Bilingual Education in the 21st Century

2

Languaging and Education

A Child’s Language Use: A Scenario

Follow 14-year-old Tatyana as the computer is turned on. The web-based program Tatyana uses has a drop-down menu making it possible to switch between the Ukrainian in which her schooling is conducted, the Russian her father speaks to her, and the French she wants to learn. And when the computer’s microphone is turned on, Tatyana avidly listens to the different voices of the many games that are available, in Ukrainian, Russian, French, English, or any other language she fancies. Watch the screen as the child sends messages back and forth, with multiple signs, words, and visuals combining to communicate effectively with the many participants on the other end, sometimes nearby, but many other times far away.

Now listen to Tatyana as she speaks to her other teenage sisters. The Ukrainian she uses is very different from that which she speaks with her mother or the Russian which she spea ks to her father. The language she hears on television and radio depends on who in the home is holding the remote control. Different channels often bring other languages, other varieties, as the characters change from professional to working-class, from rich to poor, from adults to children, and as programs originate in different geographical areas for specific populations.

Now enter Tatyana’s school, but stop at the playground. There you see children of the same language-background interacting, sometimes going back and forth from language practices of play and friendship to those of schoolwork. Other times, children of different language backgrounds are together – playing, talking, engaging in language practices as they relate to their peers.

Then walk into a classroom. Tatyana, who was chatting comfortably with many friends in the playground, is now sitting quietly at a desk. Sometimes, the teacher calls for group work and Tatyana is asked to complete a task with classmates. But the task is directed, the language is controlled, and only “accountable talk”1 on the subject of the lesson and in the standard language of instruction at the particular time is allowed by the teacher.

If Tatyana is lucky, she is in a bilingual classroom, but even there she’s not allowed to use her multiple language practices to complete school tasks, to communicate with others, to think clearly, to show the understandings acquired, the knowledge internalized. The teacher carefully controls the language that is to be used during instruction. Assessment is done only using paper and pencil tasks, and often just in the dominant school language. Even when technology supports assessment, the academic tasks usually require only written language, devoid of sounds, of visuals, of other signs and language practices that may be in the child’s linguistic repertoire.

The teacher’s talk is often very different from that of the children. And the discourse used in the classroom is very different from the authentic, multiple communication that takes place in the children’s home and in informal settings. Even teachers who pride themselves on using an innovative pedagogy fall prey at times to the Initiation-Response-Feedback (IRF) sequence (also referred to as IRE: Initiation-Response-Evaluation) that has been identified in the literature (Cazden, 1988; Sinclair & Coulthard, 1975) as common in classroom discourse, with the teacher questioning, the student responding, and the teacher evaluating and giving feedback.

Overview

In this chapter, we will discuss:

• language constructions;
• languaging in different contexts.

Introduction

Before we examine the concept of bilingualism that underlies all understandings of bilingual education in Chapters 3 and 4, it is important to think about language itself, because language is both the medium through which school subjects are taught and is also an important subject studied in school. Bilingual education often involves educating in languages of unequal positions and power, so it is important first to discuss how certain languages have come to have the powerful role that they have today.

Educators and scholars of bilingual education also need to be aware of the purposes for the imposition of certain language codes, and especially the standard academic language. Juxtaposing these notions with the fluid ways in which languages are used in the twenty-first century, what we will here call “languaging,” allows us to understand the changes that we must make conceptually in our thinking about language to support the children’s language practices in classrooms.

In this chapter, we focus on the complex role that bilingual schools play regarding language. Whereas all schools, even monolingual ones, must negotiate the standard language that they use and promote, and the intricate language practices of students, it is in bilingual schools that this complexity comes to the fore. In bilingual schools the heterogeneity of language practices involving two or more languages is much more intricate than the two standard languages in isolation that schools use and promote. It is precisely this tension between the heteroglossic language practices of emergent bilingual2 and bilingual students, and the standard language promoted in school, that makes bilingual education such a fertile ground for thinking about language. It is the task of any bilingual school to build on this tension, as it acknowledges and utilizes the child’s complex linguistic practices to ensure that the use of two or more standard languages are incorporated into the child’s linguistic repertoire.

Language Constructions

Constructing language

Makoni and Pennycook (2007) have proposed that our present conception of language was originally constructed by states that wanted to consolidate political power, and in so doing established language academies, encouraged the preparation of grammars, dictionaries, and treatises to strengthen and standardize languages, and encouraged the enumeration of languages in ways that masked their differences or similarities.3 With regard to language academies, among the first was the Accademia della Crusca, founded in Florence in 1572 to uphold the Tuscan dialect of Dante and Petrarch. In 1635 Cardinal Richelieu founded the Académie Française to promote clarity, simplicity, and good taste in French. And in 1713, the Real Academia Española was established in Spain with its motto of “limpia, fija y da esplendor” (cleans, stabilizes, and gives splendor), championing Spanish (Castilian4) and keeping it uncontaminated. Throughout the eighteenth century, other language academies flourished in Europe, and Arabic bodies were established in several countries, including Syria, Iraq, Egypt, and Jordan. Academies in Damascus, Cairo, Baghdad, Amman and Rabat all work for their own interest in the standardization and spread of Arabic (Laroussi, 2003). Official and semi-official agencies in multilingual African and Asian countries are concerned with both language purification, as well as language selection. In Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore, where Malay is used, The Handbook for the Formation of Technical Terms was agreed upon in 1975.

In contrast to these efforts to control language, there has never been an official English language academy. The major repository for standard English is in dictionaries, though there have been many individual guidebooks on usage (one of the more famous being Fowler’s Modern English Usage [1968, revised by Sir Ernest Gowers, Oxford, Oxford University Press]). In 1755, Samuel Johnson published his great dictionary, stabilizing English, but rejecting what he called linguistic “embalming.” In the United States, Noah Webster published his dictionary in 1827, removing “improprieties and vulgarisms,” but staying away from prescription.

That the construction of language, as we know it today, is tied to political control is evident, for example, in the case of Spanish. The year of the encounter between the Old and the New World, 1492, is also the year of the conquest of the last Arab kingdom of the Iberian Peninsula in Granada and of the expulsion of Jews by the Catholic monarchs; it is also the year of publication of Elio Antonio de Nebrija’s grammar, the first grammar of a modern European language. Nebrija’s work explicitly links the standardization of language, through a grammar, to the consolidation of political power, as it claims: “siempre la lengua fue compañera del imperio” (language was always the companion of empire).

The social construction of language was not simply limited to Europe. In Korea, for example, King Sejong invented Hangul, the phonemic alphabet organized into syllabic blocks in the fifteenth century. Hangul replaced the Chinese characters that had been used.

In the case of colonized populations, “constructed” state languages were then “administratively assigned” to them (Makoni and Pennycook, 2007). Beyond states, there were missionaries and colonial officers who evangelized, converted, controlled, and administered colonized populations. Errington (2001) has shown how missionaries and colonial officers imposed these “invented” monolithic languages onto specific territories. For example, Batibo (2005) describes how the rivalry between two missionary organizations led to separate orthographies for two languages in Cameroon – Ewondo and Bulu – which are mutually intelligible. The same...