Preamble
This book is the result of work I have carried out as a researcher, teacher trainer and language adviser in Pakistan and the UK. It emerged from several research projects which I was involved in from 2008 to 2013. Initially, I explored language and literacy in the lives of a Pakistani family in north Manchester, UK. Taking the opportunity to extend this study by travelling to Pakistan with them for three months in 2009, I then decided to stay in Pakistan for 12 months to work at the British Council. During that time I travelled across the country for work and formally carried out a study (Capstick 2011) of English language learning for prospective migrants from Azad Kashmir. In this study, I contrasted the educational experiences of English language learners and their access to English, Urdu and Mirpuri Punjabi. The reason for choosing this approach was to begin exploring the role of language and literacy in the chain migration which has developed between this part of Azad Kashmir and the northwest of England. By tracing access to English language courses and tests, the study demonstrated that English contributes to family life at a time when the West is experiencing a tightening of the relationship between language, immigration, citizenship and national security (Blackledge and Creese 2010; Cooke and Simpson 2008). Since the 9/11 attacks in the US, there has been increased scrutiny of Muslims entering the UK and a conflation of English language proficiency with social integration. The aim for the follow-up study, which was to form the basis of my PhD in Applied Linguistics, was to extend this small-scale research by exploring the role of all the languages and literacies in Mirpuri migrants’ repertoires and to pin down what roles these translingual practices play in the chain migration between Mirpur and northwest England.
These two related but distinct studies were then followed by a countrywide research project conducted for the British Council, which I coordinated from Islamabad, exploring language and education in Pakistan. This involved generating recommendations for the government of Pakistan and a process of public scrutiny through policy dialogues, conference presentations, ministerial-level discussions and interactions with the public which took place during October 2010 and February 2011, culminating in Language and Education in Pakistan: Recommendations for Policy and Practice (Coleman and Capstick 2012). Findings related to the language in education situation in Pakistan are included in Chapter 4 of the current volume as they form part of the social, political and economic context of this study. Thus, the data for this book were collected in four phases, each of which will be explored in the chapter on methodology.
Pakistan, the UK and Migration
From 2008 to 2013 when this study was carried out, Pakistan was in the news across the world due to increased militancy and the US-led war against the Taliban in the northwest of the country. Azad Kashmir, a disputed territory also in the north of Pakistan, has its own security issues (Puri 2010) which emerged at the time of independence from Britain and which influence the language policies and language practices explored in this book. As a result, the portrayal of both country and territory is often dominated by political and military issues. Furthermore, Western imperialism has a long history in the region, Pakistan having been carved out of British India in 1947, since which time the population has grown dramatically. Moreover, migration to Britain has also increased significantly due to the colonial ties which bound the cheap labour of towns like Mirpur to the industrial heartlands of England. In terms of development, however, Pakistan has one of the lowest figures in the world for public expenditure on education at only 2.9% of GDP (UNDP 2010), a statistic which is often quoted as an indication of poverty in the country. Hence many Mirpuris leave school having been unable to achieve literacy in Urdu, the national language, or English, the official language, which then makes their goal of migrating to Britain more challenging but often more appealing as they seek a better life for themselves and their families. The result is that Mirpuris continue to see England as a land of opportunity in much the same way that their grandfathers and grandmothers did a generation ago. Conversely, the British government no longer requires the cheap labour from South Asia which it once sought to power its post-war economic recovery and is gradually moving towards tighter controls on migration from non-European Economic Area countries. Five months after I moved to Pakistan to work on this study, in November 2010, the British government introduced English language testing for migrants. This had immediate consequences for the Mirpuri families which had developed transnational kinship networks across the world, and their language learning and their literacy practices, as individuals turned to their family, friends and wider communities as a means of accessing the literacies that they need to migrate. These are the literacies that they need for filling in visa forms as well as those for maintaining ties with their families and friends before and after migration. It is the aim of the author from this point onwards to explore these literacies of migration by looking at their roles in migration from Mirpur to Lancashire in the northwest of England.
Why Pakistan and Why Literacy?
Of all the questions I have been asked about my research, the most common by far is ‘Why Pakistan?’ In responding to this question I will also address my interest in literacy and set out my broader research interests and the reasons for choosing this study. I have been interested in language in education since I started work as a teacher in 1994, as the medium of instruction in the classroom, and all the other languages that are used alongside it, influence how some students have access to literacy while others do not. Working in countries such as Pakistan, where this medium of instruction can be very different to the languages used at home, meant that I then became increasingly curious about the relationship between home and school and how this influenced access to literacy. Moreover, I grew up in a county, Lancashire, in the northwest of England, where many Pakistani migrants from poor parts of Pakistan have settled. During my lifetime, I have witnessed the politicisation of issues related to immigration and integration. This politicisation of Asian migrants and their families is, unsurprisingly, less at the neighbourhood level, where people on the whole get along well, but rather at the national level by political actors and media commentators who live far away from the families they stigmatise when they call for increased English language testing for migrants from non-EEA countries. While working in Pakistan, these interests coalesced into my questioning the power relations that prevented access to the dominant languages, including English, which would help individual family members pass these tests, and how this lack of access was then compounded when Pakistanis migrated to the UK, where English is the dominant language and literacy. At the same time, Asian migrants in the UK begin to face increasing pressure to demonstrate their proficiency in English or face the danger of being accused of, at best, an unwillingness to integrate, or, at worst, a desire to see Britain harmed in some way.
In Discourse and power in a multilingual world (2005), Adrian Blackledge explores the connection between the violent disturbances on the streets of northern towns in 2001 and the introduction of the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act at the end of 2002. Part of the legislation included a requirement for the spouses of British citizens to demonstrate proficiency in English when applying for British citizenship. Through his analysis of complex chains of discourse, Blackledge was able to show that political actors argued that the violence on the streets was caused by some Asian residents’ inability to speak English. These findings are important to my own study as I am interested in finding out not only how these assumptions about language and security relate to the specific language practices of families but also how these families cope with the consequences of increased immigration bureaucracy when spouses wish to live together in England. The second reason for taking up Blackledge’s work is his application of the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) as a theory and methodology for understanding the relations between discourse and social practices. This is something I do through my analysis of literacy as a social practice as well as in my critical enterprise. By critical enterprise I mean the way in which I ‘make the implicit explicit’ in the analysis of discourse, following Chilton et al. who suggest that this means ‘making explicit the implicit relationship between discourse, power and ideology, challenging surface meanings, and not taking anything for granted’ (2010: 491). Chilton also highlights a further aspect of the critical enterprise which I use to orient my work, that of being reflexively self-critical. This is also captured in Heller’s critical sociolinguistics, which she defines as ‘informed and situated social practice, one which can account for what we see, but which also knows why we see what we do, and what it means to tell the story’ (2011: 6). What I take from Heller here is that, as a researcher researching discourses, my critical project must include a critical examination of my own discourses. I see this as part of the way that ethnographers think about reflexivity when addressing the way the researcher and the conditions of the study affect knowledge production in the field, and my awareness of this. In light of this, I explore my own research journey in Chapter 3 through a reflexive account of how my positionings impact on the production of research. These methodological foundations prepared the way for the formulation of the following research aim: to understand the literacies and languages related to migration and what these tell us about how migrants make use of all of their language resources in a range of institutional and non-institutional settings. Based on this aim I formulated the following research questions:
- 1.What literacies are available in Mirpur and how do prospective migrants access English and Urdu for migration?
- 2.How do Mirpuri migrants to the UK and their families use literacy mediation when dealing with the dominant literacies of migration?
- 3.What language and literacy practices do Mirpuri migrants, their families and friends choose to stay in touch online and how do they justify these language and literacy choices?
- 4.How can the Discourse Historical Approach in Critical Discourse Studies be combined with New Literacy Studies to explore the multilingual literacy practices of migrants?
References
Blackledge, A. (2005). Discourse and power in a multilingual world. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRef
Blackledge, A., & Creese, A. (2010). Multilingualism. London: Continuum.
Capstick, T. (2011). Language and migration: The social and economic benefits of learning English in Pakistan. In H. Coleman (Ed.), Dreams and realities: Developing countries and the English language (pp. 207–228). London: The British Council.
Chilton, P., Tian, H., & Wodak, R. (2010). Reflections on discourse and critique in China and the West. Journal of Language and Politics, 9(4), 489–507.CrossRef
Coleman, H., & Capstick, T. (2012). Language in education in Pakistan: Policy recommendations. Islamabad: British Council Pakistan. Retrieved from: http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/sites/teacheng/files/Language%20In%20Education%20in%20Pakistan.pdf
Cooke, M., & Simpson, J. (2008). ESOL: A critical guide. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Heller, M. (2011). Paths to post-nationalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRef
Puri, L. (2010). Across the line of control: Inside Pakistan-administered Jammu and Kashmir. New Delhi: Penguin/Viking.
UNDP (United Nations Development Programme). (2010). The real wealth of nations: Pathways to human development (Human development report 2010, 20th anniversary edition). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan for UNDP. Retrieved from: http://hdr.undp.org/en/content/human-development-report-2010