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 (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- 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. In some parts of East Vancouver, the proportion of pupils whose mother tongue is not English reaches the 75% mark. Separate English as a Second Language classes become impossible at these levels, and through mainstreaming, secondary English instruction becomes mixed with primary literacy instruction once again. For pupils whose parents are themselves not literate in English (or any other language, in some cases), the same kind of alienation of purpose divides the family at home and the child at school. The crucial difference in this scenario from that of the residential school idea is that the family is at home with the child, and are generally highly supportive of literacy in English for their children. As a consequence, family-based literacy programs which either enlist the help of English-

55 speaking family members to support literacy training, or additional support for English literacy training of parents who cannot take on that role, has proven helpful. (See Boschung et. al., 1999 for the design of these programs). We will refer to this as an in­ context immersion situation, where the language of instruction and the wider community is a dominant language, the children and family speak a minority language, and the role of the family and minority community is important to both minority language maintenance and the support of dominant-language schooling. Canada has provided a large and detailed literature on language immersion programs, largely because of the official effort to provide immersion instruction in either of the official languages, when it is not the regional language of the local school system. For example, complete primary and secondary school immersion in French is available to any child in British Columbia, which is almost completely anglophone. We will refer to this as isolated immersion, in which the language of instruction is a minority language, the children and family speak the dominant language, and the minority community has little impact on school success. The connection between mother-tongue education and second-language acquisition (including transferability of literacy skills). has been explored widely elsewhere (see, for example, Coulmas, 1984, Danesi, 1988, Cummins, 1980). Carey (1993) outlines the differences between isolated immersion and the in-context type identified above, pointing out that the indicators of success for in-context immersion are more favorable, but present a massive challenge for teacher training. This is no doubt the weak link in in-context immersion in developing countries, as this is a problem in general. What questions do these cases raise for many developing areas in which the target language of schooling is different from that of the local community? The cases are similar to those of the indigenous peoples of North America over the past 100 years. Rapid regional development creates a new economy and brings universal schooling to ethnic minorities with no history in the dominant language. The schools that result become immersion schools by default. Research in this area is badly needed, but we will assume here the results transfer. Literacy does not easily prosper in all immersion situations, as we have seen from the North American experience, and the same examples establish that the use of minority languages as a vehicle for literacy appears to have both linguistic and educational utility. What other options than immersion schooling remain in contexts of this kind? Some form of bilingual education remains the principal option. In this connection, we turn to a case from China, in which both immersion and bilingual methods were juxtaposed. This has a bearing on the observations in Carey (1993), in which the desirability of bilingual programs over in-context immersion was questioned. In this case, isolated immersion is indicated, since speakers of a minority language (on the national scale) dominate in the local community. Since much of this discussion has been descriptive rather than analytical, we will begin with a description of the speech community in question, including the state of literacy there, and then provide some sugge~tive data from the region about the comparative effectiveness ofbilingual and immersion programming in the schools. The Kam experience. Efforts to foster literacy among formerly preliterate groups in Asia have not easily achieved high levels of literacy. In this section we will outline what has happened in the case of China's Kam nationality of , , and Province.

56 The Kam. The Kam are the largest representative of the Kam-Sui (called Dong-Shui in Chinese) sub-branch of the Kam-Tai (called Zhuang-Dong in Chinese) minority nationality. In 1990, they had an official population of 2,508,624, which was concentrated in the ~rea where the three provinces of Guizhou, Hunan, and Guangxi 2 come together . The most concentrated administrative area ofKam settlement in these three provinces is found at Qian Dongnan Miaozu Dongzu Zizhi Zhou (SE Guizhou Miao-Kam ), where there live 1.1 million Kam or about 43% 3 of the total Kam population . But even here the distribution of is not homogeneous, as their territory is divided into two distinct areas separated from one another by the villages of other groups, the Han or Chinese, Miao (Hmong), Y ao, and Bouyei. Despite these differences though, there is no doubt among the Kam that people from both areas belong to a single ethnicity, as they share about 80% common vocabulary in basic words and they have a large body of folklore, animistic spirits, singing traditions, culinary, marriage, and funeral practices in common. The south is the area more traditional in preservation of and culture, whereas the north has come under more influence from the Han language. Before 1958, the Kam had never had a literate tradition. While speakers of the language have for several centuries used to record their language, there was never any attempt to develop a trans-regional, officially sanctioned, and accepted for the Kam language. The reasons that the Kam had remained unlettered until the 1950s were that they live in relative isolation from influences from outside their own mountainous area, travel within their own territory was limited, the Kam remained self sufficient tillers of the soil with low expectations for education, for bettering their economic lot in life, and for engaging in any kind of mercantile activity. There is, for example, even today only one roadway into the southern heartland from the north leading from Kaili to Rongjiang. Mostly transportation within southern Kam territory makes use of the rich system of waterways. Secondly, while a number of Kam have gone on to higher education in China and few even abroad, the general level of secondary education remains low. Finally, the Kam still do not do business and must rely on Han merchants and craftsmen for manufactured goods and maintenance. There was and remains for most people no pressing need to become literate. Whatever needs they had for recording plans for houses, bridges, and drum towers - in the construction of which they excel, carpenters were satisfied to notch bamboo or wood staves or knot string or rope. For a group of such large population the Kam ethnicity demonstrates a surprising number overlapping speech communities and a part of Kam literacy needs could in the past be fulfilled through their access to some other speech community. Of the 2.5 million persons claiming Kam ethnicity only about 1. 7 million can actually speak the Kam language. The remainder are usually the offspring of Kam who have in past generations abandoned their village lifestyle and have settled in small towns and, in

2 In China the Kam are called D6ng and constitute an official minority nationality. In Vietnam, the Kam are called Fming. About 100 years or more ago, two groups of immigrants left these three provinces in search of a better life. One group went to the north and settled in Hubei Province, where about 20,000 are still found. The other groups must have been much smaller. It travelled south and west settling in Vietnam in Tuyen Quang Province, where only a very few people can today speak this language and remember their practices. We will not be considering either of these two groups in. our remarks )lere. 3 The sources for this report focus on Qian Dongnan Autonomous Prefecture and we have little information about the literacy attempts in other places.

57 time, increasingly in larger cities such as , Guizhou's capital, Changsha, Hunan's capital, and in Liuzhou in Guangxi Province. The citified Kam speak some form of Chinese. The remaining 1. 7 million Kam speakers can be categorized into 1 million monolinguals, 400 thousand with some degree of control of the Han language, and 300 thousand bilingual Han and Kam speakers (Chen, 1995). Thus, about one-half of the Kam population has been able to use Chinese writing for its written needs. A brief history of the Kam script. In 1956, the central government of China sent out research teams from the National Academy of Sciences, Central University of Nationalities in Beijing and several other work units to areas throughout China with no orthographies to determine the language use situations. They found that the Kam language had two regional variants each having three local vernaculars. It was then also decided to take the speech varieties of Guizhou's at Zhanglu Village as the model for constructing a writing system. In September 1957 a meeting was convened in Guiyang with representation of officials from the three provinces; again the next year in August an official committee for developing a script was established and a trial orthography was designated. In 1959, a Kam-Han dictionary, Dong-Han Jianmin Cidian, was published and in 1961 a Han-Kam dictionary, Han­ Dong Jianmin Cidian, was issued. The first steps toward "sweeping away illiteracy" were in place, when larger events, the tumultuous years of the Great Cultural Revolution, broke over China and prevented much work until after 1980. Kam language and script in the public domain. There have been a considerable number of laudable efforts at promoting the Kam language use in the public domain. The first efforts were limited and concentrated on using Kam script to promote better agricultural technology among the farming population. The vehicle was the prefectural newspaper, Miaozu-Dongzu Zhou Bao (Miao-Kam Weekly), jointly published in Miao and Kam scripts. It centered on translating simple and applied Chinese sources of information about how to increase rice production and better one's life. As a result, new terms for technological innovation were coined in the Kam language. A number of tools for new literates were also putUished in the early years. These included the dictionaries mentioned above and the teaching materials for the script. Before 1980, the print support of the Kam language was meager and sales were poor. A third area that has taken root in the last twenty years is the publication of the Guizhou Minzu Bao (Guizhou Minority Newspaper), which contains news in Miao, Bouyei, and Kam script. Also the Nanjang Newspaper has specialized in publishing bilingual side-by-side essays in Kam and Han scripts. These have been especially helpful for the semi-literates in improving their Han skills. Recently, inquiries among individuals have shown that Kam writing is making its way from the domains of official sanction into the private world of advertising copy, name cards, and letters for the folks back home among the new Kam working class, business people, and entrepreneurs in larger cities. As well, official documents, formal and informal, are demonstrating more and more frequent use of Kam. The script is employed in government announcements, proclamations, and in banners displayed when a road or bridge is dedicated. Kam is used in judicial decisions and local government directions. There are also growing numbers of radio and TV broadcasts, especially in the heartland areas of Liping, Rongjiang, and Tianzhu Counties. Very important are also motion pictures in Kam language. Since 1980, there have been 31 movies with more than 3000 words that have been seen by more than 3 million people. Local cultural events, plays, operas, singing contests, and story sessions are exclusively in Kam, as

58 they~ always have been. Some areas of writing are still monolingual. These are traffic signs and ads for banks and the post office. Literacy efforts since 1980. Adult literacy formed an important part of Kam literacy efforts from the start. As early as 1958 some use ofthe new script was being made in Qian Dongnan Prefecture. The work with grownups intensified after 1980 with much more widespread classes in adult and continuing education using newly developed materials such as the Dongyu Duben (Kam Reader). In 1982 in Rongjiang County at Chezhai Village and ·in Tianzhu County at Shidong Village, there were literacy courses for 82 persons. Between 1980 and 1995 more than 850 classes or workshops for adults had been convened at 277 locations. These were focused on centers of Kam population: 67 in , 55 in , 55 in Rongjiang County, 57 in Tianzhu County, and smaller numbers in outlying places. About 30 thousand adults 4 received instruction, and 82 percent were judged to have become literate . Exit tests in four locations showed 90% performance on tasks of spelling, vocabulary, and composition. Some anecdotes of this campaign were that adult learning in the Kam script provided a more efficient method for literacy in Han characters than monolingual instruction in Han characters. Generally, literacy workers found minimum skill in Han writing was achieved after six months of instruction, but that as many as 90% needed re-education, since many failed to retain their skill level after a period of time. When Kam script was co-introduced with Han writing, then only three months of instruction were needed and the level of retention was much higher. Beginning in 1982, Qian Dongnan Miaozu Dongzu Zizhi Zhou primary schools began a program of bilingual instruction in 57 schools. These included seven in Liping County, four in Congjiang, 15 in Rongjiang, three in Jianhe, 12 in Mianbing, 14 in Tianzhu and others. There were 522 classes in bilingual study of Kam and Chinese with 17, 992 students. Three types of instruction were used: • In the year before Kam children were to start primary school, they were instructed in the Kam language; after the first year, Kam instruction continued after hours in order to aid in the teaching of the Han language • In the first semester, children were taught the Kam orthography; in the second semester, Kam was used as a tool in the instruction in the Han language • Starting the first semester both Han and Kam were used equally. The children used the materials, Xiaoxue Dongwen Keben (Primer for Kam writing), developed in the 1950s. A post-instruction written test of the children showed that, in four schools tested, the children scored 36.1/40 on Kam sounds, 18/20 on Kam sentence structure, 16.7/20 on sentence formation, and 18.1/20 on translation exercises. On an oral test, students achieved a 97% success rate on word recognition.

4 Mer 1989, the number of literacy students dropped dramatically from a high of about 8,000 in 1985 to 96 in 1992. Chen (1995) ascribes the decline to a lack offunds. One wonders as well whether the waves of prosperity that began to lap at the gates of even remote villages were dampening the enthusiasm for acquiring literary among the Kam, when the road to bettering one's life was not necessarily seen in knowing how to read and write a minority language. As one wag put it to one of the authors: knowing a minority language is local meal ticket; knowing south-western Mandarin is a provincial meal ticket; but knowing is a national meal ticket; and knowing English is an international meal ticket. It is an irony that linguists have been at the forefront in improving instruction in English, while this endeavor may have iri the short run undermined efforts to promote minority literacy.

59 Tests also confirmed that students who had bilingual instruction outperformed those who were instructed only in the Han language and this higher level was achieved even on non-language subjects. In a comparison of class results from language and math areas, achievement in bilingual instruction is higher. Results have been further classified as to whether they come from schools with historically high levels of achievement in general, as opposed to schools that do not reflect higher levels of achievement across the board:

Table 13: Comparison between top-tier and lower-tier schools [:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::~~~~:~~~::::::::::::::::::::~:~~~:::::::::] l Top-tier schools 1 1Bilingually instructed 85.2% 87.6% j Monolingually instructed 70.7% 79.4% j Lower-tier schools j Bilingually instructed 78.6% 63.3% l.~~.~~~~~.~~.~~.. ~!:~~~~.~~~ ...... ??:.~ ...... ~!:?.~ .. !

In each case it is evident that, in both very good schools and in mediocre schools, bilingual instruction promoted the learning of language and math skills of the children. Even more striking is the difference bilingual instruction made in lower-tier schools. It essentially made the difference between functional failure in both categories and achievement levels at an acceptable level. It would be interesting to replicate this experiment in other minority communities in different countries to determine just how exemplary these results are. They are certainly suggestive, and invite further investigation. The activities sketched above show a long term and sincere governmental effort at linguistic empowerment of the Kam written and spoken language and record a history that takes the Kam from pre-literacy to the beginnings of literacy. And they also show an enthusiastic reception among the populace in some places to these public and educational policies. But the attitude toward reading and writing Kam is quite heterogeneous. As Long (1998) reported, the attitude of the Kam toward their new script can be divided into three types. First of all, there is that majority ofKam living in remote areas who have recognized the usefulness of the Kam writing system and want their children educated at first in this new way. Secondly, there are those living in towns or cities who have mastered Chinese and "Many (of them) ... consider that the orthography is of no use whatsoever." They are unwilling to let their children be taught in this script. Finally, there are those who are not opposed to the script but do not value it highly, because there is so little published in Kam. Clearly, much is still to be done to deepen the modest successes achieved thus far. It appears that only about 10% of all monolingual speakers have been reached to daj:e. The fall off of numbers in adult classes is also disturbing. Economic prosperity seems not to have helped the efforts so far. On the contrary, ultimate linguistic survival of the Kam language probably rests in the development of stable bilingualism in the face of rising prosperity in their territories. The lesson of this model effort shows us though that perseverance is imperative. The warnings of Muhlhausler (1996: 259-264) about the pervasiveness of transitional bilingualism leading to monolingualism in the dominant language irt similar circumstances need to be taken seriously. Despite the best of brooms and the most diligent of sweepers, there is danger that many won't just

60 sweep their illiteracy in Kam away, but will simply switch the Kam broom for a Han broom and abandon their efforts to write Kam entirely.

Conclusion We have reviewed a variety of situations in which litera'cy in a dominant language has been promoted among speakers of a minority language. This is a paradigm for developing countries, as the educational system faces these situations more often than not. The sum of the findings here is suggestive - certainly much more detailed empirical work needs to be done. We have abstracted away from many variables, such as language vitality and community size in the minority community, political and economic system, long-term effects and transitional literacy. We can, however, establish that dislocated or isolated immersion in these contexts has had a history of problems relating to literacy, pr'()bably because of an alienation that sets in when instruction in a dominant language and culture is attempted without the support of the minority language and culture. The deficit that arises is likely found in subject-matter achievement as well as language proficiency, as indicated by the Kam findings above. The whole question of whether achieving literacy goals by immersion can be effective is still open to much debate. There are clear examples where it has not worked. The main advantage of a bilingual system like that of the Kam prototype is that it permits cultural continuity between school, home and community while entrenching the dominant language in its main role as a tool rather than an overwhelming cultural imperative.

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