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!

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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!

Diversity of international students is celebrated through images that map students onto nations represented by their flags

International education is often touted as a golden road to fluency in another language and the development of a global vision. However, ethnographic research into the language learning and settlement experiences of international students in a variety of national contexts has painted a less rosy picture, as the Language-on-Move archives devoted to international education show.

Such research has found many discontinuities between the promises of international education and students’ actual experiences.

One of the problems in the existing system of international education is the nation-based categorization of seeing international students of diverse backgrounds as a homogeneous group (Piller, 2017).

This categorization is further complicated when international students return to their ancestral homelands for their international education. Such “return migrants” may be positioned in often conflicting ways on the continuum of local and migrant, native and foreigner, as our recent research explores (Li & Han, 2020).

Ethnic Chinese students migrating to China for their international education

As one of the largest diasporas, ethnic Chinese constitute a population of over 50 million. The great majority of them live in Southeast Asia. Ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia have been perceived as a powerful nexus between China and Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries, mostly due to their remarkable economic performance and their historical contribution to China’s nationalist movement in the early twentieth century. As China is emerging as one of the largest receiving countries for international education, ethnic Chinese may get the first admission ticket to higher education institutions in China.

However, the prioritization of ethnic Chinese migrating to China for their international education is not without problems. These students are confronted with several linguistic and cultural challenges.

Some of these challenges are similar to what has been reported in previous studies, and others are specific to this group and have to date mostly been overlooked in the existing literature on international education.

One big challenge relates to a conflict between students’ self-perceptions of their identities and the ways in which others perceive them. An ethnic Chinese student from Myanmar, for instance, expressed her shock and confusion since coming to China: “我以为我的根在中国，来中国我发现我没根了！” (“I used to think that my roots are in China. However, coming to China has made me rootless.”)

Like this female student, ethnic Chinese students from Myanmar used to be oriented towards China. Learning Putonghua in Myanmar was a top priority for their transnational empowerment (Li, 2017; Li, 2020; Li, Ai, & Zhang, 2020). However, once they move to China for their studies, their trajectories gradually gear them to identify Myanmar as their true homeland and as their land of opportunity. How is this possible?

Linguistic and cultural essentialism

To find out, we (Li & Han 2020) examined the learning experiences of 14 ethnic Chinese from Myanmar who were enrolled in Putonghua-medium degree programs at a Chinese university. We found that the language ideologies of speaking standard Putonghua and writing simplified Chinese characters challenged these students’ sense of being authentically Chinese. In the process, they were turned from proficient Chinese speakers in Myanmar to deficient Putonghua speakers in China.

Ethnic Chinese students from Myanmar are often made to feel weird for engaging in practices that are considered “Burmese”, such as putting on thanaka, a protective white-paste face mask

National essentialism was another ideological force that challenged their Chinese identity. In their classrooms and everyday interactions, the students found themselves positioned not as ethnic Chinese but as Burmese nationals. This “one nation, one culture, one language” mindset not only erased our participants’ Chinese identity but also reinforced an essentialist view of Myanmar as the country of the Burmese, the dominant ethnic group in that highly diverse country.

Neo-essentialist curriculum

Most research into international education is based in Anglophone countries, where a monolingual mindset prevails and exclusive use of English is promoted while languages other than English are devalued.

This is not the case in China. China’s promotion of Putonghua as an international language follows a reciprocal approach that also values the languages international students bring. Their bilingualism is regarded as an asset. In our case, both Burmese and Putonghua constitute desired linguistic capital to achieve mutual cooperation and promote the regional economy and integration between China and ASEAN.

However, this promotion of bilingualism is not unproblematic, either. Linguistic diversity is not unconditionally valued but rests on its convertibility in an international communication market – between the Chinese and Burmese state in this context.

This orientation to the nation as a market applauds bilingualism in Burmese and Putonghua but marginalizes bilingualism in non-standard Chinese varieties and languages that are not official to a nation.

In short, our research demonstrates that the neoliberal valorization of bilingualism is not in and of itself better than the monolingual mindset: it only reproduces the cultural superiority of essentialized linguistic icons while devaluing and erasing non-privileged cultural forms and identities.

The future of Chinese international education

While the Covid-19 pandemic has revealed the language challenges confronting diverse populations worldwide (Piller, 2020; Piller, Zhang, & Li, 2020), it has also reconfigured the global economic and political order.

Since the outbreak of Covid-19 early last year, China has shifted its global strategy by strengthening its regional connectivity with Asian countries. In 2020, ASEAN replaced the USA and EU to become China’s largest trading partner. A recent trade agreement, Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) has reinforced the regional integration between China and its region. As the largest free trading zone covering 30% of the global populations and 30% of global GDP, RCEP will mark a new era for Asia-Pacific cooperation in various social dimensions.

Will the free movement of goods and people in this vast zone also lead us to a greater valorization of linguistic and cultural diversity? Will it open a space for embracing diversity and bringing greater equity and social justice?

Our research suggests that, as long as the ideological foundations of linguistic and cultural essentialism stay in place, the international education in RCEP may just be old wine in a new bottle.

References

Li, J. (2017). Social Reproduction and Migrant Education: A Critical Sociolinguistic Ethnography of Burmese Students’ Learning Experiences at a Border High School in China. (PhD). Macquarie University.
Li, J. (2020). Transnational migrant students between inclusive discourses and exclusionary practices. Multilingua, 39(2), 193-212. https://doi.org/10.1515/multi-2019-0125
Li, J., Ai, B., & Zhang, J. (2020). Negotiating language ideologies in learning Putonghua: Myanmar ethnic minority students’ perspectives on multilingual practices in a borderland school. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 41(7), 633-646. doi:10.1080/01434632.2019.1678628
Li, J., & Han, H. (2020). Learning to orient toward Myanmar: ethnic Chinese students from Myanmar at a university in China. Language, Culture and Curriculum, 1-19. doi:10.1080/07908318.2020.1858095
Piller, I. (2017). Intercultural communication. Edinburgh University Press.
Piller, I. (Ed.) (2020). Language-on-the-Move COVID-19 Archives.
Piller, I., Zhang, J., & Li, J. (2020). Linguistic diversity in a time of crisis: Language challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. Multilingua, 39(5), 503-515. https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/multi-2020-0136/html

Dr Li Jia (4th from right) with her supervisor, Professor Ingrid Piller, and members of the Language-on-the-Move team

The Language on the Move team is proud to celebrate another PhD in our group. Dr LI Jia was awarded her PhD degree by Macquarie University for her thesis about “Social Reproduction and Migrant Education: A Critical Sociolinguistic Ethnography of Burmese Students’ Learning Experiences at a Border High School in China.”

Congratulations, Dr Li Jia!

The thesis takes the reader to the Chinese-Burmese border area of Yunnan province in South-West China, and begins as follows:

Excerpt from Li Jia (2017), “Social Reproduction and Migrant Education: A Critical Sociolinguistic Ethnography of Burmese Students’ Learning Experiences at a Border High School in China”

Borderlands are often flashpoints for political or ethnic tensions. At the same time, they may also be sites of heightened intercultural engagement and contact. The China-Myanmar border area is an example of the latter, where in recent decades people’s desire to interact with each other and to understand each other’s languages and cultures has increased substantially. As a native of the China-Myanmar border area, I was born and brought up in a Chinese border town close to Myanmar, and many of my relatives and friends to this day work and live on the Burmese side of the border. Like many Han people, my family has kept our ancestral book, which traces my family’s presence in the region back to the military migrations during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). The book records the male names of each generation and highlights the images of those who bore official ranks. Despite the fact that my family can clearly trace our Han ancestry over six centuries, our lifestyle is quite different from that of Han people in more central areas of China. As border people, we find it much easier to go “abroad” to Myanmar than to travel “nationally” outside of Yunnan province. Border people are conveniently allowed to travel to designated Burmese border towns without applying for a visa. Crossing this international border for us often means little more than crossing a bridge, a road or a river. Living in the border area, we are more familiar with the tropical foods imported from Myanmar and Thailand than many of the foods advertised on Chinese national television.

Trilingual signage at the Muse checkpoint on the China-Myanmar border

Despite this familiarity, interactions between Chinese and Burmese are not necessarily deep. Over the past three decades, Burmese people can also be seen across all walks of life on the Chinese side of the border particularly in domestic work, on construction sites, in restaurants, shops, hospitals and schools. However, despite their increased visibility, I grew up knowing very little about this group of “familiar strangers” who cover their faces in thanaka, a yellowish-white cosmetic paste made from ground bark, and who wear longyi, a sarong-like skirt, and flip-flops in the streets. At a very basic level, my research was motivated by the desire to learn more about interactions between the “familiar strangers” calling the Chinese-Burmese borderlands home.

The interactions I am interested in are embedded in significant socio-economic and developmental differences between China and Myanmar. With China and Chinese people the “senior partners” in most border relationships, Chinese language learning is of immense economic value to Burmese people. For instance, Burmese workers are often paid differentially according to their Chinese language proficiency. The owner of a seafood restaurant in Tengchong explained to me that she paid the lowest wages to Burmese workers who could not speak any Chinese and who were washing dishes in the kitchen. Servers with some Chinese proficiency were paid more and could hope for further pay increase if they improved their Chinese. The top job in the restaurant was being a cashier and was reserved for the most fluent Chinese speaker. When I asked the cashier how he had learned Chinese, he explained that he had learned all his Chinese on the job. Having migrated to Tengchong from Myanmar two years earlier, he spoke the local dialect fluently. His dream for the future was to improve his standard Chinese, to move to Shanghai, to marry a Shanghainese girl and to start his own seafood restaurant. His story is not unusual. As I discovered over the course of my fieldwork, Chinese language learning plays an important role in the trajectories, experiences and aspirations of border people from the Burmese side of the border.

“Learn Chinese, Double Your World”: Promotion of Chinese as a global language

Burmese border people are not alone in learning a new language to be able to communicate more efficiently in the border regions. While Burmese may not be as essential to the socio-economic prospects of Chinese citizens as Chinese is to those of Burmese citizens, there is no doubt that Burmese language learning is beneficial and widely desired. For instance, a Tengchong policewoman, Ms Lei, told me that she had been recruited into the police force because of her Burmese proficiency. After failing the national university entrance exam, Ms Lei had to look for a job in her home town. Unsure of her prospects, she considered the importance of Burmese and decided to attend an evening school. Compared to English, Ms Lei felt it was so much easier to learn Burmese. It took her only two months to pass an interview for a border trade company selling agricultural machinery and equipment to Myanmar. This job experience helped her improve her Burmese greatly because she had to communicate with her Burmese customers every day. With her enhanced Burmese skills, she got a chance to work for the police emergency hotline. From there, she got promoted to a police officer role that focussed on the registration of Burmese migrants. Normally, such a position can only be attained by someone with a university degree but for Ms Lei Burmese proficiency proved more valuable than a university degree. Again, Ms Lei is not unusual, and many border people orient to local transnational opportunities rather than more centralized opportunity structures. Apart from being successful in finding work with a government institution, Burmese language skills are particularly useful in the burgeoning border trade with Myanmar.

Stories such as these are part of the everyday experiences in the border region, where people have come to realize the increasing importance of interacting with each other and knowing each other’s languages in doing business, making money, looking for a good job, gaining promotion or even creating a desirable marriage. For Burmese migrants, the hope that learning Chinese will improve their future is not only observable in worksites such as the restaurant described above, but also from the fact that an increasing number of Burmese students are sent to high schools on the Chinese side of the border for their formal education. As an educator, I decided to focus my research on this group of young people caught up in the socio-political transformation of the borderlands and the corresponding intense transnational interactions they experience. What are their educational trajectories and experiences?

Migration for educational purposes has become common practice as students and their families seek a better future. In the twenty-first century, educational migration is no longer confined to English-speaking countries and “the West”. Many Asian countries such as Hong Kong, Singapore and mainland China are emerging as popular destinations for international students (Chiang, 2015; Gu & Patkin, 2013; Kang, 2012). Therefore, there is a necessity to extend existing research in migrant education to include a greater diversity of sociolinguistic contexts (Piller, 2016a, pp. 1-15). Considering the increasing prominence of Chinese language promotion worldwide and very little research on international students’ learning experiences in mainland China, this thesis aims to contribute to the knowledge of migration, Chinese language education and social justice, in general, and of Chinese border high school education and Burmese students’ language learning experiences, in particular.

Want to read more? The full thesis is available for open access through our PhD Hall of Fame.

“Learn Chinese, Double Your World”: Promotion of Chinese as a global language

Research seminar about the language learning experiences of Burmese high school students in China

Topic: Following the China Dream (中国梦): Burmese students in a Yunnan border high school

Where: Macquarie University, S2.6 (AHH) 1.620 Faculty Tute Rm (16UA),

When: Wednesday, 22 February, 13:00-14:00

Presenter: Li Jia

Host: Professor Ingrid Piller

Abstract: In the current era of globalization desired migration destinations are no longer confined to Anglophone and Western countries. Given the increasing prominence of China’s economy and soft power projection in the world, China has emerged as an increasingly attractive destination for international students. One of the first studies to systematically examine their educational experiences, this seminar shares findings from an ethnographic research project on Burmese students’ language learning experiences at a border high school in Yunnan in China’s south-west. The focus will be on the educational barriers experienced by Burmese migrant students, the educational policies and teaching practices affecting them, the agentive practices of migrant students and their interactions with the educational context in which they find themselves. The presentation will be of interest not only to those with a background in Educational Linguistics and Chinese Studies but to anyone wishing to understand how migrant education produces and reproduces the social order, particularly against the novel promotion of Chinese as a global language.

Li Jia (3rd from left) during field work

About the presenter: LI Jia is Associate Professor of Foreign Languages at Yunnan University. For the past three years, she has been a PhD student in the Linguistics Department at Macquarie University. Under the supervision of Ingrid Piller and as a member of the Language on the Move research group, she has conducted a critical sociolinguistic ethnography of the education experiences of Burmese migrant students in China. Her thesis is currently under examination. Her research interests are in the sociolinguistics of language learning and ASEAN students’ education in her native Yunnan, China.

Christmas party at an International High School in Yunnan

Over the past few decades, an increasing number of Burmese international students have enrolled in high schools in Yunnan, a province in the Southwest of China bordering Myanmar. More and more Burmese students are crossing the border in order to receive formal education in China. These international students have come to China with various dreams and parental expectations. Upon crossing the border gates, the contrast between the two countries remains imprinted on their memory, marking the beginning of Burmese students’ lives in China. One Burmese university student told me about her first impression upon crossing the border:

我们的国门，我们的路是石头满地飞，中国是油漆路，有多大区别！ 这边是，国门很大，我们的国门就是一个篱笆一样的，去到中国人，人家很有礼貌，穿着制服问你：‘你好 怎么怎么样’； 我们是穿着拖鞋，拿着钢笔在那里给你勾，给你过.

Our national check-point, our road is full of gravel flying everywhere. In China, it’s a tarred road. What a big difference! On this side, the [Chinese] national gate is very big. Our national gate is like a bamboo fence. When you go to the Chinese border soldiers, they are very polite, dressed in military uniform and greeting you with ‘nihao blah blah blah’ [makes typing motions with her fingers to indicate computerized bureaucratic procedures]. Ours are wearing flip-flops, holding pens and ticking boxes on forms before allowing you to pass.

The modern border buildings and infrastructure, advanced computer technologies, standardized Chinese language and homogenous military uniforms seem to mark a positive beginning for the international experiences of Burmese students. However, being able to cross the geographical border does not mean that Burmese students are able to cross the various ideological boundaries that they encounter in their daily lives.

The story of Yingying (a pseudonym) shows that even after crossing a physical national border, international students may continue to carry the border within them.

Yingying, a straight-A student in Myanmar, came to China to attend high school in 2013 when she was 14 years old. She and her parents had a long-term plan for her education in China: after studying hard, she would go on to enrol at a Chinese university and eventually graduate to become a doctor.

However, things did not go according to plan. Her experience at school brought her nothing but feelings of discomfort and exclusion.

来这边在得不舒服，学习也跟不上，我旁边坐的是学习好的人，老师讲呢，不懂呢问他们，但他们爱理不理，不想理啊! 问老师，老师在批作业没有时间，等晚自习时才能去问。 以前在缅甸发高烧时都要去读书的，来这边连点小感冒都不想去，看他们觉得太不舒服了。

I have never felt comfortable since I arrived here. I can’t catch up with the others. I’m surrounded by high-achievers and my teacher said I could ask my peers if I don’t understand something, but they are indifferent, and can’t even be bothered to speak! I could ask my teachers for help, but they are busy marking students’ homework and don’t have time. I have to wait until evening class. When I was in Myanmar, I insisted on going to school even if I had a high fever, but since coming here I don’t want to go to class if I have even the slightest cold. Seeing them really makes me uncomfortable.

Unfortunately, sitting with the high-achievers does not help the new Burmese students successfully integrate into the class. To her surprise and disappointment, Yingying receives nothing but indifference and blank rejection from her Chinese classmates. Her only hope is that help will be forthcoming from her teacher, but the likelihood of this too becomes quite slim and her cumulative questions and uncertainties arising from the heavy coursework load have to wait until evening class every day. Within two months of starting at the school, this formerly outstanding student has already ‘learned’ to be absent from class in China, something she would never have been in Myanmar even when she had a high fever.

What has made this straight-A student learn to play truant, and what makes her feel ‘uncomfortable’ sitting with her Chinese classmates in class? Her laziness? Her isolation from her peers? Each and every Burmese student will have had different expectations of their life abroad before their departure, but what they could hardly have imagined is the overwhelming feeling of isolation from the mainstream school culture that they would experience. The students are all receiving the same education in the same school, but what has separated them from the mainstream group? What invisible borders stand between them? To answer these questions, I adopt critical race theory (CRT) as a lens to analyse the intersection between race, language and other social categories on campus.

Yosso et al. (2009) demonstrate how racial micro-aggressions can create a negative campus climate in US schools. Latina/o students were found to experience various forms of micro-aggressions at individual and institutional levels. Micro-aggressions include assaults, such as intentionally derogatory verbal or nonverbal attacks; insults, such as subtle put-downs of a rude and insensitive nature regarding a person’s racial heritage or identity; and invalidations, or remarks that diminish, dismiss, or negate the realities and histories of people of color (Yosso et al. 2009, p.662). No matter whether micro-aggressions are conscious or unconscious, they permeate everyday mundane life on campus, which can cause extreme stress to marginalized students.

Similar to exclusions experienced by Latina and Latino students on US campuses, Burmese students are also being racialized in Chinese schools. At educational institutions in China, Putonghua is the (only) legitimate medium of instruction and Burmese students’ linguistic repertoires are often problematized. Most of the participants in my study are huaqiao (华侨), Burmese nationals but ethnically Chinese. Huaqiao students such as Yingying believe that their motherland is in China even though their nationality is Burmese.

However, crossing the border often changes what it means to be huaqiao. Yingying speaks perfect Chinese; in fact, her Chinese writing has received the acknowledgement of her teacher by being awarded the highest mark in the mid-term essay writing exam. Despite this, she is treated as an outsider and excluded by her Chinese peers.

Yingying’s dream of pursuing her academic aspirations in China ended after only half a year when she could no longer cope with the exclusion she experienced. She has gone back to Myanmar to continue her studies, rationalizing her return as motivated by ‘the cold weather in China.’

Crossing the border back from her imagined motherland to her birthplace must also have changed her perception of the meaning of ‘home’ and ‘belonging’.

Yingying is not alone in traversing national borders only to find that borders are also being carried within as a sense of difference and exclusion. Every day thousands of Burmese people are crossing borders to seek their future in China. More and more highways, railways and airports have been established to facilitate mutual cooperation and understanding. China is working hard to open up to and strengthen its ties with Myanmar and other ASEAN nations. But Yingying’s story shows that transforming physical borders is not enough. Critical race theory can help us understand the intersection between language, race and other social categories in China’s rapidly transforming border regions, and more specifically, in China’s rapidly internationalizing educational institutions. Her experience reminds us that borders can take many forms.

Tara J Yosso; William A Smith; Miguel Ceja; Daniel G Solórzano (2009). Critical Race Theory, Racial Microaggressions, and Campus Racial Climate for Latina/o Undergraduates Harvard Educational Review, 79 (4)

PASCH Schools: Partners for the future

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trilingual signage at the Muse checkpoint on the China-Myanmar border

Applied Linguistics at Macquarie University presents

Multilingualism at the China-Myanmar border: fieldwork experiences

When: Wednesday, March 26, 1:00-2:00pm [Please note updated time!]
Where: Macquarie University, W5C 221
Presenter: Li Jia, Macquarie University and Yunnan University

Abstract: In this talk I will share my experiences of conducting sociolinguistic ethnographic fieldwork investigating multilingualism in education in the Chinese-Myanmar border area. Having recently returned from half a year of fieldwork, I will talk about the challenges and opportunities of doing ethnographic fieldwork in an out-of-the-way locale and with speakers of a range of languages. The presentation will also be of interest to those who wish to increase their understanding of the languages and peoples of the rapidly changing borderlands of China and Myanmar.

About the presenter: Li Jia is currently a PhD student in the Linguistics Department at Macquarie University and she is also a lecturer at Yunnan University. Her research interests are in the sociolinguistics of language learning and classroom discourse. She is passionate about improving language education in her native Yunnan and beyond.

Japan Store near the University of Yangon

“Welcome to the Golden Guest Inn, Ms Takahashi! We’ve been expecting you!” A Chinese-Burmese man warmly welcomed me on my arrival at his family-run inn in Yangon. It’s just a typical welcome greeting, not a big deal, of course, except that he delivered this in his fluent Japanese: “ようこそゴールデンゲストインへ、高橋さん！お待ちしてました！”

My cheerful conversation in Japanese with this smiling inn owner was set against a conversation in English earlier that day: just then, a Western NGO staff had told me that “Burmese are too busy learning English. Not many people are interested in learning Japanese at this stage”.

It was not only the Japanese-speaking inn owner that proves this observation wrong. Let me give you a quick account of what you could expect in Yangon if you know Japanese.

One of the first things that you’ll notice is the hundreds of busses on the roads of Yangon that are imported from Japan. Some busses still carry original logos in Japanese, while some others are covered with local advertisements. Inside, however, most of the busses still have original Japanese signs and notices. Japanese tourists love those signs as a quick google image search of “日本語　バス　ヤンゴン” demonstrates.

Japanese writing left on the window: Forwarded to ミャンマー(Myanmar) from アル アイン (Al Ain, UAE)

Also, expect to see many second hand cars and trucks from Japan running around in town. Many of them carry Japanese writings on the body of the cars or markings on the windscreen. Why would the car owners leave these writings on? It seems that they function as a symbol of authenticity. While products made in China and South Korea are on the increase, Japanese products continue to be seen as ‘high quality’ and thus desirable. No wonder, then, that Daiso is already there, as well as its local equivalent shops who sell “Japanese products”.

You’ll also find many Japanese(-themed) eateries in Yangon, even if the scale and range is still limited in comparison to other major cities in Southeast Asia, which is currently going through a Japanese food craze. Japanese eateries are often more expensive than local ones but many of them are packed with locals and Japanese expats alike. My favorite is Oishii Sushi on Latha Street in downtown Yangon, where the Burmese owner spent 12 years training as a sushi chef at Bikkuri Zushi in Tsuzuki-ku, Yokohama.

Indeed, I met many Japanese-speaking Burmese in Myanmar. Realizing that I’m Japanese, they excitedly told me that they love everything Japanese; that they have Japanese friends who taught them Japanese; and that their family members are studying or working in Japan. Of course, these language proficiencies in Japanese remain invisible to non-Japanese speakers.

What is strikingly visible, however, is the rapidly increasing number of Japanese companies that are opening their businesses in Yangon.

Ads about Japanese Entertainment Festival 2014 with the Genie Family anime characters at Sakura Tower (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Genie_Family)

Enter Sakura Tower. Located across from the Traders Hotel (by Shangri-La) and built by a Japanese company, Sakura Tower hosts many large Japanese corporations and organisations including Honda, Mitsubishi Corporation, ANA, NTT, NHK and JICA. When I had a coffee at Sakura Tower’s Sky Bistro, one third of the customers were Japanese expats having power lunch. I happened to meet a young Japanese man who told me that he decided to open a business in Yangon because he thought Myanmar was “Asia’s last frontier”. During our conversation, a Japanese car pulled up and the driver yelled out, “吉田さん、迎えに来ました！(Mr. Yoshida, I’ve come to pick you up!” Mr. Yoshida turned to me and said, “He is my local business partner. I’m studying Burmese, but it helps a lot that his Japanese is really good.”

Indeed, Japanese-speaking local people are one of the factors that make Myanmar attractive to Japanese businesses. For instance, established in 2008, Myanmar DCR is rapidly expanding its IT business by hiring Japanese-speaking local staff. According to their website, Japanese is their official company language and everything is presumably carried out in Japanese. It is likely that as more Japanese businesses, large or small, are entering the Myanmar market, the demand for Japanese speaking staff will increase further.

Given all these observations above, it is rather surprising that there seems to be little discussion on improving the provision of Japanese language education in Myanmar. It is understandable that improving English language education is a must for Myanmar as it continues to embrace globalization. At the Seminar on Promoting Multilingual Education, which was held in Yangon in early February, English was the only international language (in addition to minority languages and Burmese) that was considered worth discussing. Chinese was mentioned occasionally but only as a remote option. Other languages, including Japanese, did not even rank a mention.

Learning Japanese in Mon State: “I want to study in Japan in the future”

During the seminar, however, I met many local students who expressed their interest in learning Japanese. During lunch time, for example, an English-speaking young man, a member of the Mon ethnic group, showed me his notebook which was full of Japanese writing, saying that he wanted to study in Japan in the future. A teacher told me that her 23-year-old son, who is currently studying Japanese in Japan self-funded, is seeking a scholarship to continue his studies in Tokyo. They both said that Japanese proficiency and familiarity with Japanese culture would be a great advantage given that more Japanese businesses are entering Myanmar and that English proficiency alone would no longer suffice to secure attractive employment. Although they are not trained language education experts, these participants, who never spoke up during the official parts of the workshop, can clearly see that a single-minded focus on English is short-sighted.

In fact, a language policy without a material basis might leave many multilingual youths disillusioned. Towards the end of the last day at the seminar, a male high school student stood up and commented: “All these discussions are very useful. But we want to be kept informed, too, like what we are learning all these languages for or what we can do with these language skills in the future.” Also, some of other young Burmese I met during my visits are already multilingual, and yet they are uncertain about finding meaningful work or securing scholarships in the future.

To build a socially-inclusive language policy in Myanmar necessarily requires research on the intersection between multilingual proficiency and employment and education. It will be crucial to have a systematic understanding of current and emerging employment (for instance, foreign companies and organisations in local areas) and further educational opportunities locally and internationally, and to base language policy on language requirements to secure these.

English textbook used at the non-Government school

“I take a bilingual approach, so you might not understand some parts of my class. But I hope you’ll enjoy it.” Dressed in a blue traditional dress, a tall middle-aged Burmese teacher explained her teaching approach to me in the beginning of her class on English at a non-government tertiary school.

The school is located some 40 minute taxi ride away from downtown Yangon, the former capital city of Myanmar. Facing the class of some 50 students from various ethnic backgrounds, she began her class by taking attendance, and then started instructing her students to work on the section on Iceland as a tourist destination in their textbook Travelling.

I have never been to Iceland, and I’m not sure how many of these students are ever going to visit the Nordic country, but looking around the class, I saw all students glued to their textbook. Seeing the recent developments in the country, teaching English for tourism is important indeed.

As Myanmar moves towards further democratization, the country is rapidly emerging as an attractive travel destination. Compared to my first visit to Myanmar two years ago, I saw more Western tourists out and about in the city with a local tour-guide this time. In addition, touted as the ‘last frontier in ASEAN’ by international investors, Myanmar has also seen a rapid increase in the number of business travellers from all over the world. At the same time, the country is taking many measures to encourage tourism. These include visas on arrival and the presence of stylish brand new Toyota Tourist Police cars. In contrast to the much older-looking ‘normal’ police cars these seem to create some sense of safety for tourists. Apart from me, there were several European tourists taking photos of the Tourist Police cars.

Tourist Police cars in Yangon

English proficiency is crucial for the young generation to gain employment in the emerging tourist market. Apart from careers in tourism, English is also seen as an important educational qualification. As Dr. Thein Lwin (2011, p. 12) explains, recent years have seen an unprecedented popularity of English in this former British colony where English proficiencies “lead to economic advantages, help in dealing with the outside world, and improve prospects of study abroad and employment.”

Indeed, many students I met at the school mentioned above said that they are planning to apply for a scholarship to study abroad. Many scholarship programs are available but all require high English proficiency. One student, from Shan State, has set his heart on studying in neighbouring Thailand, and if he succeeds, he’d be the first person from his village to study for a master’s degree abroad. At this stage, for him and his aspiring classmates, their future success depends largely on English.

Many local teachers teach English bilingually, as the teacher I mentioned in the introduction, and the focus is on practical English, English for tourism, for instance. It is obvious that learning English is serious business in Yangon. However, not all teachers seem to realize that.

For instance, one student, Elizabeth (pseudonym), told me about a visiting professor from the US. Assuming that volunteer teachers are welcome in a country where English language education is being taken so seriously, I said “Oh that’s great!” I also knew that Elizabeth was an admirer of the US – she had studied in the US for one year on a scholarship in 2013, and she said she was aspiring to go back there to pursue a master’s degree in business.

She hesitantly replied, however, “Well… actually no so great”. The reason – the US professor’s teaching approach didn’t match their sense of identity as adult learners of English:

We didn’t like her class because … she treated us like children. She gave us children’s books to read, and like, we are adults, but she asked us to sing songs, and we were like, what the he-!?

Elizabeth continued to explain how the professor asked them to sing Christmas songs, which they didn’t want to, but “we didn’t want to be impolite, so we sang along those stupid songs and did everything she asked us to do” she said, half-smiling and half making a face.

Elizabeth’s story reminded me of a similar experience I had when I was studying at a two-year college of English in Tokyo back in the 1990s.

In our second year, we had a new teacher from the US, a fresh university graduate, to teach literature. The textbook she chose for us was Mother Goose. While some of my classmates found it useful to learn “American culture”, the majority erupted in anger. In the second week, we told her at the beginning of class that we were offended by her choice of Mother Goose. I remember one frustrated classmate telling her off, “You think we are children?!” What she didn’t know was the fact that many of my classmates could have easily gone to a four-year university but chose this immersion school to master English for the purpose of career development and further education. Just like the students I met in Yangon, English was not some kind of fun hobby but serious business for us.

Our American teacher was lucky. She learned, even if the hard way, that selecting learning materials requires knowing her students’ sense of identity and their aspirations. By contrast, the professor teaching at Elizabeth’s school seems to have gone home without realising how her teaching materials may have been offensive to some of her students. Whether they become tour guides or office workers or English teachers or continue to study overseas, reading American children’s books and learning how to sing Christmas songs may have some use but it also runs the risk of hurting adult students’ dignity.

Of course, whether more practical textbooks like Travelling are preferable to children’s books depends on the context in which learning takes place. Children’s books or songs can be very useful for adults learning a new language but learning materials need to match the students’ aspirations, and their purpose needs to be clearly explained to them.

This is all language teaching 101, and the current English language teaching boom in Myanmar shows that there are many opportunities to put high-quality English language teaching it into practice.