Liberating Language Education

Vally Lytra, Cristina Ros i Solé, Jim Anderson, Vicky Macleroy, Vally Lytra, Cristina Ros i Solé, Jim Anderson, Vicky Macleroy

• Éditeur: Multilingual Matters
• Année: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781788927963
• Sujet: Filología
• Sous-sujet: Enseñanza de las artes lingüísticas

This book responds to a growing body of work in sociolinguistics and applied linguistics that places an emphasis on situated descriptions of language education practices and illuminates how these descriptions are enmeshed with local, institutional and wider social forces. It engages with new ways of understanding language that expand its meaning by including other semiotic resources and meaning-making practices and bring to the fore itsmessiness and unpredictability. The chapters illustrate how a translingual and transcultural orientation to language and language pedagogy can provide a point of entry to reimagining what language education might look like under conditions of heightened linguistic and cultural diversity and increased linguistic and social inequalities. The book unites an international group of contributors, presenting state-of-the-art empirical studies drawing on a wide range of local contexts and spaces, from linguistically and culturally heterogeneous mainstream and HE classrooms to complementary (community) school and informal language learning contexts.

Part 1

Policies, Discourses and Ideologies

1‘I Don’t Think We Encourage the Use of their Home Language …’: Exploring ‘Multilingualism Light’ in a London Primary School

Thomas Quehl

And too often there are parts of our country, parts of London and other cities as well, where English is not spoken by some people as their first language and that needs to be changed.

Boris Johnson at a leadership husting, 5 July 2019

Introduction

This somewhat muddled statement might be best understood not as a casual utterance by a politician in the midst of a stressful leadership campaign but rather as a deliberate intervention, reaching out to an audience that is seen as responsive to a particular kind of discourse. The quote illustrates how the trope of ‘language’ can be mobilised as a versatile element in ideologies and discourses around immigration, multiculturalism and racism. Within ‘natio-racial-culturally coded orders of belonging’, where the variables of ‘nation’, ‘race’ and ‘culture’ are used in flexible ways, such ideologies and discourses become politically and socially efficient not the least through the vagueness of those variables and the ways in which they are used to reference each other (Mecheril, 2018). As has been said of the situation almost two decades ago, ‘realities are constructed which suggest that the only way to be British is to be an English (or possibly Welsh or Gaelic) speaker. This discourse is common-sense, self-evident, and oppressive’ (Blackledge, 2004: 88). Thus, debates about language form part of a struggle not only over language practices but also over the kind of society Britain envisions for itself (Blackledge, 2004: 89). While Johnson’s assertion mirrors current attempts to redefine the ‘British nation’, the implicit uses of ‘language’ as a proxy for ‘immigration’ and ‘English not as first language’ as surrogate for ‘otherness’ point to the fact that language ideologies – reminiscent of the role they have played in the formation of nation-states (Hobsbawm, 1992) – are constantly reloaded and employed in relation to symbolic and material resources. This overall context is relevant for any exploration of the effects of language ideologies in schools, as historically the education system has been a constitutive element of this formation of the nation-state. Moreover, schools are meant to reproduce society’s power relations and the language relations embedded in them (Bourdieu, 1991), while also being the very places where symbolic resources and material resources are intertwined, contested and (potentially) redefined. Moreover, language ideologies and discourses on language and its use translate into how people perceive themselves and others as speakers, and into the ways in which those experiences are enacted in language practices that affirm, undermine or change classifications and rules (Busch, 2017a: 52).

In this chapter, the focus is firstly on how society’s language ideologies and discourses about language use translate into language use in the classroom, and secondly on how multilingualism is represented in the primary school. Both questions are relevant: socially, because political and media discourses (Wright & Brookes, 2019) use the trope ‘Speak English!’ efficiently and with nationalist and racist undertones in debates about immigration or the multilingual society generally; pedagogically, because the current situation in schools is still characterised by ‘the lack of recognition of the importance of nurturing pupils’ own languages in the school curriculum’ (Leung, 2019: 18).

The chapter draws on a broader study in three English primary schools that focuses on teacher agency in multilingual pedagogies. Within the framework of the new sociolinguistics of multilingualism (Martin-Jones & Martin, 2017a), the ethnographic study included participant observations, semi-structured teacher interviews, participatory activities with children and an exploration of linguistic schoolscapes. The Year 4 classroom from which the data are taken belongs to a primary school in an Inner London borough, whose website states prominently that the children speak approximately 40 languages apart from English. I present data that allow us to trace how monolingual dominance affects the classroom, where a monolingual norm and a symbolic take on multilingualism merge into what I will call ‘multilingualism light’.

Conceptual Framework

Exploring the question of how the monolingual norm is shaped follows the general understanding that schools are sites where ideologies are produced rather than merely imposed on pupils (Apple, 1982: 26), and that dominant norms conceal the processes of their own production. These perspectives point to wider conceptualisations of the relationship between structure, ideology and subject that are important for thematising the work accomplished by ideologies. One prominent framework in this regard is subjection, which emphasises, in Judith Butler’s formulation, the two-fold nature of the relationship between ideology and subject: ‘The more a practice is mastered, the more fully subjection is achieved. Submission and mastery take place simultaneously, and this paradoxical simultaneity constitutes the ambivalence of subjection’ (Butler, 1997: 116). Another salient framework that is relevant for problematising norms in the specific context of educational institutions and linguistic difference is the process of symbolic domination (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977), which ‘masks its concrete sources, that works because it appears not to work, that works by convincing all participants in an activity that the rules that are, in fact, defined by one group are natural, normal […]’ (Heller & Martin-Jones, 2001: 6).

The prevalence of monolingualism in the English primary school classroom has been thematised throughout the last two decades, using various terms and theoretical perspectives. Bourne (2001a) argues that pupils learn to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate talk just as they learn their ‘basic skills’ in school, and she observes children navigating the expectations of a classroom where the teacher follows the ‘monolingual habitus’ (Gogolin, 1997), while they use their ‘mother tongue’, ‘home’ or ‘community language’ for informal talk. Kenner and Ruby (2012) describe an ‘institutional silence’ in the school where children learn to compartmentalise their use of languages in marked contrast to their plurilingual practices at home. Similarly, Welply (2017) sees the school’s monolingualism as implicitly expected without being formally defined, which leads to a situation where the ‘children’s experience of their other languages in school is most often marked by absence and silence’ (Welply, 2017: 450–451). Employing discourse analysis to teacher interviews, Cunningham (2019) concludes that prohibition and discouragement of what she terms ‘languages beyond English’ featured across multiple schools. The shifting paradigms associated with a ‘new sociolinguistics of multilingualism’ (Martin-Jones & Martin, 2017b: 1) allow for an extended lens through which the classrooms’ monolingualism is examined. Two concepts are important for this inquiry: language ideologies and linguistic repertoire.

The institution school is historically located at the centre of dominant language ideologies, for which it also functions as a production site (Bourdieu, 1991: Ch. 1). Kroskrity (2010) suggests seeing language ideologies as a cluster concept with various convergent dimensions, of which the following appear particularly relevant to the school. Firstly, language ideologies are not neutral, since the perception of language they represent is formed in the interest of a specific social or cultural group. Thus, formal education is ‘a discursive space in which groups with different interests struggle over access to symbolic and material resources and over ways of organizing that access that privilege some and marginalize others’ (Heller & Martin-Jones, 2001: 5–6). Secondly, language ideologies are multiple because lines of difference within one sociocultural group (e.g. class, gender or age) can generate various perspectives articulated as indices of group membership: ‘Language ideologies are thus grounded in social experience which is never uniformly distributed throughout polities of any scale’ (Kroskrity, 2010: 197). Thirdly, members of society can display varying degrees of awareness of language ideologies. On the one hand, a high level of discursive consciousness and active disputation of ideologies may exist, and on the other hand one may find a ‘practical consciousness with relatively unchallenged, highly naturalized, and definitively dominant ideologies’ (Kroskrity, 2010: 198). The types of sites where those ideologies are produced and commented upon contribute to those varying degrees of awareness (Kroskrity, 2010: 198). This is especially significant for classroom explorations because i...

Table des matières

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Introduction: Why Liberating Language Education?
• Part 1: Policies, Discourses and Ideologies
• Part 2: Language-Living: Materialities, Affectivities and Becomings
• Part 3: Transcultural Journeying and Aesthetics
• Part 4: Voices, Identities and Citizenship
• Conclusion: Language Education Collages
• Index