In this episode of the Language on the Move podcast, I speak to Professor Margaret Kettle about the Multilingual Glossary of School-based Terms. This is list of school-related terms selected and translated to help multilingual families connect with schools. The research-based glossary was developed jointly with the Queensland Department of Education, Education Queensland school personnel, Multicultural Australia, and community group members and families.

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Related content

• Monolingual school websites as barriers to parent engagement
• Community Languages Schools Transforming Education
• What do migrant parents expect from schools?
• Studying abroad is amazing, or is it?

Transcript (coming soon)

We prepared and distributed numerous learning packs

Editor’s note: The language challenges of the COVID-19 crisis have held much of our attention this year. Here on Language on the Move, we have been running a series devoted to language aspects of the COVID-19 crisis since February, and readers will also have seen the special issue of Multilingua devoted to “Linguistic Diversity in a Time of Crisis”.

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

Here, Nusrat Parveen reflects on the challenges of home learning from her experience as a teacher in a highly linguistically diverse primary school in a Sydney suburb with relatively low socio-economic status.

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We set up remote learning stations

When COVID-19 was declared a public health emergency in Australia in March 2020, schools shifted to implementing home-based learning. For a period of 10 weeks, students in NSW were “home-schooled.” This post explores the language and communication challenges remote teaching posed in my school, where 98% of students come from a language background other than English and where over half of students come from homes that find themselves in the lowest socio-economic status bracket, according to government data.

Scrambling to shift to remote learning

Shifting to remote learning constituted a huge challenge for schools.

On March 23, 2020, the NSW Department of Education declared remote learning for all students, except for the children of essential workers who could continue to attend school physically. The Department outlined the action plan for learning from home: schooling was to go digital with a combination of online and offline tasks.

Teachers went into overdrive to create learning from home activities, collate resources, and deliver home learning resource packs to students.

The challenges of communicating with all stakeholders

But creating activities and resource packs turned out to be the least of it. Communicating what was going on to all stakeholders turned out to be an even greater challenge.

We created remote learning grids

Department guidelines needed to be communicated to staff, parents, and students. This was not a one-off task as there were frequent changes, and everyone needed to be kept in the loop. Some of these communications needed to occur not only in English but also needed to be translated or interpreted for parents from non-English-speaking backgrounds.

School strategies to support remote learning

The following are some of the strategies that our school adopted to support remote learning:

• Loaning devices and providing internet access to households
• Providing IT support for students and parents
• Translating documents and interpreting communications as needed. This was done through community language teachers and community liaison officers.
• Setting up ‘Learning Stations’ in the school hall to deliver home learning resources and supporting parents to understand the resources and what was required of them in person but while adhering to social distancing safety protocols.
• Making regular phone calls to students and parents to follow up on learning and well-being
• Up-skilling teachers in the use of various online resources and platforms
• Using automated translation software to translate tasks for newly-arrived students with limited English
• Offering alternative offline resources for students with no internet options

We created special materials for new arrival students

As these examples show, remote learning created a large variety of communication challenges that needed to be met in a short time frame and with little preparation.

Maintaining regular communication with new arrival families

Generally, newly-arrived students receive extensive support with their English language learning and to ensure their well-being (see also Tazin Abdullah’s exploration of the language learning and support needs of ELICOS students during the pandemic).

Maintaining that level of support over the internet and through phone calls while also attending to all the communications mentioned above was almost impossible.

We created bilingual notices for parents

In this situation, where everyone was stretched to their limits, the tiered intervention support for new-arrival students took a backseat and more or less fell apart during the period of remote learning.

Eventually, the communication and support gap with new-arrival students that had emerged during the lockdown period had to be restored when NSW schools resumed face-to-face learning in May.

Lessons from the remote learning period

Parent feedback showed a lot of appreciation for the school’s efforts. However, it also showed that many tasks were considered too difficult for students and parents to understand. As 98% of our students come from a language-other-than-English background this may not be surprising.

Beyond the linguistic difficulties, the digital divide was very real in our community, which is at the lower end of socio-economic status in Sydney. Not having access to the required devices or to an internet connection was a problem for many families.

Now that the NSW school closure is in the past, heeding the lessons from this effort is vital for future disaster preparedness:

• We need a multilingual communication strategy that does not leave out anyone irrespective of whether they speak English (well) or not.
• We need to urgently bridge the digital divide so that everyone can access online communication if need be.

In short, policies and strategies need to pay attention to vulnerable students and families, including those who have limited English and/or are affected by poverty. This is not only vital during times of crisis but should be standard practice to ensure social cohesion and equitable access for all.

Readability scores of the two selected public service information texts by the NSW Government

This morning I googled “nsw corona/covid restrictions”. The top hits all refer to NSW Government websites, including these two: “What you can and can’t do under the rules” and “Public Health Orders and restrictions.”

Both sites are clearly structured with lots of subheadings and dot points. But they are also long and text-heavy, and the font on “Public Health Orders and restrictions” is so small that the page literally looks like small print.

In both cases, you need to be a fairly motivated reader to work your way through them, and “Public Health Orders and restrictions,” in particular, looks more like it is aimed at lawyers than a regular reader.

Readability statistics for both texts confirm this impression. The Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level of “What you can and can’t do under the rules” is 11.0 and that of “Public Health Orders and restrictions 14.2. The Flesch Reading Ease Score of “What you can and can’t do under the rules” is 48.1 and that of “Public Health Orders and restrictions 33.2.

What is readability?

Readability essentially refers to how easy or difficult it is too read a particular text.

There are a number of measurements of readability. For English, the two most famous of these are Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level and the Flesch Reading Ease measures. Both are algorithms that are now built into most word processing software.

The basic idea behind these two measures is twofold:

• The more words per sentence, the less readable a text is.
• The more syllables per word, the less readable a text is.

Consider the examples in the table.

Comparing the two sentences, it is obvious that the first is much easier to comprehend than the second. Although they have the same number of words, the multi-syllabic words of the second sentence require much more precise and specialized knowledge.

Source: Flesch, How to write plain English

In short, to easily read the second sentence, you need to have a much higher level of (a) English language proficiency, and (b) science knowledge than for the first.

The Flesch measurements of readability

The Flesch measurements were developed by Rudolf Flesch, an Austrian-American writing consultant.

The Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level tells us who we can expect to have the requisite knowledge to read a particular text: 1.3 means that a first grader can be expected to read “People need air.” 13.1 tells us that 13 years of formal education are required to easily read “humans require oxygen.”

The Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level follows the US system of school grades from 1 to 10. A number greater than 10 indicates the years of formal education required.

The Flesch Reading Ease Scale is also linked to grade levels and formal schooling. The higher the level, the easier the text. The 90.9 score of “People need air” tells us that the text is very easy. All that’s needed to easily read it is an elementary school education.

At the other end of the scale, a score of 6.5 suggests that a college education is required to comfortably read “humans require oxygen” (As an aside, don’t get too focused on the precise score. Measuring the readability of a 1-sentence text is problematic, and I’m doing it to make a point. All readability scores are useful indicators but there are also obvious problems, which I’ll discuss some other time.)

Why does readability matter?

Let’s now go back to the two public service messages from the NSW Government with which I started this post: one requires 11 years of formal education and the other 14 years of formal education. With a Flesch Reading Ease score of 48.1 and 33.2 both are considered difficult to read, at the reading level of a college student.

This means that a fair number of Australians will have difficulties reading these public service messages.

Australia has compulsory education and, by international standards, a fairly well-educated population, as findings from the OECD’s Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) show. Even so, these data also show that there is significant variation in the reading abilities of Australians.

While the PIAAC levels do not directly match the Flesch levels, one thing is for sure, and that is that those Australians who score at or below Level 1 on PIAAC will definitely not be able to read texts that requires more than 10 years of formal education.

In other words, at least 13.7% of the Australian population, probably more, will not be able to read the two key texts about NSW’s Covid-19 restrictions. This amounts to a total of at least 2,320,000 people.

In the interest of full disclosure: these are the readability stats for this blog post

In a crisis where the actions of each and every one of us have a huge impact on the overall course of the pandemic, this is a very large number.

Attention to inclusive communication has certainly increased over the course of the pandemic, and here on Language on the Move we have focused on public health communication to linguistically diverse populations. The same goes for the special issue of Multilingua devoted to “Linguistic diversity in a time of crisis,” which will be published later this week.

Despite greater attention to the important role of inclusive communication, the fact that key information about Covid-19-related restrictions are out of the reach of more than 13.7% of the Australian population – irrespective of whether English is their main language or not – is concerning.

What is even more concerning is that the two examples I have chosen are not exceptional: two recently published research papers about the readability of Covid-19 online patient education materials and public health information websites in various countries found that these materials are generally pitched at a readability level that is too difficult for significant segments of the population.

Conduct your own research

Choose an English language text about Covid-19 and assess its readability by measuring its Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level and Flesch Reading Ease Scale. You can do that by copying and pasting the text into MS Word. Include additional qualitative observations of readability and discuss whether the readability matches the reading levels of the target audience.

To learn more how reading is learned and why some people never become highly proficient readers, despite going through compulsory schooling, watch this lecture:

References

Mishra, Vishala, & Dexter, Joseph P. (2020). Comparison of Readability of Official Public Health Information About COVID-19 on Websites of International Agencies and the Governments of 15 Countries. JAMA Network Open, 3(8), e2018033-e2018033. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2020.18033
Szmuda, T., Özdemir, C., Ali, S., Singh, A., Syed, M. T., & Słoniewski, P. (2020). Readability of online patient education material for the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19): a cross-sectional health literacy study. Public Health, 185, 21-25. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.puhe.2020.05.041

Language challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic

Visit here for the full Language on the Move coverage of language aspects of the COVID-19 crisis. The special issue of Multilingua with 14 peer-reviewed research papers about “Linguistic diversity in a time of crisis” will be published later this week; in the meantime, all the papers are available ahead of print here.

Muslim women praying in a Minquan mosque

While everyone knows that China is now the second largest economy in the world, few people realize that there are still over five million people living in poverty in the country. The majority of China’s poor live in its multilingual and multicultural peripheral regions.

Therefore, as part of its efforts to eradicate poverty, the Chinese government has implemented the nationwide project to promote Putonghua as a form of linguistic capital. This promotion of Putonghua – along with widespread English language learning – from above has been widely discussed and researched by Chinese sociolinguists (see, for instance, these PhD theses available right here on Language on the Move: Grey, 2017, Li, 2017, Yang, 2013, Zhang, 2011).

However, what seems to have been largely overlooked is language learning of other languages from below and the empowerment it can bring, as I learned in my research into Arabic language learning in Minquan, a Muslim-centered and poverty-stricken region.

Socioeconomic and demographic features of Minquan

Located in the far east of Henan Province, central China, Minquan County has a population of 870,000. The vast majority of these are farmers. Because the ever more frequent droughts have rendered production of the main crops of maize, cotton, peanuts, and wheat unstable, an increasing number of young people are leaving Minquan for China’s big developed cities in search of better opportunities.

Education and literacy levels in Minquan are low in comparison with the rest of China and only two third of teenagers in Minquan continue their studies beyond compulsory junior high school education.

Another feature of Minquan is its sizable Hui ethnic minority, whose members are Muslim. In Minquan it is common for local people to exchange greetings in Arabic and for the women to wear colorful hijabs. Five times a day, the streets echo with the Muslim call to prayer chanted slowly and sonorously in Arabic over the audio systems of the local mosques.

Arabic as a way out for Minquan’s Muslim women

The Hui ethnic group do not have their own language but speak Chinese. However, in recent years, I have observed an increasing trend for local people to study Arabic, the holy language of Islam, not only for religious purposes but also for material profit. For my graduation research project at Yunnan University, I probed the Arabic language learning experiences of three Muslim women from Minquan. All three participants, two of whom are my relatives, were born and raised in Muslim families in Minquan. Their mother tongue is Chinese and they all started to study Arabic formally in their teens.

Their reasons for Arabic language study were initially due to their limited opportunities.

The youngest participant, Ma Lifang (all names are pseudonyms) is a 19-year-old high-school graduate, who has studied Arabic in a mosque since 2018. After failing the gaokao (the national university entrance exam), she followed an imam’s recommendation to learn Arabic in order to maintain her education and with an eye to a profitable future through Arabic as experienced by Ma Zhenyi (32) and Ma Xiangling (39).

Ma Zhenyi is an entrepreneur who now runs her own translation and interpreting company in Yiwu, the world largest wholesale market. Despite her excellent academic performance in junior high school and her desire to continue her studies, she was denied the opportunity of receiving a high school education because of her family’s poverty. The traditionally low expectations on Muslim women in her community also played a role. While she did not have the courage at age 15 to oppose her parents when it came to high school, she found a way to convince them to let her study Arabic in the mosque:

别人都一直说，都是建议让我跟爸爸妈妈讲（我想学），然后当时也没那么大的勇气。因为我姐姐她也想去学习，但是爸妈没同意，就没学成。我也没有那么大的勇气去说。后来越学越感兴趣，越学越感兴趣。然后，就鼓起勇气说。
Others kept telling me, suggesting that I should tell my parents (I want to study), but I didn’t have the courage. My older sister also meant to study, but my dad and mom refused and she could not. I just didn’t have the courage. Later Arabic interested me more and more, I had to be brave enough to tell them. (Interview with Ma Zhenyi)

Perhaps it was Ma Zhenyi’s talent in memorizing Arabic verses that contributed to her success; or the fact that her older sister could share the family’s financial burden so that Ma Zhenyi could have the chance of further study for a couple of years. Either way, while seeking her spiritual asylum in the holy language of Islam, Ma Zhenyi could continue to study and build her dream for the future.

Middle-Eastern buyer checking cargo with seller in Yiwu (Image credit: promotional video for Yiwu)

Her excellent performance together with her deep faith next launched her to another opportunity to continue her Islamic and Arabic studies in Xi’an, one of China’s largest cities and the capital of Shaanxi Province. At that stage, she won a scholarship to go to Egypt for further Arabic study. There, she met her husband and when both of them returned to China, they settled in Yiwu, where they first took up Arabic translation and interpreting jobs and eventually opened their own translation company in 2012.

Ma Xiangling (39) also works as an Arabic-Chinese translator and interpreter in Yiwu. Like Ma Zhenyi, she was denied a senior high school education after graduating from junior high school in 1998. She was sent to learn Arabic at a local mosque-based school instead. At the time, she did not expect any material rewards from learning Arabic at all. She simply followed the local expectation of being a good Muslim woman in the hope that she might assist her future husband and educate their child in the faith. Upon graduation, she got married but almost immediately found herself engulfed in constant domestic violence. Over many years, Ma Xiangling’s life was torn to pieces as her only financial support was her tormenting husband. She finally managed to regain her freedom through a painful divorce. In 2014, with the help of friends doing business in Yiwu, she revived her Arabic language skills and migrated to Yiwu to work as translator there.

Self-transformation through Arabic

Confronting their disadvantages in age, gender and poverty, these three women turned to Arabic as a way out.

All three women started to learn Arabic as a low-cost study option when they failed to progress in the Chinese public educational system. Their parents believed that learning Arabic would increase their daughters’ marriage prospects by making them good assistants to their future husbands serving the faith. The value of speaking Arabic as a profitable commodity in the new contexts of China’s global expansion was not obvious to my participants until they embarked on their journey and seriously invested in learning Arabic. Nevertheless, their Arabic skills have shaped a brand new life vision for them.

Ma Xiangling’s social media post in Chinese and Arabic about destiny (my English translation)

Their years of investment into Arabic have transformed their identities from poor subjugated Muslim women into independent and enterprising individuals. Despite failing to gain admission to a Chinese university, Ma Lifang, for instance, now even considers PhD study within her reach:

有的(课本）都是北大的什么的… 还有那种全阿语的.都是老师们从国外给带来的。好多老师也是从国外的毕业，还有博士学位。
Some (textbooks) are from Peking University, and some are written in Arabic, imported from abroad. Many teachers graduated from abroad, some with PhD degree. (Interview with Ma Lifang)

When asked what she wanted to do with her life, Ma Lifang readily talked about several options, such as taking up a translation job in China’s booming export industry or going abroad for higher education, just like her teachers.

Ma Zhenyi has experienced the transformational career that Ma Lifang anticipates. Learning Arabic has expanded her life trajectory from a poor village girl first to the big city of Xi’an and from there to Egypt. The level of Arabic language proficiency she gained there, enabled her to work as an interpreter and translator in Yiwu, and later to establish her own business there.

Business opportunities related to Arabic are plentiful, as she explained to me:

大概有目前来说有102个国家的人来这里(义乌)进行购物。其中呢大概有40到50个国家，大概了50%左右是以阿拉伯语为沟通媒介的……我现在接触的这些人啊，多数都是在40以上的。年龄40以上的人并没有意识到他们需要学英语你知道吗。
There are foreign businessmen from 102 countries coming to Yiwu to purchase commodities. 40 or 50 countries out of 102, about 50% of foreigners use Arabic for communication…the majority of my foreign customers are over 40 years old. You know, people over 40 are not aware of the necessity to speak English. (Interview with Ma Zhenyi)

Although Ma Xiangling’s career has been less stellar, Arabic has transformed her, too, into an economically and spiritually independent woman supporting herself and her family. In January 2020, her family (her parents and her disabled son) was able to move into a newly built two-storey house.

Tensions and contradictions of Arabic

Despite their empowerment, Arabic is not a panacea and all three women face tensions and contradictions embedded in wider structural constraints that are beyond their control.

Reflecting on the profits Arabic has brought to her, Ma Zhenyi, for instance strongly feels the tension between its material and spiritual rewards. While she is grateful for the material rewards that learning Arabic has brought her, she also finds herself in a constant state of dilemma between her entrepreneurial identity as a successful businesswoman and her sense of guilt at not having enough time for prayer and reading Quran, or for mothering her school-aged daughter.

The gendered market also impacts their opportunities to invest in their future, as Arabic language practices are more gendered than those of many other languages. Ma Xiangling explained that women can only go so far with Arabic. While they might be able to secure a translation job in Yiwu or elsewhere in China, their opportunities to work abroad or even travel for business are heavily constrained, particularly when it comes to major Arabic-speaking trading partners like Saudi Arabia and Iraq.

Ma Xiangling’s reflections on working abroad must be understood against the emerging oversupply of Arabic speakers in China as Chinese universities have begun to actively promote non-English foreign languages. As a middle-aged woman without a degree, Arabic proficiency alone is no longer enough to make her feel confident about her future.

Arabic as a third space

Arabic has become a significant foreign language for China’s relationship with the Middle East. However, for the women in my study, it is much more than that. Arabic also functions as a way out, as a reachable escape route for Muslim women who have been trapped in the cage of poverty and religion.

Reciting Arabic verses as a child, reading the Holy Quran as a teenager, and eventually translating for Sino-Middle East trade as adults, Chinese Muslim women from less-developed areas have turned the Arabic language into a third space where they can continue their education, obtain career success, and achieve emancipation in their daily lives. In Minquan, this impoverished corner of the world, Arabic provides both a spiritual asylum and financial independence. It frees and awakens Muslim women tormented by misogyny and poverty.

After quoting to me the Hadith “all men are brothers”, Ma Zhenyi added what has been missing from there: “and women are sisters.”

References

Grey, A. (2017). How do language rights affect minority languages in China? An ethnographic investigation of the Zhuang minority language under conditions of rapid social change. (PhD), Macquarie University.
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.
Yang, H. (2012). Naxi, Chinese and English: Multilingualism in Lijiang. (PhD), Macquarie University.
Zhang, J. (2011). Language Policy and Planning for the 2008 Beijing Olympics: An Investigation of the Discursive Construction of an Olympic City and a Global Population. (PhD), Macquarie University.

Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Language Resources and Research Center for Standardized Use of Chinese Language, Beijing Language and Culture University

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Editor’s note: This is a translated and shortened version of an article first published in Chinese as “战疫语言服务团的故事” in the CPPCC Newspaper on March 9, 2020. Translated by Dr Zhang Jie, Zhongnan University of Economics and Law, Wuhan, and Dr Li Jia, Yunnan University, Kunming.

In this article, Professor Li Yuming not only recounts the rapid linguistic response of Chinese applied sociolinguists to the COVID-19 epidemic but also outlines a program for “emergency linguistics,” a research specialisation devoted to language and communication aspects of disaster preparedness.

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Handbook of Hubei Dialects for Medical Assistance Teams

Doctor-patient communication in Hubei dialect, online resource

The outbreak of COVID-19 has required the whole of China to stand together against the epidemic with the mobilisation of national resources to assist Hubei, the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak. One of the difficulties in mobilising trans-provincial resources is the language barrier between doctors and patients in clinical communication. To solve the urgent needs of language communication between doctors from other parts of China and local patients, the medical assistance team of Qilu Hospital of Shandong University compiled The Guidebook of Wuhan Dialect for Medical Assistance Teams, Audio Materials of Wuhan Dialect for Medical Assistance Teams, and The Handbook of Doctor-Patient Communication within 48 hours after the team arrived in Wuhan. This is an instance of the provision of language services as part of the emergency response.

The example demonstrates the necessity for linguists to participate in fighting COVID-19. As linguists, we should not let medical personnel be distracted by also having to deal with language and communication barriers.

On February 10, 2020, Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Language Resources of BLCU and the National Institute of Chinese Language Matters and Social Development of Wuhan University, together with more than a dozen research institutes and enterprises, initiated a program to join the fight against COVID-19 by offering language services.

Under the guidance of the Department of Language Information Management of the Chinese Ministry of Education, the Handbook of Hubei Dialects for Medical Assistance Teams was compiled to facilitate communication between medical assistance teams and patients in Hubei province. The Handbook includes 76 sentences and 156 words which are commonly used in diagnosis and treatment along with their equivalents in the dialects of Wuhan, Xiangyang, Yichang, Huangshi, Jingzhou, E’zhou, Xiaogan, Huanggang, and Xianning.

Although team members lived in different localities, they performed the tasks with tacit cooperation and managed to play to their respective strengths. With their devotion for three days and three nights, seven types of language service products were made available on WeChat, a dedicated webpage, converging media, video clips, Tik Tok, a 24/7 telephone hotline, and instant translation software.

The Handbook of Hubei Dialects for Medical Assistance Teams was of significant help to front-line medical personnel. Not only was it suitable for different groups of people in various scenarios, but also bolstered the confidence of medical workers. It was very well received. Almost 30 WeChat official accounts related to linguistics re-posted the handbook, setting a precedent for WeChat official accounts in fighting against the epidemic. So far, the total clicks of the handbook on WeChat have amounted to nearly 30,000; for the recording, around 340,000; and for the online version, more than 100,000. Furthermore, nearly 6,000 copies of pocketbooks published by the Commercial Press were distributed free of charge directly to the medical assistance teams in Hubei.

Bilingual Greek-Chinese diagnostic sheet

Apart from compiling the handbook of Hubei dialects, language services later expanded to foreign languages targeting international students and foreign residents who began to return and come to China with the effective prevention and control of the epidemic and the resumption of work and production. To better inform these foreigners of the updated information about the coronavirus and to protect their safety, Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Language Resources of BLCU, as a core member of the program, developed A Guide to the Prevention and Control of COVID-19 Epidemic in Foreign Languages promptly and efficiently on February 27.

The Guide includes 75 sentences commonly used in daily precautions, entry precautions, medical treatment, and personal protection. So far, the Guide has been written in more than 20 languages including Japanese, Korean, Persian, Italian, Arabic, English, German, Russian, and French, with versions including video clips, multimedia cards, and software system.

Since the launch of the Guide, not only has it received attention and support from the Ministry of Education, the State Language Commission, the National Center for Disease Control, the Foreign Affairs Office of the People’s Government of Beijing Municipality, the Chinese embassies and consulates abroad, but has also been welcomed by overseas Chinese students.

As the novel coronavirus has been spreading in other parts of the world, the Guide has now also been shared by foreign communities over the Internet and won positive feedback from some Chinese diplomatic missions.

Through such practices, China’s anti-epidemic progress and experience can be disseminated abroad, serving as humanitarian assistance for the international community in the prevention and control of the virus.

The Guide will continue to be updated based on the latest development of the epidemic at home and abroad, with more languages being added.

Another project we are working on is named Plain Chinese. Plain Chinese was successfully developed and is currently being tested. The project is tailored to international students and foreigners in China in the hope that they could be better informed about COVID-19, even if their Chinese language proficiency is limited. It is also helpful to those Chinese people who lack proficiency in Putonghua.

During and after any public emergency, mental health and psychological well-being is vital. Therapeutic interventions constitute another area for the provision of language services, and therefore constitute another duty for linguists to take on. Psychologists and linguists are expected to work hand in hand to deliver strategies for “linguistic comforting” during and after the COVID-19 disaster.

It is too early to draw conclusions as the disaster is yet to end, but I do wish to offer my reflections based on our provision of language services over the past 20 days.

First, being a scholar should not confine us to writing papers and imparting knowledge, but must include having a sense of social responsibility, the awareness and capability to solve practical problems. In recent decades, a group of Chinese sociolinguists have been calling people’s attention to language in social life (yuyan shenghuo).

This group has been advocating for attention to language-related problems in social development. Collectively, these linguists are known as the school of language in social life (语言生活派 yuyan shenghuo pai).

Professor Li Yuming’s original article “战疫语言服务团的故事” in CPPCC Newspaper, March 09, 2020

The reason why the language services program was able to rally so many volunteers, at a single call, is that these scholars actually were spurred to action by their convictions, i.e. to put their academic strength into the practice of the great cause of the motherland. Apart from the mission for research and education, scientific and educational studies also carry a social responsibility. In the fight against the epidemic, we should not simply care about self-protection, but instead, contribute ideas and exert efforts for the containment of the virus.

Second, information technology needs to be given full play in the prevention and control of epidemics. The current epidemic is characterized by immobility of people and commodities, but free flow of information.

Without information technology, it would have been far more difficult to fight this disaster. As a matter of fact, members of the language services program have not yet met each other in person, but have done an outstanding job with the help of online group chat.

Moreover, the development and promotion of language service products effectively utilized the previously established corpus, the modern language technology developed, and the inter-disciplinary talents cultivated during the construction of language resources. The progress made highlights the significance of China’s achievements in terms of the Internet and modern information technology.

Third, a plan on language services in emergency response needs to be included in the prevention and control of public emergencies. It is a critical test for the national governance system and management competence to effectively handle public emergencies. In recent years, the prevention and control of public emergencies in China have made remarkable progress, with many statutes and contingency plans enacted, such as the Emergency Response Law of the People’s Republic of China, the National Plan on Emergency Response, and the Regulation on Response for Public Health Emergencies. Meanwhile, particular units specializing in public emergency management and services have also been established. However, linguistic contingency plans are still absent from those solutions. Through the current public health emergency, importance should be attached to filling this gap as soon as possible.

It is proposed that the plan on language services in emergency responses shall include at least three aspects, namely:

First, we shall formulate the National Mechanism and Plan on Language Services in Public Emergency Response, or simply revise the current statutes, regulations and plans, such as the Emergency Response Law of the People’s Republic of China, the National Plan on Emergency Response, by adding relevant content.

The details of language services in public emergency response, however, remain to be investigated. The following might be worthy of consideration: the selection of channels through which the information is released, e.g. telephone, radio, television, network media (Weibo and WeChat included); the languages that are supposed to be used in information dissemination, including Putonghua, plain Chinese, Chinese dialects (varieties), ethnic languages, signed languages, and foreign languages; possible communication barriers and concrete solutions; application of various modern language technologies; mechanisms and plans on language services in emergency response at different levels; and, other language-related content in various aspects of emergency response, such as prevention and preparedness, monitoring and early warning, emergency response and rescue, post-emergency recovery and reconstruction.

Second, a standing language service institution for public emergencies will need to be set up. During ordinary times, only a few in-service staff or researchers will be needed while others hold their original posts. When an emergency arises, they can be urgently summoned to offer various language services.

Third, greater importance will need to be attached to language-related studies in public emergency response. Language services in emergency response is actually a problem of language application within a particular sphere and for a specific purpose. It is a special type of language situation. We should draw on the practical experience of such language services at home and abroad and take advantage of the academic achievements made in applied linguistics, to actively conduct research in this domain and establish the discipline of “emergency linguistics.” In doing so, linguists are able to contribute more to public emergency response. What is more, research centers devoted to language access in emergency response shall be founded, which are aimed at dealing with different types of public emergencies such as natural disasters, accidents, public health incidents, social security incidents, and to cultivate specialized talents by integrating with the existing departments of public emergency management and services.

My Grade 2 Reader and my primary Song book

When I was a child, I eagerly anticipated the start of each new school year. The first week or two were magical. There were new teachers, new subjects, new routines, and, above all, new books.

In the first week of each new school year, we were issued our textbooks. These belonged to the school but a copy was entrusted to each student for a year. In Year 1 of primary, there was only one such book – a reader. Each year, the number of schoolbooks increased and by the time I was in high school, a dozen or so would be handed out to each student.

Receiving the books involved some trepidation. Each of us hoped that we would get copies that the previous custodian had taken good care of; that there would be no scribbled notes, stains or dog-ears. Of course, the school had a system in place designed to prevent such abuse: each copy contained a little slip where we would have to sign our name and enter it into the list of custodians. Still, being allocated a copy whose previous custodians included A-students or anyone you admired was a good omen.

Once the books had been handed out, we would schlep them home and spend the afternoon covering them neatly in protective paper.

And then the real fun could begin: reading the books. I loved that initial read of the Literature book with its stories and poems; the Geography book exploring far-away places; the History book enabling time travel; the Biology book explaining the natural world; Maths, Physics, Chemistry, Economics, Political Science, Religious Studies, Latin, English, French – I browsed all these textbooks with awe and read as much as I could. And with eager anticipation I looked forward to the point in the school year when we would study each lesson in detail and fully unravel the treasures they promised.

Throughout the school year, the books became our regular companions. We would carry them to and from school at least once or twice a week (some, like the Maths book, every day). And we would read them over and over again and use them to prepare for tests and exams.

At the end of the school year, the textbooks had to be returned to the school so that they could be passed on to the next student cohort. By then, the books had yielded all their secrets and new riches could be expected one grade up when school would return after the summer break.

When handing in the books, each copy was closely inspected by the teacher in charge and woe to the student who had not taken good care of their books; or, heaven forbid, lost their copy. Like most students, I was terrified that the inspection might find flaws for which I would be held responsible.

Sometimes, we were the last group of students to use a particular edition and, if that happened, we were allowed to keep them. Even today, I have those copies in my library.

The practices surrounding our textbooks taught us that books are precious and need to be treated with respect. They taught us that we are part of the great chain of human generations and that we are responsible for the legacy we leave to those who come after us. They taught us that books are guides and constant companions that help you grow and mature. And they gave me the gift of a lifelong love for reading and learning.

My experience with my schoolbooks was specific to a particular place and time. What lessons did your schoolbooks teach you? I don’t mean what their content was but what the practices surrounding their use taught you about books, life, and knowledge?

Demand action from our politicians to make a LOTE compulsory!

The state of language learning in Australian schools is dire. This weekend the Sydney Morning Herald carried an article entitled “Why students are turning away from learning foreign languages.” According to figures offered in the article, language learning in Australia might well be described as moribund: today only around 10% of HSC students study a language other than English (LOTE); that’s down 30% from the 1960s when about 40% of Australian high school students studied a LOTE. In 2015, out of a NSW HSC student population of over 77,000, only around 7,000 took a LOTE.

The article explains this sad state of affairs in a number of ways:

• Australians think knowing only English is just fine and everyone is learning English anyway
• There is a lack of continuity in language programs
• Language teaching in schools is tokenistic
• Minimum class requirements of 15 students work against languages
• The small number of required HSC subjects works against choosing a language

Overall, the take-away message of the article is bleak: “That message [=that languages are useful] is really not cutting through.”

A hard-working, passionate and dedicated high school LOTE teacher forwarded the link to the article to me with this question:

What more can us teachers do to change the Monolingual Mindset?!?!

The answer is really quite simple:

Demand action from our politicians to make a LOTE compulsory!

We don’t leave it up to students whether they want to study maths, English, sciences or sports. We consider these subjects part of the core curriculum. A LOTE needs to be a required part of a well-rounded education in the same way that these subjects are.

Sadly, our politicians seem incapable of even imagining this simple solution. The objection comes in the slogan of “the crowded curriculum” – focussing on literacy, numeracy, the sciences and whatnot simply leaves no space for language learning, or so we are told. Our prime minister sums up Australia’s linguistic tunnel vision on his blog:

Learning any language at school is valuable but difficult because there simply aren’t enough hours in the school calendar for most students to achieve any real facility – as many Australians have discovered when they tried out their schoolboy or schoolgirl French on their first visit to Paris! (Malcolm Turnbull blog)

What the prime minister fails to realize is that this is not a language education problem but an Australian problem. In NSW, for instance, a LOTE is compulsory for only 100 hours in Year 7 and 8. That is insufficient time on task and, indeed, a pointless exercise. It does nothing for students other than instil a sense of linguistic inadequacy in them. No one achieves fluency in another language in 100 hours, particularly if those 100 hours are delivered in bits of two hours each, spread out over a school year.

But just because Australian curricula are designed in a way that makes language learning a pointless exercise for most students, does not mean that this is true of all language learning in school: while most Australians “on their first visit to Paris” may well be struggling linguistically, most international tourists who come to Australia are coping just fine on their first visit to Sydney. This is not because it is easier for a French, German or Japanese school kid to learn English than it is for an Australian school kid to learn French (or any other language) but because their school systems invest heavily in English language teaching.

Does making a language other than English compulsory throughout schooling come at the expense of a focus on STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths)?

Australian PISA scores in international comparison (Source: news.com.au)

No, it clearly does not, as a comparison with Finland shows. The Finnish education system is widely regarded as one of the best internationally, and regularly outperforms Australia in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) rankings on numeracy, sciences and reading scores. In Finland, all students take two compulsory foreign languages throughout schooling; 44% of Finnish school students even study a third foreign language and 31% a fourth. In fact, all countries that outperform Australia on PISA – which measures numeracy, sciences and reading – and most countries that perform more or less the same, have at least one compulsory foreign language in their school system.

In these countries, language learning is a core plank of education. Not surprising given the many benefits of language learning (I won’t reiterate the multiple benefits of language learning here but if you wish, view a short overview or listen to a more detailed explanation). It is, in fact, not true that the message of the benefits of language learning “is really not cutting through.” It may not be cutting through to our politicians but it is cutting through to parents: recent research conducted by Livia Gerber, for instance, found that Australian parents very much wished to give their children “the gift of bilingualism.” Unfortunately, our public schools are failing them in this aspiration.

Further evidence that Australian families want high-quality language education for their children comes from the fact that families who can afford it increasingly choose the International Baccalaureate (IB) offered by private schools over the HSC. In the IB, all-round academic excellence includes the study of a second language. Universities value the all-rounder academic excellence of IB graduates, too: IB scores systematically translate into higher Australian Tertiary Admissions Rank (ATAR) scores than HSC scores. By contrast, choosing a language option in the HSC can work against high-achieving students because some languages, including those where the student is deemed a “background speaker”, scale poorly.

In sum, high-performing private schools following the IB system have a compulsory additional language; internationally, compulsory additional language learning is the norm, including in some of the world’s most highly performing educational systems. So, why not in Australia’s public schools? Why do we accept the linguistic myopia of our political leaders who can’t seem to imagine high-quality language education as a core plank of academic excellence?

Nizaqete Bislimi (Source: DuMont Verlag / Franz Brück)

Some of the most striking images from the refugees who have been trekking across Europe are of families and children. Beyond the immediate perils of their journeys, migration inevitably changes families. As children are usually much quicker to learn new languages and adapt to new circumstances than adults, children and youths often inevitably become mediators between their parents and the host society.

Adults – migrant and local – often feel rather ambiguous about children as linguistic and cultural mediators: is a child that translates at a parent-teacher interview at school really to be trusted? Parents and teachers may feel apprehensive that the child is not interpreting “the truth” but may be representing their academic performance in a more favourable light than is actually warranted. Should not children be kept away from medical examinations? Parents and doctors often struggle with the fact that, where children act as mediators in a medical encounter, the child may gain knowledge of their parents’ bodies in ways that might be considered inappropriate or premature. And does not the balance of power overall shift in favour of the child? Are migrant parents “losing control” as the supposedly clear power hierarchy between adult and child breaks down when a migrant adult depends on a child to help them interact in the wider society?

A recently published autobiography shows a different side of child mediators. The autobiography titled Durch die Wand (“Through the wall”) is by Nizaqete Bislimi, a German lawyer in her mid-30s. Nizaqete’s story has been well-published in Germany for a number of years: born in Kosovo in 1979, Nizaqete’s family fled to Germany when she was fourteen years old. For thirteen years the family failed to achieve a secure legal status and lived under the constant threat of deportation. Even so, Nizaqete finished high school and graduated as one of the top students in her class. She went on to study law and is today partner in a law firm specializing in migration and citizenship law and also the president of the German Romani Federation.

Given the family’s precarious legal status over many years, it is not surprising that a typical experience during Nizaqete’s early years in Germany should have been that she needed to mediate between her mother and their (pro bono) lawyer. Nizaqete was ambitious, determined and, obviously, smart, and learned German quickly. Even so, “Amtsdeutsch” (“bureaucratic German”) and the legal register were beyond the teenager.

During one of their meetings with their lawyer, Nizaqete said to her mother “One day I will understand all this. I promise.” The lawyer explained that the only way for this to happen was for Nizaqete to study law.

Her career adviser had a different idea and recommended that she get married instead of going to university. Nizaqete’s ambitions clearly did not fit his stereotype of a young Romani refugee woman from the Balkan.

But Nizaqete had promised her mother, and she has succeeded.

The anxieties about child mediators mentioned above notwithstanding, Nizaqete’s experience deriving strength from acting as a linguistic and cultural mediator for her parents may not be unique.

Research with child language brokers has examined cognitive development, academic performance, parent-child relationships, emotional stress and moral development.

Nizaqete Bislimi with her parents on the day she was admitted to the bar (Source: Spiegelonline)

Cognitive development: because acting as linguistic and cultural mediator entails involvements in more complex situations than a child would normally encounter, for instance in legal or medical contexts, child mediators may develop higher problem-solving skills and better decision-making strategies (Morales & Hanson, 2005).

Academic performance: some studies have shown that acting as linguistic mediator is associated with higher scores on standardized tests (e.g., Dorner et al, 2007). Be that as it may, analysis of recorded parent-teacher interviews where the child interpreted between parent and teacher showed that children certainly did not lie to present their academic performance in a more favourable light than warranted (Sánchez & Orellana, 2006). On the contrary, they were likely to downplay praise from the teacher in translation.

Parent-child relationships: despite the common assumption that parents who have to enlist their children’s help to communicate outside the family are losing power and status, the evidence suggests otherwise. A US study, for instance, found that language brokering “may provide opportunities for communication and contact with parents that may contribute to adolescents feeling trusted and needed by parents” (Chao 2006, p. 295).

Emotional stress: there is concern in the literature that it may be traumatic for children to interpret for parents in contexts, particularly of a medical nature, where violence is under discussion or where they will gain insights into taboo topics such as parents’ sexuality. An interview study in the US found that practitioners in such cases often rejected the child as mediator in order to protect them from emotional stress (Cohen et al. 1999)

Moral development: some studies view linguistic and cultural mediation as a form of “required helpfulness” similarly to having to help out with domestic chores, and required helpfulness has been associated with maturity and moral development (e.g., Bauer 2013).

Overall, in migration contexts, it is often inevitable that children take on the roles of linguistic and cultural brokers between the adults in their family and the wider society. Given that this is the case, overburdening the activity with all kinds of anxieties is not helpful. In fact, child mediators may “make it possible for their parents to live, eat, shop and otherwise sustain themselves as workers, citizens and consumers in their host country” (Orellana 2009, p. 124). Conversely, they provide an important service to the host society which might be struggling to provide professional translators and interpreters in all the contexts where they might be necessary.

For many children contributing in this way to their families and societies is normal and will give them the strength to succeed against the odds. We should aim to help them with their brokering roles by developing their multilingual proficiencies and skills and by smoothing their paths; so that we’ll see many more success stories like that of Nizaqete Bislimi.

References

Bauer, E. (2013). Reconstructing Moral Identities in Memories of Childhood Language Brokering Experiences International Migration, 51 (5), 205-218 DOI: 10.1111/imig.12030

Chao, R. K. (2006). The Prevalence and Consequences of Adolescents’ Language Brokering for Their Immigrant Parents. In M. H. Bornstein & L. R. Cote (Eds.), Acculturation and Parent-Child Relationships: Measurement and Development (pp. 271-296). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Cohen, S., Moran-Ellis, J., & Smaje, C. (1999). Children as Informal Interpreters in GP Consultations: Pragmatics and Ideology. Sociology of Health & Illness, 21(2), 163-186. doi: 10.1111/1467-9566.00148

Dorner, L. M., Orellana, M. F., & Li‐Grining, C. P. (2007). “I Helped My Mom,” and It Helped Me: Translating the Skills of Language Brokers into Improved Standardized Test Scores. American Journal of Education, 113(3), 451-478. doi: 10.1086/512740

Morales, A., & Hanson, W. E. (2005). Language Brokering: An Integrative Review of the Literature. Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences, 27(4), 471-503. doi: 10.1177/0739986305281333

Orellana, M. F. (2009). Translating Childhoods: Immigrant Youth, Language, and Culture. New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Rutgers University Press.

Sánchez, I. G., & Orellana, M. F. (2006). The Construction of Moral and Social Identity in Immigrant Children’s Narratives-in-Translation. Linguistics and Education, 17(3), 209-239. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.linged.2006.07.001

Further reading

Bislimi, N. (2015). Durch die Wand: Von der Asylbewerberin zur Rechtsanwältin [Through the Wall: From Asylum Seeker to Lawyer]. Köln: Dumont Buchverlag.

Jessen, J. (2015, 2015-10-02). Nizaqete Bislimi – Vom Flüchtlingskind zur Anwältin. WAZ.

Michaelis, S. (2015, 2015-10-03). Nizaqete Bislimi startete vom Flüchtlingsheim aus eine Karriere als Anwältin. Wiesbadener Tagblatt.

Michaelis, S. (2015, 2015-09-21). Von der Asylbewerberin zur Anwältin. Der Spiegel.

Peters, F. (2013, 2013-05-30). Die Roma, die unbedingt nach Oben wollte. Die Welt.

Yordanova, Y. (2013, 2013-12-13). Nizaqete Bislimi – Wiedergefundene Identität. Deutsche Welle.

Children in a bilingual program in Hamburg (Source: AlsterKind)

It is a key finding of contemporary educational research that the children of migrants experience educational disadvantage vis-à-vis their native-born peers. The educational disadvantage of bilingual children has been documented in education systems as diverse as those of Britain, Germany, Japan and the USA. The discrepancy between the home language and the language of the school has been found to play a central role in educational disadvantage: while educational institutions continue to maintain a monolingual habitus, migrant children bring to school the experience of multilingualism.

Throughout the world, schools have been extremely slow to adapt to the realities of linguistic diversity; and the obsession of educational systems with linguistic homogeneity constitutes one of the great paradoxes of our time. While the benefits of bilingual education have been documented in a substantial body of research spanning a number of decades, the implementation of bilingual programs has been relatively slow, small-scale, discontinuous and often politically controversial. That is why academic monitoring of bilingual programs and dissemination of knowledge about bilingual programs continues to be important.

Much of the research about bilingual education for migrant students has been dominated by Spanish programs in the USA, and research in other contexts continues to be relatively scarce. A 2011 article by Joana Duarte about a six-year-monitoring project of bilingual elementary schools in the Northern German port city of Hamburg offers a fascinating exception.

Since the early 2000s, Hamburg has been offering bilingual programs in Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Turkish. These programs have been designed as dual-immersion programs and the aim is to enroll children whose stronger language is German or the target language in roughly equal numbers. Over a six-year period, the bilingual programs were monitored by researchers from the University of Hamburg, and Duarte’s article focusses particularly on the Portuguese program.

Like many dual-language immersion programs, the bilingual programs under examination have three key aims:

• Development of high-level bilingual proficiencies in German and Portuguese, including the ability to read and write in both languages (biliteracy)
• Achievement in content areas such as mathematics, sciences and social studies at or above grade level
• Development of intercultural competences

In order to achieve these goals about half of the curriculum is taught bilingually: German and Portuguese language classes are taught contrastively and with a strong focus on linguistic form. Social Studies are taught through a team-teaching approach by a German- and a Portuguese-speaking teacher, and Music and parts of Mathematics are taught by a bilingual teacher who uses both languages.

Didactically, there is a strong focus on explicit and contrastive language instruction, and explicit grammar and form-focused instruction is an important feature of all instruction, including subject instruction.

So, how does this kind of program work for the students? The researchers conducted a three-way comparison of students in the program with Portuguese bilingual migrant students and native German monolingual students at a ‘regular’ German elementary school, and also with native Portuguese monolingual students studying in Portugal.

To begin with, the students in the bilingual program significantly outperformed their Portuguese-speaking peers in a ‘regular’ German elementary school on assessments of academic language proficiency and subject content. Their gains were such that, over the six years of elementary school, the initial condition of linguistic heterogeneity disappeared and their performance was equal to that of monolingual German children after controlling for socio-economic background and individual student cognitive ability.

This means that bilingual education in a dual-immersion program can completely erase the educational disadvantage of migrant students.

Comparison with Portuguese students in Portugal showed an additional bonus: Portuguese-speaking migrant children in the program in Hamburg reached proficiency levels in Portuguese that are comparable to those of monolingual Portuguese children in Portugal.

Migrant children are disadvantaged in monolingual schools because they face the double task of learning a new language and new subject content simultaneously and they do so in the presence of native-born monolingual students, for whom the educational system is designed, and who thus ‘only’ face the task of content learning. Where schools level the playing field through the provision of bilingual education, as the Hamburg programs described here do, they not only overcome language-based educational disadvantage but also enable migrants to accumulate cultural capital by institutionalizing and certifying bilingual proficiency.

Duarte, J. (2011). Migrants’ educational success through innovation: The case of the Hamburg bilingual schools. International Review of Education / Internationale Zeitschrift für Erziehungswissenschaft / Revue Internationale de l’Education, 57(5/6), 631-649. doi: 10.2307/41480148 (available for download from academia.edu)

“How bad is your cultural cringe?” (Source: Jenna Guillaume, BuzzFeed)

Keith: I’m still really shit at pronouncing Lisa’s surname. With the umlaut o.
Hanna: What is Lisa’s surname?
(laughter)
Keith: Do I get three goes?
(Keith, Australian, in a relationship with Lisa from Germany)

Despite the increasing value of multilingualism in a globalised world, English-speaking countries such as Australia remain stubbornly monolingual. At the same time the benefits of speaking more than one language are regularly touted in public discourse. My research investigates how speakers of Australian English with a partner from a non-English-speaking background feel about their linguistic repertoires. Embarrassment, as in the example above from Keith (all names are pseudonyms), comes up a lot. So does inferiority. Because of their low proficiency in foreign languages (often as a consequence of their poor quality or limited language learning experiences in formal education) these participants feel they are bad language learners. This response seems to be one way of engaging with and mitigating their own privilege as native speakers of the powerful global language, English, compared to their partners who learned English as an additional language.

“It’s my deficiency”: being a bad language learner

And I I think I was completely in awe of that the fact that she could speak so many different languages freely, and a little bit jealous, and at the beginning was a bit more kind of definite about trying to learn German, um and I think the whole experience intimidated me cause I think I’m the kind of person who if they don’t pick something up really quickly kind of just gives up very quickly (…) (Keith)

For Lisa and Keith, Keith’s first and Lisa’s second language, English, has been the language of their relationship. Keith sees Lisa’s language skills as impressive while blaming himself for his own inability to learn German. He feels that Lisa “probably speaks better English than most native English speakers in Australia”. While Lisa learnt languages formally in her school education as a child and young adult, Keith faces all the frustration of learning another language as an adult.

In his own education Keith’s choices were limited. Although he comes from an Italian migrant background, Italian was not available at his public school in inner Sydney in the 1990s. He decided to take Latin instead, but he dropped it after junior high school when he lost interest in his schooling. He has done no further foreign language study in contrast to Lisa, who studied four languages over many years in her schooling in Germany. So when it comes to saying Keith’s Italian surname their pronunciation reflects their differing language learning trajectories:

Hanna: And how are you at pronouncing Keith’s last name (laughs)?

Lisa: I am tempted to pronounce it Italian which then nobody understands (laughs).

Keith: She- like I’m reading out a, a pizza on the pizza menu from our local pizzeria and she makes fun of my Italian accent. You know like quattro formaggi, she’s like (puts on a strong Australian accent) quattro formaggi. ‘Cause she speaks Italian, you know, these fucking Europeans!

(laughter)

In Keith’s comment about his partner’s Italian pronunciation of his Italian surname we could read humorous disparagement of her ability to pronounce it in the Italian way; in Australia foreign names are usually anglicised or pronounced in an English way. Both his lack of educational opportunity to study Italian and his Anglicized pronunciation cause him in that moment to position himself as a (monolingual) Australian in opposition to (multilingual) Europeans.

Stephen, from Australia, who is married to Christina from Argentina feels similarly critical of his own poor Spanish skills. He describes his attempts to learn Spanish as “a token effort”, says he “hasn’t got an ear for languages” and it dismissive of his own attempts to learn Spanish:

Hanna: You said you’re the odd one out; how do you feel…

Stephen: No, not at all, because uh because I recognise that it’s my deficiency in not having had the time to devote to learning a language. Now, I I make the standard joke I have 50 words of [unclear] of Spanish that I know. I work very hard and uh it’s a standing family joke (…)

In fact, Stephen studied Spanish at night, has a Spanish speaking community in Sydney and has two children who are bilingual. He also regularly visits Argentina and has frequent Argentine house guests. Spanish is a regular feature in his life. In the interview he also says that learning Spanish is “a commitment I’ve probably made and haven’t fulfilled” and feels he is a “handicapped Aussie” compared to his multilingual relations.

Another participant, Amy, has a strikingly similar evaluation of her own language skills. When I asked her why she was interested in talking to me about language she said:

Well, I suppose, I suppose it’s just there and I suppose for me it’s that I’ve got to learn more Spanish (…) And I went to lessons and I started learning and I was enthusiastic because we were going to Columbia, but as soon as we came back from Columbia I was just like that’s it, I’m just not interested anymore. And I learnt that I’m not a good language learner(…) (Amy, in a relationship with German from Columbia)

Amy’s language learning experiences at school were typical for my participants. In twelve years of state school education all she studied was ten weeks each of Italian, German and French in her seventh school year. In contrast, she praises her partner for his excellent English language skills which he acquired in Columbia from the “movies and music” he consumed from their powerful northern neighbour.

A new kind of language cringe

It seems these participants characterise their persistent monolingualism as a personal failing, a source of embarrassment, a source of language cringe. In Australia language cringe is a child of the cultural cringe. It has traditionally been associated with being embarrassed about speaking Australian English, rather than the more highly valued British English of the mother country. However, in my research I have found a new form of language cringe, related to monolinguals who speak the most valuable global language compared to multilinguals who are non-native speakers. This kind of language cringe contradicts the idea that a native speaker will always be “better” than a non-native speaker through an acknowledgment of the level of skill and knowledge which come with learning an additional language to a high proficiency.

This is most obvious when it comes to accent, because language cringe views an Australian native accent as lower value than (some) non-native accents. Lisa points out that she found the Australian accent strange on first hearing.

Lisa: I just remember the first Australian I ever met in my life (…) we started talking in English and I just thought who the fuck is this person? (laughter) It sounded so outlandish I’d never heard that before.

When I asked Keith about what kind of accent he would like his daughter to have, he reluctantly admitted that he wanted hers to be more “international”. Stephen points out that on first travelling to the United States with his wife, the locals “struggled” with his “obvious Australian accent” while she “was much more readily understood”. The implicit high value of a native accent is challenged by the transferability of a more international non-native accent.

Understanding and being able to explain the grammar of a language is another site where language cringe manifests itself. Paul, from Sydney, met Sara from Spain while travelling around South America. He was quickly hired as an English teacher because he was a native speaker. But it was Sara who taught him enough English grammar to make it through the first lesson.

(…) when Sara and I first met I needed to get some work and we were in Chile, um I just before I arrived to Chile we’d split up for a few weeks on the way to. and I’d asked Sara can you hand out a few CVs to English schools when we get there, or when you get there, which she did and I basically arrived and there was a job waiting for me which was perfect. But I’d never taught, I’d never thought about English I had no idea [Sara laughs]. and so the very first lesson I had to do (…) and uh [laughs] they, you know, the school said uh here’s the book this is Headway, this is what you’re using, they’re up to page thirty two or whatever. I opened it up and it was the present perfect and I looked at it and I was like what’s the present perfect, what’s a past participle and Sara sat down and taught me. (Paul, my emphasis)

Sara also spoke four languages to, at that time, Paul’s one. Although Sara is the one with the multilingual skills, Paul was seen by the language school as a better language user because he is a native speaker.

Managing native speaker privilege

Like Keith, Paul is impressed by his wife’s linguistic skills but he also recognises that because of the privilege of the English native speaker Sara’s multilingualism may be less valued. Rather than being embarrassed about his own failings as an individual language user Paul draws attention to the wider failings of the native speaker ideology in terms of its tenuous relation to actual knowledge about language as a system or teaching expertise. Paul acknowledges his partner’s linguistic superiority and the inherent injustice of an employment situation where he benefitted from a discriminatory language ideology because he is a native speaker.

For my other participants it may be that their conception of their own language skills as inferior in relation to the linguistic repertoire of their partners is their way to manage the inequalities brought about by this privilege. Recognising their own limited linguistic repertoire and casting it as a personal failing may be a way to tip the scales back in favour of the linguistic repertoire of a multilingual partner.

“Naughty boys” in the media: image from the Channel 4 gangs and drugs drama “Top Boy”

Teacher expectations can constitute a self-fulfilling prophecy: teachers behave differently towards children depending on their expectations of them. The ways in which teachers treat students affect students’ self-concept, motivation, achievement and aspirations. Over time, the performance of high-expectation students will increase and the performance of low-expectation students will decline, until student performance and behavior closely conforms to what was expected of them in the first place (for an overview of teacher expectations and labelling, see Rist 2015).

Teacher expectations don’t just come out of the blue but are related to social stereotypes: they are gendered, classed and raced. As we say last week, working-class Hispanic boys in the USA get a poor deal in formal education. The same is true of working-class ethnic-minority boys in many other contexts around the world.

A 2008 study of the mismatch between student aspirations and teacher expectations poignantly illustrates this point and shows how formal education can serve to limit, rather than expand, opportunities for teenage migrants. The researcher, Melanie Cooke, followed three teenage migrants in London schools over a period of six months.

At the time, the three boys were16 and 17 years old. We meet Felek, an unaccompanied refugee from Iraqi Kurdistan, whose family had pooled their resources to smuggle him out of Iraq and across Europe almost two years earlier. We meet Carlos, an asylum seeker from Angola, who had arrived in London with his family about a year earlier. And we meet Santos, a Portuguese national, whose parents are from Angola and Cabo Verde, and who had come to London to live with his grandmother.

All three boys have high aspirations: first, they want to learn English and find a place in London where they fit in; something that seems impossibly difficulty to achieve. They are disappointed with the slow progress of their English language development, and they are struggling with the fact that, in the one to two years they have been in London, they have not been able to make a single local friend. Felek has met other Kurds and also spends time with other young asylum seekers from Albania and Somalia. The friendship networks of Carlos and Santos are exclusively with other Portuguese speakers.

While they are keen to make friends and find a place where they “fit,” they are frequently harassed by local youths, and conflict and fights are a regular part of their experience.

All three boys have high expectations of their future, and all three see themselves as studious and academic. Felek dreams of becoming an engineer or a doctor to give back to his family and homeland. However, none of the three has received any guidance regarding educational pathways and, other than “studying hard” have only the vaguest ideas how their dreams might be achieved.

In sum, Felek, Carlos and Santos see themselves as fundamentally “good boys,” who have been through a lot already, who see migration to the UK as an opportunity, and who want to make the most of this opportunity to further their careers and to make a contribution to society.

Unfortunately, that is not how educational policy makers and their teachers see them.

As regards educational policy, as teenage arrivals they simply fall between the cracks of the educational system. While new arrivals up until the age of 16 are sent to mainstream schools in the UK, arrivals above this age are treated as adults and are offered English language classes designed for adults, from all kinds of backgrounds, who lack basic vocational skills (for an overview of educational provisions for refugee youths in Australia, see Moore, Nicholas & Deblaquiere 2008). The classes are designed to teach numeracy, literacy and English that will allow graduates to transfer into a vocational course and to become “job-ready.” Other than English language training, no pathway that would continue their secondary education is available to them because no one ever seems to have envisaged that teenage migrants might have educational aspirations.

As regards their teachers, they know next to nothing about their students’ life outside the classroom and so draw on stereotypes about Middle Eastern and black male adolescents in their interactions with their students: they see them as ignorant young men who lack discipline and who have no past and no future. As one teacher puts it: “they come to this country … they get off the plane and they have no idea … about anything” (quoted in Cooke 2008, p. 32).

The teachers, both of who are middle-class women, one British Asian and the other white British, in particular react to what they see as the boys’ sexism. Carlos and Santos, for instance, have both been banned from interacting with younger girls in the mainstream school to which their English-language program is attached. Supposedly, this was because the boys were causing trouble. However, Carlos’ and Santos’ explanation of the event that led to the ban is quite different: in their account, another young boy, who is also a recent arrival from Angola, one day went to school wearing girls’ pants. According to Carlos, this is what happened next:

So those girls noticed he had women’s trousers. So they started teasing him. He doesn’t speak English very well … so the only thing he did was answer back, and because we were in the middle, they blamed us all. And they said if you do anything more, they will throw us out of school. (Quoted in Cooke 2008, p. 29)

This innocuous story contrasts with the teacher’s view of Carlos as a “gangster rapper” and “the naughtiest of the naughty.”

One way to control the boys and to keep the dreaded “gangster” that the teachers believe to be lurking inside the boys at bay is through sticking strictly to the curriculum and through controlling classroom interactions in minute detail. As a result, valuable opportunities for the boys to find their voice in English are lost. Felek’s class, for instance, at one point reads a text about the refugee journey of an Afghan boy. It is a story that not only Felek but most students in the class can relate to well, and some had, in fact, watched a TV show about asylum only the night before. Therefore, they are keen to talk about the text and discuss it. However, the teacher stifles these attempts at discussion and sticks to her lesson plan, which treats the text only as basis for comprehension exercises, new vocabulary practice, reading aloud, and as a gap fill exercise.

The researcher concludes that school is not a good place for Felek, Carlos and Santos:

[T]he learners described in this article are, educationally speaking, getting the worst of all worlds, despite the intentions of their teachers. A large part of the blame for this must be laid at the door of policy makers who fail to address ESOL teenagers as whole people with transnational, diasporic complexities and aspirations and who regard teachers as technicians. Blame might also be laid at the door of teacher education, which fails to envisage the potential of education as an arena for social transformation or to encourage teachers to develop as “transformative intellectuals.” (Cooke 2008, p. 37)

As Western societies are struggling to comprehend why so many young men from immigrant backgrounds are turning “bad,” Cooke’s research offers us a glimpse of how such large social processes play out in everyday interactions: how students become not what they hope to become but what others expect them to become.

References

Cooke, M. (2008). “What We Might Become”: The Lives, Aspirations, and Education of Young Migrants in the London Area Journal of Language, Identity & Education, 7 (1), 22-40 DOI: 10.1080/15348450701804698

Moore, H., Nicholas, H., & Deblaquiere, J. (2008). ‘Opening the Door’ Provision for Refugee Youth with Minimal/No Schooling in the Adult Migrant English Program Project 2.1: ‘Modes of Delivery for SPP Youth’. Canberra: Australian Government, Department of Immigration and Citizenship.

Rist, R. C. (2015). On understanding the process of schooling: the contributions of labeling theory. In J. H. Ballantine & J. Z. Spade (Eds.), Schools and Society: A Sociological Approach to Education (pp. 47-56). London: Sage.

Bilingualism has a gender

A while ago, I reported on the findings of a US study that demonstrated that children of immigrants who achieve high-level bilingual proficiency in both English and their home language have, as young adults, a significantly higher earnings potential than their English-dominant peers (Agirdag 2013). A new study throws gender into the mix and complicates the relationship between bilingualism in adolescence and status attainment in young adulthood further.

Both studies use data from the US National Education Longitudinal Study (NELS). This is a nationally representative dataset based on a longitudinal survey of 12,144 young US Americans who were first surveyed in 1988 when they were in eighth grade. Subsequent follow-up surveys were conducted biennially until 2000, when the respondents were in the mid-to-late twenties.

NELS includes full-data sets (the participant has taken each survey and parent survey data are also available) for 1,245 Latinos, and this subset is the focus of the recent study by Jennifer Lee and Sarah Hatteberg. Like Agirdag (2013), the researchers ask whether bilingualism during adolescence has a long-term influence on education, occupation, and income. Additionally, they examine whether this relationship varies by gender.

The authors measure bilingual proficiency as follows:

• A biliterate is someone who has high levels of oral and written proficiency in both English and Spanish. 303 respondents (just under 25%) were biliterate.
• A fluent oral bilingual is someone who has high levels of oral proficiency in both English and Spanish but has little or no written proficiency in Spanish. 237 respondents (19%) were fluent oral bilinguals.
• A passive bilingual is someone who is English dominant but understands Spanish well without speaking Spanish well. 151 respondents (13%) were passive bilinguals.
• In contrast to a passive bilingual, an English dominant person does not understand Spanish well. 456 respondents (32%) were English dominant.
• A limited language proficient person is someone who is fluent in neither language. 71 respondents (6%) had limited proficiency in both languages.

Occupational prestige by gender and bilingual proficiency (Source: Lee & Hatteberg 2015, p. 17)

Boys and girls in the sample were equally likely to be English dominant and limited language proficient. However, there were notable gender differences related to bilingualism: girls were a lot more likely to be biliterate than boys (30% for females vs. 20% for males); but boys were more likely to be fluent oral bilinguals (22% for females vs. 27% for males) and passive bilinguals (9% for females vs. 16% for males).

What does this finding of gendered bilingualism mean for future life chances? Do girls’ higher biliteracy rates translate into higher high school completion rates, higher status occupations and higher incomes? The literature on the multiple benefits of bilingualism – for an overview of the cognitive, educational, and economic benefits of high level bilingual proficiency you can listen to this podcast on the Bilingual Avenue – would lead us to assume so.

Well, it did not quite turn out that way.

The researchers found that biliteracy did indeed do wonders for the high school completion rates of girls: biliterate girls in the sample were five times more likely to complete high school than English dominant girls. However, it did not work this way for boys: the high school completion rates of biliterate boys were almost identical to those of English-dominant boys. What is more, orally and passively bilingual boys were less likely to complete high school than their English dominant peers.

With regard to occupational prestige in young adulthood the findings were similar: biliterate women were significantly more likely to be employed in roles with higher occupational prestige than English-dominant women. Biliterate men, by contrast, were slightly less likely to be employed in roles with high occupational prestige than English-dominant men.

How can bilingualism be advantageous for females but detrimental to males? Surely the cognitive benefits of bilingualism – greater brain plasticity and better executive control – accrue to males and females equally.

The answer to this conundrum is that ‘bilingualism’ does not equal ‘bilingualism.’ The benefits of (high-level) bilingual proficiency are not absolute but social. What is means to be Hispanic in the USA is different for men and women. As the authors point out, “men and women experience race and ethnicity differently and indicators of ethnicity, like language, have different meanings for boys and girls, and for men and women” (Lee and Hatteberg 2015, p. 21).

That bilingualism is gendered is not a new finding (two overview articles about bilingualism and gender research by Aneta Pavlenko and myself are available here and here).

Girls in migrant families often act as language brokers and mediate between their family and mainstream institutions. Maybe such practices socialize them into the ‘feminine’ communicative styles built on cooperation, rapport building, sympathetic listening and showing empathy that are highly valued in contemporary service work, as Deborah Cameron has pointed out in Good to talk? Where such ‘feminine’ communicative styles are valued – as they are in schools and the workplaces of the service economy – it is perhaps not surprising that being able to deploy such styles in more than one language confers advantages.

By contrast, Spanish-speaking boys in the US schools are often stigmatized as trouble makers. For Latino boys and men, speaking Spanish is associated with working-class ‘macho’ styles that are not valued in educational environments nor in occupations that carry conventional prestige. Rather than being advantageous, bilingualism thus becomes a liability for Latino boys and men because it is associated with the ‘wrong’ kinds of masculinity; masculinities neither appreciated by school teachers nor by employers in the tertiary sector.

So, what about income? Does biliteracy pay? At least for the women? Unlike Agirdag (2013), whose research answered this question in the affirmative for participants from a variety of language backgrounds, Lee and Hatteberg (2015) found no relationship between bilingualism, including biliteracy, in English and Spanish, and income.

While surprising at first blush, this finding is really not unexpected. We know that “men have higher incomes than women despite having lower average levels of educational attainment and that the attributes that benefit women in school do not necessarily translate into labor market rewards” (Lee and Hatteberg 2015, p. 19). We also know that middle-class feminized work in education, health care or retail may be relatively prestigious but poorly remunerated compared to equally prestigious jobs in male-dominated industries.

Hispanics’ high-level bilingual proficiency in English and Spanish in the USA may well go the way of nursing and teaching: once it becomes feminized, it may well become ‘respectable’ and ‘prestigious’ but it will also become devalued economically.

Agirdag, O. (2013). The long-term effects of bilingualism on children of immigration: student bilingualism and future earnings. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 17(4), 449-464. doi: 10.1080/13670050.2013.816264
Cameron, D. (2000). Good to talk? Living and working in a communication culture. London: Sage.

Lee, J., & Hatteberg, S. (2015). Bilingualism and Status Attainment among Latinos The Sociological Quarterly DOI: 10.1111/tsq.12097

Pavlenko, A., & Piller, I. (2001). New Directions in the Study of Multilingualism, Second Language Learning, and Gender. In A. Pavlenko, A. Blackledge, I. Piller, & M. Teutsch-Dwyer (Eds.), Multilingualism, Second Language Learning and Gender (pp. 17-52). Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Piller, I., & Pavlenko, A. (2007). Globalization, gender, and multilingualism. In H. Decke-Cornill & L. Volkmann (Eds.), Gender Studies and Foreign Language Teaching (pp. 15-30). Tübingen: Narr.

‘Soaking up English like a sponge:’ The researcher’s young son engrossed in a Thesaurus

If someone cannot now learn their native language, adding a couple of foerign (sic) dead languages is not going to help them. And there is no possible economic return such as is available from Asian languages or living European languages – either of which will improve syntactic awareness as much as or better than Latin and Greek. All in all, deluded and wasteful. (Reader comment, 23 June 2014, The Guardian)

with Indigenous Australian languages, the buck stops here – if they are not supported in Australia there’s definitely nowhere else to go to later on…the dreadful finality of that should not escape us (Reader comment, Aug 2014 The Conversation)

Our opinions on language education are influenced by our firsthand experiences about languages: our memories of language learning, having friends, family from other countries, or traveling. Our experience is also affected by language policies which reflect the dominant social forces of the era, e.g. assimilation of migrants was the predominant force shaping language policy until the 1970s. Last but not least, the way information about languages and language education is transmitted to us conveys messages.

One very important source of information and thus conveyor of opinions is online news media. Catalano and Moeller’s (Catalano & Moeller, 2013) article about media discourse on language education in the US focuses on how media discourse may affect people’s opinion on dual language programs. The authors analysed 29 online media articles on dual language education (DLE) to explore what linguistic features they use to affect public opinion.

One such feature was the use of metaphors. These are figures of speech that contain an implied comparison, for example ‘the wheels of justice’, ‘a broken heart’, or having a ‘bubbly personality’. As Santa Ana (2002) argues in his work on metaphors of Latinos in US public discourse, the casual use of metaphors in everyday discussions and texts is a way to reproduce social inequality as they gear us towards a certain view of the world.

Catalano and Moeller (2013) found two prevailing metaphors in their texts. The first one was language as water; for instance, being ‘fluent’ in languages, a school that ‘immerses’ students in a language, or ‘mainstream’ education. These are words and phrases that are so attached to the vocabulary of language education that we use them without thinking about the additional meanings they may convey. The interesting feature the two authors found about the use of this metaphor is that both those opinions that showed DLE in a positive light (as part of multilingual discourses) used these metaphors and also those that discuss problems with past models (monolingual discourses). This use of the same type of metaphor to express both positive and negative views on two different types of DLE, according to the authors, creates confusion in readers, which in turn does not foster an effective discussion of the topic. The second most common form of metaphor was dual language education as business/factory. Examples for these metaphors include ‘developing strategies’ to overcome ‘challenges’ in language education, students needing language ‘skills’ to ‘compete’, to mention a few.

Investigating the language market in Australia

How do metaphors of language and language education work in the Australian online media? As part of my research, I analyse publicly accessible online media articles about language education in Australia. The focus of the online articles I analyse are the following: English language learning for migrants; introducing classical languages in schools; our duty to enable migrant children to keep their first languages; the push to get more migrant children speak their native language; pre-schools trialing language lessons; and finally, language education being compulsory in Australian schools.

The dominant metaphor is language education as business, which appears in all six media articles I analysed, with 18 instances of use. To give a few examples,

• We waste a precious economic resource […] essentially a free natural resource
• The more cost effective option is to maintain what you already have – to maintain the mother tongues of our bilingual children.
• when there are many languages in the classroom, as there are in most Australian classrooms, bilingual programmes become logistically difficult
• What languages should we invest in?
• learning another language helps boost children’s literacy skills and comprehension of English.

What I find interesting is, similarly to Catalano and Moeller’s (2013) findings, these metaphors do not only appear in discourses in support of multilingualism, but also in those prioritizing the role of English in Australia. As an example, the excerpt below comes from an article reporting on Senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells addressing migrants on Australia Day 2014.

A lack of English has a personal cost, especially in an ageing population with health issues, or for parents that cannot understand their child’s teacher (Hall, 2014, 26 January).

Here, lack of the dominant language is presented as an economic burden for the individual and indirectly for the whole society as well. The reliance on this kind of metaphor in discourses for and against multilingualism, just like the dual function of the language as water in Catalano and Moeller’s findings, may not foster a fruitful discussion on the role of language education in Australia. The other reason why Catalano and Moeller warn against the overuse of the business metaphor in discussions on language education is that this focus narrows down the numerous benefits of bilingualism to an economic one.

To show how prevalent the business metaphor is: the second most common metaphor in my analysis was language as living organism with nine instances, half as many as language education as business. Here are some examples:

• the best way to support their English language learning is to nurture their mother tongues
• we “kill” the languages children bring with them into Kindergarten
• It gradually withers and disappears
• We participate in the destruction of their mother tongue, because without the opportunities to develop the language it becomes stunted.

These examples are similar to Catalano and Moeller’s education as cultivation metaphors; however, their findings include ‘blossom’, ‘flourish’, and ‘shine’, which are rhetorically more powerful than the negative equivalents I have found (‘withers’, stunted’). According to Santa Ana (2002) these kind of metaphors are an alternative to the language education as business ones because they emphasize personal development and maturation – or in our case, a lack of these.

Other common metaphors were, in this order, language as object (e.g. ‘lack of English’, to retain a language’), classical language as royalty (e.g. languages as ‘rightful inheritors’, ‘the linguistic regalia of privilege’), and language as duty (e.g. it is our ‘personal responsibility’, languages ‘policed entry into medicine and law degrees’). Interestingly, water metaphors occurred only in two articles and with the words ‘mainstream’ and ‘fluent’ each mentioned twice. However, the metaphor of language as water with the misleading connotation that language learning is natural and happens without any effort is quite common in reader comments to these articles e.g. children ‘absorb English like a sponge’, which I explore in detail in my PhD research.

Improving communication on language education

Returning back to the reader comments I cited at the beginning of the post, it is clear that these metaphors find their way into our everyday talk. The two quotes employ metaphors of business (‘economic return’), gambling (‘the buck stops here’) and language as a living organism (‘dead’, ‘dreadful finality’). Current economic forces affecting people’s life priorities can explain the marketization of the way language education is discussed. However, slipping into this habit of constructing learning and learners solely as participants of the market economy diminishes the whole experience of language learning and excludes other benefits one can gain from the process. As an example, see proverbs around the world related to the connection between wisdom and languages. It is thus important to recognize the power of the ways in which we speak about language learning and the consequences these may have on indigenous and migrant languages and communities in Australia.

Catalano, T., & Moeller, A. (2013). Media discourse and dual language programs: A critical linguistic analysis Discourse, Context & Media, 2 (4), 165-174 DOI: 10.1016/j.dcm.2013.09.001

Santa Ana, O. (2002). Brown tide rising. Austin, US: University of Texas Press.

Children of migrant cotton field workers from Oklahoma (Source: Library of Congress)

I’ve just come across a fascinating article about the schooling of migrant children during the Great Depression era in the US West Coast states. The authors, Paul Theobald and Rubén Donato, tell a fascinating tale of the manipulation of schooling as an efficient way to perpetuate class relationships. By comparing two groups of rural migrants the article also offers an illuminating analysis of the intersections of class and ethnicity. The two groups are external migrants from Mexico and internal migrants from the dust bowl of the Great Plains states. The latter group came to be collectively known by the disparaging term ‘Okies,’ and is epitomized by the Joad family in John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath.

In California, schooling for Mexicans had developed in the 19^th century in a way that systematically segregated Mexican children although Mexicans were not included in the legal provisions for segregation that applied to Asians, Blacks and Native Americans. In 1920, for instance, eighty percent of all Mexican children attended separate ‘Mexican schools’ or ‘Mexican classrooms.’ The justification for segregation was that Mexican students were ‘problem students’: they were stereotyped as slow learners with a language problem and un-American habits and values. Their racial status was also frequently debated and there were a number of efforts to have Mexicans classified as ‘Indian,’ which would have legalized their segregation.

Efforts to legalize the segregation of Mexicans were never successful and so their segregation was achieved through other means such as the construction of ‘Mexican’ schools, the gerrymandering of school attendance zones, and internal segregation through tracking. Segregation coupled with the irregular attendance of families who were seasonal agricultural workers resulted in very early dropout, and most Mexican children left school without having learnt how to read and write.

‘Fruit tramp’ family from Texas, 1935 (Source: Library of Congress)

In the early 1930s around 250,000 Mexicans, including US citizens, were deported to Mexico. This created a labor void, which desperate dust bowl migrants were eager to fill. Like Mexicans, Okies were despised because of their poverty and the burden they were seen to place on the taxpayer. In contrast to Mexicans, there was no readily-available ideology that would justify their segregation: they were white and English-speaking.

Okies disrupted the logic of agricultural work and segregation in California because here were white Americans doing ‘non-white’ work. This meant that the ‘inferior’ ethnicity of agricultural workers could no longer be used to justify their low wages and abominable working conditions. Theoretically, there were two options to deal with this dilemma:

Either the conditions and circumstances of agricultural labor would have to improve to meet white standards, or the Okies would have to be shown to be as inferior as Mexican migrants. Regrettably, there was (and is) no place like school for defining inferiority. (Theobald & Donato 1990, p. 34)

Although race and language were not available as rationales for segregation, the low quality of schooling in Arkansas, Oklahoma and Texas was. A 1939 survey found that ten percent of Okie migrant children were as far as four years behind their non-mobile Californian peers. Another twenty percent were three years behind and forty percent were two years behind. As a result school authorities felt compelled to institute ‘special’ classes for Okie children.

The result was the same as it was for Mexican children: poor attendance, early drop-out and dismal outcomes. A contemporary account explains the inferiority complex schooling instilled in Okie children:

Year by year, as they grow older, the embarrassment of their ignorance increases; held back sometimes four and five grades, when they enter new schools tall youths of 13 are out of place in classes with small-fry of 7. Bashful at their own backwardness and ashamed of their clothes or “foreign” accent, they stand out as easy targets for the venomed barbs of their richer and settled schoolmates. “He’s from the country camp, that’s what they said of my child on the school ground. Don’t you see how it hurts?” one transient mother explained. (Quoted in Theobald & Donato 1990, p. 35)

Okie child camping in Imperial Valley, California (Source: Library of Congress)

That the low quality of schooling in Arkansas, Oklahoma and Texas was nothing but a pretext for segregation is most apparent from the experience of children from the states of the northern Plains. Dust bowl migrants from the Dakotas entered predominantly Oregon and Washington. These two states had no history of segregation because agriculture was not yet industrialized and therefore there were few Mexican (or Asian) agricultural workers. Furthermore, the schooling system in the Dakotas was superior to that of Oregon and Washington. Even so, segregated schooling for Okie children developed in the Pacific Northwest, too.

The authors conclude that schooling during the period was designed to perpetuate the subordination of agricultural labor. When language and ethnicity fell away as ways to legitimize the processing of Mexican children into cheap labor, other legitimation strategies such as ‘educational backwardness’ were found.

It is also worth noting that the animosity towards Mexicans and Okies during the Great Depression was justified with their poverty, with the fact that they were a drain on the public purse. However, the segregated schooling instituted for these two groups was a more expensive educational option than integration would have been. Segregation involved the provision of separate buildings and the hiring of extra teachers.

If the maintenance of a docile, inexpensive labor system required social distance between the children of property owners and the children of harvest laborers, then a slightly inflated budget at the local school was, seemingly, a small price to pay. (Theobald & Donato 1990, p. 36)

It is also instructive to consider what happened after the Great Depression and the Second World War: Okies were integrated into the mainstream and took up jobs in production and industry. In fact, today even the term ‘Okie’ itself has disappeared as a social category. By contrast, Mexicans were forced back into agriculture and segregated schooling for Mexicans continued into the 1960s.

California pea pickers returning to camp after a day’s work in the field, near Santa Clara, California (Source: Library of Congress)

The class position of Okies took precedence over ethnicity during a time of economic crisis. However, when the crisis was over, Okies were not barred from class mobility in the same way that Mexicans were. This means that class in the United States is most restrictive when it is defined by ethnicity. But in whichever way class is circumscribed, schooling plays a crucial role in legitimizing class inequality because the basic principles of school finance, educational objectives and student evaluation are defined by those in power.

The authors conclude by asking what the enduring lessons of migrant schooling during the Great Depression might be:

Rural schools can either play the traditional role of agent in the solution of the legitimation crisis of the state, or they can begin to work to expose the unethical nature of America’s treatment of the countryside. (Theobald & Donato 1990, p. 43)

Theobald, P., & Donato, R. (1990). Children of the harvest: The schooling of dust bowl and Mexican migrants during the depression era Peabody Journal of Education, 67 (4), 29-45 DOI: 10.1080/01619569009538699

Nanai/Hezhe children (Source: Wikipedia)

We have often examined here on Language on the Move how ‘English for all’ educational policies entrench inequality rather than alleviate disadvantage (e.g., here or here). But how does this play out in the real-life experiences of real people? Today I would like to introduce Wei Ru to you, a young woman from China. Wei Ru is the pseudonym of a research participant in Jenny Zhang’s PhD research.

In 2004, Wei Ru was in her final year of senior high school in a rural area of Heilongjiang province in northern China and preparing for the gaokao (高考; ‘big test,’ China’s national university entrance exam). Wei Ru is a member of an ethnic group called Nanai or Hezhe. These are an indigenous people of Siberia and have traditionally lived along the middle reaches of the Amur River Valley, an area where, today, the Amur River constitutes the border between China and Russia. Consequently, the Nanai, as they are known in Russia, and the Hezhe, as they are known in China, have been divided between these two countries and today constitute a very small minority in both countries: in 2000, there were about 12,000 Nanai in Russia and 4,500 in China. Of these, only around 5,000 speakers of the Nanai/Hezhe language remained in Russia in the first decade of the 21^st century, and only twenty in China. All twenty were elderly, and Wei Ru was not one of them.

Wei Ru has spoken Chinese all her life and has been educated through the medium of Chinese. Additionally, Wei Ru has spent many years learning Russian both formally and informally. Throughout her childhood and youth there were many Russian language learning opportunities available in Wei Ru’s home town: there is a brisk cross-border trade and Russian visitors to the town are a regular occurrence, as are visits to the Russian side of the border. In school, Russian was an important part of the curriculum. Russian teachers were highly qualified and the students enjoyed learning Russian because it was well-taught and was of obvious relevance to their lives. Furthermore, for Wei Ru, who is passionate about her Hezhe heritage, Russian carried additional significance as the language that allowed her to connect with the Nanai on the other side of the border. To her, it is almost as if Russian had become the ethnic language of the Nanai/Hezhe.

Throughout her schooling, Wei Ru had been an outstanding student: she scored on top of her class in most subjects and expected to gain university admission in a prestigious university and in her preferred major. However, when China became a member of the World Trade Organization in 2001 and won its bid to host the 2008 Beijing Olympics the same year, university admission regulations in China changed dramatically. The English language component of the gaokao, became much more important than it had previously been and the value of test scores in other languages, including Russian, decreased dramatically. Furthermore, English became an entry requirement for the most desirable majors, such as those in business, law, science and technology.

The 2004 cohort of high school graduates in Wei Ru’s area was hit particularly hard: they had invested many years into studying Russian but English language instruction had not even been available to them. As Wei Ru said wistfully:

现在［学俄语］就成劣势了。现在完全是劣势了。本来我们高考可以打130／140分嘛，120多分其实［在我们那］完全就是中等水平了。然后结果如果是英语的话也就50多分吧，就那样。

It [learning Russian] has become such a disadvantage. An absolute disadvantage! We could have scored 130 or 140 [out of the full mark of 150] on the Russian test in the gaokao. Actually, 120 was only an average score for us. But in English we would only be able to get a score of 50. That is the fact. (Quoted from Zhang, 2011, p. 198f.)

Given these odds, many of Wei Ru’s classmates decided to repeat the final year of high school in order to catch up on English. Wei Ru and her family felt that repeating a year just to learn English was not worth it, particularly as the quality of English language teaching in Wei Ru’s hometown was low: when the high school curriculum changed from Russian to English, the only way to meet staffing levels was to deploy Russian teachers as English teachers. In the process, highly qualified Russian teachers in a well-resourced Russian language program were turned into poorly-qualified English language teachers in a poorly-resourced English language program.

As an outstanding student and given a bonus rating for ethnic minority students, Wei Ru still managed to secure admission to a minzu (民族; ‘nation’) university, i.e. a university specifically dedicated to the educational advancement of ethnic minority students. However, majors for which English proficiency had become an entry requirement were not available to her, and she enrolled in an anthropology degree.

When she spoke to Jenny Zhang in 2008 about her experiences of learning and using English in China, Wei Ru was still bitter about the way her lack of English proficiency had shaped her educational trajectory. Furthermore, as she pondered her future, English continued to loom large: English was an important part of her studies as many textbooks were in English and some of her classes were taught in English by foreign teachers. So, doing well in her studies depended on improving her English, an effort she considered an arbitrary imposition and consequently resented. Despite her best efforts it was almost impossible to catch up to the English level of her class mates, who had studied English throughout junior and senior high school.

After graduation, Wei Ru was hoping to return to her hometown and enter the public service. It is obvious that proficiency in Russian would be highly useful to a public servant in the Russian-Chinese border area but in order to achieve her ambition Wei Ru would have to sit yet another English test, as English – in contrast to Russian – is also a test subject on the public service entrance exam.

Chinese educational authorities have announced that, from 2017 onwards, the English component of compulsory testing will be reduced or even removed. Wei Ru’s case shows why this is a good thing.

Reference

Zhang, Jie. (2011). Language Policy and Planning for the 2008 Beijing Olympics: An Investigation of the Discursive Construction of an Olympic City and a Global Population. PhD, Macquarie University, Sydney.

Linguistic diversity is valued in this school (Photo Courtesy of Angela Turzynski-Azimi)

‘What’s your nash, miss?’ Plurilingual pre-service teachers preparing to teach in Sydney schools

What is it like to be a plurilingual pre-service teacher, training to teach in Australian schools?

Recently, 15 primary and secondary pre-service (trainee) teachers who had a range of languages other than English, were interviewed about the relationship between their multiple languages, their tertiary teacher education, and their future teaching career. The question explored was whether these pre-service teachers are able to use their ‘plurilingual’ abilities in their own education, and in their Australian school teaching context? ‘Plurilingual’ describes an ability to use languages flexibly across different contexts, where languages interrelate and interact, with the ability to use them to critique and improve communication.

The linguistic and educational profiles of the interview participants were rich and varied. Of the 15 interviewees, eight were training to be primary teachers, and seven were training to be secondary teachers (of History, English, Society & Culture, Mathematics, Computing and ESL). They spoke 23 languages between them, acquired through immigration, family heritage, or study. While ten of the 15 participants spoke just one language in addition to English, five participants spoke more than one. For example, one participant spoke Malay, Mandarin, Indonesian, Spanish and Korean, and was keen to learn more. Two examples illustrate their personal commitment to plurilingualism:

Victor, in addition to knowledge of French and German, daily uses Russian, Serbian and English. He speaks Serbian with his wife, and is trying to raise his children multilingually by using several languages with them. His children attend Russian community school on Saturdays and Serbian community school on Sundays.

Jacinta speaks with her family in Dari and her husband in Pashtun, Dari and English. Jacinta owns her linguistic profile as somewhat ‘unique’ and became proud of her language knowledge when she realised that not everyone in Australia spoke multiple languages.

For all participants, linguistic ability was aligned closely with family and community. Their languages were used regularly within their homes and communities in child-rearing, family communication, shopping, media, and broader social interaction. Some expressed the linguistic contrast between their ‘private sphere’ and the ‘outside’ world of their city, described as ‘walking between two cultures’. They negotiate being a member of a community, finding an intercultural space between cultures, and studying in a public sphere defined exclusively in English.

Today it is considered educationally very important in schools to engage children’s identities in their learning. The participants reported, however, that they had not seen this practised, as their language abilities had received little or no recognition within tutorials or lectures during their Education degree. They would have liked to experience inclusion of their language skills and cultural perspectives in tutorials. Without such recognition in teacher preparation courses, how can pre-service teachers bring their linguistic and cultural identities into their professional identities as beginner teachers?

Pre-service teachers also complete school practicum teaching experience. The impressions they gain on school practicum are pivotal in their early perceptions of their role and sense of membership in their professional community. Around half of the group reported that they had used language or language-related skills in some small way during their practicum, and this had been a validating and positive experience. One achieved a ‘good outcome’ for a Pakistani student after working with him for a day. Another helped a recent arrival Iranian student in the playground, and was asked by the school to communicate with his parents. They were also frequently asked by students, in linguistically diverse schools, ‘what’s your nash, sir/miss?’ (nationality). Participants felt that this interaction implied the students’ enthusiasm for teachers to be equally a member of the plurilingual transnational nature of their school, exemplifying the rapport and cultural bridges which can be built through linguistic diversity. Practicum served as a trigger to think about ways to use their linguistic capital to provide a richer educational environment for all students, and opportunity, for some, to see themselves as multi-dimensional educators.

Some ‘barrier factors’ however were also experienced on practicum. Three reported that they actually concealed their multilingual ability – while in a monolingual school alongside monolingual teachers – in order to fit in. One commented that ‘not being like everyone else’ made her feel as if there was an ‘invisible wall’ between her and the school community. One was subject to an incident of verbal abuse from a group of students regarding his nationality. Several participants felt insecure about their English speaking and writing abilities. One stated: ‘I feel people judge me because I know other languages. I feel I would be more sought after if I only spoke English’. The monolingual mindset of such schools is an impediment to these pre-service teachers’ plurilingual potential. Their experiences show the patchy development of inclusive practice in Australian schools, and ambivalent attitudes towards languages generally.

When asked how they saw their languages in their future teaching career, a number answered ‘never thought about it’. At this point in their development, their principal concern is, rightly, their acquisition of classroom content knowledge, survival skills, and high standards of English literacy competence. Nevertheless, many felt they had four areas of ability, particularly connected with their language knowledge, which would be useful to them in their teaching careers:

1. They believed that they would bring a capacity for empathy to their career. Several participants spoke of an enhanced cultural awareness through their language knowledge, and an appreciation of different values held by students. This was a generic intercultural skill, not confined to students from the same cultural background. Many also mentioned empathy for English language-learners.
2. Many hoped for future practical opportunities to speak to students and parents in their languages, to be useful in building good communication across effective school communities.
3. Generic meta-linguistic ability. Four spoke of increased awareness of grammar structures and more versatile and simplified communication options.
4. Three participants spoke enthusiastically about the possibility of showing students how plurilingualism and language learning represented an exciting engagement with the world and intercultural learning. One believed that ‘new languages teach new values and understandings’ and that it was her responsibility to teach about humanity and difference. Another believed she must ‘teach that having another language is okay’, so that children could celebrate and share theirs.

These four positive projections of their teaching futures appear to have been shaped largely by two sources of input: their own plurilingual identity, and small positive experiences on practicum. They suggest no input from their experience as learners at university. Tertiary study has of course constructed their theoretical knowledge, skills, and pedagogy used during practicum, but has done so in isolation from their private identities. How, then, are these talented plurilingual pre-service teachers to conceive and develop an integrated professional identity in an Australian school context?

The opportunities for these pre-service teachers to employ their plurilingual capacity in Australia are limited. The monolingual subtext to multicultural Australia has shaped the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers which fail to recognise linguistic competence as a positive attribute for teachers in this era of international teacher mobility. University pedagogy, which is shaped by demands of the Standards, ignores the potential of linguistic diversity amongst its undergraduate cohort. Monolingual schools and teachers continue to be unaware of their devaluation of plurilingual pre-service teachers.

The cohort of plurilingual teachers entering the profession possesses linguistic and intercultural skills that must be both visible and valued; they are indispensable agents and advocates that can engineer reform regarding attitudes to language in Australian education. Unlike many of their monolingual peers, plurilingual pre-service teachers can move with flexibility across languages and cultures, crossing boundaries between their homes, communities and networks. They know they can contribute to student well-being and success through empathy and consideration of communication issues, and by playing a positive role in supporting student learning. They need professional opportunities, both at university and in schools, to demonstrate and develop their intercultural capital, in order to bring their personal identities forward into their professional futures, to the benefit of both their peers and their students.

A more detailed account of this research project will be published later in 2015, as Moloney, R., & Giles, A. (2015). Plurilingual pre-service teachers in a multicultural society: insightful, invaluable, invisible. Special Issue (Fall, 2015) of the Australian Review of Applied Linguistics (ARAL).