Educational Linguistics in Practice

Applying the Local Globally and the Global Locally

Francis M. Hult, Kendall A. King, Francis M. Hult, Kendall A. King

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781847694959
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This volume provides a state-of-the-art snapshot of language and education research and demonstrates ways in which local and global processes are intertwined with language learning, use, and policies. Reflecting but also expanding on Nancy Hornberger's ground-breaking contributions to educational linguistics, this book brings together leading international scholars. Chapters present new research and cutting-edge syntheses addressing current theoretical and methodological issues in researching equity, access, and multilingual education. Organized around three central themes --- bilingual education and bilingualism, the continua of biliteracy, and policy and planning for linguistic diversity in education --- the volume reflects the holistic and dynamic perspective on language (in) education that is the hallmark of educational linguistics as a field.

Section I
Bilingual Education and Bilingualism

Thematic Overview I
Language Policies, Multilingual Classrooms: Resonances across Continents

MARILYN MARTIN-JONES

I still have vivid memories of the time, in the late 1980s, when I first read Nancy Hornberger’s landmark ethnography of language practices and language ideologies in two rural school and community contexts in Puno, Southern Peru (Hornberger, 1988). At the time, the landscape of language policy research was dominated by studies of language planning processes and policy discourses at national level, studies which focused largely on policy documents, archival sources and interviews with policymakers in different historical contexts. So, it was really heartening to come across Nancy Hornberger’s work. Here was a researcher who, like me, was committed to approaching the study of language policy and bilingual education from the vantage point of the classroom, of teachers and learners and of local communities and who was convinced, as I was, that ethnography was best suited to this purpose, because of its emphasis on interpretive processes and on the situated nature of such processes.

In her early study in Peru, Hornberger provided us with rich and detailed insights into the daily interactional and organisational routines of life in the schools in the two rural communities where she carried out her research: one school where a Quechua/Spanish bilingual education project was being implemented and one where Spanish remained the dominant language of classroom life. Her meticulous account of the language and literacy practices, in Quechua and Spanish, that she had observed in these two local schools was contextualised in two main ways: firstly, with reference to the recent history of educational reform in Peru, to the introduction of a national bilingual education policy and to the complex processes involved in the implementation of the Experimental Bilingual Education Project in Puno; and, secondly, with reference to the values associated with Quechua and with Spanish in the two local communities and the ways in which these values had been shaped by the history of conquest and the subsequent oppression and marginalisation of Quechua speakers in the Andean region of Peru.

It was precisely this kind of multi-layered analysis – one which combined the close study of the ebb and flow of multilingual communication in classroom and community settings with ethnographic and historical perspectives – that a small group of us at Lancaster University, in the north of England, were endeavouring to develop in the late 1980s and early 1990s. We called ourselves the Bilingualism Research Group. Several of the doctoral researchers in the group were engaged in ground-breaking research in schools in the global south. They all went on to publish their research and to contribute – with Hornberger, and with other scholars such as Canagarajah (1993) and Chick (1996) – to the creation of a distinct new strand of research related to education and language policy research in the global south, which documented the local ways in which teachers and learners made and remade centrally imposed policies in the recurring cycles of life in classrooms.

Jo Arthur Shoba was doing innovative research in primary classrooms in two schools in north eastern Botswana, where English was the ‘officially approved classroom language’ but where teachers made ample use of Setswana as a ‘backstage language’ (Arthur, 1996). Peter Martin was engaged in classroom-based research in primary schools in urban and rural settings in Brunei Darussalam, where a national bilingual education programme, in English and Bahasa Melayu, had been introduced. Martin was documenting, in illuminating detail, the ways in which teachers and students in these different settings were managing the challenges of the bilingual education programme (Martin, 1996). Lin Ndayipfukamiye was researching bilingual classroom discourse in grade five primary classrooms in Burundi, where students made the transition from Kirundi-medium education to a centrally imposed French-medium education. He provided a revealing account of the ways in which codeswitching between Kirundi and French served as a communicative resource for both teachers and students as students made this transition and as they coped with the constraints of the French-only language policy (Ndayipfukamiye, 1996).

Hornberger’s research in Peru was an important point of reference for these researchers. There were powerful resonances between the language and literacy practices that she had documented in her study in Peru (Hornberger, 1988) and the practices in the classrooms they were observing and recording. The remarks that she made in the preface to her 1988 book still ring very true today, over two decades later:

While the [Puno] schools and communities described are unique, those who read the descriptions will find many similarities between these schools and communities and communities and hundreds of other schools and communities in highland Peru, thousands in the highland Andes, and indeed millions in rural areas of the developing world. (Hornberger, 1988: xvi)

I have mentioned the work of some of the members of the Bilingualism Research Group at Lancaster at some length here because these are the studies that I am most familiar with and I was fortunate enough to engage in extended dialogue with the individuals concerned as their research unfolded. There were, of course, many other researchers working in other multilingual settings who were reading Hornberger’s work in the late 1980s. Her study in Peru was widely cited and attracted a good deal of interest in post-colonial contexts. For example, when Jo Arthur Shoba returned from an early exploratory field trip to Botswana, I happened to have a copy of Nancy’s book in my office and I showed it to Jo, encouraging her to read it. She smiled knowingly and told me that she had seen it on the desk of a colleague at the University of Botswana and had already made plans to get hold of a copy!

Ethnography of Language Education Policy: A Long-standing Research Tradition

Two decades on from Nancy Hornberger’s seminal work in Peru, ethnography has come to occupy the centre ground in research on language education policy in multilingual settings. She has been at the forefront of a movement that has brought together two fields of research, with distinct histories, different orienting theories and empirical foci: on the one hand, research on language policy and planning and, on the other hand, research on multilingualism in school and classroom settings, which incorporated ‘sociolinguistically-informed approaches to ethnographic research’ (Hornberger, 1995: 245). I offer here a brief overview of the distinct histories of these two fields of research.

Research on language policy

The late 1980s and early 1990s saw a shift away from models of language policy research, that were formulated in an early sociolinguistics, grounded in structural functional thinking. New proposals were made for the development of approaches which could take account of the ways in which language policies contributed to the reproduction of asymmetrical relations of power in different political and historical contexts (e.g. Pennycook, 1989; Tollefson, 1991). These new proposals within the field of sociolinguistics reflected the wider influence across the social sciences of post-structuralist thought, particularly that which gave primacy to the role of discourse and culture in the reproduction of social inequality.

The new strand of work on language policy also reflected the influence of critical theory, with scholars being committed to engagement with questions of inequality and linguistic rights and wrongs (Pennycook, 2001; Tollefson, 2002). With this extensive new theory-building came a widening of the nature and scope of the field. Language policy research was now developed in the countries of the global north and west and there was greater concern with historical and ideological processes. However, the empirical focus was still on macro-level processes at the level of national and local governments and particular institutions.

Research on multilingualism in schools and classrooms

From the outset, research on multilingualism was guided by quite different epistemologies and orienting theories, although it was a field of study that was closely related to language policy. Within this field, there had been an early shift (in the late 1970s and early 1980s) towards interpretive and ethnographic research and to the close study of interactional processes. This intellectual shift was, of course, due to the incorporation of theoretical and methodological perspectives from the ethnography of communication (Hymes, 1974), ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (Garfinkel, 1972; Sacks et al., 1974), interactional sociolinguistics (Gumperz, 1982) and micro-ethnography (Erickson & Shultz, 1982). The work of Gumperz (1982) was particularly influential in research on multilingualism, especially in the micro-analytic study of discourse practices and face-to-face interaction in local community contexts. This work was later taken forward by Auer (1984) in his proposals for the study of bilingual conversation.

By the late 1980s, these ethnographic and discourse analytic perspectives were being incorporated into research on bilingual classroom interaction. The largest early contribution to this new strand of research came from studies in post-colonial contexts, such as those described in the opening section of this chapter (including, of course, Hornberger’s 1988 study in Peru). The 1990s then saw a diversification of research sites. Some studies were carried out with teachers and learners from linguistic minority groups (Heller, 1999; Jaffe, 1999). Angel Lin also did ground-breaking work in the changing political and sociolinguistic context of Hong Kong (Lin, 1996). Research was also undertaken in urban settings where some form of bilingual education provision was being made, in Europe or in North America, for learners of migrant or refugee origin (e.g. Creese, 2005; Freeman, 1998; Martin-Jones & Saxena, 1996; Rubinstein-Avila, 2002). In addition, research on bilingual talk was conducted in immersion programmes (e.g. Mejía, 1998), lifting the veil on communicative practices in an educational setting where there had long been a dominant discourse about sole use of the ‘target language’.

In a key paper (Hornberger, 1995), Nancy traced the intersecting influences of different kinds of interpretive work (ethnography of communication, interactional sociolinguistics and sociolinguistic micro-ethnography) on research in multilingual classrooms. She called these different kinds of interpretive work: ‘sociolinguistically-informed approaches’ (1995: 245). The key concepts are superbly illustrated in this paper and I still recommend it as a foundational reference for doctoral researchers embarking on research in multilingual classrooms. Other reviews of research on bilingual classroom interaction have followed (e.g. Lin, 2008; Martin-Jones, 2000, 2007). Together with Hornberger (1995), they build a detailed picture of the thinking about theory and method guiding research in this area in the late 1980s and 1990s.

Some of the research in multilingual classrooms conducted in the mid-1990s drew on both interpretive and critical paradigms. I am using the term ‘critical’, here, in the sense of aiming to reveal links between the interactional routines of classrooms and the wider social and ideological order or, as Pennycook (2001) put it: ‘mapping micro and macro relations’ (2001: 5). Some examples of this critical, interpretive work are included in Heller and Martin-Jones (2001). The work of Heller (1999) pioneered this approach, drawing on post-structuralist theory, and particularly the work of Bourdieu (1991), in theorising the ways in which multilingual practices in schools and classrooms contribute to the reproduction or contestation of linguistic ideologies, language hierarchies and language policies.

These rich seams of critical and interpretive research in multilingual classrooms are still being developed in new contexts, providing yet deeper insights into processes of language policy-making at local levels and into the consequences of monolingual and bilingual policies for teachers and learners in different political and historical contexts. Studies conducted within the last few years include the following outstanding examples: research centering on the introduction of local bilingual education programmes in Mozambique (Chimbutane, 2009); research on the implementation of Lao-medium education in primary schools in the north-western region of Laos where minority languages are spoken (Cincotta-Segi, 2009); research in the US related to the implementation of Title III of the No Child Left Behind Act in the city of Philadelphia (Johnson, 2007); research in France on monolingual educational programmes for newly arrived migrant children (Bonacina, 2011); and research in complementary schools in the UK (Blackledge & Creese, 2010).

Language policy ethnography

Because, historically, there has been so little interaction between scholars working in the two fields of multilingualism and language policy, critical and interpretive studies of multilingual classroom interaction, of the type that I have just reviewed above, have not been thought of as contributing to the understanding of language policy development and implementation. However, as Hornberger and Johnson (2007) have noted, ‘many ethnographies or qualitative studies illuminate the complexity of language planning and policy processes and the ways in which they create or restrict ideological and implementational space for multilingual pedagogy’ (2007: 510/511).

Ricento and Hornberger (1996) addressed this lack of articulation between fields of study in an early article. Reviewing the state of the art of language policy research in the mid-1990s, they acknowledged some of the advances made through the development of the historical-structural and critical approaches, especially that of revealing the ideological underpinning of language policies. At the same time, they argued that more attention should be given to the different ‘agents, levels and processes’ (1996: 408) involved in language policy and planning and they introduced the now familiar ‘onion’ metaphor as a way of representing the multilayered nature of language policy processes. They argued that research should take account of (or ‘unpeel’) the different layers of the ‘policy onion’, noting, quite rightly, that:

Policies change as they move down through administrative levels, either explicitly in new written documents or through interpretation of existing documents. Only the most authoritarian political structures leave little room for variation in the implementation of official language policy. (1996: 417)

The different layers of policy-making are illustrated with comparative data from language policy in the US and in Peru. Again, as in earlier work by Nancy Hornberger, the classroom is seen as the core of policy-making processes. As Ricento and Hornberger put it: ‘We place the classroom practitioner at the heart of language policy (at the center of the onion)’ (1996: 417).

A decade later, Hornberger and Johnson (2007) put ethnography firmly on the language policy research agenda. Echoing Ricento and Hornberger (1996), and subsequent work by Canagarajah (2005) and by Stritikus and Wiese (2006), Hornberger and Johnson reiterate the critique of language policy research which focuses only on the global, national and institutional dimension of policy-making and on the political and ideological processes driving language education policies. As they put it: ‘an (over)emphasis on the hegemonic power of policies obfuscates the potentially agentive role of local educators as they interpret and implement the policies’ (2007: 510).

Hornberger and Johnson return to the ‘onion’ metaphor and call for multilayered, ethnographic research on language policy and planning (LPP), arguing for ‘slicing the onion ethnographically’ (2007: 509). They demonstrate, in compelling detail, why the study of language policy ‘on paper’ (i.e. the discourse analysis of policy documents) needs to be combined with ethnography to avoid giving only a partial account of the ways in which policy-making unfolds. They explain that:

An e...