Multilingualism: A Critical Perspective 9781474212281, 9780826492104

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for our children Ida, Joel, Jess and Sam

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Acknowledgements

We owe an immense debt of gratitude to many people whose contributions have been invaluable in the completion of this book. The administrators, teachers, students, parents and families, who allowed us to intrude in their classrooms, schools and homes, did so with very considerable openness, patience and warmth. This book is about them. The team of colleagues with whom we conducted these investigations were all generous, critical, astute, creative, energetic collaborators. The work is a collaboration across four universities: Birkbeck, University of London; King’s College, London; University of Birmingham; and University of East London. Our research colleagues in the team are: Tas¸kin Baraç, Arvind Bhatt, Shahela Hamid, Li Wei, Vally Lytra, Peter Martin, Chao-Jung Wu and Dilek Yag˘ciog˘lu-Ali. They are also the authors of this book, and our discussions will not end here. We are grateful for the ongoing support of our colleagues at the MOSAIC Centre for Research on Multilingualism at University of Birmingham. We would like to record our debt to the Economic and Social Research Council, which supported the work with a research grant (ESRC no: RES-000-23-1180). We are grateful to Continuum Books for their vision, support and patience. As we were preparing this book for publication we were immensely saddened by the death of our dear friend and colleague Peter Martin. We dedicate the book to Peter’s memory. He will be always with us.

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Note on transcription

In keeping with the theoretical approach to linguistic practice which emerged from this work, we make no distinction between different ‘languages’ in the transcribed data. We use romanized transliteration for all languages other than Cantonese and Mandarin, where we retain Chinese orthography. (.) (2.5) speech {speech} CAPITALS () []

pause of less than a second length of pause in seconds transcribed speech translated speech loud speech inaudible ‘stage directions’

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1

Opening up multilingual spaces

It is a hot, sunny Sunday afternoon in June 2006, and three researchers, Adrian Blackledge, Angela Creese and Shahela Hamid arrive at a small, converted terraced house owned by a Muslim community organisation, loaned out for the afternoon and converted into a complementary school, which teaches Bengali to children between 4 years and 16 years. We are early for class and walk along the street to the home of Rumana, a ten-year-old girl, who has agreed to audio record her speech during the two-hour class, and for half an hour before and after the school session. We need to give Rumana the audio recorder and check that the equipment is working. When we get there, Shahela chats with Rumana’s mother in Sylheti. We are persuaded to have a meal of meat and saag with rice, and a traditional fish-head and tomato soup. This is a wonderful way to prepare to take field notes! Rumana says she is not sure about wearing the recording device, but is reassured when she sees that it will be attached to her salwar kameez at the waist. We go to the school in time for the beginning of class at 2 p.m., stopping to drop off a second audio-recording device with another ten-year-old student, Tamim, who lives two doors away from the school. As we fit the microphone to his collar, he tells us about going to extra tuition to prepare for the grammar school entrance exam. Tamim shows us a diary, in which he has scheduled his academic activity for each week, including grammar school tuition – Qur’anic Arabic reading, homework club and Bengali class. In addition, he has to complete homework required by his primary school teacher. When the Bengali class gets under way, there are 20 children separated into two groups, with two teachers, all in the small room that would once have been the front parlour of a family home. Shahela and Adrian introduce Angela to the teachers, as this is Angela’s first visit to the school. Angela will visit all eight schools in the four cities. The three researchers sit separately and start to take field notes independently of each other. The children sit at four trestle tables. There are no resources in the room except for a whiteboard and marker pen, printed worksheets and pencils. The children arrive and look for their worksheets, which one of the teachers has put on the table. There is a bit of a scramble to sort out each one’s work. Tamim and one or two other children 1

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enthusiastically begin reading aloud their Bengali work from last week. The tables nearest the teacher fill up first. The children seem to have an idea about where they are expected to sit. The carpet looks stained and dirty, and everything feels run down. One of the teachers, Mr J, has brought his two children, a young boy of about 6 years and his older sister, who is about 10 years. She is full of smiles and concentration throughout the class. Her father seems very proud of her and often calls on her to answer questions. Rumana sits in a group of four confident girls, of similar age, who are chatty and lively throughout the two hours. Mr J tells us that the teacher, who normally teaches the older children, is no longer going to come to class as she has not been paid for some time. The administrator, Mr K, has stepped in to teach the more advanced group. Mr K tells us that the children do not understand him as he speaks ‘posh Bengali’ – that is, he speaks the literate language, which is taught at the school, rather than the Sylheti of the students’ families. He has a calm, measured teaching style, and the children are attentive to him. Mr J is at the front of the class, speaking to the children nearest to him. The task he assigns to the children is to write, in turns, vowels next to Bengali alphabet characters on the whiteboard. At the same time as this teacher-fronted arrangement, there is another group working with Mr K on a different set of tasks. The four ten-year-old girls say they know their names in Bengali, and they write them on their papers, and ask Mr K to check. The girls are having fun talking about names and saying, in English: ‘I know, like this, like this’ – it looks as if they are trying to write various names in Bengali. One of the girls asks Mr K what a Bengali word means. He tries to explain in Bengali but the girls do not understand, and then he tries English. Mr J is writing consonants on the board for his lower level group. At times, the teacher uses English to maintain discipline, for example, ‘quiet’, and ‘Nasim, please let her finish’. Mr K separates and seats the girls at different tables because they are talking too much. He says to Rumana: ‘ghono mane ki’? (what does ghono mean?). Rumana answers in English: ‘count’. Mr K corrects her and says it means ‘deep’, and gives an example: ‘chaaro dike ghono bon’ (there is a dense forest all around). He wants them to make a sentence in Bengali, which includes the phrase ‘deep forest’. Mr K tells them to write their names on the paper and then reminds them that this should be in Bengali: ‘Bangla, Bangla, Bangla’, and taps Rumana on the head with a board rubber, as she has written her name in English. Rumana comments on Shazia’s spelling of a Bengali word: ‘put a dot at the bottom of that’. The children are keen to have their teacher’s praise for doing correct work. Shazia says of Aleha: ‘Sir, sir, she’s copying’. Mr K tells her to get on with her work, and Aleha loudly says: ‘Ah, you got blazed’! Rumana says to Mr K of her 2

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work: ‘Sir, do you like it’? Aleha and Shazia giggle at her for being oversolicitous of the teacher. Shazia says she has written out her words 15 times each, and wants to do her test. Mr K says she can say the words aloud first. Bodrul and his sister Shazia both try to do this, although Shazia says: ‘I can write it but not say it, Sir can I write it please’? When he asks them to compose a sentence in Bengali, which includes some of their newly-learned vocabulary, one of the girls says in English: ‘we don’t use this language’. Mr K is amused, and asks them to compose a sentence in Sylheti instead. There is a discussion about linguistic differences between Sylheti and Bengali, focusing on the phrase, ‘I have a friend’. Shazia says to Mr K: ‘we say aamaar shoi aasoin (Sylheti), but you say aamaar ekti shoi aase (Bengali)’. She also gives an example in English, Sylheti and Bengali: ‘aamaar ekti friend aase’. The Bengali phrase is accompanied by much eye-rolling and eyebrow-raising from Shazia, and intonation which indicates that speaking the phrase in Bengali is associated with a different social class. Bengali appears to be associated with putting on airs, showing off, or sophistication. This is a metalinguistic discussion at a thoughtful and playful level for ten-year-old children. The younger group chants loudly together, reading numbers one to ten in Bengali from the board. It is almost 4 p.m., and Mr K collects pencils and winds up the class. *** What we saw on that Sunday afternoon, just as in the other eighty-or-so visits we made to complementary schools in four cities during 2006, was usual, patterned, and unexceptional linguistic practice. At the same time, however, it was practice of significance in offering possibilities for opening up and shifting ideologies of homogeneity in a plural world. Many thousands of young people in the United Kingdom attend ‘complementary schools’ for several hours each week. Also known as ‘supplementary schools’, ‘heritage language schools’, or ‘community language schools’, complementary schools serve specific linguistic or religious and cultural communities, particularly through community language classes. Largely outside of the state’s apparatus of control and regulation, they provide an autonomous space (Mirza and Reay, 2000; Martin et al. 2004; Francis et al. 2008) for alternative educational, linguistic, social and cultural agendas. As we set out to investigate linguistic practices and the performance of identities in complementary schools, it was clear to us that the multilingualism of the population of the United Kingdom was not reflected in ‘mainstream’ educational policy, with its emphasis on English at the expense of teaching minority languages. 3

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We wanted to investigate the possibility that complementary schools’ focus on teaching and valuing minority languages other than English might offer community-led means to shift the homogenization that often attends mandatory schooling. We were interested in the social, cultural and linguistic significance of the complementary schools, both within their communities and in wider society. We wanted to know why so many people invested so much time and effort in these activities. We wanted to investigate the range of linguistic practices used in different contexts in the schools. We also wanted to explore how the linguistic practices of young people and their teachers in the schools were used to negotiate multilingual and multicultural identities. Our concern as researchers was not to evaluate these under-resourced schools, which had emerged as grass-roots movements from immigrant communities. In some ways, we were not interested in investigating schooling per se, but we recognized that schools were institutional spaces where negotiations in and about language may become visible. Nor was our focus on pedagogy, not at first at least, although we saw that teaching and learning contexts may be sites where complex bargaining over linguistic resources may occur. This book tells the story of our investigations in eight complementary schools in four cities and four linguistic communities, as we saw them in the summer of 2006. The linguistic practices we observed were structured around the teaching and learning of Bengali, Cantonese, Gujarati, Mandarin and Turkish. But what we saw, and what we heard, was more than teaching and learning, as the schools revealed themselves as sites where young people were able not only to claim multicultural identities through using a wide range of linguistic repertoires, but also appeared to be spaces where subject positions may be tried out, contested, and in all kinds of other ways, negotiated. We were able to investigate the role of language in the lives of young people and their teachers and parents, at a moment in history when some of them were holding on to existing, traditional affiliations, while others were challenging such traditions, and many were simultaneously engaged in both processes. Our story is of multilingual young people and adults at a particular moment in time and space, and of the meanings associated with their linguistic practices. We will argue, however, that this moment in time and space connects with other moments, as language practices bore the traces of other times and other spaces.

A critical perspective Why do we need a ‘critical’ perspective on multilingualism? One reason is that public discourses and language policies in the United Kingdom, 4

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as elsewhere in the developed, English-speaking world, are frequently out of step with the plural linguistic practices of its population. More than 300 languages and varieties are spoken on a daily basis in England. Yet, in recent times, the discourse of public elites has proposed that minority languages other than English are associated with, and even responsible for, problems in society. Although this notion has previously been implicit in debates about immigration and multiculturalism in the United Kingdom, the first decade of the twenty-first century has seen a noticeable shift. The discourse of politicians and media commentators has frequently characterized the use and visibility of minority languages other than English as problematic. This public discourse has made associations between the use and visibility of minority languages and societal problems such as civil unrest, social segregation, family breakdown, educational failure and financial burden to the state. Furthermore, the discourse of elites has argued that speakers of these languages must be required to demonstrate that they are able to understand English because a failure to do so constitutes a threat to national unity, British identity, social cohesion and democracy itself (Blackledge 2005). These political arguments are not simply about language, however. Rather, debates about language become emblematic of debates about immigration and multiculturalism. They are arguments not about minority languages but about the speakers of those languages. They are also arguments about the kind of society the United Kingdom wishes to become. In practice, the United Kingdom is multilingual, multicultural and pluralistic. In the beliefs and attitudes of the powerful, however, debates about multilingualism have become a means of constructing social difference, as the privileging of English (and a certain variety of English) above minority languages is ever more insistently imposed. Crawford (2008:1) argues that language-minority communities have limited power and resources to fight back against ‘a growing paranoia and intolerance toward speakers of other languages’. Research which is concerned with access to linguistic resources and with control of the circulation of linguistic resources, is inevitably research which is concerned with the construction and reproduction of social difference. The social construction of distinction based on ‘ethnicity’, ‘race’, and ‘class’, goes hand-in-hand with the social construction of distinction based on linguistic practice and ideology. A critical perspective on multilingualism is needed because debates about minority languages and linguistic minorities have become embroiled in the construction and reproduction of social difference. A second reason we need a critical perspective on multilingualism is because it enables us to interrogate the notions of ‘multilingualism’, or ‘bilingualism’ themselves (Heller 2008:252). 5

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These are notions which are constructed historically and socially and which have different meanings across different spaces and times. Questions about multilingual practices must always be situated in relation to major forms of social organisation. In order to understand access to, and use of, a range of linguistic resources, it is necessary to take a critical view of the ways in which discourses represent those resources. A critical ethnographic approach allows us to make connections between the politics and practice of multilingualism. In this context, we are interested in exploring questions about the role, value, status, and practice of minority languages in the United Kingdom. If powerful, repeated discourses argue that minority languages, and multilingualism, are the cause of problems in society, and if practices of multilingualism nevertheless continue, how are these tensions played out? Is it possible, as Hornberger (2005:606) suggests, that ‘implementational spaces’ for multilingual practice can serve as wedges to prise open powerful ideological positions? Can local practice challenge the hegemony of national and global policy? What do multilingual speakers’ linguistic resources mean to them? Are they happy to discard their languages, and assimilate to English, or are there other issues at stake? Do communities set out to ensure that their languages are maintained and passed on to the next generation, and if so, how, and why? What does it mean if speakers appropriate and make use of linguistic practices not typically associated with their ‘ethnic’ or ‘heritage’ group? Is there consensus within linguistic groups about the role, status and value of particular sets of linguistic resources, or is this contested, and re-negotiated? How do these negotiations about linguistic resources play out in institutional contexts, and what linguistic practices are used in these negotiations? Are languages kept separate, to prevent one contaminating the other, or are they used flexibly and interchangeably, as young people draw on the vast range of linguistic resources which comes their way through digital media and other means? And what do these issues mean for the way multilingual speakers feel about themselves and their place in contemporary society? In this book, we raise these questions, and offer responses from our investigations of the linguistic practices of people we encountered in four cities in England.

Monolingualism Wiley (2005:600), speaking of the United States, argues that ‘monolingualism is the real linguistic deficiency in this country’. The same can certainly be said of the United Kingdom, and yet, politicians, media commentators, and, we are told (Home Office, 2008), a majority of the 6

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UK population, believe that monolingualism in English is the natural and desirable state. Joseph (2006:45) points out that monolingual communities are ‘a figment of the imagination’, demanding the marginalization or outright ignoring of anyone who speaks something other than the majority language, or speaks the majority language in a way that diverges from the general norm, or both. Shohamy (2006:173) argues that ‘monolingualism is a myth detached from reality that must be recognized as such by educational systems’. Shohamy adds that educational institutions have often been required to subscribe to the ‘ideological aspiration’ of monolingual competence. One of the frequently heard criteria for nation and/or state formation has been commonality of language. Hobsbawm (1990:21) demonstrates that in nineteenth-century Europe, language was regarded as ‘the only adequate indicator of nationality’. However, it is not sufficient to say that speakers of the same language belong to the same nation-state. Billig (1995:29) argues that the creation of a national hegemony often involves a hegemony of language. A common-sense understanding of the relationship between language and nation ignores the diversity and variety of the language(s) spoken within many states. As Rampton’s (1995, 1999, 2006) work has made clear, even the notion of a single ‘English’ language is an over-simplification, as new varieties emerge from different cultural and social contexts. Pujolar (2007) demonstrates that multilingual practices and skills have had an uneasy fit in the national and linguistic order. Bilingual communities have often been seen as a threat to cultural unification. Heller (1999) argues that the concept of a ‘linguistic minority’ only makes sense within an ideological framework of nationalism in which language is central to the construction of the nation. She further proposes that ‘linguistic minorities are created by nationalisms which exclude them’ (Heller 1999:7). At the same time, Moyer and Martin Rojo (2007) point out that migrants are the new social actors challenging the hegemonic linguistic construction of the nation-state from below in different ways. They argue that migrants from different language backgrounds constitute a challenge for traditional nationalist discourses and ideologies in the institutions of multilingual democratic states, as ‘multilingual reality comes up against national ideologies of monolingualism and homogeneity’ (Moyer and Martin Rojo 2007:156). Debates about language and languages in the United Kingdom have become evident in political discourse throughout the first decade of the twenty-first century. In 2001, some politicians suggested that there were causal links between social disorder and people failing to learn or speak English (Blackledge, 2005). In 2002, the (then) Home Secretary David Blunkett argued that linguistic minority people should speak 7

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English at home amongst their families because ‘speaking English . . . helps overcome the schizophrenia which bedevils generational relationships’. In the same year, the British Government introduced new legislation, which extended requirements for applicants for British citizenship to take an English language test to demonstrate their proficiency in English (or Welsh or Scots Gaelic). In 2005, a computer-based version of this test was introduced, also requiring evidence of ‘knowledge of life in the United Kingdom’. In April 2007, the test was extended as a requirement for applicants for indefinite leave to remain in the United Kingdom. The year 2007 saw the introduction of a requirement for ‘visiting preachers’ to demonstrate ‘a proper command of English’ (at IELTS Level 6), and for welfare claimants to provide evidence that they were learning English. In 2008, the Government proposed a ‘preentry English requirement’ for those applying for visas to join their spouses in the United Kingdom. In the same year, the Government reformed its immigration system (Home Office, 2008), to include English language tests for those seeking to progress from ‘temporary residence’ to ‘probationary citizenship’. As elsewhere in these discourses, proficiency in English is explicitly linked to ‘British values’. Joseph (2006:33) argues that in such discourses multilingualism feels like a threat to the very foundation of a culture, since the language itself is the principal text in which the culture’s mental past and its present coherence are grounded. The English language testing regime, which has been so rapidly extended by the British Government, acts in the name of cultural and linguistic unification (Bourdieu 1998). It is a regime based on the notion that when all are able to demonstrate English language proficiency, we will be able to achieve national unity, and a sense of common belonging. It is also based on the notion that the use and visibility of minority languages other than English threatens this sense of national unity and common belonging. In these debates about immigration and multiculturalism, some elite discourses translate into legislation, are thus granted the legitimacy of the state, and potentially prevent some linguistic minority speakers from gaining access to certain resources. But it is not only in debates about immigration and English language testing that negative discourses about minority languages circulate. In a range of domains, a process of ‘méconnaissance’ (Bourdieu 2000), or collective misrecognition, comes into being through repeated discourses in contexts which include, inter alia, education, law, politics, economics, media and the academy. Bourdieu argues that where the symbolic value of one language or language variety is privileged above others, the symbolically dominated group is complicit in the misrecognition, or valorization, of that language or variety. Philips (2006) argues cogently that when some 8

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forms of talk are valued over others, this also entails the valuing of some ideologies or ways of thinking over others: ‘The forms of language and the ideas associated with the dominant or more highly valued social category flourish, while the forms of language and ideas associated with the subordinate or less highly valued social category are constricted and disattended’ (Philips 2006:490). The official language or standard variety becomes the language of hegemonic institutions because the dominant and the subordinated group both misrecognize it as a superior language. This misrecognition of the arbitrary nature of the legitimacy of the dominant language ‘contributes towards reproducing existing power relations’ (Bourdieu 1977:30). One of the most powerful domains in which English is misrecognized as the sole legitimate language is that of education. The education of bilingual learners of English as an additional language is not only a matter of education policy and practice, but ‘is implicated in national and international competition between groups for material and symbolic resources’ (Cummins 2008:xiv). Despite the evident success of at least some forms of bilingual education, politicians and policy makers are often resistant to this evidence, and consider that access to the dominant language is both more important than, and oppositional to, the teaching and learning of minority languages. In January 2007, the leader of the Conservative opposition party in the United Kingdom, Rt Hon David Cameron, MP argued that ‘there’s so much bilingual support in the classroom that we’re almost encouraging people not to learn English until later, and I think you know that’s the extent of the failure of multiculturalism, treating separate communities as distinct . . . these things just create resentment and suspicion. And they undermine the very thing that should have served as a focus for national unity – our sense of British identity’. More recently, the leader of the Liberal Democratic Party Nick Clegg, MP departed from his party’s usually liberal stance on immigration issues to tell BBC Television News (28 April 2008) that ‘too many languages in the classroom’ make life difficult for teachers. He said ‘we all have to make efforts to speak the same language because without the same language you know we can’t create a glue that keeps things together’, and argued that ‘we need to make sure that at the earliest stage possible, including in the home, young children are encouraged to learn English, that’ll be their passport to real integration into British society’. In a speech the same day, Clegg said ‘there must be a real insistence on promoting English language skills, not simply on exploring language diversity . . . because without a common language it’s impossible to create a common, shared identity’. These voices of senior national politicians propose a commonsense view that the more children are required to use English, the better 9

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they will learn in the English education system. As we will see in Chapter 2, this view is refuted by research evidence. The politicians go further, however, and argue that children should use English at all times in the classroom because not to do so may bring about ‘separate communities’, and pose a threat to ‘national unity’ and ‘British identity’. As these political arguments become naturalized, they make their way into debates about education policy and practice, and may be further accepted as natural. A common-sense view emerges, and appears to be accepted, that the use, teaching and learning of minority languages in schools in England constitutes not only a threat to children’s educational attainment, but a threat to society in general.

Four cities, eight schools, many voices In our investigation of multilingualism from a critical perspective, we are interested in an understanding of ‘language’ as sets of resources which are socially distributed, but not necessarily equally. Furthermore, we are interested in this unequal distribution of resources as the product of political and economic processes (Heller 2007). We want to understand how some linguistic resources are accorded greater value, and how discourses appear to value particular linguistic forms and practices at the expense of others. In line with Heller (2007:15), we view language(s) as sets of resources situated in social, cultural, political and historical contexts. We are interested in the notion that ‘community’, ‘identity’, and ‘language’ are social constructs, such that specific or single categorisations could not be attached to individuals based on their ‘ethnicity’, or ‘language’. Heller (2007:342) proposes that in asking such questions about the meaning and value of linguistic variability, we must pay attention to situated practice. In order to do so, we need to identify sites that reveal how actors draw on available resources to conduct their lives. In our investigation of multilingual practices, and the associated politics of identities, we were interested in young people born in the United Kingdom often to parents or grandparents who were themselves migrants from other territories. Our previous experiences of teaching and researching in the ‘mainstream’ (state) primary and secondary school sectors persuaded us that these were not institutions where multilingual young people would readily perform the full range of their linguistic repertoires. Rather, we believed that mainstream schools might constrain young people’s linguistic practices by presenting themselves as, at worst, English-only institutions, or at best as transitional bilingual contexts which required students to leave behind their other languages as they assimilate to English. A previous study by Creese 10

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et al. (2006) found that students in Gujarati complementary schools in Leicester, United Kingdom, used linguistic practices flexibly to perform a range of different and fluid identity positions (Creese et al. 2006, Martin et al. 2006). Multilingual and multiliterate sites (Hall 2002; Li Wei 2006), complementary schools seem to offer a window onto a multilingual England often hidden from the view of policy makers in mainstream education. In this sense, complementary schools provide an institutional setting to investigate multilingualism and to question monolingualizing accounts often found in political, media, educational, and other public and elite discourse. Together with colleagues from four universities in England (Tas¸kin Baraç, Arvind Bhatt, Shahela Hamid, Li Wei, Vally Lytra, Peter Martin, Chao-Jung Wu and Dilek Yag˘ciog˘lu-Ali) we set out to build on and extend the previous research in Leicester. In order to do so, we developed a sociolinguistic study of four interlocking case studies in four English cities, focusing on Bengali schools in Birmingham, Chinese (Cantonese and Mandarin) schools in Manchester, Gujarati schools in Leicester, and Turkish schools in London. Funding from the Economic and Social Research Council (RES-000-23-1180) enabled us to work together as an experienced, multilingual research team, conducting sociolinguistic field work in two schools in each of the four cities. The project design was of four ethnographically informed case studies, in which evidence was collected simultaneously. Each case study identified two complementary schools in which to observe, record, and interview participants. Researchers’ visits to the eight schools included observation of classrooms and assemblies, staff meetings, parents’ evenings, prize giving and extramural school events. We also visited some of the children at home with their families. Throughout an intensive ten-week period, field notes were shared across the full team, and discussed in regular meetings. We also collected key documentary evidence, and took photographs. After four weeks, two children were identified in each school, and over a six-week period, these children were audiorecorded and observed during the classes and if possible also for 30 minutes before and after each class. Stakeholders in the schools were interviewed, including teachers and administrators, as well as the key participant children and their parents. In this chapter, we introduce the eight schools where we conducted our investigations, in four case studies in separate cities, and give a flavour of some of the social and linguistic issues important to participants in these schools. We spent time in and around two Bengali schools in Birmingham, two Chinese (one Cantonese, one Mandarin) schools in Manchester, two Gujarati schools in Leicester and two Turkish schools in London. 11

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Bengali case study Icknield Street School was founded in 1992 by the current administrator. The school meets twice a week in a loaned mathematics classroom in a large comprehensive school on the north side of the city, close to the city centre. This space is borrowed for the purpose of running the Bengali school. At one time, the Bengali school was required to pay a fee for the hire of the room, but this has now been waived. There are two teachers, both of whom were born in Bangladesh. There are normally around twenty children and young people registered with the school, although it was rare for all of them to attend at the same time. Classes are held on Tuesday afternoons from 4.30 p.m. until 6 p.m., and on Wednesday afternoons from 4.30 p.m. until 6 p.m. The pupils pay 50p per session. The school receives a grant of around £1700 from Birmingham local authority. The teachers are paid from this grant, but the administrator argued that the grant is too small to run the school effectively. The school teaches Bengali to GCSE level, although only a small number of pupils take the examination each year. Photocopied worksheets and a small number of textbooks are used as the sole resources in the classroom. These are kept in a filing cabinet at the back of the classroom. Long View School opened in 2003. This school is part of a network of community activities organized by Birmingham Bangladeshi Centre (BBC), including homework club, summer trips, maths quiz, a community allotment and a children’s ‘cultural’ drama group. The school was established in response to the need to provide for the language needs of children of Bangladeshi origin. Parents frequently told us how grateful they were to the school’s organizers and teachers. The BBC project coordinator said the aim of the school was to raise cultural awareness and improve learners’ levels of achievement by providing cultural and linguistic support. The school also offers students some support with their regular school homework. Classes are held once a week on Sundays from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. The rented accommodation consists of one large room in a converted small terraced house, with three tables and a white board. All 26 children enrolled are from families of Sylheti origin. The teachers are untrained, and were both born in Bangladesh. One of the teachers is a native speaker of Sylheti and is also educated in Bengali, while the other is a Bengali speaker with limited knowledge of Sylheti. The predominant activity of the school is to promote writing and reading of Bengali. Students are not required to pay any fee, as some funding has been available from external sources such as the Birmingham local authority, and a television charity appeal. Teaching material (in the main worksheets) is adapted from prescribed texts recommended by the Bangladesh National Curriculum and Textbook Board. The curriculum, which puts emphasis on writing and spelling Bengali words, is delivered in Bengali, Sylheti and English. The administrator told us that the

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school’s rationale was the development and maintenance of ‘cultural knowledge’ through the teaching of Bengali. Long View complementary school supported parents in understanding the educational processes of mainstream schooling, and had encouraged some of the parents to become governors of their local mainstream (state) school. This is a powerful picture of community and parental involvement, galvanized by the complementary school as part of the Bangladeshi community organisation.

Chinese case study HX School has around 180 students, and student recruitment is mainly through word of mouth. There are 18 teachers in total, including specialist teachers for martial arts, dance, calligraphy, and painting and drawing. Most of the teachers are mature students at universities in Manchester, although others are settled professionals. All the language teaching staff are women. Classes are taught up to GCSE, AS level, and A level, and one of the language classes is offered to adults who want to learn Chinese as a second language. The head teacher stressed that because the school did not have to pay rent for their premises, they could afford to pay the teachers an average teaching salary. Recruitment of teachers is mainly through the electronic notice board of the student union of local universities. The school uses text books published by the People’s Education Press of China, which are bought through a Londonbased Chinese company. HX School has an elected school committee consisting of seven parents. The school holds regular staff meetings, an annual general meeting and an annual achievement day. NW School is a long-established Cantonese school in Manchester, founded in the 1970s. The school has very strong links with the local Chinese community through the Chinese association, which provides strong support in all areas – staff, resources and financial help. The school operates every Sunday from 1.30 p.m. until 3.30 p.m. There are around 350 students, and student recruitment is mainly through word of mouth. Some of the pupils live many miles away from the school. Around 30 per cent of the pupils’ families come from mainland China (the Cantonese-speaking region) and 70 per cent of parents originate from Hong Kong. There are 40 teachers and teaching assistants, including teachers specializing in dance and calligraphy. Some of the teachers are long-term residents in the local area, and work in professional or catering businesses. The junior classes, however, tend to be taught by college or university students, who have recently arrived in the United Kingdom from Hong Kong. They are recruited from the community through personal introductions. There is a GCSE class and a Mandarin Chinese class for native Cantonese speakers. The school uses text books

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published by Ji Nan University in China, which are donated by the Chinese consulate in Manchester. The school committee meets to make decisions about school policy and the ‘week to week’ running of the school. The school celebrates pupils’ annual achievement at the beginning of the new school year – a ‘school beginning’ ceremony. Teachers and parents in the Chinese complementary schools spoke of the enrichment of children’s lives through the experience of having contact with Chinese languages and ‘culture’.

Gujarati case study One of the schools where we conducted our investigations was the Indian Education Society Leicester (IESL), a registered charity, founded in 1964. The IESL has its own administrative premises, a converted terraced house. This house was purchased by the IESL in the 1980s, and acts as an office and meeting place. It also stores school documents, and there is a photocopier and computer for the use of the IESL. The IESL is proud of its history as one of the earliest and largest providers of the Gujarati language in the country. IESL has around 270 students. Student recruitment is mainly through word of mouth but also through local radio and Asian-language television. There are 15 teachers, six volunteers (assistant teachers), and two ‘floaters’. Classes start from ‘beginners’ through to ‘Year 7’ (13 years to 15 years), where GCSE is taught. There are 14 classes in total, two for each level with the exception of GCSE, which only has one class. Teachers receive a small remuneration for their services. The school has its own Gujarati syllabus and question papers, and these were made available to us. Books and other learning and teaching materials are imported directly from Gujarat. IESL has a governing body, which includes a secretary and a treasurer. Gujarati classes take place in the premises of two separate mainstream schools, on Thursday and Friday evenings from 7.00 p.m. to 8.45 p.m. The second school, Jalaram Bal Vikas (JBV) was founded in 1991. It is linked to the local Hindu temple. The premises used are owned by the local further education college, who do not charge any rent. The classes run on Saturdays from 9.30 a.m. to 11.15 a.m., after which there is an assembly until 11.45 a.m. There are 200 pupils on roll, and 12 teachers, who conduct classes from ‘reception’ level to A level and adult classes in Gujarati. The pupils range from 5 years to 50+ years and come from all over the city as well as the suburbs. The yearly fee is £40 per pupil, and the school receives a grant of £6 per pupil per year from the local government. The teachers are paid a nominal sum each term, depending on the funding situation. The administration and finances are managed by a parent–teacher committee that meets once or twice a term. The committee also raises the necessary extra funds to run the school. A number

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of the teachers are professionals in mainstream education as teachers, co-ordinators or bilingual assistants. The teachers are helped out by ex-pupils and volunteers during classes. The school has also created a library, funded by a lottery grant, which is staffed by a librarian every Saturday. Books and resources are imported from Gujarat. Recently, the school purchased six computers with multilingual software and is in the process of training staff in their use.

Both of the Gujarati schools we investigated promoted the Hindu religion, although they did so in different ways. At the time of the project, one school had no regular assembly, but each school session started and ended with an in-class prayer. In the second school, there was a formal assembly at the end of the school day. The prayers (prarthana) said at the beginning or the end of lessons, staff meetings and public presentations were performed in both Sanskrit and Gujarati. There were many other references to prayer in the two schools, and acts of prayer suffused the ethos of both schools. Collective prayer had a social function, and for each community, the school was a major conduit through which prayer was taught.

Turkish case study West London Turkish School was founded in 1988. It has about 110 children and runs on Sundays from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. It borrows the premises of a local mainstream school. The school has Turkish language classes from nursery to GCSE and A level Turkish, and a history class open to all levels. It has a folk dance club and one adult Turkish language class. The majority of the students are of mainland Turkish heritage, and nearly half of them are of mixed background. The school has nine teachers and two volunteer teacher assistants. Most of the teachers were appointed by the Turkish Ministry of Education, while others are professionals and graduate students originally from Turkey. Teachers use almost exclusively primary school text books published in Turkey and distributed free of charge by the Turkish Embassy in London. The young people’s linguistic and cultural maintenance was seen by the school as part of combining the children’s Turkish culture with their English culture. The children’s efforts were always publicly praised and high achievers were implicitly positioned as role models. Their academic achievements were also linked to pride and confidence in their multilingualism. East London Turkish School, founded in 1987, has about 250 children on roll and runs on Saturdays from 9.30 a.m. to 1.30 p.m. It uses the rented premises of a mainstream school. The school provides Turkish language classes from nursery up to GCSE and A level. It has a thriving folk dance club and runs a homework club with English, mathematics

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and science support classes on Saturday afternoons. The majority of the children are of Turkish–Cypriot heritage although there are some children from families originated from mainland Turkey and some children of mixed Turkish/Turkish–Cypriot background. Parents, especially mothers, actively support the school by, for instance, doing some volunteer teaching, running the school canteen and organizing various fundraising functions. The school has 13 teachers and two volunteer teacher assistants. Some teachers were appointed by the Ministries of Education of Turkey and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, while others are local (British born and/or trained) teachers, who may also teach in mainstream schools or work in other professions. The school follows the curriculum set by the Turkish Language, Culture and Education Consortium United Kingdom, although some teachers reported combining this curriculum with that provided by the Turkish Embassy in London.

Our ethnographic approach obliged us to take account of what people believed about their languages, and to listen to how they made use of their available linguistic resources in the performance of social identities. While recognising the very concepts we study as social constructions, we strove to understand the meanings they had locally for teachers, parents and young people participating in the complementary schools. In all, we collected 192 hours of audio-recorded interactional data, wrote 168 sets of field notes, made 16 hours of video recordings, and interviewed 66 key stakeholders.

Structure of the book In order to tell the stories of the eight schools and of the young people and teachers who attended them, we start by situating these institutions in the context of previous research which has investigated the interstices of linguistic practices, language ideologies and identities in multilingual contexts. Chapter 2, therefore, reviews previous research in the fields of multilingualism, multilingualism in education and complementary schools. In conducting a critical review of existing research on multilingualism, we are able to put in place one of the lenses which helps us to understand what comes into view as we spend time in and around the complementary schools. We propose an approach to researching multilingualism which departs from notions of bilingualism as the coexistence of parallel linguistic systems and moves instead towards situating linguistic practices in social, historical, cultural and political contexts. In summarising recent social research in the field of multilingualism, we argue that an ideology of ‘one-nation-one-language’ has been a key influence in shaping beliefs and values about language 16

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and languages. We adopt a social orientation to the study of linguistic practices and their meanings. In doing so, we engage with recent research which argues that languages are social constructs, invented by nations in the course of nation-building, and that linguistic resources need not be understood as bounded, discrete ‘languages’. Thus, we see ‘multilingualism’ as the appropriation and incorporation for meaningmaking of any and all linguistic resources which come to hand. This does not mean that all linguistic resources are equally available at any specific moment in time and space, but it moves us away from a traditional notion of bilingualism as ‘double monolingualism’ (Heller 2006:83). At the same time as arguing that languages are social constructs, however, we argue that many people – and certainly some of those we spoke to in the course of investigating language in complementary schools – contend that languages are salient dimensions of their sense of self. That is, some people’s ‘identity’ is inexorably linked to their ‘language’. These two positions appear contradictory, but are not irreconcilable. What they point to is that linguistic practice is always shaped by language ideology, always suffused with beliefs, values and attitudes which are associated with particular sets of linguistic resources. What they also point to is that language ideologies are shaped by, as well as shaping of, linguistic practices, as beliefs, attitudes, and values about particular sets of linguistic resources are informed by people’s access to and use of those resources. Our theoretical argument proposes that historical, sociocultural, political and economic processes are held in dynamic equilibrium with plural linguistic practice. In Chapter 2 we also briefly review research conducted over the last 30 years, mainly in the Unites States, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom, which has found that students who begin school with a language other than the national or dominant language perform significantly better academically when they receive consistent support in the minority language. We further argue that education policies and practices often deny the multilingual, multicultural reality of their constituency in the name of homogeneity. Schools are often understood by students as English-only zones, and multilingualism is left at the school gate. In this chapter, we also review new research emerging in the field of complementary school education. Often marginalized in terms of government policy and funding, complementary schooling nonetheless thrives as a movement in which particular linguistic groups have decided to take into their own hands the language education of their children and young people. Much of this research values complementary schooling as the provision of space in which students are encouraged to view their multilingual talents as a valued component of their identities. At the same time, however, we review studies which have taken 17

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a more critical and nuanced view, and found that language learning in complementary schools is not universally welcomed by students, who may experience them as the imposition of a language and heritage with which they do not claim to be affiliated. In this book we tell stories which sit within and between these dimensions of identification, and also stories of students situated in the ebb and flow between imposed and negotiated identities. In Chapter 3, we introduce the notion of ethnography of multilingualism as a means to tell our story of the multilingual practices of young people and their teachers in complementary schools, a story which illuminates social processes. We propose that ethnography of multilingualism allows us to see how language practices are connected to the very real conditions of people’s lives, and to discover how and why language matters to people in their own terms (Heller 2008:250). We argue that this is a critical approach, in that it enables us to connect language practices, social differences and social inequality. We build on Heller’s (2008) work on ethnography of multilingualism, and also on recent research which has developed linguistic ethnography (Rampton et al. 2004) as a theoretical and methodological development orienting towards established traditions, but aligning itself with a particular epistemological view of language in social context. We introduce the notion of ‘heteroglossia’ (Bakhtin 1981, 1986, 1994), which argues that, in every utterance, there are traces of the social, political and historical forces which have shaped it, and ‘indexicality’ (Silverstein 1976, 2003), which argues that language use indexes social positioning. We argue that linguistic ethnography provides an important theoretical and methodological lens to focus on the meanings of linguistic practices in and around complementary schools because it holds that language and social life are mutually shaping, and that close analysis of situated language can provide distinctive insights. This chapter situates complementary schools in their social, cultural, and historical contexts, as we hear the voices of those engaged in running the eight complementary schools, and the people engaged in teaching and learning Bengali, Cantonese, Gujarati, Mandarin and Turkish. In Chapter 4, we devote space to a reflexive approach to team ethnographic research. Here, through a series of vignettes authored by the members of the research team, we represent the voices of the nine researchers as we reflected on our relationship to our participants, and the ways in which we were able to negotiate our identities as researchers within the team. Our aim here is to give an account of working in a multilingual team of researchers and to describe how identity politics influenced relations in the field and within the team. It was important to engage with how we saw ourselves as researchers, and how we 18

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understood our relationships to the people with whom we worked (Heller 2008:249). The prior knowledge and experience which each member of the research team brought with them was crucial to the ways in which meanings were made in the interpretive process. The diversity of experiences and perspectives brought to the table in our regular team meetings was both an inestimable resource and a constant challenge. Our negotiations were not only with those we were ‘researching’, but also with each other. The nature of the process demanded of us that we come to terms with questions in relation to what counts as data, which data are more significant than others, what claims we can make, and how we should represent the phenomena we encounter. This is a creative process, enabling us to make arguments about data which had been subject to rigorous debate and discussion. We believe that demystifying the research process and making it more accessible and understandable to those who work, study and research in multilingual educational contexts will further our understandings of linguistically and culturally diverse classrooms. Furthermore, the researchers’ accounts of ethnographic team research make an original contribution to multilingualism research methods. In Chapter 5, we focus on the linguistic practices and ideologies of the schools. Here, we are interested in how young people and teachers construct, idealize and practise their bilingualism in the complementary school settings. We encounter two seemingly contradictory yet co-existing sets of beliefs and practices relating to bilingualism in the complementary schools. We look across the four case studies to develop previous work on bilingualism and linguistic repertoire (Martin et al. 2004; Creese et al. 2006; Martin et al. 2006). In this chapter, participants, usually teachers, on the one hand argue for language ‘separation’ in complementary schools, while on the other hand both teachers and young people practise a flexible bilingualism, in the course of which they call into play diverse sets of linguistic resources. We refer to the first of these positions as ‘separate bilingualism’, to describe what Heller (2006:83) has called ‘double monolingualism’ or bilingualism with diglossia (Baker 2003; Fishman 1967). We use the term ‘flexible bilingualism’ to refer to what Garcia describes as ‘translanguaging’ (Garcia 2007:xiii), and what Bailey (2007) describes, following Bakhtin (1984, 1986), as ‘heteroglossia’ – the simultaneous use of different kinds of forms or signs. In this chapter, we show how these two seemingly contradictory sets of beliefs and practices relating to bilingualism are performed in complementary schools. We argue that there are links between these two different conceptions of bilingualism and conflicting political, pedagogical and sociolinguistic discourses on language. In particular, we suggest that an ideology of ‘separate bilingualism’ is 19

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upheld in some of our participants’ discourses through recourse to powerful and pervasive political and academic discourses, which view languages as discrete and tied to nation and culture in simplified and coherent ways. Such an ideology places emphasis on categories, and linguistic and social classifications. We show how this construction of bilingualism is performed by participants in complementary schools both to reproduce essentialist views of culture, and also to challenge them. An ideology and practice of separate bilingualism allows teachers to articulate, organize and assemble resources to counter the hegemony of other ‘mainstream’ institutional accounts of nation, history, culture and language. However, in doing so, the schools themselves sometimes settle on simplified cultural narratives. Chapter 6 engages with the complexities of informal discourse in language learning classrooms. Focusing on the Turkish and Chinese schools, we argue that students at times create ‘second lives’ in the classroom. With reference to theoretical work of Mikhail Bakhtin, we suggest that the complementary school students use ‘carnivalesque’ language to introduce new voices into classroom discourse, invoking mockery and parody to subvert tradition and authority, and engaging in the language of ‘grotesque realism’. Students use varieties of ‘parodic’ language to mock their teacher, to mock each other, to mock notional students as second language learners, and to mock their school’s attempts to transmit reified versions of ‘cultural heritage’. These are voices which make meaning in creative, complex ways, voices suffused with, and shaped by, the voices of others. They are voices of struggle, voices of authority, voices of negotiation, voices which bear the traces of histories and futures, voices in process. They are multilingual voices, moving freely between ‘languages’, calling into play sets of linguistic resources at their disposal. They are voices of ideological becoming, frequently ‘double-voiced’, expressing simultaneously more than one intention (Bakhtin 1981). In our analysis, we notice that children and adults alike frequently make meaning through representing other voices within their own voices. In this chapter, we adopt a lens which draws on the work of Bakhtin and Voloshinov, enabling us to understand the myriad, complex ways in which meanings are made in the language classroom, as students and teachers (inter alia) evaluate, incorporate, appropriate, anticipate, repudiate, and exaggerate the reported and purported voices of others. In this chapter, we engage with meaning-making as dialogic process and ideological becoming as social actors in complementary schools represent themselves and others in voices which cut across boundaries in complex, creative ways. These creative discourse strategies enable the students to create carnival lives in the classroom, which provide alternatives to the official worlds of their teachers. 20

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Chapter 7 brings into view the detail of linguistic interactions and literacy practices related to the use of traditional folk tales in language teaching. The use of folk tales was a regular feature of the complementary school classrooms across all of the four case studies. In this chapter, we look at biliteracy practices in one of the Chinese schools. The schools appeared to privilege academic literacy above other literacies. However, a closer look at some of the interactions which took place around texts reveal young people and teachers involved in negotiating and contesting the school’s preferred literacy practices. Through a focus on the use of traditional folk stories in classrooms, the chapter shows young people using their bilingualism to both comply with and contest their teachers’ versions of ‘heritage’. We look at how young people reshape traditional stories into current and contextually local versions, enabling them to at the same time accept, appropriate, and re-negotiate the teachers’ versions of tradition. Biliteracy and bilingualism are used by the young people to perform flexible and ambiguous identity positionings, allowing them to resist the sometimes essentializing categorizations imposed by the schools. The teaching and understanding of the folk stories in this Chinese complementary school is achieved in two languages. The linguistic practices related to the teaching of the folk stories offer opportunities for negotiation, as the students are at the same time willing to join in with some elements of the schooled instruction of heritage and culture, while rejecting other elements. The folk stories provide a context for young people to both participate in reproduction of heritage culture and also to resist it. In Chapter 8, we engage with a dimension of the complementary school classrooms which emerged in our observations as significant – that of ‘language’ as ‘heritage’. Here, we argue that relationships between language and heritage, far from being straightforward, are complex in the way they play out in classroom interactions. In this chapter, we take a more detailed look at the Bengali schools in Birmingham in particular. Our observations and interviews raise a number of questions in our attempts to understand how the linguistic practices of students and teachers in Bengali schools are used to negotiate young people’s multilingual and multicultural identities. First, teachers, school administrators and parents articulate attitudes and values which raise questions about what constitutes ‘language’. Second, teachers and their students express views and attitudes, and use language in ways, which raise questions about what constitutes ‘heritage’. Our analysis finds that multilingual young people in the complementary school classrooms used linguistic resources in creative ways to negotiate subject positions which often appeared to contest and subvert schools’ attempts to impose upon them ‘heritage’ identities. The complexity of the young people’s 21

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responses to the teaching and learning of language(s) led us to question by what means the heritage is passed on to the next generation. Is heritage straightforwardly reproduced where the learner is born to linguistic, social, and environmental norms which are typical of urban late modernity, whereas the heritage was associated with rural poverty? These questions about social reproduction for young people in the United Kingdom raise broader issues about what constitutes (a) language, and what counts as ‘heritage’ in late modernity. Teachers and administrators of the schools believed that teaching language and heritage was a means of reproducing ‘Bengali’/ ‘Bangladeshi’ identity in the next generation. At times, the students accepted the ‘heritage culture’ as a valuable means of identifying with their familial history, while the imposition of such identities was at other times contested and renegotiated by the students. Classroom interactions became sites where students occupied subject positions which were at odds with those imposed by the institutions. These young people were discursively negotiating paths for themselves which were in some ways contrary to the ideologies of the complementary schools, where teachers and administrators held the view that they ought to learn Bengali because to do so was a practice which carried with it knowledge of Bangladeshi history, nationalism, and identity. The young people’s attitudes to their languages, and their multilingual practices, constituted a response to their place in the world, as they negotiated subject positions which took them on a path through language ideological worlds constructed by others. In the course of investigating multilingualism in these institutional contexts, we came to realize that a salient category emerging from what we were seeing and hearing was that of ‘nationalism’. In Chapter 9, we explore the meanings of ‘nationalism’ in this context. Unlooked for, and surprising in their robustness, ideologies of nationalism became a motif which permeated interviews, field-note observations, audio recordings, and video recordings. The content of language classes frequently reflected the schools’ rationale of teaching students the ‘nationalism of the homeland’ as well as teaching the heritage/community language. Teachers did this through rehearsing historical events in the collective memory of the country of origin, discussing national symbols, and making explicit links between learning the standard language of the ancestral territory and national identity. This appears to be ‘outof-place’ nationalism, ‘long-distance’ nationalism, nationalism which has to be taught precisely because it is not flagged daily in constant discursive acts of misrecognition. We may have been able to argue academically that national belonging was not important in urban, multilingual, ‘hybrid’ communities, but for some of our participants, at least, 22

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national belonging was a crucial dimension of affiliation. As our investigation progressed, the teaching of nationalism also emerged as a site of contestation, a source of frustration, and a context for re-negotiation of subjectivities. The students, almost all of whom were born and raised in the United Kingdom, at times accepted their teachers’ positioning of them as ‘Bangladeshi’, ‘Chinese’, ‘Gujarati’, or ‘Turkish’, but at other times contested the notion that they should accept national belonging and affiliation to the territory of their familial ancestors. In this chapter, we observe such negotiations, as students use their linguistic resources to challenge essential links between their presupposed connections to their parents’ country of origin and national symbols and traditions. They do not always assent to imposed subjectivities, nor do they always confirm their teachers’ version of the symbolic importance of national belonging. Chapter 10 explores some pedagogic possibilities related to the coexistence of separate and flexible bilingualism, and questions ‘commonsense’ understandings of a bilingual pedagogy predicated on what Cummins (2005, 2008) refers to as the ‘two solitudes’ (2008:65) of bilingualism. In this chapter, we describe a flexible bilingual approach to language teaching and learning in the Chinese and Gujarati complementary schools in particular. Here, we take a language ecological perspective (Creese and Martin 2008) and seek to describe the interdependence of skills and knowledge across languages. Van Lier’s (2008) ecological approach describes the need to consider the development of new languages alongside the development of existing languages. He stresses the importance of the interrelationship between teacher and learners in making this connection. The language ecology metaphor offers a way of studying the interactional order to explore how social ideologies, particularly in relation to multilingualism, are created and implemented. In the complementary schools, teachers and students construct and participate in a flexible bilingual pedagogy in assemblies and classrooms. They adopt a translanguaging (García, 2007, 2009) approach to pedagogy, which is used by participants for identity performance as well as for the business of language learning and teaching. In the complementary schools, we often see examples of the requirement for both languages, for the drawing across languages, to offer the additional value and resource that bilingualism brings to identity performance, lesson accomplishment and participant confidence. This chapter presents examples from the Chinese and Gujarati complementary schools of some of the specific knowledge and skills shown by classroom participants in practising flexible bilingualism and flexible pedagogy. Chapter 11 looks forward to new understandings of multilingualism as a feature of transnational experience and practice. In this book, we 23

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argue that linguistic practices are subject to their social, cultural, and historical contexts. We do not argue that multilingualism in itself is always an important feature of the social world. However, in order to understand a world which is socially differentiated, we do need to ask who has access to which linguistic resources, and what count as valuable resources. When certain sets of linguistic practices are privileged above others, as in the United Kingdom and elsewhere they certainly are, then the users of some linguistic practices are privileged above others. We argue that multilingualism is worthy of investigation not least because it is a feature of the multiplication and diversification of social positionings, and because it provides a lens through which to see more clearly the ways in which language practices are socially and politically embedded, and the ways in which some linguistic practices become the basis of social differentiation. What we saw and heard in the eight complementary schools in four cities was always in one way or another at the interstices of two ideological positions: one characterized by heteroglossic, flexible linguistic production which indexed multicultural cosmopolitanism, the other rooted in linguistic affiliation to national and cultural heritage. We end the book with more questions than answers, asking what direction research in multilingualism will take when old ethnicities interact with new possibilities, when linguistic practice is increasingly diverse, and when the movement of peoples and global communication accelerate linguistic change. And we conclude that the eight complementary schools in which we conducted detailed linguistic investigations sit at the very crux of a new and developing thinking about how linguistic resources are deployed in our late modern world. In this book we tell the stories of young multilingual people who are able to call into play a rich diversity of linguistic resources. These are resources which come to accrue myriad meanings, from national belonging to territories which the young people have rarely or even never visited, to popular cultural forms which they largely experience through global digital networks. These are also resources with which they find their place in the world, often sidestepping and sometimes confronting subject positions, which they may not consider to be central to their sense of themselves. These are young people who use plural linguistic resources flexibly and inclusively to negotiate their way in the world. In chapter 2, we will review some of the existing research which has led us towards our questions.

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2

Multilingualism, ideology and practice

As we begin to question the salience of the nation-state, the movement of people across territories and the rapid expansion of digital communication, so also we have begun to question the concept of ‘bilingualism’ as a fixed and static entity. As the increased movement of people introduces greater plurality, so also we are moving towards a conception of linguistic practices as multiple, plural, shifting and eclectic, by drawing on features of what we might call ‘languages’, but calling into play linguistic features and means from diverse sources. In this chapter, we set out some of the principles that provide a theoretical base for our investigation of the linguistic practices of young people in four urban settings. We have grouped these under three headings: multilingualism, multilingualism and education, and complementary schools. In this chapter we also offer brief glimpses into the multilingual practices of some of the students who attend the eight schools in which we conducted our investigations. These are glimpses into their multilingual lives outside of the institutional settings, as diverse linguistic resources are daily called into play in ways that are usual, practical and not normally oppositional.

Multilingualism Heller (2007:1) argues for an approach to researching multilingualism which moves away from a highly ideologized view of coexisting linguistic systems, to a more critical approach that situates language practices in social and political contexts and ‘privileges language as social practice, speakers as social actors and boundaries as products of social action’. In this book, we adopt just such an approach. That is, in paying careful attention to the language practices of young people in urban settings, we see new multilingualisms emerging, as the young people create meanings with their diverse linguistic repertoires. We see the young people (and their parents and teachers) using their eclectic array of linguistic resources to create, parody, play, contest, endorse, evaluate, challenge, tease, disrupt, bargain and otherwise negotiate their social worlds. 25

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Debates about language use and choice have become increasingly prevalent in political and media discourse in recent times. These debates cannot be treated as simply ‘linguistic’ or ‘cultural heritage’ issues but are ‘important political questions that may affect the social and economic position of the social groups of a given territory’ (Pujolar 2007:144). That is, debates about language are often debates about immigration, and about ‘pluralist’ or ‘assimilationist’ policy in relation to immigrant groups. In public discourse, language often becomes inseparably associated with a territorially bounded identity in a relationship that takes language, territory and identity to be isomorphic (Freeland and Patrick, 2004). One implication of this is that ideally the nation should be monolingual, with adherence to another language often (mis)read as a lack of loyalty to the national identity. However, it is not sufficient to say that speakers of the same language belong to the same nation-state. This common-sense understanding of the relationship between language and nation ignores the diversity and variety of the language(s) spoken within many states. Bourdieu (1991:45) argues that the official language is bound up with the state both in its genesis and in its social uses: ‘It is in the process of state formation that the conditions are created for constitution of a unified linguistic market, dominated by the official language’. In order for one language to impose itself as the only legitimate one, the linguistic market has to be unified and the different languages (and dialects) of the people measured practically against the legitimate language. The goal of the state is often integration into a single linguistic community, which is ‘a product of the political domination that is endlessly reproduced by institutions capable of imposing universal recognition of the dominant language, and the condition for the establishment of relations of linguistic domination’ (Bourdieu 1991:46). This linking of language, literacy and national identity happens in a number of sites that include language planning, standardisation, educational policy, citizenship testing and language instruction for immigrants (Blackledge 2005; Stevenson 2006). Recent work on language testing for citizenship has demonstrated that in a broad range of national contexts particular languages and language varieties become gatekeeping devices to determine who is permitted to become a member of the community of citizens (Blackledge 2005; Mar-Molinero 2006; Maryns and Blommaert, 2006; Stevenson 2006). Another way that governments may seek to impose national identities is through educational policies that decide which languages are to be employed – and thus, legitimized – in the public school system. Recent research has clearly documented the interpenetration of the ideological with the local, in institutional, nationalist and political dimensions.

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When a language is symbolically linked to national identity, the bureaucratic nation-state faced with a multilingual population may exhibit ‘monolingualising tendencies’ (Heller 1995:374). Heller’s (1995, 1999, 2006) study of a Francophone school in Ontario observed tensions between the monolingual ideology of the school and the language use and ideologies of at least some of its students, and the study found that some of the students resisted the linguistic ideology of the school. Also, in a school that was concerned with using French to resist the domination of English, students set up their resistance to the school through the very language that was oppressing them. In many western countries, a dominant ideology that positions the majority language (often English) as the only language of communication in institutional and other public contexts is constantly produced and reproduced. Hornberger (2007:179) argues that ‘The one-nationone-language ideology, the idea that a nation-state should be unified by one common language, has held sway in recent Western history’. In this ideology, minority languages associated with immigrant groups are, as Bourdieu put it, rejected into indignity (Bourdieu 1998:46). Minority languages that have historically been associated with particular ethnic identities often continue to be important for particular groups (May 2004), but have little capital in majority-language markets. Very often, multilingual societies which apparently tolerate or promote heterogeneity in fact undervalue or appear to ignore the linguistic diversity of their populace. An apparently liberal orientation to equality of opportunity for all may mask an ideological drive towards homogeneity, a drive that potentially marginalizes or excludes those who either refuse, or are unwilling, to conform. Gal (2006:15) argues that in the discourse of the powerful, monolingualism is often taken to be the natural state of human life. Furthermore, named languages are taken to be homogeneous, and to be expressions of the distinct spirit of a particular group. In this sense, where linguistic practices conform to certain norms and standards, they are effective in legitimizing political arrangements. However, Gal also points out that in Europe a new elite of multilingual speakers (of, e.g., French, German and English) sustains a breadth of linguistic repertoires, which transcends national boundaries. For such groups, ethnolinguistic identity may be only an occasional issue. For multilingual speakers of languages with lower status, language issues may still be salient as people attempt to negotiate identities, often from relatively powerless positions. Language ideologies are neither simple nor monolithic, however. Notwithstanding the argument that minority language speakers are subject to the symbolic violence of the dominant

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language ideology, some speakers who (or whose families) may traditionally have been associated with minority ‘ethnic’ languages, are using language and languages in new ways (Rampton 1995, 1999). While some speakers are either unable to negotiate their identities from inextricably powerless positions, and others in powerful positions have no need to do so, some speakers in modern nation-states are using their linguistic skills to negotiate new subject positions (Blackledge and Pavlenko, 2001; Pavlenko and Blackledge, 2004). In what Gal (2006:27) describes as ‘self-conscious, anti-standardizing moves’, such negotiations may include linguistic practices, which reframe previous standard varieties, incorporating, inter alia, urban popular cultural forms, minority linguistic forms, hybridities and inventions. Here, language practices associated with immigrant groups no longer represent backward-looking traditions, but may be linked to global youth culture and urban sophistication. Languages and language practices are not necessarily equated to national identity (but may be so) and are not necessarily dominated by the standardized variety. Despite powerful ideologies of homogeneity, populations in many countries – especially countries with a history of recent immigration – continue to be heterogeneous in their practices. May (2005:337) proposes that linguistic identities need not be oppositional, and asks ‘what exactly is wrong with linguistic complementarity?’ May calls for further ethnographic studies, which articulate and exemplify broad linguistic principles of language ideological research in complex multilingual contexts. Heller and Duchêne (2007:11) argue that rather than accepting ideological positions in which there is competition over languages, ‘perhaps we should be asking instead who benefits and who loses from understanding languages the way we do, what is at stake for whom, and how and why language serves as a terrain for competition’. In our study, ‘languages’ and linguistic practices emerged as resources over which people were prepared to argue, wrangle and fight. Language became a terrain where power was contested and competition played out, but at the same time became the means by which negotiations occurred. Traditionally, research in the field of multilingualism has taken as its focus bilingual language acquisition, cognition and code-switching. Heller (1999) argues that students learn to become bilingual in particular ways (and therefore not others), and that these constructions of bilingualism advantage particular groups of students. Baker (2003), building on Fishman (1967), describes bilingualism with diglossia in which each language is used for distinct and separate social functions (Baker 2003), and Swain uses the phrase, ‘bilingualism through monolingualism’ (Swain 1983:4). Each of these accounts describes the boundaries put up around languages and represents a view of the multilingual/ 28

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bilingual student/teacher as ‘two monolinguals in one body’ (Gravelle 1996:11). In this book, we pursue a social orientation to the study of linguistic phenomena and their meanings. Heller (2007) proposes four sets of concepts in the critical analysis of languages in society. First, she argues that rather than treating notions of ‘community’, ‘identity’ and ‘language’ as though they were natural phenomena, they should be understood as social constructs. Specific or single categorizations therefore cannot be attached to an individual based on their ‘ethnicity’ or ‘language’. Second, Heller refers to the work of Giddens (1984) in order to consider language as a set of resources that are socially distributed but not necessarily evenly. The third set of concepts holds that this uneven distribution of resources is the product of political and economic processes, enabling us to ask questions about which linguistic resources are assigned what value and with what consequences (Gumperz 1982). The final set of concepts considers the discourses that inscribe value (or its lack) to particular linguistic forms and practices. In summary, Heller (2007:15) views language(s) as: sets of resources called into play by social actors, under social and historical conditions which both constrain and make possible the social reproduction of existing conventions and relations, as well as the production of new ones.

Linguistic practice can only be understood in relation to histories, power and social organization. Conversely, structural analysis must include accounts of actual linguistic practices, which at times may differ from those we might expect. Our multilingual participants’ beliefs, attitudes and practices in relation to ‘language’ resonate with García’s (2007:xii) account that languages are not hermetically sealed units. The linguistic practices of García’s students in New York bore very little relation to the ‘standard English’ of school texts or the ‘standard Spanish’ that was supposed to be linked to their ‘identity’. Rather, our data suggest, in line with a recent proposition of Makoni and Pennycook (2007:2), that the notion of languages as separate, discrete entities and ‘countable institutions’ is a social construct. Bourdieu (1991:287) proposed that: language is itself a social artefact invented at the cost of a decisive indifference to differences which reproduces on the level of the region the arbitrary imposition of a unique norm.

Makoni and Pennycook (2007:1) argue for a critical historical account that demonstrates that, through the process of classification and naming, languages were ‘invented’. They add that, in direct relation with the invention of languages, ‘an ideology of languages as separate and 29

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enumerable categories was also created’ (2007:2). Makoni and Pennycook point in particular to the naming of languages such as ‘Bengali’ and ‘Assamese’ as the construction of ‘new objects’ (2007:10). Thus, languages cannot be viewed as discrete, bounded and impermeable autonomous systems. Some of our research participants, all at first glance of the same ‘ethnic’ and ‘linguistic’ group, not only disagreed with each other about what constituted a ‘language’, they also disagreed with each other about where a ‘language’ began and ended and about the value that could be assigned to a particular set of linguistic resources. Makoni and Pennycook (2007:22) propose that such ‘local knowledge’ is crucial to our understanding of language: We are arguing for an understanding of the relationships between what people believe about their language (or other people’s languages), the situated forms of talk they deploy, and the material effects – social, economic, environmental – of such views and use.

This interrelationship between what people believe about language and languages, and the way they access and make use of linguistic resources, provides a further focus for our analysis. If languages are invented, and languages and identities are socially constructed, we nevertheless need to account for the fact that at least some language users, at least sometimes, hold passionate beliefs about the importance and significance of a particular language to their sense of ‘identity’. It is now well established in contemporary sociolinguistics (Harris 2006; Rampton 2006) that one ‘language’ does not straightforwardly index one subject position, and that speakers use linguistic resources in complex ways to perform a range of subject positions, sometimes simultaneously. However, while accepting this, May (2001; 2005:330) argues that ‘historically associated languages continue often to hold considerable purchase for members of particular cultural or ethnic groups in their identity claims’. Rampton (1991, 1995) argues that we need a better understanding of the linguistic formation and social identity of the bilingual learner, and suggests a framework for viewing language education as a social activity in which efforts are made to manage continuity, change and relationships between social groups. He suggests that the terms expertise (proficiency in a language), affiliation (attachment or identification felt to a language) and inheritance (ways in which individuals can be born into a language tradition) are useful tools for describing the bilingual speaker and bilingualism. For some of the people we spoke to in the course of our research, a ‘language’ held powerful connotations in terms of their sense of belonging and selfhood, and for them particular languages continue to be an important feature of their individual and collective identities (May 2005). 30

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In the context of research on ‘heritage’ language education, it is almost a truism that learning the ‘heritage’ language ‘plays a critical role in the process of children’s identity formation’ (Nicholls 2005:164). While it is certainly an oversimplification to treat certain languages as ‘symbols’ or ‘carriers’ of ‘identity’, we are obliged to take account of what people believe about their languages, listen to how they make use of their available linguistic resources, and consider the effects of their language use – even where we believe these ‘languages’ to be inventions. Makoni and Pennycook (2007) propose the ‘disinvention’ of languages, and a reinvention that acknowledges heterogeneity, arguing that languages are discursive constructions, which perpetuate social inequities. Makoni and Mashiri (2007) suggest that rather than developing language policies that attempt at hermetically sealing languages, we should be describing the use of vernaculars which leak into one another, to understand the social realities of their users. They propose that it is necessary to overcome existing ideas about language if we are to imagine alternative ways of conceptualizing the role and status of individuals in the world, and that ‘a world in which plurality is preferred over singularity requires rethinking concepts founded on notions of uniformity over those predicated on diversity’ (2007:27). Ideologies of nation and language are founded on homogeneity. Stressing the user rather than the code or language is central to this argument. Rampton’s (1995, 2006) work on heteroglossia in urban contexts among adolescents shows how individuals may appropriate and invent linguistic practices to negotiate their identities. Rampton (2006:27) refers to ‘stylisation’ as a particular kind of performance in which the speakers produce ‘an artistic image of another’s language’ (Bakhtin 1981:362). Hess-Lüttich (1978, in Androutsopoulos 2007:207) speaks of bilingualism as a ‘style resource’. Viewing language use as a styling process places the social actor at the centre of analysis. Rampton (1998:8) argues: instead of being the product of forces that actors neither control nor comprehend, human reality is extensively reproduced and created anew in the socially and historically specific activities of everyday life.

Such a social constructivist approach works with the agency of a situated speaker and is interested in explaining language use as contextually embedded. Bilingualism as a ‘style resource’ necessitates moving away from an emphasis on languages and their different codes towards an account which describes the individual as engaged in meaning-making and identity work. Whereas a typical linguistic analysis of code-switching might focus on categorizing languages and describing the function these languages perform, a social constructivist approach problematizes 31

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the constructs of ‘language’ and ‘community’ and resists classifications of languages or communities into bounded systems. The alternative to a code-switching structuralist account seeks to show variety through heteroglossia and stylisation. Heller (2007) suggests that if we tend to understand linguistic resources as whole, bounded systems, which we call ‘languages’, it is because nations and states have found it necessary to produce powerful discourses that constitute language ideologies in the process of national belonging. Makoni and Pennycook (2007:36) argue for language policy in education that focuses on ‘translingual language practices rather than language entities’. García (2007:xiii) suggests that if language is an invention, we must observe closely how people use language, and base pedagogical practice on that use, not on what the school system says are valuable practices. While largely accepting these arguments, we also agree with Heller (2007:342) that ‘bilingualism’ or ‘multilingualism’ allows us a purchase on what count as relevant categories, and points us towards to a focus on how boundaries happen, how people and practices are included or excluded and what happens to them as a result. Moyer and Martin Rojo (2007) argue that migrants are the new social actors challenging the hegemonic linguistic construction of the nationstate from below in different ways. Migrants from different language backgrounds constitute a challenge for traditional nationalist discourses and ideologies in the institutions of multilingual democratic states, as multilingual reality faces monolingualist ideology. Our audio recordings in the homes of the complementary school students revealed how they used a broad range of linguistic resources to create meanings. Aleha, a student at one of the Bengali schools in Birmingham, used slightly different linguistic resources with her mother and her father. With her mother, a typical interaction included Sylheti and English. In the excerpt that follows, Aleha and her sister Rumana are about to leave their house and say goodbye to their parents respectfully with the Arabic-derived ‘salam alaikum’. English is mostly used by Aleha with her older sister and her mother, while Sylheti is used with her father: Example 2.1 Aleha: Rumana, come on. I’m going amma, salam alaikum {mother, salam alaikum} salam alaikum abba, zaairam aami {salam alaikum father. I’m going}

While ‘I’m going’ is spoken in English to her mother, Aleha uses Sylheti to say the same thing to her father. Notable here is the unmarked and quite usual multilingualism of the interaction: English, Sylheti and an 32

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Arabic-derived phrase enjoy a flexible and non-conflictual co-existence. We recorded many instances of flexible linguistic practice, especially in the homes of students who attended the Bengali schools. This was mainly because we gained more comprehensive access to these households, due to their proximity to the Bengali schools. In the following example, Tamim, a ten-year-old boy, is asking his mother whether he is allowed to go on the school camping trip: Example 2.2 amma aami camping-e zaaitaam. aafne last year here disoin aamaare disoinnaa. aami camping zaaitaam aafne aamaare disenna {mother, I want to go camping you allowed him last year but not me. I want to go camping you didn’t allow me last year} (home audio-recording, Bengali case study)

This is an unremarkable, quite usual example of flexible language practice in the students’ family settings, of the sort we heard on each occasion that we audio-recorded the children and other young people at home. Such multilingual practice at least partly constitutes the context for our investigation of multilingualism in the institutional setting of the complementary school. We were also fortunate to record some of the students who attended the Bengali schools while reading the Qur’an with their Qur’anic Arabic tutor. The tutor would come to the students’ houses to instruct them. One of the eight-year-old boys we met was practising to become a Hafize-Qur’an (someone who learns the entire Qur’an by heart). It was notable that the instruction from the Qur’anic Arabic tutor always took precedence over Bengali classes and indeed over other kinds of study. This appeared to be a non-negotiable form of learning and one that must be done for religious purposes. Having said this, the children appeared to be enthusiastic about their Arabic reading of the Qur’an. In the following example, the tutor has come to the house of Tamim, Shazia and Kabir, and the children are reciting Arabic terms along with him: Example 2.3 Tutor: qaribun, qareebun, qareeb [reads along with Shazia, often repeating the same words] Re- yaa ze- yaa qaa ri- bun Shazia: six times forsi {I read it six times} Tutor: qaf zabar qaa, re zer ri, be pesh bu, nun, qareebun [spells the Arabic words. This is repeated many times] laam zabar laa Tamim: Aami khaali ekhtaa mistake khorsi, ekhtaa mistake khorsi Sir {I made only one mistake, only one mistake sir} (home audio-recording, Bengali case study)

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Here, the tutor is teaching the children to learn the words in Arabic by repeating them after him. Tamim uses Qur’anic Arabic, Sylheti and English side by side. None of the Arabic words are given a definition or meaning by the tutor. However, Tamim told us that although he was not able to understand while he was reading, the tutor would explain passages, and ‘after I finish it, I am going to get an English version of the Qur’an so that I can understand every word of it’. Tamim read the verse fluently with little help from his tutor and demonstrated (in Sylheti and English) his positive attitude towards reading Arabic, saying proudly that he had made only one mistake in the passage he had been reading. In another example, the tutor of the same children reprimands Shazia for lacking concentration in her reading: Example 2.4 Tutor: [to Shazia] Shazia tomaar khaam fori khoraa, foraa khoro {your job is to read, go on read} Tamim: sir Tutor: erro khitaa khorraa? {here, what are you doing?} Shazia khoyo, khosnaa? {Shazia, say, why don’t you say} allameen, khoyo saai. kon baaiyi saao. paas baar saailaam tumaar mukher diyaa ekhtaa word tumi deikhkha forra alaal ghaibi? {say allaameen. where are you looking? I looked at you five times. are you looking at the words that you are saying?} Tamim: you’re not reading you’re gonna get proper gunnah {sin} (home audio-recording, Bengali case study)

Tamim’s teasing remark to his sister because she is not reading to the tutor’s satisfaction carries with it a connotation of something more serious than simply being reprimanded in the reading class. It may be that Tamim is mischievously making things worse for his sister by saying she is going to ‘get proper gunnah’. This word, derived from Farsi, carries meanings of divine retribution. Here, we again see what appears to be a quite usual and yet subtle deployment of linguistic resources on the part of ten-year-old Tamim. This plurality of linguistic practice is not necessarily welcomed by all, however. Indeed, it is precisely this kind of linguistic heterogeneity that is held to threaten a status quo that has previously relied on languages as bounded systems. Makoni and Mashiri (2007) argue for the need to pay close attention to the perspectives of language users, rather than imposing boundaries on their practices. Often, the classification of African languages, for example, has been based on ostensibly linguistic data that exclude the perspective of the speakers. Makoni and Mashiri call for a move away from an understanding of the ‘multilingual’ speaker 34

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with proficiency in two or more languages, towards the notion of ‘verbal repertoire’ that is not founded on the notion of competence in particular languages: ‘In a verbal repertoire a speaker may have control over some linguistic forms associated with different “languages”, but this does not necessarily mean that the speaker has anything approaching full competence in the language from which the speech forms are drawn’ (2007:84). Heller (2007:15) proposes an academic reorientation to regard multilingualism as ‘only one perspective on a more complex set of practices which draw on linguistic resources which have conventionally been thought of as belonging to separate linguistic systems’. Lemke (2002:85) welcomes a new scepticism regarding the autonomy and coherence of ‘languages’ and argues against the notion of ‘a language’ as a cogent unit of analysis: ‘It is not at all obvious that if they were not politically prevented from doing so, “languages” would not mix and dissolve into one another’. Branson and Miller (2007:131) propose that the concepts of ‘language’ and ‘linguistics’ have been instrumental in promoting certain languages at the expense of others, serving the interests of powerful elites, and in the process creating linguistic minorities. Joseph (2006:44) points out that linguistics have tended to treat languages as though they were unitary entities, either ignoring variation or relegating it to a secondary plane. Joseph draws on the work of Bakhtin to argue that the discrete systems that linguists normally study co-exist with a multiplicity of different ways of speaking that are constantly intermingling with each other, a condition for which Bakhtin introduces the term ‘heteroglossia’. Heller (2007:8) also proposes that utterances can best be understood as inherently heteroglossic, that is, a multiplicity of voices underlies linguistic variability in any given stretch of social performance. We will further explore this notion of heteroglossia in Chapter 3. There was a playfulness and creativity that was characteristic of the linguistic interactions of the students we audio-recorded in and out of complementary school classrooms. Students engaged with and accessed a broad range of linguistic resources. Bangladeshi-heritage children watched Hindi films and were familiar with Hindi songs. They sang along with the songs and were able to express their preferences and dislikes. In the following example, the two sisters Rumana and Aleha are watching a film just before going to Bengali class: Example 2.5 [Rumana sings with the music on TV] Rumana: it’s a funny movie that. this one, Hera Pheri. really funny, I like this song Aleha: I like [to baby sister] (3) talk, talk, say amaar naam Durdana say amaar naam Durdana {say my name is Durdana}

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Durdana: one khe {who’s there?} Rumana: [singing along in English and Hindi] rock your body, rock your body, rock your body, rock your body, tumhare bina {without you} chaenna aaye {there’s no peace} rock your body (home audio-recording, Bengali case study)

Here, singing along with the Hindi film music (tumhare bina etc.,) seems to be a usual feature of the children’s linguistic world, as they move in and out of English, Sylheti and Hindi while listening to, participating in and enjoying the Hindi film. At the same time, they engage bilingually with their baby sister Durdana’s attempts to speak into the digital recording device. On another occasion, the same children were recorded listening to Hindi pop music before setting off for school: Example 2.6 [Hindi song playing in the background] Rumana: [singing in Hindi] saatse aaja sa. this song’s nice Asha Bhosle sings that Asha Bhosle amma, amma, amma, I hate him. what’s his name? Aleha: Amir Khan. wait, wait, I wanna see one. I wanna see one. I wanna see number one. is that number three or number two? is that number one? (home audio-recording, Bengali case study)

Here, Rumana sings along in Hindi with the Indian pop music (Saatse aaja sa), and tells her sister that she likes the singer Asha Bhosle. At the same time, she expresses a dislike for the well-known Bollywood actor Amir Khan, who was also appearing on the show. Aleha is so enthusiastic about the Indian music that she is prepared to be late for class in order to find out which song is top of the pop charts. As we will see in subsequent chapters, the young people’s interactions using digital technologies crossed the boundaries of what we traditionally call languages. One of the Gujarati students referred to the resources he brought to sending SMS messages: ‘if I am texting my close friends, it will be like half English and half Gujarati, like tu, when UR coming’. Our understanding here is informed by Voloshinov’s pre-digital (1973:98) argument that ‘linguistic creativity cannot be understood apart from the ideological meanings and values that fill it’. Here, as elsewhere, the work of Voloshinov and Bakhtin illuminates the interpenetration of the interactional and the ideological while the students’ attitudes to linguistic resources translate into flexible practice. Language choice, use and attitudes are intrinsically linked to language ideologies, relations of power, political arrangements and speakers’ identities. Identity options available to individuals at a given moment

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in history are subject to change, like the ideologies that legitimize and value particular identities more than others (Blackledge and Pavlenko, 2001; Pavlenko and Blackledge, 2004). The shifts and fluctuations in language ideologies and in the range of identities available to individuals have become particularly visible during recent sociopolitical and socioeconomic trends and events, including globalisation and the postcolonial search for new national identities. The fact that languages – and language ideologies – are anything but neutral is especially visible in multilingual societies, where some languages and identity options are privileged above others. In contexts of inequality, the notion of ‘negotiation’ comes to the fore (Blackledge and Pavlenko, 2001; Pavlenko and Blackledge, 2004). In the process of negotiating identities, language users may seek new social and linguistic resources that allow them to resist identities that position them in undesirable ways, produce new identities and assign alternative meanings to the links between identities and linguistic varieties (Norton, 2006). The process of negotiating identities may take place between individuals, majority and minority groups and/or institutions, and those they are supposed to serve. In this book, we investigate institutional and non-institutional contexts in which the process of negotiation of identities through heteroglossic discourse is a recurrent practice. ‘Identities’ are here conceptualized as produced and legitimized in discourse and social interaction, and as multiple, dynamic and subject to change. ‘Multiplicity’ refers to the notion that identities are socially and discursively constructed in relation to variables such as age, race, class, ethnicity, gender, generation, sexual orientation and social status (Blackledge and Pavlenko, 2001; Pavlenko and Blackledge, 2004). Here we emphasize that identities are constructed and validated through linguistic practices available (or at times, unavailable) to individuals at a particular point in time and space. Since ideologies of identity underpinning particular linguistic practices valorize and legitimize these positions in different ways, individuals may occupy certain positions unproblematically while they may resist some positionings and aspire to or claim others. When discussing negotiation of identities, we differentiate between imposed identities (which are for one reason or another not negotiable), assumed identities (which are accepted and not negotiated) and negotiable identities (which are contested, bargained for and haggled over by groups and individuals) (see also Blackledge and Pavlenko, 2001; Pavlenko and Blackledge, 2004). Clearly, all three categories acquire a particular status within unique sociohistorical circumstances, and options that are acceptable for and not negotiated by some groups and individuals may be imposed on others or even on

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the same groups at a different point in time. Alternatively, assumed identity options that are not negotiated by one group of individuals may become a battleground for another group that approaches them as negotiable. In this view, then, imposed (or non-negotiable) identities and subject positions are those that individuals cannot resist or contest at a particular point in time. In the analysis in this book, institutional discourses may seek to impose certain identity positions on Britishborn students (e.g., at a simple level, when a teacher says to a student ‘you are Chinese’), who may seek to contest, resist or otherwise renegotiate these subject positions (e.g., when a student responds to the same teacher by saying ‘technically I am not Chinese’). Others, of course, may feel that they have no need or wish to do so. At some moments, however, some students may find themselves unable to contest powerful institutional discourses. It is not only in institutional discourses that identity positions are negotiable (or found to be non-negotiable), however. We recorded a tenyear-old student, Bodrul, who attended one of the Bengali schools, speaking to his father on the telephone. The father was in Bangladesh, and calling to speak to the family: Example 2.7 Bodrul: hello Father: salam ditaa naa {aren’t you going to say salam to me} Bodrul: salam alaikum Father: khontaa khoro {what are you doing?} Bodrul: khontaa naa {nothing} Father: how are you? Bodrul: ji {fine} Father: how are you? Bodrul: fine Father: good boy, good boy. amaar phute khi khore {what is my [other] son doing?} Bodrul: he khalaae {he’s playing} Father: Zakir khi khore {what is Zakir doing?} Bodrul: he madrasath {he’s gone to the madrasah} Father: hain, madrasath {yes at the madrasah} Bodrul: jo oi Amma aai giyaa {mother’s coming} (3) (home audio-recording, Bengali case study)

Bodrul’s father insists that his son uses the formal, Arabic-derived greeting, salam alaikum, and moves between Sylheti and English in his attempt to elicit responses from his son. Bodrul appears to move easily between Sylheti and English. In another, similar example, Bodrul’s 38

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father has returned from his visit to relatives in Bangladesh, and a visitor (‘uncle’) has arrived at the house. The term ‘uncle’ here is one of respect within a particular community and does not necessarily indicate that the visitor is a blood relation. In this interaction, Bodrul has let ‘uncle’ into the house, but is more concerned about a conversation with his sister Shazia and has not greeted the visitor in the way he expects. Moments later, ‘uncle’ wants to know where Bodrul’s father is, as he has not been shown in to greet him: Example 2.8 uncle: abbaae khoi {where’s your father?} Bodrul: I don’t know. [to Shazia] I’m not going to play. I want my one Shazia: I wanna watch this first Bodrul: I’m prepared to do it as well. I’m prepared to do it as well take this man, please man Father: oh fut, sasae dakhsenaani, sasae daakhsenani {son, uncle is calling you, uncle is calling you} Bodrul: aami zaaisi {I’m going} uncle: tumi khoiso khoite faartaam na {you said you don’t know} Bodrul: aami khoisina {I didn’t} Father: tumi sasare khoisoni khoite faartaam naa {did you say to uncle I don’t know?} Bodrul: naa {no} Father: sasare salam khorso ni, khoiyya laao {did you say salam to uncle, say it to him} Bodrul: [to ‘uncle’] salam alaikum Father: salam khorse sasare {he’s said salam to uncle} uncle: waalaikum salam aami dui baar khoisi, teen baar khoisi {I said salam twice, three times} Bodrul: [quietly] naam sasa, faagol beta {he’s called uncle he’s crazy}, fucking bitch, what’s he on as? Father: heh khitaa hoise? {what’s the matter?} Mother: furute name complain khorse aamaare furuter loghe complain aase {he’s complained about my son, he has complained about my son} (home audio-recording, Bengali case study)

In this interaction, once again there is an insistence on the formal, Arabic-derived greeting. Bodrul does not offer the greeting to the visitor until his father demands it of him. He appears to offend his ‘uncle’ with his brief and curt response (I don’t know), which he then denies having made. Privately, or perhaps only to his sister, Bodrul uses the very opposite of formal language to refer to the visitor who has landed him 39

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in trouble, saying in Sylheti that he’s crazy, and in English referring to him as a ‘fucking bitch’. Meanwhile, Bodrul’s mother defends her son. Here, the boy’s private response is very different from the required formality of the Arabic-derived greeting, which itself becomes a site of symbolic contestation between the participants. We would later see that teachers also insisted on the formal greeting, albeit in a more benign way than the ‘uncle’ in this interaction. For some of the students and teachers, their linguistic resources were closely associated with their sense of who they were. As we have seen, May (2004, 2005) acknowledges that for some individuals and groups, language may not be a defining feature of identity but argues that for others, it may indeed be a salient feature. May (2004:43) argues that while theoretically language may be just one of many markers of identity, in practice it is much more than that, as ‘the link between language and identity encompasses both significant cultural and political dimensions’. In our study, we encountered young people who were proud of their ability to access a range of linguistic resources. One of the Gujarati students, Shlok, told us: ‘it shows my personality that I’m proud of being who I am . . . I’m proud of being Indian, I’m proud of speaking Gujarati’. Here, Shlok makes a link between being ‘Indian’ and speaking Gujarati. Another student, Aysun, in one of the Turkish schools, was interviewed by the researcher (R) about how she felt about her multilingual resources: Example 2.9 Aysun: I know one more language and I can write it and because I do this R: is this different from your feelings towards English? Aysun: ehhh in English I can do a lot more things because I know a lot more in English. in Turkish I don’t know as much as I know in English. when I write something in Turkish it pleases me a lot more, because I know that much Turkish but English, in English I know, but Turkish I don’t know as much (student interview, Turkish school)

The student explains that she feels more satisfied when she writes something in Turkish because she needs to make more effort. Writing in English comes more naturally because her English language and literacy skills are better than her Turkish. Identities are inevitably mediated in and through languages, which (whether we like it or not) come to be associated with particular ethnic and/or national characteristics. The official language or standard variety often comes to be misrecognized as having greater moral, aesthetic and/

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or intellectual worth than contesting languages or varieties. In Bourdieu’s terms, those who are not speakers of the official language or standard variety are subject to symbolic domination, as they believe in the legitimacy of that language or variety, and ‘Symbolic power is misrecognised as (and therefore transformed into) legitimate power’ (1991:170). The standard variety may not always be the standard language of the dominant majority in society, however. Parodi (2008) studied speakers of Spanish vernacular in California and found that one of the biggest barriers faced by these bilingual heritage students in their Spanish classes at American universities was the attitude of their Spanish instructors. Frequently, they encountered teachers’ negative attitudes towards the way they spoke Spanish, stigmatizing Spanish vernacular because it was different from standard Spanish (see also the study by Valdés et al. (2008) discussed later). Wiley (2008) similarly found that the status of Chinese dialect speakers within the overall conceptualization of Chinese heritage language programmes is an issue of considerable ambivalence, and there is a need for further studies of the language attitudes of heritage language school administrators and teachers. We discuss these issues in relation to complementary schools in more detail later in this chapter. Freeman Field (2008:77) argues that student identities are constantly being negotiated and shaped within all forms of schooling, and this negotiation may take place in two or more languages, and ‘reflects the symbolic and material resources of the different social groups’. Freeman Field takes a view of negotiation that allows for the possibility that the agency of the speaker may overcome powerful structural influences. She proposes that people have choices in how they define themselves, each other, the languages that they speak and the practices they develop: ‘Although the ways that people use and evaluate languages in any given situation may be powerfully influenced by larger historical, sociocultural, political and economic processes, these processes do not necessarily determine what happens in face-to-face interaction’ (2008:88). In our study, we found that the interstices of historical, sociocultural, political and economic processes and individuals’ choices about how to define themselves were precisely the points where negotiations occurred. These negotiations were played out in each of the eight schools in which we conducted our field work and were often to be found in the detail of nuanced interactional events.

Multilingualism and education The year 2008 was designated by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as the International Year

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of Languages. In announcing this initiative, Koïchiro Matsuura, DirectorGeneral of UNESCO, said: We must act now as a matter of urgency, by encouraging and developing language policies that enable each linguistic community to use its first language, or mother tongue, as widely and as often as possible, including in education . . . Only if multilingualism is fully accepted can all languages find their place in our globalized world (UNESCO 2008)

Notwithstanding UNESCO’s imperative towards education for multilingualism, the education of multilingual students is frequently oriented towards monolingualism rather than multilingualism. In this section, we do not attempt to comprehensively review types of bilingual education (but see Baker (2006), and Cummins and Hornberger (2008), for comprehensive reviews). However, we introduce some of the issues relating to the education of the multilingual students in our study. Cummins (2008a:xii) defines bilingual education as ‘the use of two (or more) languages of instruction at some point in a student’s school career’. We can make a distinction between ‘additive’ approaches to bilingualism, which aim to add another language to the student’s existing language repertoire and ‘subtractive’ bilingualism, which effectively aims to move students towards monolingualism in the dominant language. We can further distinguish between ‘transitional’, ‘maintenance’ and ‘enrichment’ models of bilingual education (May 2008). A ‘transitional’ model shifts students away from their first language as soon as possible and uses the student’s first language only until it can be replaced with the majority language. A ‘maintenance’ approach to bilingual education, however, aims to build on and extend the student’s first language alongside learning of the majority language, with bilingualism as a key aim. A variation of this model is the ‘enrichment’ approach, which seeks to develop bilingualism by teaching through a minority target language (e.g., French immersion classes in Canada). García et al. (2006:14) refer to multilingual schools that ‘exert educational effort that takes into account and builds further on the diversity of languages and literacy practices that children and youth bring to school’. This means going beyond acceptance or tolerance of children’s languages, to ‘cultivation’ of languages through their use for teaching and learning. García (2009:6) argues that what distinguishes bilingual education programmes is the goal of using two languages ‘to educate generally, meaningfully, equitably, and for tolerance and appreciation of diversity’. She points out that in educating broadly, these programmes help students to become global and responsible citizens and also teach them to look across cultures and worlds and beyond cultural borders. 42

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Furthermore, they ‘make schooling meaningful and comprehensible for the millions of children whose home languages are different from the dominant language of school and society’ (p. 7). Cummins (2008a) refers to research (August and Shanahan, 2006; Cummins 2001; Genesee et al. 2006), which demonstrates that considerable confidence can be placed in the positive outcomes of bilingual education. May (2008:28) also summarizes research (Ramirez et al. 1991; Thomas and Collier, 2002) that found that ‘minority language students who receive most of their education in English rather than their first language are more likely to fall behind and drop out of school’. Edwards and Pritchard Newcombe (2006:138) found unambiguous evidence that ‘the longer children are educated using English and the language of the home, the better the results’. A summary by McCarty (2007:34) of recent research finds that there is unequivocal consensus that: ‘students who enter school with a primary language other than the national or dominant language perform significantly better on academic tasks when they receive consistent and cumulative academic support in the native/heritage language’. Cummins refers to ‘150 empirical studies carried out during the past 30 or so years that have reported a positive association between additive bilingualism and students’ linguistic, cognitive, or academic growth’ (2007:112). Tucker (2008:48) summarizes his review of studies conducted over the last three decades by saying that research ‘demonstrates conclusively that cognitive, social, personal, and economic benefits accrue to the individual who has an opportunity to develop a high degree of bilingual proficiency’. García et al. (2007) refer to a pluriliteracies approach developed in Wales to argue for ‘translanguaging’, which is not about code-switching, but rather about an arrangement that normalizes bilingualism without diglossic functional separation. In Wales, translanguaging and transliteracy techniques are increasingly used to develop both English and Welsh, with students hearing or reading a lesson in one language, and developing their work in the other. Baker (2006) argues that advantages of a translanguaging approach include the promotion of a deeper and fuller understanding of subject-matter, the development of literacy in the weaker language, the improvement of home–school co-operation and the integration of fluent English speakers and English learners: ‘if English learners are integrated with first language English speakers, and if sensitive and strategic use is made of both languages in class, then the learners can develop their second language ability concurrently with content learning’ (Baker 2006:297). Cummins (2008b) points out, however, that where bilingual programmes have been introduced, it has become axiomatic that the two languages should be kept rigidly separate and refers to this as the ‘two solitudes’ assumption (2008b:65). 43

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He argues that this assumption has minimal basis in research. In fact, he proposes a release from monolingual instructional approaches and advocates the teaching of bilingual children by means of bilingual instructional strategies with the learning and use of two or more languages alongside each other. Cummins (2005:590) calls on all applied linguists and language educators to ‘confront and critically re-examine our own monolingual instructional assumptions’. Creese et al. (2006) similarly propose that identity positions may be negotiated in multilingual classrooms through ‘flexible bilingualism’. García (2009) points out that our complex multilingual and multimodal global communication networks often reflect much more than two separate monolingual codes, and that the complex networks in which students participate require a different vision from one that is linear and directional. Cummins summarizes extensive empirical research which supports the interdependence of literacy-related skills and knowledge across languages. That is, research supports the notion that skills and knowledge learned in one language can be transferred to another. It therefore appears that, contrary to the common-sense understandings of politicians and some policy makers, time spent learning in more than one language or in a minority language, is not wasted curriculum time. On the contrary, Tucker (2008:41) concludes from his reading of the available literature and from his own extensive research, that ‘time spent instructing the child in a familiar language is a wise investment’. McCarty et al. (2006:91) point out that despite the multilingual and multicultural nature of societies such as United Kingdom and United States, ‘education policies and practices often deny that multilingual, multicultural reality, attempting to coerce it into a single, monolingualist and monoculturalist mold’. Shohamy (2006:173) further points out that in most educational contexts in the world, a specific national language, spoken by the powerful groups in society, is the only legitimate language in schools. At the same time, the languages of minority groups are viewed as having low status, with no legitimate place in schools. Students who are speakers of these languages are often encouraged to leave them behind as they become proficient in the dominant language. Shohamy (2006:174) argues that the dominant national language is ‘viewed in ideological terms as part of a national identity embedded with notions that language is an indicator of loyalty, patriotism, belonging, inclusion, and membership’. Such views are clear in the statements of the British politicians quoted in Chapter 1. Furthermore, Shohamy points out, not only is the dominant language privileged above others, but schools accord no legitimacy for multimodalities, mixing of languages, hybrid forms or non-verbal varieties of expression. Busch and Schick (2007) argue that as educational materials and curricula are 44

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usually centrally produced by governments, they become a means of promoting a single unified standard as the national language and in so doing fail to build on learners’ own language resources. These ideological positions are perpetuated and reproduced by national tests that assess standards of the dominant language for all students. Cummins argues that there is currently massive loss of language resources because young children are given few opportunities to use and become literate in their heritage languages. He refers to the negative and inaccurate messages which children receive in school regarding the status and utility of these languages: ‘Children understand very quickly that the school is an English-only zone and they often internalize ambivalence and shame in relation to their linguistic and cultural heritage’ (2005:590). Edwards (2004:116) argues that in England, government policy towards the education of bilingual learners has been inconsistent. While there has been official encouragement for teachers to adopt bilingual teaching strategies in the early years of children’s schooling, this has been at best a transitional approach, designed as support for young children until they are sufficiently proficient in English to leave their community language behind. The current policy has been developed around an argument that the huge diversity in languages that exists in English schools makes bilingual education in mainstream schooling impossible and undesirable. There has never been a statutory requirement for teachers to maintain students’ minority languages in school. Bilingual children learning English as an additional language are placed in English mainstream school classrooms, where their language and learning needs are to be met by a working partnership between the subject teacher and English as an additional language (EAL) teacher (Creese 2005). However, even where EAL support teachers are literate in the languages of their students, they may feel use of a language other than English is inappropriate or embarrassing and therefore mostly use English (Baker 2006; Martin-Jones and Saxena, 2001, 2003). The bulk of language support in English schools is monolingual and is delivered in English (Creese 2004). In effect, England offers only a ‘transitional’ model of education for bilingual English language learners. That is, languages other than English are used in the classroom for the purpose of a quick transition to English (Creese, 2004, 2005). Chen (2007) points out that since the passage of the Education Reform Act in 1988, ethnic minority children are no longer routinely withdrawn from classes for language support, and support teachers have moved into mainstream classes rather than providing extra English lessons. Chen concludes that learners of EAL are treated in the same way as English monolinguals, as their particular linguistic needs are ignored. However, Cable et al. (2003) found that with the progressive 45

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decentralisation of school management, some schools are beginning to introduce or re-introduce EAL ‘induction’ programmes and/or ‘withdrawal’ classes for students new to English. Sneddon (2008) argues that notwithstanding the linguistic resources of their students, schools in England remain ambivalent about promoting the multilingualism of their pupils. The current National Curriculum makes only passing mention of bilingualism. More recent policy documents make positive references to bilingual learners as part of an agenda for raising the achievement of pupils from minority ethnic communities: a government policy document (DfES, 2003) and a study from the Office for Standards in Education include examples of the beneficial impact on achievement of using pupils’ first languages in the classroom (OfSTED, 2005). Furthermore, the National Languages Strategy (DfES, 2002) provides an entitlement for all pupils in upper primary classrooms to learn languages: any language may be taught, at the discretion of the school, taking into account parental preference, linguistic context and teacher availability. However, where languages are studied in curriculum time, the main European languages, primarily French, are still the most frequently taught. Sneddon (2008:137) concludes that in practice ‘it is rare to hear pupils speak any language other than English in class’. In spite of what may be written in government and school policies about valuing the languages of the home, the most common practice in this respect is restricted to a celebratory approach, which encourages (for example) multilingual welcome signs, dual language books in the library and children responding to the attendance register with greetings in several languages (Sneddon 2008:137). Professional development materials to improve the attainment of bilingual pupils recommend that teachers celebrate children’s languages through the use of first languages in the classroom wherever possible, as well as a closer engagement with families and communities (DfES, 2006). Conteh (2007) found that government policy related to language diversity in mainstream schools has been motivated by a tacit, but strongly stated, concern to ‘contain’ bilingualism and to prepare pupils for a monolingual rather than a multilingual future in society. Community languages have steadily been marginalized and their place in mainstream classrooms eroded. At present, there is no professional qualification for teachers of bilingual students learning EAL. Indeed, Cooke (2007) points out that opportunities to gain specialist qualifications are now much more limited than they were 20 years ago. It is not possible to specialize in EAL or to make language issues central in initial teacher training. EAL teachers’ specialization in EAL comes through their own commitment in practice and through continuing professional development courses run through their local government services and university 46

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courses (Creese 2004). The number of bilingual teachers in schools in England is currently estimated to be 4 per cent (Conteh 2007). Conteh argues that ‘if we genuinely do want to help raise the achievements of ethnic minority bilingual learners in our schools, we need to recognise the distinctive skills and knowledge of bilingual teachers’ (2007:469). In individual schools and at the classroom level, on the other hand, individual teachers have for some time been creating resources to encourage the use of community languages in primary schools (Sneddon 2008). What we have said, then, is that there is very considerable research evidence that argues that when people develop multilingual proficiency they benefit socially, personally, cognitively and (sometimes) economically. In many educational settings, especially in the developed western world, opportunities to cultivate multilingualism in schools are lost in the persistent drive towards homogeneity. However, this is not to say that mainstream schooling necessarily neglects the multilingual resources of students. Rather, evidence suggests that educational policy often fails to create the conditions in which teachers are able to change their practice, and progress continues at best in an ad hoc and piecemeal fashion. In this book we examine the educational contexts of complementary schools, set up at least in part by groups who want to pass on to the next generation their minority community languages. In the next section, we review some of the research which has been conducted in the emergent field of complementary school education.

Complementary schools In the United States and Canada non-statutory educational settings which teach languages to those with familial and/or ancestral ties are usually termed ‘heritage language schools’ (Hornberger 2005a). In Australia, these institutions are normally called ‘community language schools’ or ‘ethnic schools’, while in the United Kingdom, they have often been referred to as ‘supplementary schools’. In the present study, as elsewhere (Martin et al. 2006; Creese et al. 2008), we settle on the term ‘complementary schools’, to emphasize the positive complementary function of these teaching and learning environments in relation to mainstream schools. García (2005:601) resists the term ‘heritage language’ saying it speaks of what was left behind in remote lands, what is in one’s past and is ‘certainly not something that is used in the present or that can be projected into the future’. García argues convincingly that in the United States the growth of the term ‘heritage languages’ has been complicit in the silencing of the word ‘bilingual’. Furthermore, Brutt-Griffler and Makoni argue that the term ‘heritage language’ is 47

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problematic in that it fails to deal with the complexities of language use and ideology in African contexts, and ‘ill suits the majority of contexts in the world’ (2005:612). Hornberger (2005b) accepts that none of the terms for ‘heritage language’ is ever straightforward or neutral, and they shift in meaning as social and political contexts change. However, much of the research hitherto conducted in the emergent field of complementary schooling has emanated from Canada and the United States and privileges the term ‘heritage language’. Complementary schooling in the United Kingdom is a result of historical processes and attitudes, which do not see the learning and teaching of the minority languages and cultures as the state’s responsibility (DES 1985; Rassool 1995, 1997, 2008). In our research, we view complementary schooling as a response to a historically monolingual ideology, which ignores the complexity of multilingual England. The government-commissioned Swann Report of 1985 still underpins national policy regarding community languages in the mainstream (Rampton 2006). In one well-known statement, the report proposed that linguistic and cultural maintenance was beyond the remit of mainstream education and would be ‘best achieved within the ethnic minority communities themselves’ (DES 1985:406). In many ways, this view has contributed to separation between the voluntary and statutory education sectors, and there is now a long history of the two sectors having little contact with one another in any institutional sense. Creese and Martin (2006:1) see complementary schooling ‘as a response to a historically monolingual ideology which ignores the complexity of multilingual England’. Li Wei (2006:78) argues that complementary schools in the United Kingdom ‘were set up in response to the failure of the mainstream education system to meet the needs of ethnic minority children and their communities’. He further argues that this fact has been deliberately ignored by a succession of UK governments, which have tried to appropriate complementary schools for their own political and economic agendas. Complementary schools have been marginalized by national UK education policy, and ‘were seen as a minority concern and were left with ethnic minority communities to deal with themselves’ (Li Wei 2006:78). Creese et al. (2006:23) argue that Gujarati complementary schools in Leicester provided multilingual children with a safe haven for exploring ethnic and linguistic identities while producing opportunities for performing successful learner identities. The complementary schools were ‘political and social contexts where particular ideologies dominate and children, adolescents, teachers and parents interact to reproduce and reaffirm or resist and challenge these ideologies’ (Creese et al. 2006:24). The researchers found that complementary schools provided safe spaces for the performance 48

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of different identity positions, including ‘heritage/community’ identities, ‘learning’ identities and ‘multicultural’ identities. Complementary schools provided bilingual contexts for identity negotiation in which languages and linguistic repertoires were foregrounded in schools’ mission statements. At the same time, students in the schools did not view their languages as being tied to any one ‘culture’ or ‘ethnicity’. Rather ‘they described using their languages to identify with several overlapping cultures including classroom, school, family, heritage and popular youth cultures’ (Creese et al. 2006:41). Martin et al. (2006) found that complementary schools provided environments in which students and teachers moved flexibly between languages, and that this was ‘a perfectly normal facet of interaction and is, indeed, an important way of expressing different or hybrid identities’ (2006:20). These diverse linguistic repertoires projected shifting, multiple identity positions. Recent UK government educational policy is prepared to endorse the teaching and learning of community languages in the mainstream (DfES 2002; Dearing 2007) while also putting pressure on mainstream schools to reach out to their communities and their voluntary schools (DfES, 2003). On the other hand, however, in political and media discourses there is an increasing anxiety about languages other than English and their role in multicultural England (Blackledge 2005). Complementary schooling exists in an environment which is largely monolingual in ideological orientation. Although government rhetoric purports to endorse and celebrate multilingualism and multiculturalism in schools, others have shown how this celebratory discourse serves to work against linguistic diversity. Bourne (2001) argues that we need to move beyond a celebratory view of languages other than English in the mainstream. Such a perspective views minority languages as nothing more than a safe rhetorical device in which their rich resource manifests itself as an occasional story or song about a different culture. Bourne suggests that this view of diversity plays its part in keeping other languages ‘outside and incidental to the learning process’ (2001:251). Rassool (1995:288) makes a similar point and argues that when cultural diversity, and to a lesser extent, linguistic diversity, are celebrated and valued in schools, this is done ‘without recourse to the social experiences of the speakers of these languages’. Francis et al. (2008) studied Chinese complementary schools in four cities in England, and found that teachers saw the ‘replication of Chinese culture’ (p. 10) as a key purpose of the schools. For these teachers, this meant teaching values such as ‘respect’ as well as ‘Chinese philosophy’. The students attending these schools had a different view, however, as they mainly saw the purpose of the schools as maintaining proficiency in the Chinese language. The students valued the opportunity 49

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to meet with friends and to learn about Chinese culture. The students also said that learning Chinese in complementary schools provided them with the opportunity to maintain their family affiliation with Hong Kong. Also, the pupils said that ‘they needed to learn the Chinese language because they are Chinese’ (Francis et al. 2008:9). Wu (2006) reviewed Chinese complementary schooling in England and found that the schools afforded spaces for the development of ‘a new culture’ (2006:72) and ‘brought together the different socio-historical histories of participants and allowed for renegotiation within the context of Chinese community language schools’ (p. 73). Notwithstanding their neglect by government, Li Wei argues that complementary schools are socially, politically and educationally important institutions, which ‘will continue to present a challenge to the ideologies of mainstream education and society’ (2006:82). In a further recent study of complementary schooling in the United Kingdom, Kenner et al. (2008) investigated Bangladeshi-heritage children learning Bengali in mainstream and community contexts and found that cognitive and cultural advantages of bilingual learning apply not only when learning a new language, but also for second and third generation children who are working with two already familiar languages. Lo Bianco (2008:54) suggests that intergenerational language maintenance requires institutional support, ethnic loyalty, ideological beliefs about nation-state–person, and makes heritage language policy different from other kinds of language education advocacy. Lo Bianco points out that heritage-language based bilingualism is often devalued in comparison with majority-community bilingualism. Bilingualism attained by speakers who learn English and maintain their minority language rarely attracts the same kudos or provides access to the same capital as the acquisition of foreign languages by majority English speakers. Indeed, Lo Bianco notes that policy may regard some minority languages in more negative terms than this: ‘underlying the lower priority given to heritage languages is a discursive representation that aligns heritage language advocacy with interests contrary to or at least dissonant with “the national interest”, even, in extremis, potentially disrupting “national security”’ (2008:56). In political and media discourse in the United Kingdom since the New York and London terrorist attacks in 2001 and 2005 respectively, some minority languages other than English have been associated with a threat to national unity, social cohesion and British identity (Blackledge 2005, 2006, 2009). Lo Bianco argues that as long as nations associate language with the corporate identity of the nation and then link the nation with the state, heritage language advocacy is vulnerable to accusations of the undermining of the nation or sedition. Furthermore, he argues, as long as modernity is associated 50

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with consumerism, capital and individualism, heritage language advocacy risks being declared parochial (2008:67). Clyne and Fernandez (2008) note that after-hours ‘ethnic community schools’ have existed in Australia since 1857. The languages with the largest number of students in these schools are Chinese, Greek and Arabic. Often the children speak only English at home, and some do not hear the community language much, so the onus is on the ethnic school to provide practically the only input in the community language in two or three hours weekly. The pupils tend to speak the community language to the teachers but English among themselves, both in and out of class. This can have the effect of discouraging those who have been speaking the community language from doing so (Clyne 2005). As the classes are often run on Saturdays, they compete with sporting and other extracurricular activities and are therefore not always attractive to their students. Successive governments have distanced themselves from community involvement in education, preferring to rely on ‘topdown’ policy. However, ‘ethnic schools’ continue to thrive, under their umbrella organization Community Languages Australia. Kipp (2008:81) acknowledges that Australia does not make the best of its linguistic resources but on the other hand argues that ‘institutions put in place during the halcyon days of language policy making and implementation are still making a significant contribution to multilingualism of Australia’. Kipp argues that in many ways Australia’s approach to multilingualism since the 1970s has become a model for other countries to follow. Clyne and Fernandez suggest that despite the evident multiculturalism of Australia, the future of community language learning depends on societal attitudes. They articulate their concern that the dominant monolingual mindset of Australia and increasing xenophobia could lead to a sidelining of all but the top six languages away from mainstream schools into ethnic schools. For some languages, ‘discriminatory practices against those with a home background will have a demotivating effect on language maintenance’ (2008:179). Clyne and Fernandez suggest that a further challenge will be to ensure that students with and without a background in the community language they are studying at school will be supported to fully develop their language skills. Borland (2005) found that diasporic communities formed in Australia as a result of recent migration movements faced particular issues and challenges in supporting the intergenerational transmission of their heritage language. In her study of provision for Maltese-background people in Melbourne, she found that community leaders in Australia considered heritage language and culture education important for strengthening ethnic and cultural identity while enhancing a positive sense of self for the second and subsequent generations of 51

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young people of Maltese background. The study concluded that ‘there are clearly benefits for members of the community in strengthening their awareness and knowledge of their heritage culture and language’ (Borland 2005:120). In the context of the United States, García (2005:604) decries the loss of ‘safe spaces’ provided in bilingual education programmes but suggests that complementary schools can offer an informal, communityled initiative to prise open a ‘crack’ in the educational homogenization that surrounds the ‘No Child Left Behind Act’, that allows bilingual instruction to continue in the face of monolingualizing ideologies. García concedes that heritage languages in education are good for language-minority children who are receiving no mother-tongue support in schools, but ‘they are a far cry from what we should be doing with the nation’s bilingualism and biliteracy potential’ (2005:604). Hornberger (2005b:606) suggests that it is essential for language educators to ‘fill up implementational spaces with multilingual educational practices’ in the face of restrictive policies. She argues that ideological spaces created by language and education policies can be seen as carving out implementational spaces at classroom and community levels, but such spaces can also serve as wedges to pry open ideological ones. Hornberger (2007:188) views the rise of what she calls ‘the heritage language initiative’ as a movement which helps to ‘solidify, support, and promote longstanding grassroots minority language maintenance and revitalization efforts’. In their account of ‘heritage language learners’ in the United States, Hornberger and Wang (2008:6) adopt an ecological view of heritage language learners’ identity. Specifically, they view heritage language learners as ‘individuals with familial or ancestral ties to a language other than English who exert their agency in determining if they are heritage language learners of that language’. They take into consideration the social, economic and political position of these learners and focus on the identity and biliteracy development of heritage language learners in their ecological systems. Only in this way, they argue, can theory be developed that enables researchers and policy makers to understand how learners of heritage languages present and represent themselves. Hornberger (2007:189) further argues that the heritage language initiative ‘takes an ecological, resource view of indigenous, immigrant, ethnic, and foreign languages as living and evolving in relation to each other and to their environment and as requiring support lest any of them become further endangered’. May (2008:23) suggests that heritage language programmes ‘can be regarded as an additive and strong bilingual approach’. He notes that increasingly, the majority of students in such programmes tend to be second-language speakers of the target language and the result of previous patterns of language shift 52

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and loss of the heritage language. Kagan and Dillon (2008:151) argue, however, that there is as yet no standard approach to teaching heritage languages. They acknowledge that the teaching of heritage language learners can be complicated by attitudes these students may encounter in the educational system. For example, heritage language teachers may insist on ‘pure’ or ‘standard’ forms, and in doing so stigmatize varieties spoken in the students’ families. Cummins (2005:585) argues that teaching of heritage languages is marginalized with respect to funding provision, number of languages involved and number of students who participate. Many students continue to be actively discouraged from using or maintaining their home languages in mainstream classrooms, and there is massive attrition of students’ heritage language competence over the course of schooling. Cummins identifies ‘the bizarre scenario of schools transforming fluent speakers of foreign languages into monolingual English speakers, at the same time as they struggle, largely unsuccessfully, to transform English monolingual students into foreign language speakers’ (2005:586). Cummins calls for an alternative scenario in which instructional spaces are opened up for teaching that actively promotes cross-lingual transfer and language awareness, and one in which students are encouraged to view their multilingual talents as a valued component of their identities (see also Norton Peirce, 1995, Norton 1997, 2000, 2006, 2008). Hornberger (2005b) argues that multilinguals’ learning is maximized when they are allowed and enabled to draw from across all their existing language skills, rather than being constrained by monolingual instructional assumptions and practices. Hornberger (2005b) acknowledges that heritage language learning is not universally valued, however, and suggests that both society and heritage language learners themselves position expertise in, and allegiance to, heritage languages variously as ‘problem’, ‘right’ and ‘resource’ (Ruiz 1984). Duff (2008) reviewed 30 years of research on heritage language programmes in Canada. She found that despite the satisfaction expressed by many participants in bilingual heritage language programmes, commonly cited problems included the need for language teaching that does more than pay lip service to ‘multiculturalism’ and instead cultivates proficiency in the target language, develops nuanced intercultural understandings and promotes ethnic identification and internationalisation. Duff (2008:87) also found that there was a need for ‘appropriate teacher education and suitable, engaging curriculum/materials development, along with the incorporation of new media’. These appear to be recurrent issues throughout research in complementary schools. Freeman (2007:15) found that there is a considerable shortage of teachers for complementary school classes in the United States, and even 53

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where teachers were available they often had not been trained to meet the diverse needs of their students. Baldauf (2005) conducted research on community language provision in Australia and similarly found that there was no formal provision for specialist language teachers, and that there was a need to better understand the training needs of community language teachers. Clyne and Fernandez (2008:175) on the other hand, found that ‘ethnic schoolteachers’ in Australia are now generally qualified and often teach in regular schools during the week. Maguire and Curdt-Christiansen (2007) investigated the experiences and affiliations of children attending a Chinese heritage language school in Canada, and found that the school represented a socializing and ideological space, ‘a place for learning Chinese culture and traditions’ (p. 67). At the same time, some of the students resisted being categorized as ‘Chinese’ and articulated negative attitudes to having to attend their ‘Saturday school’. Maguire noticed that most of the children she studied were able to negotiate subject positions, which allowed them to move in and out of positive and negative orientations to learning Chinese. Most of them considered learning Chinese to be ‘a necessary part of growing up, aligned themselves with Chinese culture, and expressed their allegiance to China and being Chinese’ (p. 74). Many of the students saw learning Chinese as an obligation to their families and an important part of their identity. Curdt-Christiansen (2006) explored issues of teaching and learning Chinese as a heritage language in a Chinese heritage language school in Montreal. The study found that teachers’ prior experiences, cultural backgrounds and discursive practices could constrain or enhance the students’ participation both in learning and in the construction of knowledge. When the heritage language teachers’ cultural background and discursive practices were in contrast to the ones students experienced in their everyday activities, students struggled to adjust to the heritage language classroom. He (2006, 2008) also studied Chinese heritage language learners in the United States, and concluded that heritage language development is situated in learners’ participation in social practice and depends on ‘the degree to which s/he is able to find continuity and coherence in multiple communicative and social worlds in time and space and to develop hybrid, situated identities and stances’ (He 2006:1). McGinnis (2008) argues that Chinese heritage language schools in the United States have moved from being ‘derivative’ to become ‘innovative’ and in doing so are benefiting not only the American educational system but ‘society as a whole’ (p. 240), in providing a means of sustaining, expanding and enhancing understanding of Chinese language and culture. McGinnis argues, however, that while we can take heart from the contribution of the Chinese heritage sector, a failure to integrate heritage language 54

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learners into the mainstream educational system ‘is a squandering of a precious natural resource’ (McGinnis 2008:240). Valdés et al. (2008) propose that a key challenge facing the field of heritage language teaching is that of determining the role that educational settings should play in language maintenance. Arguing that frequently embedded within educational institutions are hegemonic beliefs about monolingualism and multilingualism, they examine whether heritage language teaching may transmit ‘nation-imagining beliefs and values that can often result in the alienation and marginalization of the heritage students’ (2008:107). The researchers investigated language ideologies in a Spanish language department in a university in the United States, and found that ideologies of language indirectly reproduced the ideological hegemony of the state. Everyday interaction in the department transmitted the message that (Spanish) monolinguallike behaviour was the ideal, and U.S. Latinos must be reconstituted as imitation monolingual speakers of Spanish if they were to be valued. Valdés et al. (2008:125) concluded that ‘the department echoes the existing nation-imagining beliefs of U.S. society within which bilingualism – especially when developed in homes and communities by immigrant populations – is profoundly suspect’. While teaching literature in Spanish the department transmitted ‘views that support the idealization of the monolingual native, a view that, while focused on Spanish, nevertheless is complicit with the deep values and linguistic beliefs of American monolingualism’ (p. 125). Valdés et al. propose that one of the reasons that such ideologies are commonly reproduced in such settings is that the teachers are often individuals raised in places where the language they teach is the dominant and/or national language. Besides their deep personal commitment to the languages they teach, they may have little knowledge or understanding of societal bilingualism and ‘give much attention to ‘protecting’ the language from contamination . . . and to providing a model of a standard target language free of vulgar colloquialisms and popular jargon’ (Valdés et al. (2008:126). Valdés et al. suggest that heritage language teachers who are committed to the maintenance and teaching of their language may become intolerant of the contact varieties of the language used by heritage speakers because they have little understanding of language contact and bilingualism. They argue that teachers’ fear of contamination and erosion in their own language may contribute to the scorn that they direct at bilinguals who, unlike the teachers, may be second or third generation speakers of the heritage language. The researchers suggest that language practices will be coloured by a national aesthetic that is concerned with the characteristic features of the original national language and culture. Ricento (2005) counsels that advocates for the 55

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promotion of heritage languages need to look critically at the assumptions in which they may be complicit. Ricento argues that ‘heritage’ discourses may help promote the status quo with regard to the status and utility of languages other than English, viewing them as ‘foreign’ rather than ‘American’. In this book, we engage with these and other as yet ‘unexamined challenges’ (Valdés et al. 2008:124) in heritage language teaching and learning. In this chapter, we have introduced some of the previous research which provides a context for our investigation of the linguistic practices of multilingual young people in four urban settings in England. We argue that linguistic practices are always subject to, and shaped by, language ideologies, and language ideologies are constantly subject to, and shaped by, linguistic practices. In the context of our study, language ideologies include the monolingual mindset of the majority in England, which appears to consider that minority languages other than English are at best a private matter, and at worst a threat to social cohesion and national unity. At the same time, language ideologies include reified views of standard versions of minority languages and literacies other than English, which privilege some language varieties above others. Linguistic practices in our investigation do not merely constitute young people, their parents and their teachers ‘code-switching’ by using more than one language in a single utterance. Rather, we take linguistic practice to include the eclectic, often fragmented, inclusive utterances, which multilingual young people and adults use to make meaning. We adopt an approach that privileges language as social practice, speakers as social actors and boundaries as products of social action. We set out an interdisciplinary framework in which to engage with the interplay between language and the social and the process of meaning-creation in the making of context. We do not view ‘multilingualism’ as a fixed pattern of language use but as an inventive, creative, sometimes disruptive play of linguistic resources. This complex performance of multiple voices is always situated in social and political contexts, one of which is educational policy and practice. Here we engage briefly with multilingualism research in educational settings, and find that not only is the dominant language often privileged above others, but policy and practice often fails to value diversity of expression, as education policies and practices deny the multilingual reality of their constituency. Finally, we review research on complementary schools whose rationale can be seen as a response to a historically monolingual ideology which ignores the complexity of multilingual societies. This emergent field of research engages with grass-roots movements which have enabled immigrant communities in a variety of world contexts to (attempt to) maintain the languages and other practices associated 56

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with their territories of ancestral origin. These schools are potentially settings that open up spaces for young people to perform a broad range of multilingual repertoires. At the same time, they may be spaces in which students come to contest and challenge the reified subject positions imposed upon them institutionally. As such, they offer important multilingual environments in which to examine the interplay of linguistic practices, ideologies and identities in urban settings at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

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Ethnography of multilingualism

Heller (2008:250) suggests that doing ethnographic research allows us to tell our story of someone else’s experience, ‘a story which illuminates social processes and generates explanations for why people do and think the things they do’. Heller proposes that one of the compelling things about ethnographies of multilingualism, in particular, is that multilingualism is all about boundaries. That is, ‘it is all about what counts as the difference between two languages, about who counts as a speaker of particular languages, and about how the categorization of languages and language practices is connected to the categorization of groups of people’ (2008:252). In line with Heller’s account, we put at the centre of our investigation an approach that is critical because it addresses the issue of the ways in which social differences are connected to social inequality. Adopting a critical perspective allows us to focus on the ways in which language practices are socially and politically situated. In political and other public discourses in the United Kingdom, multilingual practices have recently been tied to the regulation of citizenship, social cohesion, national unity, British identity and even national security. An ethnographic approach to researching multilingualism allows us to link these discourses about multilingualism to the linguistic practices of everyday communication, both in and out of institutional settings. In this book, we adopt a critical ethnographic approach to multilingualism, acknowledging that bilingualism is itself a social construct and always about power, distribution of linguistic resources and construction of boundaries. Furthermore, we argue that these boundaries are reproduced, contested, challenged, fought over, altered and at times demolished in negotiations which become visible in the fine-grained detail of language interactions. Our ‘own stories’ of multilingualism are built into a team ethnography made up of different voices and experiences that weaves together different languages, beliefs, values and relationships with our research participants. We describe this further in this chapter, and the one that follows. In our attempts to understand the linguistic practices of multilingual young people in urban settings in the United Kingdom, we view multilingualism in terms of both ideologies and practices. Ours is 58

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a continuation of a sociolinguistic journey attempting to deal with what Heller describes as: Fundamental questions about the exact nature of the relationship between language and society: What is it about the way we use language that has an impact on social processes? What is it about social processes that influences linguistic ones? (Heller 1984:54)

We do not see ideologies and practices as separate entities. Rather, as we argued in Chapter 2, the interactional is suffused with the ideological and the ideological with the interactional. Silverstein (2003:202) has similarly argued that the ideological is a projection of the everchanging ‘interdiscursivities’ of the interactional which ‘at any given moment of macro-order diachrony asymmetrically determine others’. In other words, the ideological and the interactional are mutually informing. We agree with Blommaert (2005:16) that an ethnographic approach is one in which the analysis of small phenomena is set against an analysis of big phenomena, and in which ‘both levels can only be understood in terms of one another’. In this book, we explore how social ideologies about bilingualism, multilingualism and monolingualism are created, depleted, implemented and contested. We look at how participants in complementary schools practise and frame their language(s) interactionally, and how these interactions shape cultural reproductions in these community run schools.

Ethnography Ethnographic research seeks its data from the ways in which realities are framed and reframed. Approaches in the ethnographic tradition emphasize the plurality of realities employed by the people being researched and the meaning they assign to actions and objects as well as their notions of what is important and interesting (Hymes 1980; Shaffir and Stebbins, 1991). Traditionally, ethnographers have set out to be unobtrusive recorders of activity and faithful reporters of patterns in the field (Eisenhart 2001a, b). Erickson (1990:80) speaks of the need to be empirical without being positivistic, ‘to be rigorous and systematic in investigating the slippery phenomena of everyday interaction and its connections, through the medium of subjective meaning, with the wider social world’. Ethnographers strive to be reflective in representing and interpreting the social context of their research participants as they engage in social action alongside those they are researching. Moreover, there are attempts at deliberate scrutiny of the researcher’s own positioning and performances while in the ‘field’. Field work is central to the ethnographic enterprise. Erickson (1990) argues that field 59

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work is needed because of the invisibility of everyday life. Through field work, the ethnographer documents concrete details of practice and is able to consider the local meanings that practices have for the people involved in them. Blommaert (2001:3) argues that field work is more than data collection: [E]thnography is far more than a set of techniques or methods for field work and description. It cannot be reduced to ways of treating ‘data’ either, for ‘data’ in ethnography have a different status than in many other disciplines. Data are chunks of reality that have a (autobiographical) history of being known and interpreted.

The importance of ‘being there’ (Geertz 1988) in ethnography is another founding principle. Traditional ethnography has typically stressed a situated and contextually driven agenda of being ‘on site’ and geographically locatable. Eisenhart describes the challenges of doing ethnography in post-modern ‘translocal times’ (2001b:21). She points to the difficulty of conceptualizing the participant, the community and the site and argues we need to adjust our conceptual orientations and methodological priorities to take into account changing human experiences and priorities. She describes three ‘muddles’ in her account of ethnography past, present and future and then explores how these ‘muddles’ might be ‘tidied up’. The first ‘muddle’ she explores is ‘the trouble with culture’. She points out that we can no longer work with a view of culture ‘as relatively enduring, coherent and bounded’ (2001a:17). In her words, we are on ‘shaky ground’ if we use the term culture to describe social groups of people ‘with a culture that is clearly bounded and determined, internally coherent, and uniformly meaningful’ (p.17). The second ‘muddle’ she explores is ‘the enthusiasm (or not) for ethnography’ (p. 19). Here, Eisenhart explores the limitations of the sole ethnographer’s ability to participate in various settings, the amount of time the researcher can devote and the researcher’s areas of special interest and expertise. She points out that aspects of contemporary life, ‘struggles within groups, movements of people across time and space, internet communications, extralocal networks, consumerism, and the mass media’ can only be addressed superficially through current ethnographic methods. The third ‘muddle’ she describes is ‘whither ethnographers’ responsibilities to others?’ This last issue is concerned with representation issues and ethnography’s ability to represent multiple and diverse perspectives or ‘voices’ (p. 19). Eisenhart suggests that ethnographers of education should use their knowledge for educational intervention. She stresses the need to be ‘clear about our own agendas and commitments, speak what we know and believe in, listen, deliberate, negotiate, and compromise around knowledge and beliefs’ (p. 24). 60

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In describing how ethnography should ‘tidy up’ these three muddles, she describes ways in which ethnographers can respond. These include: 1. Use of collaborative teams to broaden insights and perspectives. 2. Development of models stressing mutual and shared relationship between the researcher and the researched. 3. Experiments in writing (textualist strategies) that allow more perspectives or ‘voices’ to be revealed in final accounts. 4. Research narratives which show divisions, struggles or inconsistencies in the data. 5. Different media to present the data – engaging audiences in different ways. 6. Personal narratives to portray diverse viewpoints. 7. A movement away from focus on individual people to tools of communication and interrelationship mediated by ‘translocal’ phenomena such as new technologies. Eisenhart’s ethnography looks for ways to ‘track the movement, instantiations, and effects of symbolic and material forms in various places’ (p. 24). She suggests that we must be ready to extend or go beyond ethnography’s conventional methods ‘to meet the challenges these forms (or new ways of looking at them) present’ (p. 24). In other words, ethnography needs to open up to different configurations, adapting to changing social contexts in the pursuit of the sociology of knowledge.

Linguistic ethnography As a term designating a particular configuration of interests within the broader field of socio- and applied linguistics, ‘linguistic ethnography’ is a theoretical and methodological development orienting towards particular, established traditions but defining itself in the new intellectual climate of late modernity and post-structuralism. The debate about ‘what is’ and ‘what is not’ distinctive to an understanding of linguistic ethnography is current, and the term linguistic ethnography itself is in its infancy. It can be conceived as an ideological web (Blommaert and Verschueren, 1998:25), which frames opinions and actions, provides ‘the groundwork of our thinking and identity’ or harnesses ‘ideological dilemmas’ (Billig:1988), which can be used to explore sometimes contradictory positions in creative and productive ways – requiring constant reflection and revisiting of positions. Different traditions combined in linguistic ethnography include interpretive approaches from anthropology, applied linguistics, cultural studies and sociology. Linguistic ethnography typically takes a post-structuralist orientation by critiquing essentialist accounts of social life. 61

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Linguistic ethnography has been shaped by developments in linguistic anthropology in the mid-twentieth century in the United States (Creese 2008; Rampton et al. 2004; Rampton 2007). Particular strands of linguistic anthropology that have influenced linguistic ethnography are the ethnography of communication (Hymes 1968, 1974, 1980), interactional sociolinguistics (Gumperz 1982, 1999) and micro ethnography (Erickson 1990, 1996). Hymes is well known for criticizing both linguistics, for not making ethnography the starting point for the analysis of language use, and anthropology, for insufficiently drawing upon linguistics to understand and describe culture and context: ‘it is not linguistics, but ethnography, not language, but communication, which must provide the frame of reference within which the place of language in culture and society is to be assessed’ (Hymes 1974:4). For Hymes, what was needed was a general theory and body of knowledge within which diversity of speech repertoires, and ways of speaking, take primacy as the unit of analysis. Hymes’ argument was that the analysis of speech over language would enable social scientists to articulate how social behaviour and speech interact in a systematic, ruled and principled way. This view became articulated in the ethnography of speaking (Hymes 1968) and later, the ethnography of communication (Hymes 1974). Another tradition which has shaped linguistic ethnography is interactional sociolinguistics, which focuses on discursive practice in social contexts and considers how societal and interactive forces merge. The goal of interactional sociolinguistics is to analyse how interactants read-out and create meanings in interaction. Because language indexes social life and its structures and rituals, language use can be analysed to understand how presuppositions operate in interactions. Moreover, interactional sociolinguistics has looked at how interactants use language to create contexts. Interactional sociolinguistics is often concerned with intercultural encounters and the systematic differences in the cultural assumptions and patterns of linguistic behaviour, which are considered normal by those involved (Roberts 1998). In their empirical work, Gumperz (1999) and others (Ochs 1993) show that when we speak, we have ways of conveying to the listener complex information about how we intend them to treat the message. Ochs (1993) argues: ‘in any given actual situation, at any given actual moment, people in those situations are actively constructing their social identities rather than passively living out some cultural prescription for social identity’ (Ochs 1993:296, 298). A main purpose of interactional sociolinguistic analysis is to show how diversity affects interpretation, and in this respect, it has much in common with micro-ethnography and the work of Erickson (1990, 1996). 62

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Micro-ethnography has demonstrated that people do not just follow cultural rules but actively and non-deterministically construct what they do. Erickson shows that listening is just as important as speaking in creating these environments, and speakers are in an ecological relationship with auditors (2004). Erickson’s work has been influenced by Goffman (1959), whose concern with the presentation of self in daily life has done much to demonstrate that in any encounter speakers produce signals which reveal aspects of our identities. Erickson, like Goffman, has emphasized close, detailed observation of situated interaction. The approaches described here, with their emphasis on close observational and textual analysis interpreted through an ethnographic understanding of the context, have all, in some way, shaped the work of scholars of linguistic ethnography. Like the early work in the ethnography of communication, which argued that linguistics had wrongly occupied itself wholly with the structure of the referential code at the expense of the social (Hymes 1974, 1980), linguistic ethnography’s argument is also for a socially constituted linguistics. Oriented towards these particular epistemological and methodological traditions in the study of social life, linguistic ethnography argues that ethnography can benefit from the analytical frameworks provided by linguistics, while linguistics can benefit from the processes of reflexive sensitivity required in ethnography. In linguistic ethnography, linguistics is said to offer an ethnographic analysis of a wide range of established procedures for isolating and identifying linguistic and discursive structures. In contrast, in linguistic ethnography, ethnographic analysis is said to offer linguistic analysis a non-deterministic perspective on data. Because ethnography looks for uniqueness as well as patterns in interaction, it ‘warns against making hasty comparisons which can blind one to the contingent moments and the complex cultural and semiotic ecologies that give any phenomenon its meaning’ (Rampton et al. 2004:2). A linguistic ethnographic analysis then attempts to combine close detail of local action and interaction as embedded in a wider social world. It draws on the relatively technical vocabularies of linguistics to do this. Linguistic ethnography situates the study of language as action within a methodology – ethnography – that is very widely shared not just in anthropology but also in, inter alia, sociology, education and management studies. At the same time, ‘it specifies the linguistics of discourse and text as the primary resource for our efforts to contribute in a distinctive way to the broader enterprise of social science’ (Rampton 2007:600). Rampton suggests two tenets that underpin the development of linguistic ethnography: (1) ‘meaning takes shape within specific social relations, interactional histories and institutional regimes, produced and construed by agents with expectations and 63

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repertoires that have to be grasped ethnographically’; and (2) ‘meaning is far more than just an ‘expression of ideas’, as biography, identifications, stance and nuance are extensively signalled in the linguistic and textual fine-grain’ (2007:585). It is precisely the linguistic and textual fine-grain of multilingual urban settings to which the present book attends. In this book, we concur with Blommaert’s view of discourse as ‘language-in-action’ (2005:2), emphasizing the constitutive power of discourse. Here, we focus on the social nature of discourse and the power of discourse to make and remake the social world. Like Blommaert (2005:5), we tentatively propose that our contribution in developing a theoretical framework to underpin our study is ‘an attempt to bring together a number of insights and approaches that are dispersed over time, place, and sub-disciplinary audiences’. In particular, in order to bring into view the practices of young people in four urban settings, the lens we adopt is linguistic and ethnographic. This is not to say that our concerns begin and end with the word. Rather, our interest is as much in ethnography’s traditional object of study, ‘culture’ (Rampton 2007:595), using the open, reflexive social orientation of ethnographic methods to offer analytic purchase on social practices and structures (Tusting and Maybin, 2007:576). Two linguistic concepts are key to the analysis we present in subsequent chapters: (1) indexicality and (2) heteroglossia. The concept of indexicality has been crucial in making our arguments around discourse and power. Indexicality is language’s ability – through the sign – to call up social knowledge and association in an immediate and local context. Peirce (1955) showed that the meaning of the sign is not contained within it but arises in its interpretation, so that meaning-making is actively created according to a complex interplay of codes or conventions of which we are normally unaware. Silverstein (1976, 2003) demonstrates the unavoidable referentiality of language. He describes two aspects of indexicality: the first as ‘appropriateness to’ contextual parameters already established and the second as ‘effectiveness in’ bringing contextual parameters into being. Following Silverstein’s description further, we use indexicality to understand how participants in complementary schools use their language to reflect ‘appropriateness to’ already well-established sociolinguistic parameters as well as ‘effectiveness in’ bringing about new heteroglossic practices. We describe how our research participants use different linguistic signs to ‘read off’ fluid and quick-moving identity positions. As Wortham (2003:13) suggests ‘competent hearers identify members of their own linguistic community and make sense of utterances by attending to cues that are used in appropriate contexts.’ Indexicality, like heteroglossia, is a key

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concept in informing our analysis of linguistic practices in this book. Students and teachers in complementary schools use signs to make meaning. Sometimes, these signs are used to index stratified identity positions about ethnicity and language, so that the very use of one language and not another can index a subject position. For example, in Chapter 6, we will see that a teacher’s insistence on the community language in the classroom and the proscription of English indexes a position which ties language to a particular heritage, and also sets up a position that challenges the dominance of English in everyday life. However, at other times, language choice does not index such a stratified position and instead indexes the heteroglossic lives of the multilingual people in the eight complementary schools. In such a case, signs are used in a non-boundaried way, not belonging to any one particular language, but returning their social significance as an utterance in the interpretative frame in which they are used. We see the power of language to index a variety of identity positions, which are kept fluid by participants through their multilingualism. This fits well with Erickson’s views on interaction and identity: We are not just typecast by a single category of social identity throughout an entire encounter. Our social identity is situated in the interaction at hand; we perform it as we go along and we do so conjointly with the other interactional partners . . . Culture and language style differences, in other words, sometimes made a big difference for the way interaction happened, and sometimes it did not (Erickson 1996:295).

The students and teachers in this study are bilingual and multilingual, and they are able to use signs to index positions beyond language boundaries. Bailey (2007) distinguishes between code-switching and heteroglossia. A social constructivist approach views code-switching not as the use of two separate codes but rather as the heteroglossic use of different signs combined as a resource to make meaning (Bailey 2007). Whereas a traditional code-switching description might focus on categorizing languages and describing their functions, a social constructivist approach problematizes the constructs of ‘language’ and ‘community’ while resisting classifications of languages or communities into bounded systems. Bailey argues that rather than confining signs to different languages as would be typical in an account of ‘code-switching’, heteroglossia engages with both monolingual and multilingual forms at the same time, allowing for theorizing of social and historical contexts of the utterance. Following Bakhtin (1981, 1986, 1994), Bailey acknowledges

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that within every utterance there are traces of the social, political and historical forces that have shaped it. For Bakhtin the utterance: is entangled, shot through with shared thoughts, points of view, alien value judgements and accents, weaves in and out of complex interrelationships, merges with some, recoils from others . . . and having taken meaning and shape at a particular historical moment in a socially specific environment, cannot fail to brush up against thousands of living dialogic threads. (Bakhtin 1981:276)

For Bakhtin, a unitary language is not something given, but is always posited and ‘at every moment of its linguistic life is opposed to the realities of heteroglossia’ (1994:74). At the same time, however, the unitary language ‘makes its presence felt as a force for overcoming this heteroglossia, imposing specific limits to it’ (Bakhtin 1994:74). Bailey shows that rather than confining signs to different languages, as would be typical in an account of ‘code-switching’, heteroglossia allows for theorizing of social and historical contexts of the utterance. Moving beyond conventional code-switching research, Bailey argues that: heteroglossia can encompass socially meaningful forms in both bilingual and monolingual talk; it can account for the multiple meanings and readings of forms that are possible, depending on one’s subject position; and it can connect historical power hierarchies to the meanings and valences of particular forms in the hereand-now. (Bailey 2007:267)

Bailey demonstrates that the perspective of heteroglossia allows one to distinguish between local functions of particular code switches and their functions in relation to their social, political and historical contexts, in ways that formal code-switching analysis does not. He convincingly argues that the perspective of heteroglossia connects the linguistic with the social and the historical (2007:269). García argues that monoglossic ideologies of bilingualism and bilingual education treat each language as separate and whole, and view the two languages as bounded autonomous systems. In contrast, ‘a heteroglossic ideology of bilingualism considers multiple language practices in interrelationship’ (2009:7). With its disciplinary eclecticism, linguistic ethnography is well positioned to describe linguistic diversity in complementary schools that highlight social and linguistic indices through monoglot and heteroglot practices.

Interdisciplinarity and linguistic ethnography Linguistic ethnography’s current interpretive stance is shaped by a disciplinary eclecticism. For us, this enhances its appeal. It is the 66

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interdisciplinary nature of linguistic ethnography that allows us to look closely and look locally, while tying our observations to broader relations of power and ideology. Rampton argues that linguistic ethnography is ‘a site of encounter where a number of established lines of research interact, pushed together by circumstance, open to the recognition of new affinities, and sufficiently familiar with one another to treat differences with equanimity’ (2007:585). Recent research into linguistic interaction has begun to emphasize the advantages of combining analytical approaches, rather than relying on only one approach or framework (Zuengler and Mori, 2002; Rampton et al. 2002; Stubbe et al. 2003). Rampton et al. argue that a range of approaches to analysing classroom interaction ‘offer more to the analysis of classroom discourse in combination than they do alone’ (2002:387). Stubbe et al. (2003) also consider the benefits of utilizing different discourse analytic approaches to interpret professional talk. They conclude that each approach provides ‘a different lens with which to examine the same interaction’ (2003:380), noting that different approaches are not necessarily in conflict with each other, but may be used in complementary ways. Tusting and Maybin (2007:576) argue that linguistic ethnography particularly lends itself to interdisciplinary research and offers a practical and theoretical response to ‘the turns to social constructionism and to discourse across the social sciences’, in its ability to probe in depth the interrelationship between language and social life. Tusting and Maybin suggest that colleagues from other parts of the social sciences are not only also working on language and discourse in relation to shared questions and issues, but are often drawing on similar sources of social theory, for example, the work of Bakhtin, and Bourdieu. Blommaert makes a similar point in discussing ethnography’s capacity to engage with various theoretical frameworks. According to Blommaert, the autobiographical epistemic dimension of ethnography lends itself to interdisciplinary engagement: This “deeper” dimension allows ethnography to be inserted in all kinds of theoretical endeavors, to the extent of course that such endeavors allow for situatedness, dynamics and interpretive approaches. Thus, there is no reason why ethnography cannot be inserted e.g. in a Marxist theoretical framework, nor in a Weberian one, nor in a Bourdieuan or Giddensian one. (Blommaert 2001:3)

Tusting and Maybin (2007) argue that in recent years, alongside a broadening and diversifying of interests among sociolinguists, the boundaries between the traditional variationist, sociological and ethnographic branches of sociolinguistics have become more blurred. 67

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Rampton (2006:22) proposes that sociolinguistics should be able to participate in broader debates about the contemporary world, and, since post-structuralist perspectives in social science attach special importance to discourse, sociolinguists may be able to use their specialist expertise to make a distinctive contribution. However, just as there are strengths to be gained from disciplinary and theoretical diversity, there are dangers too. In a discussion about theoretical bridge-building in sociolinguistics over 20 years ago, Stubbs (1986:3) gave the following warning: In favour of the view that theoretical diversity is good, one might argue that diversity is healthy, whereas uniformity inhibits intuitions, stifles the imagination, prevents speculations along different lines, and encourages unthinking conformity . . . The argument against pluralism also uses emotive terms. Rather than healthy diversity, one might see disarray, opportunism, relativism and compromise.

A similar point is made by Hammersely (2007) in his discussion of linguistic ethnography. Hammersely’s concern is with what he sees as a trend in the social sciences for ‘re-branding and relaunching’ existing theory. His description invokes notions of intellectual spin, which he describes as a kind of ‘hyper modernism’ attempting to ‘colonise’ intellectual territory (2007:690). He expresses concerns that different ontological orientations might clash under the pluralist approach espoused in linguistic ethnography. Tusting and Maybin (2007:581) are also aware of the dangers of eclecticism and point to the difficulties of making ‘truth claims’ based on different levels of data. Thus, the analysis of micro-interactions and what can be claimed from such data differs in nature from claims made on the basis of broader social theories. Blommaert (2007:685) makes a similar point in critiquing linguistic ethnography’s openness to combinations and divisions, which disturb long-established pedigrees while arguing that the separation of ‘culture’ from ‘language’ as two different objects and of ‘ethnography’ and ‘linguistics’, invites the question: ‘If we take a lineage from Boas to Sapir, Whorf, Hymes and Silverstein, we see that all of them use language and culture as one single object’. Epistemological assumptions in different fields of study are not necessarily mutual, and therefore need consideration in defining the principal object of study. Or they are mutual and do not benefit from being prised apart only to be rejoined in a different guise. What constitutes ‘context’, ‘culture’ and ‘language’ are not always shared in linguistic disciplines and approaches whereas in others, particularly linguistic anthropology, they are. Because ethnography ‘looks for real actors in real events, using real communicative codes with real 68

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effects in real lifeworlds’, it starts with recording ‘concrete, non-idealist and non-a priori’ categorizations of the context (Blommaert 2001:2). This does not necessarily fit with some linguistic traditions that do start with a priori categories. Below, we outline how linguistic ethnography has shaped our study of multilingualism and our understanding of culture in particular.

Linguistic ethnography and multilingualism Linguistic ethnography’s openness to other discourse analytic techniques has been important in bridging the ideological and interactional, the structural and agentic, while offering critical potential (Rampton et al. 2004). In ethnography, as Blommaert (2001:3) argues: ‘There is an acute awareness of facts being situated realities in a non-neutral world full of power, authority and evaluations.’ In adopting a linguistic ethnographic approach to develop a critical perspective on multilingualism, we take up a position regarding linguistic ethnography which balances the ‘utilitarian’ argument for interdisciplinarity with an argument for carefully attending to the long ‘pedigree’ from which linguistic ethnography is born (Blommaert 2007:685). Its close connections with linguistic anthropology and its relevance to education, in particular, has been salient in Hymes’ ethnography of communication (1968, 1974, 1980). We are in agreement with Blommaert (2007), therefore, when he questions the need to disturb the existing partners ‘language’ and ‘culture/ ethnography’ only to ‘conjoin’ them again in ‘linguistic ethnography’. We do not wish to separate linguistics from ethnography in arguing for a new and distinctive approach. Rather, we wish to stress the pedigree of linguistic ethnography and in particular its links with anthropological linguistics, where the conjoining of linguistics and ethnography has a long history. We place our work within this anthropological linguistic lineage, which sees language as social action and most particularly, as communicative action (Sapir 1921; Lucy 1993:18). Sapir’s theoretical endeavours conceptualized language as social action in context and saw language and culture as interwoven: Language does not exist apart from culture, that is, from the socially inherited assemblage of practices and beliefs that determines the textures of our lives (Sapir 1921:207)

Blommaert (2007) interprets the different understandings of ‘language’ and ‘culture’ in Sapir’s work. He shows that Sapir uses these terms in two distinct ways. The first way to interpret ‘language’ and ‘culture’ in Sapir’s work is to understand them as abstract nouns in a symbiotic relationship with one another, where language is fundamentally a 69

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cultural object. This sees the relationship between language and culture as theoretical, abstract and uncountable. The relationship is predicated on the symbolic potential of language to index cultural practices (Peirce 1955). Here, Blommaert argues that ‘language and culture’ are ‘theoretical nouns’ (Blommaert 2007:686). The second way to interpret ‘language’ and ‘culture’ is to view them as countable (a language and a culture). Sapir showed that ‘a language’ and ‘a culture’ are not necessarily congruent. That is, ‘a language’ does not simply represent ‘a culture’. The ‘English language’ does not represent ‘English culture’. Conceptualization of culture as large, geographical and static, as Eisenhart warns, are flawed and do not capture the complexity of ways of life in the English nation today. The distinction made by Sapir and Blommaert in these different understandings of language and culture are relevant to our study of complementary schools. In 1921, Sapir argued that language tends to become the expression of a self-conscious nationality. Fishman (1972) showed how language is used as a symbol of national identity and unity to legitimize the nation-state and reflect seemingly stable social interrelationships among speakers (Voloshinov 1983). Languages have long been used by political elites in sustaining the ‘one language/one culture/one nation’ paradigm and modernist nationalist ideologies further endorse this view through the way they conceptualize minority communities, often viewing them as a threat to national cultural unification (Blackledge 2005). As Pujolar (2007) explains, nation-states historically strive to articulate cultural commonality and stress the desirability of cultural and linguistic uniformity rather than diversity. Language is one of many resources used by the nation-state in support of uniformity and is used to establish its legitimacy as a sovereign unit distinct from others. Because language and culture are intrinsically linked, the recruitment of ‘culture’ to represent the nation is also part of the legitimating discourses of the nation-state; that is, a shared language represents a shared culture bounded together and protected by a nation- state, made distinct from other nation-states by its language and culture. However, this ‘common-sense’ view of culture representing a national group, which shares a common set of beliefs and practices, is at odds with accounts of linguistic and cultural practices in the research literature. Studies of culture in anthropology and sociolinguistics have long stressed the diversity and fluidity of culture and indeed the importance of not equating nation with culture: I have found it theoretically helpful to think of both culture and language as rooted in human activities (rather than in societies) and as pertaining to groups. The cultural make-up of a society is thus to

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be seen not as a monolithic entity determining the behaviour of its members, but as a melange of understanding and expectations regarding a variety of activities that serve as guides to their conduct and interpretation. (Goodenough 1994) Culture is not a stable or a self-contained but an interactional phenomenon, characterised by a high degree of variability (within ‘cultures’ as much as between them), constant negotiability, and multidirectional adaptability . . . Yet the most common presentation of (a) ‘culture’ is one that denies or underestimates precisely this flexibility and dynamics. People are supposed to have, once and for all, identifiable cultural ‘roots’. (Blommaert and Verschueren, 1998:17)

Here, culture is not viewed as static, unchanging and monolithic. Instead, culture is described as ‘process’ (Street 1993), in-flux and intertextual (Cope and Kalantzis, 2000). In language education, this debate is particularly salient. Holliday (1999:237) points out that constructing cultures as ‘large’ in language teaching involves culturist reduction of students, teachers and their educational contexts. He describes large cultures as prescriptive and normative, involving teachers and students setting out to find differences, which are then used to explain behaviour in those terms. ‘Small’ cultures on the other hand seek to explain the cohesive behaviour of small social groupings or activities, which are interpretive, self-defining, emic and are concerned with emerging social processes (Holliday 1999). Scollon (2002) calls for the ‘miniaturization’ of the concept of culture so that researchers/teachers and students study and write about the culture of the school or even the culture of the classroom. Similarly, Atkinson (1999) argues against ‘received views’ of culture in which a geographical and often distinct national entity is presented as unchanging and homogeneous with an all-encompassing system of rules or norms that substantially determine personal behaviour. We continue to see such views of culture promulgated in language teaching. They are common in course books where culture becomes equated to nation, and students learn about a national culture as fixed, static and unsituated. Theorizing of culture has done little to dislodge an intransigent national definition of culture, which is supported in common knowledge discourse. Culture is a crucial concept for participants in this research. We will see that the concept itself shifts its meaning, taking on different guises and manifestations depending on who is using it. Across the chapters in this book, we will see the links made by participants between ‘language and culture’ in both the countable and uncountable sense. On the face of it, it may appear that we are following

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a traditional ethnographic approach of analysing ‘a language’ or ‘a culture’ (Scollon and Scollon, 2007) of particular ‘ethnic’ groups whose communities have established schools to teach ‘heritage’ languages and distant national cultures. Indeed, as we have argued, complementary schools provide a space for alternative languages, heritages and histories to counter the hegemony of English, and in particular, hegemonic English histories and heritages. However, our research orientation is not to study these ‘language and cultures’, nor is it to investigate countable and defined languages and cultures. Indeed, we attempt to do the opposite. This research aims to describe social action and in particular, communicative action in complementary schools and to understand culture as created, produced and sustained through language use. In this sense, we are in agreement with Sapir that language is a cultural artifact, where culture is seen as emergent as well as patterned. In a discussion that sees young people’s language use as heteroglossic and indexing identities which do not fit comfortably into countable cultural brackets, we view our participants’ linguistic practices as cultural practices. In describing these linguistic practices, we look for patterns of language use in order to say something about the cultural practices of social action in complementary schools as particular historical and political sites. We work with a definition of context which aims to describe how ‘language actually works in a specific set of social-cultural circumstances’ (Blommaert 2007:687) and include in our understanding a recognition of the ‘mutual dependence of time and space’ (Adam 2000:133) to understand cultural processes. Like Eisenhart, Adam argues that we need ‘to expand the temporal gaze to depths and breadths that had so far fallen outside its field of vision, to touch the deep structure of social and institutional relations and thus to reach “parts” and processes that other social theories can’t reach’ (Adam 2000:127). Adam argues that we need to ‘unnaturalise time’ to understand how the paradigm of calendar time permeates all that we look at. Adam argues that this seemingly ‘neutral time’ is decontextualized and is the empty time of an industrial culture, which allows time to be commodified, recorded and counted. She argues the different ways we ‘take’ time alters what we see and understand. She goes on to describe four different ‘takes’ on time in order to further our research into social contexts. The first she describes as ‘add-on clock time’, which uses the already established parameter of ‘calendar’ time to pay more attention to sequence, speed and intensity of action. The second ‘take’ argues for the importance of context where there is an: appreciation that time and space constitutes an indivisible unity where space always implicates time and vice versa . . . Context

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matters. Its inclusion or negation affect what we understand and see . . . (Adam 2000:133)

A third ‘take’ on time profiles the multi-dimensionality of time, which describes how time functions ‘on a multitude of levels and through choreographed clusters of temporal characteristics’ (p. 135). She argues that this complexity is vital to the temporal gaze (p. 137). Elements to be considered in describing this complexity include: temporality, tempo, timing, duration, sequencing, repetition, pausing, instantaneity, transitions and simultaneity (p. 136). Adam develops these elements into the concept of ‘timescape’, which is her fourth ‘take’. She describes timescape as the ‘temporal equivalent of landscape’ and describes a ‘timescale’ analysis as not concerned ‘to establish what time is but what we do with it and how time enters our system of values’ (p. 137). We find this theorization of time useful in this study in several ways. A focus on calendar time allows us to look at the politics of multilingualism and complementary schooling and consider the ‘sequence, speed and intensity of action’ of both government’s and community’s engagement with bilingualism. It enables the contrasting inertia and energy of the different stakeholder groups involved. The importance of time and space as mutually dependent in the ‘borrowed mainstream’ schools, halls, classrooms and community centres of complementary schooling and the temporality that goes with such arrangements is also crucial. The multi-dimensionality of time is the key element in this study as we look at ‘split floors’ (Edelsky 1981) in classrooms as young people and teachers use their language to perform a range of official and unofficial identities, some of these fleeting, while others are more established. It is also important in terms of our ontological position, which stresses ‘fragmentation, contingency, indeterminacy, ambivalence and hybridity’ (Rampton et al. 2004:6). We will show the centrality of ‘simultaneity’ as an essential concept for making many of the arguments in this book. We will also consider ‘repetitions, transitions and instantaneity’ in our descriptions of teachers’ and young people’s performances. The multidimensionality of time is furthermore crucial to us methodologically, and we are aware of the temporal complexity of recording events and processes. The temporal gaze varies in our analysis depending on our research activity. Overall, we find the concept of timescape important in welding the ideological and interactional together into the same frame. With its post-modern orientation, linguistic ethnography offers the tools to counter views of culture and language as bounded and countable, and with its inter disciplinarity introduces literatures which conceptualize context in theoretically innovative ways. 73

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Investigating multilingualism The multilingual data we draw upon in this book come from our focus on the following research questions: 1. To explore the social, cultural and linguistic significance of complementary schools both within their communities and in wider society. 2. To investigate the range of linguistic practices used in different contexts in the complementary schools. 3. To investigate how the linguistic practices of students and teachers in complementary schools are used to negotiate young people’s multilingual and multicultural identities. 4. To develop innovative ethnographic team methodologies using interlocking case studies across diverse social, cultural, religious and linguistic contexts. 5. To contribute to policy and practice in the inclusion of complementary schools in the wider educational agenda. These questions were addressed through the use of four case studies, with two researchers working in two complementary schools in each case-community. As we saw in Chapter 1, the schools vary greatly in their size and resources across the case studies. The eight schools all rent spaces from other community or local government organizations, mostly schools, and are required to ‘tidy up’ on leaving these rented spaces. The majority of the schools run their classes at the weekends on either Saturday or Sunday, although others meet on afternoons after school or on weekday evenings. The schools are voluntary and receive money from parents to finance the schools’ activities. Some schools also receive additional funds from UK-based community organizations, as well as local authority and national schemes to which they must bid. The individual case studies are central in producing detailed and nuanced accounts of two schools in each city. They allowed each tworesearcher team to bring their particular linguistic and social knowledge to their interpretation of social action in each community. However, the project also sought to harness these specific researcher backgrounds and knowledges into the larger study.

Research methods Three principle methods are used in this research. These are: (1) ethnographic observational field work, (2) audio and video recording, and (3) semi-structured and open interviews.

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Ethnographic observational field work Our field work involved ten weeks of visits from two members of the research team to each school over a minimum period of three months. Researchers’ visits to the eight schools included observation of classrooms and assemblies, staff meetings, parents’ evenings, prize giving and extramural school events. Observations produced 133 sets of field notes representing 399 hours of field work. Field notes were shared weekly across the team through postings onto the electronic system, Sharepoint. In addition, documents pertaining to school life were collected (such as teacher registers, codes of conduct, meeting agendas, teaching materials and special event programmes). In some of the case studies, researchers retained long-term involvement with the schools, either as researchers or as teachers themselves.

Audio and video recordings Following receipt of their signed consent, we made audio and video recordings of key participant children in the schools and, at times, with their families at home. The majority of the children were aged between 10 and 16 years. Recordings of key participants were made with the children wearing a lapel microphone. The young people were selected after four weeks of observation through a process of either student selfselection and/or teacher suggestion, with student and parental consent. The aim was to record two students per school over six weeks. This was achieved in most cases but was not always possible, and differed by case study due to unforeseen circumstances such as children leaving the school during the period. In addition to classroom recordings, we also recorded during break times, assemblies, and at home before and after the complementary schools sessions where possible.

Semi-structured and open interviews We developed sets of interview schedules for our three main groups of research participants: key participant children, teachers and administrators and parents. These were standardized across the case studies and translated by each of the bilingual researchers. However, they were intended as prompts rather than as fixed questions, and researchers following an ethnographic case study approach used them in fluid ways in order to elicit accounts of social processes, values and beliefs relevant to the interviewee. Throughout this book, we are mindful of Pavlenko’s (2007:176) argument that interview or narrative data can not

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be treated as ‘truth’ or ‘reality itself’. Rather, in line with Pavlenko, we are ‘sensitive to the fact that speakers use linguistic and narrative resources to present themselves as particular kinds of individuals’ (p. 177). Despite the mass of data collected in this qualitative research project, we are aware of the challenges facing the ethnographer and our limitations in following, describing and capturing the complex worlds of our participants. Our ethnography, like any other, is partial and restricted. We do not present our work as comprehensive, as there is always another story to be told. We declare our own intellectual assumptions throughout this ethnographic process and have not attempted to delete our socio-historical selves from our ethnographic accounts – these are ingrained in our representations. Our work and intellectual ideas cannot be separated from the team of researchers with whom we collaborated in collecting and analysing data. We have struggled against ‘superordinating’ and over-generalizing categories while recognizing we are restricted by our current language of description. We have sought to offer accounts of social life as heterogeneous and under-patterned, while also looking within and across sites for social regularities. The linguistic ethnography we present in the following chapters draws on all of the sources of data we have described. Our findings are recorded in the transcriptions of particular audio and video recordings and in our field notes. Other sources are not included here and these sources include photographs and policy documents of individual schools. Although not presented as data sources, they have contributed to shaping the arguments we make. We have made good use of new ‘surveillance technologies’, which ‘have allowed us to transport selected and carefully focused slices of life out of the original nexus of activity for collegial, peer-reviewable examination in richer more multimodal formats’ (Scollon and Scollon, 2007:620). We interrogate these sources to make claims about the data using different levels of methodological warrant at various stages of the research. Throughout the book, we present multilingual extracts from a mass of interactional data, choosing not to follow usual multilingual transcription conventions, which present one language in ‘bold’, another language in ‘normal font’ and yet another in ‘underlined’. Instead, our transcription avoids creating boundaries between languages by marking them as different. This is in keeping with arguments about translanguaging and heteroglossia, which emerge from the data and view the participants engaged in using linguistic resources to make meaning in ways that do not always recognize language boundaries. We wish to represent the heteroglossia of our bilingual participants and therefore adopt a transcription convention which reflects this linguistic fluidity. 76

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Our digital recordings have captured all kinds of interactions, in class, at break times, on the way into and out of complementary school and in some instances at home. Young people volunteered to wear the microphones and had control over when to keep the recorder running and when to turn it off. Inevitably, there was a lot of interest in the digital audio-recording devices, and we have captured much of this interaction as students performed to their peers and to the unseen audience which the recording device represented. The interactions and dialogues we present from these recordings vary in level of detail. Our presence taking field notes during the lessons also helped to provide further detail to the transcripts. In the informal spaces of complementary school where interactions happen during times of movement and fleeting interactions between peers, it is not always possible to say who the individual speakers are, or to add detail through field note observation. This means that some of our audio transcripts appear more complete than others, and we are not always able to name the participants in every interaction. Notwithstanding the importance of these new technologies in assisting the research process, we retain the importance of field notes in documenting our findings in the field. As Tusting and Maybin (2007:578) remind us, ‘it is intrinsic to any ethnographic research that the researcher as participant-observer is part of what is going on’. We use our field notes to record the social action and to highlight the reflexivity of our role in shaping the research process. Our field notes reveal what Cicourel (1992:309) has described as privileging ‘some aspects while minimising or ignoring other conditions’. According to Cicourel ‘the observer is obligated to justify what has been included and what has been excluded according to stated theoretical goals, methodological strategies employed, and the consistency and convincingness of an argument or analysis’ (p. 309). And as Rampton (2006:394) argues, ‘the researcher’s presence/ prominence in the field setting defies standardisation and it introduces a range of contingencies and partialities that really need to be addressed/ reported’. In the remaining sections of this chapter, we discuss the two main avenues in this research, which address these issues of reflexivity and findings in our ethnography: ecological validity and team ethnography. These two concepts, and our understandings of them, are used to endorse the importance of varied and contradictory voices in ethnography and the importance of revealing the ‘weave’ of the fabric and the contingencies, partialities and contradictions in our research accounts.

Ecological validity in linguistic ethnography According to Cicourel (2007:735–8), ‘Ecological validity focuses on how we seek to convince others of the viability and authenticity of our 77

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claims [through] the systematic ethnographic grounding of social interaction and language use’. Roberts (2008) describes the importance of ecological validity as ‘the relationship between contexts that researchers create and the everyday social worlds inhabited by the people they study’. Tusting and Maybin (2007:579) note that the ‘dynamic between participants’ and analysts’ perspective is an enduring tension’, with ethnographers taking up ‘varying positions on the right of the researcher to move away from participants’ own representations’. They go on to point out that ethnographers sometimes ‘make truth claims which may differ from those of their research participants’ (p. 580) and sit uneasily in a traditional ethnographic perspective with its commitment to represent its participants’ perspectives. Jaspers (2006:2) argues that researchers do not reproduce reality but ‘make assumption-laden representations of it’. These representations are selective, and we need to explicate and justify their inclusion and relevance in analysis. According to Jaspers, this involves ‘provincializing ourselves, situating ourselves in a social context, indicating how we are tied to specific social sites and groups, what our interests are’. This is necessary in order to struggle against dominant constructions of hegemony, which result in homogenization of cultural description. We need to ‘make room for dissent and deviation, as well, perhaps, as for hidden practices that are blocked from sight by more conspicuous ones’ (Jaspers 2006:3). Rampton (2006:401) also speaks of the importance of ecological descriptions in making knowledge claims in his work. He describes this process as follows: Ecological descriptions take subsets of practices and emphasise their relationship with other kinds of practice, process and phenomenon in the field setting, many of them occupying different levels of social and cultural organisation.

He describes this process as an activity in which ‘cross type and cross level relationships are drawn from the backroom, promoted centrestage and elaborated in the spot light’ (p. 401). These knowledge claims are foregrounded in order to increase: the ease with which other researchers can compare my findings with their own. Rather than taking sole responsibility for a general claim which stands or falls in subsequent argument, the objective is to build towards cumulative, comparative generalisations, sharing the responsibility for doing so with critical but cooperative readers. (Rampton 2006:402)

We find the terms ‘ecological validity’ and ‘ecological description’ useful to open up our work and make explicit the role we as researchers played in knowledge construction. Ecology is an important term for us. 78

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It has been useful in articulating and exemplifying the broad linguistic principles of language ideologies in the complex multilingual contexts of complementary schools (see Chapters 6 and 7). It has been useful methodologically in widening the role our readers play in its scrutiny of issues of validity and authority. It has been central in considering how different voices in the team play their part in what is noticed and recorded. In the last section of this chapter, we introduce our understanding of team ethnography, and pay particular attention to the use of field notes in the team. We do this because field notes were the one means by which the research team became reflexive about its own positioning in knowledge construction.

Field notes in team ethnography We have argued elsewhere that field notes are central in team ethnography, and can be used to reveal processes of research claims (Creese et al. 2008). We see field notes as playing a central role in meeting ‘evidentiary standards’ (Rampton et al. 2004), especially so in times of new technological advances. They are crucial in making transparent the construction of arguments and the processes of representation. They play their part, particularly in a team of ethnographers, in making explicit decisions about what is included and what is left out. The sharing of field notes forces contemplation of issues of power and hierarchy both within teams and outside teams as we represent those we research. We believe they have a particularly important role in linguistic ethnography because they provide evidence of theory building from the bottom up. As Roberts recently argued (2008), ‘Ethnography doesn’t just “open up” the linguistic analysis, it helps to rein it in! Over-analysis and overinterpretation are curbed by ethnographic realities.’ We use our field notes in team ethnography to work with these ‘ethnographic realities’. However, we do not wish to over-inflate field notes as interpretive resources. Field notes are primary data sets, ephemeral, neither right nor wrong and an interpretation to be contested and agreed upon and to be further analysed in relation to other data sets. Like other data in qualitative research, field notes are partial and incomplete. But like other data sets they are also evidentiary, and can be used equally alongside other data. Erickson and Stull (1998:23) account for the similarities and differences between writing field notes as a lone ethnographer and as a team ethnographer: Field notes are the first written products of a field team’s ethnographic gazes. The plural, gazes, sounds strange, but final reports from team ethnography are jointly constructed – or should be. . . .

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For lone ethnographers, field notes serve as aides memoir, initial analyses and archives to be visited when away from the field. For team ethnographers, field notes are all these things and more; they also are a means to share findings with other team members. Unfortunately, anxiety about the adequacy of one’s own notes and professional competition and jealousy combine with this tradition of secrecy to inhibit sharing of notes and thus, the flow of information.

Erickson and Stull (1998) speak of the systematic sharing of observations through regular ongoing interpretation of meanings as essential to successful team research (1998:18). They helpfully describe how observations may be shared in several ways: One way is that observers may witness the same event and then discuss it afterward. Second, investigators may read each other’s field notes and offer comments, add information, or challenge interpretations. A third way is that teams can hold regular debriefing sessions to present and analyze members’ findings. (ibid.)

All three approaches were used in our investigation of linguistic practices and ideologies in complementary schools. In team ethnography, we use field notes to reveal ourselves in the research process and to demystify our development of knowledge claims in relation to those we research. The ethnographer is often conceptualized as a solitary figure jotting down field notes on site. In our team ethnography, field notes played an important role in reflecting, positioning, representing and declaring. Emerson et al. (1995:8) point out that field notes are the invisible work that shapes the final published text, and are therefore important because they make the process of ‘thought-to-findings’ more explicit as team ethnographers write their own and read and discuss their colleagues’ ‘primordial’ writings (Emerson et al. 1995:16). We recognized the simultaneity and duality of our field note writings. Our experience of team ethnography is that the space between writing field notes and reflecting on them is simultaneous, in the sense that we were engaging with the ideas expressed by colleagues in the period between site visits and during visits as we checked our understandings of one another’s weekly findings. Rather than being ‘aides memoir’ (Erickson and Stull, 1998:23), they become the terms of engagement leading to discussion of emerging themes and ideas that were visited and revisited regularly, providing opportunity for a full and contested debate. They therefore performed the dual purpose of providing primary data and, in part, constituting the team. As we have seen, the investment of self in the writing of field notes is well established in the ethnographic tradition, and indeed the 80

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centrality of the researcher in ethnography is fundamental. In the following chapter, we further explore the researcher’s investment in the self and the team. We make an argument that multilingual team ethnography provides an appropriate methodology for studying situated multilingualism while also serving to introduce the many voices and different perspectives argued for by Eisenhart (2001a, b). Linguistic ethnography plays a central role in the research on which we report in this book. We have used its provenance in linguistic anthropology in our interpretive accounts of local lives; we have used its eclecticism (and all its concomitant dangers) to draw on tools for analysis across different traditions of discourse analysis. We have made use of its openness to interdisciplinarity by bringing together fields of study and literatures to enable us to describe the social context. In particular, we find helpful its orientation to post-structuralist approaches that require an unsettling of the normative and usual social categories available for research on language, culture and identity. Linguistic ethnography sets out a position that has much in common with contemporary sociolinguistics, its interest in the interplay between language and the social, the patterned and dynamic nature of this interplay and the ‘processual’ nature of meaning-creation in the making of context. In this chapter we have outlined the epistemological orientation of linguistic ethnography and its traditions in anthropological linguistics. However, we have also emphasized its interdisciplinarity and its openness to working with traditions not necessarily associated with anthropological linguistics. In the next chapter, the methodological influence of linguistic ethnography in shaping team ethnography in this research is described.

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A multilingual research team

This chapter addresses our aim to develop innovative ethnographic team methodologies using interlocking case studies across diverse social, cultural, religious and linguistic contexts. We give an account of working in a multilingual team of nine researchers, and describe how identity politics influenced relations in the field and in the team. As we said in Chapter 3, we believe that demystifying the research process and making it more accessible and understandable to those who work, study and research in multilingual educational contexts will further our understandings of linguistically and culturally diverse classrooms. Scholars in education and ethnography acknowledge the importance of collaborative research between teachers and researchers (Beaumont and O’Brien, 2000; Hawkins 2005; Conteh et al. 2008; Denos et al. 2009). Beaumont and O’Brien (2000) stress the importance of cowriting between practitioners and researchers in reports of research collaboration in the area of language education. Hawkins (2004) speaks of a shared agenda between teachers and researchers in untangling learning in classrooms and emphasizes the importance of equality. Denos et al. (2009) give an interesting account of professionals collaborating, discussing and understanding across their different contexts of schools and universities. They describe how teachers and academics all experience varying roles as ‘knowers’ and learners and therefore vary in expertise and knowledge. They discuss the processes of collaboration between teachers and academics in their ‘Teacher Action Research Group’ (TARG). Through these meetings, members attempt to transform their own practices, understandings and workplaces. They describe the processes of team meetings as building solidarity, confidence and strength through discussion. Using teacher vignettes of classroom lives, Denos et al. illustrate how teachers and academics challenge powerful structures through collaboration. They describe as particularly problematic a narrowly conceptualized education system, which constructs students into constrained and limited identities. Conteh et al. (2008) describe a process of collaborative classroom-based action research in linguistically diverse classrooms between teacher-researchers and a professional researcher. They argue for a better understanding and implementation of the interface of theory and practice in the lives of 82

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teachers and academics. They speak of the need to introduce and account for researchers’ different perspectives, revealing in the process the dialogic and transformative quality of collaborative research. An important feature of their research was the ‘equal collaboration between the three participants’ (p. 3). Because ‘there was no funding for principal investigators, research assistants, or other hierarchical roles’ (p. 3), flatter and more equal relationships could be established and maintained. Conteh et al. adopt Somekh’s theoretical and methodological framework (Somekh 2006) to stress the value of action research for transforming classroom practice. These studies emphasize the following: the importance of collaboration, shifting and fluid constructions of knowledge and expertise in the research process; the sharing and negotiation of new understandings; and the flattening of hierarchical structures. Much less has been written about team collaboration processes in the various stages of ethnographic educational research. The research team we describe in this chapter is made up of individuals with diverse ethnic, ‘race’, gender, nationality, linguistic and class backgrounds. The case study pairings are as follows: Bengali case study: Chinese case study: Gujarati case study: Turkish case study:

Adrian Blackledge (ABL) and Shahela Hamid (SH) Li Wei (LW) and Chao-Jung Wu (CJW) Arvind Bhatt (AB) and Peter Martin (PM) Vally Lytra (VL) and Dilek Yag˘cıog˘lu-Ali (DYA) (owing to unforeseen circumstances, Dilek left the team before the end of the project and was replaced by Tas¸kin Baraç).

Angela Creese (AC) was responsible for overall coordination and was not attached to any one case study. These individual case studies were central in producing detailed and nuanced accounts of two schools in each linguistic community. They required each two-researcher team to bring their particular linguistic and social knowledge to their interpretation of social action in each location. In each of the case studies, at least one of the researchers was bilingual in the community language and English, and in some cases, both researchers spoke the community language but may have had different levels of proficiency. In addition to the individual case studies, another dimension of the project was the sharing of data and analysis across the full team of nine researchers. This involved weekly sharing of field notes through posting of their accounts of ethnographic observations onto Microsoft’s electronic data system, Sharepoint. Angela Creese made visits to all of the schools to provide an overview of the eight complementary school contexts, and the full team met on 83

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a regular basis for analytical meetings, which involved detailed scrutiny of emergent findings. Each case-study pair of researchers made presentations to the whole team to propose features of the initial analysis. In due course, the team members co-authored academic and professional papers and conference presentations, which were shared with the team for comment at the draft stage. Researchers had at least two professional communities in which they participated: (1) in and around the complementary schools, and (2) the university. Four universities were involved in the research project, and researchers were employed by individual institutions but were expected to contribute to the full team and to the overall research aims.

Teams in research and practice Erickson and Stull (1998:23) describe the importance of team processes in representing the researched, and speak of ‘plural gazes’ in jointly constructing narratives. Creese et al. (2008) describe how a team of ethnographers uses field notes in the construction of ethnographic narratives. They argue that processes of team ethnography can be used to make knowledge construction transparent in ethnography. Mitteness and Barker (2004) describe some of the tensions in collaborative research including problems of ‘poor chemistry, work overload and financial constraints’ (p. 284). Martin et al. (1997) describe the processes of working in a bilingual research team, and how institutional structures reproduce knowledge hierarchies in linguistic and cultural capital. Ramazanoglu (1992) argues that: Working as a research team cannot be a process which can be taken for granted, nor can it be a set of relationships which is external to the conduct of the research . . . Their own class, gender and ethnicity, their social relationships, sexuality and personal values, that is the way the researchers are situated in social life, are conventionally deemed to be external to the processes of producing and interpreting data. [T]he ways in which the functioning of research teams can affect the production of social science knowledge has received relatively little attention. (1992:4)

A feature of ethnography is the presence of competing and divergent ‘cultural selves’, and how these identity politics shape what is noticed in the field. According to McCorkel and Myers (2003), researchers have typically dealt with identity politics in one of two ways. Generally, they are ignored in the design of the study. Or ‘in other instances, researchers briefly acknowledge crude aspects of their identities (such as race, class, and gender) without explicating how their data, analyses, and conclusions were shaped by their positionality’ (p. 200). McCorkel and 84

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Myers believe it is important not just to acknowledge the influence of identity-play in ‘positionings’ in the field but to show how and to what extent these structure the research processes. They argue: The problem is that in the act of ‘discovering’ scientific truths, the skeletons we dig up are often our own. What passes as a scientific discovery about ‘the Other’ is often the very assumptions and narratives we used to construct our subjects and their ‘difference’ prior to entering the field. (p. 220)

With an increased awareness of relationships of power in qualitative research and new understandings of participant representation in written accounts, issues and possibilities of team research are more current. For example, teams potentially offer divergent voices in ethnographic accounts, and this is now normally held to be positive. Eisenhart (2001a:19) notes, ‘increasingly, collaborative teams are being used to broaden the scope of work to, for example, include more settings and provide different perspectives.’ According to Eisenhart (2001b:219), collaborative approaches involve ‘more different kinds of people’ in designing the research process and creating the final product, and these approaches require the researchers to disclose more about their own views, commitments and social positions. Such approaches make clearer ‘the social position, cultural perspective and political stance’ (2001b: 219) of the researcher and how these influence subsequent actions.

Researcher reflexivity Eisenhart (2001a) notes that: Although feminist, ethnic and postmodern critics have influenced the way ethnographers think about their relationships with study participants and the styles ethnographers use to write their accounts, methods of site selection, data collection and analysis remain virtually unchanged. (2001a:218)

Eisenhart’s argument is that ethnographic methodology has not kept pace with its core theoretical literature. She describes advances in conceptualizing key constructs in post-modernity, such as ‘culture’, ‘community’ and ‘identity’, but suggests that there has been a lack of simultaneous methodological advances in ethnography to research these features of contemporary life. Eisenhart (2001a:19) advocates various reflexive practices as one way to respond methodologically to new theorizings of social life. Mullings (1999) draws on Rose’s concept of ‘transparent reflexivity’ (Rose 1997:311) and speaks of the need for researchers to be inwardly and outwardly reflexive, engaging in critical introspection and looking for ways to redistribute power and reveal the 85

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contexts surrounding data collection and analysis. McCorkel and Myers speak of ‘strong reflexivity’ (2003:203) in which researchers subject themselves to the same scrutiny as those they research, ‘the researcher gazes back at her socially situated research project and examines the cultural assumptions that undergird and historically situate it’. MacLure (2003) argues that ethnography needs to find ways to reveal the ambiguities of interpretation. Her argument is that in research we are caught in the web of language that gives us our world view. MacLure’s search is for new metaphors in the relation between researchers and subjects, and their ‘entanglement, knots, weaves and tissues’ (p. 127). She argues that we should refuse to settle on one particular representation of our subjects. Rather, we should be constantly perplexed and wrong-footed throughout. Mullings reports on a long line of feminist scholars who have argued the need to incorporate methodologies that recognize the existence of multiple viewpoints and the partiality of their own assessments (1999:3). Her point is that researchers’ knowledge is always partial and shaped by their ‘maps of consciousness’, and their ‘positionality’ in the social world is influenced by their unique mix of race, class, gender, nationality, sexuality and other identifiers (Mullings 1999:348). Maps of consciousness shape what is noticed and not noticed in the field, and are always unfinished. As Rosaldo (1993:9) argues: All interpretations are provisional; they are made by positioned subjects who are prepared to know certain things and not others. Even when knowledgeable, sensitive, fluent in the language, and able to move easily in an alien cultural world, good ethnographers still have their limits, and their analyses are always incomplete.

Because researchers occupy and perform different sets of social identities, they form different relationships with research participants, and this influences their noticings. Processes of self-representation in research are crucial to ongoing data collection and the perpetuation of trust and confidence. They involve the researcher in a dynamic interplay of individual identities as they skilfully position themselves in relation to the researched. As Rampton argues: the researcher’s own cultural and interpretive capacities are crucial in making sense of the complex intricacies of situated everyday activity among the people being studied (and tuning into these takes time and close involvement). (Rampton et al. 2004:3)

Mullings describes how her own particular gender, race, class and age characteristics had significant effects on the type of information collected in her study of companies in Jamaica. However, she was able to position herself away from being constructed as a representative of 86

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a given ‘community’ and the oversimplifying ‘racial and gender matching’ that came with it (1999:12). She speaks of finding spaces in the research process that ‘evoked the least threat or suspicion from the elites’ whose opinions she sought (Mullings 1999:10). According to Mullings, there is a convergence of possibilities in the relationships with participants and researchers, some of which may stultify dialogues, while others open them up. Pratt and Hanson (1995) similarly note that: Positions are not static: this is a point that needs to be underlined carefully in the contemporary context, in which ‘marking’ by sexual orientation, class, race etc. is sometimes used not only to open up new conceptual spaces but also to discipline and silence others. (Pratt and Hanson, 1995:25)

Researcher ‘positionality’ is also taken up by McCorkel and Myers (2003). They argue that master narratives (Romero and Stewart, 1999) shape what is noticed and how participants are represented by researchers. In two parallel reflexive and richly detailed accounts of themselves as researchers in a prison and a voluntary organisation, they demonstrate how the researcher’s ‘positionality’ facilitates specific forms of understandings, and impedes others.

Insiders or outsiders, both and neither Mullings (1999) critiques the binary of insider/outsider debates because they potentially freeze the way researchers are able to position themselves with interactants in time and space. Insiders are typically said to be at an advantage because they are able to use their intimate knowledge of the context to gain access and make insightful observations. By contrast, outsiders are said to be at an advantage because they are likely to be perceived as ‘neutral’ and can stand apart from the politics of the local. Martin et al. (1997:110) describe insiders as people sharing the culture and language of the researched and are likely to ‘pass’ as a native, while outsiders are described as those who do not share the language and culture of the researched group and are not included or recognized as being a member of the community. In their work, Martin et al. explicitly mention the sharing of a language as a marker of ‘insiderness’. More recently, however, it has been acknowledged that the insider/ outsider dichotomy does not capture the dynamics of social life. In the complexity of the social world, these straightforward categories are difficult to use, maintain and defend. Mullings (1999) shows how ‘insiderness’ is not performed in any simple way according to visible attributes 87

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such as ‘race’, gender, ethnicity or class. Instead, she describes how she uses her social self in a complex positioning performance in relation to those she interviews. In this way, she is able to position herself as both insider and outsider with the overall aim of gaining the trust of those she is interviewing. This strategy also involves being mildly deceitful at times, in order to manage relationships (Shaffir and Stebbins, 1991). McCorkel and Myers (2003:204) also challenge the notion of a static insider/outsider dichotomy, particularly when ‘brokered by racial and gender identities’. They show how identities are constantly developing and shifting during the processes of field work. However, they also acknowledge that ‘difference does make a difference in research’ (p. 226). In a reflexive account of their own research journeys, they demonstrate that ‘position and privilege influence the production and performance of research’ (p. 226). They argue that it is futile to renounce their ‘privileged status as knowers’ (p. 227). Rather, it is necessary to engage in strong reflexivity and turn the gaze towards themselves as researchers. In this chapter, we consider some of these challenges in the light of team ethnography in our work on complementary schools. In particular, we explore the different researcher perspectives brought to the team. We reveal consistencies and tensions among the nine-member team, in their relationships with the researched and also with each other. We consider whether representing the voices and perspectives of individual researchers in a team of researchers can add complexity and richness to ethnography. We draw together researcher reflections written as nine individual researcher vignettes by each member of the team. One of the aims of our study was to develop innovative ethnographic team methodologies across diverse social, cultural, religious and linguistic contexts. One way we attempted to meet this objective was an agreement amongst researchers to write a one-page vignette at the time of data collection, on two themes agreed on by the team as of interest to them: 1. Relationship to research participants 2. Negotiating a researcher identity within the team

No further structure was given to the arrangement and the production of these vignettes. Many of the first drafts produced accounts of more than two or three pages. These were circulated around the full team. Researchers agreed that the second and final draft outputs would be no longer than one page. These vignettes are included in full in this chapter. They exemplify the range of different perspectives brought to the research by a multilingual team with different social and academic backgrounds. In particular, we feel they are worth including in full as 88

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they reveal some of the complex issues about reflexivity discussed earlier. They show the ‘both and neither’ of the insider/outsider dichotomy and how researchers navigate these positions. We discuss two sites for negotiating the insider/outside dichotomy: the field (i.e., the complementary schools, related community settings and students’ family homes) and the university. These two contexts are sites where researchers feel relatively more or less at ease. The vignettes also reveal the importance of language in identity politics in complementary schools. We will consider how the researchers variously describe language choice as a way to build rapport and create space for trust. We will also show that this is not done in any simple structural and mechanistic way with language always linked to ethnicity. Rather, the researchers describe how they use their linguistic repertoires to negotiate ways in and out of the research process. Finally, we briefly discuss the vignettes to reveal how position and privilege work in the research process to both open up and close down opportunities in the field. The remaining sections of this chapter are structured in the following way. First, each of the nine researcher vignettes is presented with a very brief summarizing paragraph. The vignettes are paired by case study. We represent the vignettes of the two researchers in the Gujarati case study, followed by the Chinese, Bengali and Turkish case studies. The last vignette is from Angela Creese, who was not linked to a particular case study, but visited each of the eight schools across the four case studies. Following the vignettes, we turn to discussing three themes, which emerge as most salient in the researchers’ accounts: (1) insiders/ outsider ‘positionality’; (2) language and cultural background; (3) position and privilege.

Arvind Bhatt, Gujarati case study Relationship to participants: Now that I have completed observations at one school, I am asking myself: Why am I doing this research? and Why am I doing this research? The first question implies my professional motivation (other than being employed) – to promote an understanding of multilingualism and complementary schools and to investigate the complexity of social aspects of multilingual interactions in complementary schools. The second question involves reflexivity and subjectivity on a more emotional level. The tension between being objective, scientific and ‘naïve’ and being a committed advocate for multilingualism and for complementary schools perturbs my relationships with the participants. Ethnography as an ideological practice presents a sort of reality over a fixed period of time. Ethnographers impose, wittingly or unwittingly, a coherence,

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which may or may not be the truth. Being both a recognized member of the community that we are researching and also a member of the research (or academic) community, I have to tread a cautious path. Also significant is the fact that my relationships with the participants are more enduring than those with my academic colleagues, due to the fixed period of my contract with my employer(s); I cannot take the ‘research and go’ stance. Because of my connection with a university, I am ascribed a high status by the participants. This is shown by special linguistic markers and invitations to special occasions. I am also expected to give the benefit of my ‘wisdom’ to the school and to individual teachers. Thus, the deputy head teacher at the school expects me to suggest improvement in curriculum, teaching methodology and recruitment of students. And, of course, after observations, I am often approached for an ‘appraisal’ of the lesson. I play down both the status and expectations by asserting that I am ‘only a researcher’. I use my ‘insider’ persona to build trust and my ‘outsider’ persona to keep my distance. Negotiating a researcher identity: The boundaries between ‘researcher’ and ‘community member’ are not so much permeable as punctured, and I decide where they overlap (or get punctured). This luxury is not, however, available vis-à-vis my academic colleagues. Here, I have to establish and maintain my ‘researcher’ credentials through use of appropriate language and formality (although these, too, get blurred due to friendships built up during our last collaboration, particularly in the ‘pair’ situation). In the larger team setting, new but temporary (and pleasant!) friendships are being created but are constrained by the demands of the research routines. Also, I am seen as an ‘expert’ in some aspects of the research, where my skills and expertise in a particular language are valued. In many ways, negotiating a research identity in the team and the pair is much easier because of the commonly agreed roles, parameters and well- defined objectives of the project. Overall, I feel that I am not only researching a community but also, to some extent, representing it.

AB’s account speaks of engagement in the research on political and personal levels. There is commitment to the politics of multilingualism, as well as commitment to enduring relationships with those with whom he studies and works. As a long-term teacher in a complementary school, he is aware of positioning himself as both an insider and outsider in the research process, and he views this as an important skill in building trust and maintaining distance. His role as a university researcher accords him high status in the field, but with his ‘insiderness’ come the responsibilities of giving back to those he researches. 90

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For AB, the university offers less freedom than the field. This is because in the university, roles are fixed and structures that allow little opportunity for negotiation are in place. For example, time-limited contracts militate against enduring relationships. He is aware of how his cultural and linguistic knowledge is used by the team, and he sees the project as a way of representing a community as well as researching it.

Peter Martin, Gujarati case study Relationship to participants: In both sites in the Gujarati case study in Leicester, there was some link with previous research. In one of the schools, IESL, the link was through the head teacher, who had been a teacher in a school in the previous complementary schools project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). The second school JBV was one of the schools from the previous research project. Strangely enough, at the beginning of the current field work, I felt more comfortable in the ‘new’ school (IESL) than in the one I had previously studied. This was a new endeavour, and the head teacher welcomed us with open arms. That is not to say that JBV School did not welcome us back, too. They did. And, in fact, the senior administrator of this school was particularly welcoming (more about this later), as was the head teacher and the other teachers with whom I have come in contact. But the bottom line for me is that I still cannot get away from the feeling of being ‘manipulative’ and feeling that my presence disrupts the flow of the school and the classes which I observe (for example, I feel uncomfortable when teachers stop the lesson to explain something to me.) In JBV School particularly, where I had previously carried out field work, I felt I was invading their space again. For this reason, in re-establishing contacts, I took pains to point out how the outcomes of the previous project had, in some small way, raised the profile of complementary schools in Leicester and beyond. Nevertheless, I did ask myself whether some members of the school community wondered ‘why have they come back’. To some extent, the actions of the senior administrator have allayed these fears in that, in an announcement to the school, he made quite a play of the fact that ‘researchers from the University of East London have chosen our school’ to do their research. The fact that it was a non-local university – that the researchers had come from afar to see their school – seemed to increase the status of the research. Also, and this has come to light subsequently, the senior administrator has plans – which he first aired to me in an interview three years ago – for his school to purchase the building and set up an education trust, which would network with academic and funding institutions (including research). There are issues to do with use of languages, which I would like to explore – though there is no space here. In any field work with which I have been involved, I have tried to learn at least to greet people

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(and perhaps more) in the language of the community. However, there are issues due to the particular sociolinguistic context here and the subtle use of mixtures of languages that have made me reassess this situation. Negotiating a researcher identity: In my observations and thoughts about what is occurring in the sites (and I have noted this in the field notes in this project and the previous one), I often make reference to ‘wondering’ whether the more linguistically and culturally sophisticated other researcher (Arvind Bhatt) agrees with my interpretation of what is going on. I also often feel frustrated at not being able to understand everything about what is happening in the classrooms and beyond, and also the subtle nuances in the switches between languages. Some of the best quality interpretation comes in meetings between the researchers while debating the meanings of what is going on in the sites, with each researcher offering different viewpoints.

The intrusive role of ethnographic research is described in PM’s account. The need not to interfere, disrupt or take without paying back is apparent in the vignette. He gives importance to being able to show those he is researching some positive feedback and benefit. There is an awareness too of how university status is used for negotiating access to the school research sites. PM’s vignette shows an incremental commitment to those he has researched with relationships developed in a previous research project extended and developed in the present one. PM’s awareness of language, its cultural subtleties and his reliance on AB are also mentioned as important. Finally, his confidence in the interpretations of the full research team across the four universities and case studies is also significant.

Chao-Jung Wu, Chinese case study Relationship to participants: I was happily surprised when one of our key participants asked me to interview her in English as ‘it is easier’ and ‘you are easy to talk to’. There are many interesting issues behind that statement alone, but I felt at the time really accepted as an ‘insider’ in the research context. At both research sites, I could feel I was getting closer to the participants towards the end of the research. From the beginning of the research, both schools were welcoming, yet with some reservations. I was asked to produce detailed information sheets to distribute to potential participants’ parents before being allowed access to classrooms. A comment I overheard at an early stage also made me acutely aware that I had to produce the information sheets in both traditional

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and simplified Chinese characters for the Cantonese and Mandarin schools respectively, as this meant a lot to the readers. I made a habit of discussing my planned activities with the head administrators of each school. In the beginning, they preferred to accompany me to the class or required me to be very specific about which class I was going to observe, although by the end of the field work period, they indicated that I could go to any class I chose and carry out what was necessary. The acceptance of the researcher(s) by teachers and pupils was also evident – by the time other researchers from our team visited the schools, the participants did not appear to question their presence but just went about their normal routine. Their acceptance also facilitated any change of key children to audio-record, and made video recording easy to carry out. At the beginning of the field work, it was clear that some teachers felt that they might be ‘assessed’ by us, despite our reassurances and detailed explanations about the focus of the research. It was through the actual data collection – talking through the research process while collecting data and sharing sections of raw data with interested participants – that participants became more aware of what we were attempting to do and became more relaxed with my presence. I could feel the transition from ‘a stranger’ to the schools to a position where teachers and head administrators invited me to staff meetings and involved me in discussions about research and teaching relating to complementary schooling. However, there was also a linguistic barrier, as I was not able to fully understand Cantonese, and I sometimes still felt slightly distant from participants at the Cantonese school. Negotiating a researcher identity: I feel very privileged to be working in this large team, with several very experienced researchers and scholars. Maybe it was due to the very intensive data collection period right from the word go, I did not feel that I had to do much negotiation as regards to my researcher identity. At the end of the data collection period, I concentrated my efforts on collecting data and tidying up data, feeding back the Chinese schools’ points to the research team when it was necessary. I also took advantage of the fact that there were other sites working on the same project. I was able to look at other sites’ data, think about how I could better present data that I collected and pick out interesting aspects of the data, which I would not have thought much about had I not looked at other sites’ comments. I also looked at this period of time as one to develop close working relationships and get to know each other in the team. As we look more closely at our data and discuss themes emerging in the next stage, I am sure we will develop each of our identities within the team, and I look forward to that opportunity to develop.

CJW is a Mandarin speaker and writes of how English allowed her to feel like an insider with some participants in the Cantonese school. 93

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Her awareness of the different varieties of Chinese and English were important to her in negotiating different relations with her research participants. She is aware of the importance of negotiating a place for herself in the Mandarin and Cantonese schools. She knows she needs to break down barriers and looks for ways of being accepted into the school communities. Her account of working in the fuller research team is of new possibilities and development. CJW speaks less of the need to negotiate a place for herself as a researcher in the university and describes it as a place to learn and develop close relationships.

Li Wei, Chinese case study Relationship to participants: The two Chinese schools we are studying were chosen by our research assistant Chao-Jung Wu. I was not directly involved in contacting the schools, although I was in constant discussion with Chao-Jung about which schools should be used. From my previous experience with Chinese schools in Newcastle, I was aware that ‘official’ introduction was of little use. We tried to avoid the formal approach. Personally, I am particularly concerned that my status as a university professor and, as it happens, head of a university’s School of Education, might cause more barriers. When I finally visited the schools, Chao-Jung had already evidently established very good rapport with the staff and pupils at both schools. The schools knew I was coming to visit. Some of the Mandarin school teachers, including the head teacher, knew of me and my work. They called me ‘Professor Li’. I knew one of the governors of the Cantonese school, whom I interviewed, informally. As I had researched Chinese schools before, I tried not to impose any of my prior knowledge or prejudice on my visits. This is hard because the set up of Chinese schools is very similar across the United Kingdom. I was struck by the political awareness of the Mandarin school. I felt very comfortable talking to all the teachers. They did not treat me as a stranger. We all queued for tea during break time and chatted about various things. I felt that the pupils in both schools paid very little attention to my presence. By the time I visited, they were very much used to the presence of Chao-Jung. I immediately noted the similarities between the schools I worked with in Newcastle some time ago, and the schools we are studying now. I spent time talking to some pupils, and they seemed to respond easily and naturally. The pupils in the Mandarin school spoke to me in Mandarin. The pupils in the Cantonese school spoke some Cantonese and some English to me. I did not spend much time talking to parents. I spoke to two parents at the Mandarin schools, who spoke highly of the school. They both felt the need to send their children to the school because they wanted their children ‘not to forget Chinese’. I spoke to one parent in the Cantonese school, who said everybody else sent their children to the Chinese school, and he thought it

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was a good idea to send his child too. The Mandarin school parents were interested in the fact that we were studying the school as a research project. They asked for details of the project. Negotiating a researcher identity: Teachers from both schools felt that our project could potentially help their schools to raise their profiles. The head teacher of the Mandarin school was particularly ‘politically aware’. She repeated the word ‘voice’ and really believed that the Chinese community as a whole needed to have a strong voice in society. She was keen to have my support for her ideas and plans for the school. She also sought advice on how to teach very young children who are British-born and who have limited exposure to Chinese. The teachers at the Cantonese school spoke to me mainly in Mandarin. They could detect that my Cantonese was limited. Our exchange was mainly about Manchester and the school generally and not about how to teach children.

LW speaks of his reliance on CJW for negotiating access informally to the two case study schools. He is aware that his status will structure relations with the researched in ways that potentially make data collection problematic. He views the rapport and solidarity-building achieved by CJW as a crucial factor in the negotiation of research access and as a way of ameliorating of status hierarchies. He speaks of the need to play down his own university status as professor as well as his previous experience in the research of complementary schools as he feels this may create barriers. He is aware of the political project of multilingualism and also acknowledges how the schools themselves see the possibilities of becoming the subject of research. Like CJW, he is aware of how his lack of Cantonese positions him in one of the school communities.

Adrian Blackledge, Bengali case study Relationship to participants: My relationship to the participants in the case study frequently reminded me of the time I spent in the Bangladeshi community in Birmingham ten years ago, during data collection for my Ph.D. thesis. At the same time, it reminded me of the years I spent as a teacher in multicultural, multilingual Birmingham primary schools where the teaching staff was encouraged to visit the pupils’ families at home during feasts and festivals. In all of these instances, I felt both welcomed, and yet like an intruder, treading in domestic worlds where I was a stranger, and with which I was unfamiliar. On this occasion, without the collaboration and lead of my research partner Shahela Hamid, negotiating access to the domestic worlds of our participants

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would have been much more difficult or even impossible. As it was, we were often greeted with plates of curried chicken, lamb, rice, vegetables and with some curiosity about how I would respond to these delicacies. The curiosity was even greater when I was offered, and was too polite to refuse, paan. The parents of the key participant children were occasionally cautious when interviewed, but they were always generously engaged in the project and prepared to articulate their views. In one household, the administrator of a complementary school proudly showed us round a gallery of graduation photographs of his many children and described their professional careers. I believe that visits to the homes of the families also contributed to our relationships with the children. One school-based interview with three siblings lasted well over an hour, with the children, between the ages of 8 and 10, answering our questions thoughtfully and confidently. This appeared to be successful because it was a continuation of conversations previously begun when we visited them at home. Negotiating a researcher identity: Following one of our early visits to a school to observe and write field notes, one of the older pupils asked me ‘Did you understand all that?’ The class had been conducted in Bengali and Sylheti, and he was gently teasing me for the fact that I had not understood much of what was going on. This was certainly a key part of my identity as a researcher here: not only was I visiting an educational world with which I was unfamiliar, it was also difficult for me to familiarize myself quickly as the instruction was largely in languages that I could not understand. However, as the case study developed, I felt that my ignorance became my strength. The fact that my research partner had the linguistic and cultural knowledge to understand the detail of the classroom interaction meant that I could attend to broader features, and when we came to share our field notes, we were able to build a rich and detailed picture. In relation to the families, I felt that Shahela and I quickly became more than investigators, as the participants were able to share some of their own concerns about their children’s (mainstream) schooling – a murder of a pupil some yards from their front door, and family, educational and health concerns. The data from the Bengali case study have been earned through investment. I feel that the challenge now is to release and open this to the wider team so that none of us ‘owns’ any of the utterances through which we will (re-)make the meanings of our participants.

ABL speaks of his previous experience in teaching and researching in the Bengali community in Birmingham. He describes the journey of becoming familiar with unfamiliar worlds and the experience of feeling like an intruder in domestic worlds. However, he also describes the importance of these visits in building relationships of trust with 96

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participants. He shows how participants in the research also cast him as the outsider and enjoyed seeing him experience new foods. ABL speaks of his reliance on his paired researcher (SH) in terms of linguistic and cultural knowledge. However, he also speaks of their different insights and how these were brought into the research process. ABL views the data collected in the field as beyond the limits of individual case studies and speaks of the need to release it and open it up to the wider team.

Shahela Hamid, Bangladeshi case study Relationship to participants: A socio-cultural investigation of the community at the outset of the project proved a rewarding initiative for gaining access and developing relationships with members of the community. Informal meetings with community members, who were involved in complementary schools projects and other literacy and IT skills projects, gave us an idea of local community organizations. On the surface, project organizers were supportive. However, despite their positive attitudes, we were unable to make contact with two Bengali organizations. We were informed later by the administrator of another Bangladeshi organization that research in community activities is sometimes seen as prying or threatening. This experience at the initial stage of our project was useful to plan overt entry strategies. A survey of the areas where field work would be carried out provided us with information about the layout of the neighbourhoods and their apparent socioeconomic status. As we were recommended to one of the sites by a community member, we were able to assume the role of ‘a friend of a friend’. The majority of Bangladeshi complementary schools are situated locally, and as some are involved in a range of community-based activities, they function as the focal point of the community. Therefore, the regularity of our visits to the school and other community activities helped to familiarize us with community practices in a short time. Negotiating a researcher identity: As an insider (from the same ethnic and religious background with proficiency in native language varieties), I was able to gain the trust and confidence of the families. Positioning myself linguistically and culturally as a Bangladeshi woman, I was able to understand the norms and expectations of the families with whom I was negotiating. Developing a relationship with parents of key participants and teachers facilitated my status as an insider-participant observer. However, my insider status carried certain obligations with it. I had to be conscious at all times about the appropriateness of topics so that there was no loss of ‘face’. Building a relationship with the participants’ families was invaluable in understanding with whom key participants associated and their network of friends and family,

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traditional values and so on. To Bangladeshi teachers, organizers and parents, my status as a Dhaka University teacher was perceived as more important than my current researcher status. This perception was an additional advantage because it overshadowed the labels usually attached to a field worker/researcher. Thus, I was able to navigate between the roles of a knowledgeable passive researcher/observer and apa (kinship term for older sister, also a term of endearment). As a general rule, I engaged in classroom conversations only when I was included as part of a tag question or reference (e.g., confirming or supplying the English equivalent of a Bengali word or the teacher referring to me about a student’s behaviour). These engagements involved nods, one or two word responses or short sentences. I was conscious at all times not to express personal views or opinions. The team approach (two ethnographers per site) worked well in terms of complementing each other’s knowledge, interpersonal skills and abilities. Ten weeks of classroom observation, regular home visits and field notes contextualized the interactions recorded.

SH speaks of the importance of foregrounding informal relations, and the need to background ‘research’ as something potentially threatening to the community. She is aware of how to highlight features of ‘insiderness’ with the children, teachers and parents she is researching. She speaks of the need to gain trust and confidence. To do this requires displaying knowledge of appropriate topics, such as recognizing the importance of community networks, friends and families. SH speaks of the need to position herself culturally and linguistically as a Bangladeshi woman – understanding the norms and expectation that this requires. Her description of herself as ‘didi’ (older sister) and ‘listener’ are two positions she chooses to develop. She is also aware of status accorded to her beyond that of working in a research team and speaks of distant hierarchies and privileges as important in the way her participants construct her. Thus, her identity as a university teacher at Dhaka University carries more capital than her representation as a researcher from the University of Birmingham. SH says little about working in the larger research team. Rather, she focuses on her relationship with her case study partner as the most productive.

Dilek Yag ˘cıog ˘lu-Ali, Turkish case study Relationship to participants: Children initially perceived me as an outsider, ‘somebody who came to observe them’, gradually promoting me to a knowledgeable source providing answers to some questions.

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As what I was doing became clearer, my relation with the children improved, and I became a trustworthy classmate/friend/resource/carer in addition to my main role as a researcher. Their understanding of my work was enhanced when they could look at my field notes as I was scribbling them down during class and when I answered their questions as to why I was doing what I was doing. Teachers’ attitudes towards me differed in the two research sites. In one research site, almost all of the teachers were very open and accepting, with an interest in me not just as a researcher but as a ‘person’, too (maybe because I was a TurkishCypriot like them). However, in the other school I was just ‘Dilek Hanım’ (Madame Dilek), a fact that indicated a respectful aloofness between them and me. In the East London School, the two participant teachers were a little restrained in the beginning, probably due to their background – they were appointed by the Turkish government and were less acquainted with life in the United Kingdom – but gradually opened up and became more friendly, especially after I shared with them field notes about their classes’ observation. Similarly, the administrators at the two sites had differing attitudes to me both as a person and as a female ‘researcher’. In the East London School, I was called by my first name ‘Dilek’, and teachers were very protective and very supportive of my role as a researcher. In contrast to this, I was always ‘Dilek Hanim’ in the West London School, and our conversations were dominated by transactional exchanges that lacked any personal touches. My experience with the language(s) was quite revealing about the research sites as well as my own language use. I am used to code-switching between Cypriot-Turkish and standard Turkish as well as English. I do this without really noticing that I am code-switching. This is more like mirroring, empathizing with your interlocutor and using the same code. Inevitably, throughout the field work I utilize all of these varieties as I usually would. I was aware of the effect created by my use of various varieties of Turkish especially when conversing with the Turkish mainland teachers, who in the beginning thought I was from Turkey. Hence, using the same code as my respondents helped build solidarity and trust amongst the participants in the study. I also approximated my language choice when talking to the children and the parents. These were all intuitive decisions dictated by the context and the interlocutors’ language competencies. Negotiating a researcher identity: It is a given that in any team ethnographic endeavour, there will be contesting perceptions of the research work under scrutiny as well as differences in methodological and ethical approaches. Add to this the differences in personal styles, coupled with other unvoiced or invisible issues relating to the member’s professional roles and aspirations, makes the establishing of a ‘researcher identity’ within a research team a difficult task. In this particular team, establishing a ‘researcher identity’, especially for a junior researcher like me, has been a gradual development unfolding itself through successful field work, analysis and presentation of data.

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DYA speaks of the complementary schools as a place of investment for her. She speaks of the importance of being a Cypriot-Turkish woman, and of how she feels she is positioned in the field in terms of her gender and nationality. She describes feeling more comfortable when able to break down formal relations. She describes discomfort in being positioned in particular ways by senior men in the schools. DYA also speaks of her identity as a researcher at the university as one that is hard work, requiring time and investment.

Vally Lytra, Turkish case study Relationship with participants: I was acutely aware that the kinds of data we collected hinged on negotiating access to the schools and classrooms to take part in the research process with school administrators, the children, their parents and teachers. This entailed negotiating various ‘positionings’ and being cast in particular ways. For instance, school administrators seemed keen to play up my affiliation to a prestigious university, especially to parents. At the same time, my institutional affiliation appeared to be a source of anxiety for them as they seemed to see me as an assessor of their teaching and administrative practices. Teachers were keen to draw upon my researcher ‘expertise’ to discuss aspects of their teaching practices and beliefs. Occasionally, however, they seemed to challenge my researcher role by expecting me to take an active part in the lesson. It was not clear to me whether by being positioned as a ‘pupil’ the teachers in question were trying to be inclusive or whether this was perhaps some kind of power struggle between the teacher and the researcher where the former was subtly reminding the latter who was running this particular classroom. Although I consciously tried to down-play my researcher status, this seemed to be the most salient identity marker for children and parents. It was only towards the end of the field work that I felt I had made a real breakthrough with the children of one class in particular. That day their teacher was absent, and I volunteered to keep them busy. This encounter was transformative: all of a sudden children were keen to ask me questions about myself and the research project, and competed with one another to share information about them. It would be a stretch of the imagination to claim that suddenly I had become an ‘honorary in-group’ member. In my subsequent interactions with the children, however, I sensed a shift in their perspective: it looked like I was now regarded as a ‘friendly adult’ too. Negotiating a researcher identity: As a researcher in the field, I wore two hats: that of the ‘naïve’ investigator working with Turkish-speaking children in the United Kingdom for the first time, and that of the ‘knowledgeable’ researcher with experience in educational research. Overall, I tried to downplay my expertise and be more a passive observer than

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an active participant in complementary school life. The fact that I felt very much an ‘outsider’ vis-à-vis the lived experiences of people and communities I had set out to explore certainly influenced this decision. At the same time, I felt very much an ‘insider’ as I had researched mainstream schools and multilingual classrooms and worked with Turkishspeaking young people before. There was a sense of comfortable familiarity in the sudden increase of the children’s informal side-talk, exchange of handwritten notes and fidgeting with mobile phones whenever teachers turned their backs. This made me think that boundaries between being an ‘insider’ and being an ‘outsider’ were in fact permeable and that as members of a large research team, we all negotiated different levels of ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ membership and affiliation. As a researcher working in pairs and as part of a larger group, I felt that my skills and expertise were valued but also complemented by those of my colleagues. For instance, my colleague (DYA) acted as a linguistic and cultural ‘broker’ and helped me navigate the nuances of Turkish varieties and local cultural practices. At the same time, membership in a large research team opened up a discursive space for an ongoing negotiation of interpretive differences. This in turn enhanced my understanding of ways to represent the diverse voices of our participants in the research process.

VL speaks of being positioned as assessor, expert and researcher and of trying to play down these identity positions. She is aware of the advantages and disadvantages of the status accorded by the prestigious university she represents. She feels she walks the line between the naïve and knowledgeable researcher, needing both positions in order to build trust and collect data. VL speaks of occupying both roles of outsider, as a non-member of the community, and insider, in terms of her research experience in working with Turkish youth in classrooms. She describes her co-researcher as a cultural and linguistic broker. For VL, discussions with the full research team open up a discursive space for negotiation of interpretive difference.

Angela Creese Negotiating a researcher identity: Who I am in this research project is a departure from the kind of identity I like to usually have with research participants. I find myself performing a different role. The structure of the research project means that I do not have a case study site. Whereas the rest of the research team is ‘paired’ with another ethnographer and located in two schools, my role is to visit all eight schools once only. This means that I do not get to know the participants in the field, and the people I know best are the other members of the researcher team. The lack of intimacy in my relationship with participants – teachers,

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children and parents – positions me in ways with which I am uncomfortable. For example, I often find it difficult to live with the status accorded to me by the researchers in representing me to the participants (who have to find ways to explain why a third researcher is here now). Whereas usually in the field I play low status and attempt to listen and be sympathetic, I am often thrown into a high status position with the introduction ‘this is the principal researcher of the research project’. Sometimes, if I am honest, I like this. This is often in relation to the ‘senior men’, usually senior administrators, who oversee teachers, helpers, and parents (usually mothers). With the status given to me comes a new role, and I notice that I have behaved differently in some school sites. For example, because time is scarce for my one-off visit, I make demands which I would usually negotiate over time. I am aware that my one-day visit to the site places an additional burden on the researchers, who not only have to negotiate my visit with the school participants but also have to help me locate the schools and then once there, help me navigate my way round classes. The intensive data collection period and fragile atmosphere in which the researchers themselves are heavily involved in negotiating their own research identities with participants, does not make this easy, and I realize that my visits often add another level of stress to the researchers’ burden of negotiation. In many ways, I feel completely reliant on the researchers to carry my own researcher identity during these visits. I feel dependent on the kind of relationships they have established with teachers, children and parents, and I feel quite passive in the shaping of my own place in the field. As somebody experienced in doing ethnographic field work, I find this reliance on others difficult, and having my own identity as a researcher played out through another researcher is something I have not encountered before. Once or twice this has caused some tension in the research team and created in me a sense of confusion in which I feel the need to show my credentials as an experienced researcher, while balancing this with other roles I have in the research project such as maintaining an open, honest and collaborative atmosphere in which everyone feels they are developing. I have differing connections with the different languages, communities and schools in the project, and these additional factors serve to provide context and establish some kind of insider relationships missing in other ways. This is the case with two of the case study sites: Turkish and Gujarati. I speak some Turkish and was able to use this during my visits to the two schools. I spoke to the whole class in Turkish and could follow bilingual classroom instruction. I was able to do the social niceties in Turkish and perform some understanding of Turkish history and social life. My connection to the Gujarati complementary schools was through a previous research project. Revisiting the participants and researchers with whom I had already previously established close relationships gave me a sense of returning to familiar and comfortable territory.

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AC speaks of how the research design constructed her as an outsider with participants and of how she has little opportunity to build rapport with them. She is cast as the senior member of the team, and this means she is unable to take up the position of learner and listener more familiar to her. She is ambivalent about her principal investigator role. It accords her status, allowing her to disrupt gendered ‘positionings’ by male participants in senior positions in complementary school settings. However, it also creates distance from other participants in the field. She is aware of her reliance on the other researchers and the imposition she places on them. Her managerial and leadership role means she takes up positions in the team which may require her to engage with and resolve conflicts. These vignettes tell a story of nine perspectives on team ethnography. In the final section of this chapter, we discuss several themes emerging from them, in relation to the notion of ‘positionality’. They are: insider/ outsider; language and culture; and position and privilege.

Insiders and outsiders: relations in the field The researchers’ accounts show an interest in the subtleties of the insider/outsider debate and acknowledge how feelings, attitudes and stances towards insider and outsider categories vary in the two different sites of research: the complementary school and the university. The vignettes show the fluidity of the insider and outsider categories as researchers engage with different participants and negotiate themselves and the project in relation to both the research participants and the fuller team. There was awareness across the research team of needing to move in and out of insider and outsider positions with research participants, in order to at one and the same time achieve closeness and maintain distance. Some spoke of performing particular identities in order to gain access (AB, SH and VL). We hear of the importance of emotion, connection and long-term commitment to a community and a group of people (AB). Several of the researchers tell of the importance of the bigger national, cultural and religious identity markers in making them feel comfortable with those they are researching, allowing them to develop trust and confidence (DYA and SH). In contrast, two of the researchers speak of imposition, manipulation and feelings of discomfort. These researchers describe feelings of invasion and disruption in the homes and schools they visit to collect data (ABL and PM). There is an expression of the need to ‘pay back’ (PM) those whose classrooms they were disrupting. The vignettes show an awareness of how different institutional structures create and also potentially shut down possibilities for their positioning in the field and in the university. 103

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Some accounts reveal a tension between presentation of self in the field and positioning by others. Researchers describe being constructed in particular ways by research participants while recognising that such constructions are also fluid. Several of the vignettes speak of moments of ‘transition’ in the field where participants begin to trust the researcher in ways more aligned to those preferred by the researched. CJW speaks of the transition from stranger to confidante. DYA speaks of moving from ‘stranger’ to ‘friend’.

Insiders and outsiders: relations in the team A similar range of belonging and distance was expressed in terms of our other arena of practice, that of the university where the team came together to meet approximately every five weeks. The purposes of full project meetings were twofold. Mornings were generally spent on business, while afternoons were devoted to cross case study analysis and discussion of data. In the vignettes, some of the researchers speak of their ease and interest in these meetings while others speak of the demands and structures of the meetings (AB and DYA). Some saw the university as a place to interpret and learn in an open discursive space while others describe it as more fixed and hierarchical. Several of the researchers mention the importance of the university meetings as a place to be critically reflective, listen to others and hear new interpretations (PW, VL and CJW). The ongoing identity work of performing the role of researcher is also mentioned in several of the vignettes (AB and DYA). There is recognition that this required careful and cautious negotiation, not only with the rest of the team but also in representing the research participants (AB). Some of the researchers commented on both the ease and difficulty of negotiating a place in the project team. One member mentioned the university meetings as a place to move beyond the case study and the ownership of data in specific sites. The university meetings were places where data could be shared and new interpretations and representations made and jointly negotiated and contested (ABL). Other researchers spoke of the importance of the case study research pair rather than the full team as a site of exchange, negotiation and debate (SH).

Language and culture A second theme that is salient across the vignettes is the relevance of ‘language and culture’. Some of the researchers speak of how they are positioned by the team as expert in particular areas of language and

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culture (AB). Others speak of their colleagues as cultural experts and brokers who help them understand elements of the research process (VL, ABL and PM). The vignettes show the complex role that language(s) played in the project, as researchers describe the importance of both English and community languages in gaining the trust of research participants. The vignettes show the importance of language choice in shaping relations with those in the field. Some of the researchers name salient language and cultural identities for themselves as central in researching in the schools (DYA and SH). Other vignettes appear to adopt a more fluid account of culture, which is constructed locally and performed differently with different participants over the data collection period (ABL and VL). The researchers’ accounts also show that language as cultural capital is not straightforwardly agreed upon and does not guarantee insider or outsider status (Creese et al. 2008). Throughout the project, the research team was aware of how their languages and linguistic varieties were crucial in gaining access, building trust, collecting and analysing data. The vignettes from CJW and LW in the Chinese case study make this point well. CJW and LW, both Mandarin speakers with limited Cantonese, describe how different varieties of Chinese played their part in developing relations with participants in the field. The sociolinguistic relationship between Mandarin and Cantonese is beyond the scope of this chapter. However, it is important to point out the relevance of language choice in skilfully negotiating insider/outsider status in the Cantonese school. CJW’s account shows research participants’ initiation of English as a sign of developing trust and inclusion between the researcher and the researched in the Cantonese complementary school. The use of English appears to have allowed a closer researcher/researched relationship, which the use of Mandarin with the Cantonese-speaking teachers possibly did not. CJW’s vignette also shows the researcher’s awareness of orthography in developing the trust and respect of those she was researching, as different writing systems index different political and socio-historical traditions. Bilingualism and multilingualism were important researcher resources across all four case studies of the research project. Access to different varieties of languages allowed the researchers to form relationships of trust. However, as with other identity markers (gender, sexual orientation, class, ‘race’ and age), language choice and use could sometimes open up new conceptual spaces but also sometimes silence them (Pratt and Hanson, 1995). Our multilingual study shows the importance of language as a resource in the research process, but it also shows the importance of other indexical factors in positioning oneself in the field and the team.

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Power and privilege Members of the research team were in different ways aware of issues of power and privilege, not only in relation to the research participants, but also within the team. Of interest to the researchers was the place of the university in positioning researchers and participants in the research process. Many of the researchers speak of the advantages and disadvantages gained by this position and refer to the ways in which the status imposed by a university study is co-constructed by participants, researchers and the fuller team. The members of the team were not equally at home in the academic environment. Some felt apprehensive about fitting in to the academy and said they were more comfortable in and around the complementary schools. Several members of the research team spoke of the need to negotiate themselves away from the identity of ‘researcher’ or to acknowledge it and find ways to accommodate it (LW and AC). However, at other times researchers were aware of making the most of their researcher status, particularly as ways to counter other ‘positionings’ around social categorization such as gender (SH, AC and DYA). Some of the researchers’ accounts also refer to an awareness of the agency of the research participants in using the power and status of being researched. The vignettes describe research participants in administrative roles both enjoying their connection to prestigious university research and its potential political gain, but some also express a concern about increased surveillance. Eisenhart (2001b) makes particular mention of collaborative research teams in meeting the challenges of conventional ethnography. She discusses the possibilities they offer for portraying internal tensions and inconsistencies as well as producing accurate, balanced, insightful and respectful ethnographic accounts. We do not suggest that team ethnography is the panacea for overcoming all the issues facing ethnographic research in the late modern era. In fact, in many ways, this discussion raises more issues than it resolves. Despite a broadly positive experience of doing team ethnography, we acknowledge that voices compete and offer contradiction and contrast in describing the processes of constructing an ethnography. Where does this leave us? In revealing the different perspectives of this team and how they compete and complement, engage and retreat, we believe we are able to represent different voices in our final accounts. Eisenhart (2001b) has argued that conventional ethnography is not known for its attention to divisions, struggles or inconsistencies or for its scope or mobility. She suggests that ethnographers will need to respond in two ways to new theoretical developments in the field of education and culture. According to her, ethnographers need to be: 106

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pushed by theoretical and social currents to trace cultural forms ‘upward’ and ‘outward’ so as to consider how they are manifested and produced in networks of larger social systems. (Eisenhart 2001b:22)

In other words, in order to understand ‘community’ in contemporary life we will need to trace relationships across time and space to understand how they are performed locally but formed or controlled elsewhere. Eisenhart goes on to argue that ethnographers are also likely to be: pushed ‘downward’ and ‘inward’ to see how cultural forms become part of individual subjectivities or imaginations. (Eisenhart 2001b:22)

We believe that team ethnography, with its attention to the different social, cultural and linguistic perspectives of team members, offers possibilities to be pushed upwards and inwards. A team of researchers offers different instantiations of micro experiences resulting in the production of divergent and overlapping views of the social order. A multilingual team in particular offers rich descriptions of how language and culture play a part in the construction of meanings and knowledge in the everyday practices of the field and the university. The different multilingual perspectives of the diverse team also offer different voices, through their own reflexive accounts as well as through their findings and representations of research participants in the field. It is clear that language is an important social marker, along with ‘race’, gender and social class, in the ‘positionality’ of the researcher in the field. However, this does not imply that the position of the researcher in the field is dependent on a static marker, which guarantees either ‘insiderness’ or ‘outsiderness’. Rather, language is used ‘agentively’ by the researcher to build trust and confidence with research participants. In rendering the processes of meaning-making and representation explicit we can demystify the processes of team ethnography. The multilingual and socially produced knowledge and skills of different team members introduce diversity. They increase the number of voices brought into the frame. Understanding how a multilingual research team builds relations with those they are researching in multilingual settings opens up opportunities for dialogue and understanding between teacher, learner, parent and researcher and provides a process of knowledge exchange and construction in multilingual research sites. In this chapter we have introduced the collaborative approach through which we view multilingualism. Our perspective is richly informed by the voices, experiences, knowledge and findings of a diverse yet coherent team of researchers. In the next chapter, we zoom in on the complementary schools themselves, as we begin describe the ideologies and linguistic practices of students and teachers. 107

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5

Separate and flexible bilingualism in complementary schools

In this chapter we describe the range of linguistic practices of multilingual participants in the setting of complementary schools. We focus on interactions in and out of the classroom and during break times and also the time during which the children enter and leave the school. We present a range of different voices from teachers and young people as they engage in official and unofficial school business, and develop this further in the following chapter. Here, we present the typical, routine and ritualized discourses of complementary school life and highlight the different ideologies towards, and practices of, multilingualism. We make links to the following chapters in touching on issues of ‘heritage’ and ‘nationality’, which are left for further development in Chapters 8 and 9. This chapter, along with those that follow, illuminates seemingly contradictory tendencies at all levels as participants balance and reconcile what often appear to be paradoxical ideologies and practices but are lived out simultaneously and unparadoxically. Other chapters will discuss apparent incongruities such as students’ contradictorily cooperative and resistant identities, and students’ simultaneously serious and ‘carnivalesque’ participation in classroom lessons. In this chapter, we look at two ideologies of bilingualism – ‘separate’ and ‘flexible’ bilingualism – and examine how they are simultaneously played out in the classroom. We consider how separate bilingualism is linked to a view of culture as a large national and geographic entity, and how flexible bilingualism is linked to a view of culture as local identity performance and practice. An argument will be made that links these two different conceptions of bilingualism to conflicting political, pedagogical and sociolinguistic discourses on language. We use the term ‘separate bilingualism’ to describe what Heller (1999:271) has called ‘parallel monolingualism’ or ‘bilingualism with diglossia’ (Baker 2003; Fishman 1967). We use the term ‘flexible bilingualism’ to describe what Garcia describes as ‘translanguaging’ (García 2007:xiii), and what Bailey (2007) describes, following Bakhtin (1986, 1994), as ‘heteroglossia’. As we argued in Chapter 3, theorizing the use of linguistic signs as

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processes of translanguaging and ‘heteroglossia’ provides a better understanding of participant identities in these multilingual contexts. ‘Separate bilingualism’ is constituted by some of our participants through recourse to powerful and pervasive political and academic discourses, which view languages as discrete and tied to nation and culture in simplified and coherent ways. Such a view of bilingualism places emphasis on categories, and linguistic and social classifications. We will show how this understanding of bilingualism among the teachers and administrators we met in the complementary schools can be linked to reified, static views of culture, as complementary schools themselves sometimes settle on simplified cultural narratives. However, an ideology and practice of separate bilingualism also allows teachers to articulate, organize and assemble resources to counter the hegemony of other ‘mainstream’ institutional accounts of nation, history, culture and language. ‘Flexible bilingualism’ represents a view of language as a social resource (Heller 2007) without clear boundaries, which places the speaker at the heart of the interaction. It stresses individual agency and understands language use as predicated on using all available signs (themselves socially constituted) in the performance of different social identities. Participants’ awareness of ‘language’ or ‘code’ is backgrounded, and ‘signs’ are combined and put to work in the message being negotiated in hand. Flexible bilingualism captures the ‘heteroglossic’ nature of communication in the bilingual context of complementary schools. It leads us away from a focus on ‘languages’ as distinct codes to a focus on the agency of individuals in a school community engaged in using, creating and interpreting signs to communicate to multilingual audiences. We will look at how participants use linguistic resources to break down boundaries between languages in performing the routine activities of complementary schools.

Separate bilingualism The default mode in the complementary school classrooms where we conducted our observations, is that the teacher mainly speaks the community language, and students mainly speak English (Creese et al. 2007a, b, c, d, 2008). This is in keeping with a previous study conducted in Leicester (Martin et al. 2004, 2006). Across the different case study schools, it was not uncommon to hear: ‘Türkçe Konus¸’, ‘Bangla-e maato’, ‘䃯Ё᭛’ (Cantonese), ‘䇈᱂䗮䆱’/‘䇈ढ䇁’ (Mandarin) and ‘Gujarati bolo’, which in all cases translates as a request to use the community language and not English. We record, in a short field note, a teacher

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in a Turkish complementary school insisting that students use Turkish and not English: Example 5.1 Homework comprises of three parts and seems like a lot, learning words, using them in sentences and answering questions. One child asks in English after many attempts to understand in Turkish, ‘can you tell me in English what number two means please’, and the teacher responds, in Turkish, ‘Neden I˙ngilizce? {why English?} The child says, ‘because I don’t understand’. But still there is no English, only slower Turkish with more examples. (field notes, Turkish school)

When questioned about this observation, the teacher argued that: ‘I˙¸s in içinde Türkçe varsa o derste kesinlikle Türkçe konus¸ulması lazım. Is¸in icinde I˙ngilizce varsa o derste kesinlikle I˙ngilizcenin konus¸ulması lazım’ {if it’s a Turkish class the lesson must be exclusively in Turkish. if it’s an English class, the lesson must be exclusively in English}. The teacher is advocating a clear separation between English and Turkish and appearing to allow for very little interactional space for the juxtaposition and mixing of sets of linguistic resources. We can see in these field notes that the teacher would prefer the young people to speak Turkish rather than English. In many ways, we can link this view to orthodoxies found in the fields of education and language teaching. Communicative language teaching (CLT) methodologies in both English as a second language (ESL) and modern foreign language (MFL) contexts have long argued that the best way to learn a language is to use a language. This is an argument based on the notion of ideal bilingualism as a kind of ‘double monolingualism’, so that ‘true, real, good linguistic competence is that which takes as its model the way one uses a language in a monolingual setting’ (Heller 2006:83). We come across similar arguments in relation to bilingual education: Bilingual educators have usually insisted on the separation of the two languages, one of which is English and the other, the child’s vernacular. By strictly separating the languages, the teacher avoids, it is argued, cross contamination, thus making it easier for the child to acquire a new linguistic system as he/she internalizes a given lesson. . . . it was felt that the inappropriateness of the concurrent use was so self-evident that no research had to be conducted to prove this fact. (Jacobson and Faltis, 1990:4)

Keeping languages separate, the pedagogic argument goes and allows for maximum exposure to the target language. These orthodoxies lend support to ideologies of separate bilingualism found in complementary school classrooms. Garcia (2009:8) argues that bilingual education that 110

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insists on ‘the strict separation of languages is not the only way to successfully educate children bilingually, although it is a widely conducted practice’. We will take up the pedagogic discussion in Chapter 10, where we consider the implications of flexible approaches to teaching bilingually, but for now, we concentrate on illustrating the two different ideologies of bilingualism in evidence in the complementary schools. In the extract that follows, the request to keep the languages separate is made explicit by the teacher in a Bengali school. However, this goes one step further when the teacher links the teaching of language/literacy to a national identity: Example 5.2 T: Bangla-e maato etaa Bangla class {speak in Bangla this is Bangla class} khaali English maato to etaa Bangla class khene {if you speak in English only then why is this the Bangla class?} S: miss you can choose S: I know English S: why? T: because tumi Bangali {because you are Bengali} S: my aunty chose it. she speaks English all the time. (classroom audio-recording, Bengali school)

Here, the teacher tells the students to use Bengali and connects the speaking of Bengali to being Bengali. However, the students question this statement by the teacher and suggest that they have a choice about which languages they speak. The student’s ‘aunty’, herself of Bangladeshi heritage, is offered as an example of someone who has resisted the notion of ‘one-language-equals-one-ethnicity/culture’. Two ideologies of bilingualism are in play here. On the one hand, the teacher insists on an idealized construction of bilingualism that argues that the languages must have separate functions, with Bengali given the status of classroom language. On the other hand, another ideology and practice of bilingualism comes into play, as language is used flexibly by the teacher (because tumi Bangali) to interact with her pupils. In Example 5.3, a similar debate about culture, nationality and identity is taken up in one of the Chinese complementary schools. Example 5.3 [Students have been writing the words of the Chinese national anthem] S1: [finishes writing and puts down his pen] I don’t know any of that. S2: my parents forced me to sing the song T: you are Chinese S3: even if you live in England.

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T: you are Chinese S2: technically I am not Chinese (classroom audio-recording, Cantonese school)

As in Example 5.3, the students question the teacher’s assumptions, and S2 attempts to re-negotiate the teacher’s imposed subject position, as the writing of the words of the national anthem provokes a discussion about nationality and identity. Across the four case studies, teachers moved in and out of a position which insisted that languages be kept separate and that the classroom be a place where only the community language could be used. Teachers expressed their fear that the young people will lose their language and identity unless they insist on separate bilingualism. One teacher in the Gujarati school said, ‘I’m proud of my language. Our identity is our language. It is our mother tongue and if we don’t speak it, who are we?’ Another teacher from the same school said: Example 5.4 We must all speak Gujarati in class and in the school – Gujarati is learnt if it is spoken. I’m strict about speaking Gujarati in class. Parents should speak Gujarati with their children but there is not much support from them. (interview with teacher, Gujarati school)

There was anxiety about language shift and loss of the community language and heritage identities in the face of the dominance of English. Although there is an acknowledgement here that Gujarati in Leicester is different from ‘original’ Gujarati reflecting the changing nature of language, for the most part these teachers endorse an ideology of bilingualism as separate languages. There is no reference made to the young people’s other language, English, except to insist on only Gujarati being used in class. Teachers express their fear that the young people will lose their language and culture unless they insist on separate bilingualism. This fear is based on evidence that demonstrates the gradual loss of community languages in immigrant communities over generations. Jaffe (2007:53) argues that when a minority community sees the ‘tip in the direction of the dominant language’, they do not choose to adopt current discourse patterns for their linguistic standard. Rather, ‘authentic’ identity ‘is anchored in the pre-shift society that existed before the economic, ideological and educational pressure that led to language shift’ (Jaffe 2007:53). This helps explain why complementary schools might choose to endorse separate bilingualism and the ‘national’ culture of the ‘pre-shift’ society, preferring an idealized version of the heritage culture to the diversity of emerging cultures in diasporic urban life. 112

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This argument is developed in Chapter 8 in a discussion of the teaching of heritage in complementary schools. We now turn to look at how ideologies of separate bilingualism are refuted in practice in complementary schools by participants who are unable or unwilling to keep their languages separate in practice. Indeed, this idealized institutional ideology of separate bilingualism was at odds with the multilingual practices of all the participants (teachers, young people and parents) who found ways to neutralize and avoid such strictures. We see that teachers recognize the need to blend languages in engaging their students and indeed recognize the necessity of using all signs to perform varied identities and subjectivities. Our focus here is in describing flexible bilingualism as a practice that challenges the ideology of separate bilingualism, breaking it down and creating an opportunity for an alternative ideology. We leave a discussion of the potentials of this new ideology of flexible bilingualism as a pedagogic resource until Chapter 10.

Flexible bilingualism In this section, we present examples of flexible bilingualism in a range of settings and contexts in relation to complementary schools. These include the following: formal teaching interactions between teachers and students; informal conversations between students while in class; an assembly in which a head teacher speaks to students and parents; and interactions as young people prepare to leave for complementary schools while still at home. We provide examples from each of the four case studies (Gujarati, Chinese, Bengali and Turkish). We analyse these interactions to demonstrate the usual practices of ‘heteroglossic’ language use in complementary schools. In this analysis, the emphasis is on speaker voice and agency rather than on ‘language’ and switches of code. We will see that despite an institutional discourse that advocates monolingualism in the community language, classrooms are multilingual and use a wide range of linguistic resources in the acts of teaching, learning and social performance. In the following extract, children in one of the Gujarati schools have been asked to create a story in Gujarati. T is the teacher: Example 5.5 T: chalo, tame taiyar chho? ek diwas ( . ) chalo {come on, are you ready? one day ( . ) come on} S1: what? T: () S2: we’re still writing (2) we have written that much [shows book to T]. not much, is it?

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T: shena upper banawi chhe? {what is it about?} S2: kootro ane wandro {the dog and the monkey} T: kootro ne wandro? shu banawi chhe warta? {the dog and the monkey? what story have you made?} S1: they make friends and they go out T: be mitro chhe ane {they are two friends and} S2: they are going out T: e bai mitro chhe, kootro ne wandro ne bai farwa jay chhe {they are both friends and they go out [for a walk]} S2: they are going out T: kya farwa jay? {where do they go?} S1: junglema {in the jungle} T: junglema, wandrabhai junglema jai shake? {in the jungle, can the monkey go into the jungle?} S1: no, they are going out SS: [laugh] T: sssh! pachhi shu thyu? {then what happened?} (classroom video recording, Gujarati school)

Despite the teacher’s return to Gujarati at each turn, the students respond in English. We also see that the students’ colloquial use of English creates two different interactional frames. While the teacher’s aim is the production of a traditional folk story, the students’ aim is to give the story a more modern meaning. They use the phrase ‘going out’ to create a different meaning from that intended by the teacher, and turn the monkey and dog into lovers. The teacher does not or chooses not to understand this implication. Across the eight schools, we saw many examples of students using their linguistic awareness of English in creative ways with their teachers (Lytra and Baraç, 2009). We further explore this notion of linguistic creativity in the classrooms in the next two chapters. Underlying any discussion of linguistic practices in complementary schools is the fact that the teachers are generally more proficient in the community language, whereas students are generally more proficient in English. What happens here is that two languages are used to accomplish lessons. This is because both sets of linguistic resources contribute to meaning-making, which becomes more than the sum of its parts, in ways that language separation would not allow (Lopez 2007). We also see how linguistic resources are accessed and brought to bear on the interaction, for example, in the word ‘junglema’, which is introduced by students and accepted by the teacher, and continued to be used by the teacher in her focus on the production of the story. There is a certain pragmatism connected to this position, with teachers recognising that to engage students, they need to accept flexible bilingualism.

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In the following interview, the researcher, W, is speaking with the deputy head teacher of the Cantonese school. Example 5.6 W: do you encourage teachers to, say, only speak Cantonese at school? D: we’ve got the policy to tell them that all the time W: right D: but, you see, the kids tend to be paying attention as soon as they use their ‘mother tongue’, English, in class. I think that’s the tendency (interview with deputy head teacher, Cantonese school)

This teacher uses a definition of ‘mother-tongue’ based on proficiency and expertise and describes English as the students’ mother-tongue. He argues that the use of both languages is a resource to engage the students. In the three examples that follow, teachers describe the mixing of languages as a resource to include young people in the Gujarati schools: Example 5.7 we’re always comparing – it is nice to do things in Gujarati but we love you to do things in English as well. how are we going to separate those things? no. Actually we are giving more. you don’t have to change the way you are to mix with others. you can enjoy both worlds, both lives. (head teacher interview, Gujarati school) Example 5.8 The languages are getting mixed so a new language is emerging – the language of Leicester! (teacher interview, Gujarati school) Example 5.9 Since this is a Gujarati school, I will mix English and Gujarati . . . if you don’t understand you can raise your hand and I will explain it. (field notes, Gujarati school)

In all three examples here, teachers in the Gujarati schools endorse the mixing of Gujarati and English. This is an alternative institutional ideology to that of separate bilingualism, and was particularly noticeable in the two Gujarati complementary schools. We discuss this in more detail in Chapter 10, where we explore the pedagogic potential of complementary school classrooms and flexible bilingualism in particular. There, we show examples of how teachers in the schools used their

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linguistic repertoire to engage their audiences in literacy practices and whole school events. In our next example of flexible bilingualism in complementary schools, we turn to the Cantonese case study. Towards the end of our period of data collection in the Cantonese school, a money box went missing. This incident became the focus of several discussions across the school and was simultaneously dealt with in different classrooms. Following the incident, teachers at the school were asked to use their own means to find the missing money box and ask their students for help in the matter. In this incident, the teacher (Example 5.10) asks the students to put their bags on the desk so that she can search them. Our field notes of this classroom show that chorusing and teacher-fronted classroom discourses are the usual interactional pattern, with few opportunities for pair or group work. The teacher keeps a tight rein on the classroom discourse. The interactional order was the teacher-controlled highly repetitive initiation-responsefeedback (IRF) sequence (Sinclair and Coulthard, 1975; Mehan 1979). However, the serious and unusual nature of the stolen money box incident disrupts this usual pattern. In this changed setting, flexible bilingualism is practised naturally and unproblematically (T is the teacher; Y, L, and G are girls; B is a boy): Example 5.10 T: ଞ, ໻ᆊ㙐ԣˈᇛԴ‫ⱘץ‬᳌ࣙᬒϞᶅDŽ{ah. everyone listen. put your school bag on the table} B: what? Y: 咲㾷ਔ˛{why?} T: ಴⠆ᅌ᳝᷵ᵅ㽓ϡ㽟њˈ᠔ҹᅌ᷵㽕 {because there was something missing from the school so the school would like to} check. check ᳌ࣙˈᡞ᠔᳝᳌ࣙᬒ೼ᶅϞ {school bags. put all your school bags on the table} L: ϡ㽟њҔ咑˛{what’s missing?} T: ⬅Դ‫ץ‬এ᧰ˈ䙘ᰃҪ‫ץ‬㞾Ꮕᡞᵅ㽓ᬒߎ՚˛{you’ll go and search or ask them to put things out themselves?} ࣙ㺣᠔᳝ⱘᵅ㽓ᣓߎ՚DŽDŽDŽDŽᡞ᠔᳝᳌ࣙ㺣ⱘᵅ㽓ᬒ೼ᶅϞDŽ  DŽDŽ {take everything out from your school bags. put everything in your school bag on the table.} G: bag (2) they aren’t mine, they are yours [students continue chatting while removing things] T: ୖˈϡᰃিԴ‫ץ‬௜ˈ⫼䲏᠟ˈϡᰃ⫼‫ן‬ষ {wei, I didn’t ask you to be noisy. use your hand not your mouth.} ௅{nah} OK଺{la},Դ‫ⱑ⏙ץ‬௲ {you’re all innocent} [laughter] G: I need to throw this throw this throw it in the bin

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B: 㗕᏿ˈϡ㽟њҔ咑ਔ˛{teacher, what’s missing?} T: ϡⶹDŽ{don’t know} (classroom audio-recording, Cantonese school)

The next example is from a different class, but still concerns the missing money box. The students are without their regular teacher. It is their last lesson of the school year, and the class has just finished their final examination. C (class-minder) has been sent in to mind the class: Example 5.11 C: [to the students]  Դ‫ץ‬ത೼䙷㺣ˈҞ໽ᕜ➅ˈ៥ϡᛇࢩDŽԴ‫࠯ץ‬ᠡ‫خ‬䘢Ҕ咑˛ {you sit there. it’s very hot today. I don’t want to move. what have you done just now?} S1: ੾ᠧ″ಝDŽ{playing game boys} C: ᠧ″ˈ䙷咑ད˛ᠧҔ咑″ਔ˛ {playing game boys. isn’t that great? what game did you play?} B: Astro Boy C: ៥ᛇଣԴ‫ץ‬DŽ{I’d like to ask you} B: 䏶䎇⧗ਔDŽ{let’s play football} C: ϡᛇᕜ➅ਔ. ≦᳝௶⥽ˈതདѯˈ䎠㽾Դ. {don’t want to. it’s very hot. nothing to play now, sit down properly, don’t fall off } [all laugh] Դⶹῧϟᬊᅌ䊏䙷㺣ˈ᳝ᔉᶅҨˈ᳝‫ן‬ԃԃ᳝‫ⱑן‬㡆ⱘ {you know downstairs where they collect school fees there is a table, an uncle had a white} box 㺱⹢䡔 {for keeping loose change} missing now. is anybody see anybody take it? S1: ᳝ᑒ໮䣶ਔ˛{how much money was there?} S2: ≦᳝‫ן‬Ҏད‫ڣ‬䄬ᕫԶ. {nobody seemed to know him} C: seriously, ད‫ڣ‬ϝ᭛⊏Ⲧ䙷ῷ {like a sandwich box} S1: ϝ᭛⊏Ⲧ˛{sandwich box?} C: Զᬒ {he puts} some loose change in there. has anybody seen anybody who nicked it or took it? S2: no. S1: ≦᳝DŽ{no} S3: is it something done during the break time? C: eh? S3: it’s probably stolen during the break time C: yeah, but it is unusual. ಴⠆ᑇᰖ {because normally} nobody took it and it’s just surprising, it’s the last time, somebody must think they could do something S1: ૨ད䁅Զ⭊ϝ᭛⊏亳੫ԶDŽ{it’s hard to say. he might have mistaken it as a sandwich and eaten it} C: ૨ⶹਔ. ⧒೼ⳟⳟ᳝≦᳝Ҏ㽟䘢 . . . Դ‫ץ‬㗗ᅠ䀺଺. Ҟ໽. {don’t know? see if any of you seen it ( . ) have you finished your test today?}

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S2: S3: C: S3: C: S3: C:

S1: C: S1: C: B: C: S2: C: S2: C: B:

᳝Ҕ咑௶‫ ˛خ‬. . . དᚊਔ {what can we do? it’s so boring} check ᠟㹟{bags} ᠟㹟. Դ‫ৃץ‬৺↨៥᧰˛{bags, are you letting me search it?} ད.{OK} ㅫ଺. াᰃ㾎ᕫདDŽDŽDŽ{never mind. I just feel very} ༛ᗾ. {strange?} ૨া༛ᗾ. ֖ད䳛倮. 咲㾷᳝{not just strange. also very shocked. how can} something happening in this school? how come something like this happen in here? ಴ ৠᅌད {because pupils are very} honest ⱘ௯ˈᰃ஢ {aren’t you} honest, ഺⱑਔ {frank} 䁴ᆺ {honest} honest ϡᰃഺⱑ੽ {is it not frank?} 䁴ᆺ {honest} 䁴ᆺⱘᄽᄤ {honest child} 䁴ᆺⱘᄽᄤ. ᳝≦᳝Ҏⶹਔ˛{honest child. anybody know?} ៥䅔䘢䂆᭛଺ {I’ve read the text} ⫬Դ៤䂆䅔ϔ⃵㌺៥㙐଺ˈԴ⫬৏ {then you can read the whole text to me} ៥䅔䘢 {I’ve read it before} Դϡ㿬ᕫњˈᰃ஢˛{you don’t remember now, do you?} Դ‫ץ‬Ҟ᮹‫خ‬䘢Ҕ咑˛{what have you been doing today?} test (classroom audio-recording, Cantonese school)

As C was not the class’s regular teacher and was covering for a colleague at short notice, the lesson could not be planned beforehand. The nature of the relationship between adult and student is therefore different in this class, as the pedagogic rationale of language teaching was less clear with the adult serving to ‘mind’ the students rather than ‘teach’ them. Indeed, compared to the previous example, we do not see the same hierarchical structures used by the adult to bring about student action. The adult sanctions the discussion of electronic games and football, while it is the students who suggest the searching of bags. We also see examples of the teacher and young people using both languages to discuss the missing money box. The young people and teacher are using their linguistic resources to enforce and question the seriousness of the event. The teacher starts in Cantonese and engages the students in procedural or managerial talk about what they have completed in class before introducing the topic of the stolen money box. She moves between languages in discussing the theft with the students. She uses colloquial English (‘nicked’), while the young people are openly curious about what has happened. They use both languages to ask open questions to their adult minder, and make jokes in both Cantonese and English. The teacher uses both languages to describe how she feels and 118

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uses the English word ‘honest’ to describe how she views the young people who attend the school. This word prompts a further discussion of vocabulary, with students offering ‘frank’ as a synonym for honest. The discussion is full and flowing. The teacher and young people use whatever linguistic resources are at their disposal to take up identification positions around the missing money box event. In a third example from the missing money box episode, we recorded pupils in unofficial talk around the same theme. The students are chatting to one another and playing with the recorder at the end of the school session: Example 5.12 G1: is this recording? G2: I think it is T: [in the background] ㊪㋭ᥝܹൗഒㄦˈϡ㽕⬭೼⧁㺣DŽ{put the sweet wrappers in the bin, don’t leave them in the class} G1: do get off just do B1: why? G1: it’s not yours B1: so what? G1: it’s not yours do you want me to strangle you? B: go on then oh, I’m going to toilet G2: [giggles] G1: oh, no the geek boy has arrived [they fight for the recorder] G2: Rachel said that she likes (..) nobody B1: hello, hello, PC1661 [1661 in Cantonese] Դⱘᅌ᷵ি‫خ‬Ҕ咑˛ {what’s your school called?} Ss: [chatting, very noisily. A boy picks up the recorder and speaks into it] B2: ᳐Ꮦ{Manchester City} something something ᅌ᷵ˈᅌ᷵ˈ ᳾ⶹDŽ {school, school don’t know} B1: ᳐ජ‫‘ڥ‬௰௰’㧃Ҏᄤᓳᅌ᷵↨Ҏًњϔ ‫ⱑן‬㡆ⱘ䣶䡔ᵅᵅDŽԶህ ૨ⶹ䙞‫ًן‬੫DŽ⧒೼ህ᧰DŽDŽ᧰DŽDŽ᧰᳌ࣙˈ{someone stole a white money box, something from Manchester City Chinese descendents school. we don’t know who stole it. now, we have to search . . . search . . . search school bags} 䂟Դ⌒ {please send} Spiderman ੠ {and} Batman ՚ᬥ៥‫{ ץ‬to rescue us} thank you bye-bye (classroom audio-recording, Cantonese school)

We see the children use their multilingualism in this off-task interaction, moving between English and Cantonese. Overall, the extract evidences the young people’s ability and willingness to use their languages as they draw on their different experiences of language and genre in their mock news report. They use the ‘shock horror’ news headlines of tabloid media to parody the searching of bags for a money box that has 119

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gone missing in the school, introducing the global superheroes, Batman and Spiderman. The mimicry of the global media voices is ‘artful performance’ (Rampton 2006:27), when the act of speaking itself is put on display for the scrutiny of an audience. The recontextualized voices of the superheroes allow the introduction into the classroom of ‘two aspects of the world, the serious and the laughing aspect’ (Bakhtin 1968:96), as the students respond with humour to the incident of the missing money box. We further explore the concept of classroom humour in discussion of carnivalesque discourse in the next chapter. In some ways, this example lends itself to a typical code-switching analysis, in which the different languages are linked to different functions. The gossip and fight for the recorder is predominantly in English, whereas the missing money box ‘play’ is located in the school and in Cantonese. One might argue that English functions to perform the everyday banter of youth as they gossip and play-fight, whereas Cantonese functions to mimic – good-naturedly – the voices of the teachers. However, we suggest that such a structural analysis is limited. Rather, we would suggest that it is more useful to think about the multiple signs the young people have to hand in conjuring up this headlining news report. Both ‘languages’, along with other linguistic signs (prosody, intonation and pitch) are put to work in performing and communicating this genre. It is a bilingual and ‘heteroglossic’ text in which superheroes are called upon to save the day. For the young people attending complementary schools across the four case studies, bilingualism is an everyday, unmarked practice. In the Bengali case study, we were able to record the young people before they arrived and after they left the school. In Example 5.13, ten-yearold Tamim uses English to complain about his younger sibling, Naseem. His younger sister Shopna also joins in, using English and Sylheti: Example 5.13 Tamim: don’t man, shut up is that (.) you can go upstairs, you can go upstairs do you wanna watch it stop fighting all the time, I love it but don’t, don’t, don’t Shopna: Naseem stop it. don’t man etaa khotaa honosnaani {why don’t you listen?} (home audio-recording, Bengali case study)

In the next moment, the door bell rings, and Tamim asks his younger sister Tasmia to open the door: Example 5.14 Tamim: the man oh furi aaise {that woman has come} she has to come back. khulo {open} khulo, khulo {open, open} Tasmia, don’t you (..) my hand is stuck like that (home audio-recording, Bengali case study)

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Tamim has a lot on his hands. He is responsible for looking after his younger brother while his two sisters also get involved. The doorbell rings, and he must answer it while making sure his siblings are under control. His language use reflects the domestic scene with a lot going on and with different siblings making different demands of him. His language expresses the urgency and informality of ‘being responsible’. He and his sister Shopna use their languages to impose order, and to simultaneously discipline and encourage Naseem, thus making sure she opens the door and deals with a visitor. In the interaction, linguistic resources are put to use to manage a domestic scene. Less apparent is the switching of languages, more apparent is a flexible use of linguistic resources. That is, rather than thinking of Tamim’s languages as distinct codes delivering different functions, it is more useful to consider the signs at his disposal as a responsible sibling to cope with the social context at hand. The last extract comes from a Turkish classroom and shows three interactants: the teacher (T), and two students, Baran (B) and Cem (C). The extract shows the formal frame in which the two boys converse with the teacher who is also engaged in teaching the whole class, and the informal frame in which the two boys converse with one another out of the teacher’s earshot. As the two boys move between frames, they use both languages to keep both sets of ‘conversations’ going: Example 5.15 T: [in the background] parçanın ana düs¸üncesi {the gist of this piece} B: hey hey, bro T: biz buradan ne mesaj aldık {what message do we get from this} B: mesaj (.) hiç yalan etmeyin {the message is (.) you must never lie} T: anlayamadım bir daha söyler misin? {I am sorry can you repeat it please} B: yok (.) flop yaptım {no (.) I have flopped} T: demin söyledig˘ ini söyler misin? {can you repeat what you have just said?} B: korkuyom {I am scared} [to Cem] take it off man, now T: [to Cem and referring to the mobile phone] kaldırıyorsun {put it away} C: tamam tamam kaldırıyorum {OK. OK. I am putting it away} B: hayır, al ög˘ retmenim {no sir, confiscate it} [to Cem] telefon kullanma pislik {don’t use the phone you scum} who is the gayest person in your class? in school? T: [to whole class] Aferin. Hayatta hiç yalan söylemeyeceg˘ iz {well done. we must never lie}

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B: I will stab you Cem I’ll stab you T: [to whole class] ¸s imdi kaseti birlikte dinliyoruz {now, we will listen to the tape together} B: what game did you get off me? what is it called? that’s poor crap [teacher puts on a Turkish song] (classroom audio-recording, Turkish school)

Baran seems to be able to successfully move between informal peer talk and pupil–teacher talk. It appears that he is aware that Turkish is required to ‘deal’ with his teacher’s questions, whereas English seems to be preferred for the playful talk he engages in with Cem. However, Baran uses both English and Turkish at one point to respond to the teacher (flop yaptim) and Turkish in mock discipline and insult of Cem (telefon kullanma pislik {don’t use the phone you scum}). This allows Barat to side with the teacher and also mock him. Again, we would suggest that it is not the use of different languages or codes which is of importance here in understanding the social act and local rationalities of these interactants. Rather, it is the agency of the social actors as they ‘make hay’ with an unrewarding subject (Rampton 2006:3) and draw upon their linguistic resources to perform a range of identities including attentive pupil, compliant student, friend and ‘youth’. Our argument in this chapter has been that an ideology of ‘separate bilingualism’ is often constructed in complementary schools to establish routines and policies that are not in keeping with the flexible bilingualism of participants as they make use of a range of linguistic resources. Separate bilingualism can be understood as constituting a response to a fear and anxiety relating to the potential loss of the community language, and the cultural knowledge it is considered to index. For the teachers, separate bilingualism offers an opportunity to counter the structures and systems of mainstream discourses by insisting that a particular ideology of bilingualism and a standard version of the community language continue to be valid in the face of powerful English monolingual structures. It also allows participants to link the community language to particular heritages and histories. We have suggested that flexible bilingualism be viewed as ‘heteroglossia’ rather than code-switching, allowing the speaker rather than the language to be placed at the heart of the interaction, and linguistic practices to be situated in their social, political and historical conditions. García (2009:8) argues for flexible bilingual classroom practice, as ‘the language practices of bilinguals are interrelated and expand in different directions to include the different communicative contexts in which they exist’. Gutiérrez et al. (2001:128) argue that ‘hybrid language use is more than simple code-switching as the alternation between

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two codes. It is more a systematic, strategic, affiliative and sense-making process.’ In the next chapter, we consider some of the ways in which students discursively negotiate a range of subject ‘positionings’ in official and unofficial worlds of the classroom.

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6

Official and carnival lives in the classroom

In this chapter, we adopt a lens that draws on the work of Bakhtin and Voloshinov and enables us to understand the myriad, complex ways in which meanings are made in the language classroom, as students and teachers (inter alia) evaluate, incorporate, appropriate, anticipate, repudiate and exaggerate the reported and purported voices of others. These are voices that make meaning in creative, complex ways and also voices that are suffused with, and shaped by, the voices of others. They are voices of struggle, voices of authority, voices of negotiation, voices which bear the traces of histories and futures, voices in process. They are multilingual voices, moving freely between ‘languages’, calling into play sets of linguistic resources at their disposal (Heller 2007). They are voices of ‘ideological becoming’ that are frequently ‘double-voiced’, expressing simultaneously more than one intention (Bakhtin 1981:324). In our analysis, we noticed that children and adults alike frequently made meaning through representing other voices within their own voices. In her linguistic ethnographic study of children’s voices in and out of schools, Maybin (2006:24) found that ‘meaning-making emerges as an ongoing dialogic process at a number of different interrelated levels: dialogues within utterances and between utterances, dialogues between voices cutting across utterance boundaries, and dialogues with other voices from the past’. In this chapter we engage with meaning-making as dialogic process and ‘ideological becoming’, as social actors in complementary schools represented themselves and others in voices that cut across boundaries in complex, creative ways.

Dialogic discourse Bailey (2007:269) argues that in researching the ways in which linguistic practices contribute to social identity negotiations among multilingual speakers, a Bakhtinian perspective ‘explicitly bridges the linguistic and the sociohistorical, enriching analysis of human interaction’ as it is ‘fundamentally about intertextuality, the ways that talk in the hereand-now draws meanings from past instances of talk’. Tsitsipis (2005:2) finds Bakhtin’s thought ‘useful for the unraveling of the discursive continuities in chunks of narrative or conversational segments as well 124

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as for the study of broader structures related to the political economy of language’. Rampton (2006:364) adopts Bakhtin’s analysis to understand the linguistic practices of students in an inner-city high school, and especially the ‘spontaneous moments when these youngsters were artfully reflexive about the dichotomous values that they tacitly reproduced in the variability of their routine speech, moments when they crystallized the high-low structuring principles that were influential but normally much more obscure in their everyday variability’. Maybin (2006:4) situates her analysis of the verbal strategies of school children firmly in Bakhtin’s framework to account for social practices, which ‘both reflect and help to produce the macro-level complexes of language, knowledge and power (sometimes referred to as discourses), which organise how people think and act’. Lemke (2002:72) invokes Bakhtin to argue that language in use is dialogical, as ‘it always constructs an orientational stance toward real or potential interlocutors, and toward the content of what is said’. Lin and Luk (2005:86) engage with Bakhtin’s notion of ‘carnival laughter’ to understand the creative linguistic practices of English language learners in Hong Kong schools. They demonstrate that students are able to resist the routines of regular classroom practice by populating prescribed utterances with playful, ironic accents. Why, then, are contemporary linguists, seeking to understand aspects of the ways in which young people speak in late modernity, going to the writings of a literary scholar born in nineteenth-century Russia, whose main academic interests were in the novels of Dostoevsky and Rabelais? Linguists have increasingly turned to the works of Bakhtin and his collaborator Voloshinov because their theories of language enable connections to be made between the voices of social actors in their everyday, here-and-now lives, and the political, historical and ideological contexts which they inhabit. In familiar terms, Bakhtin’s philosophy of language contributes to the means by which we may go beyond a simple dichotomy of ‘micro and macro’, or ‘structure and agency’, to understand the structural in the agentic and the agentic in the structural; the ideological in the interactional and the interactional in the ideological; the ‘micro’ in the ‘macro’ and the ‘macro’ in the ‘micro’. A key feature of Bakhtinian thought in making such a contribution is the notion of language as ‘dialogic’. Related to notions of intertextuality, interdiscursivity and recontextualization, Bakhtin’s thought suggests that voices relate to other voices by representing within their own utterance the voices of others (Blackledge 2005; Luk 2008). In doing so, a voice may be hostile to other voices, be in complete harmony with them or suppress them, leaving only a suggestion that they are in any way present. Luk (2008:129) suggests 125

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that according to Bakhtin ‘our speech, that is all our utterances, comes to us already filled with the words of others’. Discourse bears the traces of the voices of others, is shaped by them, responds to them, contradicts them or confirms them, and in one way or another evaluates them (Bakhtin 1981:272). Within a single utterance different voices clash or coincide, ‘make digs’ at each other or concede to each other, and this may be as much the case where one of the voices is apparently quite absent as when both are present. Discourse, then, is dialogic, shaped and influenced by the discourse of others. Van Lier (2002:158) points out that language is always dialogical, reflecting other voices, as ‘it is shaped by the context and at the same time shapes the context’. Bakhtin argued that language is ‘historically real, a process of heteroglot development, a process teeming with future and former languages . . . which are all more or less successful, depending on their degree of social scope and on the ideological area in which they are employed’ (Bakhtin 1981:357). Maybin and Swann (2007:504) propose that Bakhtin’s notion of ‘heteroglossia’, ‘the co-existence and struggle between diverse social languages and between centripetal and centrifugal forces’, can be used to explore the ‘dialogic positioning of social languages within texts, and their animation and double-voicing’. Rampton (2006:27) notices in the speech of students in British secondary schools that young people at times break into ‘artful performance’, when the act of speaking itself is put on display for the scrutiny of an audience. Rampton refers to a particular kind of spoken performance, ‘stylisation’, in which ‘accent shifts represent moments of critical reflection on aspects of educational domination and constraint that become interactionally salient on a particular occasion’. That is, in producing an artistic image of another’s language (in Rampton’s study ‘posh’ or ‘Cockney’ accents), speakers position themselves interactionally in relation to certain ideologies. Dialogical relationships are possible not only between entire utterances; the dialogical approach can be applied to any meaningful part of an utterance, even to an individual word when ‘we hear in that word another person’s voice’ (Bakhtin 1973:152). Bakhtin argued that the importance of struggling with another’s discourse, and its influence in the ‘individual’s coming to consciousness’ (1981:348), is enormous.

‘Carnivalesque’ In his seminal work Rabelais and His World (1968), Bakhtin analysed three arenas of significance in what he called the language of carnival (Bakhtin 1994:196): (1) festivities, (2) parody and (3) the language of the market-place. The linguistic practices of the multilingual young people 126

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in our study lead us to give closer consideration to these aspects of Bakhtin’s work. For Bakhtin, ‘carnivalesque’ language is full of ‘the laughter of all the people’ (1994:200) and includes ritual spectacles, festive pageants, comic shows, parodies, curses and oaths. In the medieval Europe of Rabelais, carnival festivities were characterized by comic parodies of serious official, feudal and ecclesiastical ceremonies. Carnival was ‘a counter-hegemonic tradition’ (Caldas-Couthard 2003:290), which, in Bakhtin’s words, ‘celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions. Carnival was the true feast of time, the feast of becoming, change, and renewal. It was hostile to all that was immortalised and completed’ (Bakhtin 1986:10). The notions of change and renewal, and of ‘becoming’, are crucial in Bakhtin’s understanding of the ‘carnivalesque’. In their study of young second-language learners, Iddings and McCafferty (2007:33) point out that ‘Although Bakhtin clearly viewed carnival as an act of rebellion, the mood of rebellion in carnival is not primarily one of anger for him, but most saliently one of satire, critique, and ultimately, play.’ The festive laughter of carnival is ambivalent, at one and the same time triumphant and mocking, asserting and denying, burying and reviving. Parody was a widespread feature of carnival festivities in the Middle Ages. Sacred parodies of religious thought and parodies of debates and dialogues were common elements in the temporary liberation of the people, as they appropriated and subverted generic ritual by presenting droll aspects of the feudal system and feudal heroics. In parody, the first voice introduces a second voice, which has a semantic intention that is directly opposed to the first, and ‘The second voice, once having made its home in the other’s discourse, clashes hostilely with its primordial host and forces him to serve directly opposing aims, as discourse becomes an arena of battle between two voices’ (Bakhtin 1994:106). Bakhtin argues that parodic discourse can be extremely diverse and is analogous to discourse which is ironic or makes any other doublevoiced use of someone else’s words. Pennycook (2007:587) suggests that mimicry of the dominant powers and discourses unsettles those powers, as ‘parodic strategies are also acts of sameness that create difference: they differ from the original, and simultaneously change the original through recontextualization’. In her investigation of the language socialization experiences of a Punjabi-speaking English language learner in Canada, Day (2002:85) summarized Bakhtin’s notion that ‘no two apparently identical utterances made by different individuals can ever be truly alike, because dialogic relations are always present when we talk’. Bakhtin demonstrated that ‘carnivalesque’ parody was often 127

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tolerated by the powerful, as it was no more than a temporary representation of the usurping of traditional and conventional hierarchies. Parody is far from meaningless though. In standing on their heads the usual relations of power in society people claimed their freedom, however ephemeral, and in that moment challenged the established order. Bakhtin makes a distinction between mocking laughter that he terms ‘bare negation’ (1994:200), which he associates with the modern, cynical world and the ambivalent laughter of the people, which includes the mocker in the mocking, as ‘he who is laughing also belongs to it’ (1994:201). Laughter is all-inclusive and is the language of ‘the people’s unofficial truth’ (1994:209). A third aspect of carnival is ‘grotesque realism’. Bakhtin pointed out that the language of carnival was the language of degradation: ‘The essential principle of grotesque realism is degradation, that is, the lowering of all that is high, spiritual, ideal, abstract; it is a transfer to the material level, to the sphere of the earth and body in their indissoluble unity’ (1986:19). The language of the bowels and the genitals and the language of curses and oaths meant the defeat of authority by the people, as ‘This laughing truth, expressed in curses and abusive words, degraded power’ (Bakhtin 1994:210). Ribald references to the phallus played a leading role in the grotesque image and the language of the market-place, which remained outside official spheres but was an ambivalent language, directed at everyone. There were myriad expressions of abuse and mockery filled with bodily images, as ‘men’s speech is flooded with genitals, bellies, defecations, urine, disease, noses, mouths, and dismembered parts’ (Bakhtin 1994:235). This was a language that in its debasement debased power and was at the centre of all that was unofficial. At once positive and negative, speaking both of decay and renewal, ‘the beginning and end of life are closely linked and interwoven’ (1994:234), as each image creates a ‘contradictory world of becoming’ (Bakhtin 1968:149). Bakhtin differentiated between ‘authoritative’ discourse (e.g., of the father or teacher), and ‘internally persuasive’ discourse, where the latter is populated with the voices, styles and intentions of others. An individual’s ‘ideological becoming’ (1981:342) is characterized by the gap between the authoritative voice and the internally persuasive word. Rampton (2006:28) revealed adolescents using ‘posh’ and ‘Cockney’ varieties ‘to embellish performances of the grotesque and to portray images of unsettling, disorderly sexuality’. These stylizations were located in the adolescents’ broader trajectories of ‘ideological becoming’, ‘relating both to the kinds of educated people that these youngsters were becoming and to historical movements in education’ (Rampton 2006:365). The three aspects of the ‘carnivalesque’, carnival festivities, parody and the language of the market-place, will 128

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inform our understanding of the linguistic practices of the multilingual young people in our study and of their complementary school teachers. In this chapter, we focus on just two key classroom episodes, which reveal something of the ways in which the participants’ linguistic practices constituted and were constituted by their social, political and historical contexts and also extended our understanding of the young people’s linguistic (and other semiotic) meaning-making as aspects of their ideological becoming. They are (1) a dictation class in the Cantonese school in Manchester, and (2) a classroom activity in one of the Turkish schools in London. These instances were also typical of interactions we observed and recorded across the eight complementary schools.

Episode1 The first episode was audio-recorded in the Cantonese school. The teacher is engaging the children in a dictation test, which was a typical activity in this and other schools where we conducted our observations. We hear the voices of four students (S1, S2, S3 and S4), and the teacher (T). S2 was wearing a digital audio voice recorder with a collar microphone. The students were all born in Manchester in the north of England and usually spoke English with strong Mancunian accents. The teacher was born in China, and had lived in the United Kingdom for five years. Example 6.1 S1: chapter fourteen S2: कಯ䂆{lesson fourteen} [to S1]DŽ ュҔ咑{what are you laughing at}˛ shut up T: 咬ࠄ {dictate up to} ‘䰓⊶㕙㰳亯㠍 {the Apollo spaceship}’DŽ [starts to read the dictation] S1: [to the teacher] wait, wait, wait [stylized, high-pitched] T: OK. ៥‫ݡ‬䁾䘢{I’ll say it again}DŽ‘ϗ᳜क݁᮹{July the sixteenth} comma Ҫ‫{ץ‬they} [ത䰓⊶㕙㰳亯㠍] {took the Apollo spaceship and} 䲶䭟њഄ⧗ {left the earth}DŽDŽDŽ䲶䭟њഄ⧗ {left the earth}’DŽ S3: uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh [stylized] T: 㰳亯㠍 {the spaceship}DŽ䰓⊶㕙㰳亯㠍 {the Apollo spaceship} 䲶䭟њഄ⧗{left the earth}DŽ S2: the one million pound question [stylized] T: হ㰳{full stop}DŽ S2: the one million pound question when you’ve got to copy this [stylized] T: ‘亯㠍亯ᕫᕜᖿ{the spaceship flew very quickly}DŽDŽDŽÿ

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S2: [to a student] do you mind not swearing I’ve actually not stopped the tape T: ‘亯㠍亯ᕫᕜᖿ{the spaceship flew very quickly}DŽDŽDŽ’ S1: I can’t keep up the pace S4: Ҕ咑 {what}˛ T: 亯㠍亯ᕫᕜᖿ{the spaceship flew very quickly}DŽDŽDŽ S2: Ҕ咑{what} I can’t keep up of the pace˛Դ䛑૨䄬䃯㣅᭛DŽ {you don’t know how to speak English} me not speak English [highly stylized] S1 me not speak Chinese [highly stylized mock-ethnic accent] what? S3: [to teacher] YOU’RE TOO FAST [assertively] T: OK. S4: [to teacher]SLO - OW DO- W - N [exaggerated and slow] T: ៥᜶᜶䁾 {I’ll say it slowly}ˈ᳔ᕠϔ⃵{the last time}DŽDŽDŽ ᳔ᕠϔ⃵њ{the very last time}DŽ S4: thank you S1: I am lost (classroom audio-recording, Cantonese school)

In this excerpt, we are interested in the ways in which the voices of the students engage and clash with other voices. We are also interested in the ways in which the students adopt a highly stylized language to represent this engagement with the voices of others and position themselves in particular ways. The students are finding it difficult to keep up with the teacher’s Cantonese dictation. S1 asks the teacher to slow down (‘wait, wait, wait’). This apparently unidirectional request becomes double-voiced, however, as the student adopts a high-pitched, stylized intonation which mimics and mocks that of the teacher. The voice of the student clashes with the voice of the teacher and is ambivalent. Meaning is twofold, as the student both requests that the dictation activity be slowed down to a manageable pace and also undermines the activity itself by mocking the intonation of the teacher. S3 similarly introduces a dialogic element to what at first sight appears to be simple back-channelling, apparently affirming the teacher’s discourse. This is more than that however, as S3 develops a rhythmic, exaggerated intonation which subverts the teacher’s discourse at the same time as affirming it. The discourse of S3 is double-voiced, both mocking and supporting the teaching and learning activity. S2 adopts a stylized accent, perhaps that of a television game-show presenter, to say ‘the one million pound question’. He then connects the voice of the television presenter to the classroom activity, saying, in the same media-type voice, ‘the one million pound question when you’ve got to copy this’. Here, the student introduces a (real or imagined) voice from popular culture and allows that voice to coexist alongside 130

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the formal discourse of the dictation activity, in a quietly subversive double-voicing. S1 says ‘I can’t keep up the pace’, complaining again that the dictation is too fast for him. S2 immediately picks up on this, parodying S1’s complaint by repeating it in a slightly stylized accent. In this repetition, S1’s voice clashes with the voice of S2. Maybin (2006) argues that such repetition is almost always evaluative. Voloshinov points out that ‘every utterance has above all an evaluative orientation’ (1983:105). Pennycook (2007) and Day (2002) demonstrate that repetition of discourse is often an act of sameness that creates difference, making new meanings in new contexts from apparently identical language. The repetition of ‘I can’t keep up the pace’ has a new and different sense when repeated in a slightly stylized voice. S2 then adopts a highly stylized, ‘ethnic’ type accent to say ‘me not speak English’. This appears to be prompted by S1’s complaint that he cannot keep up with the dictation activity. First, he says ‘Դ䛑૨䄬䃯 㣅᭛DŽ{you don’t know how to speak English}’, possibly aiming his accusation at the teacher, who is conducting the dictation in Cantonese. Deliberately appropriating the stereotypically incorrect syntax of the English language learner (‘me not speak English’), S2 now seems to parody the voice of a student who has not yet developed English proficiency. In the world of schooling which these young people inhabit, this may be the caricatured voice of the ‘EAL’ or ‘ESL’ student. Talmy (2004) demonstrated that hierarchies of English language learners exist in classrooms, as the EAL/ESL category is culturally produced and reproduced. Talmy refers to the discursive construction of the newly arrived, ‘fresh-off-the-boat’ student, relationally defined against an unmarked, idealized ‘native’ speaker (see also Creese et al. (2006) for discussion of ‘freshie’ subject positioning in other complementary schools in United Kingdom). Talmy refers to the ‘linguicism’ at work in the social practice of ‘the public teasing and humbling of lower L2 English proficient students by their more proficient classmates’, which ‘was one of the primary ways that students produced and reproduced the linguicist hierarchy’ (2004:164). In the Cantonese classroom, the subjects of the teasing and humbling are not present, but the discourse is just as much targeted at the exotic ‘other’. This double-voiced discourse appears to negatively evaluate learners of English, while allowing S2 to positively position himself as a more proficient speaker of English. S1 responds with an even more highly stylized ‘mock-ethnic’ accent: ‘me not speak Chinese’. Here, S1 picks up on S2’s mock-EAL/ ESL joke and recontextualizes it, substituting ‘English’ with ‘Chinese’, maintaining his position as one whose ‘Chinese’ is not sufficient for the demands of the dictation exercise. The comic ‘ethnic’ accent in which this is spoken pokes fun at the learner of Chinese, while at the same 131

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time acknowledging that he too is a learner of Chinese. He inhabits this position at the same time as distancing himself from it, in discourse which is intensely dialogic. The meaning of S1’s statement would have been very different if he had said, in his usual Mancunian accent, ‘I don’t speak Chinese’. Instead, the discourse of the two students invokes stereotypes of language learners that only become stereotypes because they are frequently reiterated. They may position themselves as language learners, but in Talmy’s terms, they do not position themselves on the same plane as lower English proficient students in the ‘hierarchy of linguicism’. Complex ideological worlds clash and do battle in these short utterances. Assumptions about language learners, and perhaps these learners’ feelings about language learning, become evident. At the same time both positive and negative, critical and playful, the students’ discourse is double-voiced. The second excerpt is from the same class and the same session. It followed one minute after the previous excerpt. The voices are of the same social actors as in Example 6.1. S2 continues to wear a collar microphone. Example 6.2 S3: [loud mock-snoring sound] T: ᳜⧗Ϟࠄ㰩䛑ᰃ䱑‫{ܝ‬there was sunshine everywhere on the moon}DŽ S1: what? . . . [laughs] sorry T: ᳜⧗Ϟࠄ㰩䛑ᰃ䱑‫{ܝ‬there was sunshine everywhere on the moon}DŽ S1: uh-huh uh-huh S2: two Rooneys what do you feel what does it feel like not to be in the World Cup? what is it like not to be in the World Cup, Rooney? S1: very terrible S2: and you, Rooney? S3: it’s fine, I can play in the second game S1: oh really? S2: OK S3: I think I played a tremendous part, er, a terrible part in the play but I could go straight down the wing and pass it to Michael Owen and know he’ll score but that’s the way it goes (.) my name is Peter Crouch, commentating for the BBC cause I can do the robot [stylized] S1: OK T: Пᕠ{after that} comma ࠄ㰩䛑ᰃ⷇丁੠⊹ೳ{there were stones and soil everywhere}DŽ[reading dictation] S2: Eric, Rooney’s lost.

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T: S2: S1: S2: S1: S3: S2: S1: S2: S1: S2: S1: S2: T: S1:

ϡព䱑‫ܝ‬DŽDŽDŽ{If you don’t understand ‘sunshine’ . . .}ˈ Пᕠህᆿ{after that, just write} comma verily talking gibberish somebody hold it oh Rooney the police are after you [singing in animated, high-pitched voice] case by case hey Homer, thanks for the Duff beer [highly stylized American accent] he threw the book over the mike (2) Abdul Abdul Abdul Abdul Omar Abdul Abdul Omar what? gibberish. Omar what? gibberish (.) Sherman’s new name is (.) Mohammad. Abdul Abdul what? what? you are Mohammad [continues to repeat dictation] what? what? what? (classroom audio-recording, Cantonese school)

The loud snoring sound of S3 articulates comic resistance to the continuing dictation activity. S1 mimics the teacher’s voice in saying, loudly, ‘what?’, in a similar way to his parodic voice in Example 6.1. Here, though, he seems to respond to an (unheard) admonishment from the teacher and apologizes. He retreats to the more quietly subversive strategy of repetitive back-channelling, as in the previous section. Now S2 introduces a further voice from the world of popular culture, this time that of a television football commentator. The recordings were made at the time of the football (soccer) World Cup in 2006. S2 initiates a role-play with his friends S1 and S3. Wayne Rooney, Michael Owen and Peter Crouch are all England footballers. Peter Crouch was well known at the time for celebrating scoring a goal by doing a dance in the style of a robot. All three students here attempt to create a role-play in the voices of their football heroes. This is a comic interlude, as the students adopt a genre that is conventionalized and by now traditional. The presentation of football matches on television in Europe is routinely accompanied by post-match interviews with players and studio interviews with pundits, who are usually former or current players. The students are relatively respectful of the genre, but usurp it for comic effect (neither ‘two Rooneys’, nor ‘cause I can do the robot’ fit the genre in a straightforward way). The role-play is subversive, as the group introduces comic discourse which is at odds with the ‘official’ ongoing dictation activity. The appropriation of voices from outside contributes

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to the students usurping the teacher’s intentions. Pennington (1999:63) refers to the ‘commentary frame’ of classroom discourse as the frame ‘least tied to the lesson and most related to the world outside’. This is a vernacular framing of talk in the classroom, which can enable students to divert a lesson to their own purposes and create an ‘alternative discourse’. S2 refers back to the end of Example 6.1, where S1 said ‘I am lost’, but now refers to him as ‘Rooney’, continuing the football theme. The teacher pursues the dictation, and S2 comments that he is ‘talking gibberish’. This is not necessarily a comment on the Cantonese language per se, but certainly on the continuing ‘official’ classroom activity. Further voices are now introduced, once more from the students’ familiar worlds of popular media. S2 says ‘oh Rooney the police are after you’, mixing genres for comic effect, and S1 responds by singing in a high-pitched voice what seems to be a theme tune from a television programme. Next, S3 introduces a voice from the popular television cartoon series, ‘The Simpsons’. This is the voice of Barney Gumble, authentically contrived here for no apparent purpose other than to contribute to the comic creation of the students’ ‘second world’ in resistance to the teacher’s dictation. Now S2 begins allocating new names to the other students. No longer ‘Rooney’, they are ‘Abdul’, ‘Omar’ and ‘Mohammed’. S2 seems to position the other students as associated with heritages in which they would have Islamic names. Their demographic context suggests that in the students’ experience, these would very likely be fellow students of Pakistani, Bangladeshi or perhaps Somali heritage. S2 may be making a link here between Islamic names and his and S1’s ‘mock-ESL’ positioning of themselves and others. Although S1 now adopts the same stylized response (‘what’ ‘what’) to S2 as he had to the teacher, S2 holds sway, insisting on calling each student by Islamic names. It is not clear whether the repetition of ‘gibberish’ refers to the putative speech of the new characters ‘Abdul’, ‘Omar’ and ‘Mohammed’, a dismissal of S1’s parodic response or a comment on the teacher’s dictation. The teacher, meanwhile, continues to dictate to students who are doing anything other than write down what he is saying. In this episode from the Cantonese classroom we have seen students appropriating a range of voices from popular media culture and introducing them into the classroom in highly stylized versions. The students here introduce ‘surreptitious layers of talk of their own initiation’ (Luk 2008:127) to counteract the alienating effects of the teacher’s authoritative discourse. We have also seen students mocking themselves and others, parodying the voices of language learners in unofficial, ‘carnivalesque’ language and allocating new names to each other, which seem to chime with these ‘mock-ESL’ subject positions. 134

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Episode 2 The second episode was recorded in one of the Turkish schools in London. In this episode the teacher is teaching Turkish in the context of a traditional Mother’s Day celebration. The participants are the teacher (T), a student (S1) who wears a digital audio recorder, and other students (Ss). Here too the episode begins with a dictation activity. S1 is engaged in conversation with other students, inaudible to the teacher. Example 6.3 T: bas¸lık yazın annenize bas¸lık. evet yazıyoruz {write the title. for your mother. yes we are writing} yazıyoruz annenize {we are writing to your mother} bu ¸sarkıyı ben söylicem siz yazıyorsunuz {I will tell you the lyrics you’ll write it} [some of the students are playing with their mobile phones] S1: [to a student] yea you dickhead (.) suck my balls man suck my balls suck it no I’m not accepting it suck my balls T: çocuklar yazdıg˘ ınızı okuyorum. {kids, I am reading the lyrics that you were trying to write} yani anlayacag˘ ınız o kadar çok zahmet çekiyor ki kimsenin güleceg˘ i yok. Bunu yazdınız mı? {that is to say that she is toiling away to such an extent that nobody feels like smiling. Have you written this?} Ss: yazdık {yes, we have} T: ikinci kıtaya geçiyoruz. {now we are going to the second verse} [plays music on cd system. some students are talking] S1: I bet it’s a man who’s high (.) yani gelin çiçek toplayalım [sings, exaggeratedly imitating the high-pitched voice of the singer] ey he’s taken helium he’s taken helium the person singing is a man who’s taken helium man T: dinliyoruz {we are listening} [stops the music] Yazmaya devam edeceg˘ iz. {we will continue writing} S1: [to a student] shut the (.) s-t-f-u (.) you know what s-t-f-u means? T: [reading the lyrics of a song] yollarına serelim. Yani gelin çiçek toplayalım. {let’s cover her way with flowers. So let’s collect some flowers} kimin yollarına seriyorlar? {whose way are they covering with flowers?} Ss: annelerinin {their mother} T: annelerinin {their mother} S1: exactly it means shut the fuck up T: çok önemli anneler gününde. {it is very important especially on Mother’s Day} S1: [to a student] I am not accepting man T: sevgi dolu türkülerle. {and with songs full of love} Melis yazıyor musun? annesini sevenler yazıyor. sevgi dolu türkülerle. annemize verelim. {are you writing Melis? If you love your mother you will write this. And give the flowers to your mother} S1: I don’t like my mum (.) I love her

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T:

seni annene ¸sikayet edeceg˘ im. {I will complain to your mother about you} S1: eh fat boy eh the one who sucks your dad’s dick eh the one that sucks dick the one that’s not gay I want the one that’s not gay (classroom audio-recording, Turkish school)

The teacher begins a dictation exercise not unlike the one we saw in the Cantonese classroom, but here the focus is the festive occasion of Mother’s Day, and he dictates the lyrics of a traditional Turkish song. As he speaks, some of the students continue to use their mobile phones to send songs to each other. S1 uses abusive language to insist on his negotiating position in relation to swopping music files with another student. He is ‘not accepting’ the file the other student wants to send and argues this emphatically in what Bakhtin called the language of the market-place, three times repeating ‘suck my balls’. The teacher appears to be unaware of this interaction, or else judiciously ignores it. He continues with the dictation and plays a traditional Turkish song to the class on an audio system. The ‘official’ activity of the classroom continues, with the complicity of most of the students. S1 immediately takes up the opportunity to ridicule the song, joining in with the singer in a mocking, high-pitched voice. He argues that the voice of the female singer is probably that of a man ‘who’s taken helium’, further ridiculing the song. However, this is double-voiced discourse, as in order to exaggerate and mock the voice of the singer, he also participates and becomes at least minimally involved in the celebration of Mother’s Day. As in Rampton’s (2006:315) study, the student on the one hand does what he is supposed to do, while on the other hand he simultaneously makes space for activities more to his liking. The teacher stops the music and tells the class that they will continue writing. S1, denied his opportunity for subversion, again invokes the language of curses and oaths. His discourse appears to be quite literally that of the ‘market-place’, the language in which to negotiate over the swopping of sound files. S1’s language creates a second, unofficial world, a discursive space in which to do business quite unrelated to the official activity of the classroom. At the same time he is able to move between the two floors, at one moment negotiating with oaths and curses which distinguish the discourse of the market-place and are only for the ears of other students, and in the next re-joining the more public discussion of the Mother’s Day celebration. Even here, S1’s discourse is double-voiced, as he initially appears to adopt a subject position which disallows any such celebration (‘I don’t like my mum’), and seems to create a world which is contrary not only to the classroom activity but also to the expectations of the teacher. After a pause which is all comic timing, however, he 136

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turns the apparently shocking initial statement into a joke in which he declares his love for his mother, thus enabling him to continue to participate in the class activity, albeit in the role of the clown. His declaration is ambivalent, mocking the notion of making such a declaration while still making it. The official, authorized statement, ‘I love my mother’, appears to be ‘reaccented’ (Luk 2008:127), undermined, overturned and yet confirmed. Ironically in the context of the planned activity, the teacher now uses S1’s mother as a threat. S1, having made his brief incursion into the official, public world of the classroom, now returns to his semi-private space of oaths, curses and degradation, again invoking ribald reference to the genitals and sexual activity. This is discourse at the centre of all that is unofficial. It is discourse that, in its grotesque imagery, creates a second life, one that opposes power without opposing it, which undermines the official activity without undermining it. This is the language of the market-place, in its debasement debasing power, if only ephemerally. The next excerpt is from the same class, recorded two minutes later. Now other students, S2 and S3, become audible. The teacher switches on the music again. Example 6.4 T: [switches music on again] dinliyorsunuz. sizde söyleyin dans yapabilirsiniz {you are listening. you can sing along too, you can dance} S1: hadi {let’s do it} S2: hey dance Turkish style. Turkish style ‘düg˘ ün’ {wedding ceremony} [laughs] S1: hadi halay çekelim. halay çekelim {let’s do folk dancing.. let’s do folk dancing} do you know how to halay çek? hadi halay çekelim {do you know how to do folk dancing? let’s do folk dancing.} whoever is doing it with me? Halay çekelim. {let’s do folk dancing} hey just come, just come, just come man. fuck you. it’s gonna be joke. hey, hey [dancing] I know how to do it. AAHH MY PENIS! S3: [laughs uncontrollably] T: [switches music off. wants students in two groups so that they can sing together. switches music on again] S1: wait . shush I’m gonna sing [coughs to clear his throat] evet {right} T: söylüyoruz. {we are singing} S1: hoy Ismet, let’s sing. kimsenin güleceg˘ i yok kimsenin güleceg˘ i yok [singing along to music] LA LA LA LA LA LA LA [exaggerated, loud] yeah. [to a student] give me that ball please. please [T is singing, some students are singing and clapping]

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T:

Gökhan dıs¸arı. {Gokhan get out} sen dıs¸arı. {you get out} Hakan dıs¸arı . . . {Hakan get out} bas¸kanın yanına gidiyorsunuz. annelerinize söyleyin beni görsün. {you are to see the principal.. tell your mother to see me} (classroom audio-recording, Turkish school)

S1 again seizes an opportunity to subvert the activity, bursting with enthusiasm when the teacher suggests that the students can dance to the traditional music. The second student picks up on S1’s intonation and suggests that they should dance ‘Turkish style’ in the way that would be typical at a Turkish wedding. The Turkish word ‘halay’ refers to a folk dance performed in a circle. Here, S2 invokes the wedding, appropriating one traditional ritual (the wedding) in order to mock and subvert another (celebration of Mother’s Day). S1 continues in English and Turkish, inviting all to ‘just come’. At this point, S1 is shouting loudly, while S3 is laughing uncontrollably. Our field notes for this session read as follows: ‘The music plays and the boys rap dance, make odd faces and produce funny noises. S2 is now setting the tone in the group of boys. They are imitating folk dance movements’. The students here introduce both of the elements of popular culture (‘rap dance’) and parody traditional folk dance. By both means hostility to the official, traditional and authorized activity is constituted. It is an act of sameness and difference, based in the traditional, to traditional music, but at the same time creating something new, making change by recontextualization. This is not mere repetition but appropriation, the subversion of ritual by presentation of a new version of the traditional, which creates a momentary suspension of conventional hierarchies. The introduction of ‘rap dance’ is comic not least because it is anachronistic, an element of the ‘folk-culture’ of the people, which impinges on the authorized heritage of school activity. The mockery of the traditional dance (odd faces and funny noises) becomes a comic parody of the official discourse. Notwithstanding this, there is again a sense in which the creation of the parody partakes of the activity which the teacher is seeking to create. This is very different from non-participation. It is participation, but on the terms of the students rather than the teacher. They use the tradition and the heritage to create their own order, challenge the existing hierarchy and claim their freedom, however ephemeral. They populate traditional discourse with their own local social languages and voices for their own purposes (Lin and Luk 2005:89). In mocking the dance, they mock the tradition, but at the same time mock themselves. This is ambivalent laughter, at once positive and negative, creating a ‘contradictory world of becoming’ (Bakhtin 1968:149). It is as if the students will only participate in the ‘heritage’ they are offered if they can put their own stamp on it, take it as their own, and usurp it. S1 dances, 138

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but ends the dance with a cry of ‘AAH MY PENIS!’ as reference to the genitals becomes once again the centre of the unofficial world. S1’s cry subverts the formality of the dance, but at the same time he mocks himself and, perhaps, all males. This is an inclusive joke, a laugh at the expense of the people but also with the people. At this point, the teacher attempts to organize the students to sing the Mother’s Day song. Again taking his cue for subversive action, S1 is quick to take the floor. He clears his throat with a cough which exudes seriousness and respect. Here ‘evet’ is stylized, adopting the voice of a professional singer, as he prepares to sing. At first he calls on the help of another student (Ismet) to help him with the song, just as he had called on others to help him with the dance. Ismet does not join in, but S1 goes ahead, at first singing the song rather hesitantly, but apparently respectfully. After a few moments, he changes tone, singing ‘LA LA LA LA LA LA LA’ in a comic, grotesque, exaggerated voice, which serves to undermine the activity. It may be that S1 did not know the words of the song very well and so lost confidence and reverted to the comic. Whatever the reason, there is more than one voice evident here: the voice which attempts to participate in singing the Mother’s Day song, and the voice that subverts the celebration and exudes hostility to the authorized heritage. Although some students are engaged in the activity, the teacher breaks off from this to admonish the group of boys who have treated Mother’s Day as an opportunity for ‘carnivalesque’ humour and dispatches them from the classroom with another threat to involve their mothers.

‘Carnivalesque’ classrooms What can we say, then, about the ways in which the linguistic practices of students and teachers in complementary schools are used to negotiate young people’s multilingual and multicultural identities? In this chapter we have set out to examine some of the ‘unofficial’ discourses of the schools, as students respond to the teaching and learning of their heritage languages and ‘cultures’ in ways which enable them to contest and negotiate the subject positions which are ascribed to them. A Bakhtinian analysis enables us to identify how meaning-making emerges as an ongoing dialogic process at a number of different, interrelated levels. These are mocking voices, parodic voices, voices that clash with each other and are hostile to each other, voices that represent and recontextualize other voices, voices of oaths, curses and abuses, and also voices of what Bakhtin calls the ‘bodily lower stratum’ (1968:20). We will discuss these unofficial meaning-making discourses in relation to (1) parody, and (2) the official and carnival worlds of the classroom. 139

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Rampton (2006:31) builds on Bakhtin’s (1986) notion of ‘speech genres’ in arguing that in classrooms as elsewhere certain roles and relationships and certain patterns of activity come to be expected, but ‘generic expectations and actual activity seldom form a perfect match, and the relationship between them is an important focus in political struggle’. In the classroom we investigated there appeared to be more than one set of expectations for the students: the ‘official’ genre of teacher-directed discourse and the ‘unofficial’, ‘carnivalesque’ genre of the market-place. In the two episodes examined in this chapter, first we have seen students parodying their teachers’ intonation (e.g., ‘wait, wait, wait’), and parodying accepted classroom discourses (e.g., ‘uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh’). Both uttered in stylized discourse and both slight exaggerations of the usual, either in terms of intonation or frequency of reiteration, they are instances of ‘repetition as an act of difference, recontextualization, renewal’ (Pennycook 2007:580), acts of ‘sameness that create difference’ (ibid.:587). They are recontextualizations that position the students both within and without the classroom activity, as participants and non-participants, as they attempt to engage with the teacher-led activity while discursively positioning themselves at one remove from full participation. Second, students adopted stylized parodies of stereotypical ‘ethnic’ voices to mock each other, themselves and generalized language learners of lower proficiency than themselves (‘me not speak English’, ‘me not speak Chinese’). Talmy (2004) has argued that such discourse contributes to the reproduction of a form of linguicism that is officially sanctioned and institutionally situated. Apparently unofficial and playful, the students’ parodic discourse constitutes and recontextualizes the pejorative subject-positioning of the lower proficiency language learner, and in so doing reproduces the hierearchy of linguicism which is often evident in multilingual school systems. Possibly related to this parodic discourse was discourse in which one of the students gave Islamic names to his peers, playing around with subject-positioning and proposing perhaps that they are lower proficiency language learners. Third, the discourses of the students parodied ‘cultural/heritage’ practices. Throughout the eight schools we studied, we found frequent instances of the teaching of language in the context of the transmission of national, ‘cultural’ and heritage knowledge about the country of (teachers’ and families’) origin. In Chapter 8 we will discuss studies that have argued that rather than being a static entity, ‘heritage’ is a ‘process or performance that is concerned with the production and negotiation of cultural identity, individual and collective memory, and social and cultural values’ (Smith 2007:2). In the complementary schools, while teachers and administrators believe that teaching ‘language’ and 140

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‘heritage’ is a means of reproducing ‘national’ identity in the next generation, the imposition of such identities is often contested and renegotiated by the students, as classroom interactions became sites where students occupied subject positions that were at odds with those imposed by the institutions. In the brief episodes we examined in this chapter, we saw students in the Turkish classroom parody ‘heritage’ songs associated with a traditional festival and engage in a parodic, mocking version of a traditional Turkish wedding dance. The students moved between subject positions, or maintained more than one subject position simultaneously, as they both participated in the activity and derided it. The students’ discourse became a battleground on which to play out oppositions between the ‘heritage’ identity imposed by the school and the students’ contestation and re-negotiation of such impositions. Their clowning and laughter, hostile to the reified, ‘immortalized and completed’ (Bakhtin 1968:10) version of heritage, created a moment of freedom from the school’s imposed ideological position. Billig (2005:208) makes the point that ‘rebellious humour conveys an image of momentary freedom from the restraints of social convention’, and ‘constitutes a brief escape . . . a moment of transcendence’. In the examples here, humour as rebellion, escape and even as transcendence enables the students to challenge the validity of the authorized heritage and indeed the authority of the teacher. However, Billig counsels that humour is not only at the disposal of the rebel and can equally well be appropriated by the powerful. Referring to ‘the wishful thinking of Bakhtin that tyrants do not laugh properly’, Billig (2005:210) suggests that far from subverting the serious world of power, humour can strengthen it. To support his case, Billig refers to examples of racist and other discriminatory joking. In fact, Bakhtin’s argument in relation to the ‘carnivalesque’ humour of the Middle Ages was not that it was always subversive or rebellious, but that it was ambiguous, and at one and the same time mocking the powerful, and restoring the social order. Both subversive and conservative, it undermined the powerful only for a moment, before authority was re-established. In our observations we saw clear distinctions between the official and carnival worlds of the classroom. Bakhtin proposed that ‘There is a sharp line of division between familiar speech and “correct” language’ (1968:320). We saw that the students were able to create in familiar speech a ‘second life’ constituted in ‘carnivalesque’ language and ‘organised on the basis of laughter’ (Bakhtin 1968:8). For Bakhtin ‘The men of the Middle Ages participated in two lives: the official and the carnival life. Two aspects of the world, the serious and the laughing aspect, co-existed in their consciousness’ (1968:96). The social world of the Middle Ages was, of course, very different from that of the students 141

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in the complementary schools, not least in the range and variety of sources on which late modern young people may draw. Nonetheless, Bakhtin’s thought on ‘carnivalesque’ language is illuminating here. We saw that students in the Cantonese and Turkish schools created second, unofficial lives through the introduction of comic characters into the classrooms and through the grotesque realism of the market-place. The classrooms became populated with football commentators, footballers, television presenters, cartoon characters and other generalized media voices. These characters were all recontextualizations of voices heard elsewhere. Their introduction into the classroom was a means of generating laughter, the laughter of the unofficial, oppositional to authority and officialdom. It was more than this though. At the same time as creating comic effect, the recontextualization of these characters enabled the students to introduce elements of popular culture, of ‘their’ culture, into an environment dominated by the official agenda of language and heritage learning. These characters were created by students engaging in ‘a particular kind of performance – stylisation’ (Rampton 2006:27). In just one example, the introduction (in the discourse of a student) of the highly stylized, American-accented voice of Barney Gumble, a character from ‘The Simpsons’ (‘hey Homer, thanks for the Duff beer’), is apparently unconnected with anything that goes before or after. The mimic may be using precisely the same words, and precisely the same accent and intonation as voice actor Dan Castellanata, but no two apparently identical utterances made by different individuals can ever be truly alike (Day 2002). The context is all-important here, and the recontextualized voice takes on new shapes and meanings because it is uttered in the classroom. Comic and ‘carnivalesque’, the cartoon character’s voice contributes to the students’ unofficial, second lives. Barney Gumble represents the unofficial life of the students in the official world of the classroom. In addition to introducing new characters to create the second life of the classroom, students introduced the language of oaths, curses and abuses and the language of the body. Bakhtin (1968:411) argued that ‘Abuses, curses, profanities, and improprieties are the unofficial elements of speech’, and that in the language of the market-place these elements were often associated with the ‘language of the bowels and the phallus’ (ibid. 317). We saw that in the Turkish classroom in particular, ‘abusive’ and ‘grotesque’ language was used as the discourse of bartering and negotiation, just as in the medieval market-place. Bakhtin pointed out that ‘The people’s laughter which characterized all the forms of grotesque realism from immemorial times was linked with the bodily lower stratum. Laughter degrades and materializes’ (1968:20). In addition

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to ‘carnivalesque’ snoring in the Cantonese classroom, we saw one of the key participant students in the Turkish school say ‘suck my balls man’, ‘shut the fuck up’, and ‘the one who sucks your dad’s dick’, as he haggled over business transactions in the music file-sharing marketplace. This was not merely negative language (what Bakhtin calls ‘bare negation’, 1994:200), but was suffused with ambivalence. Contrary to the official world of teaching and learning, the student’s grotesque realism was an accepted discourse in the second life in the classroom. At the same time positive and negative, this was a language that was hostile to all that was completed, immortalized and official, but which created a world of creativity and laughter in which business could be transacted. Lin and Luk (2005:94) propose that teachers should enable students to construct in the classroom ‘their own preferred worlds, preferred identities, and preferred voices’, and this has to begin with teachers’ deeper understanding of these worlds, identities, and voices. They suggest that such an understanding will enable teachers to ‘capitalise on the local resources of students to build bridges between students’ life world and what is required of them in the school world’. They propose explicit discussion with students of different social languages and the imposed hierarchy of social languages in society. Indeed, one example they suggest is for teachers to create an imaginary context in which students are asked to interview their favourite soccer stars. Another possibility is for teachers to accept and manage the ridiculing and questioning of official texts in the teaching of ‘cultural’ content. We develop this in looking at bilingual pedagogy in Chapter 10. In this chapter, we analyse some of the voices from the Cantonese and Turkish complementary schools in the United Kingdom. They are voices in process, voices which make meaning in creative, complex ways. Meaning emerges as an ongoing dialogic process at different levels: in official discourses and unofficial discourses, and also in the ways in which students are able to move freely between the official and the unofficial. Students use varieties of parodic language to mock their teacher, mock each other, mock notional students as second language learners and mock their school’s attempts to transmit reified versions of ‘cultural heritage’. In addition, we see students engage in what Bakhtin (1968:96) called ‘two aspects of the world, the serious and the laughing aspect’. Students are able to create second lives in the classroom, where unofficial interactions and transactions can occur, in language that is ‘carnivalesque’ in its grotesque realism. We see meaning-making as dialogic process, as social actors in complementary schools represent themselves and others in voices which cut across boundaries in complex,

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creative ways. In the next chapter, we look at how one of the teachers in the Mandarin Chinese school in Manchester engaged students in using traditional folk stories as curriculum content, and ways in which students were able to position themselves as both participants and nonparticipants in this ‘cultural heritage’ activity.

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7

Multilingual literacies across space and time

A strong theme running across our research in complementary schools is the provision of a curriculum tuned to specific heritages, histories and cultural festivals (Blackledge and Creese, in press; Conteh et al. 2007; Sneddon 2000; Wang 2008; Wu 2006). In our classroom observations and recordings, and in our participants’ statements in interviews, there was a clear sense that the teaching of ‘language and literacies’ was inexorably intertwined with the teaching of ‘culture’ (Kenner et al. 2007). Our interest in this chapter is the use of folk story as a curriculum resource to negotiate identity, culture and heritage. We look at how participants ‘take hold’ (Kulick and Stroud, 1993) of a text and address it in relation to their own conceptions of knowledge and identity. We show, as Street suggests (2003:2827), that ‘The result of local-global encounters around literacy is always a new hybrid rather than a single essentialized version of either.’ Our interest is to understand how the learning and teaching of folk stories in complementary schools provides insights into practices and values about heritage, which we take up further in Chapter 8. Here we view literacy as always contested, both in its meanings and its practices, and hence always ideological (Street 2008).

Multilingual literacies Warriner (2007) refers to ‘transnational literacies’ that focus on languagelearning and identity and illuminate: the complicated and consequential relationships between global/ transnational/local processes and individual literacy practices, including the use of language and semiotic resources in both written and multimodal forms to foster, maintain, or transform transnational relations and identities. (Warriner 2007:210–11)

Warriner deals with literacy as a ‘social-historical-political practice’ (Warriner 2007:207). Her analysis contests views of national identity as bounded and static, and she refers instead to transnationalism: Transnationalism is understood to be the condition of cultural interconnectedness and mobility across space, as well as the ‘processes

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by which immigrants forge and sustain multistranded social relations that link together their societies of origin and settlement’ (Basch et al. 1974:7). (Warriner 2007:210)

Richardson Bruna (2007:235) argues that transnationalism is expressed and reinforced in and through linguistic and literacy practices. Ethnography is well suited to the study of social literacy because of its focus on the local and ‘on real world settings and its attention to documenting the details of how these patterns arise and are conveyed, valued, and devalued’ (Freebody 2008:111). However, Warriner (2007:308) points out that more recently the dialectical relationship between the local and the global in literacy studies has been highlighted, ‘reminding us that not only are distant (global) literacies embedded in the local’, but also that ‘dominant, universalizing literacies can be seen, on closer inspection, as profoundly local’. Brandt and Clinton (2002) argue that it is not enough to treat literacy as solely an outcome or accomplishment of local practices, but rather, literacy must be seen as a participant in them. That is, ‘understanding what literacy is doing with people in a setting is as important as understanding what people are doing with literacy in a setting’ (2002:337). Brandt and Clinton are interested in the ‘transcontextualized and transcontextualizing potentials of literacy and particularly its ability to travel, integrate and endure’ (p. 337), and comment on the ‘limits of the local’. This includes acknowledging that literacies and all the technologies that have played their part in shaping them often come from ‘outside’ and bring meanings that are larger than the local perspectives of participants. Street (2004) points out that those ‘distant’ literacies do not arrive in local contexts with their force and meaning intact. Warriner (2007:303) summarizes these recent developments: Examining the ‘global as embedded in the local’ (Street 2004:328) – or the way that interactions with texts are influenced by local, global, and transnational processes simultaneously – provides insights into the material consequences of literacy – or the ways that specific literate practices in particular communities are ‘used and deployed to shape capital, social relations and forms of identity’. (Luke, 2004:333)

Luke urges attention to the use of specific literate practices in communities, how these become ‘inflated and deflated’, under what circumstances and for what purposes (Hull and Schultz (2001, 2002) in Warriner (2007:309)). In her study of the informal literacies of Mexican newcomers, Richardson Bruna (2007) refers to the work of Gee (2001) to describe the role of literacy in communities: 146

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One enacts identities and literacies that signal ‘allegiance to, access to, and participation in specific practices’ (Gee 2000–2001:105) that are meaningful to the target affinity group because of a shared interpretive system. (Richardson Bruna 2007:236)

The signalling of ‘involvement’ is also described by Wortham (2003) who describes how ‘competent hearers identify members of their own linguistic community and make sense of utterances by attending to cues that are used in appropriate contexts’ (2003:13). Our work has shown that complementary schools often aim to reproduce and maintain group affinity and involvement (Creese et al. 2008; Martin et al. 2004).

Social identification Placing value on the importance of teaching about festivals, foods and holidays is a common approach in teaching ‘culture’ in language classrooms (Byram et al. 1991; Cortazzi and Jin, 1999). Hall et al. (2002:415) speak of ‘filling in the gaps of cultural specificity that mainstream schooling neglects’. Complementary schools’ curricula are very much focused on the teaching of ‘culture’. In language education, the debate about teaching language and culture is complex. Despite the difficulties of conceptualizing the teaching of culture pedagogically, culture is viewed as at the very core of language teaching. Most scholarly work on culture in language teaching has focused on either EFL/ESL or MFL contexts. There is much less research on the distinctive context of complementary school classrooms and the teaching of culture and language (but see Curdt-Christiansen (2008); for a pedagogy focus, Brinton et al. (2008); and for a focus on identity, Khun Eng and Davidson (2008)). There has been considerable debate about the teaching of culture in language learning classrooms. It has been argued that very often language text books present images of culture which are overly positive (Byram et al. 1991). Harmonious images in text books portray noncredible and unrealistic lives, resulting in difficulty for learners to find their own voice and identity in narrowly defined cultural texts (Kramsch 1993). Others have pointed to the important role the teacher plays in mediating ‘culture’ in the classroom. Byram et al.’s (1991:153) research implies that rather than the text itself, ‘it is the teacher’s way of using the textbook which is significant.’ Van Lier (2008) stresses the importance of the interrelationship between teacher and learners in making the connection between language learning and identity development. Warriner (2007:210) argues ‘it is not the literacy practice per se that has consequences or effects, it is how those literacy practices are valued, elevated, and devalued – or their currency – in particular contexts that promotes emancipation or resistance.’ 147

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In his detailed study of a single classroom, Wortham (2006) demonstrates how students, teachers and curriculum afford opportunities for social identification. He argues that students drew on widely circulating models of identity, locally developed categories of identity and the curriculum itself to socially position each other. He found that how participants socially positioned each other affected who learned what. In his research, Wortham (2006:30) gives an account of social identification as always occurring in particular events: Individuals behave in certain ways or possess certain characteristics, and those behaviours or characteristics are interpreted by the individual and by others as signs of identity, as indications that the individual belongs to a recognized social type. We can identify people by referring to or by reacting to their characteristics and behaviours, but in either case all social identification happens in practice. Although models of identity may circulate widely across space and time, such models exist empirically only as people use them to identify themselves and others in actual events. Any account of social identification must explain how social identification gets accomplished in particular events as people react to or characterize others as having recognizable identities.

This explanation of social identification is particularly helpful in understanding how young people and their teachers engage with a particular aspect of the curriculum, namely folk stories, in language and literacy learning. A range of identifications is performed during a particular literacy event. Overall, our interest is in the bilingual and biliterate nature of these interactions and the way these linguistic resources allowed the students to negotiate identities and the teacher to adopt a responsive pedagogy. In this process, we will also see that the folk story itself took on other forms and meanings.

Folk stories as cultural artefacts A typical parental rationale for sending their child to complementary schools is explained by the head teacher of the Chinese School. Example 7.1 I think the Chinese school can provide children a chance to experience the Chinese culture. For example, we did this before, during Mid-Autumn festival, we’d get some moon cake. And during Chinese New Year, we’d talk about this and that (head teacher interview, Mandarin school)

Folk stories become iconic cultural artefacts, which develop community status through their iterative retelling and represent particular 148

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understandings of heritage. In the eight complementary schools, we often came across the teaching of traditional folk stories as curriculum content, alongside other ‘cultural heritage’ content such as the Mother’s Day celebration we saw in the Turkish school in Chapter 6. Folk stories were common texts for teachers and students in their two-hour teaching sessions and acted as a dominant curriculum resource to remind students of shared cultural heritage. Bartlett and Holland argue that cultural artefacts are used to shape cultural worlds: Cultural worlds are continuously figured in practice through the use of cultural artefacts, or objects inscribed by the collective attribution of meaning . . . Cultural artefacts are essential to the making and remaking of human actors. (Bartlett and Holland, 2002:12–13)

Folk stories come to represent culturally authentic texts. Sánchez (2007:277) uses the term ‘cultural authenticity’ to describe the construction of transnational narratives across national borders. She describes ‘the practice of telling and re-telling narratives’ about celebrated events as a means to strengthen intergenerational and transnational home life in the United States. Family members used ‘culturally authentic images as ways of preserving the iterative form of community narratives’ (277). Sánchez (2007:267) refers to Hymes’ concept of narrative development: Hymes (1996) describes how one’s personal experience can become an event to be told, being told and being retold until it [takes] shape as a narrative, one that might become a narrative told by others.

Curdt-Christiansen (2008) argues that complementary schools aim to maintain the Chinese culture and language using textbooks that ‘are designed by the Chinese government to accommodate the needs of overseas Chinese students in heritage language schools and which have content deemed appropriate for this purpose’ (p. 98). She explains that irrespective of the political period, Chinese governments have always used stories, fairy tales, fables and other genres for teaching moral and cultural values: Consequently, children learn written language through the reading of texts that explicitly teach them culturally appropriate values and socially accepted norms. Chinese textbooks tend to contain many of the culturally valued didactics, such as perseverance, filial piety, diligence, obedience, education and to give emphasis to the importance of effort, achievement, patriotism, etc. (p. 99)

Curdt-Christiansen argues that becoming literate in a Canadian complementary school is an ideologically laden process. Learning words through textbook-teaching produces expectations of appropriating 149

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‘ways of behaving, valuing and being in the world’ (p. 111). Her conclusion however, is that it is the ‘teachers’ responsibility to instil in children the ability to read, to critically analyse texts and to use language in an efficient way to convey their viewpoints and express their thoughts and opinions.’ (p. 111). Curdt-Christiansen argues that ‘textbook texts should be interrogated as social and cultural artefacts’ (2008: 111). In this chapter, we consider the role of ‘folk stories’ as curriculum in complementary schools. We conceptualize folk stories as literacy events in which a piece of reading and writing is ‘integral to the nature of the participants’ interactions and their interpretive processes’ (Heath 1982:93). We also view the teaching text and the interactions around it as literacy ‘practices’ embedded in a social context in which the way people take hold of them are ‘contingent on social and cultural practices and not just on pedagogic and cognitive factors’ (Street 2008:5). Further, we view folk stories as instances of biliteracy, which bring together biliterate actors and their ‘interactions, practices, activities, programs, sites, situations, societies and worlds’ (Hornberger 2008:275). Folk stories are cultural artefacts and global texts, disembedded (Giddens 1991) from local sites of production but able to sustain value in a plurality of contexts through the creation of local meanings. Our data lead us to suggest that complementary school classrooms are sites of local–global encounters producing new understandings around traditional folk stories. Following Wortham (2006), we look at the pedagogic and discursive practices related to folk stories to consider the social identification opportunities they offer teachers and students and the social ‘positionings’ which classroom participants choose to take up in relation to the stories. We will examine one example of a literacy event from the Mandarin Chinese complementary school in Manchester. Teachers and young people exploit the traditional story to engage with a variety of positions in relation to culture and identity. In bilingual interactions, young people and their teacher recontextualize the story to locate and relocate themselves in relation to it. The participants laugh at and distance themselves from the tale but also engage with it as it is reconstituted and embedded through local practices.

Literacy event The literacy event we examine here consists of six ‘lesson frames’ (Goffman 1974), which occur in one lesson of around 20 students (ages from 13 to 14) in which audio-recordings were made of the whole class through a recorder placed at the front of the classroom. In addition, one student wore a lapel microphone and digital audio recorder. Field notes were also taken during the class. The six lesson frames were: 150

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1. 2. 3. 4.

Teacher review of previous work on festivals Teaching of new vocabulary for reading Reading dialogue from a textbook Teacher-led exposition of two folk stories: ‘Hoyi shot the suns’ and ‘Chang’e flew to the moon’. 5. The lesson ends but conversations about the play continue. 6. E-mail from the teacher to the students about homework and the play. Classroom participants use the folk story teaching and learning to create new meanings around the story which involve the young people questioning and challenging the story line and teacher account. We do not view these practices as oppositional to the teacher or institutional order. Rather, we adopt Richardson Bruna’s argument that these interactions can be explained as ‘transcultural repositioning’ and not as students’ oppositional behaviour, but ‘attempts at forging fluent or fluid connections between their cultural and student identities’ (Richardson Bruna, 2007:234).

Frame 1 Teacher review of previous work on festivals Example 7.2 [the teacher is reviewing national festivals in China] T: དˈ䖭ᰃҔМ㡖᮹? {OK, what is this festival?} ៥ӀϞ⃵䆆њ {we talked about this last time}ˈЁ೑ⱘಯ໻㡖᮹ {the four major Chinese festivals}DŽಯ໻㡖᮹䞠䖍᳝ાಯ໻ {four major festivals include which four?}ˈ ៥Ӏ‫ݡ‬ಲᖚϔϟ {let’s recall them again}DŽ៥Ӏ᳝ {we have} Spring Festival ᰃҔМ㡖᮹ {what festival is it}˛ S1: ᯹㡖{Spring Festival} T: ད {OK}ˈ᯹㡖 {Spring Festival}DŽ✊ৢϟϔϾਸ਼ {what is the next one}˛the next one? Ss: ‫ܗ‬ᆉ㡖{Lantern festival}DŽ T: ‫ܗ‬ᆉ㡖{Lantern festival}ˈϟϔϾ{next one} Ss: ッज㡖{Dragon boat festival} T: ᳔ৢϔϾ{last one} Ss: Ё⾟㡖{Mid-Autumn festival} T: Ё⾟㡖{Mid-Autumn festival} Mid-Autumn festival Ё⾟㡖໻ ᆊৗ[ҔМ{what do people eat at Mid-Autumn festival}? S: ᳜佐{moon cake} T: 䖬‫خ‬ҔМਸ਼{what else do we do?}ˈϔ䖍ৗ᳜佐{eating moon cake}ˈϔ䖍{while we?} S2: 䌣᳜҂{appreciate the moon} (classroom audio-recording, Mandarin school)

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The teacher uses the IRF moves typical of her teacher-fronted class. She leads the students in a question and answer session and uses both languages (Mandarin and English) to establish what students know about the festivals. The ‘Mid-Autumn festival’ is the link to the upcoming lesson focus, and she uses her question about food to elicit ‘eating moon cake’. The teacher then goes on to link ‘eating moon cake’ with ‘appreciating the moon’. The lesson continues with the pre-teaching of core vocabulary items. Frame 2 Teaching new vocabulary for reading Having established her context, the teacher pre-teaches the new vocabulary. The terms to be taught are: 㡖᮹{festival} ᳜҂{moon} ᳜佐{mooncake} Ⳑᳯ{long for} জ໻জ೚ {big and round} ҆Ҏ{family} Ҏ䯈{mortal world} ৃᰃ{but} ҹৢ {in the future} জ催জ໻ {tall and big}Ё⾟ {mid-Autumn} ಶ೚ {united} ᑌ⽣{happiness} Ӵ䇈{legend} জᖿজད{fast and well}

In the three examples that follow, the teacher explains these terms. This is done in a tightly controlled way, with the teacher providing many examples and moving through the usual IRF sequence. However, the students take the opportunity to interrupt and have fun with the activity. In the first extract, the teacher is teaching the terms ‘long for’ and ‘big and round’ Example 7.3 T: ៥Ӏ䛑Ⳑᳯⴔ䖛೷䆲㡖 {we all look forward to Christmas}DŽ ⱑⳐᳯⴔ䖛⫳᮹{Bai is looking forward to her birthday}DŽⳐ ᳯ{long for} can be a little heavy for all these occasions ↨བ 䇈 {for example} ៥Ӏ䛑Ⳑᳯⴔ⼪೑㒳ϔ {we all long for our mother country to be reunited} ᇍ৻{right}˛៥Ӏ䛑Ⳑᳯⴔ⼪ ೑{we all long for our mother country to} get reunited [long pause] Liu: ⳐᳯЁ᭛ᄺ᷵ᅠњ{long for Chinese school being finished}DŽ [students laugh] T: ߬{Liu} be serious, OK? Liu: I am serious, I’m looking forward to it T: ↨བ䇈 {for example} ៥Ӏ䛑ⳐᳯᆊҎಶ㘮 {we all long for family reunion}DŽfor example, if you are here in Manchester, your parents are back in China, and you have been separated for years, you are looking forward to the reunion of the family S1: Ⳑᳯ໽⇨{long for the weather} T: ད{OK} ϟϔϾ䆡{next term} জ໻জ೚{big and round}DŽ៥ ӀҔМϰ㽓জ໻জ೚{what can we say is big and round?}

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S1: ᳜佐{moon cake} S2: ᳜҂{the moon} T: ᳜  佐ᰃϡᰃজ໻জ೚ {are moon cakes big and round}? [jokingly] we got a special moon cake, জ໻জ೚{big and round} ད{OK}ˈ䖬᳝ҔМϰ㽓জ໻জ೚{what else is big and round} S1: ᳜҂ {the moon} T: [䰸њ᳜҂{apart from the moon} Liu: ໾䰇{the sun}DŽ T: ໾䰇гᰃজ໻জ೚{the sun is also big and round}DŽ Ding: my head T: Դⱘ༈{your head}DŽϕ䇈Ҫⱘ༈জ໻জ೚{Ding said that his head is big and round}DŽit’s true. ᇍњ{that’s right}DŽ[students laugh] ད{OK} (classroom audio-recording, Mandarin school)

In this extract, we see the students introduce their own examples of ‘long for’ and ‘big and round’. There are different degrees of challenge here to teacher authority but the teacher refuses to acknowledge them as a serious threat or oppositional behaviour. The teacher persists with the official curriculum of vocabulary teaching while one of the students, Liu, introduces an element of parody, using the vocabulary item itself to appropriate the activity and entertain his classmates. The teacher allows the students to joke and tease and laugh together as long as vocabulary instruction continues bilingually. We might consider this an example of what Rampton describes ‘having it both ways’ (Rampton 2006:367). That is, within the classroom context, the students performed a serious and non-serious stance toward this element of the curriculum. In the predictability of the tightly controlled teacher-led IRF lesson in this complementary school classroom, the young people (as in many educational contexts) find ways to introduce an element of unpredictability. Bannink describes this unpredictability as occurring in “the cracks and seams” of the lesson, and argues that they are examples of ‘authentic conversation’ in the language learning process (Bannink 2002:281). Van Dam (2002) shows these incidences are mutually constructed by classroom participants in a particular class in his research, arguing that verbal duelling and mild teasing are frequent in many classrooms, as is the ‘interactive juggling between play and seriousness’ (Rampton 1995:75). In the next example, young people again use the lesson content for light relief. In our field notes we record: Example 7.4 It is so hot! It’s very difficult indeed for anyone to concentrate. The teacher quietly pleads with the class, ‘you have to behave yourselves, we have visitors today, show respect’. There is an example

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of a sound in Mandarin which sounds like ‘yo yo’ in English. The boys start to joke, ‘yo yo man’. (field notes Mandarin school)

In drawing attention to a bilingual homophone and its potential extraneous associations, the boys are entertaining the rest of the class: Example 7.5 Bai: ད{OK}ˈ᳔ৢϔϾ{the last one}ˈ’জᖿজད’ {fast and well} S: fast and good T: ↨བ䇈{for example} ⱑⱘ԰Ϯ‫خ‬ᕫজᖿজད{Bai’s homework is done fast and well}DŽOK ໻ᆊ䛑ⶹ䘧њ{you all understand}ˈজᖿজདᰃҔМᛣᗱ {what it means by saying ‘fast and well’} do it very fast and do it very well. ໻ᆊ䛑⊼ᛣњ {everyone pay attention}ˈজ{as well as} [pronounced as ‘yo’] জ{as well as} [pronounced as ‘yo’] means both and Bai: yo yo [students laugh] (classroom audio-recording, Mandarin school)

The pre-teaching of the vocabulary exercise becomes an opportunity for linguistic play here. The students are keen to make their classmates laugh and achieve this by manipulating the bilingual context to draw comparisons across languages. The students recontextualize the teacherled task of learning new vocabulary and reconstitute it as a productive creative task in which they make creative play with the bilingual homophone (yo yo). The two boys have found ways to bring other voices into the classroom. It is not clear how the boys have interpreted ‘yo-yo’. It has of course many meanings in English including the name of a rapper from the United States, the name of a band, and the title of a record label. It is also a classic toy. Judging from their pronunciation and their use of ‘man’, the two students seem to associate the phrase with the sounds of urban English and faux American. Across the eight complementary schools, we often came across young people using their bilingual skills to introduce other genres and voices into the classroom (Maybin 2006). We saw in Chapter 6 that students frequently import voices from outside as classroom resources. In Example 7.5, the students use the bilingual pun (‘yo yo’) as an example of what Wortham describes as publicly circulating models of identity brought into the classroom from outside. Moreover, because of the context they achieve this bilingually through their access to different languages. Through engaging with their peers and making the class laugh, they weave in and out of global and local discourses, access time and space zones and index social genres and discourses not anticipated by the teacher or one another. Across the schools, young people and teachers engage in linguistic duelling around their different linguistic knowledge, skills and proficiencies. Young people in particular use their 154

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expertise in English to sometimes correct or improve their teachers’ discourse in, for example, providing more nuanced vocabulary items than those of their teachers. In the field notes, we record: Example 7.6 The teacher is telling some folk stories. One is about ‘mortal’ and ‘immortal’ worlds. The teacher spends some time explaining the difference between these two terms in English. Given the students’ linguistic sophistication, I doubt they need it! The teacher explains that ‘families are gathered back together’ and one child offers ‘reunion’ as a synonym for the teacher to use (field notes, Mandarin school)

The activity of pre-teaching vocabulary in preparation for the dialogue about the folk story provided an opportunity for young people to bring into the classroom their own examples, resources and interests, which the teacher chose to endorse or reject. However, there were pedagogic activities which appeared to preclude the introduction of other voices in classroom discourse. During these frames the legitimate voices were those of the text and of the teacher. We see this is in the next two lesson frames:

Frame 3 Reading dialogue from a textbook

In this lesson frame there is a change in footing as the central literacy event is held. In the field notes we record: Example 7.7 The class is silent for the first time as our two key participant children read out the dialogue. The change in atmosphere is quite startling, with the class respectfully listening to the students (field notes, Mandarin school)

The two young people read out dialogue from a text book. There are two central characters in the dialogue. One is Helen, who is not ethnically Chinese, and the other is Xiao Yun, who is of Chinese heritage. Throughout the text book, Helen learns about Chinese traditions and life through the other Chinese characters. Liu reads Helen, while Qin reads Xiao Yun: Example 7.8 Liu [reading Helen]Ҟ໽ⱘ᳜҂জ໻জ೚{today’s moon is big and round}DŽ Qin: [reading Xiao Yun] Դ䖬ϡⶹ䘧৻ˈҞ໽ᰃ‫ݰ‬ग़᳜ܿकѨˈ Ё೑ⱘЁ⾟㡖{don’t you know, it’s the 15th of August by the lunar calendar. Chinese Mid-Autumn festival}DŽ

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Liu˖៥਀⠌⠌䇈䖛ˈϔࠄЁ⾟㡖ˈЁ೑Ҏ䛑㽕ৗ᳜佐{I heard from Dad before. Chinese eat moon cakes at Mid-Autumn festival}DŽ Qin˖೼Ё೑ˈ䖬᳝䖭ḋϔϾӴ䇈ਸ਼{In China, there is also such a legend}DŽসᯊ‫{׭‬in the ancient time} ᳝ϾҎিႺ࿹{there’s a person called Chang’e}ˈ᳜ܿकѨ䙷ϔ໽{on the 15th of August}ཌྷৗњҭЍ{she had a magical remedy}ˈϔϟᄤ亲 ࠄ᳜҂Ϟ{which made her suddenly fly to the moon}ˈ䖰⾏ њ҆Ҏ{far from her family}DŽ Liu˖Ⴚ࿹ϡᛇಲᆊ৫{did Chang’e not want to go home}˛ Qin˖ ᛇଞ {she did}ˈৃᰃཌྷ‫ݡ‬гಲϡᴹњ{but she could never come back}DŽҹৢ {after that} ↣ࠄ᳜ܿकѨ {every 15th of August} ҎӀህϔ䖍䌣᳜{people appreciate the moon}ϔ䖍 ৗ᳜佐 {while eating moon cakes} ˈⳐᳯႺ࿹㛑ಲࠄҎ䯈 {and long for Chang’e to come back to the mortal world}ˈᆊ ᆊ᠋᠋ಶ೚ᑌ⽣{every family can be united and happy}DŽ (classroom audio-recording, Mandarin school)

The authority of the written text and the participant structures of classroom life seem to demand that the students are quiet during their classmates’ reading of the text. This is a typical language teaching text used to provide context for the pre-taught vocabulary items, while also attempting to offer some authenticity through providing a dialogue. Students are expected to be interested in the Mid-Autumn festival, the food particular to it and the legend behind it. The current festivities are related to China today and family practices. The ethnically Chinese character is presented as the cultural expert while Helen, the nonethnically Chinese character, shows interest but little knowledge. The dialogue provides some initial detail about a folk story of ‘ancient times’ in which Chang’e flies to the moon. The dialogue makes links between current times and local celebrations of family life and ancient times and legends of distant places. A date is given (15 August) on which celebrations happen and families are reunited. The text describes a family within a community and acknowledges the universal desire to be with loved ones. Immediately following the dialogue, and still referring to the text, the teacher focuses on specifics of grammar and pronunciation. The authority of the teacher-led technical explanation does not allow students to make light of teacher authority here: Example 7.9 T: ᳝ϔϾҎিႺ࿹ {there is this person called Chang’e}, there is a person, ཌྷᰃ⬋ⱘཇⱘ{is she a male or female}˛ S: ཇⱘ{female}DŽ Qin: ཇⱘ{female}DŽ

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T: Qin: T:

ЎҔМԴⶹ䘧ཌྷᰃཇⱘ {how do you know that she is female}˛ because ᅗⱘ‫أ‬ᮕᰃ’ཇÿᄫ{it has a ‘female’ radical}DŽ ᇍњ{that’s right} ˈ಴Ўᅗⱘ‫أ‬ᮕᰃÿཇÿᄫᮕ{because it has a ‘female’ radical} (classroom audio-recording, Mandarin school)

The textbook dialogue is used by the teacher to do some academic literacy work on orthography and to point out grammar and also pronunciation. The emphasis is on the mechanics of the language (radicals and strokes), and the students follow the teacher’s questions, displaying their knowledge of Chinese literacy. Frame 4 Teacher-led exposition of the folk story: ‘Hoyi shot the suns’, and ‘Chang’e flew to the moon’

In this section, we see the teacher explain the folk story covered in the text book dialogue and given in Example 7.8. Here there are several examples of the students finding opportunities to question and challenge the validity of the story, and in doing so introduce their own agendas. The tale involves ten suns, brothers in the same sun family, who according to legend had each taken their turn in the sky. However, one day they all decided to go into the sky together, and this results in chaos. It is left to an archer appointed by the Heavenly Emperor to sort it out. The archer Hoyi solves the problem. However, in doing so, he further upsets the Emperor who as a punishment banishes Hoyi and his wife Chang’e to the mortal world. The archer’s wife is so afraid of dying she selfishly takes a magical remedy meant for both her and her husband, resulting in her banishment to the moon, where she lives alone for eternity. The lesson is spent explaining these tales to the young people. The teacher later provides a written Mandarin version of the story as homework. Here we look at some of the classroom interactions around the folk story.

Example 7.10 T: 䖭ᰃ໾䰇ଞDŽӴ䇈ଞˈ{this is the sun the legend says} this is a myth ↣Ͼ໾䰇䞠᳝ϾҔМϰ㽓ଞ˛{what is there in each of the suns?} inside every sun there is something inside Yang: dust [students laugh] S2: gas? S3: yeah, gas T: there is some bird SS: what?! [students laugh in disbelief] T: it’s a legend, it’s not true. it may sound ridiculous, but it’s just a legend (classroom audio-recording, Mandarin school)

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There is a point of negotiation here as the young people convince the teacher to concede that the idea of the bird in the sun is ridiculous. In responding to the teacher’s question scientifically, rather than entering into the requirements of the genre and suspending their disbelief, the young people subvert the activity. They bypass the make-believe required of legend and myth and introduce a more rational and scientific take on the story. The teacher acknowledges their interpretation of the story but insists on the appropriateness of the non-rational storyline in the context of the ‘legend’ genre. In the next extract, we see the story followed through to its conclusion: Example 7.11 T: [draws ten suns in the sky on board] ㄀Ѡ໽{the next day} ᠔᳝ ⱘ໾䰇䛑䎥ࠄ໽Ϟএњ{all the suns went onto the sky} ⦄೼Ӯߎ ⦄Ҕ Мᚙ‫{މ‬what will happen} what will happen? S: people are burning [laughs] T: ད{OK} the forests ᠔᳝ⱘỂᵫ䛑ᗢМ{what happened to all the forests}˛ B: [chanting] BURN! BURN! UH [falls to the floor and pretends to be dead] (classroom audio-recording, Mandarin school)

In the field notes for this session, we comment: Example 7.12 The explanation of the folk stories goes on. The teacher has drawn a picture on the board. I can hear the boys in front of me saying how ‘ridiculous’ it is. ‘Where does she (mother in the story) get the horses from?’ The teacher persists in both Mandarin and English. ‘9 out of her 10 suns are killed. He is running out of arrows’ (field notes, Mandarin school) Example 7.13 T: ᳝Ҏᡞㆁًњˈ಴Ў {someone stole the arrow, because} people, they know that they will not survive if there was no sun right if there is no sun, they will not survive either. so people took the arrow. Zhang: [expressing doubt] 䖭Ͼৢ㖓ϡពଞ? {and this Houyi didn’t understand?} T: it’s a legend Zhang: [sarcastically] oh it’s a legend. let’s just let it go. hey (classroom audio-recording, Mandarin school)

In the field notes and the interaction here, we can see the students persist in ridiculing the story. Finally, the teacher asks a comprehension question about Chang’e and his experience of life on the moon. A student answers as follows: 158

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Example 7.14 S: ϡད⥽DŽ{it was no fun.} T: ЎҔМϡད⥽˛{why was it no fun?} Liu: া᳝ϔϾ‫ܨ‬ᄤ೼䙷‫ܓ‬ᓘ㥃DŽ{there’s only one rabbit making remedies.} Ss: [laugh] T: [laughs] া᳝ϔϾ‫ܨ‬ᄤ^only one rabbit`ˈ䖬᳝ϔϾⷡᷥⱘҎ {and a person who cuts the tree}, ᇍ৻^right?}, a man who cuts the tree Yang: there’s no tree on the moon [laughs] (classroom audio-recording, Mandarin school)

The student’s answer ‘it was no fun’ appears to prompt an open and inquisitive follow-up question from the teacher. The open question (‘why was it no fun?’) leads Liu to contribute a further (correct) detail about the folk story before Yang returns to questioning the legend’s validity (‘there’s no tree on the moon’). In the interaction, the usual IRF sequence is disrupted, as students both identify with, and distance themselves from, the folk story. The young people are able to show an interest in Chinese heritage positioning while almost simultaneously standing back from the version of ‘cultural heritage’ imposed in the classroom. At times the students, and to a certain extent the teacher, ridicule the story. The students think it absurd that a bird can live in the sun that Houyi could not understand that people need the sun to live, and that trees grow on the moon. The story-telling provides much laughter and opportunities to fool about and move from arranged seating. The young people are animated. There is student consensus about the implausibility of the story. As we suggested earlier, the teacher does not experience this as oppositional. Rather, the students’ questioning and ridicule is an opportunity for bilingual and biliterate interactions and literacy learning. There is ridicule but there is also engagement. The teacher narrates the story, and allows bilingual interaction around it as students are permitted to challenge her in both English and Mandarin. The IRF sequence is interrupted. The student questioning and challenging of the task – their playfulness and naughtiness around the telling of the folk story – is at least partly sanctioned by the teacher. This is a language learning classroom and their bilingualism and biliteracy is used to challenge the storyline. Certainly, both languages are needed for the understanding and questioning of the story. Field notes from a non-Mandarin-speaking researcher record: Example 7.15 The children seem to have got the point of the story, which I have failed to. They must do this through the teacher’s code-switching as it is not achievable through the English only (field notes, Mandarin school)

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Towards the end of the lesson, the teacher suggests that the pupils could act out the stories in a play. She assigns roles to the students, asking them to volunteer for parts in the play. Finally, our field notes record: Example 7.16 the bell rings outside the classroom but the teacher continues. she gives out homework. There are more protests. the teacher promises to e-mail the story to their parents’ e-mail box (field notes, Mandarin school)

The lesson has formally come to an end. The teacher sets homework and the children copy this down from the board into their notebooks. During this time the audio-recordings continue, and there are complaints about the amount of homework. The lesson formally ends, and the young people start to leave the classroom and are met by their parents at the door. As they leave, they continue to talk about the folk story and their homework. There is great interest in the possibility of enacting the story as a role play. Frame 5 The lesson ends, but conversations about the play continue Example 7.17 T: 䶽ᰃ໾䰇ཛྷཛྷ৫{Han are you (playing) the suns’ mother}˛ S1: yeah, mum. T: the six dragon drawn carriage. Han: what! You want me to buy one? [students laugh] T: you find some way to prepare one. Han: you want me to buy a dragon lead and carry arrows and a bow? [everyone laughs] and carry a bad boy like him Ding: I have to find some arrows T: [to Han] you can draw something. I know you can draw a horse right? you can draw a dragon as well. Ding: 㗕Ꮬ{teacher}㗕Ꮬ {teacher} how about the arrow? T: arrow, you can use a hanger. You know hanger? [students talk about the play excitedly] (classroom audio-recording, Mandarin school)

The students’ responses to the homework task of preparing for the role play shows how excited they are about the play and acting out the folk story. The literacy event is about to be transformed into the new medium of a play script, with its oral performance and visual literacy. The students are excited about costumes, art, design and stage props. They place themselves at the centre of the event – leading a dragon, carrying weapons, transporting the ‘bad boy’. The folk story no longer seems to be about ancient times and a collective heritage but rather 160

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about a class community of young people performing to their peers. As Bloome et al. remind us, identity construction is carried out through the ‘the daily life of classrooms’ (2005:xvi). As Wortham argues, the curriculum is very much an opportunity for social identification. The young people resist widely circulating identity positions connected to a heritage agenda constructed by the school and the teacher. The teacher manages this resistance and allows young people to use the curriculum and its tasks to bring in other identity positions, which are constructed anew by classroom participants in the complementary schools. The curriculum provides social identification possibilities for compliance, acceptance, resistance and refusal. The multilingual nature of the schools foregrounds the importance of the young people’s and teachers’ bilingualism in this identification process. The last example is an e-mail, which the teacher sent round to students reminding them about the play and setting them other homework. The e-mail was written in English but with two attachments in Mandarin, re-telling the folk story covered in class. Frame 6 E-mail from teacher to the students about homework and the play Example 7.18 Dear class, Please find in the attachment (hope your computer can read Chinese) the stories I told you on 11 June. We are going to develop them into a play. I hope you have not forgotten about your roles. Anyway I will give the cast as below: [gives names of characters and students who will play them] So please think about what you will have to prepare for your role. For example, Ding can use a hanger as the bow; Lei Lei can make a crown and wear it (note the difference between the western crown and the ancient Chinese crown). And everybody please think about your (and others’) lines in the play. This Sunday (18 June) we will work on the script together and rehearse the scenes. All the best, [teacher’s name] PS: Don’t forget your homework: 1. New characters of Lesson 20 (Page 86): Look them up in dictionary – give which dictionary you are using and which version first, and then for each character give its radical, the number of strokes (with the strokes of the radical excluded), which page in the dictionary and what it means 2. New words (Page 86, Ex 3): copy them, one line for each 3. The text: copy one time

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In the e-mail, the teacher builds on the students’ enthusiasm for the play. The teacher juxtaposes the oral task of ‘preparing for the play’ with the literacies of ‘reading the story’ and completing ‘grammar and vocabulary homework’. Her mention of specific students’ names entextualizes the students into the folk story. That is, the story is now about them and is not only an ancient text from a distant time and place. She has introduced the possibility of producing a new story played out as a drama with each of them scripting their part. The student Ding will become the central character Houyi, and he must prepare his bow. Lei Lei will become Emperor of the Heaven and must look after her crown. In scripting and performing the role play, the teacher provides them with an opportunity to again bring in their own voices and vernaculars. The teacher also asked the students to write a first-person narrative based on the story. The girls were to write in the voice of ‘Chang’e’ and the boys were to write as ‘Houyi’. Folk stories as global texts are made local through bilingual and biliterate interactions. They are viewed by teachers and staff in complementary schools as iconic, culturally authentic artefacts, which through their narrative retelling over time and space have come to be viewed as literacies significant to participants in complementary schools. Like many of those who read and write about them, folk stories are well travelled texts. Folk stories were viewed by teachers as symbolic footprints of a culture and community. In some examples, language teachers use folk story literacies to endorse traditions, values and beliefs. They are used to invoke features of the collective memory of community. However, young people also use them to question some of these notions, including their central message, such as accepting authority and respect for elders. Distant literacies do not arrive in local contexts without their force and meaning changing (Street 2002). The use of folk stories in complementary schools shapes the practices around them. That is, choice of texts and the teaching of them is an ideologically laden process (Brandt and Clinton, 2002; Curdt-Christiansen 2008). Young people challenge and question some of the core elements of folklore in the tales told to them by their teacher. However, there is a willingness to recreate the stories anew through a process of questioning, ridiculing, and challenging scripted and teacher accounts. In the interactions around folk story teaching, students find ways to play with language – coming up with their own definitions to illustrate key vocabulary and questioning the claims made in myths and legends. They laugh at the genre and distance themselves from it. They show scepticism and disbelief in the story. They even partially convince their teacher to accept their argument. However, they are also willing to engage with the story. They discuss festivals and moon cakes, listen to 162

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their friends reading and eagerly anticipate taking part in a play. They present themselves as articulate young people willing to question heritage as a handed-down, stable set text of ancient times with an unchanging storyline. Their contribution to the story is to question its validity. Like Wortham (2006), we found evidence of different social identifications taken up through the curriculum. Some of these include bringing into the classroom other publicly circulating identity models (Wortham 2006) and other voices (Maybin 2006), while others still were created locally. In this chapter, we have seen the importance of bilingualism and biliteracy in the teaching of folk stories and social identification practices. The teaching and understanding of the folk stories in this Chinese complementary school is achieved in two languages. The use of only one would not allow the classroom participants to engage with, explore and challenge the text in the same way. We have suggested that the teacher partly allows participants to challenge the story because this challenge is bilingual. The task continued bilingually with many opportunities for students to display and play with their skill and knowledge about language, culture and identity. The practices around the teaching of the folk story literacy event show that the teaching of ‘heritage identities’ (Creese et al. 2006) is open for negotiation, with young people willing to join in with some elements of the schooled instruction of heritage and culture while rejecting others. The folk stories provided a context for young people to both share in constructions of culture but also to resist them. In the next chapter, we engage further with negotiations around the teaching and learning of ‘heritage’, in this instance focusing on the Bengali schools in Birmingham.

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8

Contesting ‘language’ as ‘heritage’

We have seen that one of the key rationales of the complementary schools is the teaching of language as ‘cultural heritage’. At the same time, participants in and around the complementary schools appeared to differ from each other in their views of what constitutes language, and what ‘counts’ as (a) language. Furthermore, we are led by our participants to consider the relationships between ‘language’ and ‘heritage’ and the role of teaching and learning language(s) in the reproduction of that ‘heritage’. The young people’s responses to the teaching and learning of ‘language(s)’ led us to question by what means ‘the legacy of history is appropriated’ (Bourdieu 2000:151). Is ‘heritage’ straightforwardly reproduced where the learner is born to linguistic, social and environmental norms which are typical of urban late modernity, whereas the ‘heritage’ was associated with rural poverty? These questions about social reproduction for young people in the United Kingdom raise broader questions about what constitutes a ‘language’, and what counts as ‘heritage’ in late modernity. Before discussing our observations in and around the Bengali classrooms in Birmingham, we reflect theoretically on these questions relating to ‘language’ and ‘heritage’.

‘Heritage’ Bourdieu and Passeron (1979) proposed that all teaching implicitly pre-supposes a body of knowledge, skills and modes of expression which constitute the heritage of the cultivated classes. In our classroom observations and recordings and our participants’ statements in interviews, there was a clear sense that the teaching of ‘language’ was inexorably intertwined with the teaching of ‘heritage’. Many of our participants used the term ‘culture’ to refer to those elements of Bengali/Bangladeshi life and history, which they wished to transmit through complementary schooling. In our analysis we interpret this as ‘heritage’ and distinguish ‘heritage’ from ‘culture’. Whereas ‘heritage’ refers to elements of past experience that a group deliberately sets out to preserve and pass on to the next generation, ‘culture’ is ‘reproduced and emerges in people’s activity together – it exists in the processes and resources involved in situated, dialogical, sense-making’ (Rampton 2006:20). 164

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In recent times, the scope of definitions of ‘heritage’ has broadened considerably from concern for the preservation of buildings and historical sites to include areas, towns, environments, social factors and ‘intangible heritage’ (Ahmad 2006:299; Smith 2006: 54). UNESCO’s Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage defines ‘intangible cultural heritage’ as: The practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, skills – as well as the instruments, objects, artefacts and cultural spaces associated therewith – that communities, groups and, in some cases, individuals, recognize as part of their cultural heritage. This intangible cultural heritage, transmitted from generation to generation, is constantly recreated by communities and groups in response to their environments, their interaction with nature and their history, and provides them with a sense of identity and continuity, thus promoting respect for cultural diversity and human creativity. (UNESCO 2003, Article 2:2)

Patrick (2007) points out that appeals for the protection of forms of ‘intangible heritage’ have played an important role in campaigns for language rights. Whether we are dealing with traditional definitions of ‘tangible’ or ‘intangible’ heritage, we are engaging with sets of values and meanings, including emotion, memory and shared knowledge (Smith 2006). ‘Heritage’ describes sets of shared values and collective memories that are ‘constructed as a “birthright” and are expressed in distinct languages and through other cultural performances’ (Peckham 2003:1). Pearson and Sullivan (2007:208) suggest that heritage resources may have a ‘special value to minority groups in the community’, who have a particular interest in their own history. Regardless of the ‘management’ of heritage resources, subordinate groups ‘often choose to mobilise a “strategic essentialism” as a political tool’ (Stanton 2005:416). From our participants we heard at times that certain sets of linguistic resources were believed to function as threads of association with historic contexts. Sets of resources often come to represent abstract notions such as sense of place, community or belonging (Smith 2004). ‘Heritage’ can be thought of as the preservation of a potential loss (Peckham 2003:1), ‘anything that someone wishes to conserve or to collect, and to pass on to future generations’ (Howard 2003:6). Bourdieu and Passeron (1979:25) suggest that ‘inheritance always implies the danger of squandering the heritage’. However, it cannot be assumed that the preservation and transmission of ‘heritage’ is straightforward. Simply the process of ‘passing on’ resources will alter them. Tunbridge and Ashworth argue that there is rarely a simple relationship between a group of people and ‘heritage’ resources: ‘The same piece of heritage can be interpreted and received by different groups in quite different ways’ (1996:92). 165

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Rather than being a static entity, ‘heritage’ as a process of meaningmaking may ‘help us bind ourselves, or may see us become bound to, national or a range of sub-national collectives or communities’ (Smith 2006:66) as particular resources come to act as powerful symbols of, or mnemonics for, the past (Lipe 2007). Smith (2006:3) proposes that the idea of ‘heritage’ is ‘used to construct, reconstruct and negotiate a range of identities and social and cultural values and meanings in the present’. She argues that ‘heritage’ is a set of practices involved in the construction and regulation of values, a discourse about negotiation, using the past, collective and individual memories, to negotiate new ways of being and to perform identities. People engage with ‘heritage’, appropriate it and contest it (Harvey 2007). ‘Heritage’ may become a site at which identities are contested rather than imposed unproblematically. That is, those who seek to preserve and pass on certain sets of resources may find that the next generation rejects imposed subject positions, contests the validity or significance of resources, or appropriates them for other purposes. For Bourdieu, ‘heritage’ is reproduced through ‘class’ and ‘education’, in the reproduction of ‘distinction’, ‘an unacquired merit which justifies unmerited attainment, namely heritage’ (Bourdieu and Darbel, 1991:110). Bourdieu (1993:299) argues that in education there is an assumption of a community of values between pupil and teacher that occurs where the system ‘is dealing with its own heirs to conceal its real function, namely, that of confirming and consequently legitimizing the right of the heirs to the cultural inheritance’. He further argues that: Only when the heritage has taken over the inheritor can the inheritor take over the heritage. And this appropriation of the inheritor by the heritage, the precondition for the appropriation of the heritage by the inheritor (which has nothing inevitable about it), takes place under the combined effect of the conditionings inscribed in the position of inheritor and the pedagogic action of his predecessors, themselves possessed possessors. (Bourdieu 2000:152)

The teaching and learning of languages in complementary schools act as sites at which ‘heritage’ values may be transmitted, accepted, contested, subverted, appropriated and otherwise negotiated. These are sites for the negotiation of identities, for the acquisition and performance of sets of linguistic resources, which are called into play by social actors under very particular social and historical conditions (Wiley 2005, 2007). These conditions may both constrain and make possible the reproduction of existing conventions and relations, as well as the production of new ones (Heller 2007). 166

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Local knowledge about ‘language’ and ‘heritage’ In this chapter, we focus particularly on the two Bengali complementary schools in Birmingham. One of the teachers told us that there was a clear association between learning Bengali and affiliating to the heritage of Bangladesh: Example 8.1 from the national concern you should know Bengali, national Bengali the basic thing I’m not saying that he or she should be highly qualified in Bengali, national Bengali just the national thing, the basic thing. They should know like the alphabets, how to read. sometimes if somebody speaks with them the national language they should be able to know what they’ve been saying (teacher interview, Bengali school)

We constantly saw individual participants positioning themselves in relation to the ‘ethnic, linguistic, and cultural loyalties’ (Pavlenko 2007:177), which they chose to emphasize. One of the senior teachers in the same school argued that learning Bengali was associated with maintaining knowledge of Bangladeshi ‘roots’: ‘We may have become British Bangladeshi or British Indians but we don’t have fair skin and we cannot mix with them. We have our own roots and to know about our roots we must know our language’. For both of these Bangladeshiborn teachers, teaching and learning Bengali was an important means of reproducing their ‘heritage’ in the next generation. We heard an explicit rationale from administrators, teachers and parents that a key aim of the school was for the children to learn Bengali because knowledge of the national language carried features of Bangladeshi/Bengali ‘heritage’. The rationale of the schools was put into practice in the classroom through a pedagogy which frequently introduced ‘heritage’ content in the context of teaching Bengali. Here ‘heritage’ included narratives of national belonging and the introduction of national symbols of Bangladesh. In the following example, the teacher (T) engages with symbolic emblems of the Bangladeshi nation as he addresses his class of students, beginning with the national anthem: Example 8.2 T: taa hol-e prothom aamraa chinte paari taar pore prottektaa desher ektaa own theme aache. national theme aache, jaatio shongeet. different different country different theme. Prottek raashtrer, prottek state-er, prottek desher different different jaatio shongeet baa national anthem aase. {first we recognize then each country has its own theme. there is a national theme, national anthem. different different country,

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different theme. each country, each state, each country has a different national anthem} aamaader Bangladesher jaatio shongeet ki? {What is the national anthem of our Bangladesh?} ke bol-te paarbaa, Bangladesher jaatio shongeet, national song aami aag-e baajaaisi naa, tomaderke shunaaisi last term-e, hmn. {Who can tell me what the national anthem of Bangladesh is, national song. Haven’t I played it before, I played it for you all in the last term, hmn.} ke bol-te paarbaa? {who can tell me?} Bangladesher, Bangladesher jaatio shongeet {The national anthem of Bangladesh} Ss: [no response] T: Hmn, hmn? jaano naa? {don’t you know it?} S: aamaar shonaar Bangla {My Golden Bengal} T: hmn ei to {that’s it} [the teacher brings out his cell phone] chokheo dekhtesi naa {I can’t see very well} R: [to teacher] aapnaar numbertaa bolen aamraa ektaa phone kori aapnaake taaho-le to baajbe {tell us your number and we will call you then your phone will ring} T: yes, 0786676XXXX [the phone rings. the ring-tone is the tune of the Bangladeshi national anthem] gaai-te paarbaa, gaai-te paarbaa shaathe shaathe {can you sing it, can you sing along with it} (classroom video recording, Bengali school)

Here the teacher picks on a second symbol of Bangladeshi nationality, the national anthem. As he has the national anthem as the ring tone for his cell phone, the researcher calls him and he plays it to the class. He points out that each country has a distinct national anthem, and Bangladesh is no exception. The teacher then continues to list Bangladeshi national symbols: Example 8.3 T: ei. eitaai aamaader jaatio shongeet othobaa national anthem. ekhon aamaader Bangladesher ko-e ektaa jinish aache jaatio bol-e. {This, this is our national anthem. now, we have a few things in Bangladesh that are our national symbols.} jaatio shongeet {national anthem} jaatio kobi {national poet}, jaatio phul {national flower} baa jaatio baa national fol {or national or national fruit} baa national paakhi {or national bird} Bangladesher jaatio fol ki? {what is the national fruit of Bangladesh?} Ss: [no response] T: water lily, water lily, water lily Bangla, water lily, shapla. etaa aamaader jaatio ful {this is our national flower.} jaatio paakhi (.) doel {national bird (.) dove}

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[pauses and addresses R] doel-er Englishtaa ki apa? {what is the English for doel, apa?} R: [unsure, hesitates] dove T: er por-e jaatio kobi, poet, national poet, national poet Kazi Nazrul Islam {after this national poet, poet, national poet, national poet Kazi Nazrul Islam} (classroom video recording, Bengali school)

Here the process of teaching Bengali is intimately interwoven with the process of teaching symbolic representations of Bangladesh, as knowledge of national/cultural symbols, like knowledge of the Bengali language, comes to represent Bengali ‘heritage’.

Local knowledge contesting ‘language’ and ‘heritage’ Despite these powerful discourses and practices that evidenced the teaching of ‘heritage’ through the teaching of ‘language’, the notion that the discourses and practices of the Bengali schools were homogeneous in their ideological orientation to ‘language’ and ‘heritage’ was not borne out in the data. Rather, what people believed about their language (or other people’s languages), and the situated forms of talk they deployed, revealed divergent and contested views about the value and status of particular linguistic resources. When we interviewed the administrators and teachers in the schools they spoke emphatically about the need for children to learn Bengali, the standard, literate language of Bangladesh. This was frequently held to be oppositional to Sylheti, which was the spoken variety used by the families of students attending the Bengali schools. One of the school administrators was emphatic that Bengali was not the same as Sylheti, and Sylheti should not be allowed to ‘contaminate’ the standard form. He was concerned that Sylheti forms were beginning to appear in the spelling and grammar of Bengali newspapers in United Kingdom, introducing ‘thousands of spelling mistakes - Bengali newspapers I have seen in many places the spelling was wrong, sentence construction was wrong’. For the administrator, non-standard resources were ‘contaminating the language’. He made this point about the necessity for children to learn standard Bengali: Example 8.4 I am always in favour of preserving languages and all these things. but it doesn’t mean that this should contaminate other languages and give this more priority than the proper one. we have to preserve the proper one first, and at the same time we have to encourage

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them to you know, use their dialect. but we shouldn’t make any compromise between these two (administrator interview, Bengali school)

This was a strongly articulated argument in the data. The administrator of the other Bengali school stated that: Example 8.5 bhasha to bolle Bangla bhasha bolte hobe Sylheti kono bhasha naa {when you talk about language it means Bengali, Sylheti is not a language} (administrator interview, Bengali school)

For several respondents, ‘Bengali’ constituted a more highly valued set of linguistic resources than ‘Sylheti’ and was regarded as the ‘proper’ language. Pujolar (2007:78), referring to a different socio-historical context, makes the point that language policy may operate to foster knowledge of some languages, ‘but delegitimise or ignore other languages and other forms of multilingual competence and performance’. Patrick (2007:127) similarly finds that in arguing in support of a particular language, ‘speakers can be locked into fixed or essentialised notions of identity, “authenticity” and place, which provide no recognition of mobile, postcolonial speakers’. It was clear that for some of our respondents not all linguistic resources were equally valued, and while some sets of linguistic resources were considered to be ‘a language’, others were not. In this sense, there was a constant re-invention of ‘language’ on the part of some participants. Those who spoke ‘Sylheti’ were often criticized by ‘more educated’ people who spoke ‘Bengali’. They were characterized by the administrator of one of the schools as members of the ‘scheduled’ or ‘untouchable’ caste – people without rights or resources in the Indian sub-continent: Example 8.6 publicraa ki dibe amar aapne especially bujhben amader desher je shob lok aashche ora kon category lok aashchilo, mostly from scheduled caste, gorib, dukhi krishokra aashchilo. oder maa baba o lekha pora interested naa oder chele meye raa o pora lekha interested naa. oraa baidhitamolok schoole jete hoe primary schoole sholo bochor porjonto jete hoe, ei jonne schoole jaai. {what will the public contribute? you [the researcher, Shahela Hamid] especially will understand what type of people came from our country. they belonged to the category of scheduled caste, they are the poor, the deprived, farmers. their parents were not interested in education nor are the children interested. they go to school because it’s compulsory} (administrator interview, Bengali school)

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Here Sylheti speakers are referred to as the ‘scheduled caste’. Regarded as the least educated group in society, with no resources of any kind, they are considered to be the lowest of the low (Borooah 2005; Borooah et al. 2007; Kijima 2006). Linguistic features were viewed as reflecting and expressing broader social images of people. Irvine and Gal (2000:37) suggest that ‘participants’ ideologies about language locate linguistic phenomena as part of, and evidence for, what they believe to be systematic behavioural, aesthetic, affective, and moral contrasts among the social groups indexed’. One of the teachers argued that children should learn Bengali for ‘moral reasons’. Irvine and Gal propose that a semiotic process of iconization occurs, in which linguistic features that index social groups appear to be iconic representations of them, as if a linguistic feature depicted or displayed a social group’s inherent nature or essence. Bourdieu and Darbel (1991:112) argue that some more powerful groups provide ‘an essentialist representation of the division of their society into barbarians and civilized people’. The fact of speaking ‘Sylheti’, rather than ‘Bengali’, appeared to index the Sylheti group in particularly negative terms, despite the relative similarities between the ‘Bengali’ and ‘Sylheti’ sets of linguistic resources. While some speakers in our study considered ‘Sylheti’ to be quite different from ‘Bengali’, others regarded the two sets of resources as indistinguishable. As we have seen, there were several instances of participants commenting on the differences between Sylheti and Bengali in terms of social status and value, but not everyone agreed about the extent to which these sets of linguistic resources were distinct. While the administrator of one of the schools argued that Bengali and Sylheti were ‘completely different’, a student’s mother said they were ‘thoraa different’ {a little different}, while other parents also held this view, saying they were ‘little bit different thaake’ {only}’ and even ‘the same’. There was clear disagreement about the nature and extent of the differences between the sets of linguistic resources used by the students’ parents at home, and the literate version of the language taught in the complementary school classrooms. That is, there was disagreement about the permeability of the boundaries between languages. These differences of perception were likely to be ideological. Those who argued that the ‘languages’ were completely different from each other were speakers of the prestige language, unwilling to allow the lower status language to contaminate their linguistic resources. Those who argued that the ‘languages’ were almost the same as each other were speakers of Sylheti, which was held to index the lower status, less educated group. On many occasions, the research participants interactionally evidenced their awareness of differences (perhaps mainly in status and value) 171

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between ‘Sylheti’ and ‘Bengali’. There was also an awareness of Bengali as the higher-status language on the part of teachers (‘I talk posh Bengali, and the children can’t understand me’), students, administrators and parents. The following example was recorded at the dinner table in the family home of one of the students: Example 8.7 Mother: khitaa hoise? Tamim, khaibaani saatni? {what is the matter? Tamim, would you like some relish?} Father: aaro khoto din thaakbo {how many more days is that [voice recorder] going to be with you?} Tamim: aaro four weeks {four more weeks} Father: ( ) Student: no they said any. if you talk all English Father: ginni, oh ginni [calling his wife using a highly stylized Bengali term of endearment] Mother: ji, hain go daakso kheno {yes, dear why are you calling me?} tumaar baabaa shuddho bhasha bolen {your father is speaking the standard language} Father: paan dibaa {can I have some paan} aapne aamaar biyaai kemne {how are you my relation?} (home recording, Bengali case study)

Here the Sylheti-speaking parents play the roles of Bengali speakers, adopting the airs and graces that they see as characteristic of the Bengalispeaking group. The terms of endearment used here (‘ginni’, ‘hain go’) are forms of parody (Bakhtin 1973; 1984, 1986), exaggerations beyond common usage, as speakers of Bengali are mocked in neo-sophisticated discourse. This brief interaction is situated in a whole hinterland of language ideological beliefs and practices, as the couple acknowledge differences between Bengali and Sylheti as sets of linguistic resources and the conditions which differentially provide and constrain access to linguistic resources. In parodic discourse, the parents introduce into their own voices the exaggerated voice of the Bengali speaker, and that voice clashes with its host, as ‘Discourse becomes an arena of battle between the two voices’ (Bakhtin 1994:106). Here, the impromptu roleplay light-heartedly, but not half-heartedly, ‘parodies another’s socially typical . . . manner of seeing, thinking and speaking’ (Bakhtin 1994:106). In this section, we have seen that for some of our participants, some sets of linguistic resources were very considerably privileged above other, similar sets of linguistic resources. While linguistic resources that were described as ‘standard’, or ‘proper’, or ‘real’ or ‘book’ Bengali had come to represent the ‘heritage’ of the Bangladeshi nation, sets of 172

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resources described as ‘Sylheti’ had come to be associated with the uneducated poor, who were held to be disinterested in schooling, and unmotivated. However, we also saw that these distinctions were contested by others, who denied that clear differences existed, and at times made fun of the assumption that these differences were constitutive of differences in social status. That is, our participants represented disagreements about what constituted (a) language and about the ideological links between speakers and the sets of linguistic resources which they called into play.

Negotiating ‘language’ and ‘heritage’ The contested nature of the ideological links between sets of linguistic resources and their assumed associations was frequently made visible in the interactional data recorded in the classroom. Teaching of ‘heritage’ and ‘language’ became sites at which identities were negotiated in discourse (Blackledge and Pavlenko, 2001; Pavlenko and Blackledge, 2004). Here, ‘negotiation of identities’ is understood as ‘an interplay between reflective positioning, i.e. self-representation, and interactive positioning, whereby others attempt to position or reposition particular individuals or groups’ (Pavlenko and Blackledge, 2004). Of course, not all identity positions are equally negotiable. How much room for resistance to particular positioning individuals may have depends on each individual situation, the social and linguistic resources available to participants and the balance of power relations that sets the boundaries for particular identity options. Although students were often quite engaged in their languagelearning, we also saw many examples in the classroom of students resisting teachers’ attempts to teach them Bengali. In more than one example, students mocked their teachers’ pronunciation of English words. Here, though, the children challenge the teacher’s pronunciation of the name of a new child when she arrives at school: Example 8.8 Shahnaz: she is coming through the front door T: Jaara Shahnaz: [correcting teacher’s pronunciation] Zahra T: Tumaader aamaake shikhaate hobe naa {you all don’t have to teach me} ektu chintaa korbaa aamaader theke onaara boishko {you should think that he is much older than us} Shahnaz: OK, look Aleha, how do you spell Zahra? Aleha: Z-a-h-r-a. In school we call her Zahra, in school we call her Zahra (classroom recording, Bengali school)

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Here Shahnaz corrects the teacher’s pronunciation. The different pronunciations of the name are significant: in Bangladesh /z/ is pronounced as /j/, so the teacher is not pronouncing the name ‘Jaara’ incorrectly, but is pronouncing it just as it would be in Bangladesh. The pronunciation of the name which the children use in school is an anglicized version, pronouncing the /z/. The students contest the ‘Bangladeshi’ (‘Sylheti’ and/or ‘Bengali’) pronunciation of the child’s name and insist on the anglicized version. The students appear to use the teacher’s pronunciation of the Bangladeshi name as an opportunity to negotiate a subject position away from the imposed ‘heritage’ identity, and use available linguistic resources in subtle, nuanced ways to occupy a position which is oppositional to ideologies that rely on the ‘purity’ of the Bengali language. The students’ complex response to the complementary schools’ ‘heritage’ positioning of them is also evident in interviews. One of the children we interviewed in the Bengali study argued that they were speakers of neither Sylheti nor Bengali, as they were born in the United Kingdom: Example 8.9 we weren’t born in Sylhet, but we were born in the UK, my mum she talks Sylheti and we learnt some words off her. We don’t know the full Sylheti but we know half of Sylheti and when we try to talk Bengali it keeps on sounding strange (student interview, Bengali school)

In the same interview two students were talking to the researchers about a drama activity based on a story of new arrivals from Bangladesh. In talking to the researcher (R) they described this group as ‘freshies’ (cf. Martin et al. 2004): Example 8.10 R: what do you mean ‘freshie’, what does that mean? Tamim: freshie as in a newcomer R: is that bad to say to somebody? Tamim: yea it’s kind of like a blaze but it’s also a word to describe a new person coming from a different place Shazia: it’s not a good thing Tamim: it’s kind of both. if you say it as in trying to tease somebody, ‘freshie’, and we say it as in erm trying to say erm, as in they’re newcomers and they come from a different country for the first time R: could you tell if someone was ‘freshie’? Shazia: well from Bangladesh it’s not always their skin colour, it’s sometimes how they talk R: how do you talk ‘freshie’? Tamim: it’s kind of like they don’t know that much English

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Shazia:

they might just show off in their language but if you ask them a question in English they just Tamim: they’re like ‘what’, ‘what’, you know Shazia: they say strange words in their language and if you ask them a question in English they just say ‘what’ in their language (student interview, Bengali school)

The students negotiate their identity in opposition to that of the newly arrived children, repeatedly referring to ‘their’ language, which they see as different from the language they speak themselves. Here, ‘what’ ‘what’ is spoken with an intonation which suggests some confusion on the part of the newly arrived group. Although the students speak the same language as the new arrivals in daily interactions with their parents, they nevertheless indicate that ‘how they talk’ is one of the defining ways in which the ‘freshies’ are different from them. Later in the same interview the children talked about their experience of visiting Bangladesh: Example 8.11 Tamim: you know the caterpillars in Bangladesh, I don’t like them. once they crawled all over me. and plus you know the fox, it came running to our place, it nearly got his thingy off, it got his shoes. I got scared (student interview, Bengali school)

Tamim’s younger brother Kabir has a more positive view of the natural environment of Bangladesh, saying ‘I like it because there’s animals, there’s goats and everything’. Shazia too has good things to say, as she draws an imaginary map on the table with her finger: ‘My auntie’s house is there and the house we live in is here, around there there’s fields and everything and we are on a hill’. Shazia said that they had attended school in Bangladesh, where ‘They just asked me a question, because my cousin said I knew Sylheti, the teacher knows Sylheti he just asked me stuff in Sylheti’. At the same time, though, maths lessons were, said Tamim, ‘in Bangla, I didn’t understand anything’. Some of the children’s stories of their experiences of Bangladesh were less positive: Example 8.12 Shazia: sometimes the food - it was nasty R: oh, you didn’t like the food? Shazia: sometimes there were Indians in Bangladesh next to the house we lived in, I forgot they were on the hill as well and there was a ghost in the house, all of the house had a ghost there was a pond and the baby fell down. R: how did you know they were Indians?

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Shazia:

because we went to their house and they were really spooky and they were half-caste and they were half Bengali and half Indian because they were talking in Indian and they were dressing Indian R: and how do you know there was a ghost? Shazia: because my cousin’s sister told Kabir and that always used to make me scared. She knows that I am scared and then she pushes me into more scaredy things and I kept on believing her and my mum says don’t believe her because she just makes it up. She says so and so happened to her then she makes it up Tamim: now she is exaggerating too much. She goes that, you know the snake, it starts talking to her, that’s unbelievable and she goes that Shazia: it’s like that big hole she goes a snake went in there and whenever I want to go in it goes bigger and I used to believe that and my mum said that’s not true, how could that happen? and I didn’t even have any common sense then. I do fall in her traps. Tamim: and she goes that one day she fell down and she broke her two legs R: did she? Shazia: her two legs are alive R: and how did you know about this family being Indian, how did they dress differently? Shazia: they wore the red spots R: oh, so they were Hindus? Shazia: and you know the village that I live in, they don’t want to wear saris because it’s really hot and then things happen and Indians, they wear saris quite often and it just made me feel that they were Indians and I knew because my aunty, you know one of the ladies, one of the Indian ladies had her husband came and called in our house and my aunty went and told her and she was talking Indian to her in Hindi to her husband and that’s how I knew (student interview, Bengali school)

These children have an ambivalent relationship with Bangladesh. Although they say that one of the reasons for learning Bengali is so that they can talk to local people if they visit Bangladesh, they do not have particularly positive memories of previous trips. In this discussion the children seem to feel that they are outsiders when they visit Bangladesh. It is possible that their views of Hindus reflect others’ positioning of this group in Bangladesh, and ‘talking Indian’ does not appear to be a positive linguistic practice in the children’s eyes. Throughout the interview, the children referred to Bangladesh in a way that suggested that it was an alien environment for them. 176

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In this section, we have seen that students and teachers at times used the complementary school classroom as a space in which to negotiate identities. These negotiations were often focused on beliefs, attitudes and values relating to language(s), and played out in creative deployment of linguistic resources (see also Harris (2006)). We have also seen that for these students the ‘heritage’ identities which the schools set out to reproduce were often contested in subtle, nuanced ways, as the students called into play sets of linguistic resources, which positioned them as somewhat different from the imposed ‘heritage’ identities of the institution.

Teaching ‘heritage’ through ‘language’ What, then, can we say about negotiations that constitute and are constituted by, the values, attitudes, beliefs and practices of ‘language’ in and around these Bengali complementary schools? It is essential to any analysis that ‘the messiness of actual usage’ (Heller 2007:13) should be understood in relation to histories, power and social organisation. In the course of our research, we heard strongly articulated views from parents and teachers that Bengali should be taught as a mandatory part of the mainstream school curriculum. In the U.S. context, Wiley (2007:254) refers to ‘the crisis of monolingualist ideology’, which proposes that English alone is of value in society. In British political, media and other discourses a powerful ideology similarly proposes that minority languages other than English are a negative force in society. To some extent at least, the complementary schools are ‘safe spaces’ (Creese and Martin, 2006:2) in which young people are able to practise and extend their linguistic repertoires. In doing so, they are ‘contesting the historical inequalities that have seen minority languages, and their speakers, relegated to the social and political margins’ (May 2008:26). However, the process of teaching ‘heritage’ through ‘language’ is complex. First, for our participants the notion of what constitutes a ‘language’ is disputed. For some of the social actors concerned, one set of linguistic resources (‘Bengali’) is heavily endowed with symbolic associations and becomes a ‘social artefact, invented at the cost of a decisive indifference to differences’ (Bourdieu 1991:287). This ‘standard’ set of resources is regarded by some as that, which should be ‘preserved’ and kept free from ‘contamination’. This particular set of resources accrues symbolic capital as it is perceived by some social agents as intrinsically superior to some other sets of linguistic resources (Bourdieu 1998:47) and is ‘invented’ as a ‘language’, which is reified and immutable. The discourse of the school administrators in particular proposes that the ‘language’ should be transmitted to the next generation in its 177

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pure and natural form. However, this clear distinction between standard and non-standard sets of linguistic resources (‘Bengali’ and ‘Sylheti’) did not attract universal consensus. While the case for the purity of the ‘standard’ was often argued in institutional discourse, other social actors, especially the parents of the students and the students themselves, contested this view. Furthermore, we saw that some linguistic features came to be iconic representations of their speakers, as if a linguistic feature displayed the Sylheti group’s inherent nature. The fact of using certain sets of resources (‘Sylheti’), rather than others (‘Bengali’), appeared to index these speakers in particularly negative terms, despite the relative similarities of the two sets of linguistic resources. We saw that some parents mocked the ‘standard’ resources and the ideological beliefs which were perceived as accompanying their speakers. In doing so, they acknowledged the relations of power at work in the uneven distribution of resources and the discourses which inscribe value (or its lack) to particular linguistic forms and practices. Second, we saw that the teaching of ‘heritage identities’ (Creese et al. 2006), through nationalist and historical content, was at times contested and subverted by students in interactions which became sites for the negotiation of identities. We saw examples of language teachers teaching language through ‘heritage’ content with messages which were deeply rooted in Bangladeshi nationalism, invoking features of the collective memory of the nation. Also, we saw the repeated teaching of tangible and less tangible symbols of Bangladeshi heritage, from the national flag and national anthem to symbols such as the national flower, national fish and national bird. We pursue this discussion of the teaching of ‘nationalism’ in the complementary schools in Chapter 9. The teachers appeared to impose on the students identities which were associated with Bangladesh and its history. Like the institutional ‘language’ ideology, ‘heritage’ ideology was reified and naturalized. However, the students did not always accept the static, essentialized version of ‘heritage’ which the school was teaching. Howard (2003:6) proposes that ‘things actually inherited do not become heritage until they are recognised as such’. That is, while the teachers and administrators of the schools believed that teaching ‘language’ and ‘heritage’ was a means of reproducing ‘Bengali’ identity in the next generation, the imposition of such identities was often contested and re-negotiated by the students. Their apparent rejection of some ‘heritage’ symbols, challenge of their teachers’ insistence on the use of ‘Bengali’ in the classroom, and insistence on the anglicized pronunciation of a Bengali name, all became instances of students negotiating subject positions which contested those imposed by the institution.

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In the schools, there was a perceived institutional need to fill what some teachers and administrators called the ‘cultural gap’, which had been created between the students and their parents. One of the teachers said of the students: Example 8.13 to oraa {they are} British born, so they need to know Bangladesh, where their parents were born in Bangladesh, what is Bangladesh, where is Bangladesh, so many of them never express own self from own self [that] they are Bangladeshi, they always think, they always think they are British. their mind perform, mind create that they are British (teacher interview, Bengali school)

This teacher was just one of several who argued that the students lacked something in their knowledge and understanding of Bangladesh and in their sense of themselves as ‘Bangladeshis’. Bourdieu proposed that: The history objectified in instruments, monuments, works, techniques etc. can become activated and active history only if it is taken in hand by agents who, because of their previous investments, are inclined to be interested in it and endowed with the aptitudes needed to reactivate it. (Bourdieu 2000:151)

It was this very endowment of aptitudes and activation of history which appeared to be the raison d’être of the Bengali complementary schools. For the teachers, the process of teaching ‘language’ and teaching ‘heritage’, had the potential to invest their students with the aptitudes they required to inherit their heritage because ‘only when the heritage has taken over the inheritor can the inheritor take over the heritage’ (Bourdieu 2000:152). In this chapter, we have raised questions in relation to understandings of ‘language’ and ‘heritage’. The beliefs and practices of the participants raised a number of questions in our attempts to understand how the language use of students and teachers in Bengali schools in one city in the United Kingdom was used to negotiate multilingual and multicultural identities. First, participants articulated attitudes and values that raised questions about what constitutes ‘language’. For some, ‘language’ should be preserved and kept free from the contamination of other sets of linguistic resources. For others there was no distinction in practice between resources ideologically framed as legitimate and illegitimate. Second, participants expressed views and attitudes, and performed interactional practices which raised questions about what constitutes ‘heritage’. While teachers and administrators of the schools believed

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that teaching ‘language’ and ‘heritage’ was a means of reproducing ‘Bengali’/’Bangladeshi’ identity in the next generation, the imposition of such identities was often contested and re-negotiated by the students, as classroom interactions became sites where students occupied subject positions which were at odds with those imposed by the institutions. These young people were discursively negotiating paths for themselves that were in some ways contrary to the ideologies of the complementary schools, where teachers and administrators held the view that they ought to learn Bengali because to do so was a practice which carried with it knowledge of Bangladeshi history, heritage and identity. The young people’s attitudes to their languages and their multilingual practices constituted a sophisticated response to their place in the world, as they negotiated subject positions which took them on a path through language ideological worlds constructed by others. The young people were flexible and adaptable in response to their environment, as they negotiated identities which were more complex than the ‘heritage’ positions ascribed to them institutionally. In Chapter 9, we look at the teaching of ‘heritage’ specifically with reference to the teaching of nationalism and national belonging.

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9

Inventing and disinventing the national

We no longer need to worry about nationality, nationalism or national identity. Our world has become cosmopolitan and transnational. Culture is global and popular, communication zips across borders, media are easily accessible, everything is online and the internet respects no territory. The mass movement of peoples has created hybridity (Bhabha 1994), identities are fragmented, multiple and negotiable, affiliations and subjectivities are constantly in flux, economics have gone global. In this environment, the old order of the nation-state has fallen by the wayside, and ‘the political and economic bases of nationalism are threatened as social sectors develop new globalized and globalizing lifestyles, discourses and political strategies’ (Pujolar 2007:72). The hegemony of the homogeneous nation-state is over. Why, then, are we persuaded that the nation, and nationalism, are worth investigating in listening to the voices of people in four multilingual communities in the United Kingdom? The answer is threefold. First, rumours of the demise of the nation are very much exaggerated. In the United Kingdom, for example, government ministers and other senior politicians frequently underpin policy initiatives by appealing to ‘national unity’ and a sense of ‘Britishness’ (Blackledge 2005, 2006). Second, in world contexts, there continue to exist national territories and nation-states where many people feel discriminated against, threatened or otherwise embattled by those outside of their territory, and in times of trial, the collective around which they frequently group is the ‘nation’ (Castles 2005). Nationalism may be in decline in some nations, but not in others. Third, and most importantly for this chapter, in the course of investigating multilingualism in institutional contexts, we came to realize that a salient category emerging from our data was that of ‘nationalism’. Unlooked for, and surprising in its robustness, nationalism was a motif that permeated interviews, field note observations, audio recordings and video recordings. We may have been able to argue academically that national belonging was not important in urban, multilingual, ‘hybrid’ communities, but for some of our participants, at least, nationalism was a crucial dimension of affiliation. As our investigation progressed, it also emerged as a site of contestation, a source of frustration 181

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and a context for re-negotiation of subjectivities. The substance of this chapter refers to the detailed analysis of such negotiations. First, however, we attempt to define some of the terms in our discussion, beginning with an historical overview of the development of ‘nation’.

Nation The nation may be said to be in decline, but academic accounts of the development and reproduction of the nation proliferate. Since the early 1980s, the study of nations and nationalism has emerged as a field in its own right. This said, however, scholars are very far from achieving consensus on the question of how nations came into being and how (and whether) they will develop in the future. Academic discussion refers to (1) ‘primordialist’ theories of nationalism, which hold that there is something natural and historic about the nation, (2) ‘modernist’ theories, which argue that the nation is ‘a corollary of the distinctive feature of our recent world’ (Gellner 2005:40) and (3) ‘ethno-symbolist’ theories, which hold that the nation is founded on ethnic communities, or ‘ethnies’, defined by Smith (2004:25) as ‘a named human population with myths of common ancestry, shared historical memories and one or more common elements of culture, including an association with a homeland’. We will briefly consider each of these theories of nations and nationalism in turn. The ‘primordialist’ account of nations sets out to describe the nature of ethnic attachments by arguing that national identities are a natural part of human beings, and that each of us is ‘naturally’ a member of a particular nation. ‘Primordialists’ believe in ‘the givenness of ethnic and national ties’ (Ozkirimli 2000:75). In this view, ethnicity is fixed and unchanging over time and space. Critics of the ‘primordialist’ theory have argued that ethnicity, and therefore national identity, is socially constructed and fluid rather than fixed, and is constantly re-negotiated in new settings. ‘Modernist’ theories of nationalism hold that nations came into being through the modern processes of industrialisation, political democracy and universal literacy. These theories were championed by Hobsbawm (1983, 1990), Gellner (1983) and Anderson (1983). These scholars argue that nationalism emerged in the period following the French Revolution. Hobsbawm stressed the ‘element of artefact, invention and social engineering which enters into the making of nations . . . Nations do not make states but the other way round’ (Hobsbawm 1990:10). Although there is much to separate the specifics of these theorists, what unites them is the view that rather than being the outcome of pre-existing ethnicities, nations were ‘invented’, ‘imagined’ or otherwise socially constructed in the process of political modernization. 182

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Hobsbawm proposed that national traditions which appear or claim to be old, are often quite recent in origin, and sometimes invented. Invented tradition is ‘a set of practices . . . which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with a suitable historic past’ (1983:1). For Anderson remembered deaths ‘structure the nation’s biography’ (1983:205) – stories of poignant martyrdoms, assassinations, executions and holocausts, remembered as ‘our own’, serve the purpose of reproducing the national memory and imagination. Critics of modernist theories of nationalism have argued that such accounts fail to explain the ongoing influence of ethnicity in accounts of nations and nationalism in the modern world (May 2001). May argues that although modernist accounts of nationalism and nationality are broadly acceptable, the role of ethnicity is more robust than they allow. The modernist argument fails to recognize the differential power relations in which the language of the dominant ethnic group, or ‘ethnie’, is the dominant language in society, and the languages of other ethnolinguistic groups are consigned to private arenas or silenced altogether, and often associated with societal problems (Blackledge 2005). Smith (1998, 1999, 2004, 2008) proposes an account of nationalism and nationality that he terms ‘ethno-symbolism’. Smith (2004:30) defines nationalism as ‘an ideological movement for attaining and maintaining identity, unity and autonomy of a social group some of whose members deem it to constitute an actual or potential nation’. Smith argues that modern nationalisms draw strength from pre-existing memories, myths, symbols and traditions. In his most recent work, Smith (2008:182) argues that ‘a sense of shared ethnic identity remains a powerful and resilient component in even the most civic and republican of national communities’ and that from antiquity ethnic ties, sentiments and models have continually made their influence felt.

Beyond nation May and Fenton (2003:7) propose that rather than engaging in oppositional discourse, a more enlightening way to proceed is to identify the shared terrain – the marking of difference, the claims of descent, the formation of boundaries of language, culture and religion – and then to contextualize these within the arenas of specific states and specific forms of social and political action. Castles (2005) points out that more than 100 million people reside outside the country of their birth. He asks what nationalism means for people who settle in one country without abandoning their cultural belonging to another. Castles suggests that the nation-state ‘is based on the obliteration of minority cultures’ (2005:312) and that immigrant groups are often caught between 183

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an urge to maintain ‘immigrant cultures and languages’ and a pragmatic acceptance of assimilation that can lead to marginalization and loss of community solidarity. He concludes that ‘the nation-state model . . . cannot offer an adequate basis for societal belonging in the age of globalization and migration’ (2005:314) and argues that continuing attempts to base citizenship on membership of an imagined cultural community leads to political and social exclusion and the racialization of differences. May and Fenton (2003) point out that many states are multinational, comprising a number of national minorities, and/or polyethnic, comprising a range of immigrant groups. If nations are people who see themselves as those already ‘in place’, ethnic minorities are people who may be seen, however begrudgingly, as being in situ, but who still remain, by the exclusivist definitions of nation so often applied, invariably ‘out of place’ (May and Fenton, 2003:14). Makoni and Pennycook (2007:7) argue that there are substantial similarities between Hobsbawm’s notion of the ‘invention’ of tradition and Anderson’s notion of ‘imagined communities’. Unlike Anderson, though, they regard both languages and nations as ‘dialectically co-constructed’ and propose that the invention of tradition is about ‘the creation of a past into which the present is inserted’ (Makoni and Pennycook, 2007:8). They argue that the notion of ‘the invention of tradition’ implies an essential continuity in the development of nations (and history more generally), which may not be sustainable. Furthermore, they suggest that others’ languages, histories and nations are co-constructed, and that ‘many structures, systems and constructs such as tradition, history or ethnicity, which are often thought of as natural parts of society, are inventions of a very specific ideological apparatus’ (Makoni and Pennycook, 2007:9). Billig (1995) argues that in the established nations there has been a continual production and reproduction of nationhood through what he calls ‘banal nationalism’ (1995:6). That is, ‘daily, the nation is indicated, or “flagged”, in the lives of its citizenry’, as ‘in so many little ways, the citizenry are reminded of their national place in a world of nations’ (1995:7). Billig suggests that everyday nationalism is not about flag-waving, but ‘it is the flag hanging unnoticed on the public building’ (1995:8). Flags are routine symbols of nationhood, not usually noticed, usually banal, but nonetheless a reminder of nationality and the reproduction of nationalism. In times of crisis (e.g., war) or patriotism (e.g., a major sporting occasion involving the national team, or national days of celebration or commemoration), the flag can be waved in more noticeable ways. The process of ‘banal nationalism’ goes beyond traditional symbols such as flags, of course. The nation is reproduced in discourse, in ‘banal words, jingling in the ears of the citizens, or 184

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passing before their eyes’ (Billig 1995:93). Billig argues convincingly that even small words such as ‘we’, ‘you’, ‘this’ and ‘here’ are powerful in the reproduction of national belonging.

The national in the local A number of studies have sought to investigate the complexities of national belonging in increasingly transnational settings. Fenton (2007) interviewed 1,100 young adults about social change in Britain and found that they manifested ‘a significant element of indifference or disregard for national identity’ (2007:335). He speculates that this could signal ‘the appearance of a non-national generation’ (2007:336). However, other scholars are not convinced of this, and view nationalism as a robust player in changing worlds. Billig suggests that ‘the issue of immigration, more than any other, shows that the state has not withered away in the age of late capitalism’ (1995:142). Pujolar (2007) further argues that describing the contemporary world as ‘post-national’ does not mean that nationality, nationalism or nation-states are no longer relevant or are receding in favour of an international, transnational or cosmopolitan era. In fact, there are ‘strong arguments to contend that nationalism is on the increase’ (Pujolar 2007:90). Many states seek to regulate immigration, and arguments against immigration are invariably expressed in nationalist language (van Dijk 2000; Essed 2000). It is sometimes taken for granted that the concept of ‘diaspora’ is oppositional to nations and nationalism. The social relations of migrants and refugees are not confined within nations but are ‘transnational’, hence, a diaspora is a specific form of transnational community (Cox and Connell, 2003:330). However, Dirlik (2004) argues that nationalism discourse in diaspora is often overlooked. There is, of course, great diversity within as well as between groups in diaspora, and ‘a diaspora discourse that reifies cultural identity . . . is complicit in the racialization of identity, which may serve some interests but has oppressive consequences for others’ (Dirlik 2004:499). Anderson (1998:74) refers to ‘long-distance nationalism’ to suggest that a strong allegiance binds members of an ethnic diaspora to their homeland. Bolognani (2007) investigated the reproduction of ‘homeland’ attachments among second- and third-generation British Pakistanis in the United Kingdom. She found that young British Pakistanis retain a strong emotional link to the ‘homeland’, and links are kept alive by trips to Pakistan and by intercontinental marriage. At the same time, she found the notion of national belonging to the homeland to be ‘a complex resource of negotiation of what the younger generation look for as effective, equal and complete citizenship’ (Bolognani 2007:74). 185

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Alexander et al. (2007:783) conducted interviews with 50 people of Bangladeshi, Chinese, Gujarati, Kurdish and Polish heritage in the United Kingdom, and found that ‘minority ethnic “communities” are best understood as arising out of systems of localized “personal” networks which challenge reified and abstract ideas of “imagined communities”, and provide insights into the performance of citizenship belonging “from below”’. Haglund (2005:164) conducted ethnographic field work with a group of adolescents in diasporic contexts in Sweden. She found that the adolescents expressed great pride in the ‘home country’ but also that they expressed ambivalence in this identification position. A number of the young people felt that they belonged in two places at the same time, but also that they belonged in neither place. Rather than being ‘caught between’ national identifications, however, they were ‘determined to extend their possibility to make a multitude of identifications available’. It is in the process of listening to the discourse of people in their everyday lives that we are able to come to these insights. In the remainder of this chapter, we focus on classroom episodes and interviews, which reveal something of the ways in which the participants’ beliefs about languages and linguistic practices constituted and were constituted by their social, political and historical contexts, and extend our understanding of the place of ‘nationalism’ and ‘nationality’ in the way the teachers and students viewed themselves and were viewed by others.

Inventing the national In interviews and classroom observations, we heard accounts of national belonging through narratives of seminal historical events in the making of the country of origin.

Collective memory In the first example, from an audio recording made in one of the Turkish schools in London, the teacher is teaching Turkish in the context of a narrative of the foundation of the Turkish state: Example 9.1 ve savas¸ 3 yil sürüyor. Büyük çarpis¸malar oluyor, Sakarya’da oluyor Dumlupınar’da oluyo, Bas¸konutanlık meydan savas¸ı oluyor, Inönü savas¸ı oluyor. yani bu is¸in sonunda düs¸manlarımızı yurdumuzdan atıyoruz. 29 Ekim 1923’te çumhuriyet kuruluyor, daha sonra Atatürk Türkiye’yi çagˇdas¸las¸tırmak için çagˇdas¸ uygarlık düzeyine getirmek için bir sürü yenilikler yapıyor. Düs¸ünün ki o zaman ülkenin büyük bir kısmı okuma yazma bilmiyor. okuma yazma

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ögˇrenmeleri lazım. kendisi tahtanın bas¸ına geçiyor bizzat okuma yazma ögˇretiyor. bunun yanında, hukukta yenilikler, Takvim saat digˇer ¸s eyler. 10 – 15 yıl içerisinde Türkiye’yi bayagˇı gelis¸tiriyor, kalkındırıyor {the war lasted three years. Fierce fighting took place, in Sakarya, in Dumlupinar, the Inonu war and the big war took place. so in the end we threw our enemies out of our country. On 29th of October 1923 the republic was founded. After, Atatürk started his reforms in order to make Turkey a modern, civilised country. Imagine that the majority of the population were illiterate. They needed to learn how to read and write.. he himself started teaching how to read and write, and also, reforms in our judiciary followed, the new calendar system, western time and others. In ten to fifteen years he developed Turkey to a large extent} (classroom audio-recording, Turkish school)

In the teacher’s narrative, there is a clear account of the origin of modern Turkey. The extract begins with a statement about collective action, as ‘we’ (implicitly ‘the people’) ‘threw our enemies out’. Here, the naming of the sites of conflict lends authenticity and legitimacy to the discourse. However, the narrative quickly moves to the heroic actions of a single figure, KemalAtatürk. In the discourse of the teacher, Atatürk symbolizes ‘modern, civilised’ Turkey. In the metonymic, ‘he developed Turkey’, Atatürk comes to stand for the reforms and modernization of the nation. The teacher presents the students with a version of history which is validated by its strong modality and its statements of temporality (e.g., ‘29th of October 1923’). In doing so, he constructs, or invents, the Turkish nation for the young Londoners in his class. A similar example comes from field notes taken in the other Turkish school in London. Here the teacher is engaging the students in discussion about not only Turkey’s national heritage, but also a topical contemporary issue: Example 9.2 The teacher asks the class what they think about the head scarf and whether it should be worn within school premises. The class is very interested in these discussions. Both the girls and boys take turns and speak their minds. They are very mature in handling this impromptu debate. Fatma believes that everybody should be free to wear what he or she would like to wear. Hülya thinks the scarf should be banned in schools and workplaces. The teacher makes a provocative point to the pupils: ‘Eg˘er kadınlar türban giyerse erkekler ne giymeli, sarık, fes, ¸salvar?’ {What should the men wear, turban, fez, or baggy trousers, if women are to cover their heads with a scarf?}. A student explains that men used to wear this in the past. The teacher feels the need to explain this in more depth, and he

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tells the class that before the Independent Republic of Turkey was established, men dressed in turban, fez and baggy trousers, and women wore burkas. He continues: ‘Atatürk reformed the dress code in Turkey in 1928 and banned any outfit that suggested religious belief. Atatürk separated civil life from religious life. He made Turkey secular. He allowed people to live their private lives as they wish and worship whichever God they thought fit to their beliefs. Atatürk wasn’t against religion. He was against radicalism and fanaticism in religion. He gave women suffrage rights and included them in the workforce, and moreover gave them equal opportunities with men, unlike Iran or Afghanistan where women cannot work and cannot get out of the house even in today’s world. Religion is between you and God. Nothing can come between an individual and God. All religions aim to be modern and they base their principles on respect for the other’ (field notes, Turkish school)

The teacher establishes the credentials of Atatürk, the Turkish premier who introduced far-reaching reforms. Turkey is geographically removed from the students’ experience: those who have visited did so as tourists, while others have not visited Turkey. The teacher’s account also stretches across time, asking the students to imagine a period when their heritage nation was less secular and more oppressive. The school sets out to teach Turkish history, identity, belonging, values and heritage – in short, to pass on to the next generation what it means to ‘be Turkish’. The third example is from an interview with the founder and administrator of one of the Bengali schools in Birmingham. In the course of the interview, the administrator made a forceful and emotional statement following a question in which we queried the rationale for teaching Bengali to children in Birmingham: Example 9.3 ei bhaashar jonno 1952 te amaar theke dosh haath dure Barkat, Salam maara jaae 1952 te {because of this language in 1952 ten yards away from me Barkat and Salam were killed in 1952} I was also a student in year 10. From Sylhet to Dhaka was 230 miles we marched there Sylhet to Dhaka 230 miles with slogans. We want our mother language it is a raashtro bhasha {state language} how will I forget about my mother language? my brothers gave their life for this language. I will never forget it while I’m alive (administrator interview, Bengali school)

For the school administrator, the ‘mother language’ was a vital symbol of the founding of the Bangladeshi nation. More than fifty years earlier he had witnessed the incident in which the ‘language martyrs’ were 188

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killed while demonstrating against the imposition of Urdu as the national language by West Pakistan, and these events seemed to have informed his view that British-born children of Bangladeshi heritage should learn and maintain the Bengali language. The historic incident, which marks the Bangladeshi calendar as ‘Ekushey February’, continues to be celebrated as a key moment in the collective memory of the Bangladeshi nation and in the Bangladeshi community in the United Kingdom (Gard’ner, 2004). Example 9.4 is from classroom observation of one of the Bengali schools. T is the teacher and Shahnaz a ten-year-old girl: Example 9.4 T: Bangladesher teen taa national day aache, jaatio dibosh {Bangladesh has three national days, national events} national day not national anthem Shahnaz: independence day T: etaa Banglae ki bolbe shaadhinota dibosh Ekushey February shohid dibosh aage bolo Ekushey February shohid dibosh {in Bangla it is shaadhinota dibosh 21 February is shohid dibosh first say 21 February is shohid dibosh} Shahnaz: ekushey February shohid dibosh T: er pore aashlo shaadhinota dibosh {after that comes shaadhinotaa dibosh} independence day, independence day is not Bangla, it is English. Banglae holo {in Bangla it is} shaadhinota dibosh Shahnaz: chaabbish-e March {26 March} T: shaadhinota dibosh Shahnaz: chaabbish-e March {26 March} T: lastly nine months we fought against Pakistani collaborator Shahnaz: language day T: language day holo ekushey February. Chaabbish March independence day. Sholoi December, after nine months bijoy dibosh {victory day} Pakistani occupied army ke aamraa surrender korchi {we made the occupied forces of Pakistan surrender their arms} Al Badr against our independence war ke aamraa chutaaisi {we chased them out} How many national days in Bangladesh? Shahnaz: three T: Bangladesher jaatio dibosh koiti? {how many national days in Bangladesh?} Shahnaz: teen ti {three} T: Shaadhinota dibosh ebong bijoy dibosh chilo 1971. Bhasha dibosh chilo 1952. Aar bhaasha dibosh kon din chilo 52. Tokhon amraa choto {independence day and

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victory day was in 1971. Language day was in 1952. Language day was 52 when we were young} Inshaallah eta every day jodi aamraa every day discuss kori taahole bhaalo {by the grace of God it is good if we discuss this every day} (classroom video recording, Bengali school)

In a similar scenario to the Turkish school in Example 9.1, the teacher instructs the students through content which refers to a narrative of collective remembrance in relation to the nation. Curriculum content here is strongly nationalistic and appears to have the aim of instilling in the young language learners an understanding of key dates and events in the making of the Bangladeshi nation. The ten-year-old student seems to have some pre-existing knowledge of the historical context, and is prepared to volunteer this. For example, she offers the date of Bangladeshi independence from West Pakistan and is confidently able to do so in Bengali. The teacher moves comfortably between Bengali and English within and between sentences, and in his final statement uses the common Islamic expression ‘Inshallah’, derived from Arabic, alongside Bengali and English. The young student tends to respond in English when the teacher asks a question in English, and in Bengali when the teacher asks a question in Bengali. Language teaching here, as in the example from the Turkish classroom, invents for the young students a sense of national belonging which is firmly rooted in narratives of collective memory. The teachers’ stories of poignant martyrdoms and heroic victories, remembered as ‘our own’, serve the purpose of reproducing the national memory and imagination (Anderson 1983).

Flagging the national As we have seen, nationalism is constantly produced and reproduced in myths and symbols of national belonging and through the repetition of banal words. In our observations and recordings we found many references to just such ‘national symbols’. In one of the Turkish schools, for example, classes were regularly preceded by explicit reference to symbols of Turkish nationality: Example 9.5 the children are in lines facing the front where there are two famous pictures of Atatürk either side of the Turkish flag. In Turkish, [the head teacher] tells everyone that the school will be held as usual next week despite the holidays . . . the national anthem is put on by a child operating a boom box. During the national anthem parents and children all seem to be joining in. Following the national

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anthem some of the older children come to the front and pledge their allegiance about how proud they are to be Turkish: ne mutlu Türküm Diyene {how happy to say I am Turkish} (field notes, Turkish school)

Although not all of the teachers in the school agreed with these practices of singing the Turkish national anthem and having the students pledge an oath of allegiance to the Turkish nation, the head teacher said that many of the parents were happy to see them continue. It is interesting to note that some of our observations took place during the football (soccer) World Cup, and many of the students wore England football shirts while pledging their oath of allegiance to the Turkish nation. In Example 9.6, the teacher of one of the Bengali classes engages directly with a symbol of the nation in speaking to his class of students: Example 9.6 T: jehuto aamraa Bangladeshi, hoeto tomaader oneker jonmo ei deshe kintu tomaader baabaar maar jonmoto Bangladeshe, thik aache naa, hmn? kon jinishtaa desher chino bohon kore? Ektaa jinish dekhle bolte paarbo etaa ei desh. Mone koren je globe otaa. Globe-er modhdhe prithibir joto raashtro aache, theek aache, all states are indicated here. Prothom map dekhe chinte paari aar er por aamaar kaache map nei, maan chitro nei kintu emon ektaa jinish aache jetaa dekhle aamraa bujhte paarbo etaa ei desher. ki jinish etaa? {because we are Bangladeshis, perhaps many of you were born in this country but your fathers and mothers were born in Bangladesh, isn’t that right, hm? Which thing is a country’s symbol? If we see that one thing we can say this is this country. Think that that is the globe. Here we find many countries of the world, ok, all states are indicated here. First we see the map and recognize [the country], after that if I don’t have a map but I have such a thing that will help us understand that this belongs to this country. What is that thing?} Ss: [no response] T: ki re [a term of endearment to initiate conversation] Ss: [no response] T: flag. Theek aase naa? {isn’t that correct?} ektaa flag dekhle etaa jodi hoe {if we see a flag if it is this} [drawing a flag on the board] etaa kaar? {whose is this?} hmmn? ei chinno ektaa kaapor-e jodi dekhi [drawing a cross on the flag] kothaao dekhi taahol-e etaa mukh diye bola laage naa etaa England-er flag. shobaai jaane etaa England-er flag, theek? Bangladesher ektaa flag aache, keu Bangladesher ektaa flag dekhaa-te paarbaa, aasho. {Hm? if we see this sign on a cloth [drawing a cross on a flag], if we see it anywhere then we have to say that this is the flag of England. Everyone knows this is England’s flag, right?

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S: T: S: T:

Bangladesh also has a flag, can anyone show the flag of Bangladesh, come} [raises a hand to volunteer and draws the Bangladeshi flag on the board] aachchaa, colour bolo-to {ok, tell me the colour.} it’s green and red ok, green, red. dhonnobaad, etaa green, etaa red. Etaa holo Bangladesher flag {ok, green, red. thank you, this is green, this is red. this is Bangladesh’s flag} (classroom video recording, Bengali school)

In this video-recorded extract from classroom observation, the teacher initially includes himself and the students in the group of ‘Bangladeshis’ and then appears to re-negotiate this position, saying that many of the students were born in the United Kingdom, but their parents were born in Bangladesh. Implicitly, the teacher seems to argue that because the children’s parents were born in Bangladesh, they are themselves ‘Bangladeshi’. Here, the teacher first establishes common ground that although the children were born in Britain, their parents were born in Bangladesh. He says no more about this, but it is an important preface to his lecture. Implicitly, these points about national symbols need to be made because the children’s parents were born in Bangladesh, and the children were born in Britain. The teacher frequently uses rhetorical questions, for example, ‘Theek aase naa?’ {isn’t that correct?} to build and confirm consensus (Voloshinov 1973), so that although the children are unresponsive, he is able to continue as if they are complicit in his argument. As we have seen, Billig (1995) argues that national identity is constantly being discursively ‘flagged’, not with flags themselves, but with words which are familiar, routine, habitual and hardly noticed. Although it is often ‘small words’, which offer constant but hardly conscious reminders of national identity, here the teacher ‘flags’ Bangladeshi national identity precisely through reference to the national flag. This more direct ‘flagging’ of nationalism may be considered by the teacher to be necessary in reminding Bangladeshi children of their heritage in the face of the banal words that constantly construct British nationality. In the discourse of the teachers and in their languageteaching, stories, festivals, flags, oaths, images and anthems all came to be emblematic of the homeland as nation.

Language and national identity We frequently listened to the voices of those who considered their language to be fundamental to their sense of themselves. We heard this argument again and again in interviews with teachers and parents of the students: 192

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Example 9.7 Bengali is our mother land, where we come from, mainly we come from Bangladesh. Even if you are born in this country, it doesn’t matter we need to know our mother language first (parent interview, Bengali school)

For many of the parents and teachers, learning the language of the ‘mother land’ held a symbolic significance beyond the utility of the language in the U.K. context. Example 9.8 is an excerpt from an interview with a teacher in one of the Gujarati schools: Example 9.8 When the students leave the school, they won’t continue further. I’m proud of my language. Our identity is our language. It is our mother tongue and if we don’t speak it, who are we? The [Gujarati] communities in Leicester speak different varieties of Gujarati, but originally it is still Gujarati. If our language goes, so does our culture. So our language is our real identity (teacher interview, Gujarati school)

This teacher acknowledges that there is no single Gujarati language, even in the city of Leicester, but that there is nonetheless a set of linguistic practices associated with Gujarati ‘real identity’. For him, ‘our identity is our language’, and the rhetorical question powerfully implies that the loss of the language may lead to a loss of national/cultural belonging. At the same time, the teacher articulates a frustration we heard from teachers across the four cities where we conducted our investigations. Although there was pride in the language learning achievements of the students, there was a concern that this learning would come to an end when the students left the complementary schools, and the heritage language would no longer be maintained. This view was not always corroborated by the students’ account of their languages, however. In an interview with one of the key participant students from one of the Chinese schools, we heard a firm assertion of pride in both the Mandarin language and Chinese national identity: Example 9.9 I feel . . . PROUD I’m Ё೑Ҏ{Chinese}DŽBecause I can speak a different language. And then, I won’t say I’m completely English ’cause I don’t want to be completely English, because I am not. yeah, some people think, ‘oh I live in England so I’m English.’ But it doesn’t mean you are exactly English, it means you are Chinese as well. You might have an English like citizenship yeah sometimes I feel like oh, I like being English sometimes I feel like I really enjoy being Chinese because sometimes ᳝ѯᯊ‫⬉ⳟ׭‬㾚ⳟњЁ೑ⱘ⬉㾚 {after I watch some Chinese programme}ˈ៥ህ㾝ᕫ䖭ϾЁ೑ˈ䖬ᰃ{I’d feel

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that China’s still} very interesting and then the language is really beautiful so I do want to be Chinese (student interview, Mandarin school)

Here, the student’s exposure to the ‘beautiful’ national language through television appears to precipitate renewed pride in ‘being Chinese’. The Mandarin language is clearly related to the student’s ‘Chinese’ identity, while at the same time he is able to move between being ‘English’ and being ‘Chinese’.

Disinventing the national We have seen that narratives of national belonging and stories of heroic actions in the building of the nation were articulated in teacher discourse in the heritage language classrooms. These narratives appeared to have a role in teaching not only (and perhaps not principally) the language, but also a sense of national belonging to the homeland. However, these narratives were not always uncontested by students. In the following example, a student, Tamim, has been speaking English and resists and contests the idea that he should have to speak Bengali in the Bengali language classroom: Example 9.10 T: English naa Bangali maato {don’t speak English speak Bangali} Tamim: I’m not doing this. I’m not doing this again. I’m not doing it T: dekhi aamaar dekhte hoibo {let me see. I have to see it} Tamim: miss you’re slack, slack, slack, you’re so slack (classroom audio recording, Bengali school)

Here, Tamim calls the teacher ‘slack’, in a personal attack which seems at odds with the committed, conscientious approach to learning which we saw elsewhere from this student. However, it may be argued that Tamim’s enthusiasm for learning Bengali on other occasions is not entirely inconsistent with his frustration and difficult behaviour here. His enthusiasm, like his frustration, was based on a lively, enquiring mind, which insisted on being challenged. When he was asked to do something which was at the inappropriate level for him, or which he had done before, he resisted. Examples 9.11 and 9.12 are excerpts from video-recorded classroom interactional data in one of the Bengali classrooms. This is from the same class as we saw in Example 8.3 in the previous chapter. The context for this interaction is that the teacher (T1) has been teaching the students about national symbols of Bangladesh. He has covered the

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national anthem, the national bird, the national flower and the national poet. There is another teacher (T2) present: Example 9.11 T1: [addressing T2] aar jaatio ki roise, apa? {what other national symbol is left, apa?} T2: phol {fruit} T1: oh yes, national fruit. etaa chino, jack fruit naa? {do you know this, isn’t it jack fruit?} jack fruit banaan baanaan, spell hoise ni? {jack fruit spelling, spelling, is the spelling correct?} Rumana: g-a-c-k T1: no ‘g’, ‘j’ jack…. uit- uit. Jack fruit chino? Banglaae ki? jack fruit-er Bangla ki, ki? {not ‘g’, ‘j’ jack…. uit- uit . Do you know jack fruit? What is it in Bengali? What is the Bengali for jack fruit, what, what?} Rumana: kaathol [the Sylheti equivalent of the Bengali word] T1: ei, kaathol naa kaathaal [spells the word] k-aakaar – kaa, t- th- aakaar. This, not kaathol, kaathaal k-aakaar – kaa, t- th- aakaar Aleha: kaathol is disgusting (classroom audio recording, Bengali school)

Here, the teacher asks his colleague for another national symbol, and she suggests ‘fruit’. He is concerned to elicit from the children the correct Bengali translation and spelling of ‘jack fruit’. Rumana, a ten-yearold girl, attempts this, but is able only to volunteer the English spelling and the Sylheti version of the word (rather than the ‘Standard’ Bengali), which is rejected by the teacher (kaathol naa kaathaal). Rumana’s younger sister, Aleha, says quietly but audibly in Sylheti and English (and notably not in Bengali), ‘kaathol is disgusting’. While it would be going too far to say that Aleha is resisting a national symbol of Bangladesh here (she may just find the fruit not to her liking), this is hardly an affirmation of Bangladeshi national identity. The fact that Aleha makes her aside in Sylheti and English, neither of them the legitimate code of the classroom activity at this point, suggests that she is offering a challenge to the official activity of the lesson. A few moments later, the same teacher introduces a further emblem of Bangladeshi identity, the national fish, the ‘ilish’, or hilsa fish: Example 9.12 T: jaatio maas {national fish} national fish. ei desh theke tumaar abbu kin-e aane naa ilish maas, ilish maas kine naa, ilish maas khaao naa? {from this country don’t your

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father and mother buy hilsa fish, don’t they buy fish, don’t you eat hilsa fish?} Rumana: zaanraam naa {I don’t know} T: tumi zaano naa? {don’t you know?} Rumana: maas khaai naa, aamraa maas khaai naa {don’t eat fish, we don’t eat fish.} T: [sarcastically] maas posa, naa, naa, maas motte-i khaaiyyo naa, zibon-e khaaiyyo naa. etaa tus korlei bipodh. maas khaai-lei bipodh. ekhbaar zodi maas khaiyyalaao aar ekhbaar golaa-e posa laagizaae ei golaa aar zindigi-te bhaalo hobenaa. shutorong maas khono din khaaibaanaa Abbu aane naa aar Bangladeshe kichu chaaibaanaa. Bangladeshe gesso khono din? {fish is rotten, no, no, you should never eat fish if you touch it there may be danger, eating fish is dangerous, if you eat fish once and find it rotten in the throat then that feeling will remain with you as long as you live, therefore don’t ever eat fish, your father doesn’t get it and you should not ask for anything from Bangladesh, have you ever been to Bangladesh?} Rumana: dui aasilaam {I was two} T: hmn, tumi dui aasilaa ni aar er por-e aar gesso naa? ekhon tumi khoto? {hm were you two then and after that have you never been? how old are you now?} Rumana: dosh {ten} T: tokhon tumi HUA HUA [imitating an infant’s cry] khorso, tumaar ammu tumaake feeder-e dudh dise, tokhon tumito maas khaao naai, theek aase aar gesso naa. jaawaar shombhobonaa khub kom, achchaa, achchaa. {at that time you cried HUA HUA your mother fed you milk from a feeder then you didn’t eat fish. all right, you haven’t been since then. the possibility of going is remote, ok ok} (classroom video recording, Bengali school)

Having asked the students whether they eat the national fish, the teacher appears to be surprised by Rumana’s response: ‘aamraa maas khaai naa’ {we don’t eat fish}. He assumes that Rumana and her family eat the traditional Bangladeshi food. In our analysis, we frequently encountered examples of students using parody to subvert the official discourse of the classroom, or clash with the discourse of their peers. Unusually here, though, the teacher uses parody and mimicry to mock his students. Billig argues that ‘ridicule is a cost-effective means of social discipline’ (2005:198). The mocking laughter that greets a childish error is a powerful means of discipline. In parody, the first voice introduces a second voice, which has a semantic intention that is directly opposed 196

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to the first, and the utterance is an arena for the clash of two voices (Bakhtin 1994). Bakhtin argues that parodic discourse can be extremely diverse and is analogous to discourse which is ironic, or which makes any other double-voiced use of someone else’s words. In this example from the Bengali classroom, the teacher adopts a parodic, double-voiced discourse (Bakhtin 1994) to mock the student who says her family does not eat fish. This is neither the voice of the teacher nor the voice of the student, but incorporates something of each. It is also the voice of one who argues strongly that ‘fish is rotten’, a voice which is an exaggeration of the student’s ‘we don’t eat fish’, and a voice which clashes with the teacher’s own view of the symbolic importance of the national fish. This is what Billig (2005) calls disciplinary humour, an exaggerated mocking of the child’s voice as a form of punishment. The authority of the teacher is reinforced by disciplinary laughter as he defends the national symbol against the student’s ‘mocking transgression of their customs’ (Billig 2005:206). The teacher’s mocking discourse continues as he ironically suggests that if the student does not eat fish, she should not ask for anything from Bangladesh. The teacher’s disciplinary discourse further continues as he mocks the student for not having visited Bangladesh since she was two years old. The teacher represents the student’s voice as that of a baby (at that time you cried HUA HUA), and seems to suggest (in a curious logic) that she has been prevented from eating fish by an over-dependence on milk from a feeder cup. It is as if (for the teacher) the child has rejected Bangladeshi nationality in saying that she does not eat fish, and the national symbol, imposed by the teacher, becomes a site of contestation and negotiation. Many of the young people we spoke and listened to articulated subject positions which were very little concerned with national identities. The following extract from an interview in the Bengali case study with two young (9 and 10-year-old) siblings was typical. The children had been asked what kind of music they like: Example 9.13 Tamim: I like Bhangra R1: really? Tamim: I like Bhangra with rap R2: oh they have all kinds of crossover Bhangra music now don’t they Tamim: I like rap like Fifty Cent I mean R2: do you like Eminem? Tamim: yes he’s all right R1: so is that OK? I mean rap and all that is all right? Shazia: erm yea R: your dad doesn’t?

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Shazia:

he doesn’t really erm if it’s in front of him he will shout but erm if we stopped it it’s all right. Tamim: RAP anyway I don’t hear rap at home I might just hear it a bit ’cos I hear it from my friend’s dad in his cars and everything because R1: is your friend Pakistani or Indian? Tamim: English (..) I mean Bengali (student interview, Bengali case study)

Here ten-year-old Tamim associates himself with firstly Bhangra, then ‘Bhangra with rap’, and finally ‘rap like Fifty Cent’. This appears to represent a negotiation of an increasingly daring subject position. Whereas listening to Bhangra music may be regarded as relatively mainstream and conservative, ‘Bhangra with rap’ moves towards an increasingly American pop culture position, and ‘rap like Fifty Cent’ is likely to represent a ‘Gansta Rap’ identity. Tamim is happy to be associated with ‘my friend’s dad’, and the researcher assumes that his friend must be of Pakistani or Indian heritage, as it may be surprising for a good Bangladeshi to listen to this kind of music. In the final utterance in this excerpt, Tamim’s pause between ‘English’ and ‘I mean Bengali’ may suggest that nationality, ethnicity and even language are not the salient categories for him at this moment – rather, he is more interested in positioning himself as a cool, streetwise consumer of contemporary, transnational music.

Negotiating the national What, then, can we say about the teaching of nationality and nationalism in these complementary schools in four English cities? It is clear that while their main activity is language teaching, the teaching of affiliation to the homeland is one of the motivating principles for the schools. National belonging is reproduced through the inculcation of collective memories of heroic deeds, through narratives of martyrdom and radical reform. As we saw in Chapters 7 and 8, national belonging is often established in the complementary schools through the introduction of flags, traditional stories and myriad other symbols of the nation. Also, in predominant institutional ideologies, the teaching of the national language, whether Turkish, Bengali, Gujarati, Mandarin or Cantonese, is often inseparable from the teaching of the national. Keeping the standard heritage language separate from English, and from non-standard forms, appeared to be associated with the teaching of the national heritage and culture. Heller (1999:32) points out a key paradox for linguistic minority immigrant groups, which use the logic of the monolingual, monocultural nation-state to break apart the monolithic 198

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identity of the state within which they search for a legitimate place: ‘However, in order to do so, they must construct a fictive unity, which effectively produces internally structures of hegemony similar to those against which they struggle’. In this complex ideological context, complementary schools become sites where subtle, nuanced negotiations of identities frequently occur. Here we see exposition in pedagogy of pre-existing memories, myths, symbols and traditions (Smith 2004) in the re-invention of the nation. In fact, we saw teaching of nationality and nationalism, which was explicit, frequent, and direct. Very far from being ‘banal’ (Billig 1995), this was nationalism made evident in clearly visible emblems. Our investigations of complementary schools appear to exemplify what Dirlik (2004:499) calls ‘diaspora discourse that reifies cultural identity’. For school administrators, parents and teachers, national and ethnic affiliation appeared to be presented as a straightforward, unambiguous and unproblematic choice. Teaching of nationalism in the complementary schools was not the same phenomenon as the discursive flagging of nationalism in contexts where national belonging of the dominant ‘national’ group, or ‘ethnie’, is unstintingly reproduced in the repeated discourses of banal nationalism (Billig 1995:93). This is not the nationalism of the nation-state, backed by power and capital. Rather, it is the nationalism of the ‘out of place’ (May and Fenton, 2003:14), a nationalism which has to be taught precisely because it is not flagged daily in constant discursive acts of misrecognition. This was dialogic discourse, a discourse which clashed with and was shaped by the more powerful discourses of British nationalism. It was a discourse teeming with past and future discourses, a discourse that, having taken shape at a particular moment in time and space, cannot fail to brush up against thousands of other discourses (Bakhtin 1981). It is a nationalist discourse, but a very particular form of nationalist discourse, one that is shaped by the everyday discourses of banal nationalism, but one which is in itself anything other than banal. Fighting to be heard, it is a voice ‘directed both toward the referential object of speech, as in ordinary speech, and toward another’s discourse, toward someone else’s speech’ (Bakhtin 1994:105). That is, it is a discourse profoundly aware of the power of the everyday ‘small words’ of British (and English) nationalism. A final example from a teacher addressing his students in the Bengali classroom exemplifies this point: Example 9.14 raani Elizabeth aishaa aashon paathse aar aamraa shobbai ekhaane aashchi aar aiyya ekhaane aamraa mone khori aamraa saaraa hogoltaa English. Duniaat-e aar khonotaa aamraar maataar aar naa. Emon bhaabe aamaader mogoz dholaai khoraa hoise jehutu ekhtaa island-e boishaa roisi

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{Queen Elizabeth came to rule this island and we all came here and after coming here we all think that we are all English. There is no other language that we should speak in this world. Because we are sitting in an island we have been brainwashed.} (video recording, Bengali classroom)

The statement ‘Duniaat-e aar khonotaa aamraar maataar aar naa’ {There is no other language that we should speak in this world} is sharply ironic, appropriating the voice of another, in double-voiced discourse which is ‘internally dialogized’ (Bakhtin 1981:324), clashing with and responding to the nationalism of the dominant group. Teachers, and some parents, were emphatic about the importance of teaching affiliation to the homeland. For the students, born in Britain to immigrant or second-generation parents, the teaching of national belonging did not appear to produce any sense of being ‘caught between’ national identities. Rather, they were ‘determined to extend their possibility to make a multitude of identifications available’ (Haglund 2005:164). Many students expressed their pride in being ‘Bangladeshi’, ‘Chinese’, ‘Gujarati’, or ‘Turkish’ and their pride in their ability to learn the national language, and in their knowledge of aspects of the collective memory and mythology of the national homeland. But this was not uncontested. On a number of occasions, students challenged essential links between their presupposed affiliations to their parents’ country of origin and national symbols and traditions. They did not always assent to imposed subjectivities, nor did they always confirm their teachers’ version of the symbolic importance of national emblems. At times, the teachers recognized the teaching of national identity as a site of contestation and negotiation. In some instances, teachers adopted the language of repressive laughter to impart and emphasize their point. Teaching of national belonging became sites at which identities were negotiated in discourse (Blackledge and Pavlenko, 2001; Pavlenko and Blackledge, 2004), as students engaged with their teachers’ imposition of ‘national’ identities, while also taking opportunities to contest and re-negotiate these identity positions. In our investigations we saw that affiliation to the national heritage of their parents was only one aspect of these students’ sense of belonging, and one which they were at times prepared to contest and negotiate.

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10

Translanguaging as pedagogy in the bilingual classroom

This chapter considers pedagogic possibilities related to the two ideologies of separate and flexible bilingualism that we encountered in the complementary schools and questions ‘common-sense’ understandings of a bilingual pedagogy predicated on what Cummins (2005, 2008) refers to as the ‘two solitudes’ (2008:65) of bilingualism. Based on what we have seen and heard throughout our observations in complementary schools, we set out to describe a flexible bilingual approach to language teaching and learning. In this chapter we do this with particular reference to the Chinese and Gujarati schools. We argue for a release from monolingual instructional approaches and advocate teaching bilingual children by means of bilingual pedagogy, with two or more languages used alongside each other. We argue throughout this book that complementary schools are institutions which endorse multilingualism as a usual and normative resource for identity performance (Creese et al. 2006; Martin et al. 2006), and which strive to influence identity and cultural socializations, extending the bilingualism of their students (Creese et al. 2008a). Complementary schools’ particular concern with community values and the nature of affiliation to and expertise in the community language requires a pedagogy which responds to young people and teachers who have experience of diaspora in particular and distinct ways (Anderson 2008; Cummins 2005). In the context of the classroom, it is usually the case that the young people’s bilingualism is dominant in English, whereas their teachers are often dominant in the community language. This chapter sets out to describe how teachers and students have developed and co-constructed pedagogic practices for students in complementary schooling. We use a languageecological perspective to describe the ideological, interrelational and interactional opportunities and constraints afforded in these linguistically diverse classrooms (Creese and Martin, 2003; van Lier 2008).

Classroom language ecologies An ecological approach considers the already established with the new. Van Lier’s (2008) ecological approach describes the need to consider 201

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the development of new languages alongside the development of existing languages. He stresses the importance of the interrelationship between teacher and learners in making this connection salient. According to van Lier, the teacher engages the learner in pedagogic actions which should develop ‘a wide panoramic view of self’ (2008:54). From this teacher–learner engagement, new identity positions associated with language learning processes can emerge, with the teacher introducing the learner to new possibilities. Creese and Martin (2003, 2008) describe classrooms as ecological micro systems and argue that it is important to explore the ecological minutiae of interactional practices in classrooms, and link these to the ideologies that pervade language choice and language policy. A similar point is made by Jaffe (2008:225) who describes a need for ‘microecologies’ of linguistic, social, political and pedagogical practice. The study of language ecology is the study of diversity within specific socio- political settings where the processes of language use create, reflect and challenge particular hierarchies and hegemonies, however transient these might be. An ecological perspective on multilingualism is ‘essentially about opening up ideological and implementational space in the environment for as many languages as possible’ (Hornberger 2002:30). At its heart is the dialectic between the local interactional and the social ideological. Kramsch suggests that we use an ecological framework to voice the ‘contradictions, the unpredictabilities, and paradoxes that underlie even the most respectable research in language development’ (Kramsch 2002:8; Kramsch and Steffensen, 2008). The language ecology metaphor offers a way of studying the interactional order to explore how social ideologies, particularly in relation to multilingualism, are created and implemented. The purpose of this chapter is to consider how the multilingual orientation of complementary schools might develop bilingual pedagogy as an alternative to pedagogic approaches which keep languages separate. As we showed in Chapters 2 and 5, bilingual education has traditionally argued that languages should be kept separate in the learning and teaching of languages. Educationalists have ‘insisted on the separation of the two languages’ in order to make it ‘easier for the child’ (Jacobson and Faltis, 1990:4). We continue to see this argument made. Two-way bilingual immersion programmes in the United States are described as ‘periods of instruction during which only one language is used (i.e., there is no translation or language mixing)’ (Lindholm-Leary 2006:89). According to Cummins (2005), an explanation for this separation of languages is the continuing prevalence of monolingual instructional approaches in our schools. He describes the pervasive assumptions behind these approaches as follows: 202

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1. Instruction should be carried out exclusively in the target language without recourse to the students’ L1. 2. Translation between L1 and L2 has no place in the teaching of language or literacy. Encouragement of translation in L2-teaching is viewed as a reversion to the discredited grammar/translation method . . . or concurrent translation method. 3. Within L2 immersion and bilingual/dual language programs, the two languages should be kept rigidly separate: they constitute ‘two solitudes.’ (Cummins 2005:588). Language separation pedagogic approaches have a long history. In 1981, Zentella reported one of the teachers in her study of a Puerto Rican community in New York saying: When they don’t understand something in one language, they’ll go to the other, which is easier for them . . . and like, then sometimes I have to be bouncing from one language to the other, which is wrong. (Zentella 1981:127)

The teacher in Zentella’s study indicates her moral disapproval of ‘mixing’ languages in the classroom. Shin (2005:18) describes attitudes toward code-switching as negative, noting that bilinguals themselves ‘may feel embarrassed about their code switching and attribute it to careless language habits’. Setati et al. (2002:147) make reference to the ‘dilemma-filled’ nature of code-switching in their study of South African classrooms. Martin (2005:88) describes code-switching in Malaysia: The use of a local language alongside the ‘official’ language of the lesson is a well-known phenomenon and yet, for a variety of reasons, it is often lambasted as ‘bad practice’, blamed on teachers’ lack of English-language competence . . . or put to one side and/or swept under the carpet. (Martin 2005:88)

These studies show that moving between languages has traditionally been frowned upon in educational settings. A corollary of this is that teachers and students and students have often experienced feelings of guilt about the necessity to engage in bilingual practice. As we have seen in earlier chapters in this book, even in complementary schools, which endorse the teaching and use of minority languages, some teachers and administrators strongly believe that languages should be kept separate lest they ‘contaminate’ each other. Code-switching is rarely institutionally endorsed or pedagogically underpinned. Rather, when it is used, it becomes a pragmatic response to the local classroom context. Lin (1996, 2005) describes student and teacher code-switching practices as ‘local, pragmatic, coping tactics and responses to the socioeconomic dominance of English in Hong Kong, where many students 203

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from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds with limited access to English resources struggled to acquire an English-medium education for its socioeconomic value.’ (Lin 2005:46). Martin (2005:89) speaks of code-switching as offering classroom participants ‘creative pragmatic and “safe” practices . . . between the official language of the lesson and a language which the classroom participants have a greater access to’. Arthur and Martin (2006) argue that code-switching allows participants to better accomplish the lesson and is a pragmatic response to provide greater curriculum access for bilingual students.

Translanguaging as bilingual pedagogy Educational issues related to the separation of languages have led practitioners and researchers to question the stricture of separate bilingualism. Cummins (2005) challenges the squandering of bilingual resources in mainstream contexts. He argues for bilingual instructional strategies that explicitly teach two-way cross-language transfer. Anderson (2008) has recently called for flexible approaches to pedagogy to respond to bilingual contexts which do not fit easily into existing paradigms. Lin and Martin (2005) have argued for more multilingual pedagogic and curriculum research. The research documented in Lin and Martin (2005) and Arthur and Martin (2006) describe the pedagogic potentials of code-switching. These include increasing the inclusion, participation and understandings of pupils in learning processes; the development of less formal relationships between participants; ideas more easily conveyed and lessons ‘accomplished’. They speak of the ‘pedagogic validity of code-switching’ (Arthur and Martin, 2006:197) and consider ways in which research might contribute to a ‘teachable’ pedagogic resource. García (2009:5) argues that we need an integrated and plural vision for bilingual education ‘by which bilingualism is not simply seen as two separate monolingual codes’, but ‘depends upon the reconceptualization of understanding about language and bilingualism’. García argues that we need to move away from ‘monoglossic’ ideologies of bilingualism, which ‘view the two languages as bounded autonomous systems’ (p. 7) to ‘heteroglossic’ ones. She goes on to argue that we must consider alternatives to bilingual education that insist on the strict separation of languages. This has much in keeping with the theoretical position developed by Bailey (2007) and summarized in Chapter 3. Other examples of pedagogies which explicitly seek to develop bilingual strategies are based on ecological perspectives. Hornberger (2002, 2005, 2008) describes her work on the continua of biliteracy as an ecological model in the sense that language and literacy features are nested and intersecting. One change along one point of a continuum 204

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will cause potential changes along other continua resulting in a reconfiguration of the whole educational picture (Hornberger 2002). In terms of optimizing pedagogy, Hornberger suggests: bi/multilinguals’ learning is maximized when they are allowed and enabled to draw from across all their existing language skills (in two+ languages), rather than being constrained and inhibited from doing so by monolingual instructional assumptions and practices. (2005:607)

Another ecological pedagogic approach is described by Lo´pez (2008:143), who uses the term ‘concurrent approaches’ in training indigenous prospective teachers in Latin America. He describes ‘concurrent approaches’ as ‘generally untried but innovative use of languages used in the business of teaching and learning’. Lo´pez argues for a bilingual pedagogy which shows that ‘in indigenous everyday life, the two – or in some cases three or more – languages are needed many times in connection to one another and not as discretely separate as is often supposed’ (2008:143). Cummins (2005:588) too makes some explicit suggestions for developing bilingual strategies. He suggests: (a) systematic attention to cognate relationships across languages; (b) creation of student-authored dual language books by means of translation from the initial language of writing to the L2; other multimedia and multilingual projects can also be implemented (e.g. creation of iMovies, PowerPoint presentations, etc); (c) sister class projects where students from different language backgrounds collaborate using two or more languages. (Cummins, 2005:588)

In the United Kingdom, as elsewhere, bilingual children do not view their literacies and languages as separate, but rather experience them as ‘simultaneous’ (Kenner 2004; Robertson 2006; Sneddon 2000). However, some caution is advised in the development of bilingual strategies and pedagogies based on flexible methods. Martin (2005:90) writes: And yet we need to question whether bilingual interaction strategies ‘work’ in the classroom context. . . .do they facilitate learning? Can classroom code-switching support communication, particularly the exploratory talk which is such an essential part of the learning process. A corollary to this is whether teacher-training programmes (both pre-service and in-service) in multilingual contexts take into account the realities and pragmatics of classroom language use in such contexts.

Lin (1999) found that switching between English and Cantonese ensured understanding and motivation, but warned against notions of easy 205

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transferability to other classrooms in other contexts and the danger of participating in the reproduction of students’ disadvantage. Further, the development of pedagogies which respond to research will not work in any ‘mechanistic generalisable way’ (Arthur and Martin, 2006:197). The importance of responding to local circumstances is clear. Although we can acknowledge that across all linguistically diverse contexts moving between languages is natural, how to harness this pedagogically will depend on the socio-political and historical environment in which such practice is embedded and on the local ecologies of schools and classrooms. In the following sections, we look at particular examples of flexible bilingualism as pedagogy in the context of complementary schools.

Translanguaging in complementary schools In the remainder of this chapter we will refer to examples from the Gujarati and Chinese schools. We start with an assembly in JBV, one of the Gujarati schools. Assemblies are held at the end of each Saturday morning session so that parents picking up their children can attend. Assemblies are always very well attended by parents. The teachers sit at the front and the side of a large hall. Children sit on the floor facing the front with younger children (aged 5) nearest the teachers and older children (aged 16 to 18) nearest the parents. Parents are at the back of the hall. Each week, one particular class and their teacher lead the assembly. It is also an opportunity for the head teacher to address the whole school: young people, teachers and parents. There are 200 children on the roll at the school and the assembly is a busy event, which requires teachers to move furniture to accommodate all participants. As she speaks to the assembly, the head teacher (SB) uses both Gujarati and English to speak to the audience (we also provide an English translation): Example 10.1 what’s going to happen here Jalaram Bal Vikasma? Holiday nathi awata Shaniware apne awanu chhe. we’re coming here awta shaniware [several Ss put up their hands] Amar? [picks on Amar to reply] Amare kidhu ne ke GCSE presentation chhe awanu chhe. I know that we’re finishing on Friday in mainstream school, pun aiya agal badhayne awanu chhe. I know, it’s a surprise. Khawanu etlu fine chhe, K warned me today it’s something all of you will like, teachers will like something for all of us. [points to the class sitting in front of her] a balko a varshe GCSE karwana chhe etle next year a badha awshe mehman thayne, mota thayne! we’re not going to take much time, because I’ve got few other things to tell you as well.

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{what’s going to happen here in JBV? It’s not a holiday, we’ve to come here next Saturday we’re coming here next Saturday . [several Ss put up their hands] Amar? [picks on Amar to reply] As Amar said, there’s GCSE presentation, you have to come. I know we’re finishing on Friday in mainstream school, but you all have to come here I know, it’s a surprise, lovely food, K [a parent] warned me today, it’s something all of you will like, teachers will like something for all of us [points to the class sitting in front of her] these children are doing GCSE this year so next year they will come as guests, all grown up! we’re not going to take up much time because I’ve got a few other things to tell you as well} (audio recording, Gujarati school)

If we look in detail at the head teacher’s speech, we are able to identify some of the bilingual strategies SB uses to engage her audience. We can identify which utterances are said in English and which are said in Gujarati. We do this not because we wish to argue that each language is delivering different functions, but rather to argue that in attempting to classify them into language groups, such classification becomes meaningless for the speaker: In English: what’s going to happen here Jalaram Bal Vikasma? Holiday we’re coming here GCSE presentation I know that we’re finishing on Friday in mainstream school I know, it’s a surprise warned me today . . . it’s something all of you will like, teachers will like . . . something for all of us . . . next year we’re not going to take much time, ‘cause I’ve got few other things to tell you as well . . .

In Gujarati: we’ve to come here next Saturday next Saturday . . . As Amar said, there’s but you all have to come here . . . lovely food, K something for all of us . . . these children are doing GCSE this year so they will come as guests, all grown up

Both languages are used simultaneously to convey the information about school openings and closings. That is, each language is used to convey a different informational message but it is in the bilingualism of the text that the full message is conveyed. As Lo´pez (2008) argues, both languages are ‘needed’ in connection to one another. The meaning of 207

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the message is not clear without both languages. Furthermore, it is in the movement between languages that SB engages with her diverse audience. The teachers, children and parents have different levels of proficiency in Gujarati and English. The head teacher’s ‘languages’ do not appear separate for her in this social act, but are rather a resource to negotiate meanings and include as many of the audience as possible. SB’s language indexes her knowledge of the social and linguistic complexity of the community she addresses. SB’s utterances are examples of translanguaging in which the speaker uses her languages in a pedagogic context to make meaning, transmit information and perform identities using the linguistic signs at her disposal to connect with her audience in community engagement. Gujarati and English are not distinct languages for the speaker in this context. SB does not confine signs to different languages, rather, her ‘heteroglossia’ constitutes language forms simultaneously. In another example from a different Gujarati class in another school, flexible bilingualism is used as an instructional strategy to engage students. The teacher (T) has set the class some pair-work and in Example 10.2, the students are clarifying the task with their teacher before going on to do the activity: Example 10.2 T: have discussion karie, ek ek topic apu chhu badhyane, tame sharema karo ok sssh topic apu chhu mari dincharya, daily routine, tame decide karo kon bolshe {now let’s discuss, I will give a topic each to all, you share them, I’m giving the topics, daily routine, you decide who speaks} S1: what does it mean? T: mari dincharya, daily routine . . . Medha ane Jaimini, mane shu thawu game {my daily routine . . . Medha and Jaimini, what I’d like to be} S2: what is it? T: bai jana decide (.) karo only five minute jeapu chhu je awde e bolwanu {both of you decide (.) giving you only five minutes say what you can} S1: Miss, basically shu karwanu discussion karya pachhi? {Miss, basically what do we have to do? after discussion, what?} T: bolwanu {speak} S2: shu bolwanu? {speak what?} T: je discuss karyu hoi {what you discussed} S3: oh [students chat] etle we discuss it and then decide what we gonna say miss ame ek bijanu kaie ke ek ek

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T:

S2: Ss: T: S1: S2:

S1:

S3: S1: S3: S1: T: S1:

{so we discuss it . . . miss, do we speak about each other or one by one} tame decide karo ke kone bolwu chhe {you decide who speaks} [T allocates more topics to pairs while Ss chat among themselves] [off task] seriously, yellow? [giggles] how do you know? you’re bad astethi bolwanu, discuss karwanu {speak softly, do the discussion} doesn’t ask you what I want to do mane doctor banwu chhe I don’t really want to be a doctor sorry I do want to be a doctor, actually I don’t mind being a doctor I want to be you know for the kiddie ones paediatrician karanke nana chhokra manda pade to sara karwani dawa apwi chhe. {I want to be a doctor . . . when little children are ill, I want to give them medicines to make them better . . .} your turn, what do you want to be? I want to be a watch seller [giggles] Medha and Co [laughs] hurry up then, I said mine, you say yours I don’t know what you wanna be hurry up, say yours listen then Medha, hurry up, man look behind you [laughs, calls Rupal] Medha turn around [laughs] hu moti thaine {when I grow up} mane shu chhe {what is it for me} shuddup Medha, you’re such a loser! OK, stop! mane ghadialni {I want to [have a shop for] watches . . .} Medha and Co company of many watches (classroom audio recording, Gujarati school)

In this example, both languages are used by teacher and students to establish and clarify the pedagogic task. The task requires the students to discuss topics such as daily routines and what they would like to be in the future. The phrase ‘mari dincharya, daily routine’ occurs twice early on in the extract as the teacher uses both languages to focus the students on one of the assigned topics. Both languages are also used to establish the procedural knowledge about the task with ‘discussion/ discuss’ and ‘decide’ repeated multiple times in English while the focus on the speaking skill is given in Gujarati. Both languages are used to understand what is expected from the task. The students too ask the teacher to clarify the task in both languages. Once the students are working in pairs, we see English is used to joke, tease and play around, as well as to proceed with the activity. While doing the pair-work, students use both Gujarati and English to describe what they want to do when they are older. It is the combination of both languages that keeps 209

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the task moving forward. We suggest that the teacher and students are finely tuned to the normative pattern of this classroom ecology – that is, they sense the limits of what is acceptable in terms of the use of one language in relation to the other. This is because the teacher is aware of her learners’ bilingualism – its range and limitation and the identities which make use of it. The students too are aware of their teacher’s expectations and identity ‘positionings’, which are played out through bilingualism. In the next example, from the same class, the teacher rather unusually requests that English be used by a student, while another student insists a peer uses Gujarati: Example 10.3 T: pachhi? {then?} S1: [no answer] T: OK, to Englishma boli nakh, chal bol {OK, speak in English, come on} S1: I wake up in the morning, then do my brush and I have bath, then I go to school T: ketla wage? {at what time?} S1: eight o’clock T: shema ja, chaline, gadima? {how do you get there, walking, in a car?} S1: I walk it T: huh? chaline {walking} S2: [interrupting] ude {he flies} T: tari najikma thay tari school gharthi? {is your school near your house?} S1: yah T: oh, pachhi? {then?} S1: I do my lesson Ss: [laugh] T: ketla wage tari nishal sharu thai? {when does your school start?} S1: eight forty T: ketla wage puri? {when does it finish?} S2: [interrupting] athne chalis ke ne {why don’t you say eight forty (in Gujarati)?} (classroom audio recording, Gujarati school)

The teacher is willing to accept the students’ English as long as the task is completed bilingually. At each turn, she returns to Gujarati or a combination of the languages. Rather unusually, we also see a student insist on Gujarati rather than English, and jokes in Gujarati himself (‘ude’). In fact as the lesson continues, despite S2’s insistence on the use of Gujarati, S1 continues to reply to the teacher in English. The interactional 210

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pattern of teacher-Gujarati and student-English is a common phenomenon in Gujarati complementary schools (Martin et al. 2006). It is an example of a linguistic ecology which participants seem to regard as balanced. This could be interpreted as a way to save face with regard to the different levels and proficiencies in the two languages. Certainly, we found that generally students’ English proficiency was greater than their community language proficiency. In contrast, we found that teachers’ community language proficiency was higher than their English. However, this is much more than a face-saving act to hide a lack of proficiency. Given the usual practice of bilingualism in these young people’s lives, the students come to expect a particular balance of the two languages in relation to one another in the language-learning classroom. The fact that this is a place for language-learning means that participants are tuned in to the linguistic ecology of the classroom and what is acceptable to teacher and students in maintaining a ‘healthy’ language distribution and balance. In the example we have just seen, one of the students feels that a fellow student has overstepped the mark in using too much English to answer their teacher’s questions. However, we also feel there is another element of the classroom ecology here which is about participant voice. The bilingual participants in the classroom are also using their bilingualism as a style resource (Androutsopoulos 2007) for identity performance to peers. Thus, participant bilingualism in the complementary school classroom shapes the language ecology and allows for a range of identity positions to be performed. A final point to note from these examples is the use of ‘heteroglossic’ terms such as ‘sharema’, and ‘Englishma’. These are common in this teacher’s discourse. In the same lesson, the teacher uses the following terms: ‘junglema’ {in the jungle}; ‘bookma’ {in the book}; ‘yearma’ {in the last year}; ‘schoole’ {to school} ‘daddyne’ {to daddy}. Rather than describing these as either Gujarati or English, or as English with a Gujarati suffix, we describe them as ‘heteroglossic’. They are usually coined by the teacher but taken up and used by the students too as an acceptable form. These ‘heteroglossic’ phrases appear to serve as a linguistic resource which the teacher uses to keep the task moving forward. They are also likely to reflect the linguistic practices of the teacher beyond the classroom and index other language ecologies. The next example comes from the Mandarin school in the Chinese case study. Here, we see the classroom participants negotiate an interaction bilingually, through ‘bilingual label quests’. Martin (2005:11) attributes the concept of ‘label quests’ to Heath (1986), and extends the definition to describe bilingual label quests in which the teacher elicits labels from the student, allowing for the teaching to be ‘accomplished bilingually’ (Martin 2006:11). Martin describes this as a common feature of bilingual classrooms 211

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(Martin 2003). In Example 10.4, a new vocabulary item is being taught, ‘panwang’, which means ‘to look forward to/long for’. In order to capture the ‘cloze’ nature of this teaching interaction, we do not provide a direct translation of ‘panwang’ until the teacher herself does so. Example 10.4 T: ㄀ಯϾ䆡˛{the fourth term?} ⳐᳯDŽ{panwang} ⳐᳯᗢМ䇈˛ {how do you say ‘panwang’?} ↨བ䇈ˈ៥Ӏ䛑ⳐᳯҔМ˛{for example, what do we ‘panwang’?} Ⳑᳯˈ{panwang.} expect, look forward to. write down the explanation beside the words, in case you forget it later. Ⳑᳯ{panwang} the fourth one, means look forward to ↨བ 䇈ˈ៥Ӏ䛑ⳐᳯҔМ˛{for example, what do we long for?} (classroom audio recording, Mandarin school)

The teacher introduces a key vocabulary item that will later appear in a dialogue which a pair of students reads to the class (see Example 7.3). The teacher repeats the new term ‘panwang’ four times, asking students to consider how it is said before giving a clue in Chinese that it is a verb – ↨བ䇈ˈ៥Ӏ䛑ⳐᳯҔМ˛ {for example, what do we ‘panwang’?} She then uses English to give the definition – ‘expect, look forward to’. The term is given in one language and explained in another language. The ‘translation’ performs a pedagogic strategy of accomplishing one task (new vocabulary teaching) before moving to the next (story-telling). There are many variations of bilingual label quests in complementary school classrooms. Sometimes the teacher makes the bilingual label quest and also self-answers; at other times, the teacher asks in one language and expects the students to provide the answer in the other language. In complementary schools, we see examples of bilingual quests from English to the community language and also from community language into English (for further examples, see Martin et al. (2006)). In another brief example, we see further bilingual label quests, this time in a different class in the Mandarin complementary school. Here students are checking their test scores, and the request is initiated by a student rather than the teacher. The vocabulary item is ‘㟾’ (pronounced ‘hang’), which in English means ‘to navigate’: Example 10.5 S: I’ve got, I’ve got one, ‘㟾’ {‘navigate’} I’ve got ‘㟾’ {‘navigate’} wrong I’ve got ‘㟾’ {‘navigate’} wrong T: [ᇍDŽ{that’s right.} S: [‘㟾’DŽ{‘navigate’} T: ‘㟾’ᄫ {the word ‘navigate’}ˈ᳝ⱘҎ‘㟾’ᄫ‫ݭ‬䫭њ{some of you had written the word ‘navigate’ incorrectly}?‘㟾’ᄫᗢМ‫{˛ݭ‬how do you write the word ‘navigate’?} (classroom audio recording, Mandarin school)

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As with the earlier transcripts, this is a bilingual classroom with young people bringing in their different voices in identity performance. The student isolates the Chinese term ‘㟾’ {‘navigate’}. The teacher picks up on this and as the lesson proceeds (we have not included the extended transcription here) uses the student’s concern with his incorrect answer to teach other vocabulary items from the text and focuses the students on their writing and literacy practices.

Flexible bilingual pedagogy In the complementary schools we see teachers and students constructing and participating in a flexible bilingual pedagogy in assemblies and classrooms. They adopt a translanguaging approach to pedagogy, which is used by participants for identity performance as well as the business of language learning and teaching. We have suggested that as participants engage in flexible bilingualism, the boundaries between languages become permeable. We have used the terms translanguaging (García 2007) and ‘heteroglossia’ (Bahktin 1984, 1986; Bailey 2007; García 2009) to describe language fluidity and movement. Here we are concerned with the process by which the linguistic practices of bilingual participants in complementary schools constitute ‘socially meaningful forms in both bilingual and monolingual talk’ (Bailey 2007:267). In other words, the bilingual teachers and young people in the complementary schools in this study use whatever signs and forms they have at their disposal to connect with one another, indexing disparate allegiances and knowledge and creating new ones. In these schools, we see how this is achieved pedagogically, and we argue that flexible bilingualism is used by teachers as an instructional strategy to make links for classroom participants between the social, cultural, community and linguistic domains of their lives. Pedagogy in these schools appears to emphasize the overlapping of languages rather than enforcing the separation of languages for learning and teaching. García (2009:8) argues that there is a pedagogic need for ‘practices firmly rooted in the multilingual and multimodal language and literacy practices of children in schools of the twenty-first century’. We acknowledge however, that within complementary schools ideologies often clash, with as many arguments articulated for separate bilingualism as for flexible bilingualism. In our observations in the complementary schools, we often saw examples of the requirement for two or more languages, the drawing across languages and the additional value and resource that bilingualism brings to identity performance, lesson accomplishment and participant confidence.

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Some of the specific knowledge and skills demonstrated by classroom participants in practising flexible bilingualism and flexible pedagogy are the following: use of bilingual label quests; repetition and translation across languages; ability to engage audiences through translanguaging and ‘heteroglossia’; student translanguaging to establish identity positions both oppositional to and complicit in institutional values; recognition that languages do not fit into clear bounded entities and that all languages are needed for meanings to be conveyed and negotiated. Furthermore, flexible bilingualism offered the following: endorsement of simultaneous literacies and languages to keep the pedagogic task moving; recognition that teachers and students skilfully use their languages for different functional goals such as narration and explanation; and use of translanguaging for annotating texts, providing greater access to the curriculum and lesson accomplishment. If we are to move beyond ‘squandering our bilingual resources’ (Cummins 2005: 585), and ease the burden of guilt associated with translanguaging in educational contexts, further research is needed on classroom language ecologies to show how and why pedagogic bilingual practices come to be legitimated and accepted by participants. An ecological perspective requires us to question the pedagogic validity (Arthur and Martin, 2006:197) of separate bilingualism. Like Lin and Martin (2005) we see the need for further research to explore what ‘teachable’ pedagogic resources are available in flexible, concurrent approaches to learning and teaching languages bilingually.

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Multilingualism: future trajectories

Any study of language ideologies and practices is situated in and subject to its social, cultural, political and historical context. Our investigation of multilingualism in four English cities is conducted at a time of increase in movement of people across borders, and rapid development of accessible forms of communication which take little or no account of territory. Both of these dimensions – the global movement of people and the development and availability of digital communication – are factors which play into our understandings of multilingualism in late modern societies. Linguistic practices move across time and space, changing as they go, taking with them old affiliations, at times shedding these affiliations and accruing new investments. In this process of movement and change, linguistic practices come to constitute a terrain for competition, a point of negotiation, a market-place where some practices are valued more highly than others and the value of certain practices changes in the new political economy. A further dimension of the context in which we investigated multilingualism in 2006 was the changing political world. Following the terrorist attacks on New York and London in 2001 and 2005 respectively, social and political arenas altered. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, more than ever before, the British government introduced Acts of Parliament that require immigrants and visitors to demonstrate their proficiency in English in order to gain access to certain economic, cultural and symbolic resources. Quite suddenly, proficiency in English came to represent national unity, British (or perhaps English) identity and social cohesion, while the use of languages other than English came to be regarded as (or to symbolize) a threat to the security of the state. Our account of the linguistic practices of multilingual students, teachers and families does not engage explicitly with these events, as our focus is on the local and interactional rather than on the bigger political world. Nor do we find that the students, teachers and families engage in oppositional arguments for ‘their’ languages versus English – in fact, if anything they argue strongly for the learning of community languages alongside English. For most of the students, English is their strongest and most often used linguistic resource. However, there can be no doubt 215

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that the very existence of and need for complementary schools responds to a drive towards linguistic unification which potentially constitutes an erasure of multilingual Britain. Our observations in Birmingham, Leicester, London and Manchester provide insights into the ways in which multilingualisms are emerging, changing and raising questions about heritage, the remembered nation and the transmission of languages which carry the weight of ‘culture’ and distant territories. Those who take responsibility for maintaining and transmitting their languages to the next generation invest in a multilingual future, but not necessarily a version of multilingualism which is always acceptable to their students. We have seen how the movement of language and languages across time and space often comes to have different meanings for the urban, urbane, young people who attend complementary school classes. These are classrooms where linguistic practices are haggled over and bartered for, in negotiations conducted in the ‘heteroglossic’ language of the young multilingual. Flexible verbal repertoires enable the students to negotiate subject positions which may at times be at odds with the discourses of the complementary schools, and also with the discourses of national (U.K.) politicians and media commentators who call for English to replace other languages. In touch with global popular culture, these are young people who habitually incorporate in their linguistic portfolio features of global capital such as Bollywood film, hip-hop, rap and bhangra music, together with the language of the latest DVD releases and new webbased resources. This is not to say that the students we met and listened to are always in opposition to the linguistic and ‘cultural’ resources on offer in their complementary schools. In fact at times they are very much involved in their learning, proud of their multilingualism and their heritage. What we often see is that the students engage in an activity planned by the teacher, accept it to some extent, then appropriate it and use it for their own purposes. They are both in and out of their learning, accepting and rejecting, engaged and subversive, having it both ways. They do not fully accept a version of multilingualism which is based on long-distance or out-of-place nationalisms or heritages, or one based on the separation of languages. Rather, they play with their rich linguistic assets, taking from their teachers what they need and using language on their own terms. Of course, every interaction is different, and sometimes these negotiations result in teachers having things their way instead. There is almost always a sense of ambiguity, or at the very least, a sense of students and teachers (and for that matter parents and friends) investing in language as authentic heritage, at the same time as re-making and reinventing it for the transnational setting in which they find themselves. This is where our ongoing debate lies: at the 216

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interstices of nation, heritage, global movement and new communication, and in short, at the interstices of space and time.

Language ideology and practice As we have seen, the complementary schools set out to teach the heritage of the home territory through folk stories, narrative accounts, cultural artefacts, festivals and performances, offering them to the next generation as commodities with which to inherit that which should, by rights, be theirs. The concept of the nation accrued particular salience in the schools. This was not, however, precisely the same phenomenon as the ideology of ‘one-language-equals-one-nation’. It was not the dominant culture represented by, and constructed in, the dominant language, nor was it the simple equation of language, culture, nation, territory and state. Rather, it was nationalism at a distance, an out-ofplace nationalism, a nationalism which clung to territorial and linguistic roots at least partly because the new environment was powerfully and determinedly nationalistic in its turn. It was nationalism at home in another place, and perhaps even another time. But for at least some of those we spent time with and listened to it was nonetheless a nationalism which was of central importance to their sense of themselves, and to their sense of who they wished their community of children and young people to be. For the students, however, language practices stretched across other dimensions of time and space. They introduced to the classroom and their peer talk voices borrowed from popular culture. These were voices from digital space and digital time, voices from the world of electronic media, The Simpsons, television game shows, global sport, computer gaming, film and popular music. In Example 11.1, two of the students in one of the Turkish schools, Metin and Barat, are discussing a computer game while the teacher is lecturing them about the achievements of the Turkish leader Kemal Atatürk (separately represented in Chapter 9 as Example 9.1): Example 11.1 Metin: RuneScape bizim oynadıg˘ ımız Runescape in membership i RuneScape one da geçerli {the membership of the RuneScape that we are playing is valid for Runescape 1} but the Runescape 1 membership isn’t allowed on RuneScape 2 membership. Neyse {whatever}. I’ll just do my work a bit. They seem to be doing some writing. I am a hacker Barat: who did you hack? Metin: should I hack up Atila? Barat: you are hacking all

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Metin: who should I hack? tell me who to hack. anyone you don’t like (classroom audio recording, Turkish school)

This typical example points to the students’ engagement with resources quite apart from those of the official discourse of the classroom. The students’ concern is with the digital world and negotiating selves that appear tuned in and clued up, and they are able to use their resources for profit. They activate their linguistic resources creatively to negotiate with each other and to assert their late modern identities. It is worth noting though that at the same time Metin negotiates his learner identity by saying ‘I’ll just do my work a bit’. The interaction continues as the two students barter over the cost of buying and selling a computer game: Example 11.2 Metin: higher, higher. 50 den as¸ag˘ i vermem {I wouldn’t give it for less than fifty} It has got too much money on it Barat: fifty-one pound Metin: OK. it has got too much money on its items. do you think I am gonna scam you or something? Barat: what? Metin: I will only give you if your parents let you. because I’m not like that Barat: what you mean if your parents let you? Metin: because your parent (.) say you wanna buy it yeah for fiftyone pound Barat: ( ) Metin: my friend did and he took money. shit stuff (2) the dickhead. he could have had dragon weapons (classroom audio recording, Turkish school)

The students draw on linguistic resources which are contemporary and cool, as they conduct their negotiations over the price of the game. Part of their repertoire is their flexibility in accessing resources simultaneously from Turkish and English. This is a language both local and global, a language in which to conduct business in a local and global economy. It may be no more than one young student selling a game to another young student, but it is clear that the kind of language used contributes directly to the economic exchange.

The political economy of linguistic resources The eight complementary schools in which we conducted detailed linguistic investigations sit at the very crux of a new and developing thinking

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about how linguistic resources are deployed in our late modern world. The ideologies and practices evident in the schools reveal that (i) there can no more be an assumed consensus about what constitutes (a) language, (ii) old boundaries and constraints are eroding, and (iii) certain sets of linguistic resources can no longer be held to straightforwardly represent particular ‘nations’, ‘heritages’ or ‘cultures’. Individuals access sets of linguistic resources which draw from multiple sources: family, schooling, peer group, the virtual and polyphonic world of digital communication. They use these resources flexibly, in ways which enable them to negotiate cosmopolitan, multicultural identities characterized by mobility and dynamism. This notion of multiplicity, resistance to the reification of identity and globalization is one side of the story. But another side of the story we observed and listened to in and around the eight complementary schools appeared to be in direct opposition to this. At the same time as traditional boundaries are becoming more permeable, and old constraints are being broken down, so we see boundaries being shored up and constraints reinforced. In the same moment as new diversities are emerging, so we see institutional moves to protect the purity of standard versions of languages, which for some of those in and around the schools represent ways of being and ways of belonging which will not easily be sacrificed or given up. What we see in these schools are grass-roots attempts by linguistic communities in England to teach the standard language of the home territory to the next generation, and in doing so to make Turkish again, make Gujarati again, make Chinese again, make Bengali again, those who are in danger (according to this ideological position) of losing that way of being. In this process of making and re-making, the standard language must be kept separate and protected from contamination. In this ideology, the language of the home territory comes to accrue associations beyond itself : of moral values, respect, heritage, nation and culture. The language bears the burden of all this, bowed with hope and expectation as it migrates across time and space. Just about everything we saw in these eight schools was in one way or another at the interstices of these two ideological positions: one characterized by ‘heteroglossic’, flexible linguistic production, which indexed multicultural cosmopolitanism, the other rooted in linguistic affiliation to national and cultural heritage. However, these positions were not always oppositional, often coexisting in dynamic equilibrium and elbowing each other for space in the crowded linguistic economy. A further dimension of what we have seen and what we have heard is the way in which access to linguistic resources is determined in the wider political economy. These are questions about which sets of

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linguistic resources come to have what value, and about who has the power to sanction or proscribe their public use and visibility. Which linguistic practices are authorized, by whom, and why? What is the role of the state in this process of authorization? What is the role of other institutions at local, national and international levels? The answers to these questions play into our understandings of the linguistic practices and ideologies of stakeholders in the complementary schools. Discourses which privilege the use and visibility of English in opposition to minority languages have become commonplace, and commonsense, in the public arena in the United Kingdom. Prescribed ‘levels’ of proficiency in English must be achieved if some people are to access certain resources, in an argument which presupposes a consensus about what constitutes ‘English’ and assumes that a failure to demonstrate certain proficiency will threaten the cohesion, unity and security of the nation. But the other sets of linguistic resources which make up the political economy of multilingual United Kingdom are also differentially valued. Cantonese and Mandarin were spoken of by teachers and students alike as languages with economic value, and as languages which would open up opportunities on the global market. These were ‘commodified’ languages, offering social mobility and new possibilities in the future as China increases in economic power. In contrast, the value of Bengali, for example, was spoken of mainly in symbolic terms. Although at times the students in Bengali schools spoke of being able to talk to grandparents and cousins when visiting Bangladesh, most of those we listened to spoke of learning the language because ‘we are Bengali’. Despite the very considerable numbers of speakers of Bengali globally, the differential in apparent and potential economic status of Bengali compared to Mandarin and Cantonese lies in the different economic conditions, and supposed future conditions, of Bangladesh and China. It is also relevant that there are socioeconomic differences between the families of the students who attend the different schools. For example, on the whole the students at the Mandarin school were from more affluent family backgrounds than the Bengali students. In addition, we hear passionately–held contradictory views from those who daily access some of these linguistic resources. One example we came across was concerned with the relation between ‘Sylheti’ and ‘Bengali’. In the debate about which of these is a language, and which a dialect, and in the assumption from some that speakers of one set of resources are inherently superior to speakers of another set of resources, we come up against the hard edge of the political economy of linguistic resources. We hear from teachers that some parents of their students lack cultural and linguistic capital:

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Example 11.3 our Sylheti people, they don’t have any education at all, even some people they can’t speak Sylheti properly as well (teacher interview, Bengali school)

Whilst some of those at the sharp end of this discourse are able to make fun with such notions, it is nonetheless an example of how the study of linguistic variability can be sensitive to and reveal social change. Although the traditional ways of looking at language ideologies and practices still obtain, our usual perspective is a little rocked by such findings. It is certainly true that the dominant majority group discriminates against speakers of minority languages in England. But in the transnational world, this is not all. Other linguistic prejudices and discriminations are at large, and of course not only in the diasporic Bangladeshi-heritage community. Here we are challenged to look beyond the relations of power we have traditionally viewed, to a more complex world where myriad categories, boundaries and values are constructed and reinforced at the same time as, and often in the same space as, others are being torn down.

Language in a time of transition What are we left with when we can see change occurring before our very eyes – when we can see the old constraints interacting dynamically with new possibilities? What does the study of multilingualism mean when linguistic practice is increasingly diverse? First, the study of language in use is never separate from the study of society. The construction of difference through the relative permeability of linguistic boundaries challenges our expectations about how sociolinguistics connects to social theory. Linguistic variability is rapidly changing, as the meanings of linguistic features change for their users. At the same time, the demand for separation of languages is often associated with a need to drop anchor and hold on to what is known and to what is owned. Second, the study of language is inevitably the study of power, as we come to understand in increasingly nuanced ways how access to linguistic resources is associated with access to economic and cultural resources. Those who control the circulation of linguistic resources also often control other forms of capital. For this reason, the study of language often gives us a window into the exercise of power. Third, it is in the study of voice and voices that we are able to bring into close-up the subtle and nuanced ways in which negotiations occur in language. In this book, we have seen many occasions on which young people, their teachers and their parents, have negotiated a path through rough

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ideological terrain by gaining access to and making creative use of particular linguistic resources. These resources and negotiations were not equally accessible to all, or accessible at all times or in all spaces, but it was in the complex, myriad voices of the students, families and teachers that we have come to understand something of ideologies and practices at work. And fourth, there is a pressing need for further research into and development of pedagogy for bilingual education which is ‘adaptive, able to expand and contract, as the communicative situations shift and as the terrain changes’ (García 2009:8). In this book, we have seen something of the changing communicative situation and the changing linguistic terrain. We listened to the voices of school administrators, principals, teachers, canteen assistants, instructors, students, siblings, parents, visitors and others who came into contact with our audio and video recorders, and with our research team’s sharp-eyed observations. But these were not the only voices we heard. Every utterance bore the tastes and traces of other utterances across space and time. Every word we heard in the discourse of teachers, responses of their students, fragmented interactions occurring in the seams and cracks of classroom routines, alternative economies that young people developed in opposition to the official worlds of their lessons, and the borderlands of students travelling to and from school and their family homes – everywhere we saw that ‘each word tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life’ (Bakhtin 1981:293). In all of these contexts, language lay ‘on the borderline between oneself and the other . . . it becomes one’s own only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention’ (ibid.). Frequently we heard voices which bore the traces of other voices, voices appropriated and reiterated in new contexts so that they accrued new resonances, and voices creatively imbued with the colours and textures of other voices. Not that this population of voices within voices was a straightforward process, or one which could always be easily identified. Such is the delicacy of the gossamer threads caught up when histories brush up against histories, and worlds against worlds, that even close forensic analysis may not easily discover them. Nor is the appropriation and assimilation of the traces of other voices necessarily a conscious act, or one with specific intentions. More often, voices are populated with fragments of other voices, accents and intonations in a critical interanimation of language, which ‘discovers itself already surrounded by heteroglossia’ (Bakhtin 1981:295). It is in just such ‘heteroglossic’ talk that we are able to engage with the tensions and contradictions which

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coexist at the heart of the linguistic practices we have heard, and the identity positions which they constitute. In ‘heteroglossic’ talk is a tension between an institutional ideology which holds that languages should be kept separate in the languagelearning classroom, and in the same time and space also practises a flexible use of linguistic resources to make that learning happen; a tension between the teaching of ‘culture’ as a national, territorial entity and the lived experience of culture as local identities and practice. In ‘heteroglossic’ talk is the dynamic coexistence of students’ positioning as both complicit in and resistant to institutionally imposed identities and students’ simultaneously serious and ‘carnivalesque’ participation in classroom lessons. In ‘heteroglossic’ language we understand (at least) ‘two voices, two meanings, and two expressions’ (Bakhtin 1981:324). The comic, ‘carnivalesque’ language of students in classroom interaction, parodic talk of students and teachers who mock the talk of others, appropriation and exaggeration of literary style in a domestic setting, incorporation into classroom discourse of voices from popular culture, playful creativity of translanguaging talk, appropriation and simultaneous contestation of ‘cultural heritage’ artefacts such as traditional folk tales, wedding-dances, Mother’s Day celebrations and nation-building narratives – all of these and more are discourses in which dialogue is embedded, ‘a concentrated dialogue of two voices, two world views, two languages’ (Bakhtin 1981:325). They are discourses which become sites of negotiation, holding in tension beliefs, values and attitudes that often clash and collide, but which at the same time co-exist and correspond. This is where the creative struggle with another’s discourse resides and plays out – in the internally persuasive word, which is at the same time complicit and resistant. A clash with another’s word may become a clash with one’s own word, as the struggle goes on and is never completed. Within the arena of almost every utterance we encounter in and out of the eight complementary schools there is an intense interaction between identities imposed institutionally and students’ own subject positioning. This is typically an utterance which is a ‘considerably more complex and dynamic organism than it appears when construed simply as a thing that articulates the intention of the person uttering it’ (Bakhtin 1981:355). In the complementary schools in Birmingham, Leicester, London and Manchester we see multilingual young people and their linguistic practices at a particular moment in time and space, as complementary schools emerge as economies where linguistic resources become commodities to be bartered for and bargained over in the new linguistic market-place.

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Ideology, practice, and the new multilingualism Doing ethnographic research allows us to tell a story – not someone else’s story, but our own story of some slice of experience (Heller 2008:250). In one sense, our story is no more than a slice of experience: we open doors which are not often opened by outsiders, and we look in at whatever we can see, and eavesdrop on whatever we can hear, and make our story out of the ‘lived stuff’ (Rampton 2006:394) of others. But at the same time, what we see and hear is more than just a slice of experience. Adopting a theoretical and analytical perspective which combines the ethnographic with the linguistic, and which engages the dialogic thought of Bakhtin, we are able to tell a story which connects a cacophony of linguistic practice with histories and territories, traditions and heritages, with pedagogies and ideologies and the changing worlds of digital communication and globalization. That is, although when we open those doors we might only see and hear that which is before us, our analytical gaze takes us beyond the immediate, to other times and other spaces. Those other times and spaces include the tangible pasts of narrated events in the making of nations, exemplified by stories of martyrdoms, liberation struggles and heroic deeds. They also include artefacts associated with the construction of the ‘home’ territory: traditional folk tales, festivals, food and flags. They include histories of migration and, at times, multiple migrations. And, most importantly, they include local time and space, as young people live out their lives in the complex cosmopolitan worlds of their cities. In these cosmopolitan worlds new multilingualisms emerge, as young people use a vast array of linguistic resources which constantly change and develop, and which derive their linguistic features from a wide range of sources, including those associated with religious texts, the ‘homeland’ national heritage, a wide range of popular cultural forms, coarse, vernacular insults, academic English, non-standard English and many more. These complex linguistic repertoires bear the traces of past times and present times, lives lived locally and globally. These are the voices of young people whose ‘communities’ – their teachers and parents – want them to experience and to learn something of a ‘culture’, a ‘heritage’, a nation or territory, which now lies at a distance. Our story is inevitably only partially told. It is the story of the elderly Bangladeshi man in Birmingham relating with great passion in Sylheti and English his memory of being present at the ‘language martyrs’ incident in Dhaka in 1952, before proudly showing us his display of photographs of his children graduating from English universities. It is the story of the ten-year-old girl keenly competing with her peers to demonstrate her Bengali learning, while in the next moment arguing with her teacher 224

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Multilingualism: future trajectories

that she claims the right to prefer to speak English. It is the story of the student in a Turkish school in London participating in a Mother’s Day celebration by performing a traditional song and dance, while playing to the gallery of his peers to mock and usurp these very traditions. It is the story of the head teacher in a Gujarati school in Leicester using linguistic resources flexibly to address a diverse audience as she constructs a safe institutional space for multilingualism. It is the story of the student in a Mandarin school in Manchester who argues in English and Mandarin that he is proud to be Chinese, and that the Chinese language is very beautiful, but that there are times when he feels more English. It is a story of aspirations and hopes, laughter and ridicule, ritual and tradition, bawdiness and politeness, achievement and frustration and perhaps most of all a story which sits at a particular moment in time and space, at an intersection where new and established traditions connect and disconnect, where voices brush up against each other and change, where boundaries are at once erected and pulled apart. It is a story of linguistic resources evolving in practice as they come to accrue new values, affiliations and allegiances. It is a story of language in flexible use and up for grabs, language traded, exchanged, bartered, wrangled over and negotiated. It is a story of language ideology and practice changing as it moves across time and space.

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References

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Index

academic literacy 20, 156 action research 82, 83 Adam, B. 72, 73 affiliation 4, 23, 24, 30, 49, 54, 100, 181, 198, 199, 200, 201, 215, 219, 225 African languages 34, 48 Ahmad, Y. 165 Alexander, C. 186 ancestry 182 Anderson, B. 182–5, 190 Anderson, J. 201, 204 Androutsopoulos, J. 31, 211 anthropological linguistics 79, 81 anthropology 61, 62, 63, 68, 99, 70, 80, 81 appropriation 17, 133, 138, 166, 222, 223 Arabic 1, 32, 33, 34, 38, 51, 190 artful performance 120, 126 Arthur, J. 204, 206, 214 Ashworth, G. J. 165 Assamese 30 assemblies 11, 23, 75, 206, 213 assimilation 26, 184 assumed identities 37 Atkinson, D. 71 audio-recording 77, 140 August, D. 43 Australia 47, 51, 54 authentic heritage 206 autobiography 60, 67 Bailey, B. 19, 65, 66, 108, 124, 204, 213 Baker, C. 19, 28, 42, 43, 45, 108

Bakhtin, M. M. 18, 20, 31, 35, 36, 65–7, 108, 120, 124–8, 136, 138–43, 172, 197, 199, 200, 222–4 Bakhtinian 124, 125, 139 Baldauf, R. 54 banal nationalism 184, 199 Bannink, A. 153 Baraç, T. 11, 83, 114 Barker, J. C. 84 Bartlett, L. 149 Basch, L. 146 Beaumont, M. 82 Bengali 1, 2, 12, 22, 32, 33, 36, 96, 111, 167, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 178, 188, 189, 193, 194, 198 Bhabha, H. 181 Bhangra 197, 198, 216 Bhatt, A. 11, 83, 89, 92 Bhosle, Asha 36 bilingual education 9, 42, 45, 52, 110, 202, 204, 222 bilingual label quests 211, 212, 214 bilingual pedagogy 23, 201, 204, 205, 213 bilingual teachers 47 bilingual teaching strategies 45 bilingualism with diglossia 19, 28 biliteracy practices 52, 150, 159, 163, 204 Billig, M. 7, 61, 141, 184, 185, 192, 196, 197, 199 Birmingham 1, 12, 21, 95, 167 Birmingham Bangladeshi Centre 12 Blackledge, A. 5, 7, 26, 28, 37, 49, 50, 70, 83, 95, 125, 145, 173, 181, 183, 200 Blommaert, J. 26, 59, 61, 64, 67–72 Bloome, D. 161

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Blunkett, David 7 Bollywood 36, 216 Bolognani, M. 185 Borland, H. 51, 52 Borooah, V. K. 185 Bourdieu, P. 8, 9, 26, 27, 29, 41, 67, 164, 165, 166, 171, 177, 179 Bourne, J. 49, 51 Brandt, D. 146, 162 Branson, J. 35 Brinton, D. 147 Britain 185, 192, 216 British identity 5, 9, 50, 58 British values 8 Brutt-Griffler, J. 47 Busch, B. 44 Byram, M. S. 147 Cable, C. 45 Caldas-Coulthard, C. R. 127 California 41 Cameron, David 9 Canada 42, 47 Cantonese 4, 11, 13, 18, 93–5, 109, 112, 115–20, 129–31, 133–4, 136, 142, 143, 198, 205, 212, 220 carnival laughter 115 carnivalesque 20, 108, 120, 126–8, 134, 139–43, 223 case studies 11, 19, 21, 74–5, 82–3, 89, 92, 97, 105, 112–13, 120 Castles, S. 181, 183 Chen, Y. 45 Cicourel, A. 77 citizenship 8, 26, 58, 184–6, 193 classrooms 11, 19–21, 23, 35, 44–6, 63, 73, 75, 82, 92, 100, 110, 113–16, 131, 139–40, 142, 147, 150, 153, 157, 194, 201–3, 206 Clegg, Nick 9 Clinton, K. 146, 162 Clyne, M. 51, 54 code-switching 28, 31–2, 43, 56, 65–6, 99, 120, 122, 159, 203–5 collaborative research 61, 82–5, 102, 106–7

collective memory 22, 140, 162, 178, 186, 189–90, 200 Collier, V. 43 commodification 72, 220 common-sense 7, 10, 26, 44, 70, 201 Communicative Language Teaching 110 community 1, 4, 10, 12–13, 26, 29, 32, 39, 49–52, 59–60, 64–5, 73–4, 87, 89–92, 97–8, 109, 112, 147–9, 156, 161–2, 165–6, 184, 201, 208, 217 community language 3, 22, 45–51, 54, 65, 83, 95, 109, 112–14, 122, 201 community language school 3, 47, 50 Community Languages Australia 51 complementary schools 1, 3–4, 11, 13, 16–25, 33, 35, 41, 47–50, 52–3, 56, 59, 64–7, 72–5, 77, 79, 80, 83–4, 88–91, 93, 95–7, 108–24, 129, 145–50, 161–4, 198–200, 213 concurrent approaches 205, 214 Connell, J. 185 Conservative Party 9, 141, 198 contamination 55, 110, 169, 171, 177, 179, 219 Conteh, J. 46, 47, 83, 145 context 10, 16, 18, 26–8, 31, 33, 44, 47, 49, 59–64, 68–9, 73–4, 86, 92, 113, 120, 127, 129, 131, 143, 146, 156, 183 continua of biliteracy 204–5 Cooke, S. 46 Cope, B. 71 Cortazzi, M. 147 cosmopolitanism 24, 219 Coulthard, M. 116 Cox, J. 185 Crawford, J. 5 Creese, A. 1, 11, 19, 23, 47, 48, 49, 62, 79, 83, 84, 89, 101, 105, 109, 131, 145, 147, 154, 163, 177, 178, 201, 202 critical perspective 4–5, 10, 58, 69 cultural artefact 148–50 cultural awareness 12

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cultural capital 105 cultural gap 179 cultural knowledge 13, 84, 96–7, 122 cultural narrative 20, 109 culture 8, 20–2, 28, 48–54, 60, 62, 64–5, 68–73, 87, 108–12, 147–50, 164, 181–4, 216–19 Cummins, J. 9, 23, 42–5, 53, 201–5, 214 Curdt-Christiansen, X. L. 54, 147, 149, 150, 162 curses 127–8, 136–7, 139, 142 dance 13, 15, 46, 133, 137–9, 141, 223, 225 Darbel, A. 166, 171 Davidson, A. P. 147 Day, E. M. 127, 131, 142 democracy 5, 182 Denos, C. 82 Department of Education and Science 48 dialect 26, 41, 170, 220 dialogic discourse 124, 199 dialogic process 20, 124, 139, 143 diaspora 185, 199, 201 digital communication 25, 215, 219, 224 Dillon, K. 53 Dirlik, A. 185, 199 disciplinary laughter 197 disinvention of languages 31 diversity 27, 31, 45, 49, 62, 66, 112, 165 Dostoevsky 125 double monolingualism 17, 19, 110 double-voiced discourse 131, 136, 197, 200 Duchêne, A. 28 Duff, P. 53 East London Turkish School 15 ecological description 78 ecological micro systems 202 ecological validity 77–8 Economic and Social Research Council 11, 91

Edelsky, C. 73 education policy 9–10, 48 Edwards, V. 43, 45 Eisenhart, M. 59, 60, 61, 70, 72, 81, 85, 106, 107 Ekushey February 189 e-mail 151, 160–2 Emerson, R. 80 English as a second language 110 English as an additional language 9, 45 English-only 10, 17, 45 Erickson, F. 59, 62, 63, 65, 79, 80, 84 Essed, P. 185 ethnic schools 47, 51 ethnicity 84, 88–9, 111, 182–4, 198 ethnies 182 ethnography 59–70, 81–2, 84, 106, 230 ethnography of communication 62, 63, 69 ethnography of multilingualism 18, 58, 59, 61, 63, 65, 67, 69, 71, 73, 79, 81 ethnography of speaking 62 ethnolinguistic identity 27 ethno-symbolism 183 evaluation 69 everyday nationalism 184 Faltis, C. 110, 202 Farsi 34 faux American 154 Fenton, S. 183, 184, 185, 199 Fernandez, S. 51, 54 festivities 126–8, 156 fictive unity 199 field notes 76–7, 79–80, 83–4, 99, 110, 187 financial burden 5 Fishman, J. 19, 28, 70, 108 flexible bilingualism 19, 23, 44, 108–9, 113–16, 122, 206, 208, 213–14 folk dance club 15 folk tales 21, 223, 224 Francis, B. 3, 49, 50

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francophone 27 Freebody, P. 146 Freeland, J. 26 Freeman Field, R. 41 Freeman, R. 53 French 27, 42, 46, 182 freshie 131, 174, 175 Gal, S. 27, 28, 171 García, O. 19, 23, 29, 32, 42, 43, 44, 47, 52, 66, 108, 110, 122, 204, 213, 222 Gard’ner, J. M. 189 gatekeeping 26 GCSE 12–15, 206–7 Gee, J. P. 146, 147 Geertz, C. 60 Gellner, E. 182 Genesee, F. 43 genre 119, 120, 133–4, 140, 149, 154, 158, 162 German 27 Giddens, A. 29, 150 global literacies 146 global youth culture 28 globalization 184, 219, 224 Goffman, E. 63, 150 Goodenough, W. H. 71 grass-roots movement 4, 56 Gravelle, M. 29 Gregory, E. 145 grotesque realism 120, 128, 142–3 Gujarati 11, 14–15, 23, 36, 83, 89, 91, 112–15, 193, 198, 206–11 Gumperz, J. 29, 62 Hafiz-e-Qur’an 33 Haglund, C. 186, 200 Hall, K. A. 11, 147 Hamid, S. 1, 11, 83, 95, 97, 170 Hammersley, M. 234 Hanson, S. 87, 105 Harris, R. 30, 177 Harvey, D. 166 Hawkins, M. 82 He, A. 54 Heath, S. B. 150, 211

hegemony 6–7, 20, 55, 72, 78, 109, 181, 199 Heller, M. 35, 58, 59, 108–10, 124, 166, 177, 198, 224 heritage 20–2, 24, 26, 72, 112–13, 138–45, 161, 163, 164–7, 169, 173, 178–80, 192, 198, 216 heritage language 31, 41, 43, 45, 47–8, 50–6, 72, 139, 198 heritage language schools 3, 47, 54, 149 Hess-Lüttich, E. 31 heteroglossia 18, 19, 31–2, 35, 45, 64–6, 76, 108, 109, 122, 126, 208, 213 Hindi 35, 36, 176 Hinduism 14–15, 176 hip-hop 216 history 22, 27, 36, 48, 102, 109, 164–5, 178–80, 187 Hobsbawm, E. 7, 182–4 Holland, D. 149 Holliday, A. 71 Home Office, The 6, 8 Home Secretary 7 homework club 1, 12, 15 homogeneity 3, 7, 17, 27, 28, 47 homogenization 4, 52, 78 Hong Kong 13, 50, 125, 203 Hornberger, N. 6, 27, 42, 47, 48, 52, 53, 150, 166, 202, 204, 205, 226 Howard, P. 165, 178 Hull, G. 146 humour 120, 139, 141, 197 HX Mandarin School 13 hybridity 73, 181 Hymes, D. 59, 62, 63, 69, 149 Icknield Street School 12 Iddings A. 127 identities 3, 4, 10, 16–18, 21, 22, 26–8, 30–1, 36–8, 53, 58–9, 62, 84, 86, 88, 113, 122, 141, 143, 148, 151, 163, 166, 179, 180, 182, 197 identity performance 23, 108, 201, 213 ideological becoming 20, 124, 128, 129

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ideology 5, 16, 17, 27, 29, 45, 109 imagined communities 184, 186 immigration 5, 8, 9, 26, 28, 185 implementational spaces 6, 52 imposed identities 47, 223 indexicality 18, 64 India 14, 36, 40, 167, 170, 175–6 Indian Education Society Leicester 14, 24, 91 Initiation-Response-Feedback 116, 152–3, 159 intangible heritage 165 integration 9, 26, 43 interactional frames 114 interactional sociolinguistics 62 intercultural understanding 53 interdisciplinarity 66, 69, 81 interdiscursivity 125 internally persuasive discourse 128 internet 60, 181 intertextuality 124, 125 interviews 21, 22, 74, 75, 88, 133, 145, 164, 174, 181, 186, 192 invention of tradition 184 Irvine, J. and Gal, S. 171 Islam 134, 140, 190 Jacobson, R. 110, 202 Jaffe, A. 112, 202 Jalaram Bal Vikas School 14, 91, 206, 207 Jaspers, J. 78 Jin, L. 147, 168, 184, 191 Joseph, J. 7, 8, 35 Kagan, O. 53 Kalantzis, M. 71 Kenner, C. 50, 145, 205 Khan, Amir 36 Khun Engs, K.-P. 171 Kijima, Y. 171 Kipp, S. 51 Kramsch, C. 147, 202 label quests 211, 212 language acquisition 28 language affiliation 30

language beliefs 17, 19 language choice 36, 65, 89, 99, 105, 202 language diversity 9, 46 language ecology 23, 202, 211 language expertise 30, 53, 60, 68, 82, 90, 100, 101, 115, 155, 201 language ideology 18, 27, 28, 178, 217 language inheritance 30, 165, 166 language loss 45, 53, 122, 184 language maintenance 51, 52, 53, 55 language planning 26 language purity 174, 178, 219 language separation 114, 203 language shift 52, 112 language testing 8, 26 late modernity 2, 61, 125, 164 laughter 125, 127–8, 138, 141–3, 159, 196, 200 learning 22–3, 42–53, 113, 139, 167, 193, 214, 215, 238 legend 152, 156–9, 162 Lemke, J. 35, 125 Leung, C. 45 Li Wei 11, 48, 50, 83, 94 Liberal Democratic Party 9 Lin, A. M. Y. 125, 138, 143, 203–5, 214 Lindholm-Leary, K. 202 linguicism 131, 132, 140 linguistic complementarity 28 linguistic domination 26 linguistic ethnography 61–3, 66–9, 81 linguistic market 26 linguistic play 154 linguistic practices 3–6, 16–19, 21, 24–5, 56–8, 65, 72, 107–8, 124–6, 193, 220, 223 linguistic repertoire 4, 10, 19, 25, 27, 49, 89, 116, 177 Lipe, W. 166 literacy 21, 26, 40, 44, 52, 106, 111, 116, 145–8, 150, 155, 159–60, 163 literacy practices 21, 42, 116, 145–7, 213 Lo Bianco, J. 50 local knowledge 30, 167, 169

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London 11, 13, 15, 16, 50, 91, 99, 129, 135, 186–7, 215 Long View School 12 long-distance nationalism 22, 185 Lucy, J. 69 Luk, J. C. M. 125, 134, 137, 138, 143, 146 Luke, A. 146 Lytra, V. 11, 83, 100, 114 López, L. E. 114 Maguire, M. 54 mainstream 3, 10, 11, 13, 15, 16, 20, 25, 48, 51, 109, 122, 147, 177, 198 Makoni, S. 29–32, 34, 47, 184 management studies 63 Manchester 11, 13, 14, 95, 119, 129, 144, 150, 152, 223 Mandarin 4, 11, 13, 18, 93–5, 105, 144, 148, 150, 158–61, 198, 211, 220 maps of consciousness 86 market-place 126, 128, 129, 136, 142, 115 Mar-Molinero, C. 26 martial arts 13 Martin Rojo, L. 7, 32 Martin, D. 84, 87 Martin, P. 3, 11, 19, 23, 47, 48, 49, 84, 87, 109, 147, 174, 177, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 211, 212, 214 Martin-Jones, M. 45 martyrdom 183, 190, 198, 224 Maryns, K. 26 May, S. 27, 28, 30, 40, 42, 43, 52, 177, 183, 184, 199 Maybin, J. 64, 67, 68, 77, 78, 124, 125, 126, 131, 154, 163 McCafferty, S. 127 McCarty, T. 43, 44 McCorkel, J. A. 84, 86–8 McGinnis, S. 54, 55 meaning-making 31, 64, 107, 114, 124, 129, 139, 143 meconnaissance 8 media 5, 6, 8, 11, 26, 49, 53, 60, 61, 119, 131, 134, 229

Mehan, H. 116 Melbourne 51 metalanguage 3 microphone 1, 75, 77, 129, 132, 150 Miller, D. 35 mimicry 120, 127, 196 minority languages 4–6, 8–10, 27, 45, 48–50, 56, 177, 203, 220 Mirza, H. S. 3 misrecognition 8, 9, 22, 199 Mitteness, L. S. 84 mock-EAL 141 mockery 20, 128, 138 modern foreign languages 110, 147 modernism 68 monoglossic ideology 66, 204 monolingual ideology 27, 48, 56 monolingualising tendencies 27 monolingualism 6, 7, 28, 42, 55, 59, 108, 113 Montreal 54 Mori, J. 67, 142, 165, 166, 176, 182, 183, 198, 199 mother land 193 mother language 188, 193 Mother’s Day 135, 136, 138–9, 149, 223, 225 Moyer, M. 7, 32 Mullings, B. 85–7 multiculturalism 5, 8, 9, 49, 51, 53 multilingual literacies 145–7 multilingual repertoires 57 multimodality 44, 76, 145, 213, 235 Muslim 1 myth 7, 157, 158, 182, 183, 190, 199, 200, 228 narratives 20, 61, 84, 85, 109, 149, 186, 190, 194, 198, 223 nation state 7, 24–8, 50, 70, 181, 183–5, 189 national anthem 111, 112, 167–8, 178, 189, 190, 195 National Curriculum 12, 46 national identity 22, 26–8, 44, 70, 111, 141, 145, 181, 182, 192–3, 195, 200

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National Languages Strategy 46 national security 50, 58 national symbol 22, 23, 168, 190, 192, 194, 195, 197, 200 nationalism 7, 22, 23, 146, 178, 180–6, 190, 192, 199, 216–17 negotiation 4, 6, 19, 21, 23, 28, 37, 41, 49–50, 58, 83, 91, 102, 104, 140–2, 182, 185, 216, 218, 223 negotiation of identities 37, 166, 178 Nicholls, C. 31 No Child Left Behind 52 Norton Peirce, B. 53 Norton, B. 37, 53 NW Cantonese School 13 O’Brien, T. 82 oaths 127, 128, 136, 137, 139, 142, 192 Ochs, E. 62 Office for Standards in Education 46 official language 9, 26, 40, 41, 203, 204 Ontario 27 orthography 105, 157 out-of-place nationalism 216 Ozkirimli, U. 182 parents 4, 10–14, 16, 21, 23, 48, 56, 74, 94–100, 102, 112, 113, 152, 160, 167, 170–2, 177–9, 192–3, 200, 206, 218, 220 Parodi, C. 41 parody 20, 25, 119, 126, 127, 128, 131, 134, 138–41, 153, 172, 196 Passeron, C. 164, 165 Patrick, D. 26, 165, 170 Pavlenko, A. 37, 75, 76, 167, 173, 200 Pearson, M. 165 Peckham, R. S. 165 pedagogy 4, 23, 143, 147, 148, 167, 199, 201–6, 213, 214 Peirce, C. 64, 70 Pennington, M. 134 Pennycook, A. 29–32, 127, 131, 140, 184 Philips S. 8, 9 photographs 11, 76, 96

plural gaze 79, 84 pluriliteracies 43 political economy of language 125 politician 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 44, 181 politics 6, 10, 18, 73, 82, 84, 87 polyphonic 219 posh Bengali 2, 172 positionality 84, 86, 87, 89, 103, 107 post-structuralism 61, 68, 81 power relations 9, 173, 183 Pratt, G. 87, 105 prayer 15 preachers 8 presupposition 62 primary school 15, 47, 95, 170 primordialism 80, 127, 182 Pritchard Newcombe, L. 43 probationary citizenship 8 Pujolar, J. 7, 26, 70, 170, 181, 185 Qur’an 33, 34 Qur’anic Arabic 1, 33, 34 Rabelais 125, 126, 127 racialization 184, 185 Ramazanoglu, C. 84 Ramírez, J. 43 Rampton, B. 7, 18, 28, 30, 31, 48, 62, 63, 64, 67, 68, 69, 73, 77, 78, 79, 120, 122, 125, 140, 142, 153, 164 Rassool, N. 48, 49 Reay, D. 3 rebellious humour 141 recontextualization 125, 127, 128, 140, 142 referentiality 64 religion 15, 183, 188 reproduction 5, 21, 22, 29, 59, 140, 164, 166, 182, 184, 185, 206 researcher identity 88–103 resistance 27, 133, 134, 147, 161, 172, 219 Ricento, T. 56 Richardson Bruna, K. 146, 147, 151 ridicule 136, 159, 196, 225 Roberts, C. 62, 78, 79

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Robertson, L. H. 205 Romero, M. 87 Rosaldo, R. 86 Rose, G. 85 safe spaces 48, 52, 177 Sánchez, P. 149 Sapir, E. 68–70, 72 Saxena, M. 45 Schultz, K. 146 scheduled caste 170, 171 Schick, J. 44 Scollon, R. 71, 72, 86 Scollon, S. W. 72, 86 Scots Gaelic 8 second lives 20, 142, 143 Setati, M. 203 Shaffir, W. B. 88 Shanahan, T. 43 Shin, S. J. 203, 243 Shohamy, E. 7, 44 Silverstein, M. 18, 59, 64, 68 Sinclair, J. M. 116 situated interaction 63 situated practice 10 Smith, A. 182, 183, 199 Smith, L. 140, 165, 166 SMS 56 Sneddon, R. 46, 47, 145, 205 social class 3, 20, 107, 109 social cohesion 5, 50, 56, 58 social constructionism 5, 16, 67 social context 7, 18, 48, 59, 61, 62, 72, 78, 81, 121, 150 social identification 147, 148, 150, 161, 163 social identities 16, 62, 86, 109 social mobility 220 social segregation 5 socialization 127, 201 sociolinguistics 62, 67, 68 sociology 61 Somekh, B. 83 space 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 13, 73, 145, 223 Spanish 29, 41, 45 Spanish vernacular 41 speech genres 140

spelling 169, 195 spouses 8 standard language 22, 41, 172, 219 Stanton, C. 165 Stebbins, R. A. 79, 88 Steffensen, S. V. 202 Stevenson, P. 26 Stewart, A. 87 Street, B. 71, 145, 146, 150, 162 Stubbe, M. 77 Stubbs, M. 68 Stull, D. 79, 80, 84 style resource 31, 211 stylisation 31, 32, 125, 142 subjectivity 89 Sullivan, S. 165 supplementary schools 3, 47 Swain, M. 28 Swann Report 48 Swann, J. 126 Sylheti 3, 12, 32, 34, 36, 38, 40, 120, 169, 171–5, 178, 195, 220 symbolic capital 177 symbolic footprints 162 symbolic power 41 symbolic violence 27 Talmy, S. 131, 132, 140 team ethnography 58, 77, 79–81, 84, 88, 103, 106, 107 text books 13, 15, 147 Thomas, W. 43 time 72, 73 tradition 4, 18, 21, 23, 105, 114, 128, 135, 138, 141, 174, 225 translanguaging 19, 23, 43, 76, 108, 203–9, 211, 213, 214 transnational literacies 145 transnationalism 145, 146 transparent reflexivity 85 Tsitsipis, L. 124 Tucker, G. R. 43, 44 Tunbridge, J. E. 165 Turkish 4, 11, 15, 16, 23, 40, 83, 89, 98, 99, 110, 113, 136–8, 141–3, 186, 187, 188, 190, 191 Turkish Embassy 15, 16

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Index

Turkish Language, Culture and Education Consortium 16 Turkish Ministry of Education 15 Turkish wedding 138, 141 Turkish-Cypriot 16, 99 Tusting, K. 64, 67, 68, 77, 78 two solitudes 23, 43, 201, 203 UNESCO 41, 42, 165 United Kingdom 8–11, 13 United States of America 47–8 unofficial discourse 139, 143 unofficial worlds 123 untouchable caste 170 Valdes, G. 4, 55, 56 Van Dam, J. 153 Van Dijk, T. 185 Van Lier, L. 23, 126, 147, 201, 202

verbal repertoire 35, 216 vernacular 31, 41, 110, 134, 162 Verschueren, J. 71 vignettes 18, 88–9, 103–6 voice 60, 61, 95, 125–36, 139, 142, 143, 154, 163, 172, 196–7, 200, 213, 217 Voloshinov, V. N. 20, 36, 70, 124, 125, 131, 192 Wang, S. C. 52, 145 Warriner, D. S. 145–7 Welsh 8, 43 Wiley, T. 6, 41, 166, 177 Wortham, S. 54, 147, 148, 150, 154, 161, 163 Wu, C-J. 11, 50, 83, 92, 94, 145 Zentella, A. C. 203 Zuengler, J. 67

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