Language Diversity and Education

David Corson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2000
• ISBN:
  9781135662981
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This introductory text for students of linguistics, language, and education provides background and up-to-date information and resources that beginning researchers need for studying language diversity and education. Three framing chapters offer an update on the philosophy of social research, revealing how important language is for all the processes of learning in which humans engage, whether it is learning about the world through education, or learning about the nature of social life through research in the human sciences. These chapters also review the links between language, power, and social justice, and look at dynamic changes occurring in "language diversity and education" research. Four central chapters give state-of-the-art, comprehensive coverage to the chief areas of language diversity that affect the practice of education: standard and non-standard varieties; different cultural discourse norms; bilingual and ESL education; and gendered discourse norms. This book is intended for graduate students of applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, the social psychology of language, anthropological linguistics, and other related disciplines; and graduate students of education, including in-service teachers taking advanced professional development courses. Special features enhance its usefulness as a text for courses in these areas: * A clear, jargon free writing style invites careful reading.
* All ideas are well within the range that graduate students in the language disciplines or in education can relate to their work, but theoretical ideas are kept to a necessary minimum and linked with practical examples in every case.
* Extensive references guide readers to the book's up-to-date, international, and cross-cultural bibliography.
* "Discussion Starter" questions at the end of each chapter highlight key points and stimulate informed, reflective discussion.

1
Language in Social Life and Education

I think I have in fact been situated in most of the squares of the political checkerboard, one after another and sometimes simultaneously: as anarchist, leftist, ostentatious or disguised Marxist, nihilist, explicit or secret anti-Marxist, technocrat in the service of Gaullism, new liberal, etc. None of these descriptions is important by itself; taken together, on the other hand, they mean something. And I must admit that I rather like what they mean.

—Foucault (1984a, pp. 383–384)

Michel Foucault stands closer to the end of the story I tell in this chapter than he does to the beginning. Yet his description of himself here is very germane to my theme throughout. Foucault portrays himself as a person unwittingly identified with many competing orthodoxies at the same time, implying of course his preferred detachment from any single one. Similarly the role of language in social life is now more clearly seen as a series of witting and unwitting alliances that people form with the many diverse sets of discourses that they encounter. And each of these discourses is an orthodoxy that positions us, whether we resist its seductive pull or rush eagerly to embrace it.

This opening chapter suggests how important language is to the processes of learning that humans engage in, whether it is learning about the world through education, or learning about the nature of social life through research in the human sciences. As my opening paragraph hints, in recent decades the search for objectivity and for absolutes in understanding social life has gradually been replaced by a much more skeptical conception of discovery that is more in tune with the real social world. Accordingly, but gradually, human science disciplines are transforming themselves to take account of this diverging view. Furthermore, this quite different understanding of what people can really know about the human condition, is slowly filtering into school curricula, into the pedagogies that teachers choose to use, and into the new modes of administration and evaluation that schools are introducing.

In this different social climate, which many call ‘postmodernity’, people are living increasingly in social spaces where orthodoxies of all kinds are losing their influence. While this development is worrying for some, it is welcomed by many others who see it as overdue recognition of the way the social world actually is. A spirit of tolerance about matters of diversity is becoming a necessary part of modern life: a recognition of diversity in world view and behaviour is gradually becoming more acceptable these days. And it is much more taken-for-granted as well. Alongside this development, we are seeing a rapid decline in the influence of positivism as a guiding ideology in social research. So to get at these changes, this chapter’s first section traces that decline and outlines the new conceptions of discovery that have begun to replace or supplement the older positivist approaches. Later, I suggest how education is affected by these important changes that are now impacting on society and also on the work that teachers do.

DISCOVERING A DIVERSE SOCIAL WORLD

Positivism, Language, and Diversity

Not too long ago, it was still accurate to claim that positivism “is the philosophical epistemology which currently holds intellectual sway within the domain of social research” (Hughes, 1990, p. 16). In the context of that claim, an epistemology is a ‘theory of knowledge’ that describes what counts as knowledge and how people might go about acquiring that knowledge. Positivism dominated social research for most of the twentieth century, including most of the research done on language and education topics. And the variety of positivism practised in the social sciences was quite firm about its own epistemology. Beginning in Europe with Auguste Comte, positivism argued that society could be studied using ideas similar to those that the natural sciences used.

Key ideas here were that all natural (and social) phenomena can be fully described in terms of determinate laws governing the interaction of lower-order entities; and that such descriptions can be made independent of the observer. This positivist position was based on the firm belief that human action is not random. Rather, just like events in the physical world, human action was thought to conform to certain quite predictable and knowable patterns that can be re-applied to other human actions removed culturally and historically from the actions that informed the originally observed patterns.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Emile Durkheim’s ‘principle of correlation’ set the scene for most social research that followed in that positivist tradition. This important principle still has wide application in research, as it does in many processes of disciplined thinking. Again, it assumes that human behaviour follows certain predictable patterns, even across societies and cultures. It also assumes that we can understand the social world by understanding the way those patterns vary one with another. For example, from the simple fact that murder rates in certain French cities covaried with one another in ways that remained fairly stable, even over long periods of time, Durkheim (1894/1966) was able to argue the validity of his principle of correlation. But, as I indicate below, this important principle can also mislead us, by making us overlook the real diversity hidden within these apparently predictable, social patterns.

Today, the role of meaning and interpretation, especially interpreting the meanings of natural language, has become central to most forms of social research. Yet it was the language of social research that obsessed the early positivists too, although only in a very narrow sense. What interested the positivists most was finding an objective ‘observational language’ that could be used to give agreed names to all the variables in their research theories. In practice, this meant that the words and expressions used descriptively in their ideas about the world had to be translatable into meaningful statements in this observational language. Indeed, almost all the debate that engaged the early positivist philosophers addressed this problem of reducing key terms or concepts into statements in a basic and objective observational language.

This concern with finding an objective language placed severe limitations on positivist social scientists and on their theorising. What were they to do about people’s ‘mental states’, which cannot be described in anything like the neat and objective way they sought? Clearly, the workings of the human mind, and the unimaginable range of ways in which people’s minds seem to work, are important factors for understanding the social world. Yet many positivists tried to dismiss their relevance, arguing that respectable social research needed to find ways around such slippery notions as these. Often their response was to ignore mental states altogether, by theorizing them out of existence, or more rarely by refusing to entertain the possibility of there being mental states.

For example, in psychology the science of behaviourism assumed that human beings and animals act as they do in response to a wide range of stimuli in their environments. The behaviourists set about discovering those stimuli and showing their effects. They did this by devising experiments that placed severe limits on the environmental conditions operating in the experimental settings created, thereby depriving their subjects of the need or the opportunity to exercise the range of choices and interpretations that would normally be available to them in a real social world. The stimuli and the subjects’ reactions to them were the things of most concern to the behaviourists, and these things had to be observable in some way to really count. Accordingly, behaviourist research left little room for ideas like ‘free will’, ‘moral values’, or other abstract notions that grow from different people’s mental states. Indeed, like others in the positivist tradition, the behaviourists seemed to think that everyone is basically the same as everyone else. This view contrasts sharply with more recent forms of social research which acknowledge that a key attribute of human beings is our capacity to reflect on what we have said or done, and to give an account of those unique reflections in language.

Language Games and Diversity: The Challenge to Positivism

Long before positivism was challenged in the social sciences, it was already becoming discredited in the physical sciences. Karl Popper’s influence on the philosophy of science in the twentieth century was second to none; and there is no doubt that his work marks the historical and logical break between a positivist and a post-positivist view of the natural world, and eventually of the social world too. Nevertheless, Popper’s is only the first word on the subject, not the last. Much progress has been made since the 1930s when his ideas began to circulate, and even since the 1960s, when he made a substantial updating of his early work (Popper, 1972).

Until quite recently, most social researchers applied the hypothetico-deductive model of scientific reasoning to their work. The theories they offered involved deducing a statement using premises based on empirical observations. Popper’s point in opposition to that model was that this approach to the hypothetico-deductive process involves verifying what can never be known with certainty, because some counter instance might turn up in the future to show that any firm conclusion reached is wrong. This more skeptical account of knowledge was an attempt to throw off a belief in the strict regularity of the world, whose patterns one might infer inductively. Popper recognized the existence of unpredictable forms of diversity in the physical world: things that might overturn even the most strongly felt theory.

Accordingly, Popper’s main innovation was to suggest that we do not verify our theories. Rather, we falsify them by finding counter-instances which we use to eliminate error from our conjectures. Indeed, this direct challenge to positivism set philosophy heading in quite new directions. At about the same time, another Austrian philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, was discarding his own earlier positivist ideas which he had already set out in his famous Tractatus. He replaced them with a new set of ideas that was to underpin almost all modern approaches to interpretive research in the social sciences. By highlighting the role of natural language and other systems of signs in shaping the endless variety of world views that people develop, Wittgenstein threw open the door to an unlimited appreciation of human diversity. And this seems a key moment in intellectual history.

For Wittgenstein (1953; 1972), humans are participants in many different ‘language games’ that are all played within fairly closed linguistic circles. When we have knowledge or belief, we have it according to the linguistic rules that obtain in a given circle or game: in some discipline or theory, for instance, or in some other ideological framework, like a culture, a social group, a religious sect, and so forth. Although Wittgenstein’s views were very different from Popper’s, the sophisticated form of skepticism that both philosophers advanced offered a direct challenge to the naive certainties of positivism. Over several generations, this skepticism fostered the development of a more sociological view of knowledge.

An influential figure in the United States was Thomas Kuhn (1970). He argued that scientists tend to interpret knowledge from inside ‘frameworks’ or ‘paradigms’ of theory that tend to isolate scientists from the world they are interpreting. Indeed in practice these paradigms are quite like Wittgenstein’s language games. Each one stands as its own cultural meaning system, and it allows those who view the world from within it to make sense of their own world by using the system’s relevant ‘rules’ of use. In moving from paradigm to paradigm, the interpretative rules change somewhat, and often the facts drawn from the world take on a slightly different sense. The facts can be used to explain things in quite different ways, so that different theories develop from similar facts and, sometimes, these theories about the world are even contradictory or incompatible. This is because complex theories within paradigms always outrun the facts available to support them.

The expert thinking on this point is captured in W.V.O.Quine’s conclusion (1953): Theories about complex things in the world are always underdetermined by facts. The facts we have about the external world are capable of supporting many different interpretations of it. In other words, our unique experiences of the world do not impose any single theory upon us. The different theories we develop and use depend on the particular language game or games we are operating within.

Meanings and Sign Systems: Interpreting the Social World

By the end of the twentieth century, an ‘interpretative alternative’ was beginning to replace positivism. Here, the very possibility of reaching theoretical neutrality in observations is discounted. Looking out from inside a language game, the knower is always a contributor to the construction of knowledge, and this colours any understanding of the social world that we have. It also places severe limits on research, as Max Weber (1969) observed. On the one hand, the complex nature of ‘interpretative understanding’ offers an opportunity to go into social and cultural questions much further than a natural scientist could possibly penetrate the inanimate world. But on the other hand, this deeper penetration comes at a price: it means a loss in objectivity, precision and conclusiveness. So when people accept the challenge of ‘interpretation’ as a better way of understanding the social world, they also accept its inevitable ‘fallibility’. Like the verdict of a jury, our interpretations can always be overturned by new evidence. But even an overturned interpretation leaves us with only another interpretation of a text. As Charles Taylor (1979) puts it:

We are trying to establish a reading for the whole text, and for this we appeal to readings of its partial expressions; and yet because we are dealing with meaning, with making sense, where expressions only make sense or not in relation to others, the readings of partial expressions depend on those of others, and ultimately of the whole. (p. 28)

Clearly, then, meaning is central to all this, although it is not just linguistic meaning that matters. Meaning is the basis of any sign or sign system. A ‘sign’ is not really a sign unless it has some meaning for someone. A burgeoning field of inquiry called ‘semiotics’ has sprung up just to study the theory of signs, including all the work signs do in their many manifestations. The occasional detective or spy novel helps introduce its readers to the theory of signs, which agai...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Language in Social Life and Education
• 2 Language, Power, and Social Justice in Education
• 3 Different Cultural Discourse Norms
• 4 Non-Standard Varieties
• 5 Bilingual and English as a Second Language Education
• 6 Gender and Discourse Norms
• 7 Research Methods for Language Diversity and Education
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index