The Routledge International Handbook of Language Education Policy in Asia

Andy Kirkpatrick, Anthony J. Liddicoat, Andy Kirkpatrick, Anthony J. Liddicoat

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781317354499
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

This must-have handbook offers a comprehensive survey of the field. It reviews the language education policies of Asia, encompassing 30 countries sub-divided by regions, namely East, Southeast, South and Central Asia, and considers the extent to which these are being implemented and with what effect.

The most recent iteration of language education policies of each of the countries is described and the impact and potential consequence of any change is critically considered. Each country chapter provides a historical overview of the languages in use and language education policies, examines the ideologies underpinning the language choices, and includes an account of the debates and controversies surrounding language and language education policies, before concluding with some predictions for the future.

Part I

Overview

1

Language education policy in Asia

An overview

Andy Kirkpatrick and Anthony J. Liddicoat

1 Introduction

Language education polices are a form of human resource development planning (Kaplan & Baldauf, 1997) that operate to develop language abilities that a society identifies as important for social, economic, or other objectives. They make statements about which languages will be included in education and the purposes for which those languages will be taught and learned. Policies therefore project an imagined future linguistic situation and make provisions to bring this into existence (Liddicoat, 2013). Understanding such policies is important for understanding how authoritative institutions such as governments and education systems construct the future possibilities for languages within their jurisdictions and attempt to shape emerging linguistic ecologies. The goal of this book is to understand language policies for education, how they have evolved over time, and what they have to say about the future of linguistic diversity in this vast region. The focus of the book is on explicitly stated language policies; that is, policies that are enshrined in various forms of language legislation, policy documents, curricula, and other educational texts. Such policies are inevitably accompanied by implicit policies, which equally shape language practices and can contribute significantly to what happens educationally (Spolsky, 2004). As public statements of governments’ intentions and values in relation to language, explicit policies’ documents have a particular place within the policy context as they are “explicit, tangible and authoritative statements of policy positions and as such can form a useful focus for study” (Liddicoat, 2013: 4).

This book aims to examine language education policy over an extensive region in order to foster a comparative perspective on how language is included in education and the forces that shape this both within and across nations. We have chosen to focus on Asia as the largest land mass on earth, with the largest proportion of the human population, and the greatest linguistic diversity. Given the demographic and linguistic significance of this region, it represents a significant site for language policy development.

The political geography of Asia is in many ways arbitrary as the geological region does not coincide neatly with the political, linguistic, and cultural realities of the region. In fact, Asia is itself an invention of Europe and European geography that has been reproduced over time (Markovits, 2013; Noor, 2014; Said, 1979). Both the grouping of nations, societies, and cultures together as Asia and the separating them out from others are discursive acts that are problematic given the reality of social, cultural, economic, and other relations both within the continent of Asia and across continental boundaries. A neat division of the political and social world into continents is ultimately problematic given the realities of a vast land bloc incorporating Europe, Asia, and Africa with on-going contacts and demographic and economic flows across geological boundaries. In framing this book, we have chosen to construct the idea of Asia in a particular way and have excluded from consideration some areas that are geographically normally considered as a part of Asia: Russia and the Middle East. While Russia is the largest country on the continent of Asia, we have chosen not to include Russia in this volume as we felt that the political and cultural influences and the political elites that shape Russian language education policy are more strongly based in Europe than they are in Asia. The Middle East, or Western Asia, has many linguistic and cultural connections with Central and Southern Asia, but also with Northern Africa. We felt that Western Asia would be much better considered together with Africa in view of the significance of Arabic and Islam across the region.

This book is presented as a series of polity studies of the Asian region that examines the ways that the dynamics of the various languages present in each context play out in the field of education. The studies are grouped geographically for convenience: East Asia, South East Asia, South Asia, and Central Asia. However, this grouping, like any other, is somewhat arbitrary and can suggest a coherence that is not in fact evident in the local realities of the policies under consideration and can also obscure realities that cut across these geographical divisions. In addition to the polity chapters, two chapters with a supra-local focus have also been included to highlight issues that tend to be obscured in broad considerations of a polity. These issues are minority language learning and mother tongue education. These are two issues that tend to be peripheral, or even absent, in much of the policy work in the region, although significant developments have been occurring in both that deserve special attention.

All of the polity chapters in this book present information about how education policies address issues relating to national languages, indigenous languages, and other languages, of which English forms a special case. Below, we have attempted a synthesis of the policy directions found within the region in each of these areas as a way of characterising language education policy in Asia.

2 National languages

Most of the countries of Asia were colonised and only gained their independence in the second half of the 20th century and so language in education planning in many countries has to be understood in the context of earlier colonial policies and the need for nation-building work post-independence. Different countries in the region had very different histories of colonialism. In some places in South Asia and South-East Asia, European powers began to establish a colonial presence from the 16th century, while in other countries, colonial history is much more recent. Asia was a target of most of the European colonial powers, with the UK, France, Portugal, the Netherlands, and Russia all carrying out imperialist projects in the region. Spain held power in the Philippines until the 19th century, but from then had no colonial presence in the region. In some places (notably in India, the Philippines, and Indonesia), colonial history is complex with changes in the colonial power over time. In addition to the European colonisers, Japan was also an active colonial power, establishing colonies in the Korean peninsula and Taiwan in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The US replaced Spain in the Philippines from 1898 and Indonesia occupied Timor Leste at the end of Portuguese control in 1975. Most of the colonising powers established overseas colonial regimes of various types but the case of Russian colonialism in Central Asia involved instead incorporation of territory into the Russian state. In all, very few countries escaped colonisation, with Thailand, Mongolia, Nepal, and Japan the exceptions. China, although not fully colonised, ceded territory to Portugal (Macau), the UK (Hong Kong), and Japan (Taiwan and briefly Manchuria). Bhutan and Afghanistan, although not formally annexed, were subject to strong influence from the UK, especially in foreign affairs.

The colonial regimes normally used the colonisers’ language as the language of administration and established educational programmes using the colonial language as the medium of instruction. This meant that at the time of independence, there were established elites in most countries who were educated in the colonial language and the main education systems functioned in the colonial language. At independence, much of Asia, unlike Africa, rejected the use of colonial languages as official languages of the new states and chose local languages. Usually, the newly independent states chose a single language as the official variety and adoption of this language by all citizens was seen as central to the building of national identity. In a small number of countries, multiple local languages were given official recognition (e.g. India, Singapore, Sri Lanka) usually in contexts of complex linguistic diversity. Afghanistan recognised both Pashto and Dari as official.

In some cases, the former colonial language was maintained as an official language, alongside local languages (e.g. English in Singapore, India, Philippines; Portuguese in Timor Leste; Russian in Kyrgyzstan). After their return to China, both Hong Kong and Macau adopted policies that continued the use of the former colonial language (English and Portuguese) alongside Cantonese. Hong Kong formulates its policy as official trilingualism (Cantonese, English, and Mandarin) and biliteracy (English and Chinese). The reasons for keeping colonial languages are complex. In some cases, the colonial language has been viewed as important as a lingua franca that facilitates communication between ethnic groups within the nation (e.g. English in Singapore and India) and may play this role as a language not closely linked to a particular ethnic group. In Central Asia, Russian has been maintained in recognition of the large numbers of ethnic Russians present in the country but may also be considered as having a lingua franca function for interethnic communication. In some cases, although not official, a former colonial language may be given special status as a language of interethnic communication (e.g. English in Sri Lanka, Russian in Tajikistan). Former colonial languages may also be maintained as being more suited to international communication than the local official language(s).

For most of the countries in the region, literacy and internal language spread policies were important for educational planning, especially in newly independent states. At the beginning of the 20th century few countries in the region, whether colonies or not, had high levels of literacy and in colonised nations, literacy had normally been developed in the colonial language. Many of the countries of the region have therefore given a great deal of attention to literacy development in the official language, with many raising literacy levels very substantially since the mid-20th century. Internal language spread policies involved increasing use of the spoken variety among those who did not speak it as a first language. Coupled with the focus on official language literacy, this meant that education of linguistic minorities has mainly been conceptualised in terms of developing language and literacy skills in the official variety. In this context, the official language has typically been the sole language of schooling and other languages at best have been given only marginal roles.

Although in most countries in the region the medium of instruction is the sole official language of the state, there are complexities around the medium of instruction policy in some parts of Asia. In some places where there are multiple official languages, these languages have not always been treated equally. For example, in Singapore only one language, English, is used as the normal medium of instruction for the majority of the curriculum, with the other official languages having the more marginal role of subjects in the curriculum. In Central Asian ­republics such as Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, the emphasis on internal spread of Kazakh and Kyrgyz means that Russian is much less frequently used as the main medium of instruction and access to Russian schools may be limited. In Macau, Portuguese, although official, has a very marginal role in education compared to Chinese. In Hong Kong, medium of instruction is the focus of controversy with education in English medium schools considered of better quality and more desirable than education in Chinese medium schools. There has thus been substantial public pressure to expand English medium education at the expense of Chinese.

Language education policy in many parts of the region has been closely tied to the dissemination of corpus planning activities, such as standardisation, elaboration, and codification. In some countries, languages which had not previously been used in schooling or for other official functions came to be used as official languages and required substantial corpus development, especially in academic domains. In many places, language planning agencies were established to undertake this corpus development work, which involved producing reference works such as grammars and dictionaries and pedagogical materials. In most countries this work was substantially the work of post-independence governments (e.g. India, Indonesia, Philippines) but in Central Asia significant work was carried out before independence as a result of the emphasis of the USSR government on the development of ethnic languages. For these countries, therefore, at independence there was substantial corpus planning work already completed and the languages had been to some extent integrated into the educational and national system, although usually dominated by Russian. In Central Asia, a key corpus planning issue has been whether to continue or break with the decisions of the Soviet era, especially in terms of script policy. The decision to replace Cyrillic with the Latin in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan has had significant consequences for education as it has meant that existing educational resources can no longer be used, and a sig...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Epigraph
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• PART I Overview
• PART II East Asia
• PART III South-East Asia
• PART IV South Asia
• PART V Central Asia
• Index