Social Justice through Multilingual Education

Tove Skutnabb-Kangas, Robert Phillipson, Ajit K. Mohanty, Minati Panda, Tove Skutnabb-Kangas, Robert Phillipson, Ajit K. Mohanty, Minati Panda

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781847696854
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Lingüística

The principles for enabling children to become fully proficient multilinguals through schooling are well known. Even so, most indigenous/tribal, minority and marginalised children are not provided with appropriate mother-tongue-based multilingual education (MLE) that would enable them to succeed in school and society. In this book experts from around the world ask why this is, and show how it can be done. The book discusses general principles and challenges in depth and presents case studies from Canada and the USA, northern Europe, Peru, Africa, India, Nepal and elsewhere in Asia. Analysis by leading scholars in the field shows the importance of building on local experience. Sharing local solutions globally can lead to better theory, and to action for more social justice and equality through education.

Part 1

Introduction

Chapter 1

Multilingual Education: A Bridge too Far?

AJIT K. MOHANTY

I met Barun Digal in the early 1980s, a bright young grade 9 boy from a rural Nuagaon high school in what was then called Phulbani (BoudhKandhamal), one of the least developed districts in Orissa, India. Those were the early days of my research as a psycholinguist. I had just returned from Canada with a PhD and a background of hard-core experimental psycholinguistics. Barun confronted me with his naïve but searching question ‘Why was I doing all this?’ He said the Indigenous tribal¹ peoples in that part of the world were too much researched upon but nothing has changed, nothing will. In the darkness of Phulbani, I had sleepless nights searching for an answer, for some answer. A few days later, after long hours of waiting at the roadside for our jeep to return from ‘research’ in some other schools, Barun stopped us to lead me and my party for a walk into the jungle to join them, as previously agreed upon, in a night-time group picnic feast, with a tiny lantern struggling to barely pierce the dense darkness of the forest. There he was showing me the way, leading me on to my life's most unforgettable fireside dinner – the aroma and taste of freshly cooked food I could not see while eating – and leading my transformation from a dispassionate ‘objective’ researcher to someone with human concerns. Nearly three decades down the road, I am still searching for answers to Barun's questions, but in his silent ways, Barun had told me that lighting a tiny little lantern to show the way is better than cursing the darkness.

I have tried without luck to get back to Barun and see how he is doing. I know he is there somewhere doing somewhat better than many in his community. He had made it through to take the high school examination, which only about 20 in a 100 from among his peers do. Of the tribal children who join school, 50% never reach grade 5 and only 20% survive the years of schooling to take the high school examination, which only about 8% actually pass. The 80% are counted in sarkari (government) records as ‘drop-outs’. Did they ‘drop out’ of their own accord? Did their parents want them to? The untold truth is that they were ‘push-outs’ in an unresponsive system that systematically devalues them – their culture, their languages and their identities. The story of each ‘pushed out’ child is both complex and a sad reminder of our own failures, which are many.

A tribal child's first steps into school are steps into an alien world – a world she barely understands because, somewhere as she walks into her first classroom, the ties are snapped. Her resources, languages, means of communication, knowledge of her world and her culture are set aside in a system that proudly calls itself human resource development. On the very first day in school, she loses her resources and is left with nothing to be ‘developed’. She has been pushed in, to be submersed (and pushed out later), in a system the language of which she barely understands. It would take her three to five years just to comprehend the teacher and by then it would be too late. This tribal child and all others in her community are not alone. All over the world, the Indigenous peoples, the ‘natives’, the ‘first nation’ peoples, the aboriginals, the tribes and all the dominated linguistic and ethnic minorities suffer a similar fate unless they have successfully struggled to assert their linguistic and other human rights.

It is a multilingual world of vanishing languages. Nearly every fortnight, somewhere the last speaker of a language is dying. While many languages are dead or dying, a large number of languages are marginalised. The relationship between language and power makes it a world of unequal languages. Languages of the marginalised people are treated with discrimination at all levels in society, stripped of their instrumental significance. Over seven to nine years, an Indian child internalizes that some languages are more prestigious, more useful and powerful than others; tribal children learn that their languages have no use for them (Mohanty, Panda and Mishra, 1999). Languages of the disadvantaged entail disadvantages in a society that deprives them of their legitimate place in a multilingual structure. Sadly, it is a structure of a vicious circle – languages are marginalised, impoverished and weakened by gross social, educational, statutory, official and legal neglect, and the furtherance of this neglect is justified on grounds of the poverty of these languages, their so-called weaknesses and inadequacies. In India, constitutional, statutory and policy provisions for mother tongue-medium education are not implemented: the number of languages used in schools – both as languages of instruction and language subjects – has sharply declined over the years, with barely 30 languages now being used in primary grades as instructional media (Mohanty, 2008a). In the process, there is an alarming ‘push-out’ rate and an abysmally poor educational performance leading to capability deprivation, loss of identity and poverty. These, in turn, trigger further marginalisation, subtractive language learning, loss of mother tongues and loss of linguistic diversity. It is the same story all over the world.

Who suffers? The linguistic minorities and speakers of the dominated languages that are left out of schools. The tribal people in India do suffer the consequences of this neglect. More than 83 million tribal people, constituting over 8.2% of the population and speaking 159 languages, which are exclusive to them, are among the worst sufferers – only three to four of their languages have a place in schools and most are in the endangered category. Around 58,343 primary schools (grades 1–5) in India have over 90% tribal children and 103,609 schools over 50%. All these children are taught in forced submersion programmes in dominant majority-language schools with a clear subtractive effect on their mother tongues.

For these and all other similarly placed children throughout the world, their language spells their destiny. What happens to them in the face of such neglect of their mother tongues in schools? This is how I have described a Kandha (Kond) child in grade 2 of a primary school in a remote village in Raikia Block of Kandhamal (Phulbani) district in Orissa, India:

The child, who has left behind many other children of her age who never came to school, is present in the class with wide-eyed curiosity trying to figure out what is going on. Despite all the pious programmes, improved curricula, Operation Blackboard and many such efforts, she just does not learn to read and write. She is not alone; there are many other such children from Kond families who also do not learn. They are all in each other's comforting company; days pass by but they do not learn. Examinations they may or may not pass but they are certainly passing time. [...] any common person can tell you that she does not learn because she does not understand the teacher, the texts, and the curricula all of which use a language she does not know; it is not the language of her family. (Mohanty, 2000: 104–105)

Numerous studies continue to show the poor educational achievement of children in submersion education, which has a subtractive effect on their mother tongues. In contrast, studies do show better performance of children in their mother tongue-medium schools. But, is research evidence enough?

Why then are mother tongues neglected despite persuasive evidence to the contrary? As the voiceless minorities suffer the sinister exclusion of mother tongues, the silent elites enjoy the pre-eminence of dominant languages such as English. In the post-colonial world, ‘the killer languages’, including English, thrive at the cost of other languages, and in many countries the myth of English-medium superiority is propagated to the detriment of the poor and the marginalised. English and other ‘killer languages’ set in motion a hierarchical pecking order of languages that severely disadvantages the other languages, those of the Indigenous peoples and minorities, in particular. And yet, it does not have to be so. In a true multilingual system, all languages can have their legitimate place: mother tongues, languages of regional, national and wider communication. English and all other world languages can play their role; they can be healer languages and not ‘killer languages’. In a politically uncontaminated society that would not permit evil entrepreneurs of identity to rob others of their linguistic capital and cultural rootedness, mother tongues and other languages can complement each other with beauty, the beauty of the ‘petals of the Indian lotus’, as Pattanayak (1988) so elegantly puts it, beauty with diversity.

Every child must grow into this beautiful world of many languages capable of nurturing and liberating, sheltering and expanding, enrooting and emancipating. But how do we foster such growth? Multilingual education (MLE) shows the way. There is hope, as all over the world major international institutions like UNESCO accept multilingualism as a resource, a growing number of nations pledge to honour and foster every child's home language, Indigenous peoples in different parts of the globe strive to revitalise their languages, and smaller nations like Papua New Guinea lead by their success stories of making mother tongues the language of school instruction. MLE is a new commitment, one to strengthen the foundations of a necessary bridge – a bridge between home and school, between languages and between cultures. A bridge from the home language, the mother tongue, to the regional language and to the national language as well as world languages like English; an empowering bridge that leads to meaningful participation in the wider democratic and global setup without homogenising the beauty of diversity; a bridge that liberates but does not displace.

Is this a bridge too far? At one level, this bridge is an ideological promise, a first step toward a better world of egalitarian social order, equity, justice and human dignity. At another level, it is a concrete reality founded on solid theoretical groundings for realisation of the very best in every child. While there are many small successes in all parts of the world – Africa, Asia, Europe, North and South Americas – as this book shows, there are too many instances of the denial of linguistic human rights in education as well as all other major social domains, and consequent impoverishment of languages and smaller speech communities. Thus, the bridge is both promising and elusive. We know enough about multilingualism and MLE to find this bridge promising. However, it takes much more than our knowledge to make this a reality. The movement from theory to practice in all the different and challenging contexts is a difficult task. But developments in the field of MLE and numerous demonstrations of successful practical applications make this goal appear quite close and feasible. This book brings together several positive experiences from all corners of the globe: it brings a message of hope, it shows that this is not a bridge too far.

The metaphor of a bridge is compelling, but, at the same time, it is also quite limiting. A bridge is not just a one-way link; it has to work both ways and in many ways. How does one build those bridges between many languages and not just between two languages? How does one deal with the problems of number – the number of children and schools and, more significantly, the number of languages? It may look easy and possible to go from one to two – building a bridge; it is not as simple to go from two to three or four or more. How does one link the many? When does one go from one mother tongue to an ‘other tongue’ or to many other tongues? The bridge metaphor raises more questions than it answers. There are problems of transition versus transfer; there are issues of diversity and uniformity; unity of methods and diversity of practices. One script or many? What comes first? Hindi or English? Nepali or Tharu? Do we artificially homogenise varieties and diversities to be able to build the right bridges or do we allow diversity itself to be the bridge? How do we reconcile community aspirations with proven methods? And, more importantly, how does one bridge the gap between theory and practice? How does one take the principles of bilingual education and move to the practicalities of MLE in complex multilingual contexts without being accused of trying to fit a square peg into the complex contours of an uneven hole?

In this volume, we have collectively endeavoured to show that such exercises of adjustment, bridging the gap between theory and practice in respect of MLE, not only can, but must be undertaken. We have sought to extend the contours of theories of bilingual education to explore their meaningful applications in complex multilingual societies. The fundamental principles of bilingual and multilingual education have outlived the initial scepticism and are now widely accepted. However, as MLE moves to different and challengingly complex sociolinguistic contexts, there is a need to extend and contextualise the principles beyond the simpler ‘bilingual’ applications and to locate optimal models for diverse multilingual contexts. This book seeks to meet this need to relate theories and practices. It examines theoretical and global issues in respect of MLE and then builds on hard data and specific local practices in various aspects of MLE.

In Part 2 of the book, Jim Cummins, Tove Skutnabb-Kangas and Carol Benson provide state-of-the-art analyses and new insights into MLE for Indigenous, minority and marginalised communities. Cummins offers a pedagogical framework for minority students’ academic development in multilingual contexts. He suggests a tripartite division of academic proficiency, stressing the significance of focusing on reading development and transfer of knowledge and skills across languages in MLE. Cummins and Skutnabb-Kangas, as well as many other contributors to this volume, point to the centrality of societal power relations and identity negotiation for the academic development of minority students. Skutnabb-Kangas takes a critical look at the homogenising impact of globalisation and the loss of linguistic and cultural diversity – which, as she shows, is also closely related to biodiversity. She points out the need for governments and educational authorities to realise that subtractive education in the dominant language amounts to denial of linguistic human rights in education and is a crime against humanity. She also questions the conventional role of researchers and academic discourse in supporting the unequal power relations in a society and pleads for MLE for global justice. Benson examines early models of bilingual education developed in the West and shows their limitations in multilingual contexts and also in classifying the MLE programmes in different sociolinguistic contexts. She takes a critical look at the common forms of bilingual education programmes – submersion, transitional, maintenance, immersion and dual-medium models – examining their use and abuse in different contexts. She shows that as the submersion models that lead to inefficient schooling are being increasingly questioned in many countries, mother tongue-based programmes are favoured. Submersion schools in dominant international languages like English, often inaccurately dubbed as ‘immersion’ models, are also on the increase, with patronage from urban elites. The chapters in Part 2 of the book extend current thinking about bilingual/multilingual education to wider global contexts and show the limitations of an uncritical application of existing models.

The global context and promise of MLE are explored in Part 3 through analyses of some overarching issues, local as well as global. The contributors in Part 3 show that persistent shuttling between local practices and global principles is necessary for improved MLE. Robert Phillipson relates the rhetoric of egalitarian multilingualism to the realities of linguistic hierarchisation and marginalisation, and provides historical and contemporary evidence for how English has transformed from the language of colonisation to neoimperialism. He demonstrates that many language-in-education issues in Europe have similarities with post-colonial dilemmas. He cautions against false arguments for English and merely treating English as a ‘lingua franca’ when it actually functions as a lingua frankensteinia in many parts of the world. He does not deny the role of English in an egalitarian multilingual framework, but pleads for careful analysis of how to counterbalance its adverse and subtractive effects on linguistic diversity, multilingualism and MLE.

In Chapter 6, Kathleen Heugh provides a comparative cross-national analysis of MLE approaches in Africa. She points out that the current discourse on languages-in-education issues in Africa reveals collective amnesia of precolonial literacy traditions and practices, including mother tongue-medium instruction. Through her analysis of African MLE programmes, Heugh illustrates the danger of uncritically borrowing Western models such as early-exit MLE programmes with rapid transition to English or another dominant excolonial language. Her data analysis draws on North American and European research (such as Thomas & Collier, 2002), but draws significant conclusions in radically different contexts. The solid empirical results described are in many ways revolutionary, as they show that even in some of the world's economically poorest countries, long-term mother tongue-medium education programmes can be and have been realized. They lead to better results in most subjects, including in the excolonial English language, than early-exit transitional programmes.

In Chapter 7, Teresa McCarty shares her experience of the education of native American peoples to show some new directions for MLE of global relevance. She underscores the classroom performance benefits and empowerment effects of Navajo bilingual and immersion programmes. She also shows that even when there seems to be limited intergenerational transmission of an Indigenous language like Navajo, it is still integrally tied to youth identities, and the language is a powerful factor in the success of MLE programmes. She relates this experience to other contexts and draws explicit lessons for global use.

Exploration of the relationship between local and global MLE practices continues in the article by Ofelia García, who draws our attention to fluid boundaries between languages in multilingual societies. She stresses the implications of ‘translanguaging’ – bilingual or multilingual discourse practices – for conceptualising the nature of bilingualism/multi-lingualism, and the potential of such concepts as recursive and dynamic bilingualism and plurilingualism (as advocated in the European Union). She refers to monoglossic and heteroglossic types of bilingual education, and different forms of language arrangement and instructional practices in such programmes. A more explicit exploration of translanguaging could be undertaken when analysing the operation of MLE in varied multilingual societies.

In Chapter 9, David Hough, Ram Bahadur Thapa ...