvement.
Exactly the same issue is being debated in both the United
States and Canada (see Chapter 6) and in every case the one set of data that
policy-makers want to hear nothing about is the fact that it typically takes
immigrant children at least five years (often more) to catch up academically to
native-speakers English. At the AILA conference, Professor Elana Shohamy of Tel
Aviv University in Israel reported that in the Israeli context, a period of 7-9
years is typically required for immigrant students to catch up, a figure
consistent with the range found in North American data (e.g. Cummins, 1981a;
Hakuta, Butler, & Witt, 2000; Klesmer, 1994; Thomas & Collier, 1997). If
a period of 5+ years is typically required to catch up, then delaying testing
for two years, as proposed in the United Kingdom (UK), reduces the inequity only
slightly. Including these students in the testing will still skew the results
and undermine the whole accountability enterprise unless the data are
disaggregated in intelligent ways. This intelligence has to date not been very
evident in the North American context, where policy-makers have preferred to
bury their heads in the sand rather than really come to terms with what I call
in Chapter 6, “the awkward reality” of English language learning (ELL)
students.
It would not be difficult to disaggregate the data
according to a variety of criteria (e.g. poverty/socioeconomic status,
proportion of ELL students, etc.) so that the quality of school instruction
would emerge more clearly. In fact,
a recent analysis in the Times Education Supplement does exactly this for
the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) national school
examination results at the secondary level. According to the report, “it shows
huge variations in education authorities with apparently similar levels of
deprivation” (Dean, 1999). Furthermore, some authorities with high poverty
levels emerged as “winners” rather than “losers” when the data were
disaggregated:
Arguably, the
best-performing authority is the London borough of
Tower Hamlets, where more than two-thirds of pupils are on free
school meals, making it the most deprived area in the country on
this measure. Though its GCSE score of 32.8 puts it well below the
national average of 38.1, on the TES [Times Educational Supplement] analysis its
pupils scored 7.3 GCSE points above what might be expected... (Dean, 1999)
The same kind of analysis could be carried out for the
proportion of ELL students in different schools, weighted by length of residence
in the country.
So where does the figure of 2 years come from as the
criterion for including or excluding ELL students from national testing?
Presumably from the “common sense” notion that this is how long it takes
students to “learn English.” As the chapters in Part II of the present
volume argue, this conception of the nature of English proficiency is either
naive or perhaps cynical; it reflects typical time periods required to gain a
reasonable degree of conversational fluency in English but not the length of
time required to catch up to native speakers in academic aspects of English.
This example, and many more that could be drawn from other contexts, illustrates
how crucial it is for policy-makers and educators to have a clear conception of
what they mean by “language proficiency.” In an era of widespread linguistic
and cultural diversity, educational policies on curriculum and assessment that
relegate considerations regarding diversity and language to “afterthought”
or “footnote” status are likely to produce discriminatory instruction and
utterly meaningless accountability data.
The Alice in Wonderland nature of much of the
“accountability and standards” debate in North America was aptly pinpointed
by well-known educational writer Gerald W. Bracey in an article in USA Today
which appeared in early November 1999. Bracey (1999: 19A) points to the
hypocrisy of the rhetoric of educational reform in light of the fact that
politicians and policy-makers have shown minimal interest in addressing issues
of child poverty which has a “devastating impact” on school performance:
Poor children get off to a bad
start before they are born. Their mothers are likely to get prenatal care late,
if at all, which can impair later intellectual functioning. They are more than
three times as likely as nonpoor children to have stunted growth. They are about
twice as likely to have physical and mental disabilities, and are seven times
more likely to be abused or neglected. And they are more than three times more
likely to die.
What these kids need are high
standards, right? (1999: 19A)
Payne and Biddle (1999) have recently demonstrated the
independent effects of school funding levels and child poverty on mathematics
achievement in the United States. Together these variables accounted for 25% of
the variance in achievement. Level of curriculum challenge (ranging from
remedial to advanced algebra curriculum) was also significantly related to
achievement. Payne and Biddle point out that despite continuous economic growth
during the past decade, the child poverty level in the most affluent country in
the world is still more than 20 percent, substantially higher than any other
industrialized nation. They suggest
a far more likely explanation for the relatively poor showing of U.S. schools in
international comparisons than the
“declining standards” usually invoked by politicians:
Since poorly funded schools and
communities with high levels of poverty are very rare in other industrialized
nations, education in America is uniquely handicapped because of the singular
tolerance for large numbers of poorly funded schools and massive amounts of
child poverty in our country. And as long as this tolerance continues, none
of the present programs being touted for “reforming” American
education—educational vouchers, “setting high standards,”
“accountability” schemes, charter schools—are likely to improve
America’s aggregate math achievement substantially. (1999: 12)
I find the educational standards debate (discussed in
Chapter 6) particularly interesting because policy-makers and politicians are
being forced to come to terms with the situation of ELL/bilingual students in
order to implement their grand designs for higher standards (and often their own
aspirations for political advancement). The blatant contradictions between the
political rhetoric of higher standards and the tolerance for massive child
poverty and hugely inequitable school funding exposes very clearly the discourse
of coercive power relations.
These contradictions are also readily apparent in debates
on bilingual education considered in the next section. The clear message being
broadcast by the media in the United States is that bilingual education is a cause of further impoverishment for
the poor but a potential source of further enrichment for the rich.
California, December 13-16, 1999: Sorting Fact from Friction
in Bilingual Education
At a workshop in San Francisco on December 16, 1999, one
participant, Anat Harrel, originally from Israel, expressed her outrage at the
hypocrisy evident in many of the arguments against bilingual education. She
shared with participants an advertisement that appeared in a local parent
newspaper in July 1998 right in the aftermath of the Proposition 227 referendum
that aimed to vote public school bilingual education out of existence. The
advertisement was for a private school, the French-American School of Silicon
Valley, and urged readers to “Give your children a wonderful gift: A bilingual
education” (emphasis original). The text, with the Eiffel Tower in the
background, continued: “The best of two educational worlds: The accurate
planning of the French and the pragmatic openness of the American system.” (Bay
Area Parent, July 1998: 105). What angered Anat was not the advertisement
itself but rather the implicit assumptions that it pointed to in the broader
educational discourse: French-English bilingual education is prestigious and
legitimate whereas Spanish-English bilingual education is neither; bilingual
education is “the best of two educational worlds” for those whose parents
are wealthy enough to pay for a private school, but it causes
educational failure among low-income public school students. Bilingualism
is good for the rich but bad for the poor.
The results of a recent study in ten U.S. cities showed
clearly that bilingualism is certainly not bad for the poor, financially
speaking. A February 2, 2000,
report in the Latino Link section of Yahoo! News on the world wide web (http://dailynews.yahoo.com)
highlighted the fact that in Miami “fully bilingual Hispanics earn nearly
7,000 dollars per year more than their English-only counterparts.” (Latino
Link, 2000). Dr. Sandra Fradd, one of the authors of the study, noted that
people are often opposed to bilingual education because “they are unaware of
the economic importance of being able to communicate in more than one language.
... such opposition may not make good sense when the financial benefits of being
bilingual are considered.” The same pattern of economic advantage associated
with fluency and literacy in two languages appeared in most of the other U.S.
cities (e.g. San Antonio, Jersey City, etc.) (see also, Fradd & Lee, 1998).
The motivation of parents who send their children to the French-American
School of Silicon Valley is presumably similar to those in other parts of
the world who want their children to have the advantages of knowing two or more
languages fluently. I was reminded of the article Learning to Swim in English
Ocean in the Asahi Evening News which I had read in August in Tokyo.
This article highlighted the promising results that are emerging from Katoh
Gakuen in Numazu, Shizuoka Prefecture, an English/Japanese bilingual school
designed to develop fluent and literate bilingual skills.
Instruction in the early grades is two-thirds in English (L2) and
one-third in Japanese (L1). Thus, students spend the same amount of time on
Japanese language arts as students in a typical Japanese elementary school,
although all other academic content is taught through English. Hiraoka (1999)
describes how some parents have moved their families into the neighborhood
specifically to enable their children to attend Katoh Gakuen. One
such parent articulates her rationale for this move:
“In this day and age...everybody
needs a second language. The English they teach at most Japanese schools is
useless. I wanted Maki [her daughter] to speak real English in a natural
manner” (1999: 3).
This parent’s confidence in the school appears to be
well-justified from the careful evaluation carried out by Michael Bostwick
(1999), the deputy director of the school, for his doctoral dissertation.
Grade 5 students acquire considerable proficiency in English (roughly to
the level of grade 3 native-speaker students in the United States and equivalent
to grade 9 Japanese-L1 students in Japan). Their Japanese L1 academic
development and mastery of academic content taught through English progresses at
the same rate as that of control students in a Japanese monolingual program.
On December 14, I presented a workshop to educators of ELL
students in Buena Park, a community on the outskirts of Los Angeles. I
emphasized the potential for developing students’ critical language awareness
when we encourage them to focus on language and make connections between their
L1 and L2. This can and should
happen even in monolingual English-medium classes (see Chapter 10). In
particular, the wealth of cognates in Spanish and English deriving from their
origins in Latin and Greek (see Chapter 3, and Corson, 1995, 1997) provide
opportunities for students to become “language detectives” (Delpit, 1998)
searching out connections between languages or varieties within the same
language. Several participants noted that in their school districts, after the
passage of Proposition 227, teachers were being instructed not to send Spanish
books home for parents and children to read together. Furthermore, they were
being told to discourage parents from reading to their children in Spanish and
even from speaking to their children in Spanish. In these districts,
bilingualism was clearly being constructed as part of the problem, rather than
as part of the solution.
Yet just down the road from these districts were dual
language programs such as the Korean-English program in Cahuenga School (see
Chapter 8). These programs, also termed “two-way bilingual immersion,” serve
both English-dominant and L1-dominant students with the goal of developing
bilingualism and biliteracy among both groups. Despite the negative societal
climate around bilingualism and bilingual education, these dual language
programs have expanded significantly across the state during the past year, up
from 95 in 1997-98 to 108 in 1998-99. According to the California Department of
Education (1999b), these programs have increased 272% since 1990.
I spoke in one of the breaks with a group of educators from
one of the districts that operated a Spanish-English dual language program which
appeared to be functioning very successfully for both groups of students. These
educators wondered how the focus on language connections could be put into
practice in the context of their dual language program. Formal English literacy
instruction was not introduced until grade 3 and there was some pressure to
postpone it for another year, until grade 4, in order to provide even more
“psychological space” for the minority language to develop to a higher
level.
The discussion highlighted concerns about French immersion
programs in Canada that I have had for more than 20 years (Cummins, 1977) and
they appear highly relevant now in the context of dual language programs in the
United States. It appears to me
that we have become captive to the doctrines that emerged from the original St.
Lambert model of French immersion implemented in the mid-1960s near Montreal.
Among these are the following problematic assumptions:
·
The two languages of instruction in bilingual programs should be
kept rigidly separate;
·
Models that provide exclusive or near-exclusive emphasis on the
minority language in the early grades are superior to those that have more equal
instruction in the two languages (e.g. 50/50 models) and/or introduce literacy
in both languages in grade 1.
·
Transfer of literacy and concepts across languages will happen
“automatically” and thus as much instructional time as possible should be
provided for the minority language to develop because the majority language will
“look after itself” and students will catch up rapidly after formal English
instruction is introduced.
There is some substance to all three of these assumptions,
but without qualifications they become dangerous half-truths. Certainly,
languages of instruction should not be mixed in any kind of random way and it is
important to provide students with appropriate oral and written models of each
language. However, by not creating
a context for bilingual language exploration in our classrooms we miss out on
one of the most powerful tools that children in such programs have to develop
their literacy and awareness of language. In French-English programs and
Spanish-English programs, the cognate connections between the languages provide
enormous possibilities for linguistic enrichment, but not if the program is set
up to ensure that the two languages never meet.
The assumption that early exposure to the minority language
should be maximized in the early grades is not in itself harmful.
There are many highly successful 90/10 dual language programs in
operation throughout the United States, and Canadian French immersion programs
that follow a similar model have also been evaluated very positively. However,
several 50/50 programs that develop literacy in both languages simultaneously or
in quick succession in the early grades have also been highly successful (e.g.
the Oyster Bilingual School in Washington, DC and the Amigos Program in
Cambridge Massachusetts—see Chapter 8). Thus
a strong case should not be made for the absolute superiority of one model over
another.
It appears to me also that it is highly problematic to
assume that transfer of academic skills across languages will always happen
automatically. In French immersion
programs where most children have experienced a strong culture of literacy (in
English) in the home, “automatic” transfer usually does happen in the grade
1 or grade 2 year, but parental reinforcement of English literacy in the home
plays a major role in this transfer (e.g. Cashion & Eagan, 1990; Cummins,
1977).
The dangers of assuming that instructional time through the
minority language should be maximized for as long as possible and that the
academic genres and conventions of literacy in the majority language do not
require explicit formal teaching were brought home to me by debates that have
been going on recently in New Zealand in the context of Maori medium programs. A
discussion paper written by John McCaffrey, Colleen McMurchy-Pilkington, and
Hemi Dale and presented at a conference in Palmerston North in late September
1998 highlighted both the considerable success that Maori medium programs have
experienced in a short period of time but also some unresolved problematic
issues. Among these is wide range
of opinion and program implementations with respect to when and how English
(students’ L1) should be introduced into the program. The authors point out that some Maori educators want no
English whatsoever from Grades 1 through 8. However, they also note that many
educators “are now seeking assistance with English developments after finding
that total immersion in Mäori followed by total submersion in English is not
leading to the high levels of Secondary school success they hoped for” (1998:
14). They also note that educators in some programs are concerned that
“English is sometimes being delayed to the point of never being done or being
done very badly and children are exited to all English Secondary programmes
quite lost” (1998: 17). They recommend that English literacy should be
introduced somewhere between grades 3 and 5 and that a Transition program to
prepare students for the challenges of English-medium secondary school be
implemented.
Both of these suggestions appear reasonable to me. When the
introduction of English is delayed until secondary school, a number of questions
must be addressed: What are students reading in the later grades of elementary
school? The amount of Maori literature is limited (although great strides have
been made in developing material for the early grades). Are students reading in
English despite having received minimal (or no) formal English literacy
instruction, or are they reading very little in either Maori or English,
compared to children in English programs? If they are not engaged in extended
reading (and writing), this to me would represent a major gap in their
educational experience.
Another issue concerns the need for extensive opportunities
to write in a wide variety of genres if students are to develop coherent and
powerful writing proficiencies. Corrective feedback and guidance from teachers
are also crucial in this process. Writing expertise may be a central cognitive
ability, as suggested by Cumming’s (1989) findings, but extensive reading and
exposure to academic registers, in addition to authentic opportunities for use
of these registers, are required to realize this expertise in any particular
language. For example, if students are not reading extensively in English, it is
doubtful that their ability to spell correctly in English will develop
adequately (e.g. Krashen, 1993). It does not surprise me at all that students
who have not been encouraged to read and write extensively in English during
their elementary school years experience significant difficulties in English
when they enter secondary school.
However, the concern among many Maori educators about the
quality of the Maori language that students are learning is also legitimate.
They are concerned that when English is introduced too early (i.e. prior to
grade 8) there is extensive Anglicization of the language due to interference
from English. Discussions in the Summer of 1999 (and subsequent correspondence)
with Maori educators Toni Waho and Penny Poutu brought home to me the
difficulties of developing what Toni Waho calls “real Maori and not a
mish-mash of English and Maori” (personal communication, January 19, 2000).
Similar concerns have been frequently expressed in the context of Welsh and
Irish language revival efforts. Research on these issues is lacking and thus
educators must carefully observe the outcomes of different program options in
order to work towards optimal development of both languages.
As Toni Waho observed “I believe we are only part way there on the
journey to create the best solution for true high quality bilingualism”
(personal correspondence, January 19, 2000).
In the context of programs that aim to develop a high
degree of bilingualism and biliteracy in non-threatened languages,
I feel more comfortable with a program that unambiguously embraces
bilingualism and biliteracy and takes steps to develop both languages at an
early age. The research of Cashion and Eagan (1990) in Canadian French immersion
programs and of Verhoeven (1991a) among minority language students in the
Netherlands shows that transfer across languages is two-way (from L1 to L2 and
then back from L2 to L1) if the sociolinguistic and educational conditions are
right. Furthermore, the possibilities for linguistic enrichment as a result of
encouraging students to compare and contrast their languages and develop a
critical language awareness can be pursued only if both languages are
acknowledged in the program (see Chapter 10). There is nothing in either the
threshold or interdependence hypotheses (see Chapter 7) that would support
neglect of the majority language. In fact, the data reviewed in Chapter 7
suggest that both L1 literacy and knowledge of the L2 are important determinants
of successful literacy development in L2. Development of academic knowledge and
skills in the majority language will not “just take care of itself;”
it requires explicit teaching with a focus on the genres, functions, and
conventions of the language itself in the context of extensive reading and
writing of the language (see Chapter 10).
This is in accord with Hornberger’s (1989) discussion of
cross-lingual transfer in the development of biliteracy.
She notes that “highly efficient reading/writing ability in L1 does not
make up altogether for lack of knowledge of L2” (1989: 286). Furthermore, she
emphasizes that “the findings that a stronger first language leads to a
stronger second language do not necessarily imply that the first language must
be fully developed before the second language is introduced. Rather the first
language must not be abandoned before it is fully developed, whether the second
language is introduced simultaneously or successively, early or late, in that
process” (1989: 287). In short, some anxiety in relation to the strength of
the majority language is certainly justified, but protection and development of
the minority language can be better achieved by providing extensive and
motivating opportunities for its oral and written use rather than focusing on
erecting barricades against English.
The very positive media picture of bilingual education for
affluent children in countries around the world is similar to the way French
immersion programs have typically been depicted in the Canadian context. These
programs serve the interests of dominant middle-class majority language
children. By contrast, when bilingual education aims to serve the interests of
marginalized students from minority groups, the media appear to have extreme
difficulty understanding the rationale for these programs. This was brought home
to me in a personal way in a New York Times Magazine article by James
Traub entitled Bilingual Barrier. The rationale for bilingual education
was presented as follows:
The idea of bilingual education is
that students can learn a subject in their native tongue, and then
“transfer” their skills to English once they have gained English
proficiency. Some bilingual theorists, like the linguist Jim Cummins, argue that
children should not switch to English until they have attained academic mastery
in their native tongue, which takes at least five to six years—a staggering
idea given the speed with which young children attain verbal fluency. ...
Students in bilingual classes study all their subjects—and often English,
too—in their native tongue. (1999: 33)
In these three sentences the inaccuracies are legion.
A trivial one is that I am not a linguist (my academic degrees are in the
area of psychology). I have never specified that any particular time period is
required to attain “academic mastery” in children’s native
tongue—clearly academic development in L1 continues for as long as there are
opportunities for engagement with academic language in school or outside school.
For English-L1 speakers in North America, academic development in L1 will
continue throughout schooling and for many of us throughout our lifetimes.
For speakers of minority languages, academic development will continue
for as long as the school or home provides opportunities and encouragement for
development to continue. There is
no 5-6 year “cut-off” point. What I have said, and what the author and his
informants have obviously confused, is that it typically takes at least 5 years
for ELL students to catch up academically to their native-speaking peers in L2
(English).
Another confusion is the assertion that the speed with
which “young children attain verbal fluency” (in English, presumably)
implies that language learning occurs rapidly and therefore there is no need for
bilingual education. Or if there is bilingual education, transition to an
all-English program should occur as soon as students have attained “verbal
fluency.” Traub clearly has no conception of the distinction between
conversational and academic aspects of language proficiency nor of the relevance
of this distinction for understanding patterns of achievement among bilingual
students (see Chapters 3-6).
Traub also asserts that instruction in bilingual programs
is in L1-only, with minimal exposure to English until students are transitioned
to English programs after 5-6 years. In fact, the vast majority of bilingual
programs spend only a small proportion of instruction through the L1 (Wong
Fillmore & Valadez, 1996). Traub
appears to believe that the “L1-only” pattern is what I have advocated. This
is absolutely incorrect. What the research that I and many others have carried
out does show is that there is a strong correlation between the attainment of
literacy in the bilingual student’s two languages. Those who have strong L1
academic and conceptual skills when they start learning English tend to attain
higher levels of English academic skills. However, as noted above, access to
comprehensible input in English, and opportunities to use oral and written
English powerfully, are also crucial. The strong L1-L2 relationship (see Chapter
7) certainly does not mean that English-medium academic instruction should be
withheld from bilingual/ELL children for at least five years. I believe, and
have strenuously argued, that a bilingual program should be fully bilingual with
a strong English language arts (reading and writing) program together with a
strong L1 (e.g. Spanish) language arts program. There is no set formula as
to how much of each language should be used at particular grade levels (research
suggests that a variety of options is possible and the sociolinguistic context
with respect to the status of, and students’ exposure to, each language will
be a major consideration—see Chapters 7 and 8). Similarly, there is no formula
as to which language reading should be introduced in during the early grades. My
personal belief is that there are significant advantages in aiming to have
children reading and writing (or beginning to read and write) in both
languages by at least grade 2.
The Ides of March, 2000
Julius Caesar ignored the warning to “beware the Ides of
March” to his cost, but for advocates of bilingual education two millennia
later the Ides of March brought mixed messages. An article in The Economist (March
11-17, 2000) by John Micklethwait warned us that the “One-Stop
Disinformation” service operated by opponents of bilingual education in the
United States was still functioning very smoothly, as was also evident in
Traub’s (1999) article ten months previously. During the same week, however,
U.S. Secretary of Education, Richard W. Riley, delivered a speech in which he
strongly endorsed dual language programs aimed at developing full biliteracy
among Latino/Latina and other students. He advocated that these programs should
be quadrupled in the next five years. Take your pick from two diametrically
opposed versions of reality.
Richard W. Riley (U.S. Secretary of Education):
First, I want to address the promise of language.
For many, language is at the core of the Latino experience in this country, and
it must be at the center of future opportunities for this community and for this
nation. Parents and educators want all children to learn English because it is
essential for success. And we also know how valuable two languages can be.
It is high time we begin to treat
language skills as the asset they are, particularly in this global economy.
Anything that encourages a person to know more than one language is
positive—and should be treated as such. ... Unfortunately, some have viewed
those who use a foreign language with suspicion and their language itself as a
barrier to success. In some places, even the idea of “bilingual education”
is controversial. It shouldn’t be. ...
Proficiency in English and one
other language is something that we need to encourage among all young people.
That is why I am delighted to see and highlight the growth and promise of
so many dual-language bilingual programs across the country.
They are challenging young people with high standards, high expectations,
and curriculum in two languages. ...
Our nation needs to encourage more
of these kinds of learning opportunities, in many different languages. That is
why I am challenging our nation to increase the number of dual-language schools
to at least 1,000 over the next five years, and with strong federal, state and
local support we can have many more. (2000: 3-4)
John Micklethwait (The
Economist, March 11-17)
New York is the next target for Ron Unz, a
Silicon Valley millionaire who was the guiding force behind California’s
Proposition 227. This measure replaced bilingual education, which around half
the students with poor English were receiving, with crash courses in English.
Bilingual education, originally invented as a way to steer funds to
poor people in the southwest, has always produced disappointing results. It is
now merely a sop to the teachers’ unions. Since bilingual education was
banned in California about a year ago, test scores have risen. Even more
tellingly, the students who were put on the English crash course or into
mainstream classes are well ahead of those still stuck in bilingual ones
(which a few students have waivers to continue). (2000:15) <2>
Out of the six sentences in
this passage, the first is true; the other five are blatantly false. Going
through them in order:
·
Prior to Proposition 227, only 30% of English language learners in
California were in any form of bilingual program and less than 20% were in
classes taught by a credentialed bilingual teacher.
·
Bilingual education was not originally “invented” in the
United States—these programs have been operating since Greek and Roman times.
Furthermore, the spread of these programs in countries around the world,
including the spread of dual language programs in the United States, is hardly
consistent with the claim that they have “always produced disappointing
results” (see Baker & Prys Jones, 1998).
·
Contrary to the claim that bilingual education is a “sop” to
teachers’ unions, teachers unions in California and elsewhere have tended to
be very ambivalent about bilingual education for the simple reason that only a
small fraction of their members are in fact bilingual teachers.
·
The implication that test scores rose in California as a result of
the banning of bilingual education is without foundation. Changes in scores
occurred in districts in ways that appeared to be completely unrelated to what
kind of program a district implemented (Hakuta, 1999).
·
There is absolutely no data to support the claim that students put
into all-English classes made better progress than those who were “still stuck
in bilingual ones” (Hakuta, 1999).
The remainder of this
volume addresses these issues in much more depth. At this juncture, it is
sufficient to note that Micklethwait’s sketch of bilingual education would
receive an “F” grade in any assessment of journalistic competence or
responsibility. He has taken the views of Ron Unz, or one of his associates, and
has reported them as “fact” rather than attributing them as the particular
perspective of his source (e.g. “Ron Unz claims that bilingual education has
always produced disappointing results, etc.). He has obviously not checked out
any of the data that might back up his claims nor even bothered to note that
there is any alternative viewpoints on these data other than those he reports as
“fact.” Even a five-minute excursion into the Encyclopedia of
Bilingualism and Bilingual Education (Baker & Prys Jones, 1998) or into
journalist James Crawford’s web site on Language Policy (http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/jwcrawford),
would have indicated to him that the vast majority of academic analysis
of bilingual education is at variance with what he reports as undisputed fact.
In this regard, the gaps in his coverage unfortunately appear typical of
journalistic efforts in this area (see Crawford, 1998, for analysis of media
coverage of Proposition 227).
Opponents of bilingual
education in the United States have consistently distorted its rationale—the
example of Traub’s and
Micklethwait’s articles could be multiplied thousands of times (see Crawford,
1998; McQuillan and Tse, 1996). However,
advocates of bilingual education have also
sometimes failed to understand what is central and what is peripheral in
bilingual programs. This was
brought home to me when I made a presentation at a conference on “Reading and
the English Language Learner” in Sacramento, California in March, 1998. The
conference atmosphere was tense because of the assault on bilingual education in
the media in the lead-up the Proposition 227 referendum to be held in June of
that year. Many of the educators present were also strong believers in
whole-language approaches to reading which were now being castigated by the
State Board of Education as the cause of the state’s poor academic
showing in nationwide tests. Intensive and sustained phonics instruction was
seen as the savior of the next generation. The “buzzword” of the conference
was that we should adopt a “balanced” approach to reading instruction—a
sentiment few could disagree with—phonics and whole-language advocates alike
claimed that their approach was “balanced.”
In my presentation, I
tried to make essentially the two points sketched above (a variety of options is
possible regarding [a] the amount of time each language should be used
instructionally and [b] the language in which reading should be introduced).
These issues seemed to me to be “surface structure” considerations that were
less fundamental than “deep structure” issues related to the ways in which
identities were being negotiated in classroom interactions.
The response from some
advocates of bilingual education was less than enthusiastic. I was seen as
“selling out” to the new status quo. Many in the audience had spent 20+
years passionately defending bilingual education against its critics and arguing
for the importance of strongly developing students’ L1. My work had served a
useful role in this battle (e.g. Cummins, 1981a). Now I was perceived as saying
that there is no “best” proportion of L1 instruction in the early grades and
that it may not matter much whether reading is introduced in English or in
students’ L1 (usually Spanish). Many advocates of bilingual education had
interpreted my work as saying that we should strive for the maximum amount of L1
instruction in the early grades and that introducing reading in L1 was a crucial
component of an effective program.
In discussion with some
participants afterwards, I tried to point out that I had not in any sense
changed my position or emphasis from when I first started writing about these
issues in the late 1970s. I had always maintained that there should be a strong
emphasis on maintaining and developing literacy in the L1. In most cases, it
will make good sense to introduce reading in that language; Spanish, for
example, has a more regular sound-symbol relationship than English and is the
language Spanish-L1 speakers know better when they enter school, so it will make
sense in most circumstances to use that as the language of initial reading
instruction. However, the data show clearly that under some circumstances
Spanish-L1 students can learn to read first in English or in both languages in
quick succession, and reviews of the literature for more than 20 years have
shown no clearcut or absolute superiority for introducing reading in L1 as
compared to L2 (e.g. Cummins, 1979a; Engle, 1975; Fitzgerald, 1995; Wagner,
1998). To make initial literacy in the L1 central to the rationale for bilingual
education placed the whole enterprise on very shaky empirical and theoretical
grounds. Similarly, with respect to the amount of L1 instruction in the early
grades, I suggested that there is no one “best” solution that applies across
particular sociolinguistic contexts.
There seemed to me to
be a danger of focusing predominantly on promoting L1 literacy in the early
grades with some “oral ESL” accompaniment and then transitioning students in
grades 2 or 3 into all-English programs with no ongoing academic support in the
mainstream classes. Under these circumstances where there has been little focus
on helping students transfer the language and literacy knowledge gained in L1 to
L2, students are likely to flounder in an English-only program. This is
particularly the case when students’ L1 literacy accomplishments are neither
acknowledged nor further developed after transition to the “mainstream.”
Rather than being suspicious of English and delaying its introduction, my
belief is that we should encourage the development of biliteracy where students
are writing bilingual books (according to well-established whole-language
procedures), reading them with parents and peers, and generally augmenting their
awareness of language and how it works. Strong and uncompromising promotion of
L1 literacy is a crucial component of this approach but we should adopt a both/and
rather than an either/or orientation to L1 and L2. When promoted
together, the two languages enrich each other rather than subtracting from each
other. We can promote critical
language awareness among bilingual students by providing them with opportunities
to carry out projects on language and its relation to their own lives. <3>
Conclusion
These illustrations of disputes, debates, and power
struggles surrounding bilingual education could be multiplied many times over.
Among the high-stakes issues whose specifics are beyond the scope of this volume
are the following:
·
The intense public and policy debate in the Hong Kong context over
the sequencing and intensity of Chinese- and English-medium instruction at
elementary and secondary school levels (Johnson, 1997; Lin, 1997; Lin & Man,
1999);
·
Debates regarding the instructional uses of mother tongue,
regional/national languages, and former colonial languages in many African
societies and other post-colonial contexts (e.g. Dutcher, 1995; Obando, 1996,
1997; Bunyi, 1997; Williams, 1996);
·
Controversies surrounding bilingual education for Deaf
children—specifically, the extent to which in the North American context,
American Sign Language (ASL) should be used as a medium of instruction and the
degree to which linguistic and conceptual transfer will occur from ASL to
written English (Gibson, Small, & Mason, 1997; Mahshie, 1995; Mason, 1997;
Meyer & Wells, 1996).
·
The implementation of bilingual education, and the proportion of
L1 and L2 instruction, in a variety of indigenous contexts throughout the world;
for example, in the territory of Nunavut in the Eastern Arctic in Canada
(Arnaqaq, Pitsiulak, & Tompkins, 1999; McGregor, Pitsiulak, &
O’Donoghue, 1999; O’Donoghue, 1998; Tompkins, 1998) or in Australian
Aboriginal contexts (e.g. Devlin, 1997; Harris, 1990).
In all of these contexts (and clearly many more), the
theoretical and empirical issues discussed in this volume intersect in complex
ways. The controversies that characterize policy-making in contexts of
linguistic diversity in education can be analyzed from a variety of
perspectives; for example, with respect to how power is negotiated between
dominant and subordinated groups, how “language proficiency” is
conceptualized and assessed with high-stakes consequences for students and
groups, the extent to which different languages of instruction are incorporated
in school systems and the academic outcomes of different models, and the types
of pedagogy that are appropriate to develop language skills and high levels of
academic achievement in different sociolinguistic contexts. These issues have
often been seen as relatively independent of each other, with the consequence
that theoretical analyses and empirical research have remained locked within
different disciplinary perspectives (e.g. sociology, linguistics, psychology,
etc.)
My goal in this volume is to bring these perspectives
together. Every interaction between teachers and students can be analyzed from
multiple perspectives (how effective is it pedagogically, what conception of
language is implicated in the instruction, what messages related to status and
power are being communicated, etc.). The development of coherent policies and
effective instructional practices requires that the theory and research be
re-integrated rather than remain isolated in discipline-based chunks. Thus,
although the topics discussed in the following chapters may initially appear
quite distant from each other (e.g. the focus on power relations in Chapter 2,
academic and language assessment in Chapter 6, and pedagogy in Chapter 10), they
are fused in educational interactions. If theory is going to inform practice,
and in turn be informed by practice, then the theory must search for coherence
through an integrated interdisciplinary perspective that brings disparate fields
into dialogue with each other.
Footnotes
1.
On a lighter note, Bryan MacMahon, in his wonderful autobiography, The
Master, highlights the fact that the efforts of teachers will not always be
appreciated by the wider society. Walking home from school on the day he retired
after almost 50 years of teaching in rural Kerry, in Ireland, he had this
encounter
A genteel old woman paused as she
passed me by. “Was it all boys you taught up there in the school?”
“Yes,” I said. “No girls?” “None.” “Ach, sure you’re only half a
schoolmaster,” came her verdict on my lifetime of endeavor. (1992: 202)
2.
I became aware of John Micklethwait’s article as a result of a
contribution by Gisele A. Waters, a doctoral candidate in Educational Psychology
at Auburn University, to the BILING listserve on March 26, 2000.
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