Migration separates families

I am a second generation migrant from my mother’s side. When my grandfather migrated from the former Czechoslovakia to Australia after World War 2, only one member of his immediate family was a fellow survivor, his older brother. The brothers were desperate to get out of war-torn Europe and start a new life, but there was a catch. They weren’t able to go to the same place. While my grandfather received permission to emigrate with his young family to Sydney, his brother received the same from the United States. Despite already losing their parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins in the war, the brothers were unable to prevent losing each other. After they emigrated, although they wrote letters, and spoke on the phone very rarely, they never saw each other again.

Today in Australia where I live and work, cross-border communication is likely to be by phone, not letter and for the majority of migrants the greatest barrier to seeing family is likely to be economic. Many of the participants I spoke to for my research into mixed language couples living in Sydney frequently spoke to family members by phone, sometimes even daily. This is significantly more affordable now than it was fifty years ago. However, migrant families continue to be separated for many years and often permanently. The border closures during the pandemic were a very difficult period for migrants unable to travel to spend time with family, particularly aging parents and relatives. So how does communication maintain family ties across borders? And how can we as scholars engage with this topic, theoretically, methodologically and ethically?

A theory of communicative care

I was recently lucky enough to speak to Dr Lynnette Arnold about her new book on this topic, Living together across borders: communicative care in transnational Salvadorean families. In the book she describes how communicative care both sustains and resists dominating geo-political forces which maintain continued migration from El Salvador to the United States across multiple generations as solution to meeting the economic needs of the nation.

In the book Arnold details an analytical approach based on the concept of  communicative care. By this she means that the everyday communication which families engage in is an enactment of care, and that this care is “the most fundamental way that transnational families maintain collective intergenerational life in the face of continued, and seemingly endless, separation.” (p.6) She uses the term convivencia or living together, to describe the culturally specific practices she observed in her data collection with transnational Salvadoran families.

I found communicative care a particularly useful lens for examining the links between what are sometimes referred to as local or micro practices and processes and their connection to larger macro processes such as the economic and political systems governing nations. An example of this is the role of communication in maintaining the flow of global remittances which support the Salvadorean economy as well as the individual families. In this sense the book is a powerful tool for researchers who are interested in both a nuanced exploration of language practices in context and in the transformational power of research to speak back to hegemonic forces such as borders, global capitalism and neoliberalism.

Participants as researchers: researchers as participants

This study took a two stage approach to collecting the data. Starting with a lengthy ethnographic study of a village in El Salvador where she lived and worked as a young women, Arnold built up relationships with two transnational families. These families then formed the research participants for the second stage of the study, where four months worth of telephone conversations between migrant and non-migrant family members were recorded.

This stage centred the agency of the participants themselves by training them as data collectors of the recorded phone calls between transnational family members. In the interview, Dr Arnold discusses how she also employed research assistants from El Salvador who recognised the social identities – as well as the language varieties – of the research participants. This facilitated their contributions, both as accurate transcribers of the audio data but also as cultural informants in the data analysis process.

The ethics of working with migrants and language issues

For those of us working in the field of migration and language, how can we behave ethically in a space where there are profoundly unequal power relations, the stakes are high and global tensions continue to bubble around issues of migration, borders and citizenship? This is especially true for scholars like me, who are not first generation migrants themselves and thus speak from a relatively privileged position.

According to Arnold, we can start by asking what is language doing? How does it connect with the relational aspect of people’s lives and the geopolitical contexts they exist in? Thinking critically about the role of language in creating social reality allows us to become informed advocates for linguistic diversity. It enables us to think about issues of access, inclusion and ultimately social justice.

I’ll leave you with one example from the book’s conclusion which I found particularly compelling due to my own research interests into the links between language maintenance in migrant families and second language education. Arnold makes the point that one way we can support transnational families to maintain networks of communicative care is to change existing educational language policy “which all too often functions as a tool of state-sponsored family separation by pushing the children of migrants towards monolingualism in dominant languages like English” (p. 171). Instead of turning bilinguals into monolingual, language in education policy must be guided by what migrant families themselves need, which is the communicative resources to maintain ties across borders. This includes a recognition of the linguistic variety in migrant repertoires, which extend way beyond standard languages.

Reference

Arnold, L. (2024). Living Together Across Borders: Communicative Care in Transnational Salvadoran Families. Oxford University Press.

Related content

Piller, I. (2018). Globalization between crime and piety. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/globalization-crime-piety/
Weiss, F. (2012). Christmas in Nicaragua. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/christmas-in-nicaragua/

Transcript

Hanna Torsh: Welcome to the Language on the move podcast, a channel on the new books network, my name is Hannah Torsh, and I’m a lecturer in linguistics and applied linguistics at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. My guest today is Dr. Lynette Arnold, Dr. Lynette Arnold is an assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and we’re going to talk about her new monograph living together across borders, communicative care in Transnational Salvadorian Families published by Oxford University Press. Welcome to the show. Lynette.

Lynnette Arnold: Thank you so much. Hi, everybody! Ola.

Hanna Torsh: Can you start us off by telling us a bit about yourself, and how you got interested in the topic of your book?

Lynnette Arnold: Sure! So my book, Living together across borders, explores how members of transnational families find ways to live together despite being separated across borders. The families I work with are from a small rural village in El Salvador, with migrant relatives living in urban locations across the United States. I am not Salvadoran. I do not have Salvadoran family members. So you might wonder, what is it? How did I get involved in this? And my interest in this topic really emerged from 2 different but interrelated personal experiences.

I spent 5 years living in El Salvador from 2,000 to 2,005 during the years when most people are in college. I was living in El Salvador, and this is a really eye opening experience, because I got to know many young people, my age, who had grown up during the Salvadoran Civil War that happened in the 19 eighties, and in getting to know them I learned a lot about the involvement of the Us. Government in perpetuating this 12 year conflict through immense financial support of the Salvadoran military and training Salvadoran soldiers in brutal, scorched Earth tactics. All of these, the ways that us support had really caused a lot of harm in El Salvador, and that was an eye opening experience for me to realize that this big gaping hole in my education as a Us. Citizen not understanding something so vital about my country’s history and involvement in the world.

So that was one inspiration was really to help my fellow citizens better understand the human impact of us foreign policy. Our involvement in the Salvadoran Civil War was a direct cause of the widespread emigration that El Salvador shows still today. And so that was kind of one piece was recognizing that I hadn’t learned these things and wanting to share them with my fellow citizens.

The second experience was sort of more deeply relational, and it has to do with the ways that the relationships I made in El Salvador continued. When I moved back to the United States to go to college. When I moved to the US. I stayed in contact with people in El Salvador through phone calls, and I suddenly found myself part of this transnational network of folks in El Salvador, their relatives here in the United States, who I had met in El Salvador, but who had since migrated, and I started to get really interested in what was happening in those phone calls and all the kinds of complicated things that people were working out on the phone across borders. At the same time, at that moment in my life I was navigating a kind of growing realization or separation from my own family of origin. I had left at that point permanently left the Christian Commune where I was raised, and where my family still lives, so I have a very different reason for separation. But I was navigating in my own life how to be family with people that I wasn’t living together with. And so, though I juxtaposing those 2 experiences, got me really interested in how people do family at a distance and the role of language? So that was really what brought me then to the topic of the book.

Hanna: That’s so fascinating. And just a quick follow up question. You know you talk about living there, living in this rural village at a time when sort of other people were at college. How was that experience of language learning for you at that age, in this very remote community, especially when we consider today how almost how difficult that experience is to have with the new affordances that we have in terms of technology and the reach of technology.

Lynnette Arnold: That’s such a great question. Yeah. So I went to El Salvador, knowing very little Spanish. I had been raised in a kind of bilingual culture with German. So I had German as kind of a heritage language, not for my family, but from my community growing up and understood a lot of German, but went to El Salvador, so I knew how to be bilingual. I didn’t know Spanish. I took 2 weeks of intensive one-on-one Spanish courses in the capital.

And I told the guy, the instructor like this is what’s going to happen. I’m going out to this rural village by myself for the next 4 months like I need to be able to survive in Spanish, and I had a dictionary, and I had a grammar workbook and then I went out into the village. I knew one other person in the country who spoke English, who I saw maybe twice the entire time that I was there. So it was really immersion. I was living with a family. I was trying to figure out how to, you know, support the English teacher who didn’t really speak English, you know, like all of these things while also learning the language. So I think obviously, having already been bilingual, helped me like my brain, knew how to learn language, knew that, like learning, the grammar was helpful, and that then I could be like, oh, that person just used the subjunctive! That’s what it sounds like in real life, you know. I remember having experiences like that.

I think the other thing that came out of that experience for me was that I was really learning the language and the culture at the same time. So it wasn’t that I was learning these abstract grammatical forms, but I was learning how to communicate in the language as a young woman, so that was the other, like the gendered, and age the fact that I was, you know, a Us. Citizen, a foreigner. All of those things I had to learn how to use Spanish in that very kind of accurate, contextual way. And still to this day, when I speak Spanish, I find myself realizing how much that has influenced the way that I speak Spanish today. People are not familiar with my accent. I have a very Salvadoran accent. The vocabulary that I’m most comfortable with is like about farms, and, you know, growing food and animals and raising children and not, you know, academic things. And I think that experience was certainly also influential in shaping my research trajectory and the project of this book, because it made me think a lot about the really close connection between language and culture and the sort of social work that language does.

Hanna Torsh: Yeah, wonderful. I think a lot of our audience can resonate with that experience of finding their voice in another language, and having to learn how to be an identity in that language, and then perhaps shifting to another space, and having to then relearn how to be in that language.

So moving on to your book in your book, you talk about two really important concepts, and I’m interested in hearing what these mean. I think our audience would like to hear about them, too. So the 1st one is this idea of convivencia, or living together, and the other one is the idea of communicative care. Can you explain what these 2 concepts mean, and how you use them in your research and in the book.

Lynnette Arnold: Sure I’ll start with convivencia, because it’s the title of the book. So convivencia is two words; con together, and vivencia, live, so live together, made into one word in Spanish convivence as a noun form. It can be all these different things. It’s really a flexible word. People use it a lot when talking about social life. In El Salvador in general, it’s just a very high frequency word. Convivio is another related noun, that is a word for a gathering. Many different kinds of gatherings can be called convivios.

So, in addition to using the word convivencia a lot. People also spend a lot of time carving out opportunities for convivencia or living together what we might call at least an American lingo hanging out just spending time. So it’s a very common thing in rural Salvador culture to see people sitting around on the patio, kind of intermittently talking. Maybe somebody is doing some husking of corn or some other kind of work is happening. Children are in or out, in or out but that sort of spending time together, talking, hanging out, not doing a whole lot of anything is a really important part of the culture. Sometimes convivencia happens in more formal ways, like big gatherings for birthdays, or, you know, religious celebrations or things like that. But they can also be much more informal.

So when I this really sort of caught my attention in the context of the book project, because when I talk to members of transnational families both in El Salvador and in the United States. Many of them mentioned that they missed the ways that they used to convier with loved ones. So they missed that kind of living together when they were separated across borders. So I heard that truth coming out over and over in the interviews, but at the same time from my research perspective, I was seeing these families still doing a whole heck of a lot of conviviando. Even if they weren’t in the same place, they were still finding ways to live together. So I knew that from participating in the transnational networks that from sort of a research perspective, convivencia was still happening, but families were telling me that it looked different than it did when they lived together.

And so, as part of the kind of participating in these transnational phone conversations. I really started to realize that my intuition about where a lot of this living together was happening was that it was happening in these phone calls and these transnational conversations were a really crucial way that families were still able to live together when they couldn’t be in the same place. So that’s what really got me into thinking about what’s happening with this communication and communication away as a way of being together, living together when you’re separate.

So that seems like, if we want to put a label on it, we could call that the more Emic framing right the more the way that people in the community would understand what’s happening here. Convivencia is probably the label they would put on it. Communicative care is really my term and is kind of more informed by my theoretical considerations. I’m a scholar of language and communication, and I’m very interested in how language acts in the world and what language does. And at that time I had been thinking a lot about and reading a lot about feminist scholarship around care and feminist scholars, writing about care often describe it and define care as the labor or the work that we do to keep ourselves alive as a species. So it’s the work that allows individual and collective well-being and survival.

And I came to feel that what was happening in the conversations was families doing precisely that work through language? So I decided to come up with this idea of communicative care as a theoretical frame to capture what I what I thought the work was that was happening in the Conversations. I also wanted to label for the fact that I saw that care and communication were entangled in some very complex ways, and so I wanted a framework that could capture all of those different ways of entanglement. So I decided the communicative care would be a capacious way to talk about that.

Hanna: So just for our audience to understand, you have talked about those transnational phone calls. So maybe we could just take a step back and you could just describe the actual data that you work with in this book, so that so that we have a context for that.

Lynnette Arnold: The data that I’m working within the book primarily are recordings of transnational phone calls. So they are dyadic, mostly dyadic conversations between a person in the United States and a person in the El Salvador who are related to one another in some way. I have interviews and other kinds of ethnographic data that I use to sort of triangulate. These were conversations that were recorded over a 4 month  period. So in many cases I could track how something developed over time. The conversations involved, although they were dyadic, many different dyads within the family. So I could track how different dyads talked about different issues.

So that’s when I’m saying that the families are doing a lot of this conivencia, this living together through conversations, I was able to see that in recording, these phone calls and paying really close attention to what exactly they were doing when they were talking to each other on the phone and why they spent all of this, you know, effort, money and time to have these regular phone calls with one another.

So I felt the need for a framework, because I wanted something to capture the different ways that language and care were connected. So it was very clear to me that language is something that makes other kinds of care possible. So think about many kinds of care that we all engage in on, you know, part of our everyday lives. Language is absolutely central to those for these families. The money that immigrants send home is probably the form of care that most people associate with transnational families. That is not possible without communication. There’s a lot of communicative work that goes into making those remittances, those economic transfers happen. But beyond that I wanted to show. And I show in the in the book that language enacts care. Language is something that does itself do care work. It’s a way of maintaining and forging the kind of relational bedrock that is the foundation of all other kinds of care. So that was really important to me to draw that out. That language is not just facilitating other care, but that it is itself a kind of care. And then also, as we know, scholars of language know, language is always making meaning. So as it’s facilitating remittances. And as it’s enacting relational care, language is also a way that people. I used to create meetings about like what kinds of actions, when carried out, by which people count as care and which things don’t count? So all those things are sort of entangled and happening at the same time. So with a communicative care perspective, I was really trying to come up with a theoretical and analytical way to approach that and fully grapple with what was happening with this communication. And the book demonstrates ultimately that communicative care.

This approach really sheds light on how transnational families are able to forge convivencia and live together across borders, through language when they can’t be at the same place for many years at a time.

Hanna Torsh: One of the things that I found really fantastic about reading your work is that the approach you took to data collection, this very inclusive, very participant centered approach to data collection. Could you tell us a bit about how you approached the methodology in your work, and why?

Lynnette Arnold: Sure. And I want to answer this question in a way that will be helpful to emerging scholars who are maybe formulating their first research project or anybody embarking on a new research project. Because, as we know, things often don’t go to plan when we’re doing research. In fact, they often tend not to go to plan but really, if my research had gone to plan, I would not have the book that I have.

So that’s the kind of message here that things can go differently than you imagine, and still be great. So my project started off as a very traditional ethnographic. Sort of like an ethnography of communication. In that tradition I did a lot of participant observation in El Salvador and in the United States with family members, spending time in their homes, eating meals with them, hanging out on the weekends, trying to go to their workplaces, going to their schools. Just kind of spending time understanding what was happening in their lives. And then I conducted interviews with members of families in both countries. And I had that, you know, interview data that I recorded and started to analyze, and, you know, have some other work about narratives that were told in those interviews, for instance.

And then I was planning to do a longer stint in El Salvador of sort of more intensive ethnographic research, and really tracking what was happening. Over an intensive period of time in El Salvador. But then things beyond my control happened. Things got very dangerous in El Salvador. So this was in 2,014 which was a time when there was an intense spike in organized crime and gang violence, especially targeting young people. And there was a whole crisis of unaccompanied minors coming across the Us. Mexico border in relation to this and the area where I do. My research is kind of on a line between the territory of two gangs and got incredibly dangerous.

So my advisor felt like it was really unsafe for me to go back and spend a long time in El Salvador, and she was probably right. So I had to pivot and I decided to pivot to a project that was much more focused on the transnational communication.

So I ended up focusing on the phone calls and deciding to work with two extended families that I had. I knew the most members of and had the deepest relationships to. And I worked with them to record phone calls that they made across borders over a period of 4 months. I based on the interviews I had a sense of from the interviews how much people spent on phone calls per month, and I gave families this kind of stipend per month to cover the costs of the communication during the time that the recording was happening, and then I also hired research assistants in in each family. These were in both cases young people living in the United States because I was able to get to them and train them. So these were young people who were more tech savvy, who were literate and who crucially didn’t have tons of family obligations like they weren’t parents yet and so I was able to go visit them and train them in how to use the recording technology. I used a very, very simple earpiece recorder that you just held the phone up to. I had a little carrying thing for the recorder, so people could still walk around on their cell phones. These were all cell phone calls while having a little MP. 3 recorder on the kind of in their holster

And the family decided amongst themselves which calls to record. And then they didn’t necessarily have to pass all the recordings on to me. They could delete data if they wanted to. I still did delete some things that were passed on to me that I felt, especially when they were pertaining to people’s immigration situation. That I felt like legally, I didn’t want to be responsible for having that information. So I just deleted those recordings.

So that was the sample that I got was the things that families, you know felt okay about me having. And I was still surprised. You know they still felt very from my experience, participating in these networks, very authentic conversations. And there’s conflict. And there’s, you know, disagreements. There are things that happen in these calls. So I I would definitely say it’s not a entirely representative sample in that. Maybe, like the most extreme cases of conflict were not recorded, or whatever but I didn’t get the sense, either, that people were like consistently, always on their best behavior on these phone calls, for instance, it felt like they had. You know they were kind of in the habit of doing this.

Hanna: What did you then do with the with the recordings that you had. How did you go about analyzing that data?

Lynnette Arnold: Yeah. So this is another thing that many of us who do language research, you know, end up with hours and hours of recorded data, and we want to look at it closely, and it gets really overwhelming. So one thing I did that I learned from my undergraduate advisor, Mary Bucholz, was, instead of transcribing all my data. First, st I did a 1st pass of doing what’s called an in what she calls an index, which I think, is a good term. So you’re making a time stamped kind of account of what is happening every minute or so. 30 seconds, depending on how fast moving. The data is in the call, and that is a good way to listen through your data. And just what is in there, what’s happening. Get it in your head right in a way that maybe transcribing especially. This was obviously in the time before AI. But I know now lots of people are using AI to do a 1st pass on transcription. It’s not getting the data in your head in the same way. So working through an index is really good because it makes you start to see the patterns so indexing allowed me to do some qualitative sort of coding of what were some communicative patterns that I started to see what were. Think, what were things that people were doing over and over and over and over again? And decided to focus on transcribing, then, examples of those things that were happening a lot, and you’ll see if you read the book that there’s a chapter about greetings. That’s a thing that happens a lot in these phone calls. And by an example of greetings. There is a chapter about negotiating remittances which is also a thing that’s probably the thing that happens for most of the time.

And then there’s a chapter about remembering in conversations kind of reminiscing in conversations, which was one that I hadn’t, you know. It wasn’t 1 that I went in looking for necessarily but jumped out at me as something really powerful that was happening in these conversations. I was really fortunate.

During my graduate time, when I was collecting and preparing the data to be able to work with undergraduate research assistants. All of whom were Salvador of Salvadoran descent, which meant that they had the linguistic capability to understand this variety of Spanish I think at one time I tried to work with a Mexican descent student, and they were just like this. Spanish is so different from the Spanish that I’m familiar with. I don’t think I can transcribe this accurately. So it was a lovely, lovely opportunity to also extend mentoring towards you know, 1st generation largely Salvadoran American students who were an amazing help for me as well in doing the transcription, and they are all named in my acknowledgements.

Hanna Torsh: Excellent. Yeah, that’s that’s a real challenge for us here in Australia, because we are so linguistically diverse. Having that match with research support in terms of linguistic repertoire.

Lynnette Arnold: And I think even in doing the transcriptions we would meet to talk about the transcriptions. But our conversations would diverge just from the actual transcript. And they would say things like, Oh, my mom. Salvi, mom, this is a thing my mom does all the time. Or, you know, topics of conversations. They were all parts of, you know, transnational families as well. So it was really enriching, not just in the transcriptions, but also in helping me to recognize that what I had in my data was something that was broader than just the two families I was working with.

Hanna Torsh: In your book, you talk about the contradictory ways that digital communication has impacted on the families that you worked with, but also on transnational and cross border family communication generally. So could you tell us a bit about what you found out about these contradictions for your research participants, and any examples that you had would be also fascinating to hear.

Lynnette Arnold: I think there’s kind of a couple of possible answers here. And I think I’ll go with. There’s like a technology answer. And then there’s like a social life answer. And I think we maybe can do both. The technology answers that we often assume that like newer technology, more inclusive, like video technology is better and that people will default to using technologies that are more complete. So if families have access to video calling, they will use video calling, for instance, research with transnational families beyond mine. But just within the field of transnational family research has found that video calling can actually be very emotionally challenging and costly for people to engage in, and that sometimes people dis prefer, even if they have access to videos, that they prefer other forms of communication. So I argue in my work that for these families, phone calls are a real sweet spot. Because they don’t require as mo as much emotional investment. I mean, imagine yourself as a parent or as a family member separated from your loved one for years at a time. You see them on screen, and you see in real time that they’re different than they were when you were there with them. So it’s a real physical visceral reminder of the passing of time that you’re not together. On the phone that is a little bit more held at bay. But you still have the intimacy of somebody’s voice, and you can really hear all of those cues of emotion and all of those things that are so important, especially in the sort of delicate communication that families are doing often on the phone.

Phone calls are also very accessible. So I think that’s another thing to think about in terms of technology is like, and the family is who within the family can use a given technology and phone calls for the families I worked with were maximally inclusive because preliterate children can still talk on the phone and also in the families I worked with elders, and the families were often not literate or had very low literacy levels, and certainly did not have technological literacy to know how to navigate something more complex than a phone call. So phone calls were really a sweet spot, both kind of relationally and what they allowed but also because of their accessibility to everybody within the family. So talk a little bit about that in the book. Why, phone calls in this era of all polymedia. I felt the need to talk about that. It also had to do with the fact that smartphone technology hadn’t really entered El Salvador quite yet. Now it has but I still talk on the phone to my comrade. The mother of my goddaughter in the El Salvador we sell each other voice memos on Whatsapp. So you know again, you see that kind of preference for the voice communication over over video, even though it’s now more possible than it used to be.

And then there’s another answer that has to do with what digital communication affords for these families in terms of their relationships. So as I’ve been talking already, on the one hand, communication is absolutely vital. It’s the way that families are able to live together and sustain their relationships across border. It’s a means of emotional support. It forges the groundwork for this ongoing economic support like remittances. So it’s really positive things for families. But we also know from transnational family scholarship in general that digital communication for families can be really charged. It can lead to people feeling surveilled or micromanaged, especially children and women in families.

In my book, I found that kind of the the negative consequences or effects of digital communication were the ways that it perpetuated divides between migrants and non migrants within families. So if you think about a transnational family, you’ve got this big division of people living in different countries, and the migrants are perceived as those with access to more resources, and the non migrants as those with less access to resources who need help from their migrant. This is kind of a pretty broad generalization that holds for most transnational families, I think.

And what I found in my research was that this divide played out in communication, so that in family conversations there were very different communicative expectations placed on people depending on if they were migrants or non migrants. So, for instance, non migrants needed to learn that when they needed remittances they shouldn’t just ask. They shouldn’t just say, Hey, can you send me 100 bucks?

But they should tell these elaborate stories about family life in El Salvador, in which they would embed conversations of somebody else complaining to somebody else about needing money. So this very like indirect, layered way that people learned a very specific way of doing like a remittance request right?

And then, if you zoom out to think at the kind of macro level. This kind of communication is sustaining and shoring up migration right? It sustains the transnational family form. It keeps the remittances flowing so from a nation perspective, it makes migration succeed as an escape valve, as a means of generating revenue through migrant migrant remittances. Right? So in that those ways, we can see that the communication is really shoring up some inequalities right at the interpersonal and kind of the global level.

Even as it’s a lifeline for these families. So both of those things are true at the same time. And I just want to kind of end by saying it isn’t the case that communication only re in reinscribes inequalities. There are. There are ways in which communication also opens up space for people to resist and create, create new ways of doing things.

Hanna Torsh: Yeah, I’m I’m really keen to hear if you could tell us about some of the participants that you talk about in the book, and some examples of those ways of maybe either kind of perpetuating those inequalities or resisting those inequalities.

Lynnette Arnold: Yeah, I think I’ll go with the resisting examples, because they’re more interesting to me.

Hanna Torsh: Sure.

Lynnette Arnold: So one thing that’s really interesting about digital communication is that it opens up ways for young people to participate in family communication. So some transnational family research shows that young people are actually really get involved in family communication because they have to be the tech. And they’re let the tech help, you know, and then they’re there helping grandma with the laptop or whatever, and then they participate in the conversation. In my families, I found that the kind of a polymedia kind of situation where there were phone calls, but also other kinds of technology happening. Between family members opened up some conflict. So in this one case, some young men were being raised by their grandparents in El Salvador, and their dad was in the United States. He sent them a laptop. They opened Facebook accounts. They started messaging their dad on Facebook. Their grandparents are not literate. Their grandparents are not tech literate. They have no idea like what’s happening when their sons are on the laptop and so the sons use this kind of private channel of communication to complain to their dad about some stuff like teenagers do right.

Hanna Torsh: Yes, I do. Yes.

Lynnette Arnold: As they do and the dad was just hearing from them about this, and so then he called his parents, and, you know, kind of scolded them, taking his son’s word as like you know the truth rather than realizing that it was just kind of one perspective on what was happening. And this resulted in a lot of conflict within the family that then got resolved by multiple phone calls from multiple people, in which people then navigated and kind of smooth things over, and he eventually called and apologized to his mother for not understanding the situation more clearly. But so there there was a case where young people were using technology to kind of have more agency right in what’s going on in the family and try to pressure, you know, put some weight on the scales in terms of things coming out in the way that they wanted it to come out. The other example that I I like to talk about and think about is about gender. So we haven’t talked about gender yet, but it is a theme throughout the book. We know from feminist work that women around the world do the lion’s share of care in pretty much every context you can think of, and that is also true in communication.

I do have cases of men doing amazing communicative care work, a lot of like really touching emotional communication between men. So this is not to say that men are not doing the work. But one thing that I find is that women get asked to do kind of the most onerous tasks. So if a report about oh, the migrants sent money for the cornfield, and there was a flood, and all the corn seedlings died, and we need more money so that we can replant women get asked to have that conversation, even though agriculture isn’t traditionally feminine domain. But they get asked to kind of communicate that information and take on that less pleasant communicative burden. But what I found in some cases was that sometimes women were then using that that they were put in this kind of conduit position to migrants. They were using that to kind of carve out more space for themselves within family decision making. So in one instance, the father in El Salvador had sold one of the family’s cows. He had not consulted with his daughter, his eldest daughter, who lived with him in El Salvador about this decision, and she was kind of mad that he hadn’t consulted with him. But then he this was the same corn example. He needed her to talk to her brother in the United States, his son, and, you know, get some money for the corn so he came over at one night and asked her to do that the next time her brother called to ask him for more money so that they could replant I happened to be there when the brother called, and she didn’t say anything, but instead she told all about the cow, and how her brother had, how her dad had sold the cow without consulting with her, and how it was a poor decision and a waste of the family’s resources and blah blah, and that she should be consulted. So really getting a kind of word into the migrants. And then, when her Dad came back the next day to see what had happened. And what if the money was coming? She was like? Well, I didn’t tell him about it, because, you know, if I’m not consulted on things, I I can’t. You know I can’t communicate. So she really kind of used her. She was in this pivot Lynch kind of PIN position communicatively, and she used that to try to press for a like more decision, making power within the family in these kind of agricultural domains that traditionally, in traditional kind of salvadorange roles would not have been within her purview. So those are the kinds of things, and I think there were more of those things happening than I saw where people were using women especially. We’re using communication to do this kind of torquing in the mechanical sense of gender roles and kind of incrementally shifting things a little bit. So all that’s to say, I think that there are.

There were other ways to in which people were using communication to resist. So I in my, in my account, I wanted to kind of resist. One size fits all characterization of what was happening here, and really capture the complexity of communication as a wonderful lifeline for these families, but also as reproducing inequalities, and also maybe sometimes allowing for resistance, especially to gender them, and generational hierarchies within families.

Hanna Torsh: That’s wonderful. It’s a great example it kind of reminds me of also the the kind of dual role of women in households where they have to do the bulk of the domestic labor, but that also affords them a certain amount of power over some decisions. And so it’s often hard to for them to give it up, because that is then their only power traditionally, in the in those sorts of family situations. So I think that’s a yeah. And it’s really interesting, the way that intersects them with the digital world. And how the same sort of negotiations are taking place. So like, Okay, well, if this is my job, then I am going to try and carve out more agency for myself in a system where I have less agency, you know a patriarchal system. So yeah. Oh, look I I would love to talk more with you, but I am have to jump to my last question. And and and make it really open for you. I I think one of the one of the things that you talk about in your book is how you’re essentially interested in, in, as you say, providing a much more contradictory and nuanced picture of particularly transnational migrants when they have been traditionally particularly, you know, in in public discourse, cast as victims and and and really there’s been a lot of focus on the negative. So I guess I would like to ask you, you know, what? What did you? What are the key? Things that you would really like? The key findings. You would like emerging and established researchers in linguistic diversity and in transnational migrants, to take away from your wonderful book.

Lynnette Arnold: Thank you. I’ll start with a linguistic diversity piece. And I just the I cannot say strongly enough that we cannot. We can’t study linguistic diversity without also be thinking, thinking about what language is doing. So linguistic diversity cannot be separated from the function of language. What people are doing with their communication and the context in which they’re doing those things really shape what linguistic diversity does and what it’s made of. So it’s really vital to think about. One of the main things that people are doing with their communication always is relational. They’re doing relational work of all kinds, with family members, with bosses, with everybody. Right? We’re constantly managing relationships through our language. And so we need to think about that. And also the kind of geopolitical context within which those relationships are playing out. So this may get to your question about language maintenance. Actually, because I wanted to talk here for a little bit about the children of migrants in the United States. So I noticed in my research that the children of migrants in the Us. Were largely excluded from transnational communication.

This was not the case for children in El Salvador, who participated quite actively in and were trained actively trained to participate in the transnational communication, as I show in my chapter on Greetings. That shows how kids learn even before they’re verbal. They’re taught how to do these greetings.

So why does that happen? Well? Linguistic diversity is part of an answer to the question. Relatives in El Salvador tended to perceive the children of migrants in the US as not being Spanish speakers, and therefore they perceived the language barrier that kept them from communicating with grandchildren, nieces, nephews.

Whatever the relationship was, there are, of course, language barrier issues here. There are educational issues at play. Many of the children in the United States did not have access to bilingual education in Spanish and English, and obviously the social dominance of English, certainly reduced Spanish fluency for some, at least, some of the children, but many of the children who were perceived in El Salvador as monolingual English speakers would actually be characterized as bilingual. They just didn’t speak Salvadoran Spanish. They spoke US Spanish, which is a variety of Spanish that has large has been in contact with English right for a long period of time. And so it’s grammar. Its vocabulary is shaped by English and so I think that the unfamiliarity of the children Spanish was perceived by some relatives in El Salvador and this dialect difference was perceived as a as a full on language, barrier, and led to to children being excluded.

So the linguistic causes of children’s kind of exclusion from family communication were really complicated. But it’s also important to recognize that their exclusion from this communication was also influenced by non linguistic, relational and structural issues. So when families envision their future generations down. You know they envision the future of continued emigration, of continuing. So today’s children in El Salvador are tomorrow’s future immigrants. And so it was really essential for children in El Salvador to be heavily socialized into being members of transnational and families to being committed to these cross border relationships, because they would then be the ones to carry those seeds with them. When they traveled the children of migrants are seen as kind of less predictable sustainers of transnational families like well, they just really weren’t sure what was going to happen with these kids.

They weren’t sure they were going to stay committed to the family, so they were less pro. Those relationships were less prioritized in the kind of communicative care work that families were sustaining across borders. The relationship with children in the in the Us. Just wasn’t a priority. Because of this way of thinking about right and this way of understanding their future makes a lot of sense from a geopolitical perspective. It’s heartbreaking.

But I think, unfortunately, realistic reading of the inequitable global distribution of resources, and that for families to get access to those resources. People are gonna have to keep migrating right? So what this example shows us is that the kind of linguistic, the relational, the geopolitical, are all like really tightly entwined with each other. So I just want this example to sort of be a call for us as researchers of linguistic diversity, to be able to think on all of these scales at once, and to think about their interconnections.

And for me, thinking about what language is doing in the world for people. What people are doing with their language is a way to get at that and the lens of care has been a really for me a very capacious lens that has allowed me to think about the relational and interpersonal and the geopolitical kind of within the same framework and their interrelationships. So that’s really my big takeaway for kind of language researchers. Is to think about what language is doing?

I think I have takeaways that are kind of more broad for people living in a global world, which is all of us. Now. And I think I want to especially speak to readers who may not themselves be migrant to listeners right who may not be migrants themselves may not be the children of migrants themselves. And just say that it’s really important for us to understand the lived experiences of migrants. They are so integral to maintaining our societies today. But their lives do not stop at our borders. You know they have connections that go, you know, far beyond what we can see in terms of what we think is happening with migrants and what their lives are like. So this is just kind of a call for all of us to think about, how can we establish relationships with the migrants that are in our communities? And start to think about? You know what’s happening in their lives? Beyond, you know, our immediate communities, our immediate national context.

To think about also the policies and that our governments are passing their foreign policy, their immigration policy, and how that’s affecting lots of people far beyond our national borders through these transnational family connections. So again, that’s kind of going full circle back to where I started of like wanting to educate us citizens about El Salvador. Just to say that there’s so much more that we need to be aware of as you know in thinking about migrants and the roles that they play in the world. And really, yeah, wanted to make sure that they ultimately, I think what I call for my book is that migrants? I want a world where people can have full self determination over how they choose to live as a family. And that is not true for most of us in today’s world. But it is really not true for transnational families. They do not necessarily want to live in 2 different countries for decades at a time, with no chance to visit each other. And so ultimately. That’s where I end. The book is just to say, like, What can we do? How can we work in our own individual ways? For a world in which people have more self determination over care in their own. Of all kinds, including communication.

Hanna Torsh: Oh, thank you so much. I think that’s such an important message and a a great place to finish, a great message to end with. The idea of self-determination for families. And yeah, absolutely reminding us that this we might find all of this very fascinating. But of course, this is not something that any family wants. It’s kind of decade, long separation. And I really love the idea of imploring non migrants to think about migrants, and to that idea of not finishing their lives, not ending at the borders. So yeah, thank you so much.

We’d like to thank you again for talking to us about your work. We will put a link in the blog to the book. Thanks everyone for listening to us today, and if you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel, leave a 5 star review on your podcast app of choice and recommend the language on the move podcast and our partner, the new books network to your students, colleagues and friends. Thanks. Again, Lynette.

Lynnette Arnold: Thank you so much for having me. It’s been a real pleasure to talk to you today.

Hanna Torsh: Thank you until next time.

Can you share about your work and your pro bono global initiative defending language rights?

Irene: Linguistic Justice® is my personal advocacy initiative. It was born during the early pandemic days in 2020 after I quit my job as an interpreter for the New York State Court System. During my time in the system I witnessed first-hand state violence against linguistic minorities who were trying to access justice, particularly how it impacted Indigenous peoples. Founding Linguistic Justice® was my response to that experience; it provided an outlet for my desire to use my skills working with linguistically marginalized communities, instead of enabling state violence against them.

Since then, I have worked hands-on with multiple grassroots organizations in the US looking to implement a language justice approach in their operations. I consult with those organizations to help them remove access barriers, provide meaningful language access, and encourage them to create effective multilingual participatory settings.

On the global front, The Spanish Group Pilot Initiative was my pro bono initiative and my shot at raising awareness of language rights and justice in spaces traditionally dominated by the English language. Rolled out through the Global Coalition for Language Rights (GCLR), it aimed to shine a light on language rights during the Global Language Advocacy Days (GLAD) volunteer initiatives in February 2024, themed “No Justice Without Language Rights”.

The initiative was launched in July 2023 through the Coalition’s social media platforms, and my main aims were two. First, to build a global community by providing participants with quality education and a safe space to share their diverse perspectives. And second, to disseminate our educational content about language rights and justice, in Spanish, from a global platform.

To structure the educational initiative, I developed a 7-month program to facilitate community development and targeted learning. A diverse and talented group of participants spanning seven countries engaged in non-traditional learning methods inspired by my background as a former attorney, my experience as a seasoned linguist, as well as my integration of restorative practice processes for developing social capital.

The overall success of the initiative stands as a testament to the need for serious investment in the advancement of language justice, including through fully funded multilingual community education programs like this one.

Can you share more about the handbook you developed as part of your pro bono initiative?

Irene: To conclude the pilot initiative, I authored and gathered the introductory language rights handbook titled ‘Queremos escuchar tu voz’ (or ‘We want to hear your voice’).

Throughout this resource, the term ‘voice’ is used in a figurative sense to emphasize the significance of individual language preference in shaping our identity and asserting our self-determination. I wanted to underscore that our ‘voice’ represents the power of communicative autonomy of each person: a fundamental aspect of our human dignity.

In a nutshell, this handbook is a call to action to catalyze support for language justice. It aims to tackle the prevalent collective unawareness surrounding language rights, striving to expand consciousness regarding these rights and, consequently, expand our collective capacity to create language justice. It is meant to provide vocabulary for anyone who wants to understand and articulate how people are disadvantaged as users of non-dominant languages.

What are you hoping to achieve with the first edition of this handbook?

Irene: Firstly, I am hoping that the pilot initiative, along with its resulting handbook, inspires future initiatives to foster community development through multilingual education about language rights.

We must acknowledge that people cannot advocate for rights they don’t know they have in the first place. Our language is intertwined with every facet of our lives, and withholding language rights from people profoundly impacts their lives, hindering their access to social structures: information, opportunities, critical services, education and justice. So, supporting communities in understanding their language rights is crucial to nurturing their self-determination and fostering their own advocacy efforts for those rights.

Secondly, I hope it facilitates a shift in perspective, recognizing linguistically marginalized communities as rights-holders.

When linguistically oppressed communities lack the capacity to articulate their experiences, those in power may not fully understand how pervasive language rights violations are. We have unaware people in positions of authority within our systems.

The result? Without understanding language rights and the impact language oppression has on our communities, efforts remain insufficient. Holding systems accountable is crucial, but supporting them with education on this topic is equally important to foster systemic change.

Those in a position of authority within systems—public and private institutions, policymakers, and the language access industry as a whole—need to better understand language rights, and the impact language oppression has in our communities, to be able to shift their perspective: from linguistic discrimination, half-hearted compliance and indifference, to awareness, inclusion and repair.

We must care for both of these needs seriously: from the bottom-up with our communities, and from within our social structures and its systems.

Can you share more about the content of this handbook?

Irene: This introductory resource provides a thorough examination of language rights on a global scale, encompassing their legal foundations in international humanitarian law, as well as the legal framework for language rights in the United States, including relevant jurisprudence.

Among its features are discussions of language rights theory and practice, guidance on filing national origin discrimination complaints before the US Federal government, and community insights aimed at advancing language justice for all people.

Irene Gotera, Linguistic Justice®

By amplifying the voices of the participating community in the pilot initiative, I also share our findings underscoring several key imperatives to create language justice:

• Promoting self-awareness and recognition of one’s own linguistic privileges.
• Fostering collective understanding of language rights.
• Making the resources like this handbook available and accessible to staff members of organizations serving linguistically diverse populations worldwide.
• Engaging in global dialogues on language oppression to cultivate the solidarity necessary to confront it.
• Proactively defending our language rights to enhance awareness of them.
• Urging states worldwide to enact legislation guaranteeing respect for language rights, recognizing that with language rights come corresponding obligations for compliance.

The handbook closes with my perspective on the connection between language rights and justice: to create language justice for all people, we all need to develop and apply a language rights-conscious lens. I’m hopeful that this resource could be a significant catalyst in fostering exactly that. Download it here.

There is no justice without language rights.

In the conversation, we explore how the dominance of English has become more contested since the Covid-19 pandemic, particularly in higher education and global knowledge production.

Enjoy the show!

This is early days for the Language on the Move Podcast, so please support us by subscribing to our channel on your podcast app of choice, leaving a 5-star review, and recommending the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.

References

Novak Milić, J. 2024. 40 Years of Croatian Studies at Macquarie University. Language on the Move Podcast.
Piller, I. (2022). How to challenge Anglocentricity in academic publishing. Language on the Move.
Piller, I., Zhang, J., & Li, J. (2022). Peripheral multilingual scholars confronting epistemic exclusion in global academic knowledge production: a positive case study. Multilingua, 41(6), 639-662.
Salomone, R. C. (2021). The Rise of English: Global Politics and the Power of Language. Oxford University Press.

Transcript (by Brynn Quick; added 30/05/2024)

Welcome to the New Books Network.

Dist Prof Piller: Welcome to the Language on the Move Podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Ingrid Piller, and I’m Distinguished Professor of Applied Linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.

My guest today is Professor Rosemary Salomone. Rosemary is the Kenneth Wang Professor of Law at St. Johns University in New York, USA. Trained as a linguist and a lawyer, she’s an internationally-recognised expert and commentator on language rights, education law and policy, and comparative equality.

Rosemary is an elected member of the American Law Institute and a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation. She’s also a former faculty member of the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University, a lecturer in Harvard’s Institute for Educational Management, and a trustee of the State University of New York. She was awarded the 2023 Pavese prize in non-fiction for her most recent book, The Rise of English: Global Politics and the Power of Language.

Welcome to the show, Rosemary.

Prof Salomone: Thank you for inviting me, Ingrid.

Dist Prof Piller: It’s so great to have you and to be able to chat about The Rise of English. The Rise of English was first published in 2022 and has just been re-issued in paperback. The NY Times has described The Rise of English as “panoramic, endlessly fascinating and eye-opening”, and I totally have to agree. It’s an amazing book. Can you start us off by telling us what in the seemingly unstoppable rise of English has happened since the book was first published two years ago?

Prof Salomone: When I look back over those two years, I was looking for trends, you know, was there some theme running through language policy that indicated there were some new movements going on, if you will. Or was it just more of the same? I actually found both. In terms of themes I saw running through, for sure, were nationalism, immigration and a backlash against globalisation.

So, you saw that coming through in English-taught programs in universities, where the Nordic countries and the Netherlands were pushing back. They had been in the vanguard of offering English-taught programs, and then they started pushing back. Some of that was related to governments moving towards the right and hostile feelings toward immigration and linking internationalisation with immigration.

So, you saw, for example, Denmark limiting the number of English-taught courses in certain business subjects. They saw enrolments drop precipitously, particularly in STEM enrolments, and the business community started pushing back on it. Denmark, then, had to back-pedal because they realised they really did need these international students to come in. Many of these countries are suffering from declining demographics, and so they’re trying to balance this internationalisation and migration against the needs of labour and the global economy.

We see the Netherlands, right now, this week it’s been in the newspapers in the Netherlands, where there’s been proposed legislation to limit the number of courses taught in English. There was a real concern about the quality of education and accessibility for Dutch students, and whether the Dutch language itself was dying or being lost, so there was a proposal that was put forth by the minister of Education into their legislative body. That seems very likely to be adopted.

So, again, you see these Nordic countries where there was this connection between migration, internationalisation and a backlash against globalisation coming through in these very nationalistic environments.

What I saw also, which was interesting, was the use of English in diplomacy. I was tracking the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, as he was giving speeches and addressing the British parliament in English, the US Congress in English. Progressively, he was more and more speaking English, and his English was, indeed, improving. But you could see the effect of it, that he was able to address these groups. He was speaking from the heart. He was asking them for aid, appealing to them, and he was doing it very directly in their language, and without the barrier of an interpreter. He was able to control the message better. It became more and more comfortable for him to do that.

I also saw it, which was interesting, in Prime Minister Narendra Modi, when he visited NY. He has been pushing to have Hindi considered one of the official languages of the United Nations. So, he goes to address the United Nations, he speaks to them in Hindi to indicate the importance of his language, but then there’s a yoga event on the lawn of the United Nations. Now, there he has a rather young, progressive group of individuals. Some celebrities were there. And he speaks in English. So, you see this very strategic use of English being used by world leaders for diplomatic effect, for diplomatic purpose.

So, those were two of the trends that I saw, or novelties. There was also a rather interesting proposal in Italy, and again, Italy being a country where it’s become a much more conservative to the right government at this time. There was a legislative proposal that all education would have to be in Italian. Now, you understand that would be devastating for English-taught courses in the universities, and we see those growing more slowly than, certainly, in the Nordic countries. But we see Italy adopting many more English-taught courses because they also are suffering from declining demographics. And in order to attract young people from other countries to come in and stay, in order to keep their own students from leaving to take English-taught programs in other countries, the Italian universities realised that they have to move toward English-taught programs or courses. And yet, you had this proposal from the government saying that all education would have to be in Italian. There would even be fines imposed up to 5,000 euros to businesses that would use words like “deadline” or “blueprint”.

This is the sort of thing we’re accustomed to more seeing from France, from the Académie Française, but even their equivalent in Italy, the Academia della Crusca, they opposed the legislation. There was legislation proposing that English should be the official language of Italy. It’s all coming from these feelings of nationalism. So, Italy doesn’t have an official language in their constitution. Any references to an official or national language raises concerns about fascism because Mussolini imposed standard Italian on everybody, and there were so many regional varieties being spoken. So, again, that theme of nationalism, the pushback against globalisation, fears of internationalisation, that’s what I found in those two years.

Then, on the other side, there was much more young children in primary and secondary schools learning English as their second language throughout Europe and throughout the world. More and more, universities were offering English-taught courses. So, it seemed like English was really unstoppable, but then there were these other forces operating that I didn’t see originally trying to set it back.

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, look, I think that’s really one of the fascinating bits of your book, that it’s in many ways such a contradictory and conflicting story. I mean, throughout the 20^th century it seemed that there was this much more linear narrative of the rise of English. But in the 21^st century, it has become more complex and there’s this competition with other languages, as you’ve just pointed out. In diplomacy, multilingual people are English and their other language strategically. So, the story of competition between languages that is inherent in The Rise of English really also looms large in your book.

So, I thought maybe we can take this conversation now to Africa, which also plays a big role in your book, and focus on the competition between French, another European language, and English, and how it plays out there. Can you tell us a bit more about that?

Prof Salomone: Well, there’s competition in the former French colonies, the francophone countries, with regard to English. France has had a rather tenuous relationship with those former colonies over the years. We see Morocco, very slowly, moving toward English. We see Algeria, I guess it was about 2 years ago, the minister of higher education announced that university courses would then be offered in English, that university instruction would be in English in Algeria. It made headlines in Morocco when the minister of education announced that children would be learning English beginning in the 3^rd grade.

In those countries, you have English competing with Arabic and with French. There was a study done by the British Council several years ago looking at about 1200 young Moroccans, asking them what they favoured in terms of a language. Well, they favoured English more than they did French or Arabic. They predicted a large number, a very large percentage, predicted that English would be the primary secondary language in Morocco within 5 years, meaning that it would push out French. Arabic being their primary language and English being their secondary language.

So, there is this competition in Africa within the francophone countries between French and English. But you also have China in Africa now. You have Russia in Africa now. You have Chinese Confucius institutes in Africa, and Africa has been much more willing to accept those institutions. Certainly, the US and some western European countries as well. They just don’t have the resources to provide those language programs on their own, and they’re not as concerned about the issues of academic freedom that certainly rose in the US where most of those programs have closed at this point. But you do have this competition between Chinese and English, and other languages within Africa.

And now Russia coming through, and Russia is sort of following the China playbook on language, and instituting language programs both online and in person in Russia. Russia has moved into the Sahel region where we’ve had those coups in recent years, and some of that has been provoked by Russian disinformation. So, here you have, again, the use of language in kind of a perverse way as well. There’s lots going on in Africa right now in terms of the competition for languages.

That said, I don’t think Chinese or Russian is going to replace English as a lingua franca throughout Africa. I think it is replacing French in many ways.

Dist Prof Piller: Interesting that you mention misinformation because it seems to me that a lot of the misinformation is actually also enabled by English. I’m wondering whether you have any thoughts on how the global spread of English is actually part of a lot of misinformation that’s coming out of Russia or wherever it’s coming from.

Prof Salomone: Yeah, I think that’s an interesting observation because of the internet and because of streaming. Because of all these media outlets and what we call fake news. The ability of people all over the world to access this information through English. You’re absolutely right, that English is in a way fomenting some of that or facilitating or enabling some of that disinformation as well. For sure.

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, it’s contradictory yet again. So, you’ve already mentioned Chinese, and China was also one of these countries after the pandemic, as the Nordic countries, where English became a bit more controversial and they are kind of pulling back on English in higher education a bit.

So, I thought let’s turn to higher education now because English is, of course, the global language, even if it’s not the language of teaching in all higher education, it’s certainly the language of academic publishing. It’s the language of knowledge-making. So can you maybe tell us a bit more about the role of English in international academia?

Prof Salomone: Well, it’s there for good and for bad. We can argue that there is a value of a common language so researchers can better collaborate. If you think of the Covid 19 vaccine that was produced between Pfizer, an American company, and BioNTech, a German company. Could that have been produced at such breakneck speed if those scientists couldn’t collaborate with each other and communicate with each other in a common language? So, you see there the benefit of having a common language.

But then again, you also see all the downsides of it, particularly in academia. It used to be, when I would attend conferences in Europe, that you would get a headset, that there would be interpreters. That doesn’t exist any longer. Most often, those conferences may be in the national language and in English. Maybe. But very often they’re just in English. So, it really does put non-native English speakers, those who are not fluent or proficient in English, not necessarily just native speakers, it does put them at a disadvantage in terms of the ease with which they can present their scholarship. Do they have humour? Do they understand the nuances of the language? It forecloses them from networking opportunities as well if they don’t speak English proficiently. It forecloses them certainly from publishing opportunities. It used to be “publish or perish”, but now it’s “publish in English or perish”. In order to have your scholarship published in an academic or well-respected academic journal, you have to write it in English.

I bring that point up in the book. It really puts younger faculty or researchers at a disadvantage. They may not have the economic means to hire someone to do the editing on it, whereas those who do have the economic means can get that outside help. This is a booming business of editing scholarship and refining the English of scholarship. So, you see that there are some serious inequities built into the rise of English in academia.

Dist Prof Piller: You’ve got this law background as well. Do you have any thoughts on what we can do to enhance fairness? You’ve just raised all the issues and laid them out quite clearly, but what can we do to improve equity and fairness in global knowledge-making?

Prof Salomone: In a legal sense, I don’t think there’s much we can do. But I think pf Philippe Van Parjis and his proposals. He believes very strongly in English and the utility and value of English as a common language, but he understands (being a political philosopher and economist) on the other hand the limitations of it. How can we build more equity? Should there be a tax imposed on countries that have high levels of English? That money would go to other countries where there’s not a high proficiency in English in order to gain proficiency. I don’t see that being workable. I don’t see how that can occur.

I think it’s just, at this point, unfortunate. I don’t see any legal way, or even a policy way, out of it. English has become just so dominant. The interesting question I find, though, in talking to other people about this, and people in other countries, as to whether English really belongs to us, to the Australians and Canadians and Brits and Americans. Does it belong to us any longer? Or does it belong to the world? Has it become neutral? Is it just utilitarian? Just a tool, a pragmatic tool for communication that’s kind of unleashed from British colonialism or American imperialism or American soft power in Hollywood.

I think that’s easier for those of us who are anglophones to say, “Yeah, sure, I think it’s neutrual.” But I’m not sure that, for other people, it’s really neutral. I think it does carry all that baggage for better or worse.

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, true, and I guess even on the individual level. Things like, you mentioned earlier, that networking is so much more difficult in a language in which you are not entirely confident. Or even if you have high levels of proficiency, you might not be the one to joke easily or have that confidence. So, there are challenges at all kinds of levels.

Personally, I am also quite interested in individual mentoring approaches and co-publishing. I think there is a responsibility that we as people who are in established anglophone academia have to co-author or collaborate with people who are struggling with their English and to support peripheral scholars to come into these networks as more central members.

Prof Salomone: I think that’s a really interesting suggestion. I really do. Should there be some of us coordinating this? Should there be some movement, if you will, for those of us who are strong in English to mentor professors who are not, or to collaborate or to coauthor pieces with them? I think that’s really an interesting suggestion. I do. And I wonder what the vehicle could be for instituting a project of that sort. I have to give it some thought. What networks you or I belong to, seriously, to raise that.

Dist Prof Piller: For us, the Language on the Move network has been a little network where we collaborate, and we have lots of people, particularly PhD students, who come to Australia as international students and then return to their countries of origin to teach there. We continue to collaborate, so we’ve built, at a very small level in our field of applied sociolinguistics, a kind of international collaboration network. We’ve tried to co-publish in English, but also then translate some of the publications into other languages for more national or regional dissemination.

That brings me to my next question, actually, to the anglosphere. We’ve talked about English in the non-anglosphere, the countries that are not traditionally considered the owners of English. But, of course, the dominance of English, the hegemony of English, also does something to English in the US, in Australia, in the UK, and to the speakers there. We mostly see that kind of as an advantage, I think. That’s how we’ve discussed it here.

But there is also this other dark side. There is a real complacency about other languages in the anglosphere – like, “If I speak English, I don’t really need another language because I’m able to get around wherever I am on this globe.” We see that in the dwindling numbers of students who enrol in languages programs, the disestablishment of languages at all kinds of universities. Every couple of months we have the news that this or that university in the US, in Australia, in Britain, is establishing their language programs.

I’d like to hear how you view these developments and how we can push back.

Prof Salomone: It’s so short-sighted. It really is very short-sighted. It’s myopic. English cannot do it all. It just can’t. And there is a value to speaking other languages other than the human flourishing that many of us experienced in learning other languages when we were young at the university or whatever. That seems to have gone by the wayside. People don’t talk about it anymore. It really is unfortunate.

Just the joy of reading a classic in the original, or the joy of watching a movie in the original. I’ve tried it. I’ve tried a little experiment of my own of reading a book in English that was translated from Italian, then reading the book in Italian, then watching the movie version, the Hollywood movie version of the book, which was totally perverted (the book). I realised that it just lost so much in the translation. Even the best of translators, and it really is an art form and I totally respect them, even the best of translators – you’re not reading the original. So, there is that sense of human flourishing that we don’t talk about anymore.

Multinational corporations – a large percentage of businesses are done through a cocktail of different languages, so it really does give you a leg up in the job world. In the US there is this slow-moving interest toward offering dual-language immersion programs where you have half the student population (in the public schools) are native speakers of Spanish, Chinese, French, whatever. The other are native speakers of English. And you put the kids together, half the day in one language and half the day in another. What’s motivating the English-speaking parents here is the value of languages in the global economy. They’re not concerned about their children reading Dante in the original, or Moliere in the original. They’re interested in their children having a leg up in the global economy, so they’re becoming more and more popular in the US within public school districts.

So, you have that value in terms of job opportunities. We saw during the pandemic the need for multilingual speakers to deal with immigrant communities, you know, to explain to them what the health hazards were, whether it was in hospitals or social welfare agencies. There was a critical need for speakers of other languages, and some of them were relying on Google Translate or software translation. But even Google Translate – the state of California posted a disclaimer on their website that you cannot rely totally on the translation of Google Translate. It didn’t have necessarily 100% accuracy.

We know that artificial intelligence is getting much more sophisticated. As I was writing the book over those 7 years, I didn’t know Afrikaans. I didn’t know Dutch. I didn’t know Hindi. So, I had to rely on translation software, and it became more and more accurate as the years went on. BUT….but…. you lose lots of nuance there. You lose the human element. Very often, translation or interpretation is needed in a crisis situation, whether it be in foreign affairs diplomatically, or in a health crisis. Can you rely on artificial intelligence in that critical kind of moment where you really do need the understanding of nuance and sensitivity toward the human situation?

So, I think we are really short sighted in not understanding the value of other languages. Just this week it’s come up in newspapers here in the US that our Department of Defense has dropped 13 what we call flagship programs at universities. These were federally funded programs that provided funds for university students for 4 years to learn a critical language – Chinese, Arabic, Russian. They dropped 13 of them, ok? Five of them being Chinese programs.

Dist Prof Piller: That’s unbelievable.

Prof Salomone: What are they thinking? What are they thinking? That this should be a high priority for the federal government, to be training our young people in speaking Chinese and where they would have a study abroad opportunity in either mainland China or Taiwan. Thirteen of them were dropped, and 5 of them were Chinese programs.

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, I mean that’s just stupid and heartbreaking. And shocking to hear.

I want to get back to what you’ve just said about AI in a second but, before we do, you’ve mentioned the dual language programs in the US and that parents and their children are there to enhance their careers and for economic reasons.

But I have to pull out one of my favourite bits from your book, and that was the information that the most bilingual state in many ways, or the one that has the most bilingual programs is Utah. That’s related to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and how they want to be missionaries. I really enjoyed reading that. I’ve met lots of young Americans in various places who speak the language beautifully. Maybe you can tell us a bit about one of these other impulses, why people actually learn languages. The missionary impulse and this particular church.

Prof Salomone: When I thought of what states or localities should I select to flesh out these dual language programs, I chose California because that was a dramatic turnaround where bilingual programs were just about dead several decades ago. What that did, effectively, was mobilise the support for language programs to the point where they could turn that legislation around through a popular referendum. So that was just a dramatic turnaround.

I looked at Utah because Utah has just such a high number of dual language programs and was really in the forefront of these programs because you had the support of a governor, a senator, of somebody within the educational establishment. But it was all done because of a particular religious population there that values languages. They train their young people there in Utah and then send them out on a mission.

But what it has done, it’s been a boon for industry in Utah. Multinational companies are looking to move into Utah because you do have this linguistic infrastructure that’s already there.

In NY City, what I found really interesting, was the French community, this bottoms up, grassroots community of mothers who were looking for an affordable alternative to bilingual education for their children. (Then they went) to the NY City Board of Education to a particular principal whose mother was French, and so she was very sympathetic. But also, she had declining enrolments in her school, so she was very eager to welcome a larger population. That school has so changed that community in Brookly. You walk down Court Street, which is the main street there. Loads of French cafes. French restaurants. People on the street speaking French. It changed the community. It became a focal point for the community. French mass at the local Catholic church. The French population has never been politically active in NY City at all, but because of their efforts and with the support of the French Embassy as well, other language groups within NY City started saying, “We could have that as well”. So, you see a proliferation of dual language programs across the city in all kinds of languages.

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, that’s amazing. The importance of these flagship programs. And if you’ll allow me, I’ll just plug another of our podcast episodes here. We recently spoke with Dr Jasna Novac Milić, about the Croatian studies program here at Macquarie University. It’s one of the few Croatian studies programs outside of Croatia. And, like you’ve just said for this French school in Brooklyn, it’s got such a flagship role and it’s also so inspirational to other language communities when they see what you can build in terms of structures from primary education through secondary up to the tertiary level. So yeah, these programs are really, really important.

Prof Salomone: I was speaking in the UK last week, and a woman came up to me afterwards and said, “My grandson attends a dual language program in California. He’s 9 years old, and he speaks Spanish fluently.” And I said, “Well I admire his parents for having the good sense to enrol him in that program.”

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, that’s amazing. I think we really need to think about the rise of English within bi and multilingual ecologies. It’s not just about English, right? This is not English doing away with other languages. We really need to keep thinking about how we can make the best use of this international lingua franca while also supporting all these multilingual ecologies. All these languages have different roles for different people, and that’s sort of the positive side of it.

Before we wrap up now, I wanted to ask you on your thoughts on the future of English. Will we really, you know, will English keep rising? Or will not another language come along but will language tech and generative AI and automated translation be the end of any kind of natural language hegemony?

Prof Salomone: Or any kind of natural language communication at all! We don’t know. We just don’t know where AI is going to take us. And it’s developing by the nanosecond. Yesterday I viewed audios that one of my colleagues at the law school has been a partner on where they took the oral arguments from the landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education which was the racial desegregation case from 1954. Now it’s the anniversary.

They recreated the voices of the justices of what they would have sounded like. They took the transcript, the written transcript, and converted it into an audio using artificial intelligence. So, they just took audios of the justices speaking in other contexts so that they could get a sense of their voice and then transposed it onto this written transcript and created what would have been, could have been, the oral arguments in the case. I mean, who would have thought? And it sounded convincing. It sounded convincing. These were bots speaking, not the real justices. So, we have no idea.

We need human communication. We will. We’re not going to have machines communicating with each other. Not in our lifetimes. So, as a language of human communication, I think English is going to steadily increase. Not this huge trajectory that we’ve seen in the past 20 years. It’s really gone quite high. It’s not going to level off. I think it’s going to slowly increase as we see more young people learning English in schools and colleges. More of these English talk programs at universities. So, more and more people are speaking English than ever before, and that will continue.

Will it be the lingua franca forever? Don’t know. If I had to think of any language that could possibly replace it, it would be Spanish because it is a language that’s spoken on 5 major continents. But I don’t see that happening in a long time. I think English, as a dominant lingua franca, is here to stay for quite some time.

Will we see more pushback against it? Possibly. A couple of years ago I didn’t foresee the pushback that I’m seeing now. Certainly, in a country like the Netherlands or Denmark, I never could have predicted that. Or the kind of radical legislation coming out of Italy. I couldn’t have predicted that. Or the incursion of Russia into Africa. Couldn’t have foreseen that. The world is in such constant flux, and the global politics are really in such constant flux that I don’t think we’re capable of foreseeing how English is going to intermix here.

I was hoping that with the streaming of movies, that more people would become interested in foreign languages because there are so many movies being produced on Netflix. So many of those movies are produced in other countries, in other languages. But, you know, there’s dubbing. So, people just turn on the dubbing and would rather listen to the dubbed voices than listen to the original or make any effort to understand the original. I think that’s unfortunate. Part of it is us. Part of it is anglophones ourselves. Seeing English as being just the possibility of doing everything with it.

But English will continue. It will be our lingua franca for a while.

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, look, I agree. Obviously, you can never predict the future, but I think there are interesting questions to be raised, particularly in terms of how the bulk of text and garbage that is being put out by digital technologies now, how that actually will overwhelm communication in a sense.

One sense that I get from my students, many of whom are from Asia, many of them are very multilingual, is that English is completely normal. You have to have English in the same way you need to know how to read and write. But what they’re interested in is actually learning other languages. You spoke about Netflix. Korean is super popular with K-pop and Korean drama and whatnot. Really, all kinds of different languages being learned. So, I do see a great diversification actually. It seems to me that English has become so basic. You need it, no doubt about it. But what’s really interesting seems to be more and more other languages, other skills, other frontiers. It’s an exciting time to think about language.

Prof Salomone: Well (Korean) is the one language where enrolments are on the rise in the United States. Because of K-pop. Totally. It’s the only language where enrolments are going up. So, it gives you a sense of the soft power, the power of soft power.

Dist Prof Piller: Well, thank you so much, Rosemary. It’s been really fantastic and really informative. Everyone, go and read The Rise of English. It’s such a rich book and so many interesting panoramic views as we said earlier.

Thanks for listening, everyone. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel, leave a 5-star review on your podcast app of choice, and recommend the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner, the New Books Network, to your students, colleagues and friends.

Till next time!

Child at annual Mongolian Festival (Naadam) in Sydney (Image credit: What’s On)

Maintaining their heritage language is paramount for migrants internationally as language is not just a communication tool. It carries our culture, tradition, beliefs and identity. Therefore, passing our language on to our descendants is a crucial responsibility.

Living up to that responsibility can be difficult in countries such as Australia, where a monolingual mindset prevails. Small languages of emergent communities, such as Mongolian, face particular challenges.

The Mongolian language

There are 8.4 million Mongolian speakers in the world. Only 3.4 million of them live in Mongolia. A larger number of 4.1 million Mongolian speakers live in Inner Mongolia.

You might wonder what the difference between Mongolia and Inner Mongolia is. Mongolia is an independent country located between China and Russia, while neighboring Inner Mongolia is an autonomous region within China. These contiguous heartlands of the Mongolians were separated in the course of the 20^th century.

The separation had linguistic consequences, too: in Mongolia, Mongolian is written in the Cyrillic alphabet but in Inner Mongolia the traditional Mongolian script is still in use.

SBS hosts a Mongolian channel

Mongolian in Australia

The separation also has consequences in the diaspora: only Mongolians from Mongolia are captured in statistics, but the number of Mongolians from Inner Mongolia are not captured, as they are Chinese nationals.

According to the Embassy of Mongolia, approximately 25,000 citizens of Mongolia currently live in Australia. I am one of them.

In addition to being an immigrant from Mongolia, I am also the mother of a 3-year-old boy.

Despite my commitment to raising him bilingually, my son is currently English-dominant, and the same is true of my nephew, and other children in my social circle.

The perspective of Mongolian migrant mothers

To find out more, and motivated by a study of parents’ emotional investment into their children’s heritage language learning, I interviewed five migrant mothers from Mongolia about their children’s proficiency in English and Mongolian. Between them, the five mothers had ten children, who have been living in Australia for 6 months to 6 years.

This is what I found:

• Preschool children regularly mix English and Mongolian, and, by and large, do not distinguish between English and Mongolian words.
• Primary school children are all English-dominant. This is particularly true when it comes to reading and writing. All six children in this age group read and write English well, but only two of them had any literacy at all in Mongolian.
• As children grow older, their oral proficiency in Mongolian declines. They only speak Mongolian to their parents, they hesitate and search for words, and some have completely lost their productive abilities.
• The only fluent Mongolian speaker among the children is a 5-year-old recent arrival, who is quickly learning English and seems to be in the process of transitioning to English dominance since starting childcare a few months ago.

Children in traditional costume at annual Mongolian Festival (Naadam) in Sydney (Image credit: What’s On)

Although this was a small-scale informal study, the trend is clear: second-generation Mongolians in Australia are not developing their Mongolian. In fact, they are rapidly losing it once they enter formal schooling.

How can we preserve Mongolian in the second generation?

Research suggests that there are many things migrant parents can do to support the bilingual development and heritage language maintenance of their children, such as sending children to bilingual schools, attending community schools, speaking only the heritage language at home, or engaging in heritage language literacy practices, such as joint book reading or use of social media with family back home.

These are all great strategies. But they are extra difficult for speakers of small, under-resourced languages such as Mongolian. For instance, there is only one Mongolian community language school at preschool and primary level available in NSW and the community languages directory of the State Library of NSW does not hold a single entry in Mongolian.

While the need to maintain Mongolian into the next generation is keenly felt in our community, the path to achieving this goal is less clear. To preserve Mongolian, we need to find new ways to support our next generation to acquire it.

Related content

• Mongolian language
• Multilingual families

尽管有诸如此类的国际保护措施， 原住民在教育领域仍然处于劣势地位。 本文着眼于以超语实践理论， 探求解答这一问题的途径。

English version of this article available here.

*** 

作者： 余星星, Nashid Nigar, 钱祺

*** 

Tibetan Buddhist stupa and houses outside the town of Ngawa, on the Tibetan Plateau (Image credit: Wikipedia)

自体认到语言少数群体的教育困境后， 我们三人作为国际间的非土著教育工作者携手合作， 尝试提出一些新颖的教学模式。 以西藏英语课程为例， 我们将藏语和藏族文化融入藏族学生的英语课程， 旨在解决“资源不足”以及“原住民教育优先级低”的问题。 我们的重点在于反思与改革一种倾向于强调主流语言而忽视或贬低原住民语言、 文化和知识体系的教学法。

2021年， 钱祺在四川省甘孜县进行了一个月的英语教学工作。 在此地，藏族人口超过 80% （甘孜藏族自治州人民政府， 2021年)， 钱老师任教的班级， 所有的学生都是藏族人。

三语教育的现况及问题 

在具有高度多元语言背景的环境中， 钱祺发现， 以藏语进行教学时， 学生们的注意力更易凝聚。

这些学生通常接受三语教育。 他们在刚入小学时， 除了学习藏语之外， 也需学习汉语。 而当他们进入中学后， 英语课程则成为必修科目。 在此情形下， 藏族学生非但需要掌握藏语， 还需要学习另外两种语言。

近来， 研究者发现藏族学生在三语教育中有两大主要问题。 首先， 相较于汉族学生， 由于藏区教育资源的匮乏 （例如教师数量不足）， 藏族学生常被误认为是“赤字”语言学习者。 藏族文化和语言， 以及学生的民族身份， 常常被汉族主导的意识形态所轻视， 这在以普通话进行教学的英语课堂及汉族文化占主导地位的英语教科书中均有所体现。

在此背景下， 我们并没有提出一种理想化且以人权为导向的宏大改革计划 （在中国的现实情况下， 这可能并不切实际）， 而是提出了一种更务实的解决方案。 这个方案一方面在现行的教育政策框架下为可行之策， 另一方面， 它可以帮助藏族学生更快地掌握英语， 并为他们的多语言身份做出贡献。 同时， 该方案也为教师在将多语言视角纳入英语教学时行使他们的权力铺平道路。

超语实践理论的引入及课程设置 

余星星和钱祺在墨尔本大学深造期间， 在 Nashid Nigar 的指导下， 对超语实践理论有了更深入的了解。 我们讨论了如何将该理论引入到钱祺的藏族学生英语课程中。

超语实践理论对所谓的“命名语言”持批判性立场。其实践，尤其是创造性和批判性部分具有变革潜力，因为它们能超越命名语言的社会构造边界。超语实践视为一种世界观，认为说话者可通过利用他们语言工具箱中的所有资源，积极地拥抱并培养自己的多语言身份。

因此，藏区英语老师应充分利用学生的语言资源，不仅要激活学生的语言创造性（以便他们能更有效地学习英语），还要让学生有能力设疑汉族主导的语言和文化的主导地位。

以此为基础，我们为藏族学生学习英语制定了一个新的课程，主题为“发现西藏之美”，包含四堂课和一个评估任务。

首先，为了让现有的官方英语教科书对藏族学生更有价值，我们对其进行了改编，增添了有关西藏宗教、历史和地理的信息。变更后的教材主题涵盖了西藏历史上的重要人物、古代节日的描绘，以及对西藏文化的洞察。如果学生的学习材料的背景来自他们自己的文化经验，他们对英语学习将更加投入和积极。教学资源将鼓励学生透过促进藏语和英语的非等级化使用，从他们的全部语料库中取得滋养。

我们的课程中融入了许多活动。这些活动旨在向学生介绍西藏丰富的文化遗产和壮美的风光。这些活动包括学习该地区独特的动植物种类，探讨著名寺庙的历史意义，研究西藏的艺术和建筑。这些活动有助于提高学生对英语学习的投入，并在英语和他们的母语–藏语之间建立联系。

学生们将共同完成一些项目，例如制作一本小册子或一部简短的纪录片，介绍他们家乡、社区或整个青藏高原的历史、文化或自然风光。学生将被鼓励利用他们的语言能力（藏语、普通话、英语）来制作高质量的作品。这种集体努力旨在鼓励学生为自己的文化遗产和英语水平感到自豪，并在此过程中相互学习和教导。

“我眼中的西藏”是一项评估任务，根据学生制作多媒体演示文稿的能力来评分。这些演示文稿将展示西藏的某些方面的辉煌（如其文化、历史或自然风光），作为最终项目的一部分。我们鼓励学生充分利用他们的语言资源（藏语、普通话、英语），以提供一个有趣的、信息丰富的演讲。学生可以通过在抖音等社交媒体网站上发布他们的演讲，接受来自同伴和网络社区的反馈和建议。

我们期望通过这个计划，能帮助藏族学生提升他们的英语水平，同时增强他们对自己文化遗产的自豪感和对西藏壮丽风景的热爱。我们相信，当学习材料引人入胜且强调团队合作时，积极的学习环境和对提高英语技能的真诚愿望自然就会萌发出来。

成功经验

钱祺的实践成果显示，通过持续练习和表达，学生对自己的英语交流能力有了更大的信心和自豪感。他们的口语流利程度显著提高，这进一步证实了自信心与语言技能之间的正相关。

在超语实践理论的指导下，钱祺对西藏英语教育的改良，帮助藏族学生接受并认同了自己的多语言性。我们认识到，在当前中国的政治体制下，建立一个完全包容和民主的课程，尊重且赞美西藏文化和语言，可能面临很大的挑战。然而，尽管政府有严格的审查和监督，但我们依然可以通过一些实际的方法，帮助使用少数民族语言的学生不仅克服语言学习的障碍，还可以肯定和提升他们的文化和语言身份。这个过程在很大程度上依赖于教师的专业能力，以及他们对回应性教学法的热诚和代理权。

我们相信，在各种各样的教学环境中，语言和写作教师都可以根据他们的需要，调整并实施这种课程改革的方法。

关于作者

余星星是墨尔本大学墨尔本教育研究生院TESOL专业的硕士。她在中国国有企业的工作经历和她在中国西部偏远地区的家庭历史，激发了她对中国教育不平等问题的研究兴趣，包括性别和民族差异，以及城乡差距。

Nashid Nigar是墨尔本大学教育研究生院的讲师，教授TESOL硕士和教育硕士课程。她正处于完成莫纳什大学教育学院博士学位的最后阶段。她的研究兴趣包括使用跨学科的理论视角和解释学现象学的叙事方式，研究澳大利亚移民教师的专业身份。

钱祺在墨尔本教育研究生院完成了他的教育硕士学位。他曾在四川省甘孜藏族自治州的甘孜民族中学担任志愿教师。他现在在另一所初中教英语。

Tibetan Buddhist stupa and houses outside the town of Ngawa, on the Tibetan Plateau (Image credit: Wikipedia)

Editor’s note: “Indigenous peoples have the right to establish and control their educational systems and institutions providing education in their own languages, in a manner appropriate to their cultural methods of teaching and learning.” (Article 14, UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples).

Despite international rights and protections such as these, indigenous people continue to experience educational disadvantage. This article examines how this disadvantage can be mitigated through translanguaging.

点击此处获取中文版本。

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Xingxing Yu, Nashid Nigar, Qi Qian

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Cognizant of the educational disadvantage of linguistic minorities, we, three non-indigenous educators, worked together internationally to experiment with and propose some novel ways to incorporate Tibetan language and culture into the English language curriculum for Tibetan students in order to overcome the obstacle of “inadequate resources and low prioritization of education for indigenous peoples.” This is important for textbooks, materials, and pedagogy that focus on the dominant language but leave out or downplay indigenous languages, cultures, and knowledge systems.

Qian, a master’s student at the University of Melbourne in 2021, spent the summer of that year teaching English in Garzê County, Sichuan Province. According to the People’s Government of Garzê Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture (2021), although not physically located in Tibet, the Garzê Tibetan Autonomous Region has a Tibetan population of over 80%. All of the students at the school where Qian taught were Tibetan.

Trilingual education

Qian noticed that students pay more attention in class when they are taught in Tibetan.

These students commonly experience trilingual education. As soon as they enter primary school, they are taught Mandarin Chinese in addition to Tibetan; by the time they reach secondary school, English becomes a further compulsory subject. In this context, Tibetan students are expected to learn not just Tibetan but also two additional languages.

Two major drawbacks of trilingual education for Tibetan students have recently been uncovered by researchers. First, compared to their Han counterparts, Tibetan students tend to be stigmatized as “deficit” language learners due to a lack of educational resources (teachers, for example) in Tibetan areas. Tibetan culture and language, as well as students’ ethnic identities, are devalued by the Han-dominant ideology, which is reflected in both Mandarin-taught English classrooms and English textbooks where Han-culture predominates.

Instead of envisioning a more idealistic and human rights oriented big picture in terms of policy change, which seems impractical in China, we propose coming up with a more pragmatic approach that, on the one hand, is permissible within the realm of current educational policy. On the other hand, it can help Tibetan students learn English more quickly and contribute to their multilingual identities. It also paves the way for teachers to exercise their own agency when it comes to incorporating a multilingual lens into their instruction of English.

A new approach to curriculum

Qian and Xingxing learned about translanguaging while we were both master’s students at the University of Melbourne under Nashid Nigar. We discussed how to incorporate it into the English Language (EL) curriculum for Qian’s Tibetan students.

Translanguaging approaches take a critical stance towards named languages. Translanguaging practices, particularly the creative and critical aspect of them, have transformative potential because they are able to go beyond the socially constructed boundaries of named languages. Translanguaging is a worldview in which the speaker actively embraces and cultivates their plurilingual identity by drawing on all the resources available to them in their linguistic toolkit.

Educators in Tibetan classrooms should, then, make the most of their students’ linguistic resources in order to not only activate students’ language creation (so that they can more effectively learn English) but also to give their students the agency to question the dominance of Han-dominated language and culture.

We have developed a new curriculum for Tibetan students to learn English based on translanguaging theory. The topic is “Discovering the Beauty of Tibet,” and it consists of four classes and an assessment task.

First, in order to make the existing official English textbook more useful for Tibetan students, we adapted it by adding information about Tibetan religion, history, and geography. Stories about important figures in Tibetan history, accounts of ancient festivals, and insights into Tibetan culture have all been incorporated into the adapted materials. Students will be more invested in and motivated by their English studies if the materials they use to study are contextualized in terms of their own cultural experiences. The instructional resources will encourage students to draw from their full linguistic toolkit by facilitating a non-hierarchical use of both Tibetan and English.

Activities designed to introduce students to Tibet’s illustrious cultural heritage and breathtaking landscapes are woven into the course structure. Learning about the unique flora and fauna of the region, discussing the historical significance of famous monasteries, and researching Tibetan art and architecture are all examples of what might fall under this category. Activities like these help students become more engaged in their studies of English and make connections between that language and Tibetan, their first language.

Students will work together on projects such as making a brochure or a short documentary about the history, culture, or natural beauty of their hometowns, neighborhoods, or the Tibetan plateau as a whole. They will be prompted to draw on their abilities as Tibetan and English speakers to produce quality work. This group effort encourages students to take pride in their heritage and their English proficiency, and to teach and learn from one another.

“Tibet through My Eyes” is an assessment task. Students will be graded on their ability to produce a multimedia presentation highlighting some aspect of Tibet’s splendor (its culture, history, or nature, for example) for the final project. Students are urged to make full use of their linguistic resources (Tibetan and English) in order to deliver an interesting and informative presentation. Students can gain exposure for their talks by posting them on social media sites like Douyin (TikTok in China) and thereby receiving comments and suggestions from their peers and the online community.

This program will help Tibetan students improve their English while also fostering a sense of pride in their heritage and a desire to learn more about the stunning landscapes of Tibet. A positive learning environment and an earnest desire to improve one’s English skills will flourish when the emphasis is placed on interesting material and group work.

Successes

Student confidence and pride in their English communication skills increased noticeably after repeated practice in front of the camera. Their oral fluency dramatically increased, supporting the contention that self-confidence is correlated with foreign language profciency.

Qian’s reform of the English language education system in Tibet, which was informed by translanguaging theory, has helped Tibetan English language learners embrace their multilingualism. We believe that under China’s current political system, it is extremely unlikely that a fully inclusive and democratic curriculum that recognizes and celebrates Tibetan culture and language will ever be established. Even so, there is a lot that can be done to help minority speakers, despite the government’s strict censorship and surveillance, not only overcome language learning barriers but also affirm and promote their cultural and linguistic identities. This process relies heavily on teachers’ ability to grow professionally, as well as their own agency and ethical dedication to responsive pedagogy.

Literacy and language educators in a wide variety of settings can adapt this method of curriculum reform to meet their needs.

About the authors

Xingxing Yu holds a Master of TESOL from the University of Melbourne’s Melbourne Graduate School of Education. Experience in working in Chinese state-owned enterprises and her family history in remote areas of western China have prompted her to study educational inequities in China, including gender and ethnic disparities, as well as urban-rural imbalances.

Nashid Nigar has taught Master of TESOL and Master of Education programs at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne. She is at the final stage of completing her PhD at Monash Education. Adopting a transdisciplinary theoretical lens and hermeneutic phenomenological narrative enquiry, Nashid has investigated immigrant teachers’ professional identity in Australia.

Qi Qian completed his Master of Education at Melbourne Graduate School of Education. He has taught at Garzê Ethnic Middle School in Garzê Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan Province. He is now teaching English in another junior high school.

A herder guards the Mongolian script (Image credit: Ayin)

As the danger of life-threatening Covid-19 has subsided, Mongols in Inner Mongolia, a region of northern China, have faced a new threat: losing their bilingual schools. In the words of a community member: “in Spring we were afraid that we would die from Covid-19, now Autumn comes and we are afraid that we may become extinct”.

Two forms of bilingual education

To understand these fears, one needs to understand bilingual education in Inner Mongolia.

In brief, there are two different modes of bilingual education in Inner Mongolia. The established mode of bilingual education over the last 73 years has been: school subjects taught in Mongolian; plus a Chinese language and literacy course from Grade 2; plus an English language and literacy course from Grade 3. What worries Mongols is the new mode of bilingual education, which involves the gradual replacement of Mongolian-medium teaching with Chinese-medium teaching across all school subjects. In the new mode, this Chinese-medium education will be complemented by a Mongolian language and literature course. This is dubbed a second type of bilingual education but it is, in essence, monolingual, Chinese-medium education.

According to a document released on August 26, 2020, from this September the Chinese language and literacy textbook used in Inner Mongolia’s bilingual schools is going to be replaced with the national Chinese language textbook. It’s also going to be introduced a year earlier, from Grade 1. This national textbook is also used in Chinese-medium schools and is much more demanding than the one currently used in Mongolian schools. This means that children whose mother tongue is Mongolian have to learn the same content as their Chinese-mother-tongue peers, and will be evaluated in direct comparison to them.

Another subtle change is in the course name: the Chinese language and literature textbook (in Chinese: 汉语文) assumes a new name, Language and Literature (in Chinese: “语文”) while the new Mongolian language and literature textbook is “Mongolian Language and Literature” (in Mongolian “mongol hel bichig”), whereas it was previously simply called Language and Literature (in Mongolian “hel bichig”) in Mongolian schools. That is, the marked version is now the Mongolian course, no longer the Chinese course.

Some Mongols have compared this name swapping to “the step-father taking the place of the father.”

The new model jeopardizes Mongolian educational achievement

This reform poses several problems.

The famous Mongolian poem “I am a Mongol” is written on a blackboard (Source: WeChat post reminiscing and mourning the impending loss of the mother tongue)

First, are Mongolian-mother-tongue children able to learn the new, and much more difficult, Chinese language and literature syllabus at this new pace, while they simultaneously learn to read and write their own language, Mongolian, from Grade 1? How will the reform increase students’ study load?

Second, what kind of national university entrance exam will be designed for those Mongolian students?

Here let me explain briefly how students from Mongolian high schools currently participate in the national university entrance exams. Broadly speaking, the national exams across subjects are written and administered in Chinese, but the exams are also translated into Mongolian for Mongolian test-takers. For instance, maths, history, politics or chemistry are examined across the nation using the same tests, except that they are translated into Mongolian for students coming from Inner Mongolia’s bilingual high schools. There is also provision in the rules for these tests to be translated into five other official minority languages, e.g. Korean, depending on demand.

Every year around 12,000 students from Mongolian bilingual schools sit translated national university entrance tests in Inner Mongolia.

There is a compulsory language component of the university entrance exam across the nation, and what differs most for Inner Mongolia’s Mongolian exam takers is this component. Their ‘foreign language’, i.e. Chinese language and literature, comprises 70% of the score, and their English language test result counts for 30%.

So what kind of Chinese language test is now going to be used for minority Mongolian students’ university entrance exam? The announcements and documents so far do not answer this important question. Surely, Mongolian students cannot compete with Chinese-mother-tongue students and the imposition of the same Chinese language test will further disadvantage Mongolian students.

Language shift in education will push Mongolian to the brink

The Mongolian language is already fragile and has entered the early stages of endangerment. In today’s Inner Mongolia, less than 40% of Mongol parents choose Mongolian bilingual schools for their children; the rest enroll their children in mainstream Chinese schools. In such circumstances, this reform pushes already emaciated Mongolian language and culture further towards the abyss of extinction within the Chinese borders.

“Save the Mother Tongue!” Protest sign against the reform on a delivery bike

Language shift in education is known around the world, and elsewhere in China, to be a major push in a wider shift away from using a minority language at home or transmitting it to younger generations at all.

The nourishment of bilingual education

Personally, I have been nourished by the well-established bilingual education system in Inner Mongolia. When I was in Grade 4, my parents sent me to a boarding school which was around three hours’ drive from my home, over a muddy, pebble-paved country road. Even though I was intimidated by the new environment when I first arrived – most people on the street and in other public spaces spoke Chinese – this bilingual school, with its Mongolian-speaking teachers, classmates and dorm mates acted as a safe haven.

This bilingual school was the mediator for the ten-year old me to transition to new urban settings and to be socialized as both an ethnic Mongol and Chinese citizen. The importance of local, co-ethnic teachers and educational environments for the well-being of minority or Indigenous children has been proven in many studies around the world.

By contrast, the poignancy and tragedy of how a mainstream educational system can fail children from non-mainstream language backgrounds, from the start, is nowhere more heart-wrenchingly illustrated than in the documentary “In My Blood It Runs” about Indigenous children at school in Australia’s Northern Territory. If the original bilingual education system is smoldered and buried underground we will see the birth of numerous minority children who follow in the footsteps of 10-year old Arrernte boy, Dujuan – the main character in the above documentary – and totter precariously on the edge of two worlds.

Established Mongolian bilingual education has proved itself

The 73-year-journey traversed by the established bilingual education system, where all classes are taught in the medium of Mongolian, and alongside that Chinese and English are taught as single subjects, has proved that this is a mature system and suitable to the situation of bilingual Mongols in Inner Mongolia.

Numerous scientists, writers, artists, translators, teachers, other essential workers and “model citizens” have grown and blossomed thanks to the environment of bilingual education. Moreover, this year, several Mongolian bilingual high school graduates gained admission to top universities such as Beijing University and Tongji University, and they outperformed their Chinese-medium-education peers in Inner Mongolia.

In addition, the current bilingual mode of education in Inner Mongolia has facilitated inter-ethnic relations and the unity of the multi-ethnic people on the northern frontier of China. But once the established mode of bilingual education in Inner Mongolia is destroyed, the change will be irreversible. This is already clear from a historical analogy: Buryat Mongols (a Mongolian minority within the Soviet Union) failed in their attempt to revive their schools and language in the 1980s, even with the backing of Soviet policy-makers who had realized their mistakes in eradicating bilingual education the 1960s (Chakars 2014).

A dark future for China’s minorities based on the Western model

If history and political education/morality subjects are taught through the medium of Chinese from 2021 onward in Mongolian schools, the rest of the curriculum will soon shift too. Then in a few years’ time Mongolian teachers, textbook translators, publishers, writers and a host of others who are involved in industries related to Mongolian language, culture, and education will lose their livelihoods. I anticipate that this will be followed by the shrinkage and eventual disappearance of Mongolian media such as TV and digital media, which are currently thriving.

If all the courses shift to Chinese-medium instruction, the university entrance exam will soon follow suite and policy makers will simply adopt nation-wide Chinese tests for all Mongolian students in a few years. If this happens, Mongolian students cannot compete against millions of Chinese high school graduates in the world’s most competitive university entrance test, which will certainly further marginalize and systemically exclude young Mongols from higher education and the job market. It will exclude them in a way similar to the exclusion of minorities in the West, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in Australia. As such, the internal colonization of ethnic Mongols will reach its epitome and Mongolian language and culture will be wiped out in China.

Mongolian teachers’ protest sign against the education reform in central Inner Mongolia, 28 August, 2020

Concomitantly the production of large numbers of unemployed, poor, institutionally discriminated and marginalized minorities including Mongols in coming decades will plague China with many unforeseen sociopolitical and economic problems. This dire consequence has obviously been brushed aside by the group of eminent Chinese scholars Ma Rong, Hu Angang and Hu Lianhe, who boldly proposed a Second Generation of Ethnic Policies (第二代民族政策) to solve ethnic “problems” by aggressively assimilating minorities (Leibold 2012). They envisioned the “melting pot” (大熔炉) formula of the West, in particular USA, as the ultimate “solution” to the ethnic “problems” of China, even though China’s native minorities are drastically different from diasporic immigrants in America (for further details, see Elliott 2015).

China’s ethnic policies have certainly taken a drastic turn in recent years, and this has sent shock waves through the “less-famous” ethnic minorities such as the Mongols, Koreans, and those in less visible areas such as Gansu, Jilin, Liaoning, and Qinghai. What are the consequences of bringing such tribulations onto the very groups that China has held up as “model minorities”, including the Mongols? Who gains most from this rash move? Indeed, up until now, many Mongolian speakers have identified as Chinese people, and there is no need to suppress a non-existent ethnic separatism by abolishing bilingual schooling. What is the point of destroying the Mongolian language and culture that is already staggering toward the brink of extinction and to whose speakers barely anyone pays any attention?

Opposing the new medium of instruction

At present, despite their tenuous position, Mongols are fighting against the reform. In particular, they were devastated by the secret implementation of the second category of “bilingual” education mode, which violates the national Constitution, Ethnic Minority Law and Education Law as well as the Mongolian Language Act and its Regulations.

It is this surreptitious and illegal way of implementing reform that spurred Mongols in Inner Mongolia, but also outside China in Japan and Europe, to protest against it within the framework of law. In fact, from June this year the “rumor” of cancelling the first category of bilingual education surfaced and has been simmering in Inner Mongolia, yet many Mongols didn’t take it seriously as there were no official documents. It was only a week before the commencement of the new semester on Sept 1, that documents were released by the Inner Mongolia Education Bureau. Now, Mongolian parents have been actively campaigning against the reform and are refusing to send their children back to school. However, teachers and public servants are silenced and threatened with the possibility of losing their jobs if they were to speak out. For other Mongols the phantasmagoric memory of the Cultural Revolution is revisiting them and has locked their tongue. Yet others take their mourning and frustration to social media spaces despite the constant disappearance of what they post.

The goal of the on-going protests in Inner Mongolia is not to reject the content of the new national curriculum, rather it is to abort the attempt to teach it all through the medium of Chinese. Mongols hope to translate the new textbooks into Mongolian and teach them in the medium of their own language, as they have been doing for the last 73 years. Thus, our aim is to maintain the original bilingual model of education, which ensures the maintenance of the Mongolian language and facilitates the multi-ethnic Chinese nation’s progress and stability in the long-term.

References

Chakars, Melissa. 2014. The socialist Way of Life in Siberia: Transformation in Buryatia. Budapest: Central European University Press.
Elliott, Mark. 2015. The Case of the Missing Indigene: Debate Over a “Second-Generation” Ethnic Policy. The China Journal (73): 186-213,308.
Leibold, James. 2012. Toward A Second Generation of Ethnic Policies? China Brief 12 (13)

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• No child left behind: a study in unintended consequences
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Dr Kerry Taylor-Leech researches early childhood education in an English-Samoan bilingual preschool

Early childhood is an important period in the physical, social, emotional, cognitive and linguistic development of a child. To support child development during that period, care for young children has been increasingly professionalized and moved out of the family and into preschools. Formal early childhood education, particularly in the year or two before entering primary, is widely considered to enhance school readiness. Overall, preschool is assumed to be beneficial for educational success.

But how does institutional childcare affect bilingual families? Most of what we know about early childhood bilingualism comes from research conducted with families where one or both parents are not only the main caregivers but also the main providers of linguistic input.

What happens to bilingual development when young children spend a significant amount of their time in institutional childcare is still an under-researched field. One reason it is under-researched is that it is rare. Where it does not exist and where childcare is through the medium of the dominant language we know that the minority language loses out early, even in institutions and contexts that ostensibly value diversity.

Against this background any form of bilingual childcare is to be welcomed. But how do they actually work?

Bilingual signage in the a’oga amata (Image credit: Kerry Taylor-Leech)

In this week’s Lecture in Linguistic Diversity, Dr Kerry Taylor-Leech from Griffith University addressed precisely this question for an English-Samoan bilingual preschool program in Queensland. The preschool, or a’oga amata in Samoan, was established in 2018 in Logan City, and the researcher and her colleagues followed the children in the program for seven months.

Although designed as an early bilingual immersion program, English dominated as medium of communication. Samoan was mostly used symbolically: it was on display in the preschool’s linguistic landscape and was used to greet, thank and praise children.

Dr Taylor-Leech explained that the main reason for the relatively limited presence of Samoan was that not all children in the room were of Samoan heritage and even those who were did not necessarily speak the language. In fact, one mother reported that, as a result of attending the program, her four-year-old daughter was more proficient in Samoan than she was herself.

Parents valued the program very much. Even more than the language, they valued that their children were oriented to Samoan values of usitai, faaaloalo, alofa and tautua – obedience, respect, love and service. In addition to providing the children with a sense of cultural belonging and a positive affirmation of their Samoan identity, the program also succeeded in enhancing the children’s school readiness.

While the program was highly successful with regard to cultural affirmation and preparation for mainstream education, it was not so successful with regard to bilingual proficiency. Because English was the dominant language in the program, the children’s exposure to Samoan was ultimately limited. Furthermore, as the presenter explained, there was no program available that would continue to support Samoan after the children had transitioned to primary school.

Bilingual childcare by Dr Victoria Benz (Multilingual Matters, 2017)

To me, the bilingual development – or rather lack thereof – in this Queensland a’oga amata sounded uncannily similar to that in the Sydney-based English-German bilingual childcare center studied by Victoria Benz. This researcher observed a number of asymmetries between the two languages – with regard to teaching practices, material resources and student proficiencies – all of which resulted in the predominance of English in this ostensibly bilingual childcare center.

If you are up-to-date with your 2019 Language on the Move Reading Challenge, you will have read the full study, the gripping sociolinguistic ethnography Bilingual Childcare: Hitches, Hurdles and Hopes, in May.

Dr Benz also found that the predominance of English was further assured by the policy environment and the attitudes of parents and teachers. Unwittingly, these meant that the two languages were pitted against each other. Even more problematically, the goals of developing bilingual proficiency and ensuring school readiness were conceptualized as in conflict with each other because when we talk about “literacy” in Australia we mean “literacy in English” and in English only.

That school readiness and bilingual proficiency are currently conceived as incompatible was also confirmed in another study investigating parental attitudes towards bilingual childrearing conducted by Livia Gerber and myself.

As long as our education system is based on an artificial tension between bilingualism and educational success, it is hard to see how even the most well-intentioned bilingual early childhood programs can actually support the aspirations of bilingual families.

References

Benz, Victoria. 2017a. Bilingual Childcare: Hitches, Hurdles and Hopes. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
Benz, Victoria. 2017b. Bilingual parenting in the early years. Language on the Move
Piller, Ingrid. 2015. Paying lip-service to diversity. Language on the Move
Piller, Ingrid, and Livia Gerber. 2018. “Family language policy between the bilingual advantage and the monolingual mindset.” International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism
Vaá, Unasa LF. 2009. “Samoan custom and human rights: An indigenous view.” Victoria U. Wellington L. Rev. 40:237

Dr Van Tran, Charles Sturt University, presented this week’s Lecture in Linguistic Diversity

In Australia almost a quarter of the population speak a language other than English (LOTE) at home but relatively few succeed in maintaining their home language across generations. The typical pattern in migrant families is bilingualism with LOTE dominance in the first generation, bilingualism with English dominance in the second generation, and English monolingualism in the third generation.

There is a gap between parents’ desires to raise their children bilingually and their success in achieving their aspirations (Piller & Gerber, 2018).

Why do some parents succeed in their efforts to maintain the home language and to raise their children bilingually in English and a LOTE while others fail? Our guest speaker in this week’s Lecture in Linguistic Diversity, Dr Van Tran from Charles Sturt University, explored precisely this question with a focus on Vietnamese in Australia.

As part of the “Vietspeech” research project, the researcher surveyed over 150 first generation Vietnamese parents living in Australia with children aged below 18 years. The questionnaire study asked parents to rate their children’s proficiency in Vietnamese and English, respond to questions about language use practices, and identify characteristics of the child, the parent, the family, and the community. She then went on to identify the factors that differed for children with above and below average Vietnamese language proficiency (as rated by their parents).

With regard to spoken language proficiency, the best predictor was child language use. Maybe unsurprisingly, the more likely a child was to use Vietnamese, the higher their ability to speak the language.

This finding points to the existence of vicious and virtuous cycles in language learning. A vicious language learning cycle is one where there are few opportunities to speak, resulting in fewer practice opportunities, resulting in deteriorating language proficiency, resulting in reduced likelihood to speak. By contrast, a virtuous language learning cycle works in the opposite direction: many and varied practice opportunities lead to proficiency gains which in turn further increase the likelihood of language use.

This means that the ability to establish virtuous language learning cycles is one of the secrets of success in bilingual parenting.

With regard to written proficiency, the researcher identified a correlation with children’s age: obviously, a child has to be old enough to learn how to write. Literacy is tied to schooling. Therefore, children who had only recently arrived in Australia and had experienced some schooling in Vietnam had an advantage when it came to Vietnamese literacy.

In Australia, community language schools are supposed to teach literacy in the home language. However, the VietSpeech team has found that it makes no difference for a child’s Vietnamese proficiency whether a child attends a community school or not. However, it would be wrong to conclude that language education in school is pointless and that all that matters is parental effort.

Parental attitudes and efforts matter most in the early years. During the early years, the focus is necessarily on developing oral proficiency and on getting those virtuous language cycles going. However, the control parents have over a child’s linguistic environment decreases rapidly as they get older.

Starting school is usually a turning point and virtuous language learning cycles can all too easily collapse into vicious cycles at that point.

The challenge of maintaining the LOTE as the habitual language spoken in the home in the early primary years is magnified by the fact that, at this point, literacy comes into play. To continue developing the LOTE towards the full range of linguistic proficiencies, including academic proficiencies that will last into adulthood, it is essential for children to learn how to read and write in the LOTE. And learning to read and write does not only mean learning one’s ABC but being able to draw knowledge from increasingly complex texts.

Achieving biliteracy on parental effort alone, without school support, is extremely difficult. Some families adopt a “one child, two curricula” approach (Chao and Ma, 2019). In this approach, which is also employed by some of the participants in our team member’s Yining Wang’s research with Chinese parents in Australia, parents coach their children outside school hours in the curriculum of the home country. In Chao and Ma’s study, this included Chinese and maths; for one of Yining’s participants, coaching was even more extensive and also included history and social studies.

Adopting a “one child, two curricula” approach is only feasible for a small minority of families. The capacity constraints on the part of both children and parents are obvious. Therefore, for biliteracy to ever be a feasible option for all families who want it, school support is essential.

In Australia, only a very small number of schools offer bilingual curricula. Bilingual schools such as the German International School Sydney, are not a wide option, either. They are few and far between and almost always expensive private schools.

This leaves community language schools as the main option to develop and support children’s written home language proficiency. Unfortunately, Dr Tran’s finding that Vietnamese community schools do not seem to be particularly effective is not unusual. With so many other things competing for precious time, most community schools find that attendance starts to plummet by the mid-primary years.

Australia is not unusual in its neglect of community schools, as Martha Sif Karrebæk recently reported in her account of heritage language education in Denmark.

However, it does not have to be that way, as an initiative in the German state of North-Rhine Westphalia shows. There schools are required to provide home language teaching if requested by a minimum of 15 parents. Currently, schools in the city of Dortmund (ca. 586,000 inhabitants), for instance, teach 14 different home languages as part of their regular curriculum.

So proud is the city of its achievement in bilingual education that they’ve produced a video about it. Entitled “Every language is a treasure”, the heart-warming video [in German, Arabic, Bosnian, Polish, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish] features the voices of parents, children, teachers, and policy makers, and shows the real secret of successful bilingual parenting: communities and schools that value languages.

Next Lecture in Linguistic Diversity

Learn more about bilingual education and home language maintenance in Australia at next week’s lecture by Dr Kerry Taylor-Leech about “Translanguaging and identity: Creating safe space for Samoan language and culture in an Australian a’oga amata”

References

Chao, X., & Ma, X. Transnational habitus: Educational, bilingual and biliteracy practices of Chinese sojourner families in the U.S. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 0(0), 1468798417729551. doi:10.1177/1468798417729551

Piller, I., & Gerber, L. (2018). Family language policy between the bilingual advantage and the monolingual mindset. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 1-14. doi:10.1080/13670050.2018.1503227 [available open access] ]]> https://languageonthemove.com/secrets-of-bilingual-parenting-success/feed/ 50 21699 https://languageonthemove.com/no-child-left-behind-a-study-in-unintended-consequences/ https://languageonthemove.com/no-child-left-behind-a-study-in-unintended-consequences/#comments Thu, 23 May 2019 05:00:52 +0000 http://www.languageonthemove.com/?p=21411

President George W. Bush signs the “No Child Left Behind” act in 2002 (Image credit: Wikipedia)

In 2001, the United States government responded to the apparent lack of quality education in the country by passing Public Law 107 – 110, also known as “No Child Left Behind”. Its purpose was “to improve educational achievement by assessing student progress through standardized testing, mandating curricular reforms, and improving teacher quality” (Mangual Figueroa, 2013, p. 333). Section 3202 of the law states that Limited English Proficient (LEP) students should be able to “meet the same rigorous standards for academic achievement as all children are expected to meet, including meeting challenging State academic content and student academic achievement standards” (No Child Left Behind [NCLB], 2002, p. 283). While the intentions seemed honorable, unfortunately the policy neglected to recognize relevant second language acquisition research into how the needs of emergent bilinguals may differ considerably from the needs of mainstream students.

The “No Child Left Behind” educational policy arose during the George W. Bush administration in the United States as a piece of legislation aimed at improving low achieving schools across the country. After continued reports of poor test scores from students across the country compared to other countries around the world, the United States developed an educational policy that was supposed to encourage and incentivize schools to revise their instructional methods so as to promote higher tests scores. Initially, this might sound beneficial for all students, but the policy failed to acknowledge students’ diverse language backgrounds.

How did the policy affect English language learners?

Researchers in the field of TESOL were frustrated with the lack of attention the NCLB policy paid to evidence for the amount of time it takes students to learn a language and the specific needs of students learning such language that will be used for instruction and assessment. NCLB completely neglected the research on how it can take four to seven years for students to acquire an English proficiency sufficient for academic performance that will truly reflect their knowledge (Crawford, 2004).

NCLB’s focus on accountability disrupted ESL classrooms because teachers and school administrators were financially pressured into valuing test preparation over communicative skills building. As schools were expected to show growth and improvement in scores each year, ESL students were not given enough time to cultivate an understanding of the English language sufficient to demonstrate their content knowledge.

How did the policy affect ESL teachers?

A second unintended outcome of the NCLB policy affected teachers of English language learners. Within the NCLB Act, there was a section that discussed the necessary qualifications required for teachers. However, it only focused on the teachers of “core academic subjects” defined as “English, reading or language arts, mathematics, science, foreign languages, civics and government, economics, arts, history, and geography” (NCLB, 2002, p. 534).

In other words, the policy overlooked the same requirements for ESL teachers, even though the policy is supposed to serve English language learners in particular.

The idea was that improved teacher qualifications would increase the overall quality of education that all students receive, including those with limited English language proficiency. Unfortunately, “this failure to acknowledge ESL as a subject in which teachers must be highly qualified effectively denies its value and status as curriculum ‘content’ and reinforces the common assumption that teaching English language learners requires little more than a set of pedagogical modifications applied to other content areas” (Harper, De Jong, & Platt, 2008, p. 271).

How did the policy affect bilingual programs?

Yet another unintended consequence of the NCLB policy was that support that had previously been in place for bilingual language programs diminished after the passage of the act. Whereas previous improvements to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) included explicit support for bilingual education, the 2002 document hardly mentioned it. That means that with the introduction of NCLB, English language learners were cut off from explicit support for developing their native language as well as English.

This flies in the face of the agreement among linguists and educators that “development and maintenance of a child’s first language is critically important to his or her psychological, linguistic, and cognitive well-being” (Cummins and Swain, 1986, p. 97).

The root of the problem here was that NCLB placed such a high level of pressure to succeed on the tests given in English that schools and teachers were discouraged from helping students develop their native language. Again, even though the language within the act suggests flexibility and inclusion, the emphasis on accountability throughout the document severely limited the attention that could be given to individual students and their specific needs.

Deficit views and unintended consequences

NCLB obviously places little or no importance on multiculturalism and multilingualism as resources for the classroom and for the nation more broadly. Regrettably, the NCLB policy approached language education through the perspective that speakers of other languages come to the classroom with deficits rather than valuable experiences and knowledge that can add to the overall learning experience in the classroom. In practice, this kind of policy marginalizes students labeled as ‘LEP’ – not only because the label itself can be considered demeaning. By ignoring relevant research in language learning, linguistics and education, the NCLB policy – despite its stated aims to raise standards – effectively further disadvantaged already marginalized students and the educators who serve them.

Related content

• Ten lessons from the Bridging Language Barriers symposium
• Educational success through bilingual education
• Children of the harvest: schooling, class and race
• Refugee children left behind as eagle lands on the moon
• Long-term English language learners
• Schooling challenges of multilingual children
• Is there such a thing as postmodern bilingual education?
• The language that cannot speak its name
• Building bridges through multilingual schooling: a mother-tongue pilot in East Timor is showing the way
• Can ESL teachers help in maintaining the home language?
• Providing bilingual education since 1689

References

Cummins, J., & Swain, M. (1986). Bilingualism in education: Aspects of theory, research and practice. London: Longman.

Harper, Candace A., De Jong, Ester J., & Platt, Elizabeth J. (2008). Marginalizing English as a Second Language Teacher Expertise: The Exclusionary Consequence of “No Child Left Behind“. Language Policy, 7(3), 267-284.

Linguistic diversity is a demographic reality, as Dr Alexandra Grey pointed out in her presentation

This week, Professor Lisa Lim and her colleagues from Sydney University’ School of Languages and Cultures brought together researchers from Sydney and Hong Kong to examine heritage languages in urban multilingual diaspora. The many diverse perspectives and research projects presented at the symposium served to reinforce the fact that, in Australia as elsewhere, linguistic diversity is a demographic reality.

At the same time, the presenters stressed that multilingualism and language learning are not widely valued. Language learning and maintenance are, by and large, considered private concerns that are the responsibility of families. By contrast, to society at large, they seem of limited benefit. At best, heritage languages are the object of benign neglect and haphazard policy efforts; at worst, they are actively suppressed.

How can we change that situation? Is the linguist’s conviction that linguistic diversity is inherently a good thing enough to make a claim on scarce societal resources to be devoted to language teaching and multilingual service provision?

The answer is patently no.

For us as linguists, this means that greater effort is needed to provide convincing answers as to why language teaching matters and why services should be provided in languages other than English (or the dominant language, to put it more generally). We can only do so if we highlight the social consequences of linguistic diversity. How do specific language regimes constrain or enable access to social goods such as education, employment, healthcare, or welfare?

Only where we can show that language loss is connected to social injustice or that language learning contributes to the social good, can we make legitimate claims on the body politic and lobby for changes in language policy.

Language is deeply intertwined with who we are, and the symposium’s focus on ancestry necessarily trained the eye on the family. Focusing on heritage means that we are likely to ask questions about our past and where we come from. However, as families and individuals we have responsibilities both to the past and the future.

Some Hong Kong parents prefer to speak English to their children, as Professor Virginia Yip has found

Parents strive to maintain ancestral languages so that children can communicate with grandparents and remain connected with their country of origin. At the same time, they are guided by future-oriented considerations, such as which languages can be expected to be most beneficial to children’s future careers. In Hong Kong, for instance, calculations of future benefit motivate parents to switch to English as family language.

The dichotomy between English and Chinese is artificial, of course, and bilingualism provides a ready means to honor families’ responsibilities both to the past and the future.

Bilingualism can be an attractive option for some families. At the same time, we also need to ask whether – in our desire to defend bilingualism against the monolingual mindset – we are not celebrating bilingual parenting a bit too enthusiastically, creating new barriers along the way. Bilingual parenting in the absence of strong institutional support, particularly in schools, is an uphill battle and one that requires significant resources to succeed.

There is an increasing body of evidence that parents want bilingualism for their children. However, wanting to raise bilingual children is not enough to do so. For us as researchers, this tension might mean that it is time to turn our attention away from battling the monolingual mindset to actually helping to build an infrastructure that makes bilingualism and language learning a realistic option for all parents, irrespective of whether they can afford to pay for private school attendance, are willing and able to give up their Saturdays for community school attendance, or decide to prioritize full-time parenting for maximum minority-language input over paid employment.

If we agree that bilingualism is not only the private responsibility of families but requires a whole-of-society commitment and effort, this inevitably raises the question of limited resources. In the Hong Kong example, the choice is not actually between English monolingualism and English-Chinese bilingualism but between Cantonese, Mandarin, English, a variety of combinations, and, for an increasing number of families, a wealth of other languages. In Australia, over 300 different languages are spoken.

Can and should we treat all these languages as equal when it comes to language teaching and multilingual service provision?

Linguists tend to shy away from the question of hierarchies – the equality of all languages is a fundamental tenet of our discipline. This means that, by and large, we are not very good at countering the obvious truth of the argument that it is impossible to treat all languages equally in schools and public service provision. I suggest we need to start asking some uncomfortable questions in order to be able to advocate for positive change.

Again, this means we need to shift our attention from language to social impact: what kinds of language policies have the most positive outcomes not in terms of language but in terms of social and family cohesion? In other words, we need a social justice approach to linguistic diversity.

Related content

• Ten lessons from the Bridging Linguistic Barriers Symposium

New Zealand’s PM wants to raise her newborn daughter bilingually (Source: radionz)

New Zealand’s Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, plans to raise her newborn daughter bilingually in Māori and English. Her desire for her child – and all New Zealand children – to grow up proficient in more than one language is not unusual in today’s world and echoes the desires of many Australian parents, too. A recent study of young Australian mothers found high levels of support for bilingual child rearing.

Mothers wanted to give their children “the gift of bilingualism” and spoke glowingly about the many advantages and benefits they hoped bilingualism would bestow on their children. They felt that proficiency in another language in addition to English would enrich their children’s future, that it would give them a career edge, and that it would allow them to travel overseas but also connect with diverse communities in Australia. Many also believed that bilingualism would give their children a cognitive advantage and they were aware of health benefits of bilingualism such as delayed onset of dementia.

In short, like New Zealand’s PM, the mothers in the study aspired to raise their children with English and another language for many good reasons. There was another similarity: while they knew what they wanted, they did not quite know how to achieve their goal. Like Ardern they confided that, while they were sure they wanted their children to learn English and another language, they found it difficult to figure out “how that will happen.”

The main difficulties with raising bilingual children in Australia – as in any English-dominant society – can be traced back to the overbearing role of English. The dominance of English makes bilingual parenting extra hard for a number of reasons.

To begin with, Australians often have relatively low levels of proficiency in another language and this can lead to deep insecurities. How do you do “being a competent parent” while fighting insecurities whether your pronunciation is good enough or struggling to find the right word?

Second, you may want bilingualism for your child. But you also want your child to be well adjusted, to make friends easily and to do well in school. English is the indispensable means to achieve these goals. So, you may suffer from a niggling doubt that the other language may detract from your child’s English.

By focusing on the other language in the home, do you inadvertently jeopardize your child’s academic success or their friendship groups? Research shows that this is not true but it can certainly seem that way when your child throws a tantrum in the supermarket and everyone stares at you as you try to calm her down in another language.

Third, contemporary parenting is difficult and fraught with anxieties at the best of times. Bottle or breast? Disposable or cloth nappy? Soccer or cricket? The number of decisions we have to make seems endless and each decision seems to index whether we are a good parent or a parenting fail.

Questions of language choice and language practices add a whole other dimension to the complexities of modern parenting: When should you start which language? Who should speak which language to the child? Is it ok to mix languages? The list goes on and on. Parents not only need to figure out answers to these questions, they also need to live their answers out on a daily basis.

Furthermore, parenting is not something that we do in isolation. Mums and dads may not arrive at the same answers. When one partner is deeply committed to bilingual parenting and the other is not, that can easily put a strain on the relationship. Many couples know that mundane questions like whose turn it is to do the dishes can easily escalate into a fight when everyone is tired and juggling too many responsibilities. Now imagine such daily problems amplified by debates over whose turn it is to read the bedtime story in the other language or whose fault it is that the bedtime story in the other language is always the same because there are only two books in that language in the local library.

The parents of New Zealand’s “First Baby” want to raise their daughter bilingually because they recognize that bilingualism is important in today’s world – just like Australian parents. They do not quite know how to do it and they will undoubtedly struggle turning their aspiration into a reality as their daughter grows up and starts to have her own ideas about bilingualism. Having to make language decisions part and parcel of all the mundane parenting and family decisions that we all make all the time will be a challenge – just as it is for Australian parents.

But that is where the similarity ends.

New Zealand parents do not have to face the challenges of raising their children bilingually alone – in contrast to Australian parents. We all know that it takes a village to raise a child. Parents need the support of the wider community. This holds even more so when it comes to bilingual parenting. Specifically, bilingual families need institutional support, particularly from schools, in order to thrive.

New Zealand’s te kōhanga reo or “language nests” are preschools that operate through the medium of Māori and have been highly successful in supporting bilingual proficiencies in Māori and English. Additionally, there are now plans to make bilingual education in Māori and English universally available in all public schools by 2025.

In Australia, our policy makers have so far ignored the aspirations of an ever-growing number of families for meaningful language education that fosters high levels of linguistic proficiency in English and another language. In fact, the overbearing role of English in academic achievement often means that schools actively conspire against the wishes of families. As a result, those best able to raise bilingual children in Australia are those who have the means to afford specialized private schools, extended overseas holidays or bilingual nannies.

When will our leaders end the disconnect between families’ linguistic aspirations and the education system? When will we see an all-of-society effort to help put the bilingual proficiencies needed to thrive in the 21^st century within the reach of all?

Reference

Piller, I., & Gerber, L. (2018). Family language policy between the bilingual advantage and the monolingual mindset. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 1-14. doi:10.1080/13670050.2018.1503227 [if you do not have institutional access, you may download an open access version here. The number of OA downloads is limited, so, institutional users, make sure to leave this link for readers without institutional access … An OA pre-publication version is available here].

Dr Fadila Boutouchent during her guest lecture at Macquarie University

When she was in kindergarten, my oldest daughter came home one day talking about “our soldiers” who “went to war for us“. It was the Anzac Day history lesson, a day which commemorates Australia’s involvement in World War 1 and the loss of life which resulted. However, just who was that “us” supposed to be?

My daughter has past and present relatives from the (former) Austro-Hungarian, British and Ottoman empires. As is true of most Australians, during WW1 my daughter’s ancestors would have actually been on both sides of the battle. This made me particularly uncomfortable with the idea of pitching a unified “us” against “them”.

As a parent, I expect my school to utilize a curriculum which is inclusive, not exclusionary and divisive. In fact, most of the time, they do. This was the only time I could recall that our school had tapped into this way of thinking about culture and belonging.

Educational curricula are powerful sites for the construction of national identity.

How does that work in a diverse society? What happens to newcomers who may not fit the dominant imagined identity? How can schools fullfil their obligation to meet the needs of students of diverse backgrounds while still attempting to instill a shared sense of identity and belonging?

The research of Dr. Fadila Boutouchent (University of Regina, Canada) addresses these important and fascinating questions and asks how immigrant parents perceive their children’s education, particularly in Francophone schools, which have as a central role the maintenance and construction of a Canadian Francophone identity. As part of the Lectures in Linguistic Diversity series at Macquarie University, Dr. Boutouchent presented her research on these schools in the small city of Moncton in New Brunswick, Canada.

New Brunswick is a province with a bilingual language policy, which means that citizens have the right to access services in either French or English. In addition, New Brunswick prioritizes French-speaking immigrants, in order to maintain its Francophone community.

In the Canadian context, research into immigrant students has tended to focus on Anglophone schools which are in the majority, have more experience with and are better resourced to manage the needs of diverse students. In contrast, little is known about the experience of migrant children in Francophone educational contexts, which are managed by the Francophone community.

Bilingual welcome sign at the entrance to Moncton city (Source: Wikipedia)

So how do recent migrant families fit into this picture? Dr. Boutouchent and her team sought to understand how immigrant families perceive their children’s education before and after their arrival in Moncton, and how they are involved in their social and educational integration.

The researchers interviewed 14 parents of families who had migrated from Africa or the Caribbean between 3-10 years prior and whose children were enrolled in Francophone schools. They found that there were some key issues for immigrant parents across the group.

The first was that immigrant parents felt they were not informed about the school system before arriving in Moncton. In particular, they did not know about the existence of Francophone schools. This group of parents was mostly highly educated and had very high expectations of their children’s educational success. Although they had trusted that the school would be good quality because it was in a developed country, some were disappointed, and one mother even said she would have liked to teach her daughter at home if she had been able to.

These issues of quality were at times compounded by language. The local variety of French is quite distinct. The Acadian French identity is historically very strong, and is marked by an accent which may be difficult for newcomers. This is similar to my own research on adult migrants in linguistic intermarriage who reported that they had unexpected problems with the Australian English accent on arrival.

The Chiac slogan “Right Fiers!” (“Right proud!”) has caused controversy (Source: cbc.ca)

We know from the previous lectures in the series that children’s willingness to speak different languages changes over time and that schooling is a key time for the formation of language habits. A particular challenge for immigrant children in Moncton is constituted by the fact that local youths speak a variety called Chiac, a mixture of French and English. Francophone migrants raised with standard French found Chiac incomprehensible and alienating.

One participant reported that her son began to stay inside during break times because he could not understand or speak to his fellow students.

If you can’t speak to other kids, how can you feel like you belong?

Parents also reported that their children experienced bullying and racism, and that the schools were not always well-equipped to manage the needs of refugee children who were not at the same educational level as their peers. They also regarded the lack of inclusive, multi-ethnic content in the curriculum as a problem.

There are no easy answers as to how to balance the educational and linguistic needs of newcomers with those of old-timers, but a good first step is to listen to the voices of those who are living the encounter. Small cities, like small schools, have the advantage that the distances between people and institutions are smaller, making both problems and solutions more visible. This also means that change is potentially easier to implement.

Dr. Boutouchent finished her lecture by making the case that Moncton is a site where Francophone schools could become “spaces for intercultural communication and nourish a culture of understanding and acceptance”. That sounds like a goal which all schools and parents could agree on.

Reference:

Benimmas, A., Boutouchent, F., & Kamano, L. (2017). Relationship Between School and Immigrant Families in French-Language Minority Communities in Moncton, New Brunswick: Parents’ Perceptions of Their Children’s Integration. In G. Tibe Bonifacio & J. L. Drolet (Eds.), Canadian Perspectives on Immigration in Small Cities (pp. 235-253). Cham: Springer International Publishing.

Dr Sabine Little during her guest lecture at Macquarie University

When my daughter was five years old, she one day solemnly informed me that, from now on, she was no longer going to speak German because it was not good for her health. “German hurts my throat”, she explained. The statement showed astute phonetic and psychological judgement. She had identified the kind of argument that would carry weight with her parents (in a way that “I don’t like German” or “Everyone else speaks English” might not have).

My response was to explain the basics of articulation to her and to conclude my explanation with the assertion that, because German is more guttural than English, German-speaking kids get to eat more lollies than English-speaking kids do. For the time being, that was the end of that attempt to change our family language.

For bilingual children, the early primary years are a common point of linguistic rebellion. At that time the dominant language starts to make its weight felt through the school and children begin to see their family from the outside for the first time in their lives. The combined discovery of a stronger language and of social difference may lead them to reject the home language.

For parents, children’s linguistic rebellion can be profoundly confusing and challenging.

A common experience is for bilingual children to ask their parents not to speak the home language in public, in the school or in front of their friends. For many parents such a request can be deeply hurtful. It may feel like a rejection not only of the language but also of the parent who speaks the language.

As a parent, how do you respond to that? Do you respect your child’s wishes, even if it may come at the cost of language loss? Do you insist on the home language because you know that eventually the child will be grateful for the bilingual proficiencies you have instilled in them? Do you force them to follow your choices because you believe that the home language is an important aspect of your identity and their identity? Do you give in sometimes and stand firm on other occasions?

There are probably as many variations on the answer to these questions as there are families, and it is always helpful to learn from the experiences of other families.

How would you feel about inheriting this vase? (Source: veniceclayartists.com)

The research of Dr Sabine Little (Sheffield University, UK) addresses precisely such questions and asks how bilingual parents and children jointly negotiate language policies in the family. As part of the Lectures in Linguistic Diversity series at Macquarie University, Dr Little conceptualized the home language as heritage language and likened it to “Great Aunt Edna’s vase”.

When Great-Aunt Edna passes on and leaves her treasured vase to her nephew, all kinds of scenarios are possible. He may have exactly the same taste and love the vase because it is a fantastic vase. He may not care much for the vase but treasure it because it reminds him of his love for Great-Aunt Edna. He may care neither for the vase nor Great-Aunt Edna, and therefore let the vase gather dust in a corner. Or he may find the vase so atrocious that he wants nothing to do with it and gives it away. A further complicating factor may be other members of his family who have their own views and preferences about the vase.

In short, the inherited vase may be a source of pride, guilt, conflict or disregard. Not all of these emotions may be talked about openly: some people love kitschy vases but may be ashamed to admit that; others may hate them but are afraid to be judged disrespectful of Great-Aunt Edna.

It is easy to see that a vase can be a complicated inheritance. Now imagine how complicated things can get when the inheritance is not an object but a language.

In her research with 212 bilingual families in the UK, Dr Little found that parents often failed to talk about these complicated feelings with their children. If conflicting emotions around language choice were left to fester, this could easily turn language into a battleground for the family and a source of tensions between parents and children.

In fact, attempting to raise children bilingually may not only impact on the parent-child relationship but can also put a strain on the couple relationship, as Livia Gerber and I found in new research just published in the International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism.

In data from an online discussion forum about bilingual parenting, we found that mothers were much more invested in their children’s bilingualism than fathers. Mothers often perceived fathers as uncooperative or incompetent obstacles to enacting a bilingual family policy.

Taken together, both pieces of research warn of the dangers of letting language choice become a source of tension in the family.

One way to overcome such problems is to keep renegotiating language choice with children as they grow up. Dr Little recommends talking as much about language choice and the home language as in the home language.

That is certainly sound advice.

Connecting this research with the research about linguistic habit formation by Professor Maite Puigdevall we heard about in a previous lecture in the series suggests that there is another possibility, too: the transition to primary school is a key moment when linguistic habits are subject to change. What may seem like rebellion on the part of the child may in fact be the overwhelming influence of a new world with its new habits. It is not so much that they rebel against the home language but that the dominant language is taking them over.

Acknowledging the force of habit can be another way to escape the impossible choice of letting go of the home language or turning the home language into an ongoing source of tension. As so often in life, the road to success is through the formation of good habits.

Instilling good bilingual habits in their children is, of course, not something parents can do on their own. In addition to strong home language habits in the family, they will need the support of the community. Home language support in the school is ideal and lobbying for home language support in the school may be one of the most effective ways in which parents can support their children’s bilingualism.

Where school support for the home language is not feasible, it is important to seek out other forms of community support. After all, it takes a village to raise a child. Parenting cannot be done alone but needs community support, and this is even more so the case when it comes to bilingual parenting.

References

Little, S. (2017). Whose heritage? What inheritance?: conceptualising family language identities. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 1-15. doi:10.1080/13670050.2017.1348463

Piller, I., & Gerber, L. (2018). Family language policy between the bilingual advantage and the monolingual mindset. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 1-14. doi:10.1080/13670050.2018.1503227 [if you do not have institutional access, you may download an open access version here. The number of OA downloads is limited, so, institutional users, make sure to leave this link for readers without institutional access … An OA pre-publication version is available here].

Colours of the alphabet

February 21 is International Mother Language Day and serves as an opportunity to discuss and promote the use of first-language medium education. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) estimates that up to 40% of the world’s population does not have access to education in their home language. This is the result of language policy, teacher training and resource issues and language beliefs. The minority language-speaking students behind this statistic face significant educational disadvantages that can have a lasting impact on their learning and participation into adulthood.

The 2016 documentary film, Colours of the Alphabet, presents this difficult situation from the perspectives of three young children in Lwimba, in rural Zambia. This film follows Steward, M’barak and Elizabeth as they commence grade one, cleverly depicting some of the challenges they face navigating their earliest learning experiences, in languages they do not know. The situation in this multilingual, post-colonial setting are anything but straightforward.

Directed by Alastair Cole, the film forms part of a larger research project led by four UK universities, which “aims to filmicly reveal the complexities of our multilingual world, specifically focusing on linguistic anthropological perspectives of minority languages use and education”. The film achieves this goal, presenting this Zambian case study, which subtly brings together opinions, policy and experiences around education in a multilingual environment where many of the students do not have the opportunity to learn in their home language. Avoiding the use of any explicit narration, the film follows the three young students, living in a predominately Soli-speaking area in rural Zambia, during their first two terms of grade one. It is a carefully combined collection of footage of the children travelling to and from school, in the classroom and playground, and interviews with the children’s teacher and another of the school’s teachers, and with the children’s parents and a local elder.

Cleverly reflecting its title, the film begins with an explanation that different coloured subtitles will be used to represent the different languages – orange for Soli – the local language, green for Nyanja – the main language of instruction, purple for Bemba – which is used during religious singing at one point in the film, and white for English. This provides a visual representation of the linguistic rollercoaster that Grade 1A faces during their introduction to schooling.

As explained in the interviews accompanying the in-class footage, national education policy requires classes to be taught in Nyanja. For many of the students, like Steward, who speak Soli at home, this causes major problems. Some face difficulty understanding even basic requests to sit down, or talk about what they did on the weekend. Their teacher, who comes from another region, speaks very little Soli and at various times we see her seeking assistance from her students to translate simple sentences for her students when they appear unresponsive to the questions or requests she makes in Nyanja.

As pointed out early in the film, Zambia’s dominant regional languages each represent a separate group of people, and their use is inherently political. In a bid for neutrality and unity, English was instituted as the official language. This means it is introduced from the very start of primary education. However, the incorporation of English-language teaching and the use of English as the medium for some lessons – and especially in teaching the children about good manners – only adds another layer of complexity. This creates a double linguistic barrier for many of the students and reinforces a hierarchy of languages in which English as national and global language is of ultimate value, followed by the regional language common in urban centres (in this case Nyanja), and finally, the local Soli.

The effects of these challenges on the students are often very clear and sometimes heartbreaking. Steward’s struggles over the course of the year are particularly touching – especially in one scene where he stays behind at the end of class, silently crying at his desk, his teacher unable to coax him into sharing his problems with her. However, the classroom footage and Steward’s own example makes it clear that the students’ face more than just linguistic barriers. Grade 1A comprises of at least forty children of various ages who attend school each morning (Grade 1B is the afternoon class, led by the same teacher). Various scenes show children squabbling over learning materials and some children not even having a pen or pencil to bring to class to do their work. Class attendance is patchy at best, with class dwindling to just seven students on the final day of Term 2. Interviews with Steward’s father suggest that his home life may also be a source of struggle for him.

While the choice to prioritize Nyanja and English in the classroom creates serious challenges for these young students, many acknowledge and often accept the reasons behind these choices. Teachers who do not speak Soli can obviously not use it to teach, and even those who do speak it, like another teacher interviewed in the film, may not be comfortable using it to teach concepts that they themselves learned in another language. Likewise, there is a lack of learning resources, like books, in the language. The students’ parents also speak about how important it is for their children to learn English – the official language of Zambia – and see it as fundamental to their children finding good careers and succeeding in the world. Even Elizabeth’s parents, who believe that she would learn much more efficiently in Soli, acknowledge the importance of her learning English – because “everything is written in English”.

The political and ideological reasons for favouring more powerful languages, and ultimately valuing English most highly, create a significant stumbling block. Perhaps the most poignant scene in the film is where the teacher is attempting to teach the class the Zambian national anthem. She explains a little about its background, about Zambians being proud of having struggled and being an independent nation, free from its past colonial oppressors. The teacher then starts singing “Stand and sing for Zambia, proud and free, Land of work and joy in unity…”. In English. The students stand facing their teacher, trying to copy the sounds of these words, in the official and most highly valued language of Zambia and its education system: English – the language of neutrality and unity in a country of over 70 languages, but ironically also the very same language of the country’s colonizers, the independence from whom the anthem celebrates.

While the parents and teachers acknowledge the linguistic difficulties the children face, they accept this reality and focus their energies on supporting the young students to do their best within the existing system. Yet, if we explore the beliefs, policies and influences behind this system more closely, their validity begins to fall apart. For example, research suggests that students who are introduced to English later, after having their first language as the medium of instruction in their early years of study are actually likely to do better at learning it. The inability of the teaching staff to use Soli (either because of their own linguistic background or because they did not study in this language) is arguably a result of policy rather than a mere coincidence. The absence of Soli as a language of education – including in higher education – over the course of one generation nearly guarantees its absence in the next. As UNESCO suggests, such an issue could potentially be addressed through programs emphasizing training teachers from regional areas who have the requisite languages skills.

The elder interviewed for the film shares his love for the Soli language, which he sees as having a rich tradition, and his beliefs that the language is actually growing in strength. However, the distinct domains in which these different languages have been used, along with all the other challenges dealt with in the film, mean that despite the many benefits of first language education, it may be hard for local people like him to even imagine Soli becoming the language of instruction. When the interviewer proposes the idea of Soli-medium schools, he stops to think and smiles. “Could this happen? Is it possible?” he asks. “We would love that, but can it be?” Still, once he considers this, we see his ideas quickly develop and with a twinkle in his eye he goes on to suggest that students could even go to university and get a degree in it. “It would be nice”, he says.

Colours of the Alphabet delicately presents the complexities that Steward, M’barak and Elizabeth confront in their first two terms of primary education, in a classroom where the local language, Soli, has no place. Their experiences suggest that lack of access to education in one’s own language, while a surprisingly common phenomenon on a global level, helps to create or entrench serious inequalities in our societies: at the very least, these students have to work much harder to achieve what other students learn through their first languages. This film is therefore an important one in drawing our attention to this very real and pervasive challenge, which is highlighted on International Mother Language Day.

King Sejong the Great (1397-1450) (Image source: Wikipedia)

Today, South Koreans celebrate Hangul Day. Hangul Day is a national holiday to celebrate the Korean script. I am not aware of any other national holiday anywhere else to celebrate a particular script (except for the North Koreans who also have a national day to celebrate the Korean script but they call it Chosŏn’gŭl Day and celebrate on January 15). What is so special about the Korean script that it gets a national holiday in both Koreas you might ask?

There is actually a good reason: the invention of Hangul is not only a major linguistic achievement but also of significant social importance.

Hangul was invented by King Sejong the Great who lived from 1397 to 1450 CE and was the fourth king of Korea’s Joseon dynasty (1392–1910).

As a small nation, Korea at the time was overshadowed by its powerful Chinese neighbor which was styled as “elder brother”. As is often the case in such relationships, and is still true today, powerful nations not only rule over less powerful ones but they also come to be seen as providing the standard of all fashion, culture and knowledge. As today, subaltern people are apt to misrecognize the language and culture of the powerful as an intrinsic feature of their power. The hegemonic nation comes to be seen as the source of knowledge and local ways are often denigrated and dismissed as lacking value. Same old story back in 14^th-century Korea:

China was considered the source of all culture and learning. The Korean elite therefore thought it natural that becoming literate meant learning the Chinese language: everything worth reading was written in Chinese. (Gnanadesikan 2009, p. 193)

Despite all the Chinese learning, not all was well in the kingdom of Korea; in fact, it was a rather backward place. Unlike many feudals, King Sejong was not content with living the good life at the expense of his subjects. On the contrary, committed to serving the good of his nation, he wanted to improve his country and better the lot of all Koreans. In addition to being the king, he had a lot going for him: he had received an excellent education (through the medium of Chinese, of course), he was bilingual in Korean and Chinese and he was an immensely talented scholar with wide-ranging interests. All his reading and writing obviously was in Chinese but Chinese publications were the only game in town.

One of King Sejong’s interests was related to agriculture, an area with obvious potential to improve the lot of Koreans: the growing population needed food. So, he started numerous scientific and technological projects to help increase agricultural production. However, all the agricultural knowledge of the time was based on Chinese climatic conditions and he realized that existing knowledge could not just be taken holus-bolus from China but needed to be adapted to Korean conditions. He saw the need for localization, if you will. One example of such a localization measure was the development of a specifically Korean agricultural calendar to determine sowing and harvesting times that were ideal for the Korean peninsula.

Another example of his wisdom in adapting Chinese knowledge to the Korean situation related to medicine where he commissioned a medical encyclopedia that focused on native Korean herbs and remedies and described their uses and where to find them.

King Sejong also was interested in jurisprudence:

Throughout his reign he showed a passion for justice, working to improve prison conditions, set fairer sentencing standards, implement proper procedures for autopsies, protect slaves from being lynched, punish corrupt officials, set up an appeals process for capital crimes, and limit torture. Nevertheless, one problem continued to vex the king: the litigation process was carried out in Chinese. Were the accused able to adequately defend themselves in a foreign language? Sejong doubted it. (Gnanadesikan 2009, p. 195)

The basic consonant signs of the Korean alphabet representing their pronunciation (Source: Gnanadesikan 2009, p. 198)

The justice system was not the only area where King Sejong discovered that all his reform attempts continually ran into a language barrier: whether it was agriculture, medicine, law or any other area of life: dissemination of knowledge, development and progress were stymied by the fact that only a tiny minority of Koreans could read. As mentioned above, all writing was in Chinese and Chinese literacy was restricted to a tiny elite. The vast majority of Koreans had no access to all the knowledge that was available. Teaching everyone how to read and write in Chinese was obviously not practical.

King Sejong concluded that, in order to achieve broad dissemination of knowledge, Korean needed a writing system of its own; not one based on Chinese but one that was based on Korean and easy to learn.

He started to look around for ways to develop a script for Korean. In addition to Chinese, he was able to study Japanese, Jurchen and Mongolian scripts. While these syllabary-based scripts provided some inspiration, it must be considered a stroke of genius that he figured out the difference between consonants and vowels – characteristic of alphabetic writing – by himself. In a next step, he divided the consonants into groups according to their place of articulation – another impressive feat in the absence of any phonetic models.

Having identified the phonetic characteristics of the sounds of Korean, he devised signs that represent pronunciations. This is in contrast to all other writing systems where signs initially started out as ideograms representing objects. At the danger of overusing the expression “stroke of genius” – that’s precisely what it was!

The new script was published in early October 1446 and the preface, written in Chinese, states:

The speech sounds of our country’s language are different from those of the Middle Kingdom and are not communicable with the Chinese characters. Therefore, when my beloved simple people want to say something, many of them are unable to express their feelings. Feeling compassion for this I have newly designed twenty-eight letters, only wishing to have everyone easily learn and use them conveniently every day. (Quoted from Gnanadesikan 2009, p. 204)

Korean consonant letters. Easy to learn, right? Even if you’ll need to allow for some more time to learn the vowels, too … (Source: Gnanadesikan 2009, p. 198)

Maybe unsurprisingly, the Korean elite hardly welcomed the new script. They probably saw the threat it posed to their monopoly on learning and education. In any case, they did not like it and the script was widely denigrated as “morning script” (because it was so easy it could be learnt in a morning) or even as “women’s script” (because it was so easy even women could learn it …)

Wise King Sejong did not risk a fight and did not impose the exclusive use of Hangul. As a result, Korean elites let the script slip into oblivion after his death and it almost did not survive the Japanese invasions of the 16^th century, which devastated the country.

In fact, history has hardly been kind to Korea; and in 1945, after the ravishes of wars and colonization, the illiteracy rate in the country stood at close to 80 percent. Hangul played a key role in turning these figures around and the illiteracy rate in both Koreas is today close to zero: testament to the continued relevance of the vision of a centuries-old wise ruler intent on serving the common good.

The story of Hangul presents an inspiring case study in the ways in which language arrangements can form obstacles to progress and social justice and the ways in which these can be overcome. For details on the story of Hangul, read Chapter 11 “King Sejong’s One-Man Renaissance” of Gnanadesikan (2009), on whose account I have drawn here. For a general discussion of the relationship between linguistic diversity and social justice, see Piller (2016) – today and tomorrow is your last chance to tweet about #linguisticdiversity and enter our draw for a copy of the book.

References

Gnanadesikan, A. E. (2009). The Writing Revolution: Cuneiform to the Internet. Malden, MA and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Piller, I. (2016). Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice: An Introduction to Applied Sociolinguistics. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.