Fostering Multiliteracies: 2nd conference day

Our two plenary speakers

It’s easy to have a good time at a conference on the spectacular campus of the American University of Sharjah and with such a great group of delegates.

Nancy Hornberger, today’s plenary speaker, started her lecture with a reminder of the fact that multilingualism is normal and monolingualism is a cultural limitation. Way to go!

Nancy’s lecture illustrated “ten certainties” of multilingual education with case studies from Latin America and New Zealand. Nancy is certain about the following:

1)     National multilingual language education policy opens up ideological and implementational spaces for multilingual education

2)     Local actors may open up — or close down — agentive spaces for multilingual education as they implement, interpret, and perhaps resist policy initiatives

3)     Ecological language policies take into account the power relations among languages and promote multilingual uses in all societal domains

4)     Models of multilingual education instantiate linguistic and sociocultural histories and goals in each context

5)     Language status planning and language corpus planning go hand in hand

6)     Communicative modalities encompass more than spoken and written language

7)     Classroom practices can foster transfer of language and literacy skills along receptive-productive, oral-written, L1-L2 dimensions and across modalities

8)     Multilingual education activates voices for reclaiming the local

9)     Multilingual education affords choices for reaffirming our own

10) Multilingual education opens spaces for revitalizing the Indigenous

I’ve got a bit of a Socratic bent (“ἓν οἶδα ὅτι οὐδὲν οἶδα; “I know that I don’t know”) and so I’ve amused myself during some of the less exciting presentations by trying to think up exceptions and counter-examples to these certainties. Certainty #6 seems kind of hard to disagree with …

My personal award for best paper of the day (with the same disclaimer as yesterday …) goes to Muhammad Ali Khan, who is undertaking an ethnography of an English-medium high school in Karachi, Pakistan, in order to understand the lived experience of language policy. In many ways the story he presented was all too familiar: the teachers and the students in that high school were in unison that a person who doesn’t speak English, doesn’t get any respect in contemporary Karachi, no matter how multilingual they might otherwise be (students didn’t even bother to count languages other than English and Urdu when asked how many languages they spoke …). Knowing English isn’t a magic bullet, either, as English with a Pakistani accent doesn’t get much respect, either, and one of the teachers kept encouraging their students to watch CNN and BBC to learn “good English.” Instilling a linguistic inferiority complex in young people is actually a quick-and-dirty way to naturalize existing inequalities: the rich send their children to private schools, where they can learn “good English;” the middle class send their children to less expensive private schools, where they learn Pakistani English; and the poor have no choice other than the public schools with Urdu as the medium of instruction.

The paper reminded me very much of John Taylor Gatto’s classic Dumbing Us Down: the hidden curriculum of compulsory schooling. The question of who has a vested interested in a particular arrangement of language education and a particular set of linguistic ideologies is a powerful one, not only in Karachi!