Additionally, multilingual crisis communication has been the focus of the research projects conducted by Master of Applied Linguistics students at Macquarie University as part of their “Literacies” unit. We close the year by sharing some of their findings.

Here, Yudha Hidayat shows that the over-reliance on written communication channels in rural Indonesia has resulted in a stark lack of information about how to prevent the spread of the virus.

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Official COVID-19 information

The information gap between urban Australia and rural Indonesia

When the COVID-19 pandemic really took off in March 2020, I called my parents, who live in a village in West Nusa Tenggara (WNT) province. I asked them how the people in my village were preparing themselves to stem the spread of the virus.

Their shocking response was that they had no idea what to do.

I explained the health protocol in detail and sent money so that villagers could buy face masks. That was all I could do while I was far away from home.

For this research, I explore how it is possible that a community is not aware of COVID-19 prevention measures. How could my parents not know what to do? It is true that they do not own smartphones and do not have internet access but they do watch a lot of TV.

Unlike most people in my village, I am a literate and educated man. Having a strong internet connection in Australia, I can access a wide range of information from different sources in English and Indonesian.

Here, I argue that the pandemic has exposed global inequalities in information delivery and that local governments need to take local communication seriously in the fight against the disease.

How COVID-19 prevention information was delivered in WNT province

The local government has relied heavily on its official website and social media as the primary tools for delivering Covid-19-related information.

Official COVID-19 information

The official website is updated weekly and provides infection lists. The website also includes a long health protocol, and provides flyers, graphics, tables, and figures. All this information is only available in Indonesian with some English words and phrases mixed in, such as “social distancing”, “lockdown”, and “contact tracing”.

Monolingual information in a multilingual context

The reliance on the Indonesian language, as the only language used for this essential information, ignores the diversity of multilingual citizens.

WNT province comprises two main islands, namely Lombok and Sumbawa, and tens of small islands. The majority of the people in this province are from three ethnic groups, namely Sasak, Bima, and Sumbawa. Each of these groups has its own language including various dialects and at least nine other languages are spoken in the province, including Bajo, Balinese, Bugis, Javanese, Madura, Makasar, Mandarin Ampenan, and Melayu.

Given low levels of education in the province, the Indonesian language proficiency of many of these speakers of other languages will not be sufficient to fully understand the public health information provided to them.

Digital written communication in a low-literacy and low-technology context

The reliance on written text and on online delivery is also problematic.

According to data from the Ministry of Education and Culture of Indonesia (2019) WNT has a low overall literacy index (i.e., 33.64). Furthermore, only a small number of citizens use digital technology to access written materials (20.48), and reading is a habit for only a minority (38.17). Another indicator shows that 12.41% of the population of WNT are illiterate.

All these facts make it clear that COVID-19-related information provided only through the written medium on a website is out of the reach of many citizens.

English loan words exacerbate the problem

The use of foreign terms, tables, and figures on the website exacerbates these problems further.

Even among those who are proficient in Indonesian and have access to the internet, not everyone will understand English. The high level of English loanwords thus acts as a further barrier.

Infection numbers remain high throughout Indonesia

The same is true for the ability to interpret tables and figures.

What can be done?

As I have shown, vital information related to COVID-19 is provided in a way that makes it inaccessible to many in WNT. Although it is true that Covid-19-related reporting can also be found on TV and in newspapers, neither of these channels address the problems of illiterate people and/or those who live in remote areas.

It is obviously impossible to lift the literacy levels of a populations during a crisis or to catch up on telecommunications infrastructure. But that does not mean that public health information cannot be communicated effectively.

The alternative method that I propose is to utilise the oral method as an additional communication channel, as has been done successfully in Taiwan (Chen, 2020). The infrastructure exists as every neighborhood has a leader (‘Ketua RT’) who could be trained and tasked with providing COVID-19 information in this manner.

Oral communication could utilize the loudspeakers of mosques and temples that are readily available in every neighborhood. Oral announcements over loudspeakers are plausible since they can easily be delivered in local languages and are accessible regardless of literacy level and internet access.

This would not only help curb the spread of the virus but also accord local people the dignity and respect they deserve.

Reference

Chen, C-M. (2020). Public health messages about Covid-19 prevention in multilingual Taiwan. Multilingua, 39 (5), 597-606.

After we completed our fieldwork, we were fortunate to obtain additional funding; first, to travel to New York to share our findings at the United Nations; and second, to bring together our findings in the first book to be published on this topic: The Legal Protection of Refugees with Disabilities has just been published.

For me personally, this project was a unique opportunity as a young researcher – I was able to gain invaluable experience designing, coordinating and carrying out fieldwork across six different countries, with a variety of people, in a variety of languages. I learned many valuable lessons which have hopefully helped me grow as a researcher and contributed to my capabilities as a PhD candidate.

But what does this project, which centres around international human rights law, have to do with language or sociolinguistics? While this research is officially within a very different field, I have still identified so many points of crossover, or ways of thinking, that have really helped each of my research fields.

Article 1 of the CRPD states:

Persons with disabilities include those who have long-term physical, mental, intellectual or sensory impairments which in interaction with various barriers may hinder their full and effective participation in society on an equal basis with others.

Laura during fieldwork in Nakivale Refugee Settlement, Uganda, 2013

Instead of placing the focus on the individual, the CRPD, both in Article 1 and throughout the remainder of its provisions, places the onus on societies. It forces us to think about the way our physical, social and legal structures differentially impact the various individuals who come into contact with them. For me, this critical reflection is also key to my growth as a sociolinguistics researcher.

For example, it may be easy to blame migrants for the various challenges they face: not being able to get a high-paying job, or having difficulty at school. But is this really about their individual ‘flaws’, or not trying hard enough, or does it have more to do with the legal, social, political and linguistic structures in our societies, which impact us all differently, advantaging some more than others?

In Chapter 6 of our book, for example, we discuss how a lack of work rights in many displacement settings greatly increased the risk of acquiring a disability, as refugees may be forced into exploitative and unregulated work.

Aside from legal status issues, language barriers played a significant role in access to a range of services – including gaining the knowledge that services existed in the first place. A comparison between the Syrian refugee populations in Turkey and Jordan provides an apt example: most Syrians in Jordan were able to communicate directly with locals, and even those who used Sign Language were more likely to find someone with whom they could communicate – Jordanian and Syrian Sign Language are mutually intelligible, and those literate in Arabic could also use written text to communicate. This obviously facilitated service provision, and access to work and education. By contrast, in Turkey, despite the government making very clear and concerted efforts to assist the Syrians there, language barriers created significant challenges in every aspect of life and access to services.

A refugee-run business in Za’atari Refugee Camp, Jordan, 2014

In places like Malaysia and Indonesia, although there were local disability rights organisations doing important work to advocate for greater inclusion, the invisibility of refugees living in their community, along with language barriers, meant that refugees largely missed out on benefiting from these groups. When we interviewed participants from Myanmar, the interpreters (themselves refugees) explained that they could not even translate ‘human rights’ as it was a completely unfamiliar concept – and we soon gave up asking. This contrasted with the situation in Uganda, where many of the refugees we met with had participated in programmes aimed at improving their rights, and when we spoke with them they were well versed in the ‘language’ of the CRPD and the concepts and rights it promotes.

Prolonged displacement situations are pertinent examples of how these types of linguistic barriers can play out quite differently over time depending on the particular structures in place in the host country. For example, in Malaysia, where young refugees have no access to the education system, their development of literacy and language skills is limited to what is offered by refugee volunteers. These classes are usually conducted in the language of the refugee group, and a range of barriers exist for children with disabilities, given the location of these ‘schools’ – in high-rise apartments, up narrow staircases – and the types of facilities they have – volunteer teachers with limited training, no assistance for those who need extra help, limited access to basic assistive technology like glasses or hearing aids. This understandably limits integration within the host society, and in any future country of resettlement, and the likelihood of being able to participate in the workforce in the future.

In contrast, in Uganda, where refugees are officially welcomed and permitted to settle permanently in the country, refugee children have the right to access local schools, and, in the case of a number of children who were deaf or hard of hearing who we met in camps in the south of the country, they may even be able to access specialised education, where needed.

In each setting, age-based policies that limited specific types of assistance to children (under 18 years) meant that those who had had disruptions due to their experiences as refugees or living through conflict situations may simply age out of opportunities that locals would have been able to access as soon as the need arose, following a ‘normal’ timeline.

It is unsurprising that these different levels of access would lead to different opportunities to participate in the host society, in both the short and long term, and very different experiences of what it means to have a disability. These experiences have reinforced for me the fundamental importance for social justice that we continue to question the way social, political and legal structures – and the beliefs and attitudes that underlie them – can impact on participation for the diverse individuals who make up our communities.

Reference

Crock, Mary, Laura Smith-Khan, Ron McCallum, and Ben Saul. 2017. The Legal Protection of Refugees with Disabilities: Forgotten and Invisible? Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar. Access the eBook and read the first chapter for free.

Images copyright of Mary Crock/University of Sydney.

PASCH Schools: Partners for the future

Last week I was privileged to attend the 3^rd Conference of School Principals of PASCH Schools in Southeast Asia. A ‘PASCH school’ is a regular secondary school with a particular emphasis on the learning and teaching of German as an additional language. PASCH schools constitute a global network of more than 1,700 schools. ‘PASCH’ stands for ‘Schools – Partners of the Future.’ Funded by the German government, the PASCH network was initiated in 2008 in order to offer opportunities to youths from around the globe to learn German and to develop a positive relationship with modern Germany. PASCH supports professional development training for teachers, provides language learning resources for schools, offers scholarships for students to study in Germany, and numerous other virtual and non-virtual exchange and collaboration opportunities, including global student newspapers.

Attended by representatives of various national ministries of education, school principals, German language teachers, industry representatives and former students from across Southeast Asia and Australasia, the conference provided an excellent opportunity to gain an understanding of the state of the art of language education in the region.

Most language teaching efforts across the region are, unsurprisingly, devoted to English. However, there is a clear sense that English is no longer enough. To begin with, the countries of the region are characterized by enormous linguistic diversity and mother tongue education in addition to instruction in the national language is increasingly incorporated into curricula.

Second, with the greater regional integration that the introduction of the ASEAN Economic Community in 2015 promises neighbouring languages are gaining in importance. While as yet weakly integrated in most curricula, their role is set to expand.

Finally, there are other international languages such as Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Japanese or Spanish. Offering the latter in the curriculum is often a niche effort of schools who are trying to differentiate themselves from other schools and who are attempting to provide their students with an additional edge. That teaching international languages other than English is intended to create a small elite group of cultural mediators is best illustrated with the example of Singapore. There, the opportunity to study a third foreign language is offered to students who achieve in the top ten percent in the primary school leaving certificate. Only these top academic achievers are able to pursue a third language in high school by attending a Ministry of Education Language Centre (MOELC) in addition to their regular studies. The languages on offer include Arabic, Bahasa Indonesia, French, German, Japanese, Malay and Spanish.

While German may seem like a relatively irrelevant language to pursue in Southeast Asia, this is in fact not true for students at PASCH schools. These highly motivated students do so with two main goals in mind: to pursue tertiary education at a university in Germany and/or to pursue employment with a German company. Speakers at the conference included a number of students who had achieved their goal and who spoke about their experiences of learning German in school, participating in exchange programs, studying at a German university and working in a role where their German skills are advantageous.

In addition to achieving personal aims, fostering German skills among a small group of cultural mediators also benefits the wider society, as speakers from various national ministries of education stressed. These benefits are related particularly to knowledge transfer. Interesting examples include partnerships with German companies to deliver an innovative automotive engineering program in a Malaysian college or partnerships between Singaporean polytechnics and German small-to-medium enterprises to deliver a dual vocational training program. In fact, attending industry representatives stressed the importance of combining language skills with strong academic and vocational skills for success in the global workplace.

Finally, a number of school representatives argued that a focus on German had improved overall language education in their school. A teacher from an Australian high school, for instance, mentioned that – in the context of Australia’s notorious ‘monolingual mindset’ – his school’s focus on German has had positive effects on language learning more generally. As students in the German immersion program have discovered the value of learning German, their desire to learn another language has also increased and the school has unexpectedly seen enrolments in its Japanese language program rise, too.

In Indonesia, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam, the positive side-effects of a school’s focus on German are different and relate to improved teacher quality. Speakers from these countries explained that teacher quality – both in terms of proficiency and pedagogy – was a concern. This affects predominantly English language teachers, as English is the most widely taught language. Participating in the professional development opportunities offered by the PASCH school program has helped to disseminate pedagogy training across languages and thus has resulted in improving the professionalism of English language teachers, too.

Despite their diverse backgrounds all speakers stressed that the problems facing humanity today are global problems and that the world needs to move beyond competition to become an international learning community. Linguistic diversity will inevitably mediate the success of our partnerships for the future.

The house of the English high school teacher in the village in Sulawesi where Pasassung conducted his fieldwork

In a recent post, I reviewed language policy research that shows how compulsory English in China has given rise to new inequities and is far from being a means to fair development. In that context, compulsory English language learning is problematic for reasons of practical feasibility, allocative effectiveness and distributive justice. That macro language policy perspective is complemented by a school ethnography of English language learning in a small village in Indonesia. The study was conducted by Nicolaus Pasassung in 1999-2000 and has unfortunately never been published but the PhD dissertation it resulted in has now been made available here on Language on the Move.

The thesis titled Teaching English in an “Acquisition-Poor Environment”: An ethnographic example of a remote Indonesian EFL classroom grapples with the question why compulsory English language teaching in Indonesian high schools has been such a failure. That question in itself was not novel even at the time of the research: the World Bank, for instance, had funded the British Council to explore exactly that question a few years earlier and their answer had been that the English language curriculum and the English language teaching methods in Indonesian high schools were inadequate. The solution was relatively simple: the communicative approach was promoted as the panacea to Indonesia’s English language teaching woes.

However, as the researcher found when he spent almost a year in a remote village on the island of Sulawesi, the curricular and methodological problems in the junior high school he observed were part and parcel of a much larger complex that mitigated against the success of English language instruction; this complex also included the status of English, the cultural values of the school and wider society and the material conditions under which English language teaching took place.

To begin with, English and contexts where it was used were entirely alien to the village and there was no place for English in the community outside the classroom. Even in the classroom, the language had a tenuous hold. For instance, the thesis includes a poignant description of a lesson in which students were studying hotel dialogues from the prescribed textbook. Neither the students nor the teacher had any experience of hotels and a number of misunderstandings unfold as the teacher tries to teach and the students try to study vocabulary items in English that they have no concept of in their native language: in a village that does not have electricity, “vacuum cleaner” is one such example where the researcher as participant observer is called upon by the teacher to explain what a “vacuum cleaner” might be.

This is one tiny example of a sheer endless list of obstacles that the students face: inappropriate materials, teachers’ limited proficiency, corruption, efforts to maintain a harmonious society where everyone keeps face, limited resources on every level etc. etc. all conspire to turn the compulsory English lessons in the junior high school under investigation into a meaningless waste of time. Not only does compulsory English study under these conditions not produce any results but it attracts a cost: the opportunity cost to spend the time invested into English lessons in a more productive way.

Like Guangwei Hu and Lubna Alsagoff in their review of compulsory English in Chinese secondary education, Nicolaus Passasung, too, recommends, inter alia, to make English language learning in Indonesian high schools an elective.

Would such a move further entrench the disparities between rural and urban populations and between the rich and the poor, as the proponents of compulsory English argue? In the world described by Pasassung, English simply doesn’t matter. Existing inequities are largely unaffected by English as securing a good education including learning English in itself is not enough to advance in a world where personal advancement depends on connections and even bribery. As one villager explains, without additional financial and social resources, his sons have little to gain from their education:

Why should I be bothered sending my children to university and spend a lot of money? A lot of graduates are unemployed. When someone finishes university, s/he only wants a white-collar job and would prefer being unemployed to working in a garden. I do not have anyone who can help my children find work in a government office, and I do not have enough money to bribe them. (quoted in Pasassung 2003, p. 145)

Pasassung, Nikolaus (2003). Teaching English in an “Acquisition-Poor Environment”: An Ethnographic Example of a Remote Indonesian EFL Classroom Unpublished PhD Dissertation, University of Sydney

Backed by Ms Lee, a 75-year-old real estate millionaire, the Hunminjeongeum Society is on a mission to save small languages from extinction by giving them a written form. She has donated a large part of her fortune to this project and likes to think of herself as the linguistic equivalent to Médecins Sans Frontières. In that she is no different than a plethora of linguists and missionaries, mostly out of North America, who devote their efforts to saving endangered, dying and dead languages. I reported on one such project recently. How come the Hunminjeongeum Society is drawing so much media attention then? Instead of the Roman alphabet, they are proposing to use the Hangul script to bring literacy to the speakers of those endangered languages!

So far, the Hunminjeongeum Society seems to have met with limited success: according to the New York Times article, to date the Hangul script has been introduced to only one language, Cia-Cia of Buton Island in Southeast Sulawesi, Indonesia, and actually to only about 50 speakers of that language. Nine of those were recently visiting Seoul and signed a memorandum of understanding for Ms Lee’s foundation to create a Korea Center in Bau-Bau City, Buton Island’s center of 60,000 inhabitants. According to the Korean Herald

The [Korea] center, which is expected to open next spring on the island, will teach Hangeul and Korean to local people and document the Cia-Cia’s culture, history and folktales.

The combination of the provision of literacy in the native language and the teaching of a metropolitan language is clearly modeled on the practices of missionary linguists who for some time have relied heavily on literacy support for endangered languages combined with English teaching as their way to spread the gospel (Pennycook & Coutand-Marin, 2003).

Missionary linguists from the English-speaking world count their successes in millions rather than double digits. Even so, they do not seem to get as much negative press as the efforts of the Hunminjeongeum Society do. The New York Times quotes the Indonesian ambassador to South Korea as saying “The Cia-Cia […] don’t need to import the Hangul characters. They can always write their local languages in the Roman characters.” – as if the Roman alphabet were an inherently superior choice.

On the Language Log, Victor Mair lists a range of questionable assumptions surrounding the project. One such questionable assumption is that having a written form will save the language from disappearing. Very true – as Peter Mühlhäusler documents in his 1996 book Linguistic ecology. Mühlhäusler shows that codifying a vernacular language by giving it a written form can actually hasten rather than halt a language’s demise. This is because, for one thing, one variety out of many has to be chosen for codification resulting in a loss of linguistic diversity. Second, once speakers have learnt how to read and write in their own language they look around and see that apart from graded readers and the bible there is very little reading material available in their newly-written language and thus they take their newly-acquired reading habits elsewhere: to a language where more interesting reading materials are available. Problem with Mair’s critique is that the principle of codification per se is problematic rather than in which alphabet you do the codifying.

On the Language Museum Blog, Michelle tut-tuts “What do you think? Is it appropriate to apply the Korean alphabet to completely different languages?” Well, it doesn’t bother me any more than applying the Latin alphabet to “completely different languages” – it has worked out ok for, let’s say, English.

I agree with all the concerns out there – even the China Daily’s worry that there might be cultural imperialism at work. Of course, there is. According to Seoul Village, Professor Kim Ju-Won, the president of the Hunminjeongeum Society doesn’t even mince words about the ulterior motives of the project:

In the long run, the spread of Hangeul will also help enhance Korea’s economy as it will activate exchanges with societies that use the language.

It is the double standard that irks me: when the Koreans are trying to spread their script and their language in the same way the British and American empires have been spreading their script and their language for centuries, it suddenly dawns on all those critical thinkers out there that there might be something wrong with the practice…

The way I see it, the Cia-Cia have acted as discerning consumers of development aid in the global marketplace: the Korean offer of literacy and language tuition comes with a range of concrete benefits and material goodies thrown in and the offer was obviously better than any they might have received from anyone trying to save their language with Roman characters. I say good on the Cia-Cia! I wish them well, and I’m sure we’ll see more and more of this kind of language competition.

References

Mühlhäusler, Peter (1996). Linguistic ecology: language change and linguistic imperialism in the Pacific region Routledge

Pennycook, A., & Coutand-Marin, S. (2003). Teaching English as a Missionary Language Discourse, 24 (3), 337-353 DOI: 10.1080/0159630032000172524