Cindy is passionate about inclusion, helping other educators develop leadership in EAL/D and cater for the academic and wellbeing needs of multilingual learners, including students from refugee backgrounds. She is an author of professional publications, served as President of the Association for Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (ATESOL) NSW and is Member of the Board of Directors of Primary English Teaching Association of Australia known as PETAA.

Cindy Valdez teaching in Cambodia (Image credit: Cindy Valdez via SBS)

Additional materials

• “They changed me”: Filipina educator on helping refugee students survive peace, SBS Filipino (2023)
• Valdez Adams, C. (2022) “Including” English as and Additional Language or Dialect (EAL/D) Learners in Your Classroom. Journal of Professional Learning 2

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Transcript (to follow soon)

Have you ever listened to a language you don’t know and thought you recognized a word—only to realize later that you were completely mistaken? Our ears play tricks on us.

A while ago, I ran a small experiment with my German students. I played them two short sentences in Czech, my native language, and asked them to transcribe what they heard. The results were fascinating.

For example, about 90% of the forty students wrote down the Czech word malí [maliː] ‘small’ as mani [maniː]. To me, this seems puzzling—there is no n in the word! But for my students, the Czech l-sound somehow resembled the German n-sound. None of the Czech speakers I consulted ever had this impression.

This little classroom experiment shows something important: we don’t all hear sounds the same way. Our ears—or better said, our brains—are tuned by the language(s) we grow up with.

Why do we hear differently?

Image 1: Oscillogram and spectrogram of the Italian words papa ‘Pope’ and pappa ‘porridge’

Long before we speak, we are already great language users. Research shows that newborn babies can already distinguish speech sounds from noises. Even more surprisingly, they are able to recognize the rhythm of their native language from a non-native one before birth.

After birth, infants are surrounded daily by an enormous amount of speech input. Step by step, they build categories for the sounds of their native language. Up until around 8 to 12 months they can distinguish nearly all of the world’s speech sounds, even those that never appear in their environment.

A Japanese baby, for example, can hear the difference between r and l just as well as American or German babies can. But this ability does not last. As children grow, their brains focus on the categories that matter in their own language and ignore the rest—like the difference between r and l. This is why many Japanese adults often find it notoriously difficult to distinguish the two consonants in languages like English. What was once easy for the baby can become very challenging for the adult.

We perceive foreign languages through native filters

Learning the sound system of a language doesn’t stop with vowels and consonants. It also includes rhythm and intonation. And even for individual sounds like a or o, it’s not only about how you articulate them but also how long you hold them. This brings us to segmental quantity, or length. It refers to the use of duration (short vs. long) of vowels or consonants to distinguish lexical meaning. Quantity shows remarkable cross-linguistic variation.

The case of long consonants in Italian

Image 2: Soundproof cabins at the Free University of Berlin (left) and University of Helsinki (right)

What feels natural in one language may not exist in another. Take Italian. It belongs to just 3.3% of the world’s languages that distinguish short from long consonants (Ladefoged & Maddieson 1996).

This contrast appears in more than 1,800 Italian words, such as papa /ˈpapa/ ‘Pope’ versus pappa /ˈpapːa/ ‘porridge’ (Image 1). To be understood and to speak well, learners must get long consonants (called geminates) right—although it can be very challenging (e.g., Altmann et al. 2012).

Cross-linguistic differences in learners

In our project “Production and perception of geminate consonants in Italian as a foreign language”, we examine how Czech, Finnish, German, and Spanish learners acquire this feature.

The selection of these languages is not random. They all handle consonant length differently. German, for example, has no consonant length but contrasts short and long vowels in stressed syllables (e.g., Stadt [ʃtat] ‘city’ vs. Staat [ʃtaːt] ‘state’). Czech, like German, distinguishes vowel length, but unlike German, it does so in both stressed and unstressed syllables (e.g., nosí [ˈnosiː] ‘(s/he) carries’ vs. nosy [ˈnosɪ] ‘noses’). Finnish is the most similar to Italian, since it has both vowel and consonant length (e.g., muta [ˈmutɑ] ‘mud’ vs. mutta [ˈmutːɑ] ‘but’). And finally, Spanish has no length contrasts at all.

This diversity allows us to test how a learner’s native language shapes the way they hear and produce length in Italian.

How good are learners at perceiving length in Italian?

In a laboratory setting (Image 2) and by means of a perception experiment, we tested and compared 20 Czech, 20 Finnish, 20 German, and 20 Spanish learners of Italian.

We used 45 short nonsense words that followed Italian spelling and sound rules but had no meaning. Each word had two versions, differing only in whether a consonant was short or long (e.g., sàpolo vs. sàppolo; milèta vs. millèta).

The words covered different consonants and stress positions and were recorded by a native Italian speaker. In every trial, participants had to answer the question: “Does the audio pair you hear belong to the same or different word?”

What we found

Image 3: Learner accuracy in perceiving Italian consonant length in comparison to native listeners

First language has great impact! Finnish learners, whose native system is closest to Italian, were the most accurate in hearing the difference between short and long consonants.

Czech learners followed, while German and Spanish learners struggled more (Image 3). Other factors also played a role. Learners heard contrasts more easily when the crucial sound appeared in stressed syllables, and some consonants were easier to notice than others.

Proficiency helped too—advanced learners did much better than beginners.

However, it is unexpected that the German group scored lower than the Spanish group—sometimes research simply surprises us!

Many factors could explain this, since every learner has their own story. Things like previous language experience, weekly study time, exposure to Italian, time spent in Italy, Italian friends, motivation, and personal talent can all play a role.

In our case, German learners had spent fewer hours per week learning Italian and had less experience studying or staying in Italy. Immersion—the experience of being surrounded by a language in real-life settings—seems a plausible factor behind their performance.

Why perception matters in language learning?

Why does pappa sometimes turn into papa in the ears of Italian learners? Because we all hear foreign languages through the features we are familiar with.

Our experiment showed that perception is difficult—but it can be improved. The key is to notice what is different and to train your ears. This means: Pronunciation training must start with perception (e.g., Colantoni et al. 2021).

In the end, learning a language is not just about new words—it’s about learning to hear differently.

References

Altmann, H.; Berger, I., & B. Braun (2012). Asymmetries in the perception of non-native consonantal and vocalic contrasts. Second Language Research 28(4), 387–413.
Colantoni, L., Escudero, P., Marrero-Aguiar, V., & J. Steele (2021). Evidence-based design principles for Spanish pronunciation teaching. Frontiers in Communication, 6, 639889.
Ladefoged, P., & I. Maddieson (1996). The sounds of the world’s languages. Oxford: Blackwell.

Acknowledgement

This blog post was written as part of the DFG-project “Production and perception of geminate consonants in Italian as a foreign language: Czech, Finnish, German and Spanish learners in contrast”, funded by the German Research Foundation (Project number 521229214) and executed at the Free University of Berlin. Project website: https://italiangeminates-project.com/

In his long career Dr Rapatahana has taught English as a foreign language (EFL) in countries in the Pacific, Southeast, East and West Asia, where he noticed that sexual exploitation was common practice by former colleagues. This prompted him in his retirement to write a book about this difficult and important topic, where he draws on a wide range of sources, from academic papers to media reports, and from blogs to organisations which report on sexual violence against children, to assemble a compelling case for the widespread occurrence of sexual predation in the EFL sector.

The conversation addresses his new book, Sexual Predation and TEFL: The teaching of English as a Foreign Language Enables Sexual Predation (Brill, 2024) which explores how teaching English overseas intersects with and enables widespread sexual exploitation.

Trigger warning: this interview discusses sexual exploitation and related content that listeners/readers may find distressing.

If you liked this episode, support us by subscribing to the Language on the Move Podcast 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.

For more Language on the Move resources related to this topic, see The dark side of intercultural communication, Orientalism and tourism, The dark side of TESOL and Child pornography and English language learning.

Transcript

Hanna: Welcome to the Language on the Move podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Hanna Torsh, and I ‘m a lecturer in Linguistics and Applied Linguistics at Macquarie University. My guest today is Dr. Vaughn Rapatahana, Te Ātiawa. Dr. Rapatahana is an author, poet, and editor who commutes between homes in Hong Kong, the Philippines, and Aotearoa, New Zealand. He is widely published across several genres in both his main languages, te reo Māori and English, and his work has been translated into Bahasa Malaysia, Italian, French, Mandarin, Romanian, and Spanish. He earned a PhD from the University of Auckland, and is a co-editor of two books, one called English Language as Hydra, and the other called Why English? Confronting the Hydra, published by Multilingual Matters in 2012 and 2016.

Today, we are going to talk about his new monograph, which was published in December 2024, entitled, Sexual Predation and TEFL: The teaching of English as a Foreign Language Enables Sexual Predation, published by Brill.

Welcome to the show, Vaughan!

Vaughan Rapatahana: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Hanna: I’d like to start by asking you to tell our audience a little bit about yourself, and how you got interested in the topic of your book.

Vaughan: I first started teaching English overseas, I put teaching in quotation marks, because I’m not sure if it’s actually teaching which we’ll talk about later, in the Republic of Nauru in 1979, so I’ve been doing that on and off over the years, ever since, until I retired completely from working in 2019 because I ‘m an old man now. But I’ve taught English overseas which I would equate to teaching English as a foreign language in many overseas locales, including the Middle East, Brunei, Jerusalem, Xi’an in China, Hong Kong, Philippines, where have I missed? Probably other places. And of course, in Aotearoa itself, because as you pointed out my first language is te reo Māori, so I’ve taught English as a second language in schools, Kaupapa, where Māori is the first language, so that’s here in Aotearoa, New Zealand. I’ve always been interested in this topic.

Because I have met up with people who are sexual predators during my sojourn overseas. I’ve read lots of news reports, and I guess, like the proverbial rolling stone, the more I read and experience, the more I became interested, and wrote about it, and researched about it, and collated notes, and added to them all the time. It got to the stage I wanted to write a book about it, which I managed to do successfully.

Hanna Torsh: For those who haven’t read the book, one of the things you do at the beginning is you define some of these key terms. So, how do we define sexual predation, and then how do we define TEFL?

Vaughan: I’ve defined them in the book more widely than people probably accept them. Sexual predation, as I’ve noted here, is a control or power-based, exploitative, predatory, abusive form of behaviour, deliberate, often pre-planned. It’s all too often, sadly, by males. whether they be teachers or members of the public in countries where students have gone to learn the subject, or to learn English. It includes all forms of sexual harassment, so I’ve equated harassment and predation together. Doesn’t necessarily have to be physical, can be verbal, can be just the gaze. the sexualized gaze. So that’s sexual predation. And it’s generally male preying on female, whether they’re students, fellow teachers. socio-economically deprived women in countries where male teachers have gone to teach the language. And LGBTQ teachers and students as well are often other victims. So that’s predation. TEFL stands for Teaching English as a Foreign Language.

But it’s not merely teachers, male or female, going overseas, to teach English. or students from countries where English is not a first language going to countries where it is, it’s also not just in schools, it’s in tuition centres, it’s, in aid programs, like Peace Corps, and volunteerism, the whole industry of volunteerism, which are advertised, especially online, where young people especially go overseas. sort of like a white saviour complex to go over and help the poor local indigenous person learn English. They think they need it, they think they need to do it, they think they are the white saviour. It’s in orphanages, orphanages, so there’s a big, huge orphanage tourism aspect. to things like the Peace Corps. Also, what Haley Stanton so cogently has written about recently, TEFL tourism, where people go overseas to teach English, but at the same time have a fun time in places like Thailand, going to the beach partying. dropping drugs, having indiscriminate sex. So, TEFL is much wider than just one person going to another country in a school. It’s huge, in volunteerism, TEFL tourism, orphanage tourism, Peace Corps, teaching English, or trying to teach English, or pretending to teach English, often by totally unqualified people. who only are there because they can speak English, is also TEFL.

Hanna: I think that’s really valuable, that definition, because it reminds us that we’re not just talking about classrooms and teachers and students, we’re talking about a whole industry and all the associated practices, many of which, as you say, take place in spaces that are less formal, that are less regulated, and often are associated with cultural practices that are nothing to do with teaching and learning. And how do you think that the way you’ve examined it is different from the kinds of stereotypes and common beliefs that people might have about this issue?

Vaughan: Because I think, as I’m trying to point out, it’s a much wider issue than dirty old men going overseas, traveling child sex offenders deliberately saying they’re going to teach English so they can go and pray on children. That is many people ‘s perception of sexual predation and TEFL. And it’s a key one, and it’s a very sad, unfortunate one, and it’s statistically not stopping, and there’s so many news reports about such people. The preferential sex offender, but it’s also all the other areas I ‘m talking about, it’s the TEFL tourists going overseas and smoking dope, and going to a brothel, and engaging in underage sex with the local prostitutes. That’s just one example of sexual predation in TEFL.

So, it’s much wider than the dirty old men. It includes, as I said before, often Asian girls, teenagers, young women, going overseas, thinking they need to learn English, and being molested or raped or in severe cases, murdered by males in the local population. It also includes what I call Charisma Man, that’s NET ‘s (native-speaking English teachers) who’ve got this  wonderful aura about them because they’re  in another country, and they ‘ve suddenly become charisma men, getting accolades from the local populace women and girls they wouldn’t get in their own countries, and taking advantage of it, and sort of boasting about their accolades and their sexual prowess in those new countries. So, these are just some of the things sexual predation and TEFL involve. It’s a much wider, much more complicated, with many aspects to it, and that’s why the book is so thick, well over 400 pages, because there’s so much in it.

Hanna: And unfortunately, we’re only able to talk about a few of those issues today, but I hope that readers do go and engage with the much wider scope that you’ve explored in your very thorough book. One of the things that struck me while reading your book is that this is an important conversation to be having, but this is one of the few publications that I’ve certainly, in my career in applied linguistics and TESOL, ever come across, so it’s a very under-researched context. And the second point is it draws an important connection between the kinds of, exploitation that you’re talking about. and this phenomenon that many of our audience might know, called linguistic imperialism. Could you expand on those two aspects for the audience? So, the first one is, you know, why is this one of the few books I ‘m seeing on this topic? And the second one is, what is this connection between sexual predation and linguistic imperialism?

Vaughan: There’s a blind spot, especially amongst practitioners of the tongue. That’s English as first language speakers and writers and authors and teachers. They don’t want to hear about this sort of aspect, sexual predation, in their industry. They want to go overseas and earn big money and have a good time, or have a stable career, because they’re not all TEFL tourists, of course. Many are stable, middle-class individuals who are having lucrative overseas careers. The last thing they want to hear about is, bad guys in their profession. And the legal aspects, publishers are wary as well, they don’t want to get too involved, especially if names are concerned, or news reports. There’s a certain amount of embarrassment, but mainly I think it’s just pushing it under the table, ignorance, and denial.

As NET myself in some of those countries, or all those countries I mentioned, I often used to write to the South China Morning Post when I lived in Hong Kong, and still return there all the time, saying, why have you got these NET teachers in your country earning such huge money with huge, gratuities and airfares every two years. What are they actually doing? Do the local population really need English? Of course, my answer was always no. Those letters were published in the South China Morning Post, and of course a huge barrage of letters coming in from other native English-speaking teachers who are then saying, of course we’re needed here, and of course the Hong Kong Chinese need to learn English. So, there’s that denial and defiance and sweeping under the table. But I know what I was talking about, because my family is Hong Kong Chinese. They can speak English; their first language is Cantonese. They had no need for native-speaking English teachers in their schools, absolutely no need at such huge expense. So, there’s the first part of the question. That’s why there’s very little written about it. It’s about time there was, and this is the book which I ‘m very proud of, because I think it’s my most important work, and I’ve written well over 50 books. This is my key one.

Hanna: Over 50 books, and this is the most important one. So, there’s a real vested interest there in people not exploring and uncovering these practices?

Vaughan: And the employing countries who think they need to have English to become wonderful countries turn a blind eye as well, because they think they need to have English, so they don’t have good hiring practices. This is a huge generalization. There are so many loopholes. People can get rehired, a traveling child sex offender who ‘s teaching English can go from one country to another, and there’s no overall global mechanism to even know that they’re moving from one country to another. So, the actual employing countries are just as bad as the employer countries. There’re so many loopholes involved. One example about such sinister predators, the preferential sex offenders, they can change their names, get new passports, and travel overseas again and escape the sexual offender registers in their own countries, like the UK, which is still ineffective in that area.

It’s an exploitative industry, summarized by my other two books published by Multilingual Matters, The [English] Hydra, this huge mechanism, earning huge amounts of money for certain vested interests, basically white, middle-class, Western, concerns, the Hydra is spreading linguistic imperialism, native-speaking English teachers, huge testing industry, textbooks, and they’re  going to turn a blind eye because of the money. Yes? And then, at the same time, the local people, the local countries, the cultures were not gifted English as a first language and never historically have been them, are being lulled into the sense that they need to have English. It’s pushed onto them. And a white face will always get a job, even if they have no qualifications. So, it’s exploitation, imperialism continuing. Robert Phillipson must take a lot of accolades there, and he was one of my co-authors in the first book, English Language Hydra. I’ve worked together with Robert and the late and lamented Tove Skutnubb-Kangas, his wife, we all worked together on those two early hydra books.

So going back to your second part of your question. I mentioned a term English language sexual imperialism, which, to me, is part and parcel of the hydra, part and parcel of linguistic imperialism. They go together. So, when English language is spread and forced and sold to places that think they need to have English. Sexual imperialism happens at the same time. through some of the channels I’ve already mentioned before, they go hand in hand in hand. I ‘ll read you a quote, if you don’t mind, from Joanne Nagel in 2003, “the history of European colonialism is not only a history of language dominance, it is also a history of sexual dominance.” I agree completely. So, they’re hand in glove via all the different ways I’ve mentioned in this book. So, in my own quote: “When the language is presented in English as a foreign language situation, at least potentially, so are patriarchal, sexist, chauvinist tropes and the correlated behaviours.”

Linguistic imperialism and sexual imperialism go together. And it’s been going on for hundreds of years, from the white man going to Africa and bringing his own sexual tropes there. That’s still going on. The male preoccupation with the exotic Asian female, for example. This is 2025, but nothing ‘s changed.

Hanna Torsh: In your book, you give us concrete examples of the kind of link that you’re talking about between English language teaching and sexual imperialism. In your book, you talk about the ways in which, the career of teaching English overseas is sexualized, even before potential teachers begin teaching. Can you tell our audience what you found that out about that?

Vaughan: It comes from just lots of experience, lots of reading, lots of research, and just the sheer obvious facts. For example, English itself is a sexualized language, just given the components, structures of the tongue itself are sexualized. If you want to read Lewis and Lupyan in 2020, a very good article about that, just how pronouncedly sexist English language as a language is, in terms of its words and the word use. Many TEFL textbooks, even in 2025, are still predominantly sexed or gender biased. That’s even if some of those countries receiving English as a supposed gift, even have textbooks. And if they do, they’re usually old ones, and there might be one shared between 50 students.

The gender bias is apparent and still obvious. Males still continue to dominate in management, and TEFL conferences. Varinder Unlu, came up with the website ELTToo, and about the sexist basis of the English language teaching industry, the EFL, TEFL conferences and management structures. And she got repudiated and reprimanded by too many males for doing so, which goes back to that vested interest, not wanting to know and hiding it away.

English is taught in a sexualized fashion. For example, as in Spanish TV, a woman strips as she’s teaching English. Bizarre, but true. And it’s advertised, especially tuition centres, for example, in Japan, some of the advertisements are so blatantly sexualized and sexist. Dozens of examples are shown in the book. Another key point is the sex tourism. There’s a huge global trend, and it’s not just English teachers going overseas to partake in sex tourism, but the fact that so many people from Western countries and local countries might go to Southeast Asia for sex tourism encourages the teaching of English to cater for those tourists. The “sex pats”, another term, who just goes overseas to partake in sexualized adventures with the young, people who have no money, who are in the sex trade, because they have to be to survive, people like that. And the statistics shown by concerns that are trying to combat sexual predation in TEFL, like ECPAT and APLE Cambodia. There’re so many examples that they publish on their website and in their reports, shows the problem isn’t going away, it’s probably escalating. Despite the best efforts of places like EPAC and Apple to do something about it, and the poor efforts by local governments and countries sending the offenders overseas.

Hanna Torsh: And can you just, for the audience, explain what those acronyms are?

Vaughan: Good question. ECPAT is not just one organization, it’s an overall name for organizations that fight child exploitation, and protecting children being exploited. And APLE Cambodia is a specific example that works under EPAC, but it’s its own separate body in Cambodia, fighting child exploitation and protecting children over there. Many cases are of English-speaking teachers, tutors, or people going over and opening orphanages, or pretending to do aid out in rural communities, but actually are there as sexual predators, preying on youth. Often some of them are so cheeky as to marry a local say, Cambodian woman, and then exploit the woman ‘s children. So that’s APLE, Preda in the Philippines is another organization doing the same thing, preventing child exploitation, including by white men going there and running sex rings, paedophile rings, which is all in the book.

Hanna Torsh: Yeah, great, thank you. We are running out of time, Vaughan, and it’s such a big topic, but I ‘d like to end by asking, you’ve talked about the issue being bigger than the kinds of extreme, horrific crimes you’ve just talked about, that it’s actually permeating the whole industry, and that there’s this close relationship between English language teaching and sexual predation. What would you like our audience to go away with, in terms of the key message of your book, bearing in mind that a lot of our audience are emerging and established researchers in Applied Linguistics and TESOL.

Vaughan: Be aware of the problem, be far more aware. Report any incidents of sexual predation, even if they seem minor. If you think a student’s being harassed by a male teacher, or you think of fellow female teachers being harassed by a male teacher, or by local members of the community, report it. Get your own professional bodies to be far more proactive. They’re not proactive in fighting this massive problem across the board, all the different types of behaviours of sexual predation and TEFL, and it’s all its various guises.  Close loopholes globally, not so easy, but let ‘s get, say, UK government to say, how come sex offenders who are on the sexual offenders list can still go overseas and teach by changing their names through a passport? And be caught years later in another country altogether. And these are all documented cases.

And my final key point has always been, do we really need to teach English in other countries beyond first language countries? And my point is, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, we don’t need English even to be taught. There’s no clear requirement for EFL in many places anyway. You can circumvent the hydra by just doing away with it. People can develop their own languages, because as Tove Skutnabb-Kangas said many, many years ago, linguicism comes in when linguistic imperialism comes in, and linguicism is the loss of your own Indigenous tongue, because English is taking over. We don’t need the hydra.

Hanna: You also make the point in your book that local teachers are often underpaid and undervalued relative to, imported teachers. And I thought that was a powerful message too, and linked to the idea of decolonizing, English language.

Vaughan: And it rankles with them. I was earning much more money than most of my fellow teachers in Hong Kong, and I wasn’t working the hours that they were putting into, or were expected to put in, and they weren’t getting the big, huge gratuities. Total exploitation. Totally unnecessary, but as I keep on saying, there’s a vested interest going on there, and they aren’t going to shut up. They want the money. Although in the last two years, finally, maybe they went back and read my letters to the South China Morning Post. the Hong Kong government now has now de-escalated the financial benefits for the NET scheme there and has now thrown open the budget that was formerly there for nets to be hired by schools, to the schools themselves to hire NETs, but at a lower rate. Why? Because fiscally, Hong Kong can ‘t afford what they were spending before, billions and billions of Hong Kong dollars on net teachers. So, ironically, socioeconomically, the net scheme is becoming disempowered because Hong Kong can ‘t afford to pay anymore.

Hanna Torsh: Wow. A good outcome for local teachers, potentially, and for schools, if they’re getting more of that funding. So that’s perhaps a nice place to finish up. Look, thank you so much, Vaughan, for this important work. It certainly got me thinking about my own teaching career as an English language teacher, and the various associations that I ‘m part of, and how particularly how this issue of sexual predation intersects with a lot of the work we talk about on LOM on native speakerism and now this new emerging, body of work on decolonizing English. So, lots of important food for thought. Thanks again. Do you have any final comments you would like to make before we say goodbye?

Vaughan: Tēnā koe. Thank you very much for the opportunity. I guess I ‘m going to have to say, find the book and read it, because it’s new, and it’s important. And it’s not been expressed sufficiently, or powerfully before. It’s telling things that people don’t want to hear, quite frankly.

Hanna Torsh: I couldn’t agree more. And if you’re like me working at a university, request that your library order Vaughan ‘s important book.

So, thanks again, Vaughan, and thanks everyone for listening. 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.

A wonderful companion read to this episode is Distinguished Ingrid Piller’s Can we escape the textocalypse? Academic publishing as community building.

If you liked this episode, check out more resources on technology and language: Will technology make language rights obsolete?; the podcast Tech Won’t Save Us; and Are language technologies counterproductive to learning?

(Image credit: EduResearch Matters)

If you enjoy the show, support us by subscribing to the Language on the Move Podcast 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.

Transcript (by Brynn Quick, added on February 21, 2025)

Brynn: Welcome to the Language on the Move Podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Brynn Quick and I’m a PhD candidate in linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. My guest today is Dr. Sue Ollerhead.

Sue grew up in multilingual South Africa, a country with 12 official languages, where she learned English, Afrikaans, Isizulu, Isikosa, and French at school and university. She is currently a Senior Lecturer in Languages and Literacy Education and the Director of the Secondary Education Program at Macquarie University. Her expertise lies in English language and literacy learning and teaching in multicultural and multilingual education contexts.

Her research interests include translanguaging, multilingual pedagogies, literacy across the curriculum and oracy development in schools. Sue is currently Editor of TESOL in Context, the peer-reviewed journal of the Australian Council of TESOL Associations. She serves on the Executive Board of the English as a Medium of Instruction Centre, EMI, at Macquarie University.

Today, Sue and I are going to chat about an article that she’s recently written for the Australian Association for Research in Education, entitled, Teachers Truly Know Students and How They Learn, Does AI? We’ll discuss the emergence of AI platforms like ChatGPT and how they are affecting teacher training and student learning. Sue, welcome to the show, and thank you so much for joining us today.

Dr Ollerhead: Hi, Brynn. Lovely to be here today.

Brynn: To get us started, can you tell us a bit about yourself and about how you became an educator in the English as an additional language space?

Dr Ollerhead: Thanks, Brynn. As you said, I grew up in what you would call a super diverse country, South Africa, which is also very multilingual with 12 official languages. So as well as you said, I learned English, Afrikaans, Isizulu, Isikosa, and French at school.

I would also hear a plethora of language mixing or translanguaging by people all around me all the time. And when I finished university, I began my teaching career at a TESOL Medium Primary School and then went on to teach Zulu-speaking factory workers in South Africa’s Adult Migrant Literacy Program. I’ve also spent a large part of my working life teaching English and working in educational publishing in Sub-Saharan Africa and the United Kingdom.

So always within very multilingual and multi-cultural context. And I guess what surprised me when moving to Australia in my mid-30s, was the monolingualness of the schools and working environments that I was working in, which seemed to be at odds with what I knew to be a significant proportion of people living in Australia, speaking languages other than English at home. It was almost as though those became invisible in the public sphere and English seemed to dominate everything.

So, I guess that questioning of monolingual public spaces and how they include or exclude people has driven a lot of my research work. I think particularly how children who speak languages other than English at home can be excluded within classrooms that adopt an English only approach to learning. I guess the focus of my academic career over the past 10 to 15 years has always been to train students to become knowledgeable, reflective, and responsive teachers of learners from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds.

Brynn: That’s amazing. You really did have a lot of multilingual experience. That’s so cool that you were able to be in an environment with so many different languages like that.

And I think that that must be really useful for you as an educator for not just students like primary or secondary school students, but now that you teach future teachers how to teach. So, let’s talk about this article that you’ve written called Teachers Truly Know Students and How They Learn, Does AI. So, this article discusses the use of AI and platforms like ChatGPT in this teacher training, which you do.

And one important part of learning how to teach is learning how to write effective lesson plans. I mean, I remember doing that for my own teacher training course that I went through when I became a TESOL educator as well. So, talk to us about, I guess, the importance of lesson plans and also about this emerging use of AI in lesson plan creation and what we know about the percentage of teachers who are actually using AI to create their lesson plans.

Dr Ollerhead: I think I heard a statistic the other day that teachers have, on average, about eight minutes to plan lessons over and above the other duties they have. So, we know that teacher workload is a very big issue. And there’s no surprise then that busy teachers are turning to GenAI models like ChatGPT or Perplexity to streamline lesson planning.

I certainly am no expert on AI, but it’s very much part of the landscape now in teacher education. And we know that for teachers, simply by entering prompts, like generate a three-lesson sequence on maybe something like Agricultural Innovation in Australia, they can quickly receive a detailed teaching program tailored to the lesson content, compete with learning outcomes, suggested resources, classroom management tips, and more. So, this is fantastic.

It represents a pragmatic solution to busy teachers, to overwhelming workloads. And it also explains why they’re being taken up quite readily by school teachers and also in places of higher education and teacher training environments. And as far as how many teachers use AI for lesson planning, I suppose a useful survey would be one that was run by the Australian Association of Independent Schools in 2023, where they reported over 70% of primary teachers and 80% of secondary teachers were using generative AI tools in their work.

And the lesson planning or learning design was rated as the top AI assisted task. Now, granted the survey dates back to August 2023, but one could assume that uptake is even greater by now. And in my work as a secondary teacher educator, my observations of AI use amongst teachers across government, independent and Catholic sectors generally support these findings.

Brynn: I can understand why, honestly, because, I mean, we are both educators and I get it, our workloads are huge, and especially if you think about teachers who, I guess, are working in the primary and the secondary school levels, they are not just working from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. every day. They are putting in so many more hours that people don’t actually see happening.

And then to have to create, not just create lesson plans, but I think maybe people don’t realize that various departments of education or different sectors require you to document these lesson plans in a very specific way and you need to map them onto learning outcomes and objectives and things like that.

So, it’s not just quote unquote creating a lesson plan. You have to really put a lot of effort into it. And if you’re saying that teachers are only getting something like eight minutes to do that, that’s unfathomable. That’s untenable.

Dr Ollerhead: Absolutely. Very, very overwhelming. And we know that lesson planning is really, really important.

A well-planned lesson is really fundamental to classroom management, to effective differentiation, to really, really considering the accessibility of the content. But it is a big task on top of, as you say, all the other tasks that teachers are having to fulfill on a daily basis.

Brynn: You just mentioned something called differentiation. And I think that this is a really important point to talk about. So, talk to us about this concept of differentiation in teaching.

What does it mean? And why is it a concept that teachers need to keep in mind when they’re planning their lessons?

Dr Ollerhead: The D word, yes, differentiation. It’s probably one of the most important and most challenging things to learn when training to become a teacher. And it really, Brynn, it really lies at the heart of Australian Professional Teaching Standard 1.3, which is “know students and how they learn”.

And especially knowing about how to differentiate for students from different cultural, linguistic, religious and socio-economic backgrounds. Differentiation in general refers to the practice of tailoring instruction to meet the varied learning profiles, backgrounds and abilities of each child or student in your class. And it starts with really understanding the diversity profile of your class.

So, for example, I said in the article that let’s say you teach a class where 95% of your class comes from a language background other than English. And you might think, well, that’s unrealistic. Actually, in Sydney, it really isn’t.

There are many areas where that would be the norm rather than the exception. In fact, in New South Wales, one in three students comes from a language background other than English. And in your class, your class comprises a mix of high achieving, gifted and talented individuals, some of whom are expert English users, while others might be newly arrived in Australia and they might have been assessed as emerging on the ELD Learning Progression, which is a tool that we use to measure where students are in their English language learning trajectory.

Now, these students need targeted language support to be able to even access the content of the curriculum. And let’s say your students come from various backgrounds. Some might be Aboriginal Australian students, others might come from countries as diverse as Sudan, China, Afghanistan, Bangladesh.

Some might even have spent three or more years in refugee camps before arriving in Australia, with no access to formal education at all. Others live in Sydney without their families. So, yeah, some are highly literate.

And while others have yet to master basic academic literacies and literacy skills in English. So given this diverse scenario in one class, and as I said, that is actually often the norm, rather than the exception. Differentiation can include things like the types of teaching strategies that you use.

So, using a variety of teaching strategies to engage students at different levels. So, for example, your highly proficient English users might work on extension activities that challenge their critical thinking. New arrivals who are still coming to grips with English as a medium of instruction could benefit from visual aids, graded texts, interactive group work to help them grasp key concepts.

We could also differentiate in terms of the assessment that we use. So, we might implement diverse assessment strategies that allow students to demonstrate their understanding in ways that align with their language proficiency and educational background. So, this might include allowing students to present their knowledge through oral projects or visual representations rather than traditional written assessments.

I always give the example of the water cycle. A child doesn’t necessarily come to the classroom not knowing anything about the water cycle. It’s just that they’re not able to understand it.

They’re not able to express that knowledge in English. So, giving them another mode through which to express that knowledge is really, really important. Of course, language support is very important as well.

So, for those students who are especially new arrivals, who are emergent on the EAL/D learner progression, we can provide targeted language support to scaffolding techniques that can involve using sentence starters, graphic organisers, active vocabulary acquisition activities, specifically designed for the content being taught. You know, in second year, we have a lot of technical vocabulary that is very specific to the field in which you’re teaching. So, for example, the word culture in science means something very different to the way it’s used in society and culture, for example.

And we actually need to think, well, this needs to be, these differences need to be made explicit for our learners, especially those who come from EAL/D backgrounds. But I guess one aspect that’s often overlooked is cultural differentiation. And this refers to modifying lesson content to be culturally relevant and accessible to all students.

So, it’s not just a sink or swim situation where we expect students to come to Australia and understand everything about Australia and its culture. What it means is integrating examples and materials into your lesson that reflect the backgrounds of your students and the various cultural contexts they come from and connecting your curriculum to their experiences. So, Robin Maloney and Leslie Harbin and Susan Oguro have written an amazing book that actually encourages teachers to teach for linguistic responsiveness.

And they encourage teachers to ask questions like, before you teach content, it’s really helpful to ask yourself questions such as, what are my own biases and blind spots related to the subject matter? What insights might my students have that I’m unaware of? So, for example, we know in maths, all countries have mathematical systems that are very particular to their cultural context.

And those can be very rich learning opportunities for all students in the classroom. Also important is what sensitivities could arise in discussions about this content with concerning values, knowledge and language. And I think most importantly, how can I teach this material in a culturally and linguistically responsive manner that promotes my students’ well-being and achievement?

So, do my students see themselves reflected in this content? Or is it presented in a very sort of Australian, monocultural, monolingual way? That is the challenge that I always set for my students to master as teachers who are going into contexts where they’re going to be teaching in very diverse settings.

Brynn: And what I’m hearing in that explanation is that teachers are not just planning this, you know, one lesson plan, saying, okay, everybody in the class is going to be able to do this skill and they’re all at this level. Because even if we had a classroom of monolingual English Australian born students, there is no classroom in which every single student is at the same level on particular skills or in particular classes. So, teachers are already having to do this work constantly, even if they’re in this sort of more monolingual, monocultural environment.

But what I’m hearing you say, and it’s true, is that our reality, as people who live in Sydney and the surrounding suburbs, is that we are becoming more and more and more multilingual, multicultural, and that this is just reality, that teachers are having to now have these additional thoughts and these additional considerations as they plan lesson plans. And the thing is, with this expectation of, well, can teachers just use AI to plan lesson plans? Now we have to think, well, can AI actually take these things into consideration?

Dr Ollerhead: That’s exactly right, Brynn. And it really gets to the heart of what we know about teaching. We know that teaching is not just a science.

It’s not just a process of knowing a series of principles, a series of methods and applying them. It’s actually also an art in terms of that element of, I always say that I think the most important material for success as a teacher is the ability to listen well. So, a teacher that’s in tune with their students will really by default be able to differentiate because in the moment they’re hearing, OK, I’m not sure if my class has actually been taken along with me in this lesson.

I think I might have lost them somewhere. So, I’m not going to ask the question, does everybody understand? Because of course, you’re going to get the answer, yes, of course.

Nobody wants to say they don’t understand. It’s really about the art of listening in, of asking the right questions. And then based on the answers you get to those questions, saying, OK, how can I tailor my delivery to respond to the needs of my learners?

So, I can do many things really, really well. And there’s no doubt there’s a role for it in lesson planning. But I think I guess what I was hoping to explore in that article is that there’s an essential element of listening that is very human, listening and responding with empathy in the moment contingently, that at the moment is still very human, I think.

And I would like to think that with the rise of AI, and we’ve seen it just completely overtake all our expectations, instead of trying to compete with AI, I think what we need to do is to get better at what we do, and that’s being human. And I think that very human empathetic element of listening to our students, finding out more about who they are, where they come from, how they’re feeling today, are they actually even in a space to be learning about equations when they’re still trying to understand the new culture that they found themselves in. So, I guess that’s my biggest hope is that we’re going to graduate a generation of teachers who are really checking in and attuned to the wonderful diversity we have in our classrooms.

Brynn: I think that the whole concept of differentiation in teachers is inherently human. And another part that you talk about in the article that I think is along the same lines is thinking about lesson plan creation in conjunction with the concept of the quote virtual school bag, which I love.

So, what is a virtual school bag? And why is it something that teachers need to think about when planning their lessons, especially when considering linguistic and cultural diversity within a classroom? And then there’s this question of can we expect AI to be able to consider a student’s virtual school bag?

Dr Ollerhead: I’m so glad you asked about that, because that to me has always been a really powerful visual metaphor. And that’s the concept of the virtual school bag comes from Pat Thompson and the work that Barbara Koma has done from the University of Queensland. They’ve done amazing work on looking at the rich cultural and linguistic resources that students from language backgrounds other than English come with to the classroom.

And they conceptualize it in the form of a visual metaphor. And they say that many children come to school with their virtual backpack that’s filled with things like cultural knowledge, geographical knowledge, practical knowledge of cultures and customs and skills from their own context. We call those funds of knowledge.

But what happens is that often they’re asked to leave that schoolbag at the classroom door and not to unpack it. And it’s only really the mainstream resources that are unpacked in the classroom. And so, they say it’s very dehumanizing if children are prevented from showing others what’s in their backpack, what they have to bring to learning, what they have to bring to the teacher.

You know, as teachers, we’re constant learners as well. So, I find that a very powerful metaphor. And you can only really discover what’s in students’ or children’s virtual backpack if you create a space in which all knowledges and cultures are valued in the classroom.

Now, AI is a tool, but it’s not an environment, it’s not a climate, it’s not an ecosystem where children feel safe. That is the teacher’s role. And so, I work a lot with a concept, a theory and a practice of full translanguaging.

And we call that a translanguaging space or a stance where the teacher does not have to be proficient in every single language of the classroom but makes space for the articulation of those languages and cultures throughout certain aspects of their teaching.

Brynn: I think that it gets to this point that I do think that we’ve been seeing more and more in education in general over the last even just decade, which is that we can’t expect every student in a classroom to fit into this one mould. I’m thinking of even just different neuro types or different learning styles, let alone linguistic and cultural backgrounds. And I do think that as a society, we’re getting better at making space for all of those differences.

But I think that we have to keep in mind this long educational tradition of almost trying to force the mainstream that we saw happening, you know, kind of since the beginning of education, really. You know, I’m thinking back to like one room schoolhouses and things like that. And we have to think, okay, we know that that did not work.

You know, we’ve, I mean, I’m a millennial, and that was still very much the education system that I grew up with, was trying to fit all of these kids into this one mould. And so, what I can almost hear is people saying, well, but if we’ve got these multilingual, multicultural students, shouldn’t they just have to learn English? Shouldn’t they just have to assimilate and fit into Australian culture?

But you mentioned the humanity of the teacher and the teacher really recognizing the humanity of the students. And, you know, some people might say that actually, you know, using AI to create these lesson plans, it’s fine, because AI can be more objective. It can almost, you know, force this mainstream.

So, tell me what you would say to those people that are saying, like, well, shouldn’t we all be sort of fitting into this one mould?

Dr Ollerhead: Yeah, that’s a great question, Brynn. And I think it kind of taps into some very powerful discourses at the moment about things like explicit teaching and, you know, being very clear about what the outcomes are for lessons. And there’s definitely merit to explicit teaching and making, you know, making visible the things that students need to achieve in a lesson.

What I want to emphasize is that including students’ cultures and language in the classroom is not antithetical to teaching them how to learn in English. In fact, what we find is that it supports their English learning. And you know why it does that?

It’s because it validates students’ identities. It sees what they come with as a strength and it gets them engaged in lesson content and lesson activities. If you come to school and you don’t see a place for yourself in learning, you’re going to disengage.

And we know that that is a big barrier to successful learning. So these things do not actually necessarily that they don’t preclude each other. So we need to remember that the complete understanding of a student’s unique cultural background, their personal experiences and their emotional needs is complex and often requires human empathy and insight.

And if you’re ever in a classroom, I’m really fortunate to work with some incredible teachers. And I see so many teachers who have been in the field for a very long time. They might not even call what they say differentiation, what they do as differentiation, but they do it instinctively because it’s second nature to them to just tap into where students are, to listen intently, to quickly in the moment tweak their instruction or their strategies to meet their students’ needs.

But we can’t expect new teachers to understand that. We can’t expect new teachers to have the wherewithal to immediately differentiate, especially because our classrooms are becoming more multicultural and multilingual, because of globalization, because of migration. But strangely enough in Australia, that hasn’t actually meant that our teaching practices have become attuned to that increasing diversity.

And it’s something we can’t shy away from. It’s actually something that needs to be dealt with not just in early childhood or primary or secondary, but also at universities. And we really need to, I guess, rethink this “it’s simpler if everybody learns English” because that just doesn’t cut it anymore. We know that it benefits everybody when we have plurality in classrooms where we can learn from each other, where there’s genuine intercultural sharing and understanding. And I guess what we want to do as teacher-trainers and teacher-educators is to say teaching is an ongoing learning process.

But if you understand from the outset that the key to being an effective teacher is actually exercising that empathy, exercising that insight, I think that sets you up for success and it certainly sets your learners up for success. We know that even though AI is amazing in the way that it can analyse and recommend resources related to a student’s virtual school bag, teachers still play a crucial role in ensuring that those resources are integrated in a way that is thoughtful and responsive to each student’s needs.

Brynn: I love that idea of not denying the fact that we have AI, AI is here, people are using it. I mean, this is a whole other episode, but we see students use it as well in their writing.

It’s not something that we can close our eyes to and say, “No, no, this doesn’t exist. Let’s just pretend like it’s 25 years ago.” So, I love that you’re acknowledging, yeah, it exists, it can be a tool for certain things, especially for those busy, busy teachers who have so much that they have to accomplish in such a short amount of time.

But I just really love this idea of fundamentally, teachers have to tap into their humanity and their empathy, and they have to recognize the humanity in their students in order to create a more meaningful and productive classroom, because it’s really only going to be a net positive when we have that integration of cultures and languages and students working together, because in our globalized world, that’s what they’re going to have to do when they’re grownups anyway, you know?

So, you said that you can see AI being used as a tool. Where do you see it going? Where do you think it’s heading in the education and teacher training sectors, for good or for bad?

Dr Ollerhead: Yeah, I mean, you’ve summarized it so well Brynn, but I think it’s, I guess my hope is, and again, I mean, I don’t have a crystal ball, and you know, there’ve just been such rapid changes within the last two years. But my hope is that it will become a symbiotic relationship, where, I mean, for sure, the educational sector will not simply adopt AI, it will embrace it as a catalyst for enhancement. But I think the key there is the word enhancement.

It augments things. It’s really amazing at generating big data sets. And you know, that’s what it does.

I don’t think we could ever hope to compete with that. But again, getting back to the hope that there can be a relationship between AI and education that is symbiotic. So I guess what I mean by that is sort of a balancing act where technology supports, not just supports, but actually amplifies the irreplaceable human qualities that drive effective teaching and learning.

And as AI continues to evolve, I’m excited about the possibilities it presents, I guess, for enriching education and empowering students and teachers. But I’m very much aware that we can’t deny that it’s here. But I’m also very wary of outsourcing crucial things like differentiation for control and linguistic diversity to AI, without actually understanding the fundamental knowledge on which we have to base our judicious use of lesson planning.

Brynn: I love that answer. I think that that’s a perfect summary of where we’re at and where, hopefully, we are headed. So, Sue, thank you so much for talking with me today, and thank you for being on the show.

Dr Ollerhead: It’s been a pleasure, Brynn. Thanks so much.

Brynn: And thank you for listening, everyone. If you liked listening to our chat today, please subscribe to the Language on the Move Podcast, leave a five-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. Until next time.

Each year, we celebrate Buwan ng Wika or (National) Language Month in the Philippines. Formerly focused only on the Filipino national language, the month-long celebration has evolved into a multilingual celebration seeking to raise awareness also of other Philippine languages, including Filipino Sign Language and indigenous tongues and writing systems. But, of course, we are free to celebrate languages any other time of the year.

At the University of Santo Tomas (UST), the oldest university in Asia, Buwan ng Wika was auspiciously extended with three events spotlighting language this year.

First, during the first week of October, new street signs were installed around the Manila campus of UST. Quite distinctive, the new signages had the familiar campus street names transliterated in Baybayin, an old Tagalog writing system largely used in the northern part of the country before the Spanish rule from 1565 to 1898. Along with other initiatives by Filipino scholars to revive this pre-colonial script, the project enriched the university’s linguistic landscape. Notwithstanding criticisms about the weak translation of an earlier version of these signs, the move reflects an appreciation for languages that are less visible.

Second, not long after this multilingual campus update, precisely on October 10, 2024, language scholars across the Philippines were rattled by the ratification of Republic Act No. 12027. This new law discontinues the mother tongue-based multilingual education (MTBMLE) policy enacted in 2013. While the MTBMLE implementation had important challenges such as limited instructional materials, among others, there was palpable panic and disappointment from groups of language teachers and scholars over the legislative imperative to repeal the language-in-education policy that advocated the use of mother tongues as medium of instruction in basic education classrooms.

The Multilingualism and Multilingual Education class under the English Language Studies Program of the UST Graduate School was not going to stand silent. Our small cohort of six (five PhD candidates and course facilitator, Dr. Pia Tenedero) responded to this issue by raising three important questions that problematize the seemingly reactive, government decision to withdraw its support of mother tongue-based instruction. We believe that, given a better fighting chance, the MTBMLE could work wonders as it did in East Timor. Our formal response and appeal (posted in the UST Department of English Facebook page) is pictured here.

Whether this and other official statements released by various universities and professional groups will or can make a difference remains to be seen. But putting forward a position statement allowed us to engage with the real-life implication of the theories we have been discussing in class since the term began in August.

Third, our class had another special opportunity to extend our appreciation of multilingualism in education contexts. On 26 October 2024, Dr. Loy Lising of Macquarie University and Language on the Move, spoke to our group in an exclusive online learning session. Anchored on the theme “The Future of Language Learning: Moving Toward a Multilingual Mindset in Education System,” the two-hour conversation was attended by about 50 language undergraduate and graduate students and teachers from UST, Mariano Marcos State University Baguio, and De La Salle College of Saint Benilde, Antipolo. Dr. Lising shared reflectively on the theme, grounded on two important, recent publications—the “Multilingual Mindset” (Lising, 2024) and the book Life in a New Language (Piller et al., 2024).

Dr. Loy Lising and the Multilingualism and Multilingual Education class of UST

Two key concepts framed the interactive discussion: linguistic hierarchies and multilingual mindset. Reflecting on linguistic hierarchies, we acknowledge the differential social value of languages (based on Ingrid Piller’s (2016) award-winning book Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice). To drive this point, Dr. Lising asked us how many languages we have and whether we and the places where we use them value these languages equally.

Multilingual mindset, which Dr. Lising defined in her article, recognizes disparities in language proficiencies, repertoires, and practices. It is “a way of thinking about language that is mindful and expectant of these variations,” which, in fact, characterize every human interaction, but are particularly salient in migration contexts. This disposition or way of seeing presents an important alternative (even, antidote) to the pervasive “monolingual mindset,” which sees the world only in terms of one language – English (Clyne, 2008).

Capping the month with a conversation that explored challenges and hopes of multilinguals based in the Philippines, we came out of it feeling more certain about the importance of language mindfulness and energized to do our part as language teachers and researchers to grow the multilingual mindset in our homes, classrooms, research sites, places of worship, holiday destinations, and everyday interactions.

This time of the year certainly taught us several ways to grow in our mindfulness of multilingualism beyond the traditional Buwan ng Wika. Afterall, languages ought to be celebrated every day of the year!

References

Clyne, M. (2008). The monolingual mindset as an impediment to the development of plurilingual potential in Australia. Sociolinguistic Studies, 2(3). 347–366.
Lising, L. (2024). Multilingual mindset: A necessary concept for fostering inclusive multilingualism in migrant societies. AILA Review, 37 (1), 35–53.
Piller, I. (2016). Linguistic diversity and social justice. Oxford University Press.
Piller, I., Butorac, D., Farrell, E., Lising, L., Motaghi-Tabari, S., & Williams-Tetteh, V. (2024). Life in a new language. Oxford University Press.

The conversation addresses community and heritage language schooling research and practice, and our guest’s long history of important language policy research and activism, as well as the interconnections between the two.

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.

Reference

Cruickshank, K., Lo Bianco, J., & Wahlin, M. (Eds.). (2023). Community and Heritage Languages Schools Transforming Education: Research, Challenges, and Teaching Practices. Taylor & Francis.

Transcript (by Brynn Quick; added 29/05/2024)

Welcome to the New Books Network.

Dr Torsh: Welcome to the Language on the Move Podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Hanna Torsh, and I’m a lecturer in Linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.

I’m very pleased today to say that my guest is Joseph Lo Bianco, a foundational figure in linguistics here in Australia. I could say many things, but I will introduce him as Professor of Language and Literacy Education at Melbourne University. Today, we’re going to talk about his new book, Community and Heritage Languages Schools Transforming Education: Research, Challenges and Teaching Practices. It was co-edited with Ken Cruickshank and Merryl Wahlin and published by Routledge.

Welcome to the show, Jo!

Prof Lo Bianco: Thank you very much, Hanna.

Dr Torsh: Now, for those who don’t know your very impressive body of work or, perhaps, are new to this field, could you just start by telling us a little bit about yourself?

Prof Lo Bianco: Ok, well thank you for the invitation. I’ve recently retired from the position at the University of Melbourne in Australia which I’d had for 20 years. Prior to that and even during that period of time at the university, I worked in language policy studies. I started off my academic life as an economist. I was very interested in the integration of migrant populations, particularly migrant women.

I worked in that focus of work in Victoria. But I became less interested in it when it started not to focus on culture and not provide any kind of focus on people’s language. I retrained as a language person and educator and linguist, and then I became slightly uninterested with the descriptive tendencies of a lot of linguistics. I’ve always really been interested in public action probably more than anything. So, I started to research policy around language. I became actively involved in those things myself directly.

Then, during the late 1970s, early 1980s in Melbourne, Victoria and other places, I was very involved in activism around these things. There were some political changes which meant that I was invited to put my money where my mouth was. I was basically demanding that governments do better for minority populations and they said, “Well, let’s see what you would do.” So, I was invited to draft policies. I did write these, and I became extremely interested in the traction of ideas.

The policies were accepted. The National Policy on Languages in 1987 was the peak. Really, it was the first multilingual policy, some people say the first one ever anywhere, but certainly in English speaking settings. Then I became very heavily involved in the implementation of this. I developed a very acute interest in problems of making change real. This moved me away from academic research considerations. I had always loved research, but you can’t do so many things at once. So, I became very actively involved in that.

Because the policy was adopted by government and launched and funded, there was a lot of interest in it internationally, and the early successes that we had. Languages started to boom. We had extraordinary growth in research and interest in translation and interpreting and in the approach that we took in the policy, which was comprehensive.

Most policies, if you look at them, on language tend to be just the policy on behalf of the official dominant language of a country. Country X protects Language Y. That’s typically what language policies do. Or they tend to be some concession to a minority population, but they don’t go very far.

We were trying to do very ambitious things, you know. Think about public discourse, how people spoke to each other, inclusion of minorities, social cohesion, but also justice and rights questions. Naturally, a lot of opposition grew up against this from people who didn’t like what we were trying to do. So, the politics of language became my life, really, for many years.

Then, because of what we were doing, it got noticed by people like Joshua Fishman in the United States, who invited me over there. I’ve never done what I promised him I would do, actually. At one point he said I really should document this as an experiential process, and I will do that in my retirement at some point as a reflection on how to do language policy from the inside. Even though language policy is something that is studied by applied language scholars, they still tend to theorise it a lot. So, its practicality is lost, I think, and I want to reinject that.

But anyway, this was noticed around the world, and I got lots and lots of invitations to work in different places, including with international organisations like UNESCO and UNICEF and the Council of Europe. So, I started to do assignments on invitation in Southeast Asia – Samoa, Tonga, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu. And in South Asia – Sri Lanka for the World Bank, Myanmar for UNICEF and other Southeast Asian settings. Thailand, Myanmar, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines. I went to many assignments in Europe.

So, this has been my career since then, working on practical language policy things, which always raise questions of literacy and language study but also the linguistics of these problems. Who describes what language is? How do they do them? What happens with the work that linguists do? How does it get taken up or not get taken up within practical contexts? That became my obsession.

Recently, we’ve just submitted for publication a book on Tunisia that I’ve done with a colleague. We’ve looked at language, ideological discourses. Arabic, French, the two kinds of Arabic, English and Berber and other language issues there. So, it became a kind of reverberating set of discussions. I’ve had a very wonderful career of working all around the world in different settings on practical problems.

In some places, we’ve produced significant change. In Thailand, we produced the first language policy in that country that wasn’t just about the protection of the national language. In Myanmar, we did 45 public discourses around language rights for minority populations, the learning of the main language by minority populations, which is often also a grievance. This kind of thing. I did a trilingual policy in Sri Lanka in 1999 and submitted this and worked with the President’s office on the implementation on it. Then it got thwarted by conflicts there.

So, I’ve had this wonderful opportunity and in this part of my career I want to think about putting down some reflections on this experience.

Dr Torsh: Oh, thank you. That’s so interesting. I’m thrilled to hear that you’re going to write a reflection about that process of putting together the National Policy on Languages because that’s something that continues to be important in the work of myself and other scholars in Australia, so that’s really exciting.

Ok, but we’re here to talk about your new book at the moment, so congratulations on that new edited book. Before we talk about it, the book is called, as I said, Community and Heritage Languages Schools Transforming Education: Research, Challenges and Teaching Practices. For our listeners who aren’t really across the community languages sector in Australia, could you just give us a brief overview of it? Obviously, it’s also connected to your own policy activism, and how did that happen? How did it come about that it was established in Australia, and how has it changed? How has the policy focus and the sector changed since that time?

Prof Lo Bianco: Well, it’s a long and convoluted story, and I can only tell a tiny fraction of it. Suffice to say that in really nearly every society that I’ve worked in, I’ve visited and worked with community language schools in Nagoya in Japan, these kinds of processes of a community generating institutional structures to support and maintain and transmit their languages to their children is really universal.

In some cases in some societies, it’s heavily repressed, and in other societies they’re actually encouraged. But the phenomenon is practically global, I would say, and it tends to be ignored. Most of what focuses the attention of researchers in relation to language education is mainstream or official or dominant schooling. We’ve had this third sector, you might call it, third sector schools. The two sectors other than that are the public government school and then the independent or private schools, and in Australia there are large Catholic school sectors. So, they’re the two other sectors and then you have these parttime schools in the main, although some of them are also full time, that are schools whose primary purpose is the transmission of language and culture to immigrant children, but also increasingly indigenous children in our society.

Now, traveling around the world and the kind of work that I’ve done that I described before, I noticed at meetings and other places there would be community representatives, or even academics who would come and say, “Look, I’m working with Chinese schools in Malaysia” or something or other. And that can be mainstream government schools or that can be the parttime schools.

So, with Ken and Merryl we decided that we would hold an international conference to try and do some proper comparative work. This had never really been done. And we had this very successful conference in Sydney, much affected by Covid and restrictions on travel, but nevertheless it was a very successful conference. And we realised there’s a huge unaddressed agenda there, well we suspected that. So, we thought we’d produce a volume that started to map out the territory. There’s a little bit of a taxonomy that I started to produce in my own chapter, but there’s a lot of work that needs to be done into this.

But also, what needs to be both theorised and then developed in a practical way, is what do we want of these schools? If we’re adopting a pluralist position where we believe in language rights, what role would we hope for these schools? Then, in practical terms, what could be done?

Now, in my policy work, right back to the really early 1980s, late 1970s, I worked for government in Victoria. We promoted all sorts of things like cooperation and integration between these schools. Sometimes these schools use the premises of a mainstream school on a weekend or after hours. So, we used to do very practical things. We did this in 1981, you know, facilitating the writing up of contracts, of meetings between the two sectors. Often, the teachers are not trained, or they can be trained teachers in another system but it’s not recognised here. We would facilitate collaboration.

You can imagine the kinds of problems that would be there of a practical nature. Of people not understanding each other, even mistrust. Sometimes much worse things than that. All of these things were there and in spades, which is a colloquialism of saying in large quantity. So, we started to do lots of facilitation of this.

In 1982, actually from your university, Macquarie University in Sydney, Professor Marlene Norst, who has sadly passed away, she was commissioned partly from some of the pressure we had been putting on the federal government, to do a survey of these schools as a preparation to some kind of systemic support for them. She produced a wonderful report (which) unfortunately got repressed by forces who didn’t want this report. It wasn’t just a survey. She produced a really interesting guide to what could be done. She went beyond the brief in a very helpful way.

There’s always resistance to any kind of progress. We know this. Unfortunately, her work got marginalised. But I promote it a lot because I liked her a lot. She was a good scholar and tried to do a great thing, but it’s got ignored.

I took that up in my 1987 National Policy on Languages and promoted it, and we got some extra funding for these schools, so they started to be incorporated into the system. So, this is what we wanted to do in the book, is to think, “Well, what do other societies do? Are they marginalised? Are they given municipal level support, but not state or federal government support, depending on the governance structures in different countries? Are they actively repressed? Are they underground schools?”. This happens in very repressive systems. This can be very dangerous to the lives, actually, of people, to engage in this kind of activity. So, I think there’s a call for solidarity with people who struggle against repression, but also to learn from systems where more substantial work is done.

In some systems, government and public education, or mainstream schooling, only supports prestige foreign languages and these community languages tend to be marginalised and they might get some token support or acknowledgement or given a license to continue to teach, but they’re not actually encouraged. And all the community language teaching and language maintenance, as distinct from second language learning, would happen only in those marginal settings.

Well, in Australia and many other countries in the world we have a much more integrated approach. Our mainstream schools teach multiple languages, including many community languages. Many students study the language at school, at mainstream school, that they might also study in an after-hours system. So, I think, and we can go onto this with another question, but I think we need to think imaginatively and in a future-oriented way about cleaning up this mess, as it were.

Having principles that start from a different basis, not a toleration basis, but a basis of learning, for having a different way in which all of these – I mean, children just have one brain. The learning goes on in that same one brain, and if that one brain is shopped around different systemic structures, those structures ought to get their act together rather than the child and the family having to continually have to adjust to different forms of provision.

Dr Torsh: Yeah, great, thank you. I think for those who are outside of the sector and aren’t that aware of it, can you just explain what that discontinuity actually can look like for those who haven’t experienced it?

Prof Lo Bianco: Well, it can look like a child studying whatever language it happens to be, let’s say Chinese, Mandarin Chinese, in a school in Sydney during the week. They might do a one- or two-hour program during the week, so it’s not a huge commitment of time. And then, because their family might come from Malaysia and be an ethnic Chinese family but they might not speak modern standard Chinese, or Mandarin, in their home, the child goes to a Saturday morning school run by the community, or an after-hours school two days a week. And sometimes that after-hours teaching happens in the same physical premises as the week program.

Now, there’s a lot of issues here. One of them is about the coherence of the pedagogies that are used in the two places and the wastefulness of the lack of any collaboration between the two systems. Wouldn’t it be much better if it were possible for this to be maybe not seamless, that would be an ideal aspiration, but at least less jagged and disruptive if it were coordinated in some way, pedagogically as well as in other ways. If there were shared knowledge among the different teachers about individual children.

It would have to start from a child’s focused look and also be informed by good pedagogical language learning processes and also of the affordances. Different systems afford different possibilities. Imagine a highly literate mother tongue speaker teaching on a Saturday or Sunday but who isn’t necessarily a trained teacher. This might be a perfect input for colloquial, continuous communicative language. Then you might have a more structured grammar-centred approach in the school system. These are just some ideas that I’ve had that we could work on, and we’ve put them into action in some places.

But I feel like systems, governments, run away from this. It seems to them like an immense problem, a very messy problem. But as I argue in my chapter in the book and at the talk I gave at the conference, I think they’re going to have to deal with this at some point because of the radical changes that are happening in the world of communication and learning anyway that are going to overwhelm all these structures. We’re going to be forced to think about these things differently. I always think if you can predict a change happening, prepare for it. Start talking about it. Get intellectuals in to start theorising what’s involved. Literacy scholars have got a lot to contribute here, and people who think about the semiotics about the representation of language with communities.

I love partnerships which involve these kinds of interactions. I’ve always found them very productive, and I’ve always tried to set them up. That’s what we did in Myanmar (with) all those dialogues.

Sticking with the community language schools which, in some countries, I have to clarify, are called heritage language schools, or heritage languages, and I and other people have resisted that encroachment of that terminology here. Not because it’s bad terminology but because typically in English, I think, “heritage” has a connotation of something that’s in the past, like a heritage façade of a building. Or the heritage which might be the historical memory of a community. I’m not saying that it’s inevitable that it has that connotation, but I think it often does. Whereas a “community language” suggests that it’s something that is present and vibrant and vital within an existing alive community now. So, I’ve preferred it from that point of view.

In the book, we say “community/heritage” because obviously other people use the other terminology. And of course, we can inject new meaning into terms. We don’t have to be defeated by past ways in which words work. So anyway, there’s that kind of issue there.

Dr Torsh: Yeah, that’s great, thank you. I’m now rethinking my use of “heritage language” in my own work, so that’s great to think about that.

I’m really interested in this argument that you make in your chapter, as you said, about changes in our understanding of what literacy is. So, you have a chapter in the book which is based on a talk that you did at the conference. The chapter, which introduces the volume, is called “Community/Heritage Language Schools Transforming Education: Beyond complementary, more than integration”. And you’ve already said systems need to grapple with this idea that you can’t have these two sectors not talking to each other, that it’s not in the interest of the learner. You argue that in part because of this idea of the way we understand literacy is changing as a result of technology, of the fourth industrial revolution.

Can you tell us a little bit more about that, for our listeners? I realise they have to go read the chapter, but just a little bit of a summary for them, to draw them in?

Prof Lo Bianco: It’s an immense topic, of course. If you look at any organisation that has worked in literacy for a long time, you can’t fail to notice that they have adjusted their definition of what it is. One organisation whose definitions I have studied is UNESCO. Of course, they are a very important organisation in this because when they were founded, from the very beginning, they were given the world mandate I would call it for kind of a global agenda for literacy in the world. That’s how I’ve described it in a publication.

If we look at how they understood literacy in the late 40s, early 1950s, and compare it to how they understand literacy today, it’s cheese and chalk. Two very, very different notions. Teachers and researchers have done this. I mean, there have been many movements in this. One of the most important ones was the new literacy studies of the 1990s which started to inject social understandings of literacy and move away from a pure and psychometric or cognitivist approach. Of course, it’s moved on even a lot since then.

So, what we know is that what is taken to be literacy has expanded beyond simple capacity to read and write a language to multiple other dimensions of what’s involved in being a literate person in a society that penalises people who are not literate. This is the really important social consequence of this, that we have the social cost. It shouldn’t be like this, but it is. The social cost of low literacy even understood in traditional ways of understanding literacy is very, very high. There is a high risk of unemployment. It’s no accident that a really high proportion of prisoners in jails are low literate people. There are multiple explanations of this. It’s not a predictor, it’s a consequence of the social punishment.

I’m very committed to this because both of my parents were very low literate people. Neither of them had any serious formal education. And yet, they were both very intelligent people. So, we can’t make any kind of connection between intelligence. This is an enormous discourse, and I’ll just leave it planted there, but what I did want to say about this is that what’s changed in our understanding about literacies from the 50s to now has been this social dimension.

What’s changing increasingly now is a massive technological injection in which multimodality is the principal characteristic of literacy. I mean, anything we do online cannot be reduced to language-centred semiotics. It involves manipulation of multiple semiotic resources that are not just linguistic anymore. Colour, movement, image – there’s any number of things that go into a very complex meaning-making practice. This is going to continue to accelerate in what some people call literacy 4.0. My colleague Professor Lesley Farrell at the university uses that term. (This) mirrors industry 4.0, the 4^th industrial revolution, which is not just computers but artificial intelligence beyond computing as a practice that people are in charge of. It’s absurd in a way, to call them machines anymore, but machines which learn and can learn independently generate their own kind of knowledge and then project that into the space of meaning. So, we’ve got something really radical going on. That’s going to change how language works.

I think one of the reasons we have a crisis in language study today, and this is very true, sadly in English speaking or dominant countries in particular. We have the biggest struggle for language teaching and learning that we’ve had for many years. People misunderstand the technologies as obviating the need for language study. That’s because they’re very reductionist about what’s involved. People used to take literacy in this very reductionist simple way. They take language to be very reductionist, and they tend to think it’s just basic communication. So, we can inject that stuff with voice retrieval. You can ask your little pen to say something in Japanese and you’ll hand that to someone and it’ll say “good morning” in Japanese.

This is completely possible. It exists. There are very sophisticated technologies that will even do lip syncing, so that you’ll look like you’re speaking the language when you take a video of yourself speaking German or Italian or whatever it happens to be. So, this is going to be a battle that we have, to persuade administrators and other people that language learning is not this. This is forms of communication. Let’s welcome them. Let’s adopt them. Let’s embrace them. We can’t deny them. They’re there. They’re going to grow. Elon Musk wants to inject probes or whatever they are, implants in people’s brains. All of these things are going on at a very rapid rate, and some of them might be ethically very, very questionable. But I can’t see any way that they’re going to be stopped or slowed down until we get on top of what they mean for people.

So, we have to understand them. What they mean is that people’s learning will be occurring in places other than in schooling. It will be self-generated and generated by outside forces including machines. It’s going to be massively challenging to everything that curriculums, official curriculums, require and prescribe in schooling.

This is going to create, I think, for indigenous populations, and especially for dispersed, small populations – I worked with the Tigrinya community in Melbourne many years ago with a very small population in Melbourne but who had other members in Brazil and in Africa and in Italy and other places. You can aggregate numbers in communities with the technologies that you can’t do otherwise very easily. So, there are multiple benefits that we can point to. Individualisation, aggregation, personalisation, learner control and pacing. There’s lots of pedagogical impact that a learner can govern in this.

The challenge for schooling is absolutely foundational, almost existential I would say. Therefore, we have to embrace it. In my chapter, and I only just make a small dent into the problem, we have to think about a new way to imagine learning and start from there. The school systems that currently are the principal institutional ways of delivering learning have to be redone, and they have to be seamless. Teachers have to be managers of the educational experiences of learners. That’s how I call them. Rather than the exclusive input to the learner. So, they have to understand the principles of the acquisition of language knowledge.

I see a bigger role for professional language specialists in this, to interact with practitioners directly, but also curriculum writers and others. We have to rethink these things. And then communities who own community or heritage language schools and who are the repositories of the communication in these languages, you know, the Arabic, Tamil, Vietnamese and Greek in Sydney and everywhere else in Australia and other countries. A large part of what’s involved in learning is interaction with speakers, so we have to make sure that there’s seamless connection there.

So, I’m just touching on the outlier of this, but that’s what I’m trying to do with this, is to get people to imagine more creatively, pushing ahead, but not that far. These things are imaginable within a decade. Many of them exist now. Instantaneous translation, voice to script, I mean all of these things challenge all the separations we’ve ever had. What is literacy going to be when it’s possible to have no division between spoken language, signed language and their representation in a written form or some other form?

They’re really important questions to ask and to be asked by people who are interested in multilingualism.

Dr Torsh: Yeah, so much to think about. And I guess this kind of question that you sort of answered, but I want to make sure I understood and maybe you can elaborate a little bit. For mainstream teachers, this is the question you pose at the end of your chapter and that somebody asked you, and I really was interested in this. What can mainstream teachers do in order to support the learning of community languages? It sounds like you’re saying they are also a really important part of this process, of this existential crisis that we’re seeing in education when it comes to both language and literacy and what they mean.

Prof Lo Bianco: I’m often asked this question by mainstream teachers when I give talks. As I said before possibly, I’m speaking to Indonesian teachers in Victoria tomorrow. One of the anticipated questions is exactly this even though their specialist teachers of Indonesian are mainstream teachers.

When you look at students who drop out of language programs – I did a study once in the western suburbs of Melbourne in working class schools. I interviewed and discussed and did subjectivity analysis with large numbers of kids. I published it in a book in 2013 out of Multilingual Matters. One of the things that we found (is that we) classified students according to whether they were going to continue or drop language study. We classified them as “waverers” or “committed” kids and then we worked heavily with the waverers to think about what was it that was going on in their minds.

One of the things that came up repeatedly is something that mainstream teachers have got an enormous amount of influence on, and not just the language teacher. That is the attitude or ideology that is attached to the practice of language teaching and learning.

We found that lots of students had imbibed a negative, sometimes quite racist construction of what they were engaged in. This was not coming from the language teacher. This was coming from systemic imagery and systemic, often not even openly, hostile – anyone who’s had children or raised children or been around children, little children I mean, knows quickly that they are semiotic sponges. They pick up signals from multiple sources. They know when something is half-hearted. In the book I called it half-heartedness. When schools are just half-hearted about something, kids get it. They know it’s less important than something else. You’re not actively saying that learning Japanese or Italian, the two languages in that particular volume, is less important than doing something else like sport. But I see the way the school is arranged, and I can work out that’s exactly what you’re doing. One of the girls I interviewed said this to me. She said, “They don’t really, really mean it. We can tell. So why are they pretending?”. So this is something mainstream teachers can do, be enthusiastic supporters.

I helped introduce a CLIL program in a Japanese school where the boys, it was a boys’ school in this particular case, had had a mostly grammatical or formal syllabus. They were doing fine. And as soon as the Japanese teacher started to teach content that was about the Fukushima earthquake, really interesting material in which the kids had to research online and the teacher had to teach technical language ahead of time so they could manage to read these complex texts and stuff like that, the first thing that happens is pushback from the mainstream teachers. Oh, geography, that’s my space. Or, oh science and physics, that’s my space. You’re just the language teacher. That was all resolved beautifully when the teachers understood that the purpose of the CLIL was for the language teacher to enrich the content in the Japanese program. It wasn’t the exclusive teaching of the science or geography. Then they started to see the benefit of additional focus on the content they were teaching as specialists. So, the collaboration was brought about.

These conversations between the mainstream and specialist language teachers are essential. Mainstream language teachers can either choose to be an innocent bystander, an active supporter or at least an encourager. Again, it’s this same one mind that these children have. One mind, one heart that gets shipped around to different classes. The multiple messages that they pick up about the choices they need to make are significant. So that’s something I would say in relation to that question.

Dr Torsh: Great, thank you. Yeah, I know that study well. I’ve used it in my own research. It’s fantastic. I think that it’s really helpful to teachers, and I know we have education students who listen to the podcast, so really helpful to know what they can do.

That was really my last question, but before we wrap up, I just want to know – you’ve talked a little bit about your next project on Tunisia, which is a fascinating context. I’m excited to hear about that. What else is up next for you?

Prof Lo Bianco: Well, that one’s in press, or it’s under review. I’m working with a dear colleague in Sri Lanka. I’ve lived and worked in Sri Lanka, and my colleague and I are putting together a volume on bilingual education there. Bilingual education means, typically, English plus either Sinhala or Tamil. That’s a project that will come out next year. I’ve got a book coming out with some colleagues from Hong Kong Uni on supporting learners of Chinese. There’s a lot of other work. I’m much less efficient than I used to be because of illness and old age, both of which have made me slow down.

But I really, really want to go back into the theory of language change and deliberate language change. Language always changes. Everyone knows that language is a dynamic process and changes. But language policy and planning is deliberate language change, and even deliberate language change can happen unconsciously. But planned deliberate language change, which is what I call language policy, and as I said, Joshua Fishman, when I first met him, said that I should document this, a kind of insider account of policy writing, and that’s what I want to devote some time to.

But unfortunately, I was trained as an academic in an era in which you made a distance between yourself as a scholar and the subject matter. I know I haven’t done that for years, but that’s still my predilection. I have to overcome that a great deal to speak personally in this way in writing. I need to do that. That’s something I ought to do. I’ve got a huge amount of documents from, like, 45 years of engagement in language policy, agitation and writing and stuff, and criticism.

You can’t just criticise if you want to – I mean, a lot of language scholarship is dominated by a critical disposition these days, especially sociolinguistics. That’s been important to uncover and expose a lot of injustices and hierarchies in the world. But I don’t think we should overstate the agentive power of our disciplines to really affect change. You have to engage with processes of concrete change, and you have to not set aside criticism, but make criticism productive. I find that, unfortunately, a lot of critical scholarship, maybe not a lot, some critical scholarship is not so productive. If you want to be productive, you have to engage with people whose views are different from your own. You have to compromise on things. You have to find conceptual categories that unite differences.

When I was working in Myanmar and south of Thailand where there’s been a conflict for many years in which language and script and bilingualism are implicated, it’s really really indispensable. It’s not just a methodological, I think it’s an ethical requirement to adopt a different set of understandings and practices. Criticism is something that has to be understood as being particular to some purposes and not others. So, I do think that there’s too much mindless criticism. Too much of a disposition to begin activity with a critical air.

Having said that, I don’t want to be assumed to be anti-critical. Criticism is critical to civil life, to decent life, to social improvement. I just think that there are moments of productive participation in shared creation of new things in which criticism can be a problem. I’ve seen that to very bad effect. I’ve seen it from people who have been trained just in the critical tradition who don’t know when to stop.

So that’s something I’d like to do. I’m going to think about that a lot. I haven’t written enough about that. I read other people’s writing on this and I’ve learned from it, but I feel as someone who has tried to write language policies and be engaged with concrete productive change and not just analysis or critique, that that’s something I want to think about more carefully.

Dr Torsh: Oh, that’s a really wonderful place to end, I think, on that. What do we do beyond criticism, especially for emerging scholars and research students? So, fantastic. Fantastic.

Look, I would love to keep going, but I have to wrap up. So, thanks again, Jo! 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 our Language on the Move Podcast and our partner, the New Books Network, to your students, colleagues and friends.

Till next time!

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.

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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.

Carla Chamberlin, Ingrid Piller, and Mak Khan in conversation

TESOL and social justice

One of the thrusts of my research has been a critical examination of the social consequences of the global spread of English.

In my book Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice, for example, I argue that “Englishization” engenders an external orientation to development. Knowledge produced and disseminated through the medium of English comes to be regarded more highly than knowledge produced and disseminated through the medium of other languages. On the individual level, the hegemony of global English carries psychological costs and may contribute to linguistic marginalization and feelings of inferiority.

This argument is based on a number of empirical studies conducted by our team mostly in Asia and the Middle East. The focus has been on the consequences of the spread of English on societal structures, institutions, and individuals in those context.

One aspect of our critique has been to highlight the detrimental effects of an ideology that privileges native speakers of English as preferred knowers and teachers of the language. What I have not considered much is how native speaker TESOL teachers from Anglophone center countries position themselves vis-à-vis this kind of critique. But my work is often read in TESOL teacher training programs: how does the kind of critique outlined above affect aspiring TESOL teachers who identify as native speakers from Anglophone center countries?

Or, to put it bit pointedly: Can US native speakers of English teach English ethically?

Conversation with colleagues from the Pennsylvania TESOL organization

This question was put to me in a conversation I recently had with Professors Dr Carla Chamberlin, PennState Abington, and Dr Mak Khan, Community College of Philadelphia. Carla and Mak had asked to chat with me about questions related to linguistic diversity and social justice in preparation for the Pennsylvania TESOL convention on Nov 21, 2020. We’ve recorded our conversation and you can listen to it here:

Other issues we discuss in our hour-long conversation include the following: How can migrant parents foster their children’s biliteracy? What are the language challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic? Do multilingualism researchers have a monolingual English-centric blind spot? How do the research paradigms of World Englishes and multilingualism connect?

The conversation was also a lovely opportunity to reconnect with Mak, who used to be a regular contributor to Language on the Move writing about English and multilingual literacies in Pakistan.

So, can native speakers teach English ethically?

There is obviously no easy answer to that question. It’s the same dilemma that confronts every teacher with a privileged identity: how can male teachers teach ethically within institutional frameworks that maintain sexism? How can white teachers teach ethically within institutional frameworks that maintain racism?

My preliminary response is this: There can be no doubt that students need role models who share their backgrounds: English language learners need teachers who themselves learned English “the hard way”; girls need female teachers to look up to; and students of color need successful teachers, principals and leaders who look like them. But to inspire students you do not have to have the same identity as your students – in our diverse world that is not only impossible but counterproductive.

To teach ethically from a privileged identity you need to see yourself in your students: you need to believe in the potential of your students to replace you.

Chats in Linguistic Diversity

Did you enjoy this conversation? It is the second in a series of Chats in Linguistic Diversity. In the past some of you may have enjoyed our Lectures in Linguistic Diversity at Macquarie University. Due to Covid-19, we’ve obviously had to put this lecture series on hold. We hope that our occasional podcast Chats in Linguistic Diversity will make up for these for the time being. Feel free to contact us with topic suggestions.

Previous chat in Linguistic Diversity:

• Ingrid Piller in conversation with Dr Piers Kelly about Australian Aboriginal message sticks.

Transcript (created by Brynn Quick; added on 15/03/2024)

Dr Chamberlin: Hello, I’m Carla Chamberlin, Professor of Applied Linguistics in Communication Arts and Sciences at the Pennsylvania State University Abington College near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I’m joined by Mak Khan, Director of the Center for International Understanding and Assistant Professor of ESL at the community college of Philadelphia.

Mak and I are here today to talk to Ingrid Piller, Distinguished Professor of Applied Linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney. Dr Piller is the author of the award-winning and best-selling books Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice and Intercultural Communication: A Critical Introduction. She is the editor-in-chief of the international journal Multilingua, editor off the blog Language on the Move, and author of numerous publications about multilingualism and social justice.

Mak and I each came to know Ingrid’s work in different ways. In my own work in intercultural communication and TESOL and social linguistics, I was drawn to Ingrid’s voice that forces us to question how language and culture have been defined historically to reinforce linguistic hierarchies and social structures that benefit the privileged few. We have watched such inequalities play out with destructive results in the US. In Philadelphia, where Black Lives Matter protests and voting procedures are being challenged, and where the current pandemic disproportionately affects minorities, the job of language educators goes beyond teaching about grammar. Ingrid’s work reminds us how language and culture and attitudes toward language and culture create and maintain inequalities that profoundly shape our lives.

Dr Khan: It was December 2009 when I went to the American University of Sharjah and Zayed University. They were hosting a conference on fostering multiliteracies through education. I was a naïve doctoral student, presenting my work. After the conference was over, I saw an email. Somebody was seeking my permission to publish my work on Language on the Move. I saw that it was Professor Ingrid Piller. My doctoral supervisor had talked to me about Dr Piller’s work, so first I did not believe that it was from Professor Piller, asking me to publish my work. So, I asked my colleague. I said, “Hey, can you see that this is from Professor Ingrid Piller?”. He said yes. So, this is how we became friends.

Since then, I saw Dr Piller as a mentor throughout my PhD and after my Phd. Visiting Language on the Move regularly gave me a very different view of linguistics, which is not very traditional, I would say. My doctoral work on signage and linguistic ethnography heavily drew on her. Throughout my PhD and after my PhD, she has been the shaping person on my scholarship, on my personality. And I’m so thrilled and honoured that I’m here in her presence today and interviewing her. I’m super, super excited and would like to thank Carla for including me in this one. Thank you.

Dist Prof Piller: Thank you very much, Mak, for having me, and I just have to say I remember that conference in Sharjah very fondly. It was a really international conference in an Arabic-speaking context, and at the same time in an English-speaking context. So very diverse. We were actually handing out awards for the best paper of the day, and Khan had actually disappeared by the time we had gotten around to announcing that his was the best paper of the day.

Dr Chamberlin: Well, we have a lot of questions for you, but obviously we won’t be able to get to everything. I use both of your books in my classes, and as soon as I found them, I just thought, “Yes, yes, this is it. This is what I want my students to be reading.” Before that, I was just cobbling together all these different chapters and articles from Applied Linguistics and other sources that take a critical look at language and teaching and culture. But here, I feel like, “Yes, you’ve brought all of this together.” So I’m really, really grateful for that. And I also think that what you do – obviously your scholarly work is amazing – but I also feel that there is passion there. There’s a mission there. And I wonder what defining moments in your life led you to that. I mean, you’re multilingual. I read about your experiences, but was there anything in particular that really motivated you to pursue social justice?

Dist Prof Piller: I think we all make our lives and careers and paths and journeys. I was educated in a rural area of southern Bavaria, an area where grammar schools didn’t exist. High schools didn’t exist until about my generation. I’m the first from my village to graduate from high school. So, of course, my upbringing has shaped me. I received my higher education in Germany. I studied to become a teacher, specifically a language teacher. The languages that I focused on were English, German and Spanish. From there, I went on various exchanges to the UK. My first postdoc position was actually in the US at Becker College as a visiting professor in the English department there. From then, my career has taken me to various other places including the United Arab Emirates, Switzerland and now Australia.

Dr Chamberlin: I have students who are getting a minor in TESOL with the hopes to go abroad, having the chance to teach. For many, this is a kind of once in a lifetime opportunity to be able to do this. But they are also, and I’m glad they’re questioning this, they’re questioning the moral aspects of it. Some of them feel conflicted about wanting to go abroad and teach English and get experience, and I mean that’s what I did many years ago. It changed my life. It changed my world, but at the same time I think back and think, “Oh my gosh, I was part of this whole system of Englishization of Korea”, where I was working. My students are now asking me how they do this, how they reconcile this. And I told them I would ask you (laughs).

Dist Prof Piller: Look, I mean, it’s a difficult question really. I’ve been thinking about this question. I think it’s the same answer, actually, that we give to anyone who works in an unjust system. We live in an imperfect world, and “imperfect” is probably a euphemism, and we live in very difficult structures. But that doesn’t mean that we should not act at all. I mean, it’s the same question we could ask any white person. Should we go and teach or should we just shut up? Of course we should, but at the same time I think you can’t give up being a teacher because you have a particular identity, and the same goes for if men should teach women. That’s all positions of privilege. I carry these moral questions, I think.

Coming back to the specific question of should Americans or native speakers of English, should they become teachers of English? Look, I still don’t see why not as long, and I think that’s the caveat, as long as they also pay attention to the kinds of structures we’ve been talking about, and as long as they teach under the assumption that they are teaching the next generation of teachers. Because I think one problem that can make the privileged teaching the disadvantaged so difficult is that it’s very often under the assumption that the privileged identity is forever the teacher identity. And non-native speakers or people of colour or women will never be as good, and that kind of assumption is pernicious.

So, I think we need to teach so that our students will replace ourselves. That they will be the next generation. And that, to me, is not only an ethical linguistic question, but that it’s a question that any teacher needs to ask themselves all the time really. How is my teaching beneficial to my students, and how does it contribute to questions of social justice? How does is reinforce existing structures, and how can I help to be part of the solution as opposed to being part of the problem?

Dr Chamberlin: Yeah, exactly.

Dr Khan: So, Ingrid, I have a question about the loss of multiliteracy in my family. We moved to the United States in 2013. My wife, I and four kids. When we moved, 3 of our 4 kids were bilingual and biliterate with English and Urdu. The youngest one was 3 years old, so he wasn’t bilingual. He was only monolingual. Ingrid, in these 7 years, I have seen in my family my monolingual ones, although they can speak Urdu and do speak Urdu, they have totally forgotten Urdu script. They cannot read, nor they can write. So, my wife and I, we make a conscious effort. My little boy, he says, “When you love your Urdu language so much, why have you brought us to United States?”. He asks this question to us because, for him, United States means English only. And this question is not of that child. I come across this question from so many people around. From political debates and all these. So, my question is – in such a case as I am in, what agency do I have as a father, as a family member, to help my kids retain their language heritage?

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, that’s a difficult question, and I think one that many, many migrant parents struggle with. I think there are two aspects I’d like to speak to. One is the literacy question, and that’s sort of the very difficult pattern, of course, in migrant families, that you actually have the second generation as bilingual. They can speak the language, but they don’t have literacy skills and don’t know how to read and write the other language. It’s great that they can speak in the family, but at the same time it really cuts them off from the cultural heritage of the language and the literature and also the academic and cognitive development that actually comes through literacy in any language. So, of course, literacy is extremely important but at the same time the hardest to maintain.

And of course, it’s not surprising that it’s hard to maintain because in any context it’s the school’s job. The parents’ job is oracy and oral skills, and that happens in the family and we have outsourced literacy teaching to schools pretty much universally. So, in order to be able to maintain literacy in the language that is not the school language, I think you have to invest a phenomenal amount of time and resources and that’s just usually not a feasible proposition for most people. It really only works if you actually have community schools or if you had the support of the school, and that’s why I actually think to have language learning and bilingualism in the school system is so important.

One thing that we all need to be lobbying for in these monolingual countries or these countries with monolingual ideologies as the United States but also Australia, is actually languages in the school system. I think that’s something that actually speaks to the non-migrant population because often bilingualism is a migrant problem and a community problem, “don’t speak it in public and leave us alone”. In order for languages to be valued, everyone needs to see something in them, and coming from a context where in continental Europe you can’t actually become an educated person if you don’t learn another language. At the bare minimum, you have to learn English. That’s part of education. The European ideal, for instance, is that every citizen will learn two foreign languages – so, the national language, English, and the language of a neighbouring country. In many parts of the world, bilingual education has always been a reality and is not unusual at all. To me, it’s like learning math or learning language arts. Learning opens your mind in ways that you just can’t understand if you haven’t had that experience of language learning. It’s not only a social justice issue, but it’s really for everyone. We should lobby for everyone that language learning does something to you, that gives you an insight into another culture and into another world. You can read more things. No one debates, “Should we really learn math? Should children learn math? It takes so much time”. They just consider it natural. Languages are the same, really. They should be a normal, expected part of becoming an educated person.

Dr Chamberlin: Yeah, interestingly I asked my students in an Introduction to Social Linguistics class, now on my campus we’re 57% minority, I don’t know the exact number of multilingual students because we can’t collect all of that information. But quite a few. Typically, in a class, I have 3 monolingual English students, and the rest are multilingual. So, I ask them, “Are we a monolingual or multilingual nation?”. And they, you know, these are young people, and they say, “We’re multilingual!”. I was taken aback the first time. But then I have them go out and look, make observations, and then kind of come back to me and say, “How are we monolingual?” or “How are we multilingual?”. And of course, you know, they realise then that we are multilingual in the private sphere. It’s ok to talk to your family, to use multiple languages with your friends, but then you get into the public sphere and it’s English. So, I did kind of look at that, but I was surprised the firs time when they all came back and said we’re multilingual. We are statistically, but it’s still a monolingual mindset.

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, it’s really institutions that reinforce this idea. I mean, we have to operate institutionally in a monolingual world, and that’s what makes it so difficult, and really also creates this disconnect between the lived experience of many people. But I also agree, I mean it’s sort of beautiful to see actually that there is a younger generation who is much more attuned to different languages and now also parents who maintain languages. One thing that I see a lot is actually when there is this resistance in young children in particular. So, primary school is the time when they say things like, “So why did you bring us to this country? We’re in the US now, so let’s speak English.” It’s really also the mental stage where they want to fit in and they really buy in to wanting to fit in. As parents, I think, you have to work a bit to kind of get them through these couple of years, because by the time they are teenagers, having another language is actually a source of distinction. That’s when they enjoy their languages again. I think if you can support your child, they will thank you for it.

Dr Khan: Absolutely correct, Ingrid. My boys, who are in universities, one is in Swarthmore, the other is in Denison, both of them are now so much in love with Urdu. They are at that stage. You are 100% correct, but the little one, you know, he is still reacting, “If you love Urdu so much, why didn’t you stay back?”. You’re so right.

Dr Chamberlin: I’ve experienced that with my daughter. I didn’t think she was going to be speaking French, but I spoke French to her from the day she was born, just trying to, you know, see what would happen. And she just resisted it. She got to the point, we would read a lot of children’s books, and she could read them, but then at a certain point she didn’t want to have anything to do with it. Like you said, elementary school. And now she’s studying French.

Dr Khan: How nice.

Dr Chamberlin: Yeah, so it did come back. I’ll move on to another topic, and that is language and the pandemic. In your recent special issue in Multilingua, you had said that you received, I think, hundreds of proposals, and you decided to focus on China. And you also recently had, I think it was a symposium, this past weekend, and I just wondered – since even just the publication, things are changing so quickly with this pandemic. What have you seen change in terms of language issues and public health? If you could do another special issue part two, where do you think you would go with it?

Dist Prof Piller: Right, look, when we sent out the call for papers in March, we received, as you said, over 200 abstracts from around the globe. So, really a lot of interest. We decided on China then to make our selection path easier because we felt like Chine was 2-3 months ahead in the pandemic. They were, at that point, winning the fight against the pandemic. It sort of seemed like, to us, there maybe was a course through it, and other nations would go through a phase of outburst but then get it under control in the same way China had done. Of course, that has now been proven completely wrong.

At the same time, you know, I think it’s a really important study to just see what a very different country has done. It’s a very different setup. One that we all think of as a very highly linguistically diverse nation because China, in fact, is incredibly linguistically diverse. There was the standard language and the various varieties of Chinese that are often called dialects, but that in reality are not necessarily mutually intelligible. So, they really constitute different language when it comes to everyday interaction and communication. And then there are 55 counted minorities, so different languages in the country. We’ve heard a lot about Mongolian recently, which is one of the larger minority languages, but China is very linguistically diverse with many different languages. China is increasingly becoming a migrant destination for international students in particular, particularly from places like southeast Asia and Africa, the developing world in particular. So, an aspect of migration that, I think, in the West, is not being recognised at all. We have a very linguistically diverse situation and some interesting challenges when it comes to how they communicate timely, high-quality information as is necessary in a pandemic or in any crisis. How do you do that?

And how would I do it differently, or what would the sequel be? Two aspects that I would want to do, I mean I think there are a zillion others, but one thing is actually to look at situations in the global south where, again, we have highly linguistically diverse situations with indigenous minorities, in particular, being particularly disadvantaged and at exceedingly high risk of the pandemic. To help my students in the Master’s course I’m teaching into Literacies – they did research projects this semester. I just want to share some of their research findings.

For instance, one of my students, Kinza Abbasi, she actually did one that may be particularly of interest to you – a study of how information about Covid-19 was communicated in Khyber Pashtun province in Pakistan. It is a highly linguistically diverse province. I think there are 18 different languages spoken there. Most of the population actually is not literate in those languages, so they if they had an education, they will be literate in Urdu and maybe English. All the public information, all the campaigns that she looked at were published predominantly in English and a bit in Urdu but nothing in any of the other languages, and some of the information was really completely nonsensical. She showed us posters where there was a sheep and the sheep was crossed out, and it said something like “Don’t go near animals”. But actually, sheep herding is like, one of the key livelihoods, so it’s absurd information. And, of course, communicated through the wrong channels because posters are not actually something that works particularly well.

Another student, Alexandra Hermosa from Peru, also had similar findings. She looked at posters that were actually translated into the indigenous languages of the Andes, various languages. And she noted the Quechuan posters in particular. One thing that she found was that, again, it’s not the ideal communication channel to actually provide posters. Also, the communication strategy relied heavily on the internet in a context where there actually isn’t widespread mobile coverage, and again she found information like, “Wash your hands all the time” and “Don’t forget to turn the tap off after you’ve washed your hands”. That’s one of the things it said in Quechuan, except these villages don’t have running water. So, in the information that is – there is so much wrong. And it’s again, I think, a Western mass communication model that’s being applied there. You work through posters, you work through national languages. You have one set of communication, one set of information, whether that is culturally relevant or not.

Another of my students, Yudha Hidayat from Indonesia, he actually suggested one of the key information channels that people in Lombok Province trust is mosques, and there is an established communication channel, like how you share information across villages – through loudspeakers on the mosques. And that one wasn’t used. So, indigenous communication channels on the ground are neglected in favour of, you know, those kind of information channels that don’t actually get the information to the people.

Dr Chamberlin: Yeah.

Dr Khan: Very fascinating findings. It’s like getting a model from somewhere else and applying somewhere else without regard to anything. Wow.

Dr Chamberlin: Yeah, modalities are so important. They shape the communication, but as you were talking about it, I was just going to say – what is the best way to reach different populations? Certainly, the internet is not even going to reach me, I’m not even on social media, you know? It’s just fascinating that people try to apply the exact same model, what works here, I see a lot of signage here. Obviously, there’s you know, every newspaper has free Covid information, every newspaper online, so you don’t have to subscribe to the newspaper, but you still have to have the setup to go to that newspaper. To have the online resources and, I know New York Times translates into Spanish, but that’s it. I didn’t see other languages.

Dist Prof Piller: Well, that brings us to the question of trust. And I think one thing that we’ve seen in the pandemic, and particularly in countries like the US I think, but really many other parts of the world too, is of course a complete breakdown of trust. And that’s why the fake news and disinformation proliferate because there is a lot of communication going on, but people don’t actually know where it comes from, and part of the problem, to my mind, is actually the communication channels don’t match. The languages don’t match. The sources are anonymous. You don’t actually make news of the kind of communication channels that people trust and that people know. Ultimately, a crisis response, of course, needs to be led by the state, but it also needs to be local. The state needs to enable local action. Those kinds of countries that really have been able to respond at all kinds of levels – at the national level, at institutional levels, but really also at community level – and mobilise people who will actually door knock, people who translate, loudspeakers have been very successfully used in China, rural parts of Vietnam, for instance. So, the kind of communication channels that are known to work. One thing that was pointed out by the student that I mentioned was also just that for communication to be successful it needs to be filtered through, like, tribal leaders, and it needs to actually go through families in order to reach both men and women. If that doesn’t happen, you could just as well save the paper you are printing your flyers on.

Dr Chamberlin: Right, and the state here can’t even identify those pathways of trust. And it’s different for everyone. I also know that there’s such an abundance of information, and sometimes people just end up shutting it all off because they don’t even know where to turn to anymore. Like you said, they don’t really trust any sources, and that’s definitely been a big problem. I hope it gets a little bit better. We’ll see. We have some hope (laughs).

Dr Khan: Ingrid, can I ask a question on multilingual research, changing the topic a little bit? When I see research on multilingualism, rarely do I come across references of scholarship outside English. So, the proponents of multilingualism are often restricted to monolingual literature itself. When I was reading your book, surprisingly positively I came across the reference of Isfahan in the 17^th century. I was like, taken aback. I said, “Wow, this is new for me”. That started this thinking in me that, you know, our multilingual research, scholarship is mostly monolingual, and it’s a paradox. So, I was thinking that I would see your comment, and before you do that, I also wanted to show you the diploma, the degree, that my university, Karachi University, gave me. It’s a very bilingual, you see half Urdu and half English, so it’s like the space is divided between Urdu and English, right? Whereas my degree in Lancaster was absolutely monolingual. It’s almost impossible to imagine an American University giving a degree with English and Spanish side by side. So, the point I’m making is this one, that sometimes when we go out of the box to nations, we find lots of things which are so interesting and illuminating, like in the case of Isfahan that you talked about, or like in the case of Karachi University giving degrees in Urdu and English. Any comment?

Dist Prof Piller: Yes, look, I couldn’t agree more. You’re 100% correct. Our scholarship is exceedingly monolingual, exceedingly English-centric. It’s not just monolingual, it’s English, actually, and that is a problem precisely because of the examples we discussed earlier. Because, of course, if we do research in a multilingual context in only one linguistic side of things, we’re bound to miss so many other sides. So that’s obvious. It’s a fundamental problem, I think, of research across the board, actually.

I wrote a paper in 2016 in the Journal of Multicultural Discourses about monolingual ways of seeing multilingualism, and that was a response to research by Anthony Liddicoat who had looked at a sample of research in multilingualism and just looked at in what kind of context does that multilingualism occur, the research contexts. He found that about a third had no context at all, if was just like, you know, context-free theorising about multilingualism, and I think that is a consequence of the English-centrism of the field. Because if you’re actually only seeing English, then multilingualism is something that’s out there but is not really bound to a particular context. And then another 40%, I would say, I forget the exact number, you can look them up, a very large chunk was then about bilingualism in the English-speaking world – the UK, US, Australia. Migrant or indigenous populations, multi-migrant populations. Then a smaller chunk of research in other contexts, multilingualism in other contexts, but really most of it through the lens of English.

I guess a big problem, of course, here are publishing structure and how different research is valued and evaluated and assessed. Of course, there is this assumption built into all kinds of metrics that English publications are better, and so that puts many academics across the world really under pressure to publish through the medium of English, but in order to be able to publish through the medium of English, the ability to publish in international journals, you need to work with frameworks that appeal to the metropolis in the centre. Being part of the discussion, the conversation, the international global conversation if you actually speak to the concerns that are there in the journal. So, it’s not only about language choice.

They key problem, really, is that this English-centrism changes the content of our research because we consistently ignore local considerations, as I’ve just said, with regard to the way Covid is communicated in rural areas in the global south. This kind of ignorance is, in part, related to English western-centric ways of doing things. So, it’s really to the great detriment of everyone that these kinds of relationships pertain. Now, the question is always, “How can we change that?”. We are little people, and that one thing I think that, as university teachers, one thing we should be lobbying for in terms of policy, for instance, is that actually anyone who becomes a language teacher should actually also have learned a language. It seems to me, like, really strange that we continue to (give) graduate linguistics degrees or TESOL degrees and there is no study requirement to have studied another language. That, to me, is something we can do for instance.

One thing that I try to do, through Language on the Move for instance – because we also have a great opportunity with digital communication – so it’s no longer either or. The traditional paper journal, of course, it was more like, you know, you have one shot at it. So that no longer pertains in the digital world either. We can actually create more, kind of, academic and community spaces, and that’s the responsibility ultimately. Everyone has to come to the table and try and also disseminate their research. So, those of us who work in the west and who work through the medium of English, I think the bare minimum that we should be doing for our research is to also create translations and create other channels.

So that’s, for instance, what we’ve been getting with this special issue that we’ve just published on linguistic diversity in a time of crisis. The symposium that you mentioned that we just had this weekend – we actually ran two parallel sessions – one was an English language channel session and the other was a Chinese session, and it brought together key researchers in the Chinese spaces, really targeted at a Chinese audience. We tried to disseminate the research beyond those who speak English because, ultimately, if we look at it from a global perspective, it’s of course only a very slim number of privileged few who actually speak English too or have proficiency in English to the kind of level that allows them to absorb academic information. So, yeah, these are a couple of things that we do.

Dr Chamberlin: Yeah, changes in publishing. I’ve been on editorial boards, and I’m an editor now, and I know that the publishers only want to publish in English. It’s a journal about interculturalism, but yeah, they resist it. So, we find ourselves having to insist on English in the field of intercultural communication and intercultural education, and that’s cutting out so many people, but I don’t know how to fix it right away.

Dist Prof Piller: The problem with academic papers is also that it’s extremely rigid because it’s not always an either or question, like English or Chinese or something. Of course, in everyday communication, as we all know, bilingual people communicate through translanguaging and code switching in all kinds of ways. But academic journal articles, of course, are the most rigid and extreme end of the monolingual spectrum. So it’s not only that we publish in English but we publish in standard English that shouldn’t have any traces of (other languages). So that creates an additional barrier.

Dr Khan: Most regulated spaces, yeah.

Dist Prof Piller: Khan, as you’ve said, there’s really an interesting tension. Many of us kind of rage against the monolingual mindset, but at the same time, when it comes to our own practices, it’s quite highly regulated.

Dr Khan: Yeah, yeah.

Dr Chamberlin: Yeah, and in higher education, you know, I’m hopefully coming up with the proposals for something that we can do, not just to validate our students’ multilingualism but to use it. Let them use it. So, you know, we can recognise it, we can value it, but what are we asking them to do in languages other than English? Why can’t they, if they write a paper for some kind of capstone project before they graduate, why can’t they take that paper, that information, and disseminate it in another language through a blog or, you know, through a community organisation? So, I’m hoping to kind of put something together like that, but it’s going to be a lot of work, a lot of convincing people that it’s a worthwhile endeavour. I think it is, but I know it’s not going to be easy, but we have to start with something structurally, I think. Just talking about it, and talking about being inclusive, and I just feel like we’re talking and talking and talking and talking and not really doing. At your university or at other schools – how do you really let students use multiple languages?

Dist Prof Piller: Not really at our university. I mean, it’s very much Anglo and an English-speaking country, or a country that sees itself as English-speaking. But I guess one thing that I would like to add to your thoughts, kind of, is that all around the world we see an increasing valorisation of diversity, and that’s great. I mean, I think that really needs to happen.

But, at the same time, I think we also need to critically examine how discourses of diversity can actually coexist with very exclusionary practices. One issue that I see for people from minority backgrounds as they enter the academy in particular and as they grapple with these questions of standard English, monolingualism, multilingualism, translanguaging, using all of their languages is of course that this not entirely up to them. I mean, they enter ways of seeing, and minoritized populations are also seen as linguistically deficient. So, for anyone from a non-native – or people of colour migrants, disadvantaged backgrounds, or underprivileged backgrounds, to actually succeed they’ll always have to battle. On the one hand, they may want to use all their linguistic repertoire. On the other hand, if they do, they are still going to be seen as linguistically deficient. One person’s creativity is another person’s error, right?

And so, these kinds of tensions are something that – I think one thing we can do is actually help our students come to terms with these tensions and learn how to live with it or learn how to recognise them at least. I mean, that’s maybe the most emancipatory thing we can do as teachers – to talk to them about it and let them talk about their experiences and kind of acknowledge that it’s not only something we can do. I mean, we are actors but at the same time, everyone’s reach is limited, so it’s also about building new communities, so yeah.

Dr Chamberlin: Yeah.

Dist Prof Piller: Khan, you wanted to say something? I’ve been going on a bit.

Dr Khan: I really want to discuss with you the discourse of World Englishes if you have 5 minutes. (laughs)

Dr Chamberlin: Five minutes to discuss World Englishes? (laughs)

Dr Khan: Ingrid, when I was introduced (to) this whole field of World Englishes, I really admired it a lot because it gave me how the field of English was attached to a few countries and how this was liberating. The whole scholarship was liberating, and coming from Pakistan and South Asia, I became very confident. I was talking to Professor Carla before the interview. I found myself as a legitimate teacher of English because of this whole scholarship of World Englishes, so I was a great admirer initially when this was introduced to me.

But when I was introduced (to) the field of multilingualism, my professor taught me, then I started looking at the relationship between these two fields, and I was finding them so puzzling because when I used to read Kachru and other pioneers, I used to see the whole world through the lens of Englishes only. As if there was nothing in the world but English. And then, from the other seminar, I had this bombardment of multilingualism, that the world is entirely multilingual. In India, you drive 40 miles, you come across a new language. The relationship between these two, I’ve never been able to, you know, understand this. Could you say something (about) how these two scholarships relate to one another?

Dist Prof Piller: Look, I think that’s a rather high expectation of me. (laughs) I certainly wouldn’t presume to be able to resolve those. Just one thought or two. The World Englishes paradigm, of course, comes out of the original sin of the modern world. It’s a colonial paradigm. Ultimately it comes out of colonialism and slavery. Even if our academic discourses that we value all varieties of English, and so on and so forth, it only actually makes sense within a colonial world. So that’s that about World Englishes.

Now, of course, it has made immense contributions and we continue to live in this post-colonial world, in the world that was shaped by colonialism. So, of course, the way English works in that world is tied to our global order. So that’s a fact. That English predominates is a fact, and we try to find our way around it as we do as humans, and as we try to navigate the world in which we live and make it a better place to the degree that we can.

Now, how does this all relate to multilingualism? One interesting relationship to many is actually – I’m very interested in the history of the Mughal Empire and the Persian language. And so, the Mughal Empire, for those who don’t know, was kind of the trans-Asian empire that existed in what is today pretty much the subcontinent and other parts of Central Asia. It existed prior to British colonisation. Their imperial order was a highly multilingual imperial order, so Persian was the language. Every educated person would learn to write in Persian, and there was a whole class of scribes who got their livelihoods out of being able to read and write documents in Persian. But at the same time, Urdu and Hindi and a wide variety of also literate and non-literate languages played important roles in art, in poetry, in the familial structure. And then there was the holy language of Islam, Arabic, that was in the mix kind of. And in the transition from the Mughal Empire to the British Empire, Persian was actually used by the British in their administration of colonial English because the people they needed to run the country, of course, were all those scribes and bureaucrats and writers who spoke Persian. But gradually, Persian was being replaced by English, and not only was Persian being replaced, but the whole multilingual ecology was being changed over to a more English-centric ecology.

And so, I guess the way to maybe resolve the tension between the scholarship around multilingualism and the scholarship in World Englishes is actually to think about how these two linguistic orders are part of social orders.

Dr Khan: Yeah, thank you so much.

Dr Chamberlin: I know, I’m just thinking and thinking now. Ingrid, I don’t know how much time you have, actually, we didn’t talk about that. I don’t want to overstep.

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, look, I’m really enjoying this conversation. At the same time, maybe we’ll – I mean, you want to show this at your conference, right? So there will be a limit to how much time there is.

Dr Khan: Yeah.

Dr Chamberlin: I do have one more question I want to sneak in. I wrote this to you last night. It’s pretty much just the question of – Will we ever get over Hofstede?

Dist Prof Piller: (laughs)

Dr Chamberlin: No, it’s just, everybody goes back to that! And I’m just thinking, I have some lines, like ways to respond, but it’s like I’m talking to a brick wall or something. Of course, I know why it’s popular. It’s easy knowledge. It’s like, “Oooh, yes, we can just classify people’s behaviours according to these world views.” And then I read the literature in our field and I’m like, “Oh yeah, we’re over that.” But then I go to a workshop or a webinar and it just comes back to me. I don’t know if – I wondered if you were experiencing some of that still. I’m waiting for that pithy kind of comeback I can have (laughs). But it still just hangs on, doesn’t it? This idea that we can just, first of all, define cultures in terms of national boundaries, and then just define those cultures, those national cultures by things like individualism, collectivism, masculinity, femininity. And I’m just –

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, it does hang on, but you know what? So many things, so many discourses are hanging on. I’m kind of – you know there is this – I think it was Saint Francis who said, “God, grant me the wisdom to change the things I can change and accept the things I can’t change and always know the difference between the two.” And I think some of those, you know, forever essentialist discourses, I mean it’s not something that, at the moment, I want to really want to waste my time on.

Dr Chamberlin: Yes, I’ll just make sure people read your books (laughs). How’s that? (laughs)

Dist Prof Piller: Well, this was a lovely conversation. I really enjoyed talking to you guys.

Dr Khan: Yeah, it was wonderful. Oh my gosh. It was great. Yeah.

Dist Prof Piller: I said at the beginning, there are always ways to look at the bright side too. This is certainly one of the positive things that has come out of this pandemic. We wouldn’t have had this conversation if it hadn’t been for the pandemic. So, I think, you know, one opportunity that I see is actually for greater engagement across national borders and these kinds of barriers. As our lives have been sucked into Zoom, we really can also use those to have these conversations amongst different people from different backgrounds and across borders. And so, there is also this opportunity that we can also reach out more.

Dr Khan: True.

***

Editor’s note: Learning from home is hard enough but what if you are simultaneously learning the language of instruction? In this latest contribution to our series of language aspects of the COVID-19 crisis, Elisabeth Barakos and Simone Plöger share how new arrival students in Hamburg, who are still learning German, their teachers, and the researchers themselves have adapted to the lock-down. The call for contributions to the series continues to be open.

***

A preparatory class for newcomer students in Germany (Image credit: SZ)

Since 16^th March, schools in Germany have been closed and students need to learn from home. Learning from home is a huge challenge for many, especially recent arrivals. In Hamburg, newcomer students attend preparatory classes, where they learn German for about one year before being streamed into the monolingually oriented regular school system.

Like all other schooling, this preparatory German language learning is now supposed to take place from home. How are teachers, students, parents, and researchers adapting to these new circumstances?

Our research project – and how it has changed due to COVID-19

In January 2020 we started a research project to investigate the transitions from preparatory to mainstream classes in two secondary schools in Hamburg, with a particular focus on language learning. On the one hand, we focus on the language learning opportunities the schools implement for the students; on the other hand, we research students’ practices and experiences with a focus on how they can make use of the linguistic repertoires they bring to school.

When we started our project in January, we planned an exploration phase from March onward. The pandemic not only turned our participants’ lives upside down but also our field work plans at the school site. As our participants’ teaching and learning went virtual, so did we. We turned to methods from “virtual ethnography” (see e.g. Varis 2014) in order to get to know teachers and class contexts via emails, phone calls, and WhatsApp. This means that we use different communication spaces and digital ways in order to collect data. This way, our research continues, albeit virtually, as we adapt it to the new circumstances along with teachers, students, and parents. It also allows us to disseminate timely and novel findings on home schooling in preparatory classes during COVID-19.

Challenges of home learning faced by new arrival German language learners

Due to the school closures, the regular instruction in preparatory classes had to be changed to smartphone-based instruction. In one of our school sites, the German language teacher communicates mainly via frequent phone calls and chat groups on WhatsApp. The teacher differentiates the groups according to the students’ individual language level. Within the chats, she shares voice messages and uploads work sheets via link or photo. She also sends regular mail packages with additional learning material.

Unsurprisingly, this adaptation of teaching methods faces a number of challenges.

To begin with, the basic conditions for effective online communication are often lacking: for instance, students usually do not have their own email address; their access to computers at home is often non-existent or severely limited; mobile phones sometimes have to be shared with siblings; printing facilities are scarce and internet connections are often unreliable.

Second, communication and learning through WhatsApp-Chats and phone calls presents its own challenges. The smartphone screen is small and reading off a screen can be tiring. Furthermore, many students do not understand the task instructions as virtual explanations seem much more difficult to grasp than face-to-face ones. Teachers must therefore be highly creative when preparing lessons and adequate learning materials.

One teacher prepared this photo for students to practice prepositions

To exemplify: In order to practice prepositions and vocabulary about the topic of “home”, the teacher took photos of various objects and furniture from her own kitchen. She then sent the photos to the WhatsApp-Chat and asked each student a specific question about them (“Where is the book?” “Below the table.”).

In another example, the school used so-called cultural mediators who work as multilingual educators and support newcomer students and their families. In a phone conversation, one of them told us that she now worked as a “virtual interpreter”. When the father of a student collapsed, the family called her. She in turn called an ambulance and then translated between the medics and the family.

What the above examples demonstrate is the enormous administrative, creative and emotional labor that teachers and cultural mediators perform during this pandemic. They also show how much this type of labor and support depends on the individual person and their capabilities and investments.

Although our participants are extremely committed to their work, the examples also show the limits of distance learning: staying at home has significantly reduced students’ communication opportunities in German. Since a language is mainly learned through active communication and interaction with people, these limitations represent a great challenge for everyone involved.

The current situation demonstrates once again the importance for schools to integrate multilingual resources into their practices. As in many monolingual states, the linguistic diversity of the students is rarely taken into account in the German school system. Consequently, “one of the many lessons we need to learn from this crisis is to include the reality of linguistic diversity into our normal procedures and processes” (Piller 2020). This would mean paying specific attention to the students’ linguistic repertoires, looking for ways how to implement multilingualism in the classroom, and drawing on multilingual resources to provide information for parents and families.

Investing in preparatory classes as a space of social and multilingual learning

The work of cultural mediators as well as teachers shows that preparatory classes go well beyond language learning. Our research demonstrates that this type of class is also a social space where students meet schools in Germany for the first time. They probably meet their first friends within the new environment. In case of communication difficulties, they may resort to their classmates with whom they share their family language (which is much less common within regular classes). The preparatory class is therefore often some kind of “shelter” for the children – a place where they can arrive and find some calm and ease. In practice this also means that, in addition to verb derivation and vocabulary lists about springtime, topics such as residence permit or family reunification play an equally important role.

It is hence vital not to forget the preparatory classes and the newcomer students as Germany – and societies around the globe – discuss how to re-open schools. The teachers we speak to are worried that the preparatory classes could be disregarded. This fear is linked to previous experiences, which show that lessons in preparatory classes are the first to go whenever there is a shortage of teachers or a high level of absence due to illness. Furthermore, preparatory classes often lack reasonably equipped classrooms and digital resources. These shortcomings and the unequal distribution of resources are not new. The crisis has, however, exacerbated existing educational inequalities.

What, then, can we recommend based on our insights? For many students in preparatory classes, everyday school life signifies an important social and learning routine. In addition, they need active communication and interaction in order to continue learning German. That is why it is ever so important to include preparatory classes when gradually re-opening the schools.

References

Piller, I. 2020. “Covid-19 forces us to take linguistic diversity seriously”. A De Gruyter social sciences pamphlet: perspectives on the pandemic: international social science thought leaders reflect on Covid-19. Boomgaarden, G. (ed.). Berlin, Germany: De Gruyter.
Varis, P. K. 2014. “Digital ethnography.” Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies, Tilburg University.

Language challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic

Visit here for our full coverage of language aspects of the COVID-19 crisis.

Further reading

Richards, E. (2020, 2020-05-24). Coronavirus’ online school is hard enough. What if you’re still learning to speak English? USA Today.

Professor Ingrid Gogolin (Image credit: Markus Scholz)

***Update Nov 18, 2019: Due to unforeseen circumstances this lecture has been cancelled.***

On Monday, November 25, we’ll host the final Lecture in Linguistic Diversity at Macquarie University. Hot on the heels of the Humboldt Symposium, there will be an opportunity for in-depth engagement with the research of one of our conference keynote speakers, Professor Ingrid Gogolin, Hamburg University.

Where? Macquarie University, Australian Hearing Hub Building, 16UA 1.602 Faculty Seminar Rm
When? Monday, 25 November, 11:00-13:00

Abstract: The research project I would like to present is called “Mehrsprachigkeitsentwicklung im Zeitverlauf (MEZ)” (“Multilingual development over time”).  MEZ is a longitudinal study carried out at the University of Hamburg, Germany, by Professor Gogolin and her team. The study followed two parallel cohorts in Year 7 and Year 9 through to the end of Year 9 and Year 11 respectively. Data collection was carried out in four phases (2015-2018). The initial sample includes approximately 2,000  students with German-Turkish, German-Russian, and monolingual German language backgrounds from public schools in several federal states (Bundesländer).

Data collection includes the contextual, personal, and linguistic factors that are relevant for the development of multilingualism. This includes the assessment of participants’ receptive skills (reading and listening) and productive skills (written and oral) in academic language (Bildungssprache), as well as in the heritage languages Russian and Turkish and, where applicable, in the school-taught foreign languages English, French, and Russian. Detailed linguistic findings related to the transfer between languages and on phono-prosodical language production will be presented.

An English-language report about the MEZ research project is available here.

Building the Danish boar fence (Image credit: NDR)

Fences are popular these days: not only in the US with its border-wall-to-Mexico saga but also in Denmark, which recently started to build a fence to ‘secure’ is border to Germany. The official reason for the Danish fence is to keep out wild boars who might be crossing into Denmark from Germany. Its efficiency is highly contested … Although not directly related to issues of language, there are striking parallels between the swine fence and what I, a linguistic ethnographer with 15 years of experience in the area of multilingualism and linguistic diversity, have witnessed, researched and documented in Danish schools.

With the notable exception of English, Denmark is a country strongly beholden to the norm of monolingualism. That is, there is a wide-spread understanding that the normative situation is such that everybody speaks one language. In our case, this language is Danish. Monolingualism may seem paradoxical in Denmark, a country with only 5.7 million inhabitants, which is located in close proximity to countries such as Sweden, Norway, Germany and Poland, and which depends on international trade and exchange. As a result, Denmark is home to people from a wide variety of backgrounds, and in terms of human mobility, efficient fences are even more of an illusion than a realistic substitute for policy. Yet, for the political establishment such insights seem hard to reach and to integrate with an increasingly strong focus on the idea of the nation.

The norm of monolingualism affects many citizens with a linguistic repertoire which includes resources associated with multiple languages. Despite this diversity, the monolingual norm is produced and reproduced in various ways and in many societal domains, but particularly in education. Accordingly, it is not uncommon to witness statements such as the following: “In Denmark we speak Danish. You have the right to learn all the languages you want, but it needs to take place in your spare time.” (Inger Støjberg, now Minister for Children, Gender Equality, Integration and Social affairs; the statement was made in 2012, when she was a member of the opposition). In the quote, “Danish” is used in three different meanings: as the first language of the majority population; as the official language of Denmark; and as the most important language taught in schools. The point argued for was that the state had no responsibility towards minority children’s mother tongue education.

In fact, there is only one educational setting where so-called immigrant languages are legitimate: Mother Tongue (MT) education. MT education is located within the regular school system but outside compulsory education  (for details on MT education in Denmark, see Salö et al. 2018). In my team’s research with MT classrooms in and around Copenhagen we found that MT education is still filtered through the lens of Danish monolingualism as MT education is almost exclusively viewed with regard to its effects on Danish.

The official aim of MT education is to ensure students’ linguistic competences in the language regarded as their mother tongue, and their cultural and societal competences with respect to what is formulated as their “country of origin”. Furthermore, MT education is supposed to foster metalinguistic development, enable general participation in school and society in the “host country,” i.e., Denmark, and encourage a global perspective on language and culture (Ministry of Education 2009: 3).

In terms of public opinion (as articulated in letters to the editor, editorials, interviews with politicians, and even academics), there is a general consensus to focus on MT education in terms of its effect on Danish. This aligns with the quote above. As everyone holds that in Denmark we speak Danish, the teaching of those other languages that are associated with immigrants needs to be justified with reference to Danish. This understanding of MT education is widely shared among both supporters and opponents.

The rationale for MT education according to the Danish Ministry of Education

Yet, such effects of positive transfer were never in focus in the classrooms we followed, nor were they part of regular assessment. In fact, MT classes are entirely marginalized. They are ‘fenced’ in relation to general education, and have no relation to whatever else goes on in schools. None of the mainstream teachers or school authorities seem interested in MT education classes. This makes it completely mysterious how the “effect on Danish” should ever come about. To us, there seemed to be more obvious ways to evaluate the relevance of such educational initiatives. For instance, in terms of the classes’ effects on the students’ Arabic, Persian, Polish, or Turkish competences.

Another point is that MT classrooms include participants from a range of backgrounds, a range of relations to the supposed country of origin, and to the language taught. Consequently, one cannot expect consensus about what constitutes ‘good’ or ‘bad’ language, or more or less ‘appropriate’ language (Karrebæk & Ghandchi, 2015).

In the Persian MT classrooms we followed, for example, children came from families who were political, religious, or other types of refugees, who were supporters of the current Iranian government, or who had no explicit political stance and had moved to Denmark for job opportunities or family reasons. In recognition of this diversity, the teacher aimed to create an “ideology free” space. This would enable all students to meet, regardless of their backgrounds. Yet, one way of doing this was to exclude anything that could be associated with the current Iranian government, and even with Arabic language and culture. The use of Arabic loanwords often caused controversy in the classroom. This approach made sourcing educational materials difficult because the teacher refused to use any materials that included pictures of women in hijab. Such images, he felt, would compromise his “ideology free” classroom. On the other hand, the traumas of refugee children went unrecognized. They largely remained unspoken and if they were articulated, they were ignored and suppressed. This created awkward situations and made it difficult for some children to find themselves reflected in the classes.

In the Turkish MT classroom, the diversity among the participants created other difficulties. In this class, the most striking difference concerned the teacher. He was of Kurdish origin and his Turkish language included features that revealed this background. In general, there are strong negative associations with Kurdish-Turkish, and we saw children, and a few parents, voice this in more or less direct ways (Karrebæk & Nergiz, 2019). The teacher, however, had few options to find another job, and we doubt that anybody had thought about how an internal Turkish conflict would play out in a Copenhagen MT classroom, and how this could or should have been handled by the employing authorities.

My work with linguistic diversity in education has shown how immigrants are evaluated and valorized in relation to their Danish competences; how languages other than Danish are, by and large, ignored, devalued and suppressed by the authorities; and how children growing up in this linguistically narrow-minded atmosphere struggle to integrate their mother tongues into an attractive public identity. This is not to say that these outcomes are planned or even desired by Danish authorities. Rather, they result from a severely limited imagination when it comes to multilingualism and cultural diversity. The discursive means to imagine cultural, ethnic and linguistic diversity differently are currently lacking. After all, “in Denmark we speak Danish”. These beliefs and attitudes create a difficult work climate for MT teachers as they have to stay in fenced-in areas in a national setting very unfavorable to the use of immigrant languages. They curtail a good educational climate and obstruct any constructive engagement with MT education.

Nobody really seems to care what goes on in MT education because it is understood as being of little relevance and value – to society at large and ultimately to the children themselves. MT classes were fenced off from the children’s regular schooling experiences. Arguably, this neglect even paved the way for  “importing” conflicts from elsewhere.

In short, the orientation to standard Danish and monolingualism leads to marginalization of some children, alienation of others, poor learning conditions, and lots of missed learning opportunities, a linguistically poor society, and a society haunted by globalization and a world which it tries to keep out with a fence.

References:

Karrebæk, M.S. & Ö. Nergiz (2019). Language ideologies, the soft g, and parody in the Turkish mother tongue classroom. Multilingua https://doi.org/10.1515/multi-2018-0086

Karrebæk, M.S. & N. Ghandchi (2015). ‘Pure’ Farsi and political sensitivities: Language and ideologies in Farsi complementary language classrooms in Denmark. Journal of Sociolinguistics 19(1): 62-90.

Sahlö, L., C. Hedman, N. Ganuza & M.S. Karrebæk (2018). Mother tongue instruction in Sweden and Denmark: Language policy, cross-field effects, and linguistic exchange rates. Language Policy 17(4), 591-616

A restaurant sign featuring both Tibetan and Chinese, in a village where the Tibetan residents speak Ngandehua, one of Tibet’s minority languages (Image: Gerald Roche)

As elsewhere in High Asia, minority languages in Tibet are the first victims of international tensions.

During the recent UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) periodic review of China, a total of twelve countries raised the issue of Tibet. In their response, the Chinese delegation devoted two minutes to discussing Tibet (begins 2:33:39), and half that time was spent talking about the Tibetan language.

Interestingly, none of the countries that raised the issue of Tibet explicitly referred to language. Why, then, did the Chinese delegation draw attention to this issue?

In part it is because they consider addressing language issues a key success in China’s program for Tibet. In white papers on Tibet in 2015 (April and September), 2011, and 1992, China has repeatedly boasted of its successful provision of language rights for Tibetans.

But, language has also been a significant aspect of Tibetan grievances and international scrutiny, particularly in the last decade. Students have protested against changes to bilingual education several times since 2010. Many of the 154 self-immolators in Tibet expressed fears regarding the fate of the Tibetan language. And most recently, the imprisonment of language advocate Tashi Wangchuk brought condemnation from the international community, including from within the UN.

China therefore had good reason to focus on language issues in its response during the UNHRC periodic review.

China’s discussion of language issues focused on the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR)—despite the fact that most Tibetans in China live outside it. They described efforts to translate official documents and media into Tibetan, the successful digital encoding of the Tibetan script, and the implementation of a bilingual education system in Mandarin and Tibetan.

It is unclear if these measures actually constitute an effective offset to the aggressive promotion of Mandarin. For example, Tibetans are currently deeply concerned about the increasing presence of Chinese loanwords in Tibetan, considering it evidence of more systematic imbalances between the two languages. However, even if these measures are effective in protecting Tibetan, they completely fail to protect other languages of the region.

For example, the non-Tibetan Monpa and Lhoba peoples of the TAR speak several languages. Although China is keen to draw attention to their Tibetan bilingual education program in the TAR, the languages of the Monpa and Lhoba people are completely excluded from schools. They instead receive education in Tibetan and Chinese, bringing with it all the well-known detriments of being denied mother tongue education.

Furthermore, not all Tibetans in the TAR use Tibetan as their first language. Linguists are still recognizing previously un-described languages in the region. There is also a growing community of Tibetan Sign Language users. Neither group is catered for by bilingual education policies that focus only on Tibetan and Chinese.

If we widen the scope to include Tibetans outside the TAR, the significance of this exclusion grows. Tibetans within China speak at least 26 distinct non-Tibetan languages, none of which are recognized by the state. A total lack of state protections for these languages is leading to language loss—all these languages are now being replaced by Tibetan or Chinese.

It is also worth pointing out that whether or not Tibetan itself is a single language is not a trivial question. Although sharing a common written language, the spoken forms of Tibetan are highly divergent. Some linguists classify ‘the Tibetan language’ in China into up to 16 languages. Comprehension between these spoken languages is low. Bilingual education policies that ignore this diversity also ignore the important role that comprehension plays in the classroom.

The response of the Chinese delegate at the UN periodic review, therefore, was missing the point. Promoting a single language is an inadequate measure to protect the rights of a multilingual population. In fact, promoting the Tibetan language in many cases impinges upon linguistic rights. This is the case not only of non-Tibetan populations such as the Monpa and Lhoba, but also for Tibetans who do not speak Tibetan, or primarily use a signed language.

Unfortunately, Chinese policy-makers are not alone in missing this point. Although international organizations that advocate for Tibet frequently focus on language issues, they consistently refer to Tibetans as an homogenous population with a single language. Like the Chinese state, they tend to ignore languages when talking about language rights.

The International Campaign for Tibet (ICT), for example, expends significant effort on their website explaining that the Tibetan language is not Chinese. And despite the fact that ICT has campaigned for Tibetan’s language rights, including within the UN, this has always overlooked the region’s linguistic diversity. The Tibetan Center for Human Rights and Democracy, meanwhile, has published two reports focusing on language in education. Both these reports, in 2003 and 2007, focus only on a single Tibetan language.

Representatives of the Chinese state, and the international community of Tibet advocates, therefore, find themselves curiously united on this issue. Despite their obvious open disagreements, both agree that Tibetans speak only a single language. They therefore continue to debate linguistic rights in ways that erase and exclude Tibet’s minority languages.

This erasure and exclusion matters. It perpetuates the impression that some languages, like Tibetan, deserve rights, whilst others do not. And yet a commitment to the idea of rights involves a commitment to the equality of all people regardless of their language.

If China really wants to fulfill its constitutional promise to respect the rights of ethnic minorities, it needs to support all their languages, not just a few carefully chosen ones. And if the international community wants to hold China accountable for their failures to respect minority rights, we need to stop replicating their erasure of linguistic diversity, and focus attention on Tibet’s most vulnerable populations.

Related content

• How do language rights affect minority languages in China?
• Educating Burmese migrant students in China
• Is English stealing the home of Mongolian?
• Debating language standardization
• Explorations in language shaming
• Access denied
• Gaining a green thumb for grassroots language activism
• Crossing borders or carrying borders?
• English in the global village
• Grassroots multilingualism
• Naxi, Chinese and English

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.

My banal cosmopolitan fridge magnets

In response to my post about the banal cosmopolitanism of multilingual welcome signs last week, a number of people suggested that they quite enjoy finding their language(s) in such signs. This made me think of the ways in which global linguistic hierarchies are being produced and reproduced through practices that ostensibly value multilingualism. Even being listed in such signage may be an index of privilege while the majority of the world’s languages and peoples are rendered invisible and speechless.

The fridge magnets in my house constitute a perfect example of banal cosmopolitanism: there is one in the shape of a rooster that says “Portugal” and “Macau Souvenir”; one that spells out “Abu Dhabi” (the model horse that used to be stuck under the name has come off); one that has a map of the North American West Coast and says “California – a view of the world”; there is one that says “New Zealand” and features four colorful kiwis; another one in the shape of the map of New York State that says “Ithaca of New York”; a round one with “Buddha Eyes” from “Nepal”, where “Nepal” is written in the Latin script but stylized in a way that looks vaguely like Devanagari; a doll-shaped one with Korean script and the English caption “hand made”; and then there are six magnets featuring a toy rabbit by the name of “Felix”, who plays with a globe, travels by plane and is placed against a bottle of “original American ketchup”.

“Letters from Felix: A little rabbit on a world tour” (Cover page, German edition)

The toy rabbit Felix is the main character in a series of German children’s books and animated films. The character has been immensely successful since it was first launched in 1994. Books in the series have been translated into 29 languages (which is highly unusual for German children’s books) and more than seven million copies have been sold worldwide. There is a feature-length movie and a huge range of Felix-branded merchandise including toys, lollies, reading glasses for children, travel accessories and much more. Since 2013 Felix has been an ambassador for the global charity SOS Children’s Villages.

In my house, we have a copy of one of the German-version books in the series, the well-read and much-loved Briefe von Felix: Ein kleiner Hase auf Weltreise (“Letters from Felix: A little rabbit on a world tour”). It is a prime example of banal cosmopolitanism: it presents the global sphere as mundane and socializes young children into the practice of tourism and international travel as normal.

It also presents the “world” of Felix’ “world tour” as an exclusively North-Atlantic world.

Felix’ letter from Paris

The plot is straightforward: it all starts with an airport scene and a family returning from their (obviously international but destination unspecified) summer holiday. Sophie, one of four children in the family, loses her toy rabbit Felix. After this sad end to the holidays, the new school year starts with a surprise: a letter from Felix. It turns out that the rabbit had ended up on the wrong flight and is now visiting London. The remainder of the book consists of the letters that Felix sends from his travels – in addition to London, he visits Paris, Rome, Cairo, Kenya and New York City. Each letter is read by the whole family and taken as an educational opportunity to learn more about each of Felix’ destinations. On December 06 – St Nicholas Day, when children in Germany get gifts – Felix comes back to Sophie with a suitcase full of souvenirs.

The book is highly multimodal: in addition to text and images, it also features airmailed letters that can be removed from their envelopes and read separately. The letters serve to connect the world of the German children as they go through the fall period between summer holidays and Christmas to the six international destinations visited by the toy rabbit.

In each letter, Felix proves to be a keen observer of language and culture and provides information about Paris, Rome, Cairo, Kenya and New York City that could be considered educational for children. One piece of information that children can take away from the book is that the world is multilingual; or, rather, that the Western world is multilingual. In other words, language is a topic of Felix’ letters from London, Paris, Rome and New York City but not of his letters from Cairo and Kenya.

The map of Felix’ “world” tour

In addition to these language fun facts, the letters from London, Paris, Rome and New York City also provide information about famous buildings and other tourist sights. Each letter then provides a learning opportunity for the family as Sophie asks her parents, grandma or aunt about further information, which they then look up in an encyclopedia, another book or even a photo album from previous travels. Through this kind of further research, Sophie, for instance, discovers that the “secret code” Felix refers to in his letter from Rome is actually Latin. Unlike her older brother who studies Latin in school, we learn that Sophie is too young to study Latin but that she really enjoys looking through her brother’s Latin textbook and looking at the images of ancient Roman buildings such as the Colosseum or the Pantheon.

By contrast to these four cities, Cairo and Kenya are represented differently.

Felix’ souvenirs: stickers – to represent fridge magnets? – for banal cosmopolitanism to colonize yet another space

In the letter from Cairo there is no mention of Arabic or contemporary life in Egypt; rather Felix visits the pyramids and it almost seems as if he had travelled back in time to the age of the pharaohs. The sense of time travel is reinforced through the fact that Sophie’s additional research is not undertaken through conversations with other family members and books but through a visit to the museum where there is a show entitled “ÄGYPTEN – ein vergangenes Königreich” (“Egypt – a bygone kingdom”). Further related learning is achieved by building a Lego pyramid.

Kenya – the only destination that is identified as a country rather than a city – has neither language nor culture: in fact, it seems empty of people. Felix only observes animals: elephants, zebras and lions; and to do further research about Kenya, Sophie visits the zoo.

There can be no doubt that the playful integration of multilingualism in this book is valuable for young children: they learn that there are many different languages in the world, that linguistic diversity is intriguing and that speaking different languages is enjoyable and pleasurable. It’s an important message.

However, the fact that the message of the pleasure of language learning and multilingualism is restricted to European languages also carries another message: that Egyptians and Kenyans do not have languages that are intriguing and worth paying attention to. In fact, along with their languages, the people of Africa are neither heard nor seen: for all the reader learns in the book, they may not even exist.

Felix’ “world tour” reminds us that the world of banal cosmopolitanism is not flat, as many globalization pundits would have us believe. It’s a hierarchy where even being listed can be a privilege.

Related content

• Banal cosmopolitanism
• What makes foreigner weird? A quick guide to orientalism
• Chapter Two “Linguistic Diversity and Stratification” of Piller, I. (2016). Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice: An Introduction to Applied Sociolinguistics. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

Grade 2 Oral Tetun class

Editor’s note: As the Language on the Move team is busy preparing for the “Bridging Language Barriers” Symposium to be hosted at Macquarie University on March 16, Kerry Taylor-Leech introduces us to a mother-tongue education pilot in East Timor. Mother-tongue-based multilingual education is a key strategy for equitable access to education and Kerry explains how the pilot bridges barriers to learning faced by rural children in the global south.

Registration for the “Bridging Language Barriers” Symposium closes today but if you cannot attend in person, you can still join the conversation with our team of live-tweeters on the day. Our Twitter hashtag will be #LOTM2017. Follow @Lg_on_the_Move

***

Hatudu ba malai iha ne’bé ho kámera! (Point to the foreigner with the camera!). Some thirty little faces and fingers swing round in my direction. I am at the back of a classroom observing a Grade 2 Tetun-as-a-second language lesson in a school in Lautém, East Timor. Turning observation on its head, this energetic and charismatic teacher has made use of me in his Total Physical Response (TPR) lesson. The children love it and I too am enjoying myself immensely.

Grade 1 child reading independently

The lesson is taking place in a school participating in a mother-tongue based multilingual education pilot. Known in East Timor as EMBLI (in Tetun: Edukasaun Multilingue Bazia Lian-Inan—Multilingual Education in Mother Tongues), the pilot is overseen by the Timor-Leste National Commission for UNESCO and supported by a network of agencies and organisations known as Repete 13. The lesson observation was part of several visits I was lucky enough to make to the pilot schools in 2016, accompanying EMBLI trainers on their regular monitoring tours. I’ve been visiting East Timor since 2001 for work, consultancy and research. I was making this trip to catch up with the pilot, which I have been following since its inception. I’ve also followed and been involved in the sometimes-heated public debates that preceded it.

Fataluku word recognition

In 2013 the East Timorese Ministry of Education implemented a three-year mother-tongue pilot in three districts with large communities of endogenous language speakers (Galoli in Manatuto District, Fataluku in Lautém District and Baikenu in Oecusse District). Operating from pre-primary to Grade 3 level, the pilot officially ended in 2015 but was extended for a further two years and will include Grade 4 in 2017. Now is a good time to be writing about the pilot because the first results of an Endline Survey have recently been released. Conducted by the well-known assessment specialist Dr Steve Walter, the survey compared children’s performance in EMBLI schools, government schools and Portuguese-immersion schools. Not surprisingly, the results show the benefits of learning in a language a child understands best. EMBLI children showed marked gains compared to the other children, especially in reading. While test results are only part of the picture, they are exciting for EMBLI as they provide quantitative evidence that MTB-MLE is effective. The results are particularly pleasing because the schools are located in remote areas, where children’s performance has traditionally lagged behind that of children in urban schools. One of the most conclusive pieces of evidence from the survey is that EMBLI has produced children who are independent readers by Grade 1 – a remarkable achievement considering the difficult physical conditions in which these children are expected to learn.

Fataluku reading books

EMBLI’s achievements overall in the last three years have been impressive. EMBLI has adopted the Two-Track Method for literacy teaching, advocated and adapted by the Summer Institute of Linguistics. This highly structured approach is used in many MTB-MLE programs around the world. It is based on a combination of meaning (i.e., understanding whole text) and accuracy (i.e., understanding and using word identification strategies).

The method appears to work well in low-resource settings where children come from pre-literate homes and parents cannot easily support their children’s literacy development. Despite the dilapidated conditions and lack of facilities in East Timorese public schools generally, EMBLI teachers make their classrooms welcoming places where children are exposed to attractive, colourful materials in their home language in the form of pictures, big books, activity books and readers that reflect images from their everyday life and cultural realities. Children’s own work also now brightens up the classroom walls.

Teaching aids made from local materials

In low-resource educational settings, teachers have no choice but to be creative. EMBLI teachers supplement professionally produced material with literacy and numeracy resources made from sticks and pebbles, coconut shells, palm leaves, seeds, cardboard, buttons and plastic bottles. For early writing the pre-school children often use slates, a cheap, sturdy, and easily renewable resource.

In addition to these models of sustainability, one of EMBLI’s greatest achievements in my view is its empowerment of teachers. EMBLI trainers report that since their involvement with the pilot, the teachers are happier, more confident and have a sense of agency. In this video teachers and students can be seen at work (note: the video is in the official languages, Tetun and Portuguese). The slogan on the T-shirts reads “I like learning in my mother tongue.”

The pilot teachers work in tandem with teaching assistants. Although this system is not particularly new in East Timor, previously the teaching assistant’s primary role was to keep order and this was often done by means of the stick rather than the carrot.  EMBLI has encouraged collaborative planning and team teaching as well as approaches to classroom management that respect children’s human rights.

Pre-school teacher helping a child with letter formation using a slate

EMBLI trainers make regular site visits and teachers also benefit from being able to attend mostly local workshops and seminars. Travel from the districts to Dili takes at least a full day and even to reach district centres, teachers often have to leave home before dawn and walk very long distances. EMBLI has shown that on-site teacher training is a viable and cost-effective alternative to training conducted in the capital.

EMBLI is also a model of how to build trust and sustain relationships with communities. Parents are supportive of the pilot as they are more able to interact with school and they see their children are learning to read and write. To date the EMBLI pilot has successfully put into practice three essential principles of MTB-MLE: promoting fluency in community and official languages, creating a supportive environment for literacy, and empowering teachers, learners and parents. As countries of the global South struggle to achieve effective universal primary education the EMBLI pilot provides a model of collaboration and sustainable practice. In its three-year life EMBLI has made a significant difference to children’s learning and the prospects for its future look bright. As they say in Tetun and Portuguese, Parabens! (Congratulations!)

Photos taken with permission by Kerry Taylor-Leech

Despite their commitment to diversity and equality of access, contemporary multicultural societies and their institutions struggle to find effective ways to overcome linguistic disadvantage and break down language barriers. Today’s diverse societies comprise people with a wide range of linguistic proficiencies while institutions often continue to operate through the monolingual standard language. This mismatch can create significant barriers to social cohesion, educational success, employment opportunities and community participation.

A one-day symposium at Macquarie University asks how such language barriers can best be bridged.

Bridging Language Barriers Symposium

When: Thursday, March 16, 2017

Where: Macquarie University

Overview

The focus of the symposium will be on innovative German and Australian research that engages with the social and cultural challenges resulting from linguistic diversity. Due to migration and globalization, speakers of different languages no longer live in isolation but are increasingly in contact with each other. Even so, a pervasive monolingual mindset in many contexts has meant that institutions have been slow to recognize the challenges of multilingualism for full participation. Concerted and systematic efforts to bridge institutional language barriers to full and equal participation for those from non-dominant language backgrounds are largely lacking.

The negative impacts of language barriers contribute to group segregation and are connected to exclusion from full and equal social participation in education, employment and other spheres of social life. In fact, the language barriers faced by multilinguals in monolingual institutions often remain invisible and unacknowledged as “communication” is tacitly equated with monolingual language use; and “communication breakdown” is often assumed to be the sole responsibility of social outsiders rather than the joint responsibility of everyone within the inherently cooperative processes of communication.

The symposium will have a particular focus on linguistic barriers in educational institutions, where minority students face the double challenge of having to learn a new language while also learning academic content through the medium of that new language. If limited linguistic proficiency in the dominant language is misrecognized as poor academic performance, long-term negative consequences such as limited career prospects and social alienation may result. Language barriers must therefore be understood holistically as barriers to social participation more broadly; and strategies for overcoming language barriers must be located at the intersection of institutional language policies and wider social participation in groups and networks.

Aims

Against this background, the symposium has three aims:

• To showcase German and Australian research that examines the nature and consequences of language barriers in educational institutional contexts, and at the intersection of formal and informal participation.
• To highlight positive experiences and practices that serve to mitigate linguistic barriers to full and equitable formal and informal participation.
• To explore the possibilities for joint action on the basis of research conducted by the two partner institutions of Hamburg University and Macquarie University.

Keynote speakers

Funded by the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) under a partnership grant between Hamburg University and Macquarie University, we are delighted to welcome Professor Ingrid Gogolin and Professor Drorit Lengyel, both from Hamburg University, as keynote speakers.

Professor Ingrid Gogolin

Ingrid Gogolin is Professor of Comparative and Intercultural Education at the University of Hamburg, where she heads the research group “Diversity in Education Research” together with Drorit Lengyel. She is also the coordinator of the German National Research Cluster “Language Education and Multilingualism” funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research. Her research focuses on migration and linguistic diversity in education. One of her current major projects takes a longitudinal perspective on the multilingual development in German, Russian and Turkish as home languages and English and French as foreign languages of over 1,800 high school students.

Ingrid Gogolin is well-known to Australian audiences due to her work on the monolingual mindset with the late Michael Clyne and we are delighted to be able to welcome her back to Australia.

Professor Drorit Lengyel

Drorit Lengyel is Professor of Education in Multilingual Contexts at the University of Hamburg and she heads the research group “Diversity in Education Research” together with Ingrid Gogolin. Her research focuses on language in early childhood education and language education (Sprachbildung) between the school and the home. She is also an expert in teacher training, where her focus is on preparing teachers to work under conditions of rapid social and cultural change. One of her current major projects is a longitudinal study of the effects of coordinated German and home language programs for children (and their parents) in the primary years.

Would you like to be part of the Bridging Language Barriers symposium?

We still have a few slots for presenters who wish to present their relevant research. If you would like to be considered as a presenter, please send a 200-word abstract to languageonthemove@mq.edu.au by January 31, 2017.

Attendance will be free but numbers are limited. To avoid disappointment, watch this space and subscribe to our newsletter in the footer line so that you will not miss out on any announcements. The full program and a sign-up facility will be made available in February.

For those who are interested in participating but unable to attend on the day, Language on the Move will host a range of related online discussions and forums throughout February and March 2017. Our Twitter hashtag will be #LOTM2017. Follow @Lg_on_the_Move

Organizing committee

Ingrid Piller (chair), Agnes Bodis, Alexandra Grey, Awatif Alshammri, Gegentuul Baioud, Hanna Torsh, Jinhyun Cho, Laura Smith-Khan, Li Jia, Livia Gerber, Loy Lising, Rahel Cramer, Shiva Motaghi Tabari, Vera W. Tetteh, Yining Wang