Complex Language Ecologies and Effective Language Education1 Thomas A
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Complex Language Ecologies and Effective Language Education1 Thomas A. Perry and Jerold A . .h-amondson Introduction In the past, it has been usual for those making educational policy to consider an area into which universal education is being introduced as a linguistically homogeneous region. This view has been taken either ex post (it is considered to be this way whether it is or is not) or ex ante (it should be such a region even if it is not). In other words, educational policy seems to assume that linguistic uniformity is a basic premise that must be taken in order to assure educational effectiveness, or perhaps budgetary efficiency. In particular, it has been assumed that dealing with a single language in a given region is the only way to construct literacy programs in service of a system of universal education. This is the familiar 'standard language' ideology that drives many language policy decisions. This view is amply illustrated by reference to the experience in North America, the South Pacific (Muhlhausler, 1996), South and East Asia (Pennycook, 1994, 1998b ), and many other locales where the introduction of formal schooling coincided with language standardization to a metropolitan language in place of local languages. In many of the examples cited, English is the introduced language, while indigenous languages are the local languages that are - in most cases documented to us - deemed unsuitable for various reasons to serve as the vehicles of literacy and thus to form a foundation for a new educational system. There are other languages to be cited - French in Africa and Vietnam, to name one. These colonial examples are instructive, because the implementation of educational policy was complete and uniform. Sometimes a concerted effort at complete language replacement was explicit policy in these situations. What is notable about these efforts is that their record on literacy was, over the long term, miserable. There are indications that it need not have been that way, and that there are both sound educational grounds as well good cultural reasons for using the local language as the basis for introducing literacy. We will return to this point below. One of the clear results of comparing failed colonial schooling schemes is that none of them took into account the regions being dealt with as linguistic ecologies. Every region has a characteristic linguistic milieu that is either in some state of equilibrium or some degree of drift towards a state of equilibrium. This is an ecology as surely as any biological region is. Change in these areas is set in motion every time a new language is introduced, whether by random migration or by direct political imposition (as in the colonial instances). The roles of the various languages are rebalanced every time a newcomer enters the region. What is striking about such vast territories as the Americas, the South Pacific, Australia, India, and others is how extraordinarily diverse such areas can be. The record has shown that such regions are upset by planned 1 A part of this research was supported by grants to Jerold A. Edmondson and Kenneth J. Gregerson by the National Endowment for the Humanities and by the National Science Foundation through grants entitled, "Language of the Vietnam-China Borderlands." 53 introduction of a new lingua franca intended as a literacy vehicle as well as a commercial tool. This study will review the experience of indigenous minorities in Canada and China to ascertain indicators of success in establishing literacy, as well as outline the paradox indicated above: that overt literacy campaigns introduced with universal schooling often fail for such populations. We will also review conditions under which literacy programs have succeeded. The North American experience The overall result of North American efforts to introduce a universal, standardized educational system was failed literacy programs for native populations, and hence deeply impaired educational systems in their regions. In the aftermath of this development, economic dislocation occurred; Western North American indigenous people left their communities for centres of economic activity. Yet they were poorly equipped to enter the new regional or national economy because the educational system that was supposedly designed to equip them to cope in a new economy did so inadequately. One of the indices of this failure was an exceptionally high illiteracy rate in these groups. The Standing Committee on Aboriginal Affairs of the Canadian House of Commons held hearings in the fall of 1990 into the state of literacy among Canada's indigenous population. (Standing Committee, 1990: 5-7). This investigation was induced by the statistics that show that literacy rates among this population as a whole are lower than the general population by a significant degree. Functional illiteracy among native communities located on reserves was reported at 45% (where 17% is the national average). Government schools are provided on these reserves- so why do they fail? The answer to this is complex. This study will examine one facet of the presumed answer- the issue of mother-tongue literacy. One of the recommendations coming from these hearings was to promote· mother-tongue literacy as a means of increasing literacy rates, and by that me(\.ns, long-term educational effectiveness. In Canada, educational authorities and the church founded residential schools, which removed children from their indigenous communities and completely replaced their traditional education with a foreign one. There were significant if temporary exceptions to this rule, however, and the literacy record in these regions is interesting. In Labrador, for example, Moravian missionaries among the Inuit mounted a literacy program in Inuktut as early as 1770, and by about 1840, reports indicate near universal literacy in settlements where a Moravian school was available. These schools were open to adults as well as children, and had the effect of making literacy training part of the traditional family and elder-based education of the population. Literacy was seen as a life-skill and was both taught and supported by family members and elders. By the time universal English schooling arrived in the 1900s, the vast majority of the Inuit population were literate in Inuktut. After 1950, when schooling in Inuktut ceased altogether literacy rates began to drop rapidly. Overall, the rate of functional illiteracy among the Inuit stood at 53% in 1990 (Standing Committee, 1990: 15). Even more striking is the success of the Cree syllabary as a literacy tool. Reports indicate that near-universal literacy was achieved in Northern Ontario using a script that was devised in the 1830s. This happened without benefit of schools at all, without formally-trained teachers, and without the context of a print literature. It was sustained almost entirely by the traditional education system of the Cree~ This literate tradition is 54 not doing well in the face of the modern English-based school system - forecasts indicate use is dying and it may not survive another generation (Standing Committee, 1990: 17-18). The key feature of the success of literacy in these communities was that it was gained with the support and active promotion of customary system of education within the community, and its uses were - by choice of the community members - culturally appropriate. There was little cost to the users of writing in these cases because literacy was not seen as part .of a major cultural disruption, as it was after the introduction of universal schooling in more recent times. This seamless transition of the child from oral language community to literate language community is the normal case for the standard paradigm of systematic education. The language of literacy is the language of both home and the larger community, and the cultural context is uniform throughout. Despite these early successes, no effort was made to encourage literacy on these terms. Canadian educational policy went in a different direction. British Columbia, Canada, is a useful example. Of approximately 60 indigenous languages in Canada, half of them were located in the province of British Columbia. 'Were' is the operative word here, since many of them have by now disappeared. Until recently, English has been the only language of education (and therefore of literacy) since the introduction of universal schooling in this province. Covering a very large and mountainous territory, the authorities used residential schools to deliver education to indigenous children. This required removing children from their traditional communities and separating them from families, where traditional education was always imparted. The result - by design - was total language (and cultural) replacement. A key element in the failure of these schools to successfully impart literacy was the complete and sudden shift from home language to the culturally dominant language of the larger society. At the same time, there was a requirement to shift from an oral culture with traditional family-based education to a literate culture with large-scale, formal communal education based largely on writing. More recently, minority communities have been redefining the role of their own languages with respect to the literacy question, introducing minority language literacy in the schools as part of a language revitalization strategy (Fettes, 1992) The failure of the residential school system does not surprise linguists and educators, and nobody would recommend such a scheme today. We will refer to a system, in which the language of instruction and the wider community is a dominant language, the children speak a minority language, and the role of the family and minority community in the educational process is next to none as a dislocated immersion system of language and literacy education. An analogous but not entirely parallel situation can be found in modern-day Vancouver, where addressing the educational needs of a large immigrant community has become a major educational challenge.