Multilingual Classroom Ecologies: Inter-relationship, Interactions and Ideologies 9781853596964

Citation preview

Multilingual Classroom Ecologies

BILINGUAL EDUCATION AND BILINGUALISM Series Editors: Professor Colin Baker, University of Wales, Bangor, Wales, Great Britain and Professor Nancy H. Hornberger, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA Other Books in the Series Bilingual Education and Social Change Rebecca Freeman Continua of Biliteracy: An Ecological Framework for Educational Policy, Research, and Practice in Multilingual Settings Nancy H. Hornberger (ed.) Dual Language Education Kathryn J. Lindholm-Leary Foundations of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism Colin Baker Identity and the English Language Learner Elaine Mellen Day An Introductory Reader to the Writings of Jim Cummins Colin Baker and Nancy Hornberger (eds) Language and Literacy Teaching for Indigenous Education: A Bilingual Approach Norbert Francis and Jon Reyhner Language Minority Students in the Mainstream Classroom (2nd Edition) Angela L. Carrasquillo and Vivian Rodriguez Language, Power and Pedagogy: Bilingual Children in the Crossfire Jim Cummins Language Socialization in Bilingual and Multilingual Societies Robert Bayley and Sandra R. Schecter (eds) Learning English at School: Identity, Social Relations and Classroom Practice Kelleen Toohey Learners’ Experiences of Immersion Education: Case Studies of French and Chinese Michèle de Courcy Multilingual Classroom Ecologies Angela Creese and Peter Martin (eds) Power, Prestige and Bilingualism: International Perspectives on Elite Bilingual Education Anne-Marie de Mejía The Sociopolitics of English Language Teaching Joan Kelly Hall and William G. Eggington (eds) Teaching and Learning in Multicultural Schools Elizabeth Coelho Trilingualism in Family, School and Community Charlotte Hoffmann and Jehannes Ytsma (eds) Other Books of Interest Beyond Bilingualism: Multilingualism and Multilingual Education Jasone Cenoz and Fred Genesee (eds) Bilingualism and Social Relations: Turkish Speakers in North Western Europe J. Normann Jørgensen (ed.) The Care and Education of Young Bilinguals Colin Baker Encyclopedia of Bilingualism and Bilingual Education Colin Baker and Sylvia Prys Jones Understanding Deaf Culture: In Search of Deafhood Paddy Ladd

Please contact us for the latest book information: Multilingual Matters, Frankfurt Lodge, Clevedon Hall, Victoria Road, Clevedon, BS21 7HH, England http://www.multilingual-matters.com

BILINGUAL EDUCATION AND BILINGUALISM 44 Series Editors: Colin Baker and Nancy H. Hornberger

Multilingual Classroom Ecologies Inter-relationships, Interactions and Ideologies Edited by

Angela Creese and Peter Martin

MULTILINGUAL MATTERS LTD Clevedon • Buffalo • Toronto • Sydney

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue entry for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 1-85359-695-7 (hbk) Multilingual Matters Ltd UK: Frankfurt Lodge, Clevedon Hall, Victoria Road, Clevedon BS21 7HH. USA: UTP, 2250 Military Road, Tonawanda, NY 14150, USA. Canada: UTP, 5201 Dufferin Street, North York, Ontario M3H 5T8, Canada. Australia: Footprint Books, PO Box 418, Church Point, NSW 2103, Australia. Copyright © 2003 Angela Creese, Peter Martin and the authors of individual chapters. This book is also available as Vol. 6, Nos 3&4 of the International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. Printed and bound in Great Britain by Short Run Press Ltd.

Contents Angela Creese and Peter Martin: Multilingual Classroom Ecologies: Inter-relationships, Interactions and Ideologies

1

Ellen Skilton-Sylvester: Legal Discourse and Decisions, Teacher Policymaking and the Multilingual Classroom: Constraining and Supporting Khmer/English Biliteracy in the United States

8

Peter W. Martin: Interactions and Inter-relationships Around Text: Practices and Positionings in a Multilingual Classroom in Brunei

25

Alexandra Jaffe: Talk Around Text: Literacy Practices, Cultural Identity and Authority in a Corsican Bilingual Classroom

42

Angela Creese: Language, Ethnicity and the Mediation of Allegations of Racism: Negotiating Diversity and Sameness in Multilingual School Discourses

61

Deirdre Martin: Constructing Discursive Practices in School and Community: Bilingualism, Gender and Power

77

Jo Arthur: ‘Baro Afkaaga Hooyo!’ A Case Study of Somali Literacy Teaching in Liverpool

93

Marilyn Martin-Jones and Mukul Saxena: Bilingual Resources and ‘Funds of Knowledge’ for Teaching and Learning in Multi-ethnic Classrooms in Britain

107

Sally Boyd: Foreign-born Teachers in the Multilingual Classroom in Sweden: The Role of Attitudes to Foreign Accent

123

Nancy H. Hornberger: Afterword: Ecology and Ideology in Multilingual Classrooms

136

Multilingual Classroom Ecologies: Inter-relationships, Interactions and Ideologies Angela Creese School of Education, University of Birmingham, UK

Peter Martin School of Education, University of Leicester, UK

Introduction The papers appearing in this volume are, with one exception, those presented in a colloquium at the Third International Symposium on Bilingualism at the University of the West of England, Bristol, UK, in April 2001. The theme of the colloquium was the multilingual classroom and specifically the complex inter-relationships, interactions and ideologies within such classrooms. The idea for the colloquium was to bring together researchers whose experiences of multilingual classrooms in a range of different sites varied but nevertheless shared clear commonalities. What all studies share is an exploration of the inter-relationships between an individual and her/his languages, and across individuals and their languages. These inter-relationships are negotiated through different types of interactions, underpinned by situated and ideological, cultural and political histories. The key issues of inter-relationships, interactions and ideologies are explored within an ecological perspective that takes into account the importance of the environment and the linguistic diversity which exists within that environment. We first briefly consider how language ecology has been explored in the literature and, with reference to this literature, provide the framework for this volume.

Linguistic Ecology The key concept behind the term ‘language ecology’, defined by Haugen (1972: 325) as ‘the study of interactions between any given language and its environment’, is that a given language does not exist as a separate entity in the environment. In Haugen’s terms, ‘environment’ refers to the ‘society that uses [a language] as one of its codes’ (1972: 325). An ecological approach to language in society, then, requires an exploration of the relationship of languages to each other and to the society in which these languages exist. This includes the geographical, socio-economic and cultural conditions in which the speakers of a given language exist, as well as the wider linguistic environment. In Haugen’s original study it was suggested that, for a particular situation, several ecological questions need to be addressed. Haugen’s questions provided a useful framework for a study of language ecology, although others have noted that Haugen’s approach needs to be more comprehensive and more systematically exploited. Edwards (1992), for example, has extended the questions posed by Haugen into a 1 Multilingual Classroom Ecologies

2

Multilingual Classroom Ecologies

checklist of 33 questions, using three basic categories of variables: speaker, language and setting. The language ecology metaphor has been used in different ways in the literature. This literature on language ecology includes discussion related to cognitive development and human interaction, the maintenance and survival of languages, the promotion of linguistic diversity, and language policy and planning. Although much of the earlier literature focused on two-dimensional inter-relationships between languages and their communities, more recent work has acknowledged an ‘infinite world of possibilities’ for language ecology (Barron et al., 2002: 10). In a recent volume, The Ecolinguistics Reader, Fill and Mühlhäusler (2001: 3) suggest that the ecological metaphor illuminates a range of subject matter, including (1) the diversity of inhabitants of an ecology; (2) the factors that sustain diversity; (3) the housekeeping that is needed; and (4) the functional inter-relationships between the inhabitants of an ecology. One line of discussion has been the work of Bronfenbrenner (1979, 1993) on the ecology of cognitive development. He has explored and developed the theme of the ecology of human interaction. Bronfenbrenner’s ecological model consists of a number of what he calls ‘systems’ which describe ‘the nested networks of interactions that create an individual’s ecology’ (Renn, 1999: 6). Applying this ecology model, Renn investigated bi- or multiracial college students’ development of multiracial identity in the USA and found the model useful for ‘understanding the influence of multiple person–environment interactions’. Renn (1999: 4), citing Tierney (1993: 63), notes that individuals are ‘constantly redescribed by institutional and ideological mechanisms of power’. Mühlhäusler (1996) has developed the idea of language ecology in his discussion of the maintenance and survival of languages with specific reference to the small Australian and Pacific languages. He refers to the ‘large-scale destruction of linguistic ecologies’ and suggests there is a need to identify the ‘prerequisites for maintaining, preserving or restoring languages’ (Mühlhäusler, 1992: 165–66). The theme of language ecology also appears in the language policy and planning literature. Kaplan and Baldauf (1997: 310) have noted that efforts to plan language ‘without an awareness of the eco-system in which one is intervening can be dangerous to the health of the community’. In a later work, they refer to ‘the ripple effects of doing anything to any language or set of languages’ within a particular context (Kaplan & Baldauf, 1998: 361). Another source which looks at an ecological approach to language planning is the volume by Liddicoat and Bryant (2000). Within this volume, a focus paper by Mühlhäusler (2000) argues for the need to take into account the inter-relationships between language and the wider cultural and political environment. Phillipson and Skutnabb-Kangas (1996), in a discussion of language policy options worldwide emerging from their work on language rights, have contrasted what they refer to as an ‘ecology-of-language paradigm’, which promotes multilingualism and linguistic diversity, with the ‘diffusion of English paradigm’ which promotes a monolingual viewpoint. With reference to the work of Phillipson and Skutnabb-Kangas, Ricento (2000: 208) has highlighted a key question which needs to be addressed: ‘Why do individuals opt to use (or cease to use) particular languages and varieties for specified functions in different domains, and how do these choices influence – and how are they influenced by – institu-

Multilingual Classroom Ecologies

3

tional language policy decision-making (local to national to supranational)?’. In attempting to answer this question Ricento points to the importance of linking together the patterns of language use in particular contexts with the ‘effects of macro-sociopolitical forces on the status and use of languages at the societal level’ (Ricento, 2000: 209). This present volume focuses on one context, the classroom, and attempts to provide such a link to the wider socio-political environment. In an ecological approach to a discussion of ‘multilingual language policies and the continua of biliteracy’, Hornberger (2002: 35) states that the language ecology metaphor ‘captures a set of ideological underpinnings for a multilingual language policy’. In particular, she points to how languages exist and evolve in an eco-system along with other languages, and how they [their speakers] ‘interact with their socio-political, economic, and cultural environments’. The continua of biliteracy is an ecological model in the sense that it shows how both the nested and intersecting nature of a whole raft of language and literacy features can be implemented by educators. The model therefore provides teachers and researchers with the tools to consider how one change along one point of one continuum will cause potential changes along other continua and how this reconfigures the whole educational picture and the opportunities for participation and success in schools. Such a model is therefore dynamic and fluid, and allows educators to keep in mind a range of complex inter-relating issues around the promotion of multilingualism within educational settings. The model also has the capacity to make connections between the educators’ local and wider contexts, and the interaction between these different level discourses. In investigating multilingual classrooms through this model, one can see the ways in which power is negotiated through language by individuals and institutions, and how some languages come to be endorsed more than others. Despite the increasing amount of literature on the ecology of language, and the link with language policy and planning, there are few studies which focus on the inter-relationships between languages and their speakers in the educational context, specifically, the multilingual classroom. Mühlhäusler (1996), with particular reference to the Pacific region, has argued for a radical rethinking of language education within an ecological framework. One issue he raises is how education programmes can fit into existing linguistic ecologies. He does not, however, focus on issues inside the classroom apart from raising a number of questions about the ecological factors that promote the use and learning of languages in the classroom, and on the factors required for languages used in education to thrive outside the classroom. It is our opinion that a fuller discussion of the language ecology of multilingual classroom environments is required. We feel it is important to explore the ecological minutiae of interactional practices within such environments, along the lines, for example, of Kulick’s (1992) study of language shift and cultural reproduction in a Papua New Guinean village, and Errington’s (1998) study of interaction and identity in Javanese Indonesia, a study which considers the changing interactional practices in relation to questions of ethnicity, nationalism and political culture. Alongside a discussion of the interactions between speakers and their languages and the inter-relationships between these speakers and their environ-

4

Multilingual Classroom Ecologies

ments, a central focus of this volume is the inclusion of ideology as a concern of language ecology. In attempting to link classroom environments with the wider socio-political environment it is essential to take into account the ideologies that pervade language choice and language policy (see, for example, Luke et al., 1990; Tollefson, 1991, 1995). It does this in an attempt to make transparent the ‘naturalization’ of social differences which are bound up in language use (Heller & Martin-Jones, 2001). An ecological approach does more than describe the relationships between situated speakers of different languages, and is proactive in pulling apart perceived natural language orders: that is, where a particular language and its structure and use becomes so naturalised that it is no longer seen as construing a particular ideological line. An ecological approach attempts to make this transparent. ‘Unnaturalising’ these discourses becomes necessary to make clear ‘what kinds of language practices are valued and considered good, normal, appropriate, or correct’ in particular classrooms and schools, and who are likely to be the winners and losers in the ideological orientations (Heller & Martin-Jones, 2001: 2). To take this one step further, Hornberger (2002: 30) argues that ‘multilingual language policies are essentially about opening up ideological and implementational space in the environment for as many languages as possible’.

Structure of the Collection The papers in this collection all explore some aspect of the interactions and inter-relationships between teachers and learners, the underlying ideologies within the classroom or school contexts, and how discourses within and between micro and macro levels of education are institutionally and societally re(produced). Ellen Skilton-Sylvester’s paper focuses on Khmer/English biliteracy in multilingual classrooms in the United States. She considers the legal and official language policies in relation to minority groups and links these to the implicit policies and ideologies which exist outside the official discourse. The main thrust of the paper is the interplay between policy making, the ideologies which support these policies, and the micro-level practices in schools and classrooms. What emerges from this study is the way different teachers create different classroom policies of their own, depending on their underlying ideologies. The study provides telling accounts, using interview vignettes, of how teachers support and contest ideologies about the education of linguistically diverse students. The classroom ecologies in her study are thus influenced and shaped not only by the law but the teachers’ own classroom policies with regard to language and culture. Peter Martin provides an account of the interactions and inter-relationships around text in one multilingual classroom in the sultanate of Brunei on the northern coast of Borneo. The study is located in a small rural school in Brunei which serves a minority community. The specific focus of the study is the way the text, the teacher and pupils, and the languages used to talk around the text are positioned during the accomplishment of the lesson. The paper relates the participants’ multilingual literacy practices to the wider linguistic ecology of the environment, both the local environment and the nation, and attempts to look at

Multilingual Classroom Ecologies

5

the inter-relationships and interactions in the classroom, building a picture of the classroom ecology, and how this classroom ecology is influenced by the wider linguistic ecology. The major focus of Alexandra Jaffe’s paper is also on talk around text. The study focuses particularly on literacy practices in a Corsican bilingual classroom and the way that pedagogical practices attribute authentic and powerful identities to both the minority language and to learners. Jaffe provides accounts of Corsican literacy instruction and explores how, on the one hand, such instruction helps to foster an intimate and authentic sense of cultural ownership of the Corsican language among children who are French-dominant. On the other hand, it helps to create symbolic and functional parity between Corsican and French within the broader context of the Corsican language revitalisation scheme. The paper by Angela Creese focuses on the construction of two bilingual English as an additional language (EAL) teachers’ positionings during a two-day student staged protest against a perceived racist incident in a London secondary school. It examines how these bilingual teachers’ ethnicity and language resources in Turkish and English are employed by the school to (re)produce a discourse of diversity that attempts to level out difference. It looks at how the bilingual EAL teachers manage their multiple roles within this institutional discourse through the foregrounding and backgrounding of ethnicity, language, knowledge production, and ‘self’ in several school contexts through the two-day event and beyond. The data for the analysis come from two student-produced texts. Analysis is extended beyond the texts to look at the interactions which happen around them within the school community. Through an ethnography of communication, the paper shows how the bilingual teachers mediate, negotiate and action identification positionings towards and away from the dominant discourse of institutional sameness. It finds that the bilingual teachers both collude with and challenge this discourse. Deirdre Martin’s paper provides an account of how young Panjabi Sikh students construct languages in schools. The focus of the paper is on how young bilingual students are positioned, and how they position themselves and others through the discursive strategies across structures of languages, gender and schooling. Drawing on a theoretical framework of Bourdieu, and Martin-Jones and Heller, she attempts to explore the nature of language and power relations for this group of students. She uses group interviews in order to offer a glimpse of the students’ understanding of how their languages are legitimised in different power relations across peers, gender and teachers. The paper by Jo Arthur focuses on a group of young people attending after-school lessons in Somali in Liverpool. The data for this paper include samples of each participant’s written Somali, audio- and video-recordings of classroom interaction, and diaries in which the learners recorded their personal experience of the lessons and of the roles of Somali literacy practices in their daily lives. Arthur discusses insights gained from the data into the shaping of participants’ bilingual language practices by the different values associated with languages in their repertoire, and by the social and linguistic experience which they bring to the classroom. In the next paper, Marilyn Martin-Jones and Mukul Saxena show how (mini-

6

Multilingual Classroom Ecologies

mal) bilingual support in English dominated mainstream classroom contexts serves as funds of knowledge for classroom participants. In particular they show how bilingual assistants negotiate their relationships with bilingual children by making links between home, community and school-based contexts for learning. In their research, making use of a survey, interviews and observation, the authors document in detail the ways in which a local bilingual assistant scheme was implemented at school and classroom level. The paper focuses on the moments in class when the bilingual assistants were able to use the children’s home or community language in relatively open-ended exchanges with the children. The authors show how different participant structures provided an opportunity for the bilingual assistants to draw on their resources in subtle and complex ways as they negotiated their classroom relationships with the children. Sally Boyd’s paper looks at attitudes to accent of foreign-born teachers in multilingual classrooms in Sweden. Using results from a series of modified matched-guise tests, she shows how schools enforce not only a standardised written language ideology but in addition, overshoot their goal and demand a standardised spoken language. She makes the argument that although schools are intensely language-saturated places and demand a high level of linguistic skill for those teachers employed there, the assessments of language skills should not primarily be related to standard language norms, but rather to broader pedagogical goals. Boyd uses the paper to show how negative attitudes toward foreign accented Swedish can affect the assessments of the professional skills of foreign-born teachers made by school principals, teacher trainers and pupils. The study found that judging for foreign ‘accentedness’ was linked to judgements on teacher suitability. The study concludes that judgements of accentedness and of language proficiency play an important role in the exclusion of foreigners from qualified employment, in Swedish schools as elsewhere. Correspondence Any correspondence should be directed to Dr Angela Creese, School of Education, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham, B15 2TT, UK ([email protected]). References Barron, C., Bruce, N. and Nunan, D. (eds) (2002) Knowledge and Discourse. Towards an Ecology of Language. London: Longman. Bronfenbrenner, U. (1979) The Ecology of Cognitive Development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bronfenbrenner, U. (1993) The ecology of cognitive development: Research models and fugitive findings. In R.H. Wozniak and K.W. Fisher (eds) Development in Context: Acting and Thinking in Specific Environments (pp. 3–44). New York: Erlbaum. Edwards, J. (1992) Sociopolitical aspects of language maintenance and loss. Towards a typology of minority language situations. In W. Fase, K. Jaspaert and S. Kroon (eds) Maintenance and Loss of Minority Languages (pp. 37–54). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Errington, J.J. (1998) Shifting Languages. Interaction and Identity in Javanese Indonesia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fill, A. and Mühlhäusler, P. (eds) (2001) The Ecolinguistics Reader. Language, Ecology and Environment. London: Continuum. Haugen, E. (1972) The Ecology of Language. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Multilingual Classroom Ecologies

7

Heller, M. and Martin-Jones, M. (eds) (2001) Voices of Authority: Educational and Linguistic Difference. Westport, CT: Ablex Publishing. Hornberger, N. (2002) Multilingual language policies and the continua of biliteracy. Language Policy 1, 27–51. Kaplan, R.B. and Baldauf, R.B. Jr (1997) Language Planning from Practice to Theory. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Kaplan, R.B. and Baldauf, R.B. Jr. (1998) The language planning situation in …. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 19 (5&6), 358–368. Kulick, D. (1992) Language Shift and Cultural Reproduction: Socialization, Self and Syncretism in a Papua New Guinean Village. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Liddicoat, J. and Bryant, P. (eds) (2000) Language Planning and Language Ecology. Special Issue of Current Issues in Language Planning 1 (3). Luke, A., McHoul, A. and Mey, J. (1990) On the limits of language planning: Class, state and power. In R.B Baldauf Jr. and A. Luke (eds) Language Planning and Education on Australasia and the South Pacific (pp. 25–44). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Mühlhäusler, P. (1992) Preserving languages or language ecologies: A top down approach to language survival. Oceanic Linguistics 31 (2), 163–180. Mühlhäusler, P. (1996) Linguistic Ecology. Language Change and Linguistic Imperialism in the Pacific Region. London: Routledge. Mühlhäusler, P. (2000) Language planning and language ecology. Current Issues in Language Planning 1 (3), 306–367. Phillipson, R. and Skutnabb-Kangas, T. (1996) English only worldwide or language ecology. TESOL Quarterly 30 (3), 429–452. Renn, K.A. (1999) Space to grow: Creating an ecology model of bi- multiracial identity development in college students. AERA Annual Meeting ED 430 492. Ricento, T. (2000) Historical and theoretical perspectives in language policy and planning. Journal of Sociolinguistics 4 (2), 196–213. Tierney, W.G. (1993) Building Communities of Difference. Critical Studies in Education and Culture Series. (eds H.H. Giroux and P. Friere) Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey. Tollefson, J.W. (1991) Planning Language, Planning Inequality. London: Longman. Tollefson, J.W. (ed.) (1995) Power and Inequality in Language Education. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Legal Discourse and Decisions, Teacher Policymaking and the Multilingual Classroom: Constraining and Supporting Khmer/English Biliteracy in the United States Ellen Skilton-Sylvester Temple University College of Education, Philadelphia, USA This paper looks at the ways US English-language policies at the micro and macro levels have influenced the development of Khmer biliteracy for children and adults. It shows the power of teacher policymaking and the role of the legal system in shaping what is possible in multilingual classrooms in the United States. By focusing on ESL teachers in four multilingual classrooms, the analysis shows that it is not just that legal decisions have shaped the realities of schools, but that the discourse of the legal system has become part of students’ and teachers’ perspectives on what is possible in the classroom and, further, reifies and legitimises commonplace assumptions about assimilation, subtractive bilingualism, and the relative value of some languages over others. Even so, the analysis of four teachers and four classrooms show the ways that teacher policies can contest these assumptions and provide support for Khmer language and culture in the classroom. The paper ends with a call for educators to engage not only in micro-level policymaking as teachers but also more in macro-level policymaking as voting and engaged citizens in order to create emancipatory multilingual classroom ecologies that support linguistic diversity.

At one point during my fieldwork, a Cambodian middle school student in Philadelphia asked me ‘Is it illegal for an Asian teacher to speak her language with Asian students at school?’ (fieldnotes, 5/10/93). At the time, this question shocked me. Little did I know that teachers using a language other than English to teach would actually become illegal in the state of California a decade later (Proposition 227, Article 5). The question posed here is about the legality of speaking another language in school, but the legality of multilingual students’ presence in the United States is also sometimes questioned within the school context in relation to one’s ability to speak English. An elementary-level Cambodian student grapples with her teacher’s English-only policy in relation to her rights as a Khmer speaker to live in the United States. She explains, ‘My teacher says that if we want to stay in this country, we have to always speak English in class. We should never speak our language in class … I think it’s not fair. What if you don’t know how to speak English?’ (fieldnotes, 3/29/94). Underlying this statement is a clear message that one might be asked to leave the country if English is not spoken at school. At a more ideological level, the right to use one’s native language in and out of the classroom is often questioned based on definitions of America as a nation. One adult ESL teacher who worked with Khmer speakers as well as members of other language groups explained his position on the use of other languages in the classroom in this way: 8 Khmer/English Biliteracy in the United States

Khmer/English Biliteracy in the United States

9

Using the native language is forbidden. Forbidden. When they talk to each other, I say, ‘Don’t speak that kind of language.’ and they all don’t do it … I want them, even with each other, not to speak their native language … I’m not saying that you shouldn’t preserve your culture. I’m not saying you shouldn’t preserve your language. But to practice, you must speak English. You must do as the Romans do in Rome. It’s that simple. There’s no other way … Everyone must speak English. This is America after all, the land of the free and the home of English. (Taped interview, 10/24/94) In addition to making Khmer (and other languages) ‘illegal’ in his classroom, he also told stories of walking up to immigrants on the street or in restaurants and telling them to speak English. Not unlike the notion of a ‘citizen’s arrest’, he felt comfortable in the role of ‘policing’ his neighbourhood to make sure that English was being spoken. In these introductory examples, one can see the ways that student rights concerning language are discussed and framed by teachers. It is also not hard to see that they are quite in line with what Schiffman (1996) calls American linguistic culture – the often covert underlying ideas, decisions and attitudes on which policy decisions are made in the United States. Although there are many ways to describe the underlying ideologies of language policies and practices, my reading of the literature (Christian, 1999; Lo Bianco, 1999; Ricento, 1998; Schiffman, 1996; Wiley & Lukes, 1996) suggest several key assumptions in the dominant discourse on the learning of English by linguistic minorities. Although this is not an exhaustive list, it highlights some of the central arguments in the literature that this article addresses: (1) A prevailing language-as-problem orientation is widespread and standard English is seen as the solution. (2) An emphasis on subtractive bilingualism is widespread in ideology and in policy. (3) Immigrant and refugee rights to native languages are questioned on the basis of their status as newcomers to the United States (Wiley & Lukes, 1996). (4) A narrow view of other languages exists that includes a belief that other languages are useful only if they serve a pragmatic, instrumental function. Although there is widespread support of English monolingualism in mainstream discourses about language in the United States, looking closely at language policy is not a straightforward process. There is much agreement about the overarching ideologies and key court decisions, but much of language policymaking in this context is not immediately apparent. As Schiffman (1996: 211) suggests, ‘the strength of American language policy is not in what is legally and officially stated, but in the subtler workings of what I have called the covert and implicit language policy’. Here, Schiffman separates what is ‘legally and officially stated’ from the ‘covert and implicit language policy’. While I do not disagree that the implicit policies may be the most powerful, I will argue that they are not separate from stated official policy. Instead, I see them both as part of the ecology of US language policy, one that has a great deal of ambivalence about bilingualism. The data for this paper show the ways in which the legal system has given voice to this ambivalence and has a clear connection – both practically and

10

Multilingual Classroom Ecologies

ideologically – to what actually happens in schools concerning linguistic diversity. In addition, these officially stated policies serve to reify commonplace assumptions about what is needed, and why, in order to meet the educational needs of linguistically diverse students. A crucial part of the argument this paper is making has to do with the interplay of policy making and the ideologies that support those policies at multiple levels. Equally important is the notion that US linguistic culture cannot be described as a uniform set of beliefs. This article takes the position that there is not a single linguistic culture in the United States but multiple linguistic cultures, some of which have more influence than others. While official national policy-making may be well described by an overarching US linguistic culture, state and local contexts and even some federal funding initiatives support other beliefs and values. There is not a deterministic connection between what is stated at the macro level as official policy for linguistic minority students and what happens at the micro level in terms of actual schools and classrooms. Because of the many independent units involved in language planning in the United States in what Tollefson (1984) has called a ‘loosely coupled system’, and federal laws which encourage rather than mandate solutions (Christian, 1999), there is some room for innovation and contesting commonplace assumptions at the local level (Auerbach, 1993; Corson, 1999; Cummins, 1986/2001; Freeman, 1996; Ricento & Hornberger, 1996). This paper discusses both these micro-level ideologies and policies of teachers and the macro-level legal ideologies and policies that surround them, showing relationships between these levels of policymaking and their ideological foundations. Ricento and Hornberger’s (1996) image of an onion for describing the multiple layers of language policy and planning is useful here in that it illustrates how connected each layer is. As they say, ‘[each] layer permeates and is permeated by the others’ (p. 408). The analysis in this paper puts teacher policies at the centre of the discussion. As Cummins (1986/2001: 657) aptly explains, teachers have a powerful role in shaping school contexts in this way: Legislative and policy reforms may be necessary conditions for effective change, but they are not sufficient … The social organization and bureaucratic constraints within the school reflect not only broader policy and societal factors, but also the extent to which individual educators accept or challenge the social organization of the school in relation to minority students and communities. Change is most likely to come from the bottom-up than from the top-down (Ricento & Hornberger, 1996). As a result, looking at the ways teachers create classroom policies of their own while accepting and challenging the policies that are handed down to them is a useful and important endeavour in working toward more equitable educational policies and practices for linguistically diverse students. Although policy discussions typically focus on the macro level of analysis by analysing national and state-level decisions and structures, this paper focuses on the micro level – in particular classrooms – and analyses the ways in which English-only and multilingual ideologies are a part of local teaching policies and

Khmer/English Biliteracy in the United States

11

practices. Auerbach shows the link between micro and macro levels of analysis. She says: Whereas the agenda of the English only movement may seem obvious on a macro level, the ways in which our own practices reinforce this agenda on a micro level are less visible, and yet … what happens inside and outside of the classroom are two sides of the same coin. Whether or not we support the use of learners’ L1s is not just a pedagogical matter: It is a political one, and the way that we address ESL instruction is both a mirror of and a rehearsal for relations of power in the broader society. (1993: 10) In doing this local analysis, it is possible to see more clearly the impact of English policies on Khmer biliterate development and the ways in which local and national policies and ideologies intersect and diverge. The data come primarily from two related studies which focus on the experiences of Khmer speakers in Philadelphia: (1) a two-year qualitative evaluation of the implementation of new educational policies for Asian students in Philadelphia schools and classrooms as a result of a class-action law suit entitled Y.S. v. School District of Philadelphia; and (2) a three-year ethnographic study in the homes and classrooms of several Cambodian children focusing particularly on the intersection of bilingualism, literacy and educational policy in their lives. The paper looks especially at teacher policies concerning the use of English and Khmer in the multilingual classroom and shows how these issues surface in ESL classrooms for both adults and children.

The Khmer in America: An Important Case Study Wiley (1999) has suggested that we need more in-depth analysis of language policy and planning in relation to particular groups so that the field closes the gap between stated policies and the outcomes they shape. Many have written about the linguistic culture of the United States and the predominant ideologies which exist concerning bilingualism and bilingual education (Christian, 1999; Cummins, 2000; Schiffman, 1996; Wiley & Lukes, 1996). In several ways, Khmer speakers in the United States are not on the radar screen of many concerned with English language teaching or the linguistic rights of newcomers. This makes it an interesting and important case to study because when one asks the question ‘Why is Khmer valuable in the United States?’ many of the reasons do not fit neatly within the economic and pragmatic frameworks of mainstream US discourse on linguistic diversity. One key element has to do with numbers. Although census data can be misleading, particularly in documenting immigrant populations, the 1990 census data show that there were 127,400 speakers of Khmer in the United States (Wiley, 1996). According to the Cambodian Association of Greater Philadelphia, a recent study completed concerning the Cambodian in the area now estimates that there are approximately 18,000 Cambodians living in the Philadelphia area (R. Sorn, personal communication, 1/11/02). Although Khmer may not be seen as a threat to English, it is also perhaps not seen as a national, state or local priority because of the relatively small number of speakers. In some areas of the country, including Philadelphia, the Cambodian population has been called

12

Multilingual Classroom Ecologies

‘invisible’ (Weinstein-Shr, 1992). This ‘invisibility’ is quite connected to the role of legislation and litigation. As Ruiz (1984: 24) has said, an emphasis on language rights necessarily set up a situation where ‘the rights of the few are affirmed over those of the many’. Without the legal system, language policy would not have the ‘teeth to insist on the rights of children to equal access to schooling regardless of skin color, national background or home language’ (Olsen, 1997: 228–9). Another reason that understanding the impact of language policies on Khmer speakers is of particular interest has to do with the centrality of economics. This is not only true for this situation, but is what Burnaby and Ricento (1998: 338) call a ‘potential universal’ in thinking about theories of language policy and planning. As they state: ‘although legislation and other policy documents may trumpet a commitment to human rights, equality before the law, and other high-sounding values, economic interests and outcomes are almost always of central importance’. Heller (1999), Lo Bianco (1999) and Tse (2001) all discuss the ways in which our increasingly globalised world has changed the value of bilingualism in that speakers of some languages (who are able to become ‘balanced bilinguals’) now have new economic and social value for being able to cross borders in international commerce. However, this new prominence for some kinds of bilingualism leaves Khmer and other languages not associated with international business transactions out in the cold. This perspective can be seen locally in the comments of a school district administrator as well: My personal feeling and that of many administrators with whom I work is that a second language and cultural diversity are resources which enrich the system. However, there is a practical emphasis on functional English acquisition and an attitude held by many in the community that ‘Why do we need bilingual Asians? Their language is not being used or learned by others in the United States’. (Personal communication, 10/6/92) The question ‘Why do we need bilingual Asians?’ underscores an ideology which supports the way things are and a bottom line that sees efficiency as the primary goal of educational policy. Although the new global economy may reinforce the ‘need’ for bilingual Japanese, Chinese and Korean speakers or what Lo Bianco (1999) calls ‘Economically Significant Others’, it is less likely that the ‘demand’ for Khmer speakers has increased within a globally connected world.

Teacher Policymaking in Relation to the Legal System All four of the teachers discussed in this article are teaching Cambodian students in contexts where the legal system has shaped the structures and resources available for linguistic minority students. Although they have much say about the policies they set up in the classroom, there are external policies that shape what they do. Funding is a crucial issue in supporting the implementation of the law, especially for adult ESL students. It is often at the level of appropriations for particular projects that policies are enacted or not (Christian, 1999). In Hardman’s (1994) study, he discusses applying to the state of Pennsylvania for funding for a bilingual programme for Cambodian adults in Philadelphia. He was told that the state was unable to fund projects that provided native language instruction. While the law does not prohibit native language instruction for

Khmer/English Biliteracy in the United States

13

adults, restrictions on funding make it not possible. The laws that govern adult education for linguistic minorities have not been the same as those that govern primary and secondary public education. Even so, there are similarities in the relationship between the legal provisions and the reality of adult education programmes as well as in terms of the underlying orientation to linguistic diversity as a problem. As Christian (1999: 123) explains, ‘Adult education has experienced a policy orientation similar to that of K-12 education, in that services for LEP adults (and use of languages other than English) are allowed but not mandated’. Although there has been a long history of court involvement in settling public K-12 school-related issues in the United States, the courts have only reluctantly become involved in policy-related issues1 (August & Garcia, 1988: 58). Much of US language policy in schools is based on the Lau decision and the resulting 1975 Lau Remedies. In Lau v. Nichols, the Supreme Court set policy and precedent for acquisition policy planning for linguistic minority students. In this case, ‘The Court found that Title VI was violated when there was the effect of discrimination, although there was no intent‘ (Malakoff & Hakuta, 1990: 34). There are many connections between a local class-action suit, Y.S. v. School District of Philadelphia, and the decisions made in Lau v. Nichols. However, the agreement reached in Philadelphia included not only outlines for new instructional programmes and counselling services, but also increased bilingual support for parental communication, testing, tutoring and counselling. The bilingual supports that have come from the Y.S. v. School District of Philadelphia court mandate have provided support for Asian languages in schools, but not often in classrooms. The bilingual counsellors and bilingual tutors that have been hired in Asian languages as a result of this mandate typically provide translation support outside of classrooms. In my interviews with tutors, I found that most tried not to use their native languages in tutoring sessions, but only used them if it was absolutely necessary. In addition, the bilingual teachers who were hired were often placed in classrooms without any or many students who spoke their native languages. Because the national and state laws do not mandate native language instruction, and parents have been ambivalent about it (Hardman, 1994), the amount of support given to the language and culture of Cambodian bilingual students in Philadelphia has more to do with the policy of the teacher than state or federal law.

Policies and Practices for Supporting Biliterate Development in Multilingual Classrooms One key premise of this paper is that it is possible to support additive bilingualism in classrooms even when the teacher does not speak Khmer. As Cummins (1986/2001: 664) suggests, ‘even within a monolingual school context, powerful messages can be communicated to students regarding the validity and advantages of language development’. Hornberger (1990) has suggested that there are ways, even in a classroom where the teacher does not encourage Khmer to be spoken by students or include culturally relevant texts in the classroom, to support biliterate development by creating a classroom that makes particular kinds of choices concerning motivation, purpose, text and interaction. Building

14

Multilingual Classroom Ecologies

on Hornberger’s (1989) continua of biliteracy, Skilton-Sylvester (1997) has also suggested that meaningful vernacular, minority and contextualised content can be quite valuable in supporting biliterate development (Hornberger & Skilton-Sylvester, 2000). Tse’s (2001) study of the experiences of 10 bilinguals who were born in the US and have achieved high levels of literacy in both languages is very useful in thinking about what situations support the development of full biliteracy in the United States. She shows that there are two key elements to their ability to resist language shift: (1) language vitality, and (2) literacy environment and experiences. In terms of my analysis of classrooms, the key element of language vitality has to do with whether or not educational institutions and the teachers who teach in them value Khmer. However, none of the classrooms below include formal language instruction in the heritage language, a key element of Tse’s discussion of the literacy environment and experiences necessary for high levels of biliterate development in both languages. Drawing on the literature concerning biliterate development, my analysis of particular teachers in particular classrooms will focus primarily on the following: (1) Policies about Khmer use in the classroom (as a way of understanding the value placed on the language in these contexts). (2) Policies about the use of ‘minority’ content in the classroom and other ways of creating curriculum that is culturally relevant to Cambodians. Looking closely at the intricacies of teacher policies and their underlying ideologies is important, in part because of differences between stated policy and actual practice; and because questions about how the Khmer language and culturally relevant content are included are not just questions of whether they are, but also how and why.

Teacher Policymaking in Philadelphia: The Role of Khmer and English in the Multilingual ESL Classroom Much of language teaching can also be seen as language policymaking. As Ricento and Hornberger (1996: 421) state, ‘the most fundamental concerns of ESL/EFL teachers – that is, what will I teach? how will I teach? and why do I teach? – are all language policy issues.’ The analysis that follows focuses on adult ESL and elementary or middle-level ESL teachers in public K-12 schools who were interviewed and observed during the fieldwork period. In all, 10 teachers were interviewed – five from each group. I interviewed each teacher formally once, observed in each of their classrooms at least four times and provided weekly tutoring to Cambodian children and adults who attended each of their classes. The primary focus is on four teachers2 who exemplify different orientations to Khmer in their teaching of English (see Figure 1). None of the teachers is teaching Khmer or sees themselves as part of a bilingual programme, but the extent to which their understanding of teaching English includes the native languages of their students has a profound effect on their Khmer students and their biliterate development. A majority of the teachers I interviewed – elementary and middle school grade

Khmer/English Biliteracy in the United States

+

L1 USE IN THE CLASSROOM

– LI USE IN THE CLASSROOM

15

+ KHMER CULTURE IN

– KHMER CULTURE IN

THE CURRICULUM

THE CURRICULUM

Ms Klein (Adult ESL Teacher)

Mr Bnom (Adult ESL Teacher)

Ms Eakins (Elementary-level ESL Teacher)

Ms Menon (Middle-level ESL Teacher)

Figure 1 ESL teachers’ orientations to Khmer language and culture in the teaching of English

teachers, high school subject teachers, ESL teachers in public schools and adult ESL teachers – expressed some degree of concern about the use of the native language in class. Their opinions could be framed in terms of a continuum from an absolute restriction on the use of the L1 to an encouragement of using the L1 in class. Although two of the teachers below (Ms Klein and Ms Eakins) discuss the use of written L1 in the classroom, when Khmer is discussed, it is typically discussed in terms of oral L1 use. In spite of the similarity in teacher viewpoints, the perspectives of teachers vary quite a bit, even within the same institution. In some cases, there were also significant differences between teachers’ stated beliefs and their actual practices. Ms Klein: Supporting Khmer language and culture in the classroom Ms Klein’s beliefs run in stark contrast to the view that learning a new language should mean not using (and perhaps losing) the first. Although learning English is at the centre of what happens in this classroom, her policies about L1 use and ‘minority’ content position students’ knowledge and experience as a resource for the English classroom. Ms Klein is unique among the teachers I interviewed in that she sees the native language as a potential resource for students. As she says: I am a very strong believer in using the first language in the classroom or any resource that the student brings … You know, it can help them facilitate or acquire the second … I think that students use it to explain, I mean especially in a multi-level class … And I also think it’s essential if you’re gonna try to construct a student-centered curriculum. If you’re going to negotiate over the content of the curriculum, it’s just, it’s really difficult and not very effective to do that in the [second] language. (Taped interview, 10/13/94) Because her students speak a few different languages (Khmer, Korean, Lao, Hmong, Vietnamese), she is careful not to let L1 use alienate other students who do not use that language. One of her policies is that if an extensive period of L1 use has occurred in the discussion, she asks one of the students with the most advanced English ability to translate for the rest of the class. She also alternates between large group discussion and pair-work to allow more students to participate. Although she does not know a lot about the Khmer language, she views her

16

Multilingual Classroom Ecologies

adult students as experts and continues to learn about how the structure and pronunciation of Khmer and English are similar and different. One important distinction between the way Ms Klein approached the use of the L1 in the classroom and the way other teachers did is that she not only made it a legitimate part of whole-class discussion but also made it a legitimate part of literacy practices in the classroom. This was true not only in the ways that she supported her Khmer students’ transliterations of English pronunciation and translations of English vocabulary in Khmer, but also in the way that she encouraged students to teach others (and her) about the writing conventions of their native languages while engaging in comparisons across languages represented in the classroom. Ms Klein tries to incorporate the experiences of her students in all that she does in class. For example, over several months, students worked on creating timelines of their lives and ultimately writing about their pasts and futures. Within this general topic, she was able to focus on their interests and goals and find a balance between a focus on meaning and opportunities to pay attention to grammar. Students regularly come to class and discuss issues that their families are facing, interactions they’ve had with teachers, and so on. As the following example shows, she has also struggled to balance her desire for students to be more involved in decision-making and making suggestions about the content of the curriculum and her students’ desires for her to take more control and to lead more teacher-centred lessons: This year my idea is trying to use students dictating their language experience stories as a means of incorporating dictation into the classroom and hopefully helping them see the value of this language experience approach, but also giving them the familiarity of a dictation where someone is talking and they’re writing and then they correct it. (Taped interview, 10/13/94) Even so, she has often found that students don’t ‘count’ the learning that happens in class unless it looks like traditional learning and believe that they should be learning from her rather than from each other. As she explains: I put together this questionnaire about assumptions and beliefs about language learning and had students talk about it and we got through some of it … One of the questions was … ‘The teacher can learn from the students …’ Anyway, Chinny raised his hand … He keeps everyone in line and preserves the traditions … He raised his hand and said, ‘You know you have, you went to school for 13 years, and you went to college and graduated from college and now you’re in school again and of course, you have a lot that students can learn’ or something like that. You know, of course you know more than we do and I said, ‘That may be true about some things but think about all of the things that you guys have taught me about Cambodian culture and language, about your lives coming to the United States’. These are things that I couldn’t learn in school. These are only things that you could teach me. And I think students were reluctant to admit that I could learn from them. (Taped interview, 10/13/94) In this example, it is possible to see that Ms Klein’s beliefs about incorporating Khmer language and culture in the classroom do not just include the presence of

Khmer/English Biliteracy in the United States

17

particular languages and content, but also the ability to look at Cambodian student expectations about classroom interaction and find ways to make links to her own policies and practices as a teacher. Mr Bnom: Conflicted support of the Khmer language in the classroom Across the city, in a larger adult ESL programme, Mr Bnom was one of two Cambodian teachers I met during my years of fieldwork in Philadelphia (the other taught Mathematics in a middle school context). Like Ms Klein, Mr Bnom also taught adults, some of whom were Cambodian. However, he had a much larger class of students and a smaller percentage of them spoke Khmer. Another difference between them is that although Ms Klein had been trained as an ESL teacher, Mr Bnom was a businessman when he wasn’t teaching. His interest in teaching came from a commitment to the Cambodian community. Because Mr Bnom came to Philadelphia after learning to read and write in Khmer, he not only spoke the language of his Cambodian students, but also knew how to read and write the script. It goes without saying that he had the most well-developed knowledge of the Khmer language of any of the teachers I interviewed. In contrast to Ms Klein, Mr Bnom believed that his L1 usage would slow his students down. He explains: I try to choose the best, basic communication as much as possible. I often repeat the words, I give them examples of the word, what it means, use it in a sentence, and if they still don’t understand, then I would tell them in Cambodian … I understand their interests; I understand their ability; I understand their background. When I came here … I thought ‘Oh, I wish there was a Cambodian interpreter’. But then I got it … Like a year later, the school had a programme to hire a person who speaks Cambodian to work with kids. Then I said, this is a much slower process of learning English because I rely on interpreter so much … They will struggle, they will struggle to speak [English], but they will try. It’s like when you swim, you are about to drown yourself, but you try to kick right? It’s good. It’s good. (Taped interview, 6/20/94) Mr Bnom believes it is better if he doesn’t speak in Cambodian in class, but my observations show that he often translates new words into Khmer for students and uses their shared language as a way of encouraging students in class. Speaking the native language of his Cambodian students is one way that he makes the classroom welcoming and encouraging to his students, but it is not a part of his explicit ideas about teaching. Students often waited for him after class to ask if he could translate a document they received in the mail or a letter from school, but this was not considered part of the official class time. Although his policy is to restrict his own Khmer use in the classroom, Mr Bnom thinks that having his students speak to each other in the L1 is sometimes valuable. However, he and most of the other teachers at this centre provide very few opportunities for students to speak to each other in English or Khmer. He believes that providing a bilingual context for learning English is important and so he allows students to speak Khmer to each other. However, he believes that it is his job to provide English input to his students. By implication, students’ only source of English input in the classroom is from him.

18

Multilingual Classroom Ecologies

In terms of the content of the course, the class relied almost exclusively on a grammar workbook in which there were exercises with pictures – each allowing students to practise a particular grammatical structure. There was not a large variety of texts, the texts did not have much, if any, connection to students’ lives as newcomers to the United States or to Khmer culture, and the language used in them was of a quite decontextualised nature – primarily individual sentences to prove a grammar point. The text that was used in this class had example sentences that were clearly not based on the realities of the relatively poor urban refugees and immigrants in the class. Routinely, the example sentences would compare sports cars, tennis rackets and luxury apartments. Although these examples were for grammar practice, the ‘majority’ content actually made it difficult for adults to understand the meaning of several sentences. At times, the teacher also talked about ‘American’ culture in terms of Americans liking baseball or in terms of the history of the United States, but rarely about the backgrounds and experiences of the students. In this classroom, the lives of students were a part of the banter before class, but never part of the content of the reading and writing they did in class. Although Mr Bnom was a good teacher, and worked hard to meet the needs of his students, it also seems like a missed opportunity that his strengths as a biliterate Cambodian were not more utilised in the classroom. Even though the support for Khmer use in the classroom was primarily informal and among students, there were very few classrooms where even this degree of support for Khmer was found in public ESL classrooms. Of the five elementary school teachers interviewed, only one had a policy of allowing students to speak to each other in Khmer. Mr Bnom’s classroom policies surrounding Khmer language and content provide a good transition to the sections that follow (which focus on elementary and middle-level contexts) for at least two reasons: (1) his beliefs about what was best for his students were connected to his experience of having native language support as a young student in the School District of Philadelphia, and (2) the native language support he received as a student came directly from a court mandate. Ms Eakins: Khmer use is impolite, but Cambodian culture valued in idealised form One of the interesting things about Ms Eakins’ approach is that she sees cultural identity as quite central to her teaching as an ESL teacher, but discourages the use of Khmer in the classroom. In terms of students using Khmer among themselves, she says: I discourage it, but not in an unfriendly way. I basically … say, number one, we’re all here to practice English and we only have a little time together and during that time we really should be practicing English. And I don’t discourage the Cambodian, that’s not my point, but I say that you can, you know, you can speak Cambodian at home and it’s better if you practice English here … And I say that isn’t really polite to be speaking Cambodian cause not everybody understands it. (Taped interview, 6/2/94) However, when she can use Khmer writing as a cultural artifact and as a starting point for sharing with other members of the class about cultural diversity, she

Khmer/English Biliteracy in the United States

19

builds it into the curriculum. In discussing the role of Khmer cultural identity in her classroom, she says: When I was first indoctrinated as an ESOL teacher … we were told that one factor of the programme is helping them maintain a cultural identity. And I consider this to be very important because I think all of my students were born here … I guess I spent a lot of time, of course, surrounding the Cambodian New Year on the customs but that’s not the only time. I try to any time I have a chance I try to get things into the curriculum. I had them writing Cambodian letters … and one time a kid had Cambodian fruit that was really interesting and I had everyone try it and we wrote an experience story about Cambodian fruit. (Taped interview, 6/2/94) At first glance, this seems like a clear-cut example of a teacher valuing the backgrounds of her students in the curriculum. However, her sense of the culture of her students is that they have a deficit because they don’t know ‘real’ Khmer culture. She goes on to say: I don’t want to brag, but if it weren’t for me some of them would know nothing about their own culture because a few parents do, what I found most of them really just as soon forget everything and they’re Americanizing their children really fast and they’re not really that interested in maintaining the tradition. (Taped interview, 6/2/94) She believes that her own students do not know what it means to be Cambodian and so she has got stories about Cambodian culture from older students and parents about the way Cambodian traditions should be done. Ms Eakins’ tendency to emphasise visible culture (i.e. holidays, food, heroes) is common when culture is discussed and it often leaves students’ lived experiences outside of the classroom walls (Nieto, 1996). Auerbach (1995) talks about the importance of presenting content descriptively rather than prescriptively, ‘focusing on learners’ lived experience instead of an idealized projection of that experience’. In discussing her desire to support students’ language and culture in the classroom, she also talks about a display she designs throughout the year: If you step around this building, I put a display outside. It’s very often a display in different languages. The beginning of the year, there’ll be ‘welcome’ in all different languages. And I grab parents … I just grab people and say, can you write this in Cambodian and Laotian? And have ‘welcome’ in every language. At Christmas, you saw Christmas all over the world and you saw a display from all different countries, including Cambodia. Merry Christmas in different languages. (Taped interview, 6/2/94) The idea that translating American customs into other languages is providing culturally relevant content, for the curriculum is simplistic at best. At worst, it disguises ‘majority’ content as ‘minority’ content, while never really finding out about students’ beliefs and experiences. Although Ms Eakins cared a great deal about her students and saw the value of Khmer culture, she also framed her own students’ experiences as deficient and not ‘real’ Cambodian culture in a way that made the ways she incorporated

20

Multilingual Classroom Ecologies

Cambodian culture as relatively distant from the lives of her students. In addition, she discouraged Khmer use among her students while at the same time valuing Khmer literacy as a cultural artifact that could provide an opportunity for cross-cultural exchange and understanding. Like Ms Eakins, her colleagues at the school see their main goal as preparing students to succeed in mainstream classes and believe that most students don’t ‘need’ Khmer at school. As one of Ms Eakins’ colleagues explains, ‘We don’t use their language, except to help them teach us to count from one to ten, or little words they know like ‘Happy New Year’. But, I don’t think with the level of kids I get, I need to do that, and they have fun teaching me though …’ (taped interview, 5/17/94). However, the small size of ESOL classes serves to create an informal atmosphere with multiple opportunities for students to talk to each other outside of the context of the whole class. Although these classrooms are officially monolingual, much of the student-to-student interaction that occurs is multilingual. Ms Menon: School is not the place for Khmer language and culture Although at the same school as Ms Eakins, Ms Menon’s policies and practices are in stark contrast to any of the other teachers at the school. She believes strongly that her job is to teach American language and culture exclusively. In addition, her classroom is set up in a much more traditional teacher-centred format with the chairs in rows and with very little student-to-student contact during the bulk of class time. So, although her stated policies about Khmer use in the classroom are similar to those of other teachers, the participation structures of her classroom also restrict informal Khmer use among students. She teaches the older elementary school students, and walking into her room feels like a walk towards secondary school in a way that none of the other ESL classes do. Unlike the other teachers at her school, she also thinks that students speak their native languages too much when they are at home and believes that they need to speak more English at home. She says: You see that little Chinese boy? He’s a lot slower than I would like. Why is he a lot slower? He has the same exposure [to English] as all the other students do in school. However, what happens to him when he goes home? He’s put to work in a store. And then what does he do when he stops working at the store? What does he watch? He watches Chinese movies. Now, you know there’s absolutely no reinforcement of school there … And I said to him, I said you know, at least you’ve got to, if you’re going to watch television, watch something in English. You need to hear the sounds, not just in school … But they’ll go to their own homes, they’ll speak their own language. They don’t listen to anything else … It’s very depressing. It really is very depressing. (Taped interview, 6/9/94) This teacher does not have particular knowledge of Khmer, but draws on her own experience as someone who was not born in the United States to highlight the need for a focus on English. Like Mr Bnom, her experience as a non-native speaking newcomer has made her use an English-only policy in her classroom. Unlike Mr Bnom, she also believes students should be speaking English at home as well. In talking about the content of her classes, she discusses the way that the struc-

Khmer/English Biliteracy in the United States

21

ture of English is central to what she does – especially with beginners. However, she engages the intermediate and advanced classes in putting on a musical each year. She explains: The way the classes have evolved is that with beginners, it’s very, very structured. And in intermediate and advanced classes the structure continues, with a very heavy thrust of the core system … constant practice and drill in the tenses which is assigned in homework every day. There’s never a relief from that, or almost never … However, it is in September, along with the mechanical drills of the verbs, that they begin to learn the songs from the play. You see, because we always do a musical. We certainly try to keep it as a topical interest, such as West Side Story, which is of course an urban environment and gangs opposing each other, which I think is very important. I mean what’s the point of making them read fairy tales? I don’t see the point in it with urban kids. They have problems that we as children never had. Let’s deal with those problems … We’re dealing with a lot of very, very organised structure, of course, that the beginners have, but you have that transition now to the real stuff. While students often bristle at the amount of grammatical exercises Ms Menon asks students to do and talk about her strictness, they also become very engaged in the musicals that are put on each year. Although Khmer students’ knowledge as Cambodians is not a part of her curriculum, she makes the work on the play quite engaging and meaningful because it is performed for the rest of the school and uses a variety of texts in the classroom. The focus is definitely on literary rather than vernacular texts, but the content of the texts is meant to be connected to urban struggles, racial prejudice and adjusting to life in American culture. The message is often quite assimilationist but the themes are connected to students’ daily lives. I have heard on several occasions that Cambodian parents are quite pleased with Ms Menon’s style because she is ‘strict’ in a way that is congruent with their sense of how teachers and students should interact in Cambodia. More than once, a Cambodian parent has mentioned (without prodding) how glad s/he is that Ms Menon is the teacher of their children (Skilton-Sylvester, 1997). Although Khmer content and language are not a part of this classroom, the congruence of Ms Menon’s policies and practices with Khmer ideas of teacher–student relations is one way that cultural relevance is achieved.

Contesting Commonplace Ideologies and Policies: Valuing Khmer Early in this paper, I articulated some of the common assimilationist ideologies and legal discourses surrounding linguistic diversity in the United States and the ways that English-language policies have served to undermine the value of languages like Khmer that have little instrumental value in the global economy. I also mapped out briefly the foundation of legal decisions concerning bilingual instruction and showed that the emphasis on not mandating but allowing native language instruction has made it possible for individual teachers to contest the view that language is a problem and find ways to view language as a

22

Multilingual Classroom Ecologies

resource in their own classrooms. However, a truly additive perspective on bilingualism and a sense that Cambodian refugees have a right to use their native language in a classroom context were found only in the policies and practices of Ms Klein’s classroom. As the examples in this paper show, the situation in the state of Pennsylvania is one where policies about speaking Khmer in the English classroom and addressing Khmer culture in the classroom are almost completely up to the teacher. This underscores the importance of teacher professional development that brings together theory and practice in bilingual and English-language education to show the value of the native language in the classroom. However, because Khmer use is supported only at the level of teacher policymaking, if at all, the Khmer used in the classroom is not often used by teachers and is most often not a part of the formal instruction of the classroom. As Tse’s (2001) study has shown, this lack of formal native language literacy instruction makes it unlikely that Cambodians in Philadelphia will become fully biliterate. Other states have made different decisions. For example, Massachusetts has quite a different law from that of the state of Pennsylvania, and shows the possibility of state and local law to support bilingualism and biliteracy. In 1971, it ‘passed the nation’s first mandatory Bilingual Education Act (Crawford, 1999: 33). By state law, schools must provide bilingual instruction if they have at least 20 limited-English-proficient (LEP) children from a group whose native language is not English’ (Smith-Hefner, 1999). The enactment of this law has meant the hiring of Khmer teachers in schools with significant Cambodian student populations and the development of Khmer/English biliteracy in this state that greatly exceeds what is possible in Pennsylvania. However, Massachusetts voters recently voted to approve an English-only initiative that wipes out this state’s Bilingual Education Act and therefore Khmer literacy instruction in the state. Similar legal mandates to restrict the official use of the L1 in classrooms have already been passed in California and Arizona, dismantling in one legal moment years of bilingual instruction in schools and greatly restricting the possibility of full biliterate development in two languages (Arias & Poynor, 2002). It is clear that micro and macro language policies are entangled with each other in the ways that legal provisions and legal discourses shape what is possible in schools and the ways that teachers embrace and/or contest what the legal system contributes both ideologically and practically in their classrooms. However, Khmer/English biliteracy and the biliteracies of many others will only be a possibility if teacher policymakers and other educators see themselves as actors at the macro as well as the micro level and become actively engaged in the struggle outside the classroom to support bilingual instruction and protect language rights. Our engagement as educators with these issues will also need to include work with parents and the public at large to illustrate the ways that bilingual instruction will help rather than hurt English-language acquisition. The engagement of micro-level policymakers with macro-level policies will only succeed, however, if we are able to support adequate funding for language programmes and professional development for teachers and show the ways that English-language policies that undermine the vitality of other languages are counterproductive to the vitality of the nation, academic success for bilingual

Khmer/English Biliteracy in the United States

23

students (Davis, 1999), and even to the learning of English. If Khmer literacy is also intrinsically connected to what it means to be Cambodian (Rintell, 1995; Smith-Hefner, 1999), asking parents and children to choose between English and Khmer not only violates their linguistic rights (Phillipson & Skutnabb-Kangas, 1995), but their right to be a full members of this society. What is clear is that there are benefits to Khmer/English biliteracy and that only through emancipatory policies at the classroom, local and state level can we move toward shifting our linguistic culture rather than shifting from Khmer to English. Correspondence Any correspondence should be directed to Dr Ellen Skilton-Sylvester, Temple University College of Education, 459 Ritter Hall (003-00), Philadelphia, PA 19122, USA ([email protected]). Notes 1. The foundation of court decisions concerning acquisition policy in the schools has come not from the 1968 Bilingual Education Act, but from the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1974 Equal Education Opportunities Act. The Civil Rights Act (Title VI) does not specifically address the language issue, but instead focuses on race and national origin as the basis of discrimination. The Equal Educational Opportunities Act, however, does explicitly address the language rights of students who are not native speakers of English. It includes ‘the failure by an educational agency to take appropriate action to overcome language barriers that impede equal participation by its students in its instructional programs’ (August & Garcia, 1988: 59) as a criterion for determining the denial of equal educational opportunity in the schools. 2. At the time of this study, the elementary school was 37% Cambodian (Hornberger, 1990; Skilton-Sylvester, 1997). One of the adult ESL classrooms had a majority of Khmer speakers and the adult ESL classrooms each have a few Khmer speakers (Skilton-Sylvester & Carlo, 1998).

References Arias, M.B. and Poynor, L. (2002) Teaching against the grain: Bilingual schooling in a monolingual policy state. Paper presented at the American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA. April 2002. Auerbach, E. (1993) Reexamining English only in the ESL classroom. TESOL Quarterly 27 (1), 9–32. Auerbach, E. (1995) The politics of the ESL classroom: Issues of power in pedagogical choices. In. J. Tollefson (ed.) Power and Inequality in Language Education (pp. 9–33). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. August, D. and Garcia, E. (1988) Litigation policy. In Language Minority Education in the United States: Research, Policy and Practice (pp. 57–71). Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas. Burnaby, B. and Ricento, T. (1998) Conclusion: Myths and realities. In T. Ricento and B. Burnaby (eds) Language and Politics in the United States and Canada: Myths and Realities (pp. 331–343). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Christian, D. (1999) Looking at federal education legislation from a language policy/planning perspective. In T. Huebner and K. Davis (eds) Sociopolitical Perspectives on Language Policy and Planning in the USA. Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Corson, D. (1999) Language Policy in Schools: A Resource for Teachers and Administrators. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Publishers. Crawford, J. (1999) Bilingual Education: History, Politics, Theory and Practice (4th edition). Los Angeles: Bilingual Education Series. Cummins, J. (1986/2001) Empowering minority students: A framework for intervention. Harvard Educational Review 71 (4), 649–675.

24

Multilingual Classroom Ecologies

Davis, K. (1999) The sociopolitical dynamics or indigenous language maintenance and loss: A framework for language policy and planning. In T. Huebner and K. Davis (eds) Sociopolitical Perspectives on Language Policy and Planning in the USA. Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Freeman, R. (1996) Dual-language planning at Oyster Bilingual School: ‘It’s much more than language.’ TESOL Quarterly 30 (3), 557–582. Hardman, J.C. (1994) Language and literacy development in a Cambodian community in Philadelphia. University of Pennsylvania, Graduate School of Education. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Heller, M. (1999) Linguistic Minorities and Modernity: A Sociolinguistic Ethnography. New York: Longman. Hornberger, N.H. (1990) Creating successful contexts for bilingual literacy. Teachers College Record 92 (2), 212–229. Hornberger, N.H. and Skilton-Sylvester, E. (2000) Revisiting the continua of biliteracy: International and critical perspectives. Language and Education 14 (2), 96–122. Lo Bianco, J. (1999) The language of policy: What sort of policy making is the officialization of English in the United States? In T. Huebner and K. Davis (eds) Sociopolitical Perspectives on Language Policy and Planning in the USA (pp. 38–65). Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Malakoff, M. and Hakuta, K. (1990) History of language minority education in the United States. In A.Padilla, H. Fairchild and C. Valadez (eds) Bilingual Education: Issues and Strategies (pp. 27–44). Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications. Nieto, S. (1996) Affirming Diversity: The Sociopolitical Context of Multicultural Education (2nd edn). White Plains, NY: Longman. Olsen, L. (1997) Made in America: Immigrant Students in our Public Schools. New York: The New Press. Phillipson, R. and Skutnabb-Kangas, T. (1995) Linguistic rights and wrongs. Applied Linguistics 16, 483–504. Ricento, T. and Burnaby, B. (eds) (1998) Language and Politics in the United States and Canada: Myths and Realities. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Ricento, T.K. & Hornberger, N.H. (1996) Unpeeling the onion: Language planning and policy and the ELT professional. TESOL Quarterly 30 (3), 401–428. Rintell, E. (1995) Language, education and the survival of the Khmer. Sextant 5 (2), 1–6. Ruiz, R. (1984) Orientations in language planning. NABE Journal 8 (2), 15–34. Schiffman, H. (1996) Linguistic Culture and Language Policy. New York: Routledge. Skilton-Sylvester, E. (1997) Inside, outside and in-between: Identities, literacies, and educational policies in the lives of Cambodian women and girls in Philadelphia. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. School of Education, University of Pennsylvania. Skilton-Sylvester, E. and Carlo, M. (1998) ‘I want to learn English’: Examining the goals and motivations of adult ESL learners in three Philadelphia learning sites.’ (Report No. TR9808). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, National Center on Adult Literacy. Smith-Hefner, N.J. (1999) Khmer American: Identity and Moral Education in a Diasporic Community. Berkeley: University of California Press. Tollefson, J. (1984). Centralized and decentralized language planning. Language Problems and Language Planning 5 (2), 175–188. Tse, L. (2001) Resisting and reversing language shift: Heritage-language resilience among U.S. native biliterates. Harvard Educational Review 71 (4), 476–708. Weinstein-Shr, G. (1992) Learning lives in the post-island world. Anthropology and Education Quarterly 21, 250–268. Wiley, T.G. (1996) Literacy and Language Diversity in the United States. McHenry, IL: Center for Applied Linguistics and Delta Systems. Wiley, T.G. (1999) Comparative historical analysis of U.S. language policy and language planning: Extending the foundations. In T. Huebner and K. Davis (eds) Sociopolitical Perspectives on Language Policy and Planning in the USA (pp. 17–37). Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Wiley, T.G. and Lukes, M. (1996) English-only and standard language ideologies in the U.S. TESOL Quarterly 30 (3), 511–535.

Interactions and Inter-relationships Around Text: Practices and Positionings in a Multilingual Classroom in Brunei Peter W. Martin School of Education, University of Leicester, UK This paper emerges from a microethnographic study of a number of classrooms in different areas of Negara Brunei Darussalam (henceforth Brunei), a small Malay Islamic Monarchy on the northern coast of Borneo, Southeast Asia. The official language is Bahasa Melayu, and a local variety of Malay, referred to as Brunei Malay, is the language of everyday communication. Since independence in 1984, English has been one of the languages in the sistem pendidikan dwibahasa or bilingual education system. In this system Malay is the language of instruction for the first three years of schooling. From the fourth year, English becomes the language of instruction for most subjects in the curriculum. The focus of this paper is one classroom in a small up-river school away from the Malay centre, and in one of the few areas in the country where a form of Malay is not the major language in the community. The area consists of three ethnic groups, the Dusun, Penan and Iban, groups which have their own languages. The paper describes the reading practices in the classroom, and discusses the positionings of the participants, and the languages used to accomplish literacy events. In particular, it focuses on the inter-relationships between monolingual text and the participants’ multilingual talking text into being.

Introduction This study examines interaction around a content-area text in one lesson in a rural primary school in Brunei, a small, independent Malay Islamic Monarchy with a population of no more than 300,000 people. Although the population is small, it is a multi-ethnic country with a number of minority groups existing alongside the majority Malay polity. The study focuses on one science lesson in a school well away from the Malay centre. It examines specifically how one short science text is talked through by the classroom participants, and considers the positioning of the text, the participants, and the languages used to accomplish the lesson. In doing so, and in line with the themes of this volume, the paper attempts to relate the participants’ multilingual literacy practices to the wider linguistic ecology of the environment, both the local community and country as a whole. More particularly, it attempts to shed light on how the classroom participants, through their inter-relationships and interactions, negotiate the tensions inherent in the challenges posed by an educational system that relies on two exoglossic languages, English and Malay. The idea for the paper came about when I revisited my field notes and, in particular, the record of a vivid incident that took place in one classroom I was observing. The incident took place one rainy break time when the pupils were not able to go outside and play. I happened to walk into the classroom where seven pupils were huddled round three desks. They were discussing a sentence in Malay that had cropped up in the previous lesson, and were constructing translations into the three languages spoken by the groups in the area, Iban, Dusun and Penan. What was really noticeable was the animated discussion 25 Interaction Around Text in a Multilingual Classroom

26

Multilingual Classroom Ecologies

going on – strikingly different from the lessons I had observed. As I approached the group, their discussion slowed down so I retreated to the back of the classroom and busied myself with sorting through some books. What struck me forcibly, although I was not able to hear the whole discussion, was how all members of the group were taking part and collaboratively constructing three new texts, that is, in Iban, Dusun and Penan. As I left the classroom, I asked if I might see what they had written down, and they proudly showed me a sheet of paper with a Malay sentence and three translations into Iban, Dusun and Penan. This incident offers a compelling example of multilingual interaction outside the confines of the formal linguistic environment of the classroom. Following this introduction, the paper provides a brief account of the contextual background, both at the national level and at the local level where the study took place. This is followed by a short statement on the methodology used in the study. The main section of the paper analyses a lesson in which the participants talk around a short science text. Specifically, it focuses on the interactions and inter-relationships between the classroom participants, the languages they use, and the textbook. The final section of the paper examines the pedagogies of access for scarce resources such as English and Malay, and relates the multilingual literacy pedagogies observed in the lesson to the wider linguistic ecology outside the classroom.

Context Brunei is a small Malay Islamic Monarchy on the northern coast of the large island of Borneo. Prior to 1984, the country was a British Protectorate for a period of 96 years. Since independence, Brunei has reaffirmed Melayu Islam Beraja (Malay Islamic Monarchy) as the state ideology. The cornerstones of this ideology are bahasa (‘language’), bangsa (‘race’) and negara (‘nation’ or ‘state’), and Brunei’s desire to assert an identity for Bruneians and ‘define the nation in exclusively Malay terms’ (Gunn, 1997: 214). In modern day Brunei, negara is not seen as multicultural but, rather, as promoting the ‘political, social, economic, and political hegemony of the Brunei Malay center’ (Gunn, 1997: 214). A central reinforcement of this process is education, for example, the textbooks, ‘which reflect the culture and aspirations of Brunei Darussalam’ (Curriculum Development Department, 1990: Introduction). Of importance to this study, and the linguistic ecology of Brunei, is the hegemonic struggle between English and Malay in the country. Malay exists in a number of forms, the two most important of which are Bahasa Melayu, the official language of Brunei, and Brunei Malay, the variety of the numerically and culturally dominant group and the de facto national variety, a form of which is the language of everyday communication in most areas of the country. As noted above, the position of English in the country is, to a large extent, due to Brunei’s protectorate status under Britain for a period of just under one hundred years. From the language of British administrators, English became an important language of the Brunei elite. In the 1950s, an English-medium system of education was established, in addition to the existing Malay-medium system of education. This dual system of education, according to Ahmad (1992), fostered separatism in the country. Despite calls for a common system of education with

Interaction Around Text in a Multilingual Classroom

27

Malay as the language of instruction, the two separate streams of education continued until a year after independence in 1984. The other languages in Brunei, the minority languages, were never considered as serious candidates for languages of education. Over the last century, members of the five minority groups in the country have become assimilated into the dominant Malay culture. The policies of the dominant group have gently pushed members of minority groups under the ‘Malay’ umbrella. One such policy was the conversion of potential leaders of these groups to Islam (Brown, 1969: 12–13). During the last half century, then, linguistic and cultural diversity in Brunei has become obscured. Kershaw (1994: xi), for example, has noted how the Dusun population is close to disappearing through ‘linguistic and cultural assimilation’. Following independence, a bilingual system of education, referred to in Brunei as dwibahasa was implemented. In this system, in the first three years of schooling Malay is the language of instruction for all subjects. In the last three years of primary education, English becomes the medium of instruction for Mathematics, Science and Geography. The dwibahasa system of education is seen as a ‘means of ensuring the sovereignty of the Malay language, while at the same time recognising the importance of the English language’ (Government of Brunei, 1985: 2). This oft-cited statement is full of paradoxes and tensions. Official documents purport that Malay is the dominant language in the education system (Government of Brunei, 1985, 1992). At the same time, speeches from senior officials emphasise the importance of English for Bruneians to be able to compete in the global economy, and for science and technology. Braighlinn (1992: 21) notes the paradoxical nature of the bilingual policy in that it thwarts the ‘development of the Malay language as a medium of literary expression and analytical thought’. He is of the opinion that ‘the majority of non-middle class youth receive virtually no education at all, because the medium of instruction [English] cannot be understood’. Certainly, the privileged position given to English in the education system at all levels from primary four upwards reinforces the language values of the dominant Malay group. English is a highly valued resource in Brunei, although there is unequal access to the language. What is generally unrecognised in Brunei is that there is also unequal access to Malay, especially in the rural areas of the country. The important point to stress here is that there are groups in Brunei which have little access to either of the languages of education, English or Malay. The present study focuses on one of these rural areas. The local context The school in this study is located in a village in the interior of the country, away from the Malay centre, and in one of the most sparsely populated areas in the country. It is one of the few settlements in Brunei which has no road connection to the coast. Transport to and from the village is by boat. The 1991 Census gives a total population of 319 in the area (Government of Brunei, 1993: 4). There are a small number of villages scattered throughout the area. The school is located in a village that has a total population of 92 (Government of Brunei, 1993: 23). The population consists of three distinct groups. The most numerous are the Penan consisting of 51 individuals. The Penan, formerly a nomadic group, have

28

Multilingual Classroom Ecologies

settled in a longhouse on the left side of the river. The Dusun, consisting of no more than 30 people, live in a four- door longhouse, on the opposite side of the river to the Penan house. The remainder of the population is Iban. The school also serves a small Iban village, with a population of 40, located about 40 minutes away on foot. In the context of the village, the Penan are the largest group, but over the whole area it is the Iban who are numerically dominant, making up 79% of the total population. Neither the Penan nor the Iban are considered to be indigenous to Brunei and are classified as ‘other indigenous’ in the constitution. Although small in number, the Dusun are politically dominant in the village. The Dusun are considered as indigenous to Brunei and are constitutionally classified as ‘Malay’, although their language is non-Malay. It is from this group that the penghulu or headman of the area is chosen, who has direct links with the central government administration. The language of inter-group communication is Iban (Martin & Sercombe, 1994; Nothofer, 1991), although Dusun and Penan are both used for intra-group communication. Malay is not a major factor in the linguistic ecology of the community, although it is used in interaction with visitors from outside the area, and by some of the teachers in interaction with villagers. The seven teaching staff consisted of Dusun, Iban and Malay, all male, and all but three of whom came from other areas of the country. In interaction between the teachers as a group, colloquial Brunei Malay was used. However, the three teachers from the village (two Iban and one Dusun) often used Iban, and Dusun was also used by the three Dusun teachers. In the staff meeting that took place while I was in the school, Bahasa Melayu was used. I commented on this to one of the teachers and he stated that the headteacher always used Bahasa Melayu in meetings with the teachers. The headteacher also used Bahasa Melayu to address the villagers at a village meeting. The school is a small single-storey wooden building consisting of six classrooms, a staffroom, a library, a meeting hall, a canteen and a kitchen. The electricity supply comes from a generator but this is only turned on in the late morning, to run the fans when it gets unbearably hot, or during special functions. The meeting hall, actually an attachment to the veranda of the school, is used for village meetings, and as a place to entertain visitors, such as officials from the Ministry of Education. The teacher in the study taught Science, Mathematics and, occasionally, Geography to the primary four class. In the bilingual system of education, primary four is the stage at which English is introduced as a medium of instruction for these subjects. The teacher had 10 years of teaching experience since the completion of his teacher training certificate at the former Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah Teacher Training College in the capital. He is of Dusun descent, originating from a village in a different district. His first language is Dusun and he also speaks Brunei Malay and Iban. The primary four class observed in this study consisted of seven pupils, out of a total school enrolment of 43. There were six girls and one boy. Three of the pupils were Penan, two were Iban (one Muslim, one non-Muslim) and two were Dusun (one Muslim, one non-Muslim). The pupils’ ages ranged from 9 to 12. They were, on the whole, very quiet, and I heard little spontaneous talk in the

Interaction Around Text in a Multilingual Classroom

29

classroom. At break time, however, when the children went out to play on the field adjacent to the school, it was a different story. The children became very vocal. The only language I heard during this break period was Iban. Teachers on duty confirmed that Iban was the language of the playground. In addition, teachers of lower primary classes indicated that a lot of Iban was used in those classes, as the pupils have had little access to Malay. The desks and chairs for the seven pupils in the classroom were organised in such a way that four pupils (three girls and one boy) sat at four joined desks along the front of the class, and the three other pupils (girls of Penan descent) sat in a line of three joined desks behind the front row. There was a blackboard attached to the front wall of the class, and a teacher’s desk to one side at the front. There were two charts on the front wall, one showing the class duty roster and the other showing the daily timetable, both in English.

Methodology The initial input for this study came from two periods of fieldwork in the community. The particular interest at this stage was the interaction between the three different groups (Dusun, Iban and Penan) in the area. It was initially noted by Nothofer (1991) that the language of inter-group communication in the area was Iban. This is of some significance as it is one of the few areas in Brunei where Malay (in any form) does not have a major position in the local linguistic ecology. Periods of ethnographic fieldwork confirmed Nothofer’s findings. Observation in the Penan longhouse, and in Dusun and Iban houses showed that these groups each spoke their own languages, and yet when they came together, Iban was used, even in communication between Dusun and Penan (Martin & Sercombe, 1994). Within the village community, then, there appeared to be no niche for Malay. Subsequent visits to the area focused on the school and formal permission was granted to observe and make audio recordings of a range of lessons. Classes at primary one, four and five were observed. Microethnographic analyses were made of several of the lessons, and this particular study focuses on one of these lessons, the interaction around a short science text in the primary four classroom.

The Lesson: Talk around Text This section of the paper focuses on one lesson and, in particular, how the classroom participants interact around one short text, provided below. The aim is to look at the interactional practices around this text, the inter-relationships between the participants and the languages used by the participants in order to link the observed practices with the linguistic ecology of the wider environment. The Ministry of Education provides schools with textbooks for the various subjects in the school curriculum. The Curriculum Development Department of the Brunei Ministry of Education oversees the planning, development and writing of these texts, following closely the syllabus for each subject which is devised by the Curriculum Development Department. The text used in the lesson is shown below. As well as this text on ‘food’, the textbook also contained a number of black and white pictures showing various items of food.

30

Multilingual Classroom Ecologies

Text Living things need food to live. We need food to grow up healthily. Eating food also keep us fit and makes us think well. Food gives us the energy needed to do work and exercise. But we cannot make our own food like the green plants. Do you know where we get our food from? List out the types of food you have for your breakfast, lunch and dinner. Do all the food come from plants only? Our daily food can be largely grouped into three main groups. Each group of food is important to us for healthy living. A Energy-giving foods: These foods give us energy and heat. We need heat to keep us warm. Energy from these foods helps us to do work. These foods have starch, sugar or fats. Both sugar and starch foods are called carbohydrates. B Body-building foods: These foods are necessary for us to grow healthily. They are needed for body-repairs too. We call these foods – proteins. Children should have much protein foods to grow up strong and healthy. C Protective foods: These are some of the foods that contain vitamins and minerals. We need these foods to be strong and healthy to do work properly. Vitamins and minerals also protect us from certain diseases. They contain much fibres. This roughage helps us to pass out the wanted food waste from our body. Eating a lot of these foods helps our bowels to open and prevent constipation. (As in original) Curriculum Development Department (1990: 65–66) Although the whole transcript for the lesson is available, it is not feasible in a short paper such as this to discuss the transcript in its entirety. Inevitably, as soon as a lesson is broken up into pieces, the wider picture of the lesson becomes somewhat blurred. What I have tried to do is to break the lesson up into phases (some of which are clearly demarcated, some not), and to focus on the inter-relationships and interactions between participants, text and languages in order to show how these constituents of the classroom ecology are positioned. Although only providing extracts of the lesson transcript, I have kept the running line numbers for the whole transcript, as this will give some idea of the overall placement of text within the 50-minute lesson. For the purposes of this paper, the lesson has been divided into a number of phases, some of which recur at different times in the lesson: (1) An introductory pre-reading phase of the lesson in which the topic ‘food’ is introduced. (2) An oral reading performance, managed jointly by the teacher and individual pupils, in which the written text is given a voice. (3) Talking around the text. In this phase the teacher dissects the text, statement by statement, and repackages it using a mixture of English and Malay, as well as the occasional Iban word. (4) Displaying particular lexical items.

Interaction Around Text in a Multilingual Classroom

31

Introductory pre-reading phase The opening to the lesson provides some indication of the position of the textbook, and the two languages of the education system, in this particular classroom. Before any other statement, the teacher refers the pupils to the textbook, positioning it as an important authority in the lesson (line 1). The choice of the Malay language in this opening statement is also significant as it provides a clear signal to the pupils about the linguistic resources that will be used in the lesson, and how the lesson will be accomplished. Immediately, two languages are in juxtaposition, English, the language of the textbook, and Malay, the official language of the country, and the language of the first three years of primary education. As Extract 1a demonstrates, the teacher uses both English and Malay in order to introduce the topic from the textbook, ‘food’.

Extract 1a 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

T:

muka surat enam-puluh lima . food . makanan ulang kaji before we do our work . today’s topic about food . what do you understand about food? . makanan yang merosakkan gigi . we use our teeth ah to chew the food . yes . teeth is very important so that we can chew our ^ . food . kalau orang inda gigi inda lawa tu .. bah . so you take care of your teeth . brush your teeth every day . after you eat ah . after you eat your lunch . dinner . makan . turun tidur . berus gigi . bangun pagi berus gigi . faham tu? . mandi pagi . baik . hari ini kami belajar food . makanan .