Language learning: sociolinguistics and education.

I am reading currently The Handbook of Educational Linguistics edited by Bernard Spolsky and Francis M. Hult, in 2008, 44 chapters and 675 pages. This handbook has a huge scope, so my comments are selective. The Handbook’s concern is how children learn to speak, read and write, whether in one language or several. The discipline of the sociolinguist is to observe, listen and report. Mostly they are not teachers, but their observations are likely to be very relevant to learning and teaching.

A third of children in the world do not have an education in their first language. In some English medium schools (i.e. who teach in English) in the UK, there can be over a hundred different first languages spoken by pupils. Although it is true that English is a useful language for them to have, research strongly indicates that those who do not use their first language in school do not develop language or understanding as readily as those who do. If they can use both first language and English together, they get the benefit of proper development and bilingualism. It is important therefore that all children are able to approach learning through their first language. James Cummings conducted intensive research into this issue over several decades. He demonstrated that although conversational language can be picked up relatively quickly, the development of academic (more abstract) language is a much more difficult and long-term skill. This he termed ‘context reduced’ language, in that ordinary language is about objects, people in context. In other words, it is easier to be descriptive than philosophical. A child who has not been educated through a first language may consequently be several years behind those who have.

Of course, these children are also from lower status homes in that their language does not dominate the culture. Advantaged children are those who are educated in their first language, and they are in a position to perpetuate their advantage by achieving higher qualifications. This process of being a dominant language we term hegemony. This term draws from the Marxist observations of Antonio Gramsci, discussed elsewhere in this blog: he, writing in the 1930s, discussed political and ecclesiastical hegemony in his native Italy. Hegemony is now widely used of the privileges of power anywhere, for example in colonial and post-colonial contexts. In Curacao, for example, the Dutch colonial power runs Curacao schools through the Dutch language and using Dutch textbooks, even though the children speak Papiamentu as their first language. Where teaching is not bilingual (for example when Dutch teachers are used rather than islanders) the children are at a disadvantage with academic concepts. The same applies with English, French and Spanish medium schools.

In the UK, the tradition of having bilingual support teachers flourished in the 1980s, but became replace by monolingual teachers using the dominant language (English). This brought back the disadvantage. It becomes expensive and difficult to organise support when many first languages are found in a school. One implication is for parents and other family to become involved in the first language education of young children, from infancy and into the school years. Implications for schools are:
To value first languages, never making the use of first language a punishable offence. (This still often happens).
To encourage first language speakers into school and to work closely with parents and families, perhaps taping stories and lessons in minority languages.
To encourage peer support, with inexperienced children being helped by older more confident children.
To encourage the use by staff of common words of praise (Well done! Good!).

For the education system more generally, advisory teams need to prepare and train staff in how to cope with multilingual classrooms, for example:

• To develop appropriately the education and confidence of parents from minority communities
• To develop bilingual/multilingual dictionaries
• To become more confident in name forms
• To become more aware of cultural (including religious) practices such as festivals
• To develop curriculum resources, such as simple stories and lessons in the whole range of languages in video formats.
• But above all in how to encourage first language use in diverse classes.

This is an important agenda for raising children and families out of disadvantage. It means developing a partnership between the dominant cultural and linguistic community and minorities within it. Being bilingual is a significant skill that ought to be recognised culturally and in the market-place. Monolingual English children are disadvantaged in various ways. They have not developed language through regular use of more than one language; they can only use their first language in their work; they have no access to many of their neighbours, leading to cultural isolation. That bilingual pupils are advantaged, and monolingual pupils disadvantaged in life ought to be the focus of more discussion.

Andragogy: teaching adults.

In brief, the term was used by Malcolm Knowles in discussions of adult education. Knowles was a further education/tech college lecturer interested in how teaching adults was different from teaching school children. Pedagogy means ‘guiding children’, so andragogy would mean ‘guiding adults’. Coming from the 1960s, it is now very dated, even though there have been later editions. The model of pedagogy was different then – more transmission and authority than in experience based learning. The introduction of experience-based and discussion types of pedagogy developed rapidly in schools in the 1970s, thanks to the Stenhouse Humanities programme, Integrated Studies and the like. Primary schools were dominated throughoutout this time (after the Plowden Report of 1966, influenced by the philosophy of John Dewey) with encouraging children to learn through experience, making curricula relevant to children. Knowles was reacting against an old fashioned notion of learning and teaching.

Knowles argued that discussion was better than telling, and that discussion should be based on the adults’ life experiences. We would say that today about teaching children too. There is a big question therefore whether pedagogy and andragogy are different. It is true that adults tend to have more life experience than children, but that is a matter of degree. For both, discussion is important, and so is the structured discipline of listening, taking notes and writing essays. One big difference is in authority – you can’t talk to adults as though they are children – but you might argue that we don’t talk to children very effectively anyway and should treat them with more respect. How you give a group of students boundaries may differ between children and adults, again in degree rather than in kind. In considering how learning is best facilitated at any level, we can reflect on what works well and what not, without getting bogged down by the tired old andragogy/pedagogy debate.

The issue of how best to teach adults needs more exploration. Fill them with confidence, instil can-do attitudes, use their everyday needs and issues, help them to think and express themselves clearly, show them how knowledge is relevant to their lives, help them to analyse and synthesise, make them curious, encourage self-discipline, celebrate their achievements. This is a powerful list to act on. It is the same list as we would use with children.

Apology

Please note that my internet and email has been offline for three weeks so there has been a gap in posts. Many apologies.

Superstition and Children

There seems to be a very strange reluctance for humans to be rational. The little people tug at my Irish imagination, and demons have been left behind by my Christian upbringing. I remember as a teacher in the 1970s one of my pupils, aged 16, being exorcised by a Christian minister to remove some demon within her - when actually iron tablets and a sense of purpose would have done her more good. People with mental disorders have been accused of demon possession even into the present.

I am interested then to explore how children navigate their path between the real, the pretend, and the irrational supernatural. Perhaps I am a good person to do this. My Christian upbringing declared as real God, with a Son, with supporting angels, who was about to return to the earth at any moment to take Christians up in a twinkling to become his new world generals. This was presented as fact, as was the virgin birth and the resurrection. A young person faced with these declarations of 'obvious fact' unravels them only slowly. On the other hand, projected reality which is clearly stupid struck me very early as shameless adult deception - I refer to Santa Claus and all that jazz. At the age of around 3, I became political and campaigned hard to persuade my siblings and friends that the Father Christmas industry is a con. It was not taken kindly by either parents or children. Where my certainty came from I do not recall, but I recall being a mixture of triumphant and angry, and very impatient of people who appeared not to believe me.

I recall these events in other contexts. A dear friend who believed and continues to feel betrayed 30 years later, so hard did the disclosure of the con take her. And other parents who want their children to know the truth but find their children totally wrapped up in this false belief and find it hard to prick the balloon. The argument for perpetuating the myth is said to be to preserve Christmas as a magic time for children. Actually, it is a consumerist myth: ask, and you shall be given whatever is on your list to Santa. Christmas is a time for receiving goods - toys, sweats, inessentials. It is a cargo cult - be good and believe and goods will come to you from Lapland, delivered everywhere in the world at the same moment by a hairy man with hairy reindeer, finding a way in even when there is no chimney. That a family cannot afford the goods, and prioritise income badly to do this is not considered. I guess at 3 I didn't object to the toys, but was very clear where they came from - Mum, Dad and the shop.

Children realise that they have grown out of the con well before teenage years, and even connive to dupe their younger siblings. But this is an a inappropriate relationship between adults and young children, and abuse of knowledge and power. Young children need better guidance into what is real and what is not. Of course, if Santa is a con, other things may be too, especially things that cannot be seen and touched. It is for example no coincidence that children develop scepticism about God at the same time, another myth pushed at them remorselessly. There might be a better way, showing children from the beginning, without deception, that working out what is real is actually a difficult thing to do.

I believe that children have inbuilt strategies to help them. I mean, the pretend game. I watched some tots at our local playground playing with a rotating wheel. It had become the Titanic. A lad, age 5, very energised, was working very hard to keep the ship off the iceberg. Another child stumbled over to play with the wheel, clearly confused, so the captain shouted, 'Pretend, silly'. The Titanic sank with exaggerated human despair. Children are extremely good at Pretend. They know that truth can be wrapped up in their imaginary world, and that the game helps their understanding - without ever forgetting the difference between pretend and real. Pretend is no deception, it is a deliberate strategy to use the imagination creatively.

A pretend game of giving and receiving, not only gifts but also kindnesses, would foster the magic of Christmas, and Eid, and Divali and Hanukkah, in children. But it is the children who pretend, not the adults. When pretend becomes a dogmatic lie, and not a portal into the imagination, it actually does a disservice by confusing truth with pretend in the child's mind.

Victor Turner, social process and performance

This post is a summary of a review of the work of Victor Turner, particularly Victor Turner and Contemporary Cultural Performance, edited by Graham St. John, 2008. Turner focused on the concept of liminality, 'betwixt and between', adapted from the 1908 work of Arnold van Gennep on rites of passage. He applied this first to an African tribal society he had studied, and then to modern Western society. At a time when deep social structure was being emphasised, he rooted for social process. Social performances (such as rituals) cemented the comminity together by reducing tension.

That Turner generalised van Gennep's schema has introduced a range of confusions which this volume in part sorts out and in part magnifies. The concept of liminality (the state of being on a threshold) was applied both to major upheavals and to performances generally, distinguishing only between ‘authentic’ liminality, and playful artifices such as the theatre which are named liminoid, or liminal-like. Liminality is viewed as an in-between state of mind, in between fact and fiction (in Turner’s language indicative and subjunctive), in between statuses. This concept has endured in performance studies and has the potential for wider usage. His arguments for a positive liminal state of mind, which he called communitas, also has potential for inspiring creative ‘beyond the box’ approaches. This is ‘bottom-up’, multi-perspectival, democratic – or in his terminology anti-structural, beyond authority structures. Turner drew all this from the idea that ritual is transformative, even therapeutic, social drama, not only functional but eufunctional­ – viz. working for good. This is an attempt to define the creative process, and is still inspiring research and practice. Creativity as theshold still has potential to be developed. However, Turner’s notion of all ritual being social drama is an overgeneralisation. Some ritual is traditional, nostalgic and as regards new insights, quite dead. Tribal rituals studies in anthropology were capable of more dynamic interpretation, with rituals solving social disputes, but Turner was not justified to interpret all ritual as explained by this model. It is reasonable to use these dynamic rituals as a model for transformational theatre, but not all theatre is life-enhancing. The concept helps us to evaluate ritual, distinguishing between rituals which reconcile disputes, which affirm identity and community, and which are nostalgic and static.

Turner’s schema provides a social revolution through ritual, which draws both from his Marxist past and his Christian present. His communitas is reminiscent of ‘fellowship’. Turner’s central belief was that ritual has still a central part to play in modern western society, with serious purposes (liminal), and entertainment aims (liminoid, liminal-like). Performances can have serious transformative purpose, challenging, changing hearts and minds and being a part of social reconciliation. Much about Victor Turner has been reworked and honed; but there are serious concepts which still need to be further developed in terms of theatre, ritual and religion, and even education where there is meaning in the idea of threshold. New studies might concentrate on “the subjunctive”, the potential, the might become: using quasi-ceremony as exciting threshold activities may well reduce existing stresses and encourage appropriate forward planning.

When published, a link to the review will be provided here

Karl Marx and the Good Society

Clearing out books has led me to reread Justice, Equality and Community: An Essay in Marxist Political Theory, a study of the influence of Marx by Vidhu Verma (Sage, New Delhi, 2000). This is a book that will stay on my shelves a little longer.

The question is, what did Marx say about justice, exploitation and the just society. Her own preference was for a non-judicial form of justice, that is justice not as a mechanism of the courts, but a human value. Marx said most on exploitation, especially that based on power differentials and class. On justice and the good society, Verma has attempted, well, a jigsaw puzzle. Justice is not a matter of redistributing wealth to the needy, even if the big picture of socialism and communism was redistribution. The reality was more complex. Justice carried implications of fairness over vested interests, something we still have not worked through. Justice in a judicial sense is not justice at all but a game between advocates seeking to shed doubt on clear guilt. Only the innocent have much to fear from court 'justice'.

So today, what is justice, and what is "the good society"? The big issue is how to balance the aspirations of individuals with general social well-being. I deal first with the individual. Marx dealt with exploitation on a class level, and in particular the exploitation of workers by owners. The decision not to unfairly exploit any other person but to deal justly at all times is an aspect of ethical personal development, which is gradually developed from childhood on by example and by principle. Religions have promoted moral relationships, but they are not dependent on religious belief, and not all religious people are as ethical as the ideal. Thus, this is an agenda for families, schools and other influences, including writers and the media. In short, "What kind of person am I?" is a key educational and social question.

Justice then is an automatic act of such an attitude of mind. It is internalised. It is focused on strangers and ememies as much as family and friends. It cherishes difference and seeks to help the needy. It is hard edged too, for fighting injustice becomes a natural moral response, which means never turning a blind eye.

How to combat injustice and exploitation also has a constitutional and judicial aspect. A constitution lays down expectations; governments create laws to control specified unethical acts such as theft and murder; and courts make decisions and set sanctions. The best sanctions are curative, turning offenders into future ethical individuals. The reality is that sanctions do not do this, and are seen more as taking difficult people off the streets. For sanctions to be therapeutic is expensive. Finland prefers this option with young people, of whom only three are held in custody. This reminds me of Ernest Thompson Seton in America at the beginning of the 2oth century. Noticing that local lads were vandalising the new farm he had bought, instead of calling the police, he invited them for a weekend of woodland activities ending with a campfire. This was the beginning of the American Scout movement, and he was able to observe later in life that all, even the villains, had grown up to become successful fathers and businessmen.

How schools and society can foster this internalised sense of justice, self respect and respect for others is the greatest challenge both nationally and globally. There is no time left for the small-minded political bickering about curriculum and assessment. The stakes are too big.
Seton...