The Multilingual Turn in Languages Education

Opportunities and Challenges

Jean Conteh, Gabriela Meier, Jean Conteh, Gabriela Meier

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781783092222
• eBook ISBN: 9781783092253
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Starting from the key idea that learners and teachers bring diverse linguistic knowledge and resources to education, this book establishes and explores the concept of the 'multilingual turn' in languages education and the potential benefits for individuals and societies. It takes account of recent research, policy and practice in the fields of bilingual and multilingual education as well as foreign and second language education. The chapters integrate theory and practice, bringing together researchers and practitioners from five continents to illustrate the effects of the multilingual turn in society and evaluate the opportunities and challenges of implementing multilingual curricula and activities in a variety of classrooms. Based on the examples featured, the editors invite students, teachers, teacher educators and researchers to reflect on their own work and to evaluate the relevance and applicability of the multilingual turn in their own contexts.

Part 1

Societal Perspectives on the Multilingual Turn in Language(s) Education

Gabriela Meier

This part compiles studies from different sites that demonstrate different ways of tracing individual and societal multilingualism, language ideologies, language status and representations in schools, and what this may mean for learners and teachers. All authors look at societal and individual language ideologies, and how these are manifest in mainstream (Auleear Owodally) and complementary education (Cruickshank), in resources such as textbooks (Hu & McKay) and in beliefs that teachers hold about the place and uses of languages in schools (Young).

All contexts described in this chapter are presented as multilingual to a certain extent, even though some are politically constructed as monolingual, and in all contexts this multilingualism is represented in schools to varied degrees. The authors use different terms (home languages, oriental languages, official, foreign languages, etc.) to discuss the status of languages in society and in schools, indicating that some languages are related to religious practice and beliefs, ethnic identity or economic opportunities, and that some are seen as worthy to be used in schools and others less so.

The authors all highlight the importance of understanding classrooms as sites for the formation of social and cultural identity and ideological understandings, which are deeply embedded in local contexts. They stress how such ideologies can influence identities and belonging to social groups, and how teachers and learners in schools can adopt, resist or question such ideologies. One of the conclusions is that teacher education could play a role in providing opportunities for teachers to engage with research in this area, and reflect on their own beliefs and ideologies.

Methodologically, Chapter 1 is a longitudinal case study of language socialization with a group of pre-schoolers in Mauritius. The dataset comprises video and audio recordings from the children’s classrooms, along with field notes and stimulated recall interviews with their teachers. Chapter 2 is an account of constructions of language and multilingualism in society from the perspectives of young people in three Australian schools. The data include interviews and observations as well as questionnaires and focus groups. Chapter 3 examines one student’s book from a widely used series to teach and learn English in secondary schools in China. This is a close-up analysis of one unit based on a detailed analytic framework, which the authors reproduce in their chapter. Chapter 4 is based on interview data from 46 teachers in France, and gives an account of teachers’ beliefs as to whether the languages that children bring to school are a right, a resource or a problem.

Generic questions for Part 1

• Is there a language hierarchy in place in the society where you live or work? Which groups speak these languages, and which languages do learners and teachers use in school and in other domains?
• To what extent is there a link between languages spoken outside class and those represented inside the classroom and in relevant resources?

1	Socialized into Multilingualism: A Case Study of a Mauritian Pre-school A.M. Auleear Owodally

Guiding Questions

• To what extent does the Mauritian school context discussed here reflect language socialization outside school?
• What covert messages about language(s) are the school children in this context unconsciously exposed to?
• What are the opportunities and challenges associated with language socialization practices in multilingual contexts in Mauritius?

Introduction

Despite living on an island which boasts of its multilingualism, most Mauritian children spend the first few years of their lives in monolingual Kreol-speaking families where Kreol is the dominant language of the home and the environment. School is a major site where they are exposed to multilingualism – through the subjects taught (English, French and an optional ancestral language – one of the languages spoken or believed to have been spoken by migrants who came to Mauritius such as Hindi, Urdu, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Hakka, etc.), the written medium of instruction (English) and the oral media of communication (French and Kreol). In the context of this shift from home monolingualism to school-mediated multilingualism, one of the important language and literacy challenges that most children face is that they have to learn English and through English, given that English is the main language of literacy and the main written medium of instruction throughout the education system from the first year of primary schooling. Acting as the linguistic bridge between the home and the primary school, the pre-school is the first semi-formal institution where children are introduced to and exposed to English and multilingualism (Auleear Owodally, 2010).

In this chapter, I use a language socialization perspective to investigate the pre-school as a site where a group of children are socialized into English and, by extension, into local multilingualism. Focusing on daily routine activities (Duff, 2010; Ochs, 2000) in one government pre-school, I show how, through their language practices and language teaching practices, teachers socialize pre-schoolers into languages (their uses and functions), language learning and related ideologies.

I start with a brief overview of the local sociolinguistic situation, showing how the school system contributes to shaping and perpetuating Mauritian multilingualism. With respect to the ways children are socialized into English and local multilingualism, I describe some of the theoretical principles of language socialization which I then draw upon to frame my analysis of data obtained from a longitudinal study of a group of children in one government pre-school. After describing the research design and methodology, I present and discuss my findings.

Mauritian Education – Mauritian Multilingualism

Mauritius has been shaped by a history of voluntary and forced migration: French and British colonizers, African enslaved people, Indian indentured labourers and Chinese workers, all of whom brought along with them their diverse religious, cultural and language practices. These waves of migrants have constituted a richly multi-ethnic, multi-religious and multilingual population, with inhabitants cohabiting fairly peacefully in ‘harmonious separatism’ (Toth, 1995: 98). Although Mauritius is a secular state, it has developed a particular understanding and a particular performance of secularism (cf. Eisenlohr, 2006), with the religious often permeating secular institutions, sites and discourses. For instance, politicians regularly attend and participate in religious ceremonies, while religious images and practices often infiltrate ancestral language textbooks and classrooms in state schools (Auleear Owodally, 2012b). This point of contact between the religious and the secular is one of the many paradoxes of the local context.

The term ‘multilingualism’, used to qualify the present language situation in Mauritius, oversimplifies a more complicated language situation with different languages having different values and functions. Rajah-Carrim (2007) divides the languages used locally into three distinct categories: European languages (English and French), oriental/ancestral languages (Hindi, Urdu, Tamil, Telugu, Mandarin, Marathi, etc.) and local languages (Kreol and Bhojpuri). English is the de facto official language – the language of the parliament, the judiciary and education; however, it is socially rarely heard and seldom used. French, on the other hand, is a prestigious social language widely used in the spoken and written media and used as a home language among a small bourgeoisie. The oriental languages, which are often utilized in various in-group ethno-religious ceremonies, are seen as ‘markers of ethnic and religious identity’ (Rajah-Carrim, 2007: 52). The local languages, Kreol and Bhojpuri, are the most popularly used home languages, with the increased use of Kreol as the main home language in the past decades (the 2000 census data revealed that 69% of Mauritians claimed Kreol as the only home language, with this figure rising to 84% in 2011). However, Kreol has low social status for historical and economic reasons.

The education system has endeavoured to preserve and maintain individual and societal multilingualism. English is taught as a main language of literacy and used as the written medium throughout the education system, starting from the first year of primary education. French is taught as a quasi-compulsory subject until the fifth year of secondary education and the oriental languages are offered as optional subjects in primary schools. Paradoxically, Kreol has just recently (in January 2012) been introduced as an optional subject in the first year of primary schooling (cf. Auleear Owodally & Unjore, 2013).

The multilingual character of the primary and secondary school curricula has had a backwash effect on the pre-school. The pre-school curriculum guidelines state that pre-school children should be exposed to as many languages present in their environment as possible. The curriculum which was relevant at the time of data collection, the 2003 Pre-school Curriculum Guidelines, further clearly stipulates that children must be introduced to English, given its essential role in the primary school curriculum: ‘Since English is the official language throughout the education system, and English is the medium of instruction at a higher level of primary education, it is only logical through songs or poetry, a child will learn some English daily in relation to the theme being worked on’ (Ministry of Education and Scientific Research, Mauritius, 2003: 42). The more recent 2008 curriculum, however, names no languages, preferring the vaguer term ‘target language(s)’ to refer to the languages found in the local context.

Despite the curriculum goal of introducing children to multilingualism in the pre-school, there is little research investigating how these pre-school guidelines get translated into practice. The few studies carried out in the Mauritian pre-school context (Auleear Owodally, 2008, 2010, 2012a, 2012b; Tirvassen, 2005) indicate that English and French are the two main languages that teachers introduce and teach. However, no study has yet focused on the ways in which children are socialized into the languages that form part of the local multilingual set-up. In this chapter, I focus on Mauritian pre-schoolers’ socialization into English, and by extension, their socialization into multilingualism. The present study situates itself in the educationally oriented language socialization research in multilingual communities.

Conceptual Framework: Language Socialization

Language socialization, which is used to frame the present study, provides a sociocultural lens to analyse children’s enculturation into local language practices at home and in educational settings in various contexts (Heath, 1983; Schieffelin & Ochs, 1996). Language socialization (henceforth LS) explores how ‘communicative practices of experts and novices are organized by and organize cultural knowledge, understandings, beliefs and feelings’ (Schieffelin & Ochs, 1996: 255). The notion of ‘practices’, central to this alternative approach to second language acquisition research, is conceptualized as ‘meaningful actions that occur routinely in everyday life, [which] are widely shared by members of the groups, have developed over time, and carry normative expectations about the way things should be done’ (Moore, 2006a).

With the increasing number of migrants in the UK and the US, much of the LS research has focused on the language socialization experiences of immigrants whose home culture/language differs from that of the host country. More recently, the LS framework has been extended to investigate language practices and language teaching practices in non-Western, postcolonial and multilingual contexts. For instance, Moore (2006b) has explored the teaching of French and Quoranic literacy in Cameroon, uncovering the complex ways in which children are socialized into bilingualism and biliteracy. However, Moore (2008) has highlighted the paucity of LS research in non-Western settings and has argued that such settings offer rich sites for exploring the sociocultural nature of language learning and teaching. The present study aims to add to the LS research in multilingual communities. It draws upon some of the basic principles of LS research to frame the investigation of the ways in which children are socialized into English (and multilingualism) in a pre-school in Mauritius, with the classroom as the focal point.

One of the basic tenets of the LS research is that language is an ever-changing and fluid social practice. Thus, scholars working with this perspective focus mostly on social interactions. They propose that through the use of language and in the use of language (Schieffelin & Ochs, 1996), language learners learn more than just language(s) or aspects of...

Table of contents

• Coverpage
• Titlepage
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part 1: Societal Perspectives on the Multilingual Turn in Language(s) Education
• Part 2: Perspectives on the Multilingual Turn in Education
• Part 3: Visions of the Multilingual Turn in Pedagogy and Practice
• Conclusion: The Multilingual Turn in Languages Education
• Author Index
• Subject Index