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STUDIES IN WRITTEN LANGUAGE AND LITERACY EDITORS BRIAN STREET King’s College, London
LUDO VERHOEVEN Nijmegen University
ASSOCIATE EDITORS FLORIAN COULMAS DANIEL WAGNER Chuo University, Tokyo University of Pennsylvania EDITORIAL BOARD F. Niyi Akinnaso (Temple University, Philadelphia) David Barton (Lancaster University) Paul Bertelson (Université Libre de Bruxelles) Claire Blanche-Benveniste (Université de Provence) Chander J. Daswani (India Council of Educational Research and Training) Emilia Ferreiro (Instituto Polytecnico México) Edward French (University of the Witwatersrand) Uta Frith (Medical Research Council, London) Harvey J. Graff (University of Texas at Dallas) Hartmut Günther (Universität zu Köln) David Olson (Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, Toronto) Clotilde Pontecorvo (University of Rome) Roger Säljo (Linköping University) Michael Stubbs (Universität Trier)
AIM AND SCOPE The aim of this series is to advance insight into the multifaceted character of written language, with special emphasis on its uses in different social and cultural settings. It combines interest in sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic accounts of the acquisition and transmission of literacy. The series focusses on descriptive and theoretical reports in areas such as language codification, cognitive models of written language use, written language acquisition in children and adults, the development and implementation of literacy campaigns, and literacy as a social marker relating to gender, ethnicity, and class. The series is intended to be multi-disciplinary, combining insights from linguistics, psychology, sociology, education, anthropology, and philosophy.
Volume 10 Marilyn Martin-Jones and Kathryn Jones (eds) Multilingual Literacies Reading and writing different worlds
MULTILINGUAL LITERACIES READING AND WRITING DIFFERENT WORLDS
MARILYN MARTIN-JONES KATHRYN JONES
JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY AMSTERDAM/PHILADELPHIA
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The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences — Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
Contents Acknowledgements Contributors List of Figures List of Tables
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Foreword David Barton
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INTRODUCTION Multilingual literacies Marilyn Martin-Jones and Kathryn Jones CHAPTER 1 Literacy events and literacy practices: theory and practice in the New Literacy Studies Brian Street SECTION I: CHILDREN’S WORLDS OF LITERACY: HOME, SCHOOL AND COMMUNITY CHAPTER 2 Work or play? ‘Unofficial’ literacies in the lives of two East London communities Eve Gregory and Ann Williams CHAPTER 3 Power relations and the social construction of ‘literacy’ and ‘illiteracy’: the experience of Bangladeshi women in Birmingham Adrian Blackledge CHAPTER 4 Learning to read and write at home: the experience of Chinese families in Britain An Ran
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CHAPTER 5 Language, literacy and world view Viv Edwards and Hubisi Nwenmely
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CHAPTER 6 Language and literacy practices in Gujarati Muslim families Raymonde Sneddon
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CHAPTER 7 Children writing in a multilingual nursery Charmian Kenner
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SECTION II: TEXTS, IDENTITIES AND ADULT WORLDS
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CHAPTER 8 Enterprising women: multilingual literacies in the construction of new identities Marilyn Martin-Jones
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CHAPTER 9 Writing switching in British Creole Mark Sebba
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CHAPTER 10 Mediators and mediation in multilingual literacy events Mike Baynham and Helen Lobanga Masing
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CHAPTER 11 Texts, mediation and social relations in a bureaucratised world Kathryn Jones
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SECTION III: CREATING SPACES FOR MULTILINGUAL LITERACIES IN LOCAL COMMUNITY CONTEXTS
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CHAPTER 12 Languages and literacies for autonomy Ahmed Gurnah
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CHAPTER 13 Gender, literacy and community publishing in a multilingual context Yasmin Alam
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Contents SECTION IV: RESEARCHING LANGUAGES AND LITERACIES IN THEIR SOCIAL CONTEXTS
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CHAPTER 14 Taking account of history and culture in community-based research on multilingual literacy 275 Mukul Saxena CHAPTER 15 Photography in collaborative research on multilingual literacy practices: images and understandings of researcher and researched 299 Rachel Hodge and Kathryn Jones CHAPTER 16 Constructing a critical, dialogic approach to research on multilingual literacy: participant diaries and diary interviews Kathryn Jones, Marilyn Martin-Jones and Arvind Bhatt
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AFTERWORD Multilingual literacies, literacy practices, and the continua of biliteracy 353 Nancy Hornberger Bibliography
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Index
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Acknowledgements As this volume goes to press, our heartfelt thanks go to all those who have contributed to the volume, as single or joint authors. The papers assembled here provide a rich and revealing picture of multilingual literacy practices in different contexts across Britain. Together, we have achieved so much more than one or two authors could have done in a monograph on the same topic. We also wish to thank all those people whose lived experiences with different languages and literacies are documented on the different pages of this book. Without their participation in the research and practice described here, this book project could never have been undertaken. They have enabled us to make contemporary practices of reading and writing in languages other than English more visible and to counter universalising claims about literacy. Special thanks also go to Brian Street, the series editor (and an important contributor to the volume). Throughout this long and complex editing project, he has been behind us at every stage, guiding and encouraging us and providing prompt feedback whenever it was needed. In addition, we would like to acknowledge the support and timely bits of advice we have received from David Barton. We were very pleased when he agreed to write the Foreword for the book, relating this collection to other contemporary work on literacy. Another person who deserves a special mention here is Nancy Hornberger. She gave us meticulous feedback on the whole manuscript as well as writing an excellent Afterword to the book. In her Afterword, she sets the work on multilingual literacies being developed here in Britain in a wider context of research and practice. We are very grateful to her for bringing to this volume insights from her own extensive research on multilingual literacies. Finally, we would also like acknowledge two people who played a crucial role in the final stages of editing and formatting the manuscript. They are Ruthanna Barnett and John Hutchinson. Their technical know-how and their competent handling of this part of the work were very much appreciated. These final stages of the work were supported by a generous grant from the Research Fund of the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. Marilyn Martin-Jones and Kathryn Jones
Contributors Yasmin Alam has been teaching in a further education college in the North of England for the last ten years. In addition, she is involved in community publishing work at Gatehouse Books in Manchester. She is a researcher, writer and poet who has been working with marginalised people all her life. Mike Baynham is currently Professor of Education at the University of Leeds. Before moving to this post, he worked at the University of Technology, Sydney where he was Director of the Language and Literacy academic program. His book Literacy Practices was published by Longman in 1995. He has had a long term research interest in multilingual literacy practices. Arvind Bhatt was a Research Associate at Lancaster University from 1993 to 1996. He worked on two consecutive research projects which were ethnographic in nature and focused on multilingual literacy practices. Arvind Bhatt has served as an Advisory Teacher and Team Leader for Community Languages in Leicestershire. He has also taught Gujarati and Mathematics in local secondary schools. He is currently working as an English language support teacher in a secondary school in a multilingual and multicultural neighbourhood of Leicester. Adrian Blackledge is Senior Lecturer in English at University of Birmingham, Westhill. His research has focused on literacies in multilingual communities, and bilingualism in education. His publications include Literacy, Power and Social Justice, and Teaching Bilingual Children, both from Trentham Books. Viv Edwards is Professor of Language in Education at the University of Reading where she is also Director of the Reading and Language Information Centre. She is co-editor of the journal Language and Education and has researched and published widely in the area of multilingual classrooms. Eve Gregory is Professor of Language and Culture in Education at Gold-
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smiths College, University of London, where she works principally with students on postgraduate and research degrees. She has directed projects supported by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) investigating children’s out-of-school reading and the transfer of cognitive strategies between home and school. In 1997 she was awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship arising from this work. Her books include Making Sense of a New World: Learning to Read in a Second Language (Sage 1996), One Child, Many Worlds: Early Learning in Multicultural Communities (Fulton and Teachers College Press, 1997) and City Literacies: Learning to Read across Generations and Cultures (joint author with Ann Williams) (Routledge, forthcoming). She is currently directing a project entitled: ‘Siblings as mediators of literacy in two East London communities’ funded by the ESRC. Ahmed Gurnah has a BA degree in Politics from the University of Kent and a Ph.D. in Sociology from Leeds University. After completing his Ph.D. he went on to teach at Sheffield Hallam University. From there, he went on to work with Sheffield Local Education Authority as Head of the Sheffield United Multicultural Education Service (SUMES). Ahmed Gurnah was joint author (with Alan Scott) of a book on social theory entitled The Uncertain Science (Routledge, 1992). He has also contributed articles to journals and to edited collections on the following topics: literacy, multilingualism, educational policy, social policy and the struggle against racism. Rachel Hodge has a particular interest in researching social uses of literacy. She is an Education for Development (Ed.Dev.) Consultant, working with the Community Literacy Project Nepal (funded by the Department for International Development, DfID), supporting participatory/ethnographic research on social uses of literacy. She taught TESOL for several years in Blackburn. There she carried out micro-ethnographic research, with members of the South Asian community, for post-graduate sociolinguistic studies at Lancaster University. She also taught on the Bilingualism course at Lancaster and organised and taught Education and Development courses on ‘Researching Literacy’ for participants from different countries. Nancy H. Hornberger is Professor of Education and Director of Educational Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, Philadelphia, USA. She specializes in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology; language planning and educational policy; bilingualism and biliteracy;
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educational policy and practice for indigenous and immigrant language minorities in the United States and internationally. Recent publications include edited volumes on Research Methods in Language and Education (Kluwer, 1997, coedited with D. Corson), Indigenous Literacies in the Americas (Mouton, 1996), and Sociolinguistics and Language Teaching (Cambridge, 1996, co-edited with S. McKay). Kathryn Jones is currently working in Wales. She is Senior Research Consultant at Cwmni Iaith Cyf. (The Language Company Ltd.). She is also a parttime post-doctoral Research Fellow at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth and an honorary Research Fellow at Lancaster University. Her main interests are multilingualism, literacy and language policy and planning. In addition to her work on the literacy practices of Welsh users, her recent research includes a project on language and gender for the Equal Opportunities Commission in Wales and a project on language issues in education for the Tanzanian Ministry of Education and Culture. Charmian Kenner conducted doctoral research into multilingualism and early writing at Southampton University. She is now an Associate Lecturer in Education for the Open University, and a Research Associate with the Culture, Communication and Societies academic group at the Institute of Education, University of London. She is currently conducting a longitudinal study of children learning to write in more than one script system. Her study is funded by the ESRC. She also works as a freelance researcher and lecturer in the areas of bilingualism and literacy, and has contributed to several publications for teachers of bilingual children. Helen Lobanga Tamtam (nee Masing) is a Senior Lecturer at the Vanuatu Teachers College, Port Via, Vanuatu. The research reported on in this chapter was carried out as part of a Master of Arts in TESOL at the University of Technology, Sydney. Hubisi Nwenmely was born in St Lucia and came to the UK at the age of nine. Her experience of teaching Kwéyòl, the unofficial language of St Lucia, is reported in Language Reclamation: French Creole Language Teaching in the UK and the Caribbean (Multilingual Matters, 1996). She is a Lecturer in the Department of Professional Education in Community Studies at the University of Reading.
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Marilyn Martin-Jones is Professor of Bilingualism and Education at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. Her main areas of interest are: bilingualism, codeswitching in bilingual discourse and multilingual literacy. Most of the research that she has conducted over the last twenty years has been of a sociolinguistic and ethnographic nature and, so far, it has been based in multilingual urban contexts in England — in classrooms and in local community contexts. This work has been published in journals such as Applied Linguistics, The International Journal of the Sociology of Language, The Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development and Linguistics and Education. Her most recent publication is a book entitled Voices of Authority: Education and Linguistic Difference (Greenwood, forthcoming, co-edited with Monica Heller). An Ran was a Lecturer in English as a Foreign Language at Guangdong Foreign Studies University in the People’s Republic of China before she came to the UK as a visiting scholar in 1995. Since then, she has been working on a Ph.D. on ‘Learning in two languages and cultures’ which explores the experiences of language and literacy learning at home and in school of Chinese children in Britain. She completed her Ph.D. just before this book went to press. Mukul Saxena is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of English Language and Applied Linguistics at the University of Brunei Darussalam, SE Asia. Prior to this, he worked in Britain for fifteen years, at the University College of Ripon and York St John, at Lancaster University and at York University. In Britain, he was involved in research in a number of areas of sociolinguistics: bilingual classroom interaction, language maintenance and shift, multilingual literacies and forensic linguistics. Mark Sebba is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Linguistics and Modern English Language at Lancaster University since 1989. His interests include language contact, bilingualism, corpus linguistics and orthography. His previous publications include The Syntax of Serial Verbs (John Benjamins, 1987) — a study of verb forms in creoles, West African and other languages, London Jamaican (Longman, 1993), on the language of young Caribbeans born in London and Contact Languages: Pidgins and Creoles (Macmillan, 1997). Raymonde Sneddon is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Education and Community Studies at the University of East London. She was a teacher in
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Hackney, east London for seventeen years during which she taught primary school children from a very wide range of linguistic backgrounds. Raymonde has a special interest in researching and developing the involvement of parents and community organisations in mainstream schooling. The study reported in this volume is part of her PhD thesis. Brian Street is Professor of Language in Education at King’s College, London University and Visiting Professor of Education in the Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania. He undertook anthropological fieldwork on literacy and education in Iran during the 1970’s, and has since written and lectured extensively on literacy practices in countries such as South Africa, Australia, Canada and the U.S. He is best known for Literacy in Theory and Practice (Cambridge University Press 1985). He also edited Cross-Cultural Approaches to Literacy, (Cambridge University Press 1993) and brought out a collection of his essays with Longman under the title Social Literacies (1995), which was cited in his receipt of the David S. Russell award for distinguished research by the National Council for Teaching of English in the U.S. He has written six books and published over 60 scholarly articles. He is currently concerned to link ethnographic-style research on the cultural dimension of literacy with contemporary debates in education. Ann Williams is a Research Fellow at Goldsmiths’ College and King’s College, University of London. Her research interests are in literacy and in the phonological and grammatical aspects of modern urban English. She has carried out funded research projects on home and school literacy practices in multicultural contexts, the influence of non-standard dialects on children’s writing, the role of adolescents in language change and the formation of new town dialects. She is joint author (with Eve Gregory) of City Literacies: Learning to Read across Generations and Cultures (Routledge, forthcoming).
List of figures Chapter 4 (An Ran) Figure 1: Use of different teaching strategies Figure 2: Reading aloud behaviour Figure 3: Use of questions Figure 4: Relative proportions of different type of questions Figure 5: Use of instructions Figure 6: Use of explanation Figure 7: Different explanation strategies Figure 8: Use of review and practice Figure 9: Mother’s responses to their children Figure 10: Page from a standard Chinese textbook Chapter 6 (Sneddon) Figure 1: Mother’s use of three languages across the whole sample (in percentages) Figure 2: Mother’s use of Gujarati and Urdu in the family according to whether the family used the Community Centre (in percentages) Figure 3: Father’s use of Gujarati and Urdu in the family according to whether the family used the Community Centre (in percentages) Figure 4: Children’s use of Gujarati and Urdu in the family according to whether the family used the Community Centre Figure 5: Children’s use of Gujarati and Urdu to their siblings by age and whether the families had Community Centre support Figure 6: Mean index of literacy support experienced by 3½ year old children in Gujarati/Urdu and English Figure 7: Index of literacy support in Gujarati/Urdu and English for children aged 7 Figure 8: Index of literacy support in Gujarati/Urdu and English for children aged 11
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Chapter 7 (Kenner) Figure 1: Airletter in Gujarati, written by Meera’s mother in the nursery (with addition by Meera later that morning) Figure 2: Airletter written by Meera, alongside her mother in the nursery Figure 3a: Extract from an air letter in Thai written by Billy’s mother in the nursery Figure 3b: Symbols written by Billy later that morning: “I write like my mum”; “Mu-ang Thai” Figure 4: Meera’s linguistic world Figure 5: Billy’s linguistic world Chapter 11 (Jones) Figure 1: One page of the IACS Form (English version) Figure 2: Animal Movement form Chapter 14 (Saxena) Figure 1a: Reading skills according to language Figure 1b: Writing skills according to language Figure 2: Language/script choices for writing letters/notes to South Asian friends and relatives in Britain Figure 3: Language/script choices for writing letters/notes to South Asian friends, relatives and officials in India. Figure 4: Language/script choices for reading newspapers, books and magazines Figure 5a: Parents’ preference regarding learning of reading in different languages Figure 5b: Parent’s preference regarding learning of writing in different languages Chapter 15 (Hodge Jones) Figure 1: Fazila’s photographs, recipes and a transcript from Rachel’s study in Blackburn, England. Figure 2: Photographs and a transcript about Zuleka’s literacy practices from Rachel’s study in Blackburn, England. Figure 3: Photographs, transcript and a rap poem by Adil from Rachel’s study in Blackburn, England. Figure 4: Extract of a collaborative photography session with Rhian from
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Kathryn’s study in Wales. Figure 5: Photographs by Kathryn and Rhian from Kathryn’s study in Wales Figure 6: Photographs by Kathryn and Rhian from Kathryn’s study in Wales Chapter 16 (Jones, Martin-Jones, Bhatt) Figure 1: Kathryn’s ‘translation’ of a diary sheet for one of the participants in her study in the Vale of Clwyd, Wales (Dewi Wilkinson). Figure 2: Dewi Wilkinson’s day, Monday 20th February 1995. Figure 3: Diary sheet for one of the participants in Arvind and Marilyn’s study in Leicester, England.
List of tables Chapter 2 (Gregory Williams) Table 1a. Bilingual children and their families Table 1b. Monolingual children and their families Table 2. Bilingual children’s out of school literacy activities Table 3. Monolingual children’s out of school literacy activities Chapter 4 (An Ran) Table 1. Details of the five case study families Chapter 13 (Alam) Table 1. Freire’s comparison of two approaches to education (adapted from Freire 1970)
Foreword David Barton
It is worth pausing for a while and considering the title of this book, Multilingual Literacies: Reading and Writing Different Worlds. The title and the sub-title indicate two important complementary themes, firstly that our understanding of literacies can be furthered by examining multilingual contexts, and, secondly, that the study of multilingual communities can be enhanced by examining the significance of reading and writing. These two directions of influence, that multilingualism sheds light on literacy and that literacy sheds light on multilingualism, are themes throughout the book. This is a very rich volume. It is a unique collection of studies of multilingual language use, primarily in urban communities in Britain. Each study has its own importance and is making its own particular points. These topics are brought together in the introductory chapter and the section introductions. As well as emphasising the situatedness and the particularities of literacy practices, each study is also making statements about the nature of literacy and about the dynamics of bilingual communities and how they are held together by literate activity. As Marilyn Martin-Jones and Kathryn Jones point out in the introduction, the fields of bilingualism and literacy have somewhat different intellectual histories with distinct theoretical framings and methodological approaches. The excitement of this book is in bringing together these fields, in finding commonalities and in creating new directions. The work reported here brings together studies in Britain, as well as complementing studies of literacy in minority communities in the United States (Moss 1994; Perez 1998) and historical studies of literacy in bilingual situations (Boyarin 1992). For me, as someone who has worked mainly in literacy studies, the framing provided by multilingualism has enabled me to see many issues in a new light and to see ways in which the understanding of reading and writing can develop. As a starting-point in this, these are a set of studies of language in
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everyday life. Attention to detail seems to me to be an important common factor in these diverse studies with varied approaches and methodologies, attention to the detail of the dynamics of language use in people’s lives. This is the detail of how parents actually help children learn languages, how people switch between using different written languages in systematic ways, how people change their literacy practices during their lives, and much more. It is this detail which is needed to inform and enrich theories of language use. Equally important, such detail is needed to inform public views and government policies. Whilst much literacy research and bilingualism research has been concerned with children and schooling, one particular strength of this book is the way in which it studies the activities of both children and adults and the way it juxtaposes research in schools and out of schools. The work on children is always contextualised by considerations of adults’ practices, and activities within education are considered in relation to everyday activities. This positioning of educational practice means that the research can contribute to fundamental questions about the changing nature of schooling being posed in Britain and other industrialised countries. School learning is firmly located in children’s lives, with the importance of family and community support clearly recognised. Research on bilingualism raises many questions for the field of literacy studies to address. Crucially the research demonstrates that bilingualism is not something to be added on to literacy studies, creating some secondary area of research, something of marginal significance; rather it is central. Bilingualism research provides concepts, phenomena and ways of researching for all literacy research. Inevitably, the fusion of the two fields also changes them inescapably and provides new avenues for research. There are phenomena which help us understand monolingual and multilingual homes and communities equally, such as the role of grand parents and other family members, the importance of mediation of activities by others, how literate practices are not just to do with reading and writing, the relation of researcher and researched. One concept which is changed by the fusion of bilingualism research and literacy research is the notion of community. Research starting out from spoken language tends to emphasise interactions which are face-to-face and in the same place: consequently, communities are usually thought of as physical locations. Fusing literacy research and bilingualism research provides a more complex picture. Literacy enables us to see that communities can be held
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together by literate practices, not just by face-to-face interaction and physical location. Literacy creates textually mediated worlds and different forms of community. To give an example, in our research in Lancaster (Barton & Hamilton 1998), in a predominantly monolingual community, there were bilingual people, including several speakers of Gujarati, some of Polish, and some of French. They all lived in the same physical neighbourhood and some of their activities related to the neighbourhood and to relations with neighbours. Other activities, such as the religious activities of the Gujarati speakers, revolved around communities of interests and were not identified with the physical location of the neighbourhoods in which the people lived. Literacy was important in sustaining these dispersed activities. Reading and writing provide a powerful way in which communities of interest are held together; and other technologies are likely to create new notions of community. There is a second way in which the notion of community can develop. Communities are seen as physical; they are also seen as minority, and often bounded by minority language use. However, it is also important to research dominant and mainstream practices in the same ways, with the same theories and the same methodologies, seeing how they are located in communities of interest. This point is similar to the principle of symmetry articulated by Pardoe (2000) in relation to student writing. We would see that many of the dynamics of minority communities apply to mainstream communities, and that the dynamics of multilingual interaction throw light upon monolingual interaction. The arguments, models and theories in this book are applicable to all language research. David Barton, Lancaster, January 2000.
INTRODUCTION
Multilingual Literacies Marilyn Martin-Jones and Kathryn Jones
The contributors to this volume all share a social view of language and literacy. The chapters assembled here provide detailed insights into what people do when they read and write in different languages and how they make sense of what they do. The volume as a whole presents a rich picture of how languages and literacies are embedded in different cultural practices and in specific views of the world. It also reveals the complex ways in which people draw on the language and literacy resources available to them as they take on different identities in different domains of their lives. Across the volume, the focus moves from children in home, community and school contexts to women and men in a range of different domains: in their workplaces, in bureaucratic encounters, in adult education contexts and in their own homes and local communities. Since most of the accounts included here are concerned with language and literacy practices among people from linguistic minority groups, a major theme for the volume is that, in a multilingual setting, the acquisition and use of languages and literacies are inevitably bound up with asymmetrical relations of power between ethnolinguistic groups. The power relations in different settings are rooted in specific historical processes, in the development of a post-colonial order, in international labour migration, in the movement of refugees, in minority rights movements or in global changes of a social and political nature, but in the contemporary world, there are broad resonances in the ways in which these power relations are played out in local sites. Tensions arise between parents and local schools about the language and literacy education of their children. The home-school boundary is frequently a site of
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struggle over linguistic and cultural rights and over differing views or discourses about what counts as language and literacy instruction. Conflicts are also evident in other institutional contexts, such as in workplaces where bilingual adults are positioned as linguistic brokers or as mediators of texts produced in the dominant language or in bureaucratic settings where people are faced with texts which originate in a bureaucratic world which is quite unfamiliar to them. The chapters in this volume present illuminating accounts of the issues thrown up by the conflicts in local sites such as these. The links between language, literacy and power are viewed through three different lenses: through research carried out in different multilingual settings (Chapters 2 to 11), through reflections on the relationship between researcher and researched in ethnographic studies of multilingual literacy (Chapters 14 to 16) and through accounts of educational interventions in different urban settings (Chapters 12 and 13). Most of the chapters in the volume focus on linguistic minority groups in different areas of Britain, or more specifically, England and Wales. However, a brief glance at the range of spoken and written languages involved makes it clear that many of the women, men and children whose lived experiences with literacy are described and analysed here have networks of family and friendship which span several continents. Sylheti speakers in the Spitalfields area of London and in the city of Birmingham have family ties with Bangladesh; speakers of Kwéyòl and Jamaican Creole have links with different Caribbean islands, with St. Lucia and Jamaica respectively; speakers of Gujarati in Leicester and London are involved in kinship networks which extend to the west of India and to the south and east of Africa; speakers of Panjabi and Urdu in Manchester and Blackburn have close connections with Pakistan; speakers of Panjabi and Hindi in Southall are involved in a diaspora which stretches from the north west of India to East Africa; Arabic speakers in Sheffield have family links with the Yemen; speakers of different Chinese languages, including Putonghua and Cantonese, who live in Reading and in London keep in close touch with relatives in different regions of China, including Beijing and Hong Kong and many Welsh speakers keep in touch with relatives across an older diaspora which includes England, Canada, Australia, the USA and Argentina. Whilst the focus of this volume is on one national context, readers familiar with debates about the linguistic and cultural rights of linguistic minority groups in other contexts where there is still a powerful monolingual
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ethos will be struck by the resonances with the issues that are addressed here, in educational settings or in other institutional sites. Many of the contributors to this volume have been closely involved in debates about the languages and literacies of the newer and older linguistic minority groups in the British Isles. The publication of this volume will, hopefully, serve to make these languages and literacies, and the issues surrounding their acquisition and use, more visible to researchers and students in the fields of bilingualism and literacy studies and to practitioners in a range of institutional contexts. Most of the research work presented here was developed in the 1990s. This was a period when there was intense interest in research on multilingual literacies and some innovative work was being undertaken. Up until the mid1990s, there had been very little contact between researchers working in different localities and few opportunities for developing a comparative perspective. We therefore felt that, as a first step, we should pursue the possibility of bringing together researchers working in different multilingual settings in Britain. So, we organised a research seminar on Multilingual Literacies at Lancaster University in November 1996 as part of the Occasional Seminar Series of the British Association for Applied Linguistics. Most people involved in this seminar indicated that it had represented a landmark in the development of this field of study in Britain. We therefore decided that it would be useful to assemble a collection of papers which would capture the range and quality of recent work in the field. That is how this book project came into being. As the project unfolded, we saw that other advantages accrue from having a collection of this kind. One distinct advantage of having accounts of research in different sites in one volume is that commonalities and differences emerge which are in themselves illuminating. In addition, the juxtaposition of studies throws issues of theory and method into sharper focus. Whilst the research-based contributions to this volume all put forward a social view of language and literacy, they do so in different ways. They draw on different research traditions within Sociolinguistics and Anthropology and they employ different approaches to the study of multilingual literacy. The starting point for some researchers has been with a particular sociolinguistic approach to the study of Bilingualism/ Multilingualism or Creole Languages and, for others, it has been the New Literacy Studies, with its emphasis on ethnography. A range of research methodologies are therefore represented here. Quite a few of the studies reported in the research-based chapters of the volume are ethnographic in nature and involve participant observation, semi-
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structured interviews, the gathering of literacy materials, diary work or the use of still photography. Two studies have combined ethnography with a smallscale sociolinguistic survey. Others have combined ethnography with audioor video-recording, transcription and analysis of spoken interactions around texts. These analyses of talk around text are of two broad types: conversational analysis, focusing on the ways in which meanings are negotiated in and through interactions, and quantitative analysis aimed at capturing broader interactional patterns, such as the preponderance of different types of contributions made by different participants in an interaction. And, lastly, there are studies included here which are more text-focused and which involve close linguistic analysis, and, in one case, analysis of orthographic conventions and innovations. The research methodologies represented here fall on a broad continuum from relatively detached observation, sometimes combined with analysis which is designed to capture patterns or regularities in the use of texts or in literacy practices, to interactive and reflexive methods of an ethnographic kind. The ethnographic work reported also falls on a continuum, representing different degrees of engagement and collaboration with the research subjects. The studies which involve the greatest collaboration are those which are closest to the concerns of two educational practitioners who write about two innovative educational interventions in multilingual settings that they have been involved in (Chapters 12 and 13).
Why multilingual literacies? Both of the terms in the title of this volume derive from debates that have taken place in adjacent fields of research: in the sociolinguistic study of Bilingualism and in the New Literacy Studies. The terms may have different connotations for different readers, so our aim here is to unpack this inter-textuality and to give brief insights into the debates that led to the increasing use of both terms. We will take each in turn, starting with the term ‘literacies’. Like other academics and practitioners who locate themselves within the New Literacy Studies tradition, we talk about literacies in the plural to signal a critique of the a-social, a-historical skill/ability understanding of reading and writing associated with what Brian Street has called the ‘autonomous’ view of literacy (Street 1984, 1993: Chapter 1, this volume). Literacies are social
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practices: ways of reading and writing and using written texts that are bound up in social processes which locate individual action within social and cultural processes. These practices are partly observable in specific events, but also operate on a socio-cognitive level. They include the values, understandings, and intentions people have, both individually and collectively about what they and others do (Jones 1999: 39). Focusing on the plurality of literacies means recognising the diversity of reading and writing practices and the different genres, styles and types of texts associated with various activities, domains or social identities (see Street 1984; Barton 1994a; Baynham 1995; Gee 1990; Ivanic 1998 for a fuller discussion of these arguments). In multilingual contexts, different languages, language varieties and scripts add other dimensions to the diversity and complexity of literacies (see Hornberger 1989, 1990 for a detailed illustration of this). We use the term ‘multilingual’ rather than ‘bilingual’ in order to capture the multiplicity and complexity of individual and group repertoires. We do this for four main reasons. Firstly, the term multilingual provides the most accurate description of the communicative repertoires of many of the individuals and linguistic groups referred to in this volume: many have more than two spoken or written languages and language varieties within their communicative repertoire. These include the languages and literacies associated with their cultural inheritance, the regional varieties of English spoken in their local neighbourhoods and some form of standard English. Thus, for example, the Welsh speakers in the rural community described in the chapter by Kathryn Jones (Chapter 11) speak a regional variety of Welsh associated with Dyffryn Clwyd (the Vale of Clwyd in north east Wales). They also speak a regional Welsh variety of English. In addition, they read and write standard English. Another, slightly different example comes from the chapters by Eve Gregory and Anne Williams (Chapter 2) and by Adrian Blackledge (Chapter 3). The people whose literacy experiences are presented in these chapters speak Sylheti, a regional language spoken in the Sylhet region of Bangladesh but they read and write Bengali, the standard national language of the country. In the London context, described in Chapter 2, many Sylheti speakers are fluent in the English vernacular of East London, whilst in the Birmingham context, described in Chapter 3, many speak the local West Midlands variety of English. The shaping of the communicative repertoires of local linguistic minority groups of migrant origin depends, in this way, on the patterns of settlement in Britain. Secondly, we have adopted the term ‘multilingual’ because it signals the
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multiplicity and complexity of the communicative purposes that have come to be associated with different spoken and written languages within a group’s repertoire. As with the local vernacular varieties of English mentioned above and standard British English, the languages and literacies in the communicative repertoires of groups of migrant or refugee origin carry traces of the social structures and language ideologies of the country of origin. As Woolard (1998) and Blommaert (1999) have recently emphasised, language ideologies are intimately bound up with people’s day-to-day choices with regard to the languages used for reading and writing in different public domains and for spoken communication in the more private spaces of their lives. Thus, for example, Sylheti speakers see Bengali as having more prestige and as being the ‘appropriate’ language of literacy, whilst Sylheti continues to be used as an important emblem of identity. Similarly, the Panjabi speakers of Pakistani origin introduced in the chapters by Yasmin Alam (Chapter 13) and Rachel Hodge and Kathryn Jones (Chapter 15) speak Panjabi and write in Urdu, the national language of Pakistan. Spoken and written Urdu is seen as carrying greater prestige than Panjabi, a language which is primarily used in its spoken form but one which still commands considerable language loyalty in Britain and in the Panjab area of Pakistan. Some spoken or written languages in a group repertoire are acquired and used for highly specialised purposes. Take, for instance, the languages used for reading religious texts, during different forms of religious observance. Several of the Muslim groups mentioned in the chapters of this volume (Chapters 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 12, 13, 14 and 15) use Qur’anic Arabic for reading aloud from the Qur’an. Urdu and English are also used by some groups of South Asian origin for silent reading of books on the principles of religious practice. People from local Hindu groups, such as the Gujarati and Panjabi speakers introduced in Chapters 8 and 14 respectively, use Hindi and Sanskrit for doing the readings from Hindu epics such as the Gita, Mahabharat and Ramayan which are associated with religious observance. These readings are usually accompanied by religious songs and chants in the same languages. The third reason why we use the term ‘multilingual’ is to take account of the fact that in any linguistic minority household or local group, among speakers of Welsh, Gujarati or Cantonese, there are multiple paths to the acquisition of the spoken and written languages within the group repertoire and people have varying degrees of expertise1 in these languages and literacies. As the chapters in this volume show, the degree of expertise that
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individuals attain depends on how they are positioned with regard to access to different spoken and written varieties. For example, among some groups of migrant origin, such as those from Bangladesh (see Chapters 2 and 3) or Pakistan (see Chapters 13 and 15), women have had fewer opportunities than men to acquire literacy in English, and even the literacies of their local community. Many young people from these linguistic minority groups have not had the opportunity to acquire the literacies of their cultural inheritance because of the lack of provision in Britain for the teaching of languages other than English or the prestigious languages of the European Community. This is an issue which is brought out in the chapters by Raymonde Sneddon (Chapter 7) and Ahmed Gurnah (Chapter 12). Where opportunities are available for young people to learn to read and write in their family’s preferred language(s), they often have insufficient time to develop the expertise required to use the written languages for purposes which are meaningful to them and to other members of their family. Some languages and writing systems demand considerable investment of time and effort in the early stages of learning. An Ran stresses this point in Chapter 4 as she presents her study of Chinese children learning to read and write Chinese with their mothers at home, in an urban British context. The fourth reason why the term ‘multilingual’ is more useful than the term ‘bilingual’ is because it focuses attention on the multiple ways in which people draw on and combine the codes in their communicative repertoire when they speak and write. The term ‘bilingual’ only evokes a two-way distinction between codes whereas, as we have noted above, in multilingual settings, people typically have access to several codes which they move in and out of with considerable fluency and subtlety as they speak and write. Whilst a monolingual norm may operate for the production of texts in an institutional context, the talk around those texts may be ‘multilingual’, incorporating elements of the text and stretches of talk in different language varieties. This phenomenon is captured particularly well in the long extracts of spoken data presented by Mike Baynham and Helen Lobanga Masing in Chapter 10. The contrasts between codes in a multilingual repertoire are often employed by speakers and writers as a meaning making resource. This is what has come to be widely known as the metaphorical function of codeswitching (Blom and Gumperz 1972; Gumperz 1982; Heller 1988). In recent writing on codeswitching, it is acknowledged that the meaning making potential of codeswitching is infinite (Auer 1990). Moreover, as we have seen in recent
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empirical research in Britain (Li Wei 1994; Rampton 1995) the codeswitching practices of individuals and groups are continually shifting, with young people’s practices being the most fluid and changeable. Lastly, we should add that by combining the terms ‘multilingual’ and ‘literacies’ we intend to signal that the configurations of languages and literacies considered here are not viewed in a deterministic light. We also want to stress that specific practices which involve the use of different spoken and written languages are always undergoing a process of reaffirmation and redefinition, both within individual repertoires over individual life spans and at a broader cultural level.
The acquisition and use of languages and literacies in different sites The chapters in this volume examine language and literacy practices in a broad range of sites: from people’s own life worlds, their homes, local community contexts and the spaces they have chosen for creative expression, to institutional contexts such as schools, adult education centres, workplaces and higher education research. In this section of our introduction, we map out these sites and draw attention to some of the themes and issues which emerge from the book as a whole. Most of the themes and issues we mention below cut across the chapters and sections of the volume. Local life worlds Half of the chapters in the volume (Chapters 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 14 and 15) give us glimpses of language and literacy practices which are situated in the homes and local neighbourhoods of children and adults from different linguistic minority groups in Britain. They reveal some of the ways in which specific languages, literacy practices and uses of texts are linked with wider cultural practices and beliefs, reminding us of the importance of cultural and historical analysis in studies of literacy in local multilingual settings. For example, in Chapter 14, using a case study of one Panjabi Hindu family in Southall, Mukul Saxena shows that the history of individual families, their values and their beliefs about literacy and about different scripts, are rooted in the wider history of their region of origin. Chapters 2, 5, 6, 8, 12 and 14 take us into local urban contexts in England
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and introduce individuals and groups who are involved in organising community classes and Saturday schools for the teaching of the languages and literacies of their cultural inheritance. What is striking here is the amount of time and effort vested by parents and other adults from linguistic minority groups in organising and delivering this educational provision, outside of the formal education system, and the wealth of knowledge and expertise they bring to this enterprise. Some bring extensive experience of language maintenance efforts and literacy education in other settings. Take, for instance, the people who came to Britain from the Gujarati and Panjabi communities in East and South Africa during the 1970s. As Mukul Saxena notes in his chapter, their arrival in Britain during this period had a considerable impact on the nature and scope of local provision for the teaching of community languages. The chapters by Raymonde Sneddon (Chapter 6) and Ahmed Gurnah (Chapter 12) document some of the activities involved in setting up and running schools and classes such as these, the types of difficulties encountered by the teachers and organisers, and the benefits which have accrued to the parents and children involved. Chapters 2, 3, 4 and 6 provide insights into the literacy environments of children’s homes and into the ways in which different languages and literacies come to be associated with the relationships between family members. Chapters 3 and 4 detail mothers’ contributions to children’s acquisition of the literacies of their cultural inheritance, while Chapters 2 and 3 draw attention to the crucial role played by older siblings in orienting young children to school literacies. From life worlds to the formal education system Chapters 2–7 draw out a number of themes related to the relationship between the languages and literacies of local life worlds and those which predominate within the formal education system. The first theme has to do with the choice of the spoken and written language which is to be the medium of education and the cultural politics associated with this choice. This theme is taken up by Viv Edwards and Hubisi Nwenmely (Chapter 5) in their account of two educational initiatives: one in St. Lucia and one in Britain. First, they describe attempts that were made in St. Lucia in the 1980s to bring Kwéyòl, the language most widely spoken on the island, into the schools. The development and dissemination of an orthography for Kwéyòl was a focal part of this
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initiative. However, standard Caribbean English has remained the main language of education, despite the launching of a national campaign to promote Kwéyòl and this new orthography. What we see at work here are those cultural and historical processes identified by Bourdieu (1991) which contribute to the reproduction of symbolic power and the imposition of a particular language as the sole ‘legitimate’ language of schooling. The second initiative described by Viv Edwards and Hubisi Nwenmely was situated in the British context. This was a project for the introduction of Kwéyòl literacy in adult education settings in the London area. A small network of classes was established as a result of this initiative and succeeded in drawing in young adults who spoke Kwéyòl and who were already literate in English, but wanted to learn to read and write in Kwéyòl. The authors show how this reclaiming of literacies associated with their cultural inheritance gave these young people a means of contesting the symbolic dominance of standard English within the formal education system in England and in St. Lucia and a new means of affirming their cultural difference. The second broad theme to emerge from these chapters relates to the differences between home and school literacy practices and to differing views about what counts as language and literacy education in the early years. Most of the chapters paint a stark picture of the lack of awareness in schools of the diversity of lived experiences with literacy that bilingual children have in their homes and in local community contexts. They also highlight the tendency for parents’ expertise and their views about language and literacy education to be overlooked. Reading and writing in English is what really counts. As Adrian Blackledge points out in Chapter 3, parents who do not feel comfortable reading and writing in English are sometimes represented as ‘illiterate’, in the dominant discourse of the school, since no account is taken of their expertise in reading and writing other languages. Chapters 2, 3, 4 and 5 draw attention to the educational orthodoxies about early reading which dominate school literacy practices, practices which are now often transported into the home domain. Each of the authors in turn point out that these views about early reading take little or no account of the diversity of paths that young children take into literacy in their life worlds beyond the school or of the different ways in which young children come to see themselves as learners. Chapter 7, by Charmian Kenner, moves us away from this stark picture of the ways in which one language variety and schooled literacies are imposed
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within the mainstream education system. She focuses on one local educational intervention, in a multilingual nursery classroom, where parents were encouraged to bring home languages, literacies and scripts into school. She documents in detail how the children responded to this and shows how this intervention created new learning opportunities for them. At the same time, she provides illuminating insights into children’s developing understanding of literacy as a social practice. Adult education and community publishing Chapters 12 and 13 focus on issues related to adult literacy in two multilingual contexts: in two cities in the north of England. Both chapters chart the development of particular forms of educational intervention designed to tackle marginalisation and social exclusion among local linguistic minority groups and to change the nature of provision for the teaching of English as an additional language to men and women from local groups. The first part of Chapter 12 focuses on a local literacy campaign and Chapter 13 describes a writing and publishing project for women of South Asian origin which is publishing bilingual books by and for women enrolled in English classes. In different ways, the authors both conclude that among the essential pre-conditions for success in educational interventions of this kind is a commitment to drawing on the cultural and linguistic resources of men and women from local linguistic minority groups and working bilingually. They also emphasise the need to plan for the involvement of participants at each stage of the day-to-day organisation of such educational interventions. Both authors insist that involvement in initiatives such as these means engaging in complex cultural politics and necessitates a clear analysis of what is achievable given the social and economic conditions of local minority groups and given the nature of the gender relations within particular local groups. Workplaces and bureaucratic encounters Several chapters in the volume (Chapters 8, 10, 11 and 16) focus our attention on literacy practices and uses of texts in workplaces or in bureaucratic encounters related to people’s work. Some authors deal with rural work settings (Chapters 10, 11 and part of 16) and some with workplaces in multilingual urban settings (Chapter 8 and part of 16).
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A recurring theme in these chapters is that of mediation. The chapters which focus on rural settings foreground the tensions between rural life worlds and bureaucratic worlds and reveal some of the ways in which people are positioned by bureaucratic texts which are produced in metropolitan centres of power. These chapters also describe in detail how bilinguals, who read and write in dominant languages and who are familiar with particular kinds of texts, come to act as literacy mediators in different kinds of literacy events, assisting with the interpretation of texts imbued with bureaucratic authority or assisting with the production of letters addressed to institutions based in distant urban contexts. Mike Baynham and Helen Lobanga Masing (Chapter 10) and Kathryn Jones (Chapter 11) give us close-ups of several literacy events of this kind and show how mediators draw on different languages and on their knowledge of different linguistic registers in bridging different worlds. Chapters 8 and 16 provide brief insights into the workplace literacy experiences of bilinguals in urban settings in England. These are bilinguals who have been recruited to work in local government and voluntary institutions with a specific brief to use their languages and literacies in the provision of local services. Like the literacy mediators studied in rural settings by Kathryn Jones and by Mike Baynham and Helen Lobanga Masing, these bilinguals in urban workplaces are also positioned on the boundaries between the life worlds of people in local communities, the clients for the services provided by local authorities and voluntary bodies, and the institutional worlds in which they work. They frequently speak with clients or with the children in their care in their home or community languages, as when helping people to deal with forms or official letters, but the writing they do is predominantly in English. Adult life worlds Chapters 8 and 9 provide insights into specialised literacy practices and uses of texts associated with the life worlds of adults from two different linguistic minority groups: Gujarati and Creole speakers respectively. From these accounts emerges evidence of creative uses of languages, literacies and orthography in the construction of specific cultural identities. Chapter 8 by Marilyn Martin-Jones focuses on the languages and literacies in the lives of two Gujarati women, one Hindu and one Muslim, who both moved to Britain as young adults. It charts the ways in which particular languages and literacies
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entered their lives at different periods and in different domains. It also shows how, in their contemporary life worlds in Britain, the two women draw on language and literacy resources acquired in earlier periods of their lives in defining new gender identities for themselves. Both women are involved in extensive voluntary work in which they make use of the languages and literacies of their cultural inheritance: one in running a local Saturday school and one in organising an Asian women’s group. These activities give them ample scope for using the full range of spoken and written languages in their communicative repertoires and also for defining how they use them. In the case of one woman, her community-based activities have also opened up opportunities for the creation of new cultural forms, since she has become a composer and performer of Gujarati songs. The songs she writes blend the type of lyrics she learned as a girl in her village of origin in India with some of the new styles currently being fashioned within the Gujarati community in Britain. In Chapter 9, Mark Sebba draws attention to another context in which creative use is being made of linguistic and cultural resources. He provides detailed insights into the ways in which British writers of Caribbean origin represent Creole speech in different written genres, in poetry, plays, fiction and newspaper columns, aimed at an African-Caribbean readership. His close analysis of the codeswitching in texts such as these reveals some of the subtle and intricate ways in which identities are constructed in writing in multilingual contexts. Academic institutions Chapters 14 to 16 address some of the issues of power and method which arise in academic research on languages and literacies in multilingual settings. The six researchers who have contributed to this section reflect on the specific issues that have arisen in the context of their own research. They all point to the fact that their relationship with the participants in their respective studies was embedded in asymmetrical relations of power, between academic institutions as prestigious sites for the production of knowledge and local communities, between linguistic minority groups and dominant linguistic groups. None of the authors actually mention this, but an important related point to be made here is that relatively few speakers of Britain’s minority languages have hitherto gained access to circles where academic research on bilingualism or literacy is conducted.
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The authors of these chapters reflect on the significance of these asymmetries of power for their particular studies and they describe the different ways in which they have attempted to deal with them at different stages of their work. They all point to the value of ethnography, with its emphasis on reflexivity, as a means of establishing an open and dialogic relationship with research participants (see Cameron et al. 1992 for a fuller account of this argument). They also describe in detail how interactive approaches based on the use of diaries, diary interviews, photography and particular kinds of participant observation enabled them to create opportunities to bring the knowledge and experience of the research participants into the research process in a more direct way and to establish a more dialogic approach to knowledge-building. None of the authors use the terms ‘insider’ or ‘outsider’ in referring to the identities of researchers or researched in their different projects. These categories have come to be seen as too fixed and essentialised. Instead, all six researchers reflect, in different ways, on the complex and shifting nature of group membership, emphasising that researcher and research subjects have multiple identities, some of which are shared and some which are not. They also describe the forms of collaboration that they were involved in: collaboration with fellow researchers and with research subjects. They demonstrate in detail how these different forms of collaboration engaged them in dialogues across the boundaries of ethnicity, gender and socio-economic position, and illustrate how this led to the use of different languages and literacies at different stages of the research process. These chapters provide insights into the multilingual nature of ethnographic work in multilingual settings, a dimension of this work which is often obscured in the production of final ethnographic texts. Such texts are usually monolingual and, as Asad (1986) has pointed out, they are often written up in the prestigious languages of Western nations and former colonial powers.
The organisation of this volume Following on from this introduction, Brian Street (Chapter 1) reviews some of the concepts and terms relating to literacy which have been used by researchers and practitioners working broadly within the field of New Literacy Studies. He emphasises the need to avoid reification and to be mindful that culture
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is a process which is negotiated and contested rather than fixed and unchanging. He revisits the notions of ‘literacy events’ and ‘literacy practices’ to assess their value as constructs in a social and ideological model of literacy. He also provides an account of the role that the New Literacy Studies have played in literacy debates in Anthropology, Development Studies, Adult Literacy and Education. He concludes this chapter by indicating that the challenge for the theoretical approaches to literacy put forward in the New Literacy Studies lies in the success of their practical application, particularly in mainstream education. The remaining chapters are organised into four sections: Section I, ‘Children’s worlds of literacy: home, community and school’ brings together the six chapters which deal with the relationship between the languages and literacies of children’s homes, communities and schooled literacies. Section II, entitled ‘Texts, identities and adult worlds’, includes the four chapters which focus on adults’ lived experiences with multilingual literacies in different domains, in their own life worlds and at work. Section III, ‘Creating spaces for multilingual literacies in local community contexts’, consists of the two chapters which describe the community-based projects which were designed as a means of countering the social exclusion and cultural inequity experienced by many men and women from linguistic minority groups. Section IV, entitled ‘Researching multilingual literacies in their social contexts’, presents the three chapters which address some of the methodological issues involved in conducting research at the intersection of recent Critical Studies of Multilingualism and New Literacy Studies. Each of these sections is preceded by a short introduction. The volume ends with an ‘Afterword’ by Nancy Hornberger in which she responds to the themes of the book and maps some of the connections with research on multilingual literacies in other contexts.
Note 1.
We use the term ‘expertise’ here, rather than terms like ‘skill’, ‘proficiency’ or ‘competence’. The latter foreground the cognitive dimension of language and literacy capabilities, whilst we wish to foreground the social and cultural dimensions. The term ‘expertise’ is used by Rampton (1995), along with other terms such as ‘allegiance’ and ‘cultural inheritance’ to “refer to linguistic identities — to cultural interpretations of a person’s relationship to a language” (1995: 340).
CHAPTER 1
Literacy events and literacy practices Theory and practice in the New Literacy Studies Brian Street
What are the terms being used around literacy? A range of terms has emerged in recent years for referring to literacy, particularly amongst those who espouse a ‘social’ view of reading and writing: ‘literacy events’, ‘literacy activities’, ‘literacy patterns’, ‘literacy strategies’, ‘literacy situations’. In this article, I want to argue that the field requires some consideration and refinement of these usages: a lot of the terms blend in and out of each other and tend to be used interchangeably. I want to suggest that we attempt greater precision and, in particular, I would like to put forward the proposal that a more careful use of the term ‘literacy practices’ (Street 1988) can help move forward both research and practice and that this phrase has most salience in attempting to analyse not just describe what is happening in social contexts around the meanings and uses of literacy. More particularly, my question here is how can we get theoretically from accounts of literacy events to accounts of literacy practices? A number of the chapters in this volume employ the phrase ‘literacy practices’ but the question is whether and how they use it differently. It is difficult to answer this because the phrase is often taken for granted and authors do not always explicitly address what that means to them. It has become ‘naturalised’ as Fairclough (1992b) would say — we all assume we know what we mean by it. Such naturalisation is always a dangerous moment in any intellectual endeavour, so I want to try to unpack some of the meanings and assumptions that underlie its use. My route for
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doing so is via a series of questions which I address in a general way to those who plan to undertake research in this area in future. My questions are: 1) 2) 3)
What do you mean by ‘literacy events’ and ‘literacy practices’? How do you use the concepts in your own research? What are the concepts that you have found useful in collecting, describing and analysing your research data?
A number of other terms have appeared in the research literature. These include: ‘literacy behaviours’ (which I take to be the activity of writing and reading itself); ‘multi-literacies’; ‘multiple literacies’; ‘dominant literacies’; ‘texts and practices’. I want to consider the problems or the advantages associated with the different concepts. So, other questions I want to address here are: How have literacy researchers decided on which concept to use and why? What do authors and readers take it to mean? What work has it done? What are the problems it raises in trying to make sense of this complex area? Multiple literacies and multi-literacies I firstly want to take a step back from these terms and try to locate them in a broader debate about literacy. An apt place to begin is with the phrase ‘multiple literacies’. This is a term that I, amongst others, had a hand in developing a decade ago (Street 1984), attempting to contrast it with a reified autonomous notion that there was only one thing called ‘literacy’ — which had a big ‘L’ and a little ‘y’: which was singular and autonomous in the sense that it was a factor that independently had effects on other things. I have argued that the notion of autonomous literacy took a dominant role in a lot of circles, in government circles in the UK, for instance, and in International Agencies such as UNESCO world-wide. The idea of multiple literacies, then, was an important construct in challenging that autonomous singular literacy. However, what I begin to see happening now makes me feel that there is a danger of reification again. In characterising literacy as multiple, it is very easy to slip into then assuming that there is a single literacy associated with a single culture, so that there are multiple literacies just as there are, supposedly, multiple cultures. So when, for example, we find Gujarati culture and Gujarati ‘Literacy’ in Leicester, this autonomous tendency leads to us putting the two together. Arvind Bhatt, David Barton, Marilyn Martin-Jones and Mukul Saxena (1995) have investigated multiple languages and literacies in this particular context and they have been quite aware of that problem and I think their research cuts across
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any reification. Nevertheless, I think the ways in which the term ‘multiple literacies’ gets adopted at times falls into the trap of reification. Like me, Arvind Bhatt and colleagues would prefer to say “Culture is a verb”, (Street 1993b). This usage signals that culture is a process that is contested, not a given inventory of characteristics. This position is now well known in a lot of the literature. Certainly most anthropologists working on literacy and researchers such as Stuart Hall who have developed the field of Cultural Studies are well aware of the multiple, contested, processual nature of culture (Wright 1997; Hallam & Street 1998). A claim to culture is itself a part of the process rather than a given. So in that sense, one cannot simply line up a single ‘literacy’ with a single ‘culture’. Another phrase that emerged more recently, which I also think is problematic, in this larger context is the concept of ‘multi-literacies’. Courtney Cazden and others in the ‘New London Group’ (NLG) (New London Group 1996) have put forward the notion of multi-literacy to refer not to multiple literacies, associated with different cultures, but multiple forms of literacy associated with channels or modes, such as computer literacy, visual literacy. Kress (1997), a member of the NLG, has criticised the further extensions of ‘multi-literacy’ into, for instance, political literacy, or emotional literacy, thereby using the term as a metaphor for competence. That is one of the dangers of this approach. The NLG are especially interested in channels and modes of communication, that can be referred to as ‘literacies’. Gunther Kress, in particular, is interested in the notion of visual literacy, so for him multi-literacy signals a new world in which the reading and writing practices of literacy are only one part of what people are going to have to learn in order to be ‘literate’ (Kress and van Leeuwen 1990). They are going to have to learn to handle the icons and the signs, such as the Word for Windows package with all its combinations of signs, symbols, boundaries, pictures, words, texts, images et cetera. The extreme version of this position is the notion of ‘the end of language’ — that somehow we are no longer talking about language in its rather traditional notion of grammar, lexicon and semantics, but rather we are now talking about semiotic systems that cut across reading, writing, speech, into all these other semiotic forms of communication. This, then, is what is signalled by the term ‘multi-literacies’: a rather different approach from that entailed by the ‘multiple literacies’ view outlined earlier. Despite their differences, the problem with both positions is the same problem of reification, and also that of determination, or determinism. If you identify a literacy with a mode or channel — visual literacy, computer literacy
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— then you are slipping into the danger of reifying it according to form: you are failing to take into account the social practices that go into the construction, uses and meanings of literacy in context. In developing a multi-literacies view, then, it is important to guard against a kind of determinism of channel or technology in which visual literacy, in itself, is seen as having certain effects which may be different from computer literacy. The focus would then be on the mode, on the visual and the computer, rather than on the social practices in which computers, visual media and other kinds of channels are actually given meaning. It is the social practices, I would want to argue, that give meaning and lead to effects, not the channel itself. Literacy events and literacy practices This then leads me to consideration of the other terms cited above that have come to be employed for researching literacy and in applying new social theories to practice. Barton (1994a) notes that the term ‘literacy event’ derived from the sociolinguistic idea of ‘speech event’. It was first used in relation to literacy by A.B. Anderson and Stokes (1980) who defined it as an occasion during which a person “attempts to comprehend graphic signs” (1980: 59–65). Shirley Brice Heath further characterised a ‘literacy event’ as “any occasion in which a piece of writing is integral to the nature of the participants’ interactions and their interpretative processes” (Heath 1982a: 93). I have employed the phrase ‘literacy practices’ (Street 1984: 1) as a means of focussing upon “social practices and conceptions of reading and writing”, although I later elaborated the term to take account both of ‘events’ in Heath’s sense and of the social models of literacy that participants bring to bear upon those events and that give meaning to them (Street 1988). David Barton, in an Introduction to his edited volume on Writing in the Community (Barton & Ivanic 1991: 1), attempted to clarify these debates about literacy events and literacy practices and, in a later collaborative study of everyday literacies in Lancaster, England, Barton and Hamilton begin their account with further refinements of the two phrases (1998: 6). Baynham (1995) entitled his recent book Literacy Practices: Investigating Literacy in Social Contexts. Similarly Prinsloo and Breier’s volume on The Social Uses of Literacy (1996), which is a series of case studies of literacy in South Africa, used the concept of ‘events’ but then extended it to ‘practices’. My own recent book Social Literacies: Critical Perspectives on Literacy in Development, Ethnography and Education (Street 1995) also tries to refine and develop the relations between these terms. So, a literature is emerging that
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directly addresses the issue of the relation between ‘literacy events’ and ‘literacy practices’. I would like to outline here my own view of these relations and their significance for the field of Literacy Studies. ‘Literacy events’ is a helpful concept, I think, because it enables researchers, and also practitioners, to focus on a particular situation where things are happening and you can see them happening. This is the classic literacy event in which we are able to observe an event that involves reading and/or writing and begin to draw out its characteristics: here, we might observe one kind of event, an academic literacy event, and there, another, which is quite different, such as checking timetables and catching the bus, browsing through a magazine, sitting in the barber’s shop, reading signs when negotiating the road. The Lancaster research has made good use of the concept (Barton & Ivanic 1991; Barton & Hamilton 1998; Hamilton, Barton & Ivanic 1994; Ivanic 1997). But there is also a problem if we use the concept on its own in that it remains descriptive and, from an anthropological point of view, it does not tell us how the meanings are constructed. If you were to observe a particular literacy event as a non-participant who was not familiar with its conventions, you would have difficulty following what is going on, such as how to work with the text which provides the focus of the event and how to talk around it. There are clearly underlying conventions and assumptions around literacy events that make them work. So I now come to ‘literacy practices’, which seems to me at the moment the most robust of the various concepts that literacy researchers have been developing. The concept of literacy practices does, I think, attempt to handle the events and the patterns of activity around literacy but to link them to something broader of a cultural and social kind. And part of that broadening involves attending to the fact that in a literacy event we have brought to it concepts, social models regarding what the nature of this practice is and that make it work and give it meaning. Those models we cannot get at simply by sitting on the wall with a video and watching what is happening: you can photograph literacy events but you cannot photograph literacy practices. There is an ethnographic issue here: we have to start talking to people, listening to them and linking their immediate experience of reading and writing out to other things that they do as well. That is why it is often meaningless to just ask people about literacy alone, as in recent surveys (Basic Skills Agency (BSA) 1997; International Adult Literacy Survey, OECD 1995), or even about reading and writing, because what might give meaning to literacy events may actually be something that is not, in the first instance,
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thought of in terms of literacy at all. (Kathryn Jones, Marilyn Martin-Jones and Arvind Bhatt also make this point in their chapter, this volume). For instance, in the case of academic practices, it may be about social relations and the academy. Heath and McLaughlin (1993) found in discussing newspaper reading with urban adolescents in the USA that much of their activity did not count in their minds as literacy at all, so a superficial survey would have missed the significance of their actual literacy practices and perhaps labelled them non-readers, or more insultingly ‘illiterate’ as in much press coverage of this area. So, one cannot predict beforehand what will give meaning to a literacy event and what will link a set of literacy events to literacy practices. Literacy practices refer to this broader cultural conception of particular ways of thinking about and doing reading and writing in cultural contexts. One of the key issues, at both a methodological and an empirical level, is how can we characterise the shift from observing literacy events to conceptualising literacy practices. In my own fieldwork in Iranian villages during the early 1970s (Street 1984), what began to emerge as literacy practices were uses and meanings of literacy that were identifiable around three domains of social activity: maktab literacy practices, associated with the primary Qur’anic school; schooled literacy practices in the more secular and modernising context of the State school; and commercial literacy practices associated with buying and selling fruit for transport to the city and the market. The practices in this third domain of social activity were quite different from either of the other sets of literacy practices. Characterising them as literacy practices helped me to understand those differences, and I could then talk about whether there were certain identities associated with particular practices. In that context, the identity associated with maktab literacy was derived from traditional authority in the village located in Qur’anic learning and with a social hierarchy dominated by men. Schooled literacy, on the other hand, was associated with new learning and with modernisation, leading some village children to urban lives and jobs. Commercial literacy emerged in response to the economic activity of selling fruit to the nearby cities at a time of economic boom and involved writing notes, cheques, lists, names on crates and so on, to facilitate the purchase and sale of quantities of fruit. The framework for understanding literacy that I was developing at this time, including the concept of ‘literacy practices’ (Street 1984), aimed to provide an explanation for why commercial literacy was mainly undertaken by those who had been taught at the Qur’anic school rather than those from the modern State school, even though at first sight one might expect the literacy skills of the latter to be more functionally oriented
Literacy events and literacy practices
23
to commercial practices. Those with Qur’anic literacy had the status and authority within the village to carry on these commercial practices, whilst those trained in the State school were seen to be oriented outwards and lacked the integral relations to everyday village life that underpinned the trust necessary for such transactions. In this village context then, literacy was not simply a set of functional skills, as much modern schooling and many Literacy Agencies represent it, but rather it was a set of social practices deeply associated with identity and social position. It is approaching literacy as a social practice that provides a way of making sense of variations in the uses and meanings of literacy in such contexts rather than reliance on the barren notions of literacy skills, rates, levels that dominate contemporary discourse about literacy. Similar analyses are possible of other contexts where multiple literacy practices are associated with different arenas or domains of public life. A literature has emerged that builds upon these insights. We now have a growing body of ethnographic research which describes and explains variation in literacy practices across and within cultures, from outside of the dominant discourse (Barton & Hamilton 1998; Baynham 1995; Heath 1983; Kulick & Stroud 1993; Prinsloo & Breier 1996; Street 1993a; Maybin 1994). As this work develops, so refinements and elaborations of the key concepts highlighted in this paper emerge. Maybin, for instance, has used the terms ‘events’ and ‘practices’ within a broadly ethnographic approach in order to bring out the practical as well as theoretical problems that arise in actual research contexts. With respect to her own study of children’s everyday speech in a UK school (Maybin 1997), she explains: I used the term ‘practices’ to refer to observable patterns of behaviour across events e.g. a contrast between different practices would be between children often using reference books to announce newsworthy bits of information while teachers are using them to frame observation and epistemology. These different behaviours assume different beliefs about what the texts are for, different values and ideologies and, therefore, to me signal different ‘practices’. So I was focussing at the more empirical end of the term (Maybin 1998, email communication).
Maybin identifies a problem with ‘practices’. She says: It seems to cover rather different kinds of stuff within one term, so some aspects of it seem to be amenable to empirical investigation (what people actually do, and recurring patterns within this), while ideological aspects etc. are at a more abstract conceptual level and have to be inferred from observation and interview data (Maybin 1998, e-mail communication).
Brian Street
24
In the introduction to her chapter in Situated Literacies (ed. by Barton, Hamilton and Ivanic 2000), Maybin suggests that a number of authors in that volume are extending our thinking about events and practices through more theorising of discourse and intertextuality. She says: The taking on of more complex ideas about discourse and intertextuality in these studies of literacy enables the researchers to more clearly conceptualise the pivotal role of literacy practices in articulating the links between individual people’s everyday experience, and wider social institutions and structures. It also enables them to explore issues of power, through examining the relationship between micro- and macro-level contexts (Maybin 2000: 197).
Some of the authors in the present volume are, likewise, debating the implications of using the terms ‘literacy events’ and literacy practices’ in the contexts of ethnographic-style research on multilingual literacies in comparative perspectives. I conclude this chapter with a brief survey of the domains, practical and academic, in which these debates have taken place. I would argue that any discussion of literacy in education, in the UK as elsewhere, needs to take account of these debates and concepts rather than remaining locked within the ‘autonomous’ model with its focus on literacy rates, levels, ages and skills.
Literacy debates and conflicts: the role of the New Literacy Studies The ‘New Literacy Studies’ (NLS) (Gee 1990; Street 1993a) has provided the basis for intervention in debates about literacy in a number of different fields. By tracking the relationship of NLS to these fields over time, we can see more clearly some of the general principles that NLS raises and identify the areas of current uncertainty and conflict. In each area, I characterise the field and indicate the main topics being debated, I describe the intervention and role of NLS, and I point to the challenges and points of conflict or uncertainty which are currently salient. Out of this overview might come proposals for further intervention in the various fields, as well as developments and refinements within NLS itself. Anthropology Many of the broader debates about literacy originated in suggestions made by Goody (1968, 1977) and other anthropologists about a ‘great divide’ between
Literacy events and literacy practices
25
literacy and orality and about the implications of literacy for rationality. Goody (1968, 1977), Olson (1977), Ong (1982) and others have argued that literacy is associated with large advances in cognitive processing, and with radical shifts in the nature of society to such an extent that there is a ‘great divide’ between pre-literate and literate societies. This divide is often also extended to individuals, so that people in ‘modern’ society who score low in traditional literacy tests are seen as also limited in their cognitive and social abilities (OECD 1995; Oakhill, Beard & Vincent 1995). Writers in the New Literacy Studies (Finnegan 1973, 1988; Gee 1990; Barton 1994a; Barton & Ivanic 1991; Street 1985, 1995; Collins 1995) have argued that this position is flawed both empirically and theoretically. Ethnographic accounts (such as the classic study by Scribner and Cole 1981) make it evident that members of societies with little or no literacy can nevertheless perform the complex cognitive processes, achieve the metalinguistic awareness and perform the logical operations that Goody, Ong, Olson and others would attribute to literate society. Literacy practices vary with cultural context, there is not a single, monolithic, autonomous literacy, whose consequences for individuals and societies can be read off as a result of its intrinsic characteristics: rather, there are, as I argued above, ‘literacies’ or rather ‘literacy practices’ whose character and consequences have to be specified for each context. NLS writers and activists have intervened to challenge the great divide both within anthropology and more broadly, as we shall see below, in its practical applications in development and education. Advocating a shift from autonomous to ideological models, from statistical accounts of levels and skills to ethnographies of literacy, they have worked to move the agenda for the anthropology of literacy from the rationality debate to the study of ideology. In this context, literacy is seen as a field for investigating processes of hegemony, power relations, practices and competing discourses rather than for exploring the great divide and the relative rationality of ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’ societies. Development Assumptions regarding literacy and progress have dominated the field of development in the post war era and continue to underpin modernist projects in literacy, education, women’s development and so on. The ideas of the autonomous model of literacy, regarding both individual cognition and social
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Brian Street
progress have underpinned much literacy and development work, programmes and projects. Both UNESCO and national campaigns run by State or non-governmental agencies have based literacy projects on statistics for ‘illiteracy’ from which they have read off ‘autonomous’ consequences, such as that economic development is consequently impaired and that women are disempowered (Street 1998). Again, NLS interventions have mounted a challenge to the dominant development model and currently approaches concerned with ‘real literacies’, participatory literacy and empowerment take a more socially-oriented perspective and focus more precisely on local conditions (Rogers 1994). Current debates in this field include challenges to the apparent change from autonomous to ideological models in such projects and some critics (Prinsloo & Breier 1996) have argued that even the major alternative to dominant models — that based on the work of Paulo Freire (1972, 1985) — turns out to have autonomous tendencies. UNESCO, for instance, appears to have shifted to a more ‘social’ approach, but old skills/ autonomy/ determinism lurks beneath. Adult Literacy In the UK and in some parts of the USA, literacy movements, facilitators and writers about literacy have, for some time, used ‘social’ approaches, independently of the debates in the academic world, often with loose Freirean underpinnings that were mainly student and community centred (Fingeret 1983). These approaches have seen themselves as marginal and in conflict with dominant discourses on ‘illiteracy’, ‘deficit’, top-down, fix-it approaches (Hamilton et al. 1994). In this context, the role of NLS has been to help articulate and give academic voice to an already developed movement that was often anti-academic and felt marginalised (Barton & Hamilton 1998). Not many have been writing ‘academic’ books and articles on adult literacy, but a few pieces provide some point of reference e.g. Street’s (1997) history of Adult Literacy in the UK; Hamilton, Barton & Ivanic’s Worlds of Literacy (1994); and Barton & Ivanic’s Writing in the Community (1991). There remain in this, as in the other fields outlined, challenges and points of conflict or uncertainty. For instance, there is an ambivalent relationship still between ‘practice’ and ‘theory’: many practitioners did MAs with academics in NLS e.g. at Lancaster, Sussex and Pennsylvania, but still spoke for a vernacular voice over academicising tendencies. More recently, Government policy in
Literacy events and literacy practices
27
the UK has shifted attention from the student-centred, open learning view that dominated practitioner approaches to a more institutionalised framework of progression, skills, assessment, certification, accreditation that leaves out the ‘traditional’ adult literacy learner of earlier phases of the ‘Literacy Campaign’. Some observers (Mary Hamilton, cited in Street 1997) have noted the beginnings of resistance and indicate the possibility of a ‘new campaign’ amongst practitioners. The role for NLS here, as in development literacy, has been to expose the conceptual underpinnings of the shift and to help articulate alternatives. Schooling This area is the largest in terms of sheer numbers, publicity, effects, popular interest and government concern. Again, the dominant model in the UK is of autonomous, skill-based, delivery. This view of literacy is articulated by the media, Government representatives, Ministers, Agencies (The Office for Standards and Training in Education (OFSTED), The Literacy Task Force (LTF), the Teacher Training Agency (TTA), the Department for Education and Employment (DfEE), the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA), the Basic Skills Agency (BSA) [formerly the Adult Literacy and Basic Skills Unit (ALBSU) but now having dropped both Adult and Literacy from its name, increasingly intervening at school or Further Education level]); and by educational psychologists and researchers (for example those who contributed to the Special Issue of the Journal of Research in Reading, 18 (2), Oakhill, Beard & Vincent (eds) 1995). Newspaper clippings from the last decade of press reports on literacy indicate a focus on ‘falling standards’, ‘deficit’, ‘illiteracy’, skills or lack of them and very little influence from the more ‘social’ approaches discussed above to which lip service has at least been paid in development work (cf. Freebody 1998). Teachers and lecturers tend to be resistant to this dominant discourse and instead use, often implicitly, a ‘socially sensitive’, less skilled-based approach: some have been influenced by Freire, by ‘Critical Literacy’ (in the US this has been influenced by the work of Henry Giroux, Peter McLaren, Colin Lankshear and other critical theorists). In the UK, teachers are now taking account of Critical Language Awareness (CLA) (Fairclough 1992b), but their resistance to the more utilitarian aspects of the autonomous model of literacy, as it affects school work especially in the literature curriculum, is also part of a longer English tradition
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Brian Street
— the critical and dissenting strand from Mathew Arnold through F.R. Leavis, developed and updated by the National Association for Teachers of English (NATE). Those working in Media Studies and Cultural Studies already have a ‘social’ basis in their view of the subject and its content (cf. Buckingham 1993) that likewise eschews ‘skills’ and the ‘autonomous model’ (though they may lurk beneath and are often resurrected in assessment); Media Studies is also sometimes in conflict with more traditional ‘English’ approaches (seen as text-based, specialist, inward-looking, elitist), whilst Media Studies presents itself as clued in to students’ own social and cultural knowledge and experience, for example, of TV. NLS interventions are relatively novel in this area. In the USA Heath and Mangiola (1991) worked with teachers and with professional associations such as the National Council for Teachers of English (NCTE), and the American Educational Research Association (AERA) to develop research and texts that had practical applications. In the UK, teachers have taken up the ideas embedded in CLA, rather than the more ethnographically based NLS, but there is clearly scope for the latter as teachers look for ways to elaborate on the simplicities of the National Curriculum and to enhance ‘culturally sensitive teaching’. In this area, challenges and points of conflict/uncertainty relate to the long history of struggle and conflict in the field already, so there are many factions, nuances, internal differences amongst those opposed to dominant discourses; they call upon a variety of intellectual traditions in opposition to the dominant one (Marshall 1998; Kress 1997). The dominant discourse, however, marshals powerful alliances and resources, between government and its agencies, academic psychologists and media, as we saw above. Parents are ambivalent: they may look both ways and mistrust ‘professionals’ even whilst calling on them to resolve ‘literacy problems’. All parties may ‘buy’ social perspectives at a common-sense, relatively banal level but have different reasons for resisting fuller development of it and its implications. For example, participants in the debates about literacy and schooling have their own positions and traditions to defend: this includes, research in psychology, critical theory, vested interests in ‘English’ teaching in schools (e.g. between media departments and English departments), and government agencies such as QCA, Ofsted and the DfEE. The raising of expectations about ‘literacy’ and the preoccupation with ‘falling standards’ by current Governments in the UK and the USA and the
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media hype, even hysteria, about literacy may create space for alternatives, as the dominant approach fails to ‘deliver’, as has happened to some extent in Development Literacy work. A question for NLS theorists and practitioners is whether they are ready to seize the moment. What do they have prepared with regard to practical applications and the mediating of theory into practice, to take account of the demands that will be made on literacy theorists and practitioners if the present round of interventions proves unsuccessful? The next stage of work in this area, then, is to move beyond simply theoretical critiques of the autonomous model and to develop positive proposals for interventions in curriculum, measurement criteria and teacher education. It will be at this stage that the theoretical perspectives brought together in the ‘New Literacy Studies’ will face their sternest test: that of their practical applications in the field of mainstream education.
SECTION I
Children’s worlds of literacy: home, school and community Most chapters in this section of the book deal in one way or another with the relationship between the literacies of home, community and school. The starting point for most of them is with children’s lived experience of languages and literacies at home and in local community contexts. The literacies of school are then viewed from this vantage point. The six chapters describe in detail the languages and literacies of parents and children from different urban localities and explore the values and beliefs associated with reading and writing in different languages. Most of the accounts focus on bilingual children from linguistic minority groups, but revealing comparisons are also made with the literacy experiences of monolingual children in local working class or religious communities and with the literacy histories of monolingual and bilingual adults. These accounts give us valuable insights into the ways in which children’s experiences with different languages and literacies are bound up with relationships with parents, siblings or other people within their households or local communities. They also provide detailed descriptions of real literacy events in children’s lives where spoken and written languages are intertwined. In some of these events, the talk is centred on a text (e.g. a letter, a story book, a religious text) and written language is foregrounded, and in others, it is in the background, as in storytelling episodes where a parent is drawing on traditional legends or fables. Starting, in this way, from specific events and practices in local households and communities, the chapters build up a rich picture of some of the ways in which languages and literacies are embedded in different cultural practices and how reading and writing practices, and specific uses of texts, are rooted in different world views, in
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Section I
different religious beliefs and in different ideas about what it means to be literate or what counts as reading and writing. These chapters also document the time, effort and expertise invested by parents and other adults in local communities in orienting children to particular languages and literacies outside the formal education system and the time and effort invested by children and young adults in the acquisition, development or reclaiming of the languages and literacies of their cultural inheritance. As readers we gain revealing insights into the local contexts in which children develop a sense of how to learn before they enter the mainstream school. A number of themes emerge as the authors examine the relationship between home, community and school, between the languages and literacies of children’s life worlds and schooled literacies. One recurring theme is that schools take little or no account of home or community literacies or of the knowledge about these languages and literacies that children bring to school. A second theme which is brought out in Chapters 2, 3, 4 and 5 is that only certain approaches to the printed word are considered ‘legitimate’ in the school context. If other approaches to literacy are acknowledged at all, they are cast in a negative light and minority parents who orient their children to literacy in these ways are blamed for their children’s underachievement or for placing an excessive burden on their children’s learning. The expertise of minority parents is overlooked altogether, particularly when they are not confident in using English. And, as we see in Chapter 3, in some schools, it is even assumed that parents are ‘illiterate’ if they do not read and write English. A third theme, explored in Chapter 7, is that of bringing home languages and literacies into the school context and the ways in which children respond to such initiatives. In Chapter 2, Eve Gregory and Ann Williams unpack the notion that story reading experiences at home, shared between parent and child, which are playful and pleasurable in nature and which centre around ‘good books’, provide an essential foundation for later success at school. They argue that this ‘official’ paradigm of early reading takes no account of the diversity of early experiences with literacy that children have in different home and community settings. To support their argument, they draw on extensive ethnographic fieldwork carried out in one neighbourhood in the heart of East London (Spitalfields), with adults and children in thirteen households: seven Sylhetispeaking households and six monolingual English-speaking households. They provide an illuminating comparative account of the ‘unofficial’ literacy activi-
Children’s worlds of literacy
33
ties in the lives of these parents and their children and of the diverse strengths which grow out of these activities. In Chapter 3, Adrian Blackledge provides revealing insights into the ways in which school practices can lead to the disempowerment of women from linguistic minority groups as they seek to support their children’s acquisition of literacy in different languages. The author of this chapter focuses on one primary school in Birmingham and on the mothers of 18 six year old children of Bangladeshi origin who were attending the school. Drawing on observations carried out in the school and on interviews with the women in their homes, he describes attempts made by the school to introduce school reading practices into these children’s homes and documents the school’s failure to recognise the cultural and linguistic resources that the mothers were already contributing to their children’s early apprenticeship with literacy. This chapter sets out disturbing evidence of the manner in which parents can be excluded from the process of providing support for their children as they make the transition into primary school, when schools take no account of home or community languages and provide no bilingual materials for reading at home and when there are no bilingual teachers or interpreters present at parents’ evenings or workshops in the school. In Chapter 4, An Ran gives a detailed account of a recent research project which focused on the experiences of Chinese children learning to read Chinese with their mothers at home. She shows how the mothers drew on their own educational experience in China when tutoring their own children at home, since they had no previous experience of teaching reading and writing. The mothers took on a formal ‘teacherly’ role, making extensive use of questions, giving explicit instructions and providing explanations cast as statements or as visual demonstrations, particularly when discussing written Chinese characters with the children. The books they used were Chinese school textbooks rather than story books and reading was constructed as ‘serious work’ rather than a source of enjoyment. Like the other authors in this section, An Ran stresses the need to be aware of the diversity of views in children’s homes and local communities with regard to what counts as language and literacy education. Chapter 5, by Viv Edwards and Hubisi Nwenmely, explores two broad themes related to literacy, education and cultural difference. In the first part of the chapter, the authors highlight the ways in which different world views have shaped different approaches to the printed word. They do this by review-
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Section I
ing studies carried out in the context of religious education (organised by both Christian and Muslim groups) and in the context of secular provision organised by minority parents and community groups (the specific example they take up is that of classes for Chinese children of Hong Kong origin in Britain). From this comparative account, the authors draw out commonalities and differences in the teaching/learning practices of cultural and religious groups and foreground some of the values associated with these practices. They argue that educators need to be aware of the worlds of literacy that children experience outside of school and be prepared to learn about these experiences from parents rather than imposing school models of what counts as reading. They also argue that teachers need to make their own views about literacy explicit to parents and provide clear explanations of the thinking about literacy which underpins the specific teaching/learning approach favoured by their school. The second part of the chapter presents revealing accounts of two educational initiatives relating to Kwéyòl: first, the relatively unsuccessful attempts that were made in the 1980s in St. Lucia to introduce and disseminate a new orthography for Kweyol and to move towards a bilingual (English/Kwéyòl) language policy for the schools; and, second, the relatively successful attempts which were made to introduce provision for the teaching of Kwéyòl literacy in an adult education context in London. By comparing these two initiatives, the authors demonstrate the importance of historical and cultural analysis in accounts of such educational interventions and they provide stark evidence of the ways in which ‘legitimate’ languages prevail in national education systems. They also point to ways in which the legitimacy of languages such as English can be contested within certain sites, making it possible for learners to assert cultural difference and to work towards undoing centuries of symbolic violence imposed upon previous generations in their country of origin. Chapter 6, by Raymonde Sneddon, presents a detailed discussion of sociolinguistic data gathered as part of an ongoing study of Gujarati-speaking households in the north east of London. Drawing on both quantitative and qualitative data, she describes the language and literacy repertoires of the children and adults in these households and their patterns of language use. She shows that Gujarati is the primary language of informal spoken communication in most of the households and argues that this level of language maintenance has been achieved by sustaining close ties of marriage and kinship with Gujarat and through close involvement in local community activities, such as
Children’s worlds of literacy
35
the running of a local community centre. She also shows that, because the adults in these households are part of a close-knit Muslim community, their preferred languages of literacy are Urdu and Qur’anic Arabic. These are the languages that the children are learning to read and write in this local community context. In addition, the author informs us that most of the children (36 in all) are doing well in their local school, thereby providing powerful evidence to counter the view that time invested by children in acquiring literacy in languages other than English detracts from their achievements in the mainstream school. The last contribution to this section is by Charmian Kenner (Chapter 7). Her chapter draws on a research project which investigated children’s responses to the introduction of home languages and literacies in a school context: that of a nursery class in a multilingual neighbourhood of London. As part of an educational intervention jointly planned with the teacher of this nursery class, the parents of the bilingual children were asked to bring to the class different types of texts in the children’s home languages. They were also asked to produce texts, like letters and posters, in these languages in the classroom context. The children reacted to this initiative in a range of ways: by commenting on the purpose and significance of home texts, showing that they had already associated these texts with people and places, and by experimenting with writing in their home languages themselves. This chapter shows that it is possible for researchers, teachers, parents and learners to collaborate in making educational interventions and in bringing about change in school practices. Local initiatives such as these can open up valuable new learning opportunities for learners and can also provide a window on children’s developing understanding of literacy as a social practice.
CHAPTER 2
Work or Play? ‘Unofficial’ literacies in the lives of two East London communities Eve Gregory and Ann Williams
Mrs. L. describes her son Simon’s early reading at home: “My dad was a reader. He read anything and everything — from the newspapers. That’s why Simon could read the newspaper; he could pick all the horses out. He was four and a half when he came here and he was reading the newspaper. He still does — back page. At the time he could see what horses were running, what the prizes were, what colours they had, who the jockey was … the lot, he still does…” Parents will be asked to sign an undertaking to read with their children at home for at least 20 minutes per day under government proposals for improving literacy published yesterday …. Stephen Byers, the schools minister said he was fighting back against the dumbing down of British culture exemplified by the Teletubbies and declining standards on Radio 4. (The Guardian 29/7/97)
In late twentieth century Britain, a paradigm of early literacy prevails within which the home story-reading experience providing enjoyment, pleasure or fun to parent and child is seen as an essential prerequisite for later school success. Official reports since the 1970s have left little doubt as to the precise material and form necessary for these early reading experiences. The Bullock Report (1975: 7.2) informed parents that “… the best way to prepare the very young child for reading is to hold him on your lap and read aloud to him stories he likes, over and over again … We
38
Eve Gregory and Ann Williams believe that a priority need is…to help parents recognise the value of sharing the experience of books with their children.”
The maxim ‘Babies need books’ changed little in later decades. During the late 1980s, the Cox Report (1989: 16.8) reiterated it in the following way: “We hope that parents will share books with their children from their earliest days, read aloud to them and talk about the stories they have enjoyed together.”
In the 1990s, the School Curriculum and Assessment Authority Report on desirable outcomes for children’s learning in nurseries (SCAA 1996: 7) asked parents to support learning opportunities at home through “reading and sharing books”. Significantly, it is not enjoyment with any type of print which counts. Both the official curriculum and the academic world in which teachers are trained, only sanction and reinforce recognised ‘good literature’ whose titles are provided in the curriculum; it is on these titles that the success of seven year olds will be tested. Experiences like those of Simon, the four year old in our recent study in East London who was reading the sports page of a popular newspaper above, are clearly excluded from the school model of success. This paradigm has variously been referred to as “mainstream” (Heath 1983), “schooled” (Street & Street 1995) or “official” literacy (Dyson 1997). The official view of what counts as literacy has filtered down through the media to become the view of society at large. Headlines such as “Babies brought to book” or “Are you sitting comfortably?” (Times Educational Supplement, 28/6/1996: 2.IV) are amongst many which introduce articles describing the benefits of providing disadvantaged families and their babies with books. Large-scale research projects (Wells 1985) have also provided evidence of a correlation between success in reading at school and storytelling experience from infancy at home. Accounts of shared story-reading events, often written by caregivers about their own children, document precisely the nature of this activity as an organised social routine, specifically framed and separated from other daily events (Butler 1979; Scollon & Scollon 1981; Baghban 1984). Some studies provide ‘precise details’ of the nature of the cognitive and linguistic skills provided by story-reading interactions: linguistically, ‘book-oriented’ children are shown to be able to switch into complex structures involving longer ‘idea units’ or unit length (Scollon & Scollon 1981), as well as ‘appropriate’ collocations and word-groupings e.g. ‘the little red hen … reaped the corn’ (Dombey 1983); cognitively, children
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39
are shown to learn to ‘detach’ themselves from the immediate audience to operate within the boundaries of the text from ‘situation-dependent’ to ‘textdependent’ thought (Simons & Murphy 1986). However, the success of children who enter school already practised in skills authorised in the classroom can hardly be surprising. What we lack are studies showing how quite different skills might also be valuable if called upon by teachers during early reading lessons. This chapter investigates the ‘unofficial’ literacy practices in families like Simon’s where conventional story-reading might not take place. What other types of reading might be common in children’s homes or in the community? How well-versed in these literacy practices might young children be? How varied are these activities? With whom do they take place and what materials are used? What role might the young child play in the activity? Above all, which skills gained from these practices might be harnessed by teachers in early years’ classrooms?
Living beyond the pump: the families in the study These questions were the starting-point of a study of reading in the lives of thirteen families with children aged five to seven, attending two adjacent primary schools in East London (Gregory & Williams 2000). The district of Spitalfields where the families live, comprises one square mile to the east of the City of London, its separateness emphasised concretely and symbolically by the boundary line of an old water trough or pump at Aldgate (one of the original Roman gates into London). Spitalfields has a long tradition of receiving immigrants; the Huguenots during the eighteenth century, followed by Jews from Eastern Europe during the latter half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Today, their place has been taken by families from Bangladesh and many of the streets in the area reflect their cultural background and Islamic way of life. Seven of the families in the study were Bangladeshi British. The home language used between parent and child was Sylheti, a dialect of Bengali with no modern written form. The remaining six families were monolingual, white Londoners who lived in the same area, and, in some instances in the same blocks of flats as the Bangladeshi British families. The aim of the project was to record the literacy histories of the families in the two communities, to investigate the extent to which these literacy
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Eve Gregory and Ann Williams
practices affected the children’s reading strategies in the mainstream school and to examine the influence of ‘schooled’ learning practices on the learning patterns of the family. The literacy practices of the two mainstream school teachers were also noted and their views on the home literacy of the project families were sought. The data for each child consisted of three semi-structured interviews with a caregiver, in most cases the mother; an interview with the child her/himself; a recorded session of each child reading with the mainstream school teacher and a similar recorded session with a family member. The interviews with the Bangladeshi British parents were conducted by Nasima Rashid, the Sylheti speaking researcher. In addition, classroom observation was carried out in the two mainstream schools for one morning per week throughout the school year. Community classes and mother tongue classes attended by the Bangladeshi British children were also observed. The data was analysed using the method of multi-layering (Bloome & Theodorou 1988). This approach enabled us to combine three layers of analysis, with the focus moving from the outer layer or the social context, through a middle layer in which we examined and quantified the teaching strategies used by teachers, parents and children, to the inner layer which involved an ethnomethodological analysis of the interactions between teachers and children, and between parents and children in individual reading episodes, focusing on the roles assumed by each participant.1 A useful example of the value of combining qualitative and quantitative approaches was found in Rogoff & Gauvain’s (1986) pattern analysis used to examine instructional discourse in mother-child dyads.
The social context The demographic data from our study highlights important factors contributing to differences in the children’s home literacy practices. The family backgrounds of the children are shown below in Tables 1a and 1b.
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41
Table 1a. Bilingual children and their families
Uzma Maruf Shima Shuma Akhlak Henna Shanaz
Position Position in in family Family 4/5 5/5 5/5 2/4 9/11 3/4 2/3
Mother’s Education Grade 5* Grade 5 Grade 5 to age 15 Grade 7 Grade 4 Grade 5
Accommodation flat double flat house flat flat flat flat
*grade 5 indicates the final level of primary school and is generally reached by age 11
Table 1b. Monolingual children and their families Position in Family 1/1 3/3
Father’s Occupation Policeman Publican
Mother’s Education Age 16 Age 16
Anne Marie Naomi Richard
1/1
Builder
Age 16
2/2 3/3
Unemployed
Age 16 Age 16
Stewart
2/2
Plumber
Age 16
Susie Sally
Mother’s Occupation Childminder Works in family pub Insurance clerk Unemployed Access course Playleader in children’s playground
Accommodation flat week - flat weekend - house house flat flat flat
First, the different pattern of employment between the two groups reveals the relative isolation of the Bangladeshi British families living in this area in comparison with the monolingual families. No mother in the Bangladeshi British group was in employment outside the home, in contrast with all but one of the monolingual mothers whose work or studies demanded English literacy skills. Three out of seven Bangladeshi British fathers were unemployed and the employment of the remaining fathers was in the immediate vicinity with colleagues from the same country of origin. Second, six out of the seven Bangladeshi British mothers had received their education in Bangladesh and were literate only in Bengali. The seventh mother had attended school in Britain. This contrasted with the monolingual English mothers, three of whom
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had GCE passes. Third, the cramped accommodation of the Bangladeshi British families meant that the array of toys visible in some of the monolingual families would not have been possible. Finally, in contrast with the monolingual children, those of Bangladeshi British origin had a number of older siblings living at home. These siblings constructed a distinctive home literacy practice, which is outlined later in this chapter.
Pleasure and pain: literacy in the lives of the parent generation Although the monolingual mothers who took part in the project were recruited on a random basis, that is we approached all the white monolingual families in Year 2 and included all who agreed to take part, the accounts of their childhood literacy experiences were surprisingly homogeneous. For most of the mothers their ‘schooled’ or formal literacy experiences had been painful and disappointing. All six, whose ages ranged from 23 to 40, felt dissatisfied with their own schooling and wanted their children to have the educational opportunities they felt they had missed. Four out of the six women had truanted regularly from both their primary and secondary schools and had been afraid to go to school because of bullying or encouraged to stay at home by parents. One mother had been dyslexic at school, one fell behind in her work as she was frequently absent, and another left before taking any examinations because of the bullying she suffered. The feeling expressed by four of the mothers, was that the ‘significant adults’, the teachers, had been uninterested in them and that they had not been encouraged to work hard or to strive for success in school. Memories of learning to read in the formal context of school, were therefore painful: “I was never really that good in school. I was partially dyslexic as well and still am with writing. They used to leave me in a corner with a picture book”. (Mrs Tr). “I was slow at reading. I was behind for a long time. My mum used to let me have a lot of time off and then once you fall behind in your work you don’t want to go back any more”. (Mrs W).
In contrast, true learning and reading with real enjoyment took place at home. Thus, Mrs L who left school with no qualifications, when asked about how she learnt to read, responded
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“I’ve always been able to read. My dad was a reader”. (Mrs L).
Mrs Tr who had been dyslexic stated, “Whatever I learned was down to my mum and dad. They were good in that department because my mum’s dyslexic. On Saturday morning we used to get comics through the door. I used to sit there for hours. I used to get all of them — Buster, Beano, Dandy..my mum used to read them”.
Mrs T who had been an indifferent student in school, who “just used to walk out of school a lot of the time”, nevertheless had some “beautiful books” at home and remembers her dad taking her to WH Smith at Elephant and Castle and “buying a load of books”. All the mothers spoke with obvious pleasure of the books and comics they had read at home as children. Enid Blyton was cited by all as a favourite author, along with classics such as Black Beauty and Treasure Island. For these women, it was the home rather than the school literacy practices that shaped their learning. Significantly, in almost every case there was an interested and caring adult, a literacy broker or a “guiding light” (Padmore 1993), who encouraged them and provided books and materials. In the case of Mrs L it was her father who “was a reader”; Mrs Tr’s parents coped with her dyslexia by providing comics and Mrs T’s father took her shopping for books. The love of reading which they remembered so vividly from their childhoods had remained with them and five out of the six mothers spoke with pleasure of the books they now read. Mrs W, who missed about two years of school, “reads a lot now, mainly biography and horror”. Mrs L who left school with no formal qualifications is now a parent governor, chair of her local residents’ association and still an avid reader, sharing and discussing books with a circle of friends. Mrs Tr, once dyslexic, now reads mainly “on a night and at weekends” and on Sundays, she “sits on the settee all day with a book. I don’t move Sundays”. Mrs A the youngest mother at 23, who left school before completing her education, says of her husband, “He’s not really a reader. I’m the reader”. Interestingly there was no suggestion in the interviews that their reading might be educational or ‘improving’ in any sense. Nor was there any mention of ‘good books’. The women read for pleasure and the authors such as Catherine Cookson, Harry Bowling, Virginia Andrews, Ruth Rendell, Agatha Christie whose works they read so avidly would be considered writers of ‘popular fiction’. In this way, the monolingual mothers differed from both the Bangladeshi British mothers and from the two mainstream school teachers. For the latter
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group, there was no ‘pain/ pleasure’ dichotomy attached to learning to read. They had happy memories of both school and home reading, and they listed authors such as Enid Blyton, Noel Streatfield, and Elinor Brent-Dyer. Unlike the monolingual mothers, however, they felt that they had no time to read now, except in school holidays, and even then, it was suggested by one teacher, it was preferable to try to read ‘good’ books. The ‘reading for pleasure’ dimension that had once been part of their childhood reading patterns had now disappeared from their lives. Nor do the dichotomies of ‘work’ and ‘play’, ‘pleasure’ and ‘pain’ have much relevance in the reading memories of the Bangladeshi British mothers in the group. In Bangladesh where six of the seven mothers lived as children, learning to read took place in different schools and in different languages (state school or Arabic class), and was not the responsibility of the parents at home. Mrs. M’s words echo the experience of the other mothers in the group who had been to school in Bangladesh: “Arabic learning took place before school started, very early in the morning … we would have breakfast and go and read for several hours not far from home. Then we would return home, have something to eat and go off to school …”.
Learning to read at Qur’anic school had a strictly religious purpose. The pleasure gained was the inner satisfaction of pleasing Allah and cannot be equated with the enjoyment of the English speaking mothers in reading novels. Learning to read in the normal school was also a serious matter and took place in the same way as learning any other subject. Mrs. M’s words echo the experience of the other mothers: “In the classroom all the children would sit in rows. The master would call out the alphabet, or words, or sentences (it depended on the level) and then the class would repeat in unison… It was successful because there was a cane [she laughs], you couldn’t go far with the master’s cane …”.
Conflict between home and school reading was not an issue, since home reading was viewed as an inappropriate activity for a girl. Indeed, household duties meant that none of the group stayed at school longer than age fifteen. Mrs. S was not alone in the group in her predicament: “I finished Class 5 … and then my mother died just after my engagement, leaving 5 brothers and 2 sisters, so I had some responsibilities …”.
Leaving school early was not a choice made freely, nor did bullying or
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truanting play any role as with the monolingual English mothers. All the Bangladeshi British mothers (including the mother whose secondary schooling was in Britain) left school for either personal responsibilities or lack of money: “The trouble was there was no legal requirement for school attendance and also you had to provide books and stationery. On top of that, parents had to pay 10% of teachers’ salaries, so it was an expensive business sending your children to school, especially for the poor folk, of whom there were many…”. (Mrs. M).
All the mothers viewed learning to read as having a serious purpose, often associated with religion. Although one now borrowed Bengali books from the library, reading generally meant “reading the Qur’an”.2 ‘Pleasure’ was derived from newstelling, a regular, structured occurrence in the women’s lives.3 Both reading and newstelling were group rather than individual or paired activities. None of the mothers in the study worked within the current paradigm of early successful reading as outlined at the beginning of this chapter. The monolingual mothers saw ‘learning to read in school’ as a formal and serious business. Reading for enjoyment was something they did at home. Storyreading did not figure as a prerequisite for successful reading for the Bangladeshi British mothers who all fufilled the requirements of their own community in attending Bengali and Qur’anic classes.
‘Unofficial’ literacy practices in young children’s lives Although the thirteen families participated unevenly in home story-reading, many of the children nevertheless spent more time engaged in reading activities out of school than in the classroom. For the Bangladeshi British children, learning to read in three languages, Arabic, Bengali and English involved three different approaches to the acquisition of literacy. Six year old Nazma4 highlighted clearly the multiple worlds of reading in her life as she talked to Nasima Rashid, a member of our research team, in Sylheti. The following is an English translation of their conversation Nasima: Do you like reading in school? Nazma: Which school? Nasima: This school [English]
Yes Why do you like it? Because we do ‘work’ [uses the word for manual work] What work do you do? Um, I don’t know What work do you do in the Bengali school? We read… and write What do you read and write about? Everything. We read all kinds of things What do you do at Mosque school? We read… we learn prayers… Which school do you like best? This… English school Why? Because of story Which story? Any one… I like to hear How do you like hearing, by reading or listening to the teacher? Teacher (Gregory 1996: 36).
Table 2 shows the scope and variety of ‘unofficial’ literacy practices in the lives of children like Nazma outside school. In contrast with the monolingual group, we found that many hours (on average 13 per child each week) were spent in formal classes learning to read and write standard Bengali or to read the Qur’an in Arabic.5 These classes were strikingly different from home story-reading sessions in a number of respects. First, they were group rather than paired activities. Literacy learning was part of ‘belonging’ to a group, and sweets or other rewards would be shared to celebrate a child’s successful progress towards the Qur’an. Second, the notion of ‘pleasure’ in terms of ‘immediate fun’ gained from a story at home was obviously inappropriate. Learning to read and write in Bengali was seen as entering a cultural world and acquiring a language which had been fought over during the violent struggle for independence from Pakistan in 1971. Learning to read the Qur’an was necessary for taking on the Islamic faith. Finally, the task of ‘learning to read’ itself was quite different from the process taking place during home story-reading sessions. Early home storyreading was often characterised by children echoing the words after the older sibling as well as ‘reading’ illustrations to predict the text. In contrast, the excerpt from a Qur’anic class below shows how reading interactions are characterised by a focus on the text, immediate correction of an error by the
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Table 2. Bilingual children’s out of school literacy activities Type of Practice Context
Participants
Qur’anic class
Bengali class
Formal: in classrooms or in someone’s living room Group of 0-30 mixed age range
Formal: in classrooms or someone’s living room Group of mixed age range. Can be children of one family, up to group of 30 Cultural: to learn to read, understand and write Standard Bengali Approx. 6 hours per week
Purpose
Religious: to read and learn the Qur’an
Scope
Approx. 7 hours per week
Materials
Raiel (wooden book stand) Preparatory primers or Qur’an Child listens and repeats (individually or as group). Practises and is tested.
Role of Child
Primers, exercise books, pens
Child listens and repeats (individually or as group). Practises and is tested.
Reading with older siblings Informal: at home
Videos/ Television Informal: at home
Dyad: child + older sibling
Family group
‘Homework’: to learn to speak and read English
Pleasure/ Entertainment
Approx. 3 hours per week English school books
Child repeats, echoes, predicts and finally answers comprehensio n questions
TV in English Videos (often in Hindi)
Child watches and listens. Often listens to and joins in discussions. Sings songs from films.
teacher, followed by repetition by the child. The context is a large classroom in which 30 boys and girls of different ages are sitting cross-legged on the floor. The teacher stands in the centre and calls upon each child in turn to recite the passage which they have reached in their reading of the religious primer or the Qur’an.
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Extract 1 Teacher: Read this, Shuma Shuma: Alif, bah, tah, sayh, [the names of the graphic symbols on the page] Teacher: What was that? Say it again Shuma: Alif, bah, tah, sayh, jim Teacher: Um, that’s it, now carry on Shuma: Jim — jim, hae, kae, d- (hesitates), Teacher: Dal — dal, remember it and repeat Shuma: Dal, zal, rae, zae, sin, shin, swad, dwad, Teacher: [nods], What’s next? Thoy, zoy Shuma: Zoy, thoy, Teacher: No, no, listen carefully. Thoy, zoy, Shuma: [repeats] Teacher: O.K. Say it again from the beginning… (field notes, N. Rashid, April 1995).
Community class reading gives the impression that the children’s ‘unofficial’ reading practices are very different from the ‘authorised’ story-readings taking place in middle-class homes. Nevertheless, the Bangladeshi British children’s worlds of literacy are linked through a very special home reading activity: ‘booksharing’ with older siblings. This practice is unique in that siblings blend strategies learned in both school and Bengali and Arabic classes. What results is a ‘syncretic literacy’ (Gregory 1998) which is characterised by repetitions and a fast-flowing pace similar to that heard in the Qur’anic class, grafted onto echoing, ‘chunking’ of expressions and gradual predictions from the English school. Below is an example of one dyad, six year old Akhlak and his thirteen year old sister (underlining denotes repetition). They are reading a school book, Meg and Mog Catch a Fish, in their living room at home. Extract 2 Child 34 35 36 It’s a whobber. Meg… 37 38 Mog catched a fish 39 40 caught a fish 44 45 46 47
Sibling Okhta [this one] It’s Mog caught
They cook cooked cooked a fish and
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and Owl had a rest. Meg was looking looked out
The interaction patterns in siblings’ ‘booksharings’ showed a number of similarities with those of parent/young infant story-readings in mainstream homes (Gibson 1989). From the example above we see ways in which the child echoes words and phrases using telegraphic speech, anticipates and supplies appropriate words and phrases, especially ‘key words’ or tries to ‘chunk’ the sibling’s language through imitation. Nevertheless, there are significant differences between the Bangladeshi British siblings and mainstream infant/caregiver dyads; notably, the focus on print rather than on illustrations, as well as the seriousness with which the activity is treated as shown in the gradual insistence by the older sibling on the young child’s accuracy in reading individual words. This seriousness is also reflected in the way both older and younger siblings view ‘booksharing’ as ‘homework’, as ‘work’ rather than ‘play’ where the roles of ‘learner’ and ‘teacher ‘ are clear and not negotiable. In contrast, many of the home literacy practices of the monolingual children were seen as play, both by the parents and by the children themselves (see Table 3). Thus playing schools was cited as the favourite game of all five girls. This involved writing lists of names, ‘correcting’ children’s work, writing on the blackboard, and reading aloud to the ‘class’. Reading for pleasure and enjoyment was also a regular part of the children’s lives, although unlike the ‘booksharing’ activities of the Bangladeshi British children, reading and writing in the monolingual homes were frequently solitary occupations: “There are times when we want to relax and be quiet and she’ll be gone for an hour and she’ll be down here reading on her own”. Mrs A, mother of Susie. “…she’ll sit in her room and she’ll fold her legs and she’ll write…”. Mrs T mother of Naomi. “…I just read some books to myself in my bedroom…but I’ve read them so many times, I’m fed up with them …”. Sally.
The monolingual children’s tastes in reading were wide-ranging and provided evidence of the diverse cultural traditions embodied in children’s literature. Luke (1992) identifies two main strands: the ‘residual’ tradition, exemplified in fairy tales and works by approved authors; and the ‘emergent’, alternate version, closely bound up with popular culture. Materials which fall into the latter category and which “may run both counter and complementary to
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dominant interests” (Luke 1992: 39) are rarely approved in schools as ‘official’ literature. At home, however, these ‘unofficial’ texts formed a substantial part of the children’s reading, creating “a pattern of mutually reinforcing intertextual references”, with characters who appeared on screen, in comics, in children’s books, and as toys (Luke 1992: 39). Thus Susie, who read the classics such as Little Women and What Katy Did with her mother, claimed nevertheless that her favourite books were based on the Walt Disney films. Richard, whose passion was the Ninja Turtles (an American TV series) was firmly situated in the ‘emergent’ culture tradition: AW: What else do you do after school? Do you ever read books or anything? R: I only read Ghostbusters and Turtle books. Table 3. Monolingual children’s out of school literacy activities g Playing School
PACT*
Informal: at home Group of individual
Informal: at home Dyad: parent/child
Purpose
Play
Scope
Evenings and weekends Blackboard , books, writing materials
Homework: to improve child’s reading Three hours per week
Type of Practice Context Participants
Materials
Role of child
Child imitates teacher and/or pupils
School reading book
Child reads and is corrected by parent using ‘scaffolding' or 'modelling' strategies
*Parents And Children Together: Home reading scheme
y Comics, fiction, non-fiction Informal: at home Individual or dyad (parent or grandparent /child) Pleasure
Variety of comics, fiction, non-fiction books Child as ‘expert’ with comics or books; as interested learner reading adult nonfiction, magazines etc.
Drama class
Computers
Video/ Television
Formal
Informal
Informal
Group
Individual or in dyad with friend or sibling
Family group or individual
Pleasure and to learn skill 2 hours per week
Pleasure
Pleasure/ entertainment
Books: poetry, plays
Child performs in group, recites as individual
TV/videos
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Such texts however rarely meet with the approval of teachers and teacher trainers. Thus while they fulfil the criterion of providing pleasure and fun, they do not meet the necessary requirements to be considered ‘good books’. It would seem that the dichotomy experienced by the parental generation between serious school reading and enjoyable home reading is being reproduced in the next generation of children in the monolingual families.
Literacy brokers and their roles The recent government initiatives to improve literacy standards included plans for a parental reading pledge, i.e. parents will be asked to sign an agreement that they will read for 20 minutes a day with each child, and funds will be allocated to “to run courses for thousands of parents whose own standard of reading is not good enough to provide the necessary help” (The Guardian 29/ 7/97). Admirable though the initiative is, it nevertheless presents story-reading as a panacea for all literacy problems, taking no account of the wide range of activities already taking place in children’s homes. The monolingual mothers in our study, who are now dissatisfied with their own education, were taking steps to ensure that their children did not experience difficulties in school: Susie’s mother had begun teaching her daughter to read with flash cards at the age of 18 months so that by age three she could recognise simple words like cat and dog and “was reading books by the time she came out of reception class”. Mrs T bought Naomi maths and language activity books in order to help with school work. Anne-Marie’s parents enrolled her for speech and drama classes which they felt would “help her with exams later”. Richard’s mother attended special classes organised by the school to demonstrate how reading was taught. Without exception, the monolingual parents involved in the project were anxious that their children should succeed where they felt that they themselves had failed: “I wish I’d stayed on. That’s my big regret. I wouldn’t like her to make the same mistakes as I did”. Mrs C.
Just as in the Bangladeshi British families however, involvement in the children’s learning was not restricted to parents. In the case of the monolingual families it was the grandparents who played a major part in fostering the children’s interest in books and reading. Their roles consisted of:
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52 a) buying their grandchildren books:
“Well, my grandad buys all the dinosaur books and I’ve got ninety-nine so when I go today, I’ll have a hundred.” Sally. “She’d brought the atlas home from school and he [grandfather] went out the next day and bought her this [an atlas].” Susie’s mother.
b) providing a role model. Naomi spoke with pride about her grandad’s books: N: He’s got all these books about snakes, about birds, about insects… AW: Does he read them? N: Yes.
c) teaching the children to read. Mrs L’s father had taught her older son to read by reading the racing tips in a tabloid newspaper with him: “When he was three or four he was always with him…watched the horseracing, read the papers, taught him to read when he was in nursery”.
Clearly the transmission of literacy skills in both Bangladeshi British and monolingual English families is not seen solely as the responsibility of parents, but all three generations can play their part.
Towards a new paradigm of early literacy: some conclusions for classroom teachers The differences that children bring to classrooms, therefore, are not simply individual differences or idiosyncrasies…They are the products and constructions of the complex and diverse social learning from the cultures where children grow, live and interact…these, too, are dynamic and hybrid — mixing, matching and blending traditional values and beliefs, children rearing practices and literacy events with those of new, post-modern, popular cultures. (Luke & Kale 1997: 16).
The children and their families introduced in this chapter begin to reveal the multiple home literacy activities of two communities living within one square mile in the centre of London. Their children also show the syncretism or ‘hybridisation’ referred to by Luke and Kale as they mix and blend practices from home and school to unique new patterns and forms. Yet few of these activities fall within the officially recognised paradigm of successful preparation for school literacy, which is story-reading with the parent using a ‘good book’. The extensive and intensive nature of these ‘unofficial’ literacy prac-
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tices in both groups provides a strong argument for a shift in paradigms in the twenty-first century towards one which rethinks the way it authorises the literate and recognises strength in diversity. But what are the strengths of these particular children and how might they successfully be recognised in classrooms? First, children from both groups provide evidence of excellent capacities for memorisation. Research on children learning in Qur’anic classes in Morocco (Wagner 1993) already shows the superior serial memories of youngsters versed in the Qur’an. However, the official drama lessons of one child as well as the unofficial ‘playing school’ activity of the monolingual group reveal how memorising might be an important resource to be called upon by all. Second, these children reveal their ability to work successfully in a larger group. They also show how they can concentrate over an extended period of time. The Bengali and Qur’anic classes lasted two hours without a break, the drama class stretched over an evening, reading serious ‘adult’ books with grandparents as well as ‘booksharing’ with siblings were not fleeting activities which could be simply left unfinished. Official guidelines on Early Years education in Britain at the end of the twentieth century (SCAA 1996: 7) stress the following: When parents and adults in each setting (home and nursery) work together to support children’s learning, the results can have a measurable and lasting effect upon children’s achievement… To be successful this partnership needs to be a two-way process with opportunities for knowledge, expertise and information to flow both ways… .
In Australia and the USA, ‘partnership’ schemes are being recognised through curricula which draw children’s informal home experiences into the classroom (Gray 1984; Edelsky 1996). Redesigning early literacy courses and home reading programmes to make positive recognition of the strengths of children in the communities they serve would be an ‘official’ way to build upon our children’s ‘unofficial’ literacies in school. Acknowledgments Our thanks are due to Nasima Rashid for work carried out with the Bangladeshi British families and the children at home, in their community classes and in school. We should like to acknowledge the support of the Economic and Social Research Council in financing this research (Family Literacy History and Children’s Learning Practices at Home and at School R000 22 1186 (1994–1995).
Eve Gregory and Ann Williams
54 Notes 1.
For examples of Conversational Analysis of interactions between children, and between children and adults in instructional settings see Mishler (1978) and Baker and Freebody (1989).
2.
A fuller explanation of reading in the Islamic world can be found in Wagner (1993).
3.
The special discourse and turn taking used during these sessions led us to refer to this as ‘a living novel’ (see Gregory, Mace, Rashid, & Williams 1996).
4.
All names have been changed to protect the anonymity of the participants.
5.
For a discussion of the Arabic term qara’a meaning to ‘read’ or ‘recite by heart’ see Baynham, M. (1995).
CHAPTER 3
Power relations and the social construction of ‘literacy’ and ‘illiteracy’ The experience of Bangladeshi women in Birmingham Adrian Blackledge
This chapter locates literacy in the context of relations of power between majority and minority groups in society. A crucial aspect of these relations of power relates to the interface between cultural identity and literacy learning. Interviews with the mothers of eighteen six-year-old Bangladeshi children were undertaken as part of a four-year study of home literacy support practices. The children all attended a community primary school in the largest Local Education Authority in England. The mothers’ responses to questions about their attempts to support their children’s literacy acquisition indicated that, despite the school’s attempts to communicate with them, most of the parents were disempowered by their limited English proficiency in their efforts to help their children to learn to read English at home. Also, it became clear that their existing literacies, including literacy in Bengali, and oral literacy activities, were not actively valued by the school. That is, the mothers were regarded as ‘illiterate’ because their particular literacies did not fit with those of the school. The relations of power between dominant-culture school and minority-culture families dictated that the mothers were unable to use their literacies in the home-school learning context, as only the dominant group could decide what constituted an acceptable form of ‘literacy’. This
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chapter examines the experiences of these Bangladeshi women in a framework which considers that literacies have different meanings for individuals and groups within and between societies, and that ‘literacy’ and ‘illiteracy’ are socially constructed phenomena which are dictated by relations of power in society.
The social process of literacy Literacy does not necessarily have the same meaning or function in all societies, or in all communities within a society. Literacy is not only being able to read and write but being able to utilise these skills in a socially appropriate context (Delgado-Gaitan 1990). The development of an individual’s literacy is shaped by the structure and organisation of the social situations in which literacy is practised. Literacy development, according to this theoretical position, is driven by qualities of individuals’ engagement in particular literacy practices (Reder 1994). By emphasising the patterns of individuals’ access to, and participation in, various roles within specific literacy practices, engagement theory seeks to account for the rich variety and patterning of literacy within and across cultural groups. Literacy is a socioculturally constructed activity which varies because of different configurations that families take in different social and cultural settings (Delgado-Gaitan 1990). This suggests an expansive concept of literacy in which oral language and text-related activities occur in the context of a personally motivated situation. Literacy activities come into being through larger political, economic and cultural forces in a given society; neither their structures nor their function can be understood outside of their societal context (Scribner 1987). In multilingual settings, roles and social meanings should be understood with respect to language and literacy choices. For example, in some U.S. communities becoming literate in the native Spanish language carries negative meanings (in contrast to the positive meanings attached to becoming literate in English), even though spoken use of Spanish is preferred in most situations. Among Hmong refugees in the U.S., on the other hand, there are positive social meanings associated with developing literacy initially in the native language. De Castell et al (1986) provide a historical perspective, arguing that in order to understand literacy, the substantive context of personal, social and political values in which literacy occurs must be explicitly addressed. Literacy does not
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simply consist of a universally defined set of skills constant across time and place. Since cultures differ in what they consider to be their “texts” and in the values they attach to these, they will also differ in what they regard as literate behaviour. The same person may be regarded as ‘illiterate’ in one culture, while appearing to be quite literate in another culture. When a number of cultures co-exist within the same society it is more likely that a range of versions of what constitutes being literate will be encountered (Ferdman 1990). In seeking to understand the literacy support practices of minority groups, then, it is important to identify the social functions, meanings and values attached to literacy in particular communities.
The social construction of illiteracy Only those who have power can decide what constitutes ‘intellectualism’ (Freire and Macedo 1987). Once the intellectual parameters are set, those who want to be considered intellectuals must meet the requirements dictated by the dominant class. The intellectual activity of those without power is always defined as non-intellectual, yet it may be that some of those defined as ‘illiterate’ are refusing to be literate as an act of resistance. That is, members of oppressed groups may consciously or unconsciously refuse to learn the specific cultural codes and competencies authorised by the dominant culture’s view of literacy (Giroux 1987). ‘Illiteracy’ is therefore as much a social construction as ‘literacy’. The notion of ‘illiteracy’ has to be seen, not as an objective description of social fact, but as an ideological, historically located interpretation which is a product of specific interests and which constructs a group of people (Prinsloo and Breier 1996). Street and Street (1991) argue that ‘school literacy’ tends to define what counts as literacy, and that this constructs the lack of school literacy in deficit terms: that is, those who are not literate in the terms determined by the school are seen as illiterate, and therefore lacking essential skills. Adults who lack reading and writing skills are often judged to be intellectually, culturally, and even morally inferior to others. ‘Illiterate’ adults should be seen as members of oral sub-cultures with their own set of values and beliefs, rather than as failing members of the dominant society. ‘Illiterate’ adults see themselves, often, as interdependent, rather than dependent, sharing their skills and knowledge with members of their social networks (Lytle and Landau 1987).
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Contributory factors to some minority group underachievement derive from the sociohistorical relations between dominant and minority groups. South African research (Gibson 1996) found that farm workers who at first sight might be labelled ‘illiterate’ were able to interpret and use complex instructional documents in order to build and maintain irrigation systems. Gibson found that literacy practices among the ‘Coloured’ Afrikaans-speaking workers on three farms in the Western Cape were embedded in relations of power between worker and farmer and between men and women. Knowledge of farming was a male domain, and accessible only to men; knowledge of books was a female domain, and associated with women. Despite women’s greater level of literacy, they were consigned to more menial jobs than the men. Some male farm workers were not literate in the conventional sense, yet their command of certain knowledge gave them access to power, whereas the higher level of ‘schooled’ literacy among the women did not. Being literate in the school’s terms was not an important criterion for access to employment or power among this group. Being male was a much more significant factor. In a study of the perceived illiteracy and actual literacy practices of South African taxi drivers (Breier et al 1996), taxi drivers managed the paperwork required of their job, without having a full and formal knowledge of the kind of literacy demanded by schools. The taxi drivers were widely referred to in official assessments as ‘illiterate’. Indeed, most had little or no formal schooling. Yet, in the course of their work, the drivers were constantly dealing with situations which seemed to require reading and writing. The male farm workers and the taxi drivers were considered illiterate within the conventional model of literacy; but from a culturally sensitive perspective it is clear that they made use of literacy practices for specific purposes, in particular contexts (Street 1996). Kell (1996) reports the case of an ANC activist who operated successfully in a literate environment for many years without becoming literate according to the dominant culture conception of the term. As soon as a literacy programme arrived, however, she was constituted as ‘illiterate’, and internalised this view, so that she perceived herself as illiterate. In fact, she was constantly involved in informal literacy practices, and there was no question that she was literate in terms of her mastery of discourses of oppression during the period of political struggle in South Africa; yet in the terms of conventional, schooled literacy she was regarded as a failure.
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Literacy, illiteracy and relations of power Macro-interactions between dominant and minority groups appear to result in the internalisation by minority groups of a sense of ambivalence with regard to their cultural identity and a sense of powerlessness in relation to the dominant group. Wagner and Grenier (1991) posit a specific phenomenon of minority group illiteracy, which represents the effect of generations of economic, educational and psychological subjugation such that members of the minority group internalise the inferior status attributed to them by the dominant group. Wagner and Grenier distinguish two distinct forms of minority group illiteracy: illiteracy of oppression and illiteracy of resistance. Both derive from the problems of access to appropriate schooling and contact between minority and majority languages. Illiteracy of resistance, although caused by oppression, is to some extent instituted by the minority group itself who, wishing to safeguard its language and culture, and fearing assimilation, turns in on itself and rejects the form of education imposed by the majority group. At the extreme, the minority group would prefer to remain illiterate rather than risk losing its language. The group will cultivate the spoken word and fall back on the oral tradition and other components of its culture. By contrast, illiteracy of oppression is a direct consequence of the process of assimilation at work in schools and society; it results in the slow destruction of identity and of the means of resistance in the minority community; thus, it is brought about by the oppressive action of the majority society. The person who refuses to become literate (as determined by the dominant group) as an act of resistance may be able to read the world (politically and culturally) very clearly, despite refusing to read the word (acquire technical skills) (Freire and Macedo 1987). The illiteracy of certain minority groups can perhaps be best understood not as skills deficiencies but as refusal to internalise the values and attitudes of the literacy practices favoured by the dominant cultural group within society (Devine 1994). For example, those who have been migrants in a new country for ten years, and have not become literate in the majority language of the host country, may realise only too clearly that literacy will not guarantee them economic gains. Greater literacy does not correlate with increased equality and democracy, nor with better conditions for the working class (Street 1984). Yet for migrants an attempt to acquire literacy in the majority language may require them to put at risk their cultural identity. It is this question of the relationship between literacy and
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cultural identity that informs the next section of this chapter.
Literacy and cultural identity As literacy is a culturally defined construct, it follows that it should have close links to cultural identity (Ferdman 1990). When literacy is transferred from a dominant culture to a minority culture which has not historically been literate, majority culture values will be transmitted as part of the “package” of literacy (Street 1987). In order to acquire literacy in the majority language it will be necessary for the learner to adopt some of the cultural behaviours and values of the majority, and risk sacrificing cultural group identity. De Castell and Luke (1987) contend that this process is calculated by majority groups, so that in literacy campaigns reading and writing are secondary concerns, and the primary purpose of institutionally transmitted literacy is rather the creation of a shared sociocultural world view: the construction and dissemination of a dominant national ideology. Such campaigns treat literacy as a universal, culturally neutral information-processing skill that can be broken down into different skills. Skills sufficient for cultural transmission are taught; the bicultural skills essential for minorities to succeed in majority settings are ignored. If the acquisition of majority-culture literacy in a minority-culture context requires the adoption of some of the cultural behaviours and values of the majority group, the individual is faced with making a choice that may have implications for her or his identity as a member of the minority cultural group. The individual must either adopt the perspective of the school (and therefore the majority society), at the risk of developing a negative component to her or his cultural identity, or else resist the pressure to adopt the dominant values and behaviours, at the risk of becoming alienated from the school; whereas for dominant-culture families, the school’s perspective is likely to be consistent with their existing cultural identity.
Literacy and power among Bangladeshi women in Birmingham As part of a broader study of school-related home literacy interactions in a minority language community in an urban setting, 18 Bangladeshi mothers were interviewed in their own homes about their children’s reading. The
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interviews were conducted by the author, in the mothers’ home language, Sylheti, with the assistance of a bilingual/bicultural interpreter who lived in the local community. All of the respondents were born in Bangladesh. They had emigrated to Britain between seven and seventeen years previously. Most of the mothers had attended school for five or six years in Bangladesh, although three had received no schooling. The children’s teachers were also interviewed about their perception of the role of parents in their children’s literacy learning. All of the parents reported that Sylheti was the only language used by them in the home. They reported that their children spoke English to each other, and Sylheti when speaking to parents and other adults at home. The language of literacy for these families was Bengali. Relations of power in literacy learning Relations of power in interactions between dominant group institutions and minority group families are visible in families’ attempts to support children’s reading in school-related home literacy tasks. Literacy interactions can be analysed in terms of their specific detail (at the micro level), and in terms of their relation to power structures in society (at the macro level) (Cummins 1996). It is by an integration of micro and macro analysis of literacy interactions that literacy learning in minority communities can be fully understood. In addition to questions about their children’s home reading practices, parents were therefore also asked about their interactions with the school. These interactions were evident in attendance at parents’ evenings, parents’ workshops and Bangladeshi women’s groups in the school. Parents’ evenings Of the 18 mothers, seven attended parents’ evenings, although another seven said that their husbands attended. Of the seven who attended parents’ evenings, three said that they could not understand the teacher, so their child had to interpret. A typical response from one of the mothers was as follows: “When we go to parents’ evening the children interpret for us, so we can understand what the teacher is saying.”
The relations of power in this context are clear. Information is given in the language of the dominant culture, and interpreted in a correct or incorrect form
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by the child. In this situation it is very difficult for parents to ask searching questions of the teacher about the child’s attainment. At the same time, it is problematic for the teacher to give a full account of the child’s progress and/or academic difficulties. Another parent responded as follows: “If I go to parents’ evening I won’t really understand what’s going on, and I’m embarrassed to ask anyone, so I don’t go.”
In this case the parent is powerless to support her child’s education, because she has limited access to information about the child’s progress. The parent is rendered voiceless by the school’s failure to provide either bilingual teachers or trained interpreters who can provide access to information (Harman 1994). This micro-interaction in the school setting mirrors the experience of many minority groups in their macro-interactions with dominant-culture institutions in society. Parents’ workshops Parents were also asked about their attendance at parents’ workshops. These were morning sessions which had been running in the school to inform parents about the curriculum. Half of the Bangladeshi women interviewed had never attended, while four said that they used to go, but no longer attended. Five parents said that they attended regularly. One of the parents who did not attend gave the following response: “I don’t go to the parents’ workshop at the school because I can’t read and write or understand English, and it’s a bit embarrassing. I know there’s a girl there who will translate, but I feel a bit embarrassed to go. It doesn’t look right, the girl is young. I couldn’t even say a word, I feel so embarrassed about it.”
In this response this parent articulates her lack of empowerment in her relations with the dominant-culture school. School support for home literacy learning Relations of power in interactions between the school and the parents were also visible in the parents’ attempts to support their children’s school-related literacy. Parents were asked whether they had ever received explicit advice from the school about how to support their child’s reading at home. Seven of
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the parents replied that they had received such advice, while eleven replied that they had not. Parents described the advice they had been given as follows: “The teacher has told me that if I can’t understand a book, I can talk about the pictures. But if the book was in Bengali and English I could read the story myself.” “The teacher said make up a story from the pictures. I can’t read English, only Bengali.”
The teacher had given advice to these parents which assumed that they were illiterate. The parents’ responses clearly demonstrated that although they could not read English, they were literate in Bengali, and they could have used this literacy to support their children’s reading. However, this resource was ignored by the school. The parents were also asked whether they would like more advice about how to support their child’s reading. Four of the parents responded that they had been given sufficient advice, and two said they didn’t mind. Twelve of the parents said that they would like further support. Two of the parents responded as follows: “I can’t ask the teachers for help with teaching Rehman to read at home, because I can’t understand their language.” “I did ask the teacher for advice about how to help Shanaz to read, but because I don’t know the language, or read and write, I felt embarrassed and couldn’t understand. I don’t really say anything to the teachers now. I’m a bit frightened because I won’t be able to do it.”
The relations of power in these interactions between school and parents are clear. Parents are excluded from their children’s schooling by an educational structure which fails to value their existing cultural and linguistic resources, and which only involves those parents who are prepared to learn the language and cultural rules of the dominant majority group. These micro-interactions in the educational setting vividly reflect the macro-interactions of power in minority groups’ attempts to participate in majority-culture institutions in society. Parents’ support for English literacy learning Parents were asked whether they actively supported their children’s English literacy learning at home. Of the eighteen parents, one said that she did help
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her child to read English, while one said that she did not. Of the remainder, two said that their husbands helped, while fourteen said that siblings were the main providers of English reading support. There was no evidence that the parents’ lack of reading support was due to apathy. Rather, it was due to a feeling of powerlessness: “It’s very hard to teach the children at home because I don’t speak English. I am trying my very best.”
The link between English language proficiency and empowerment is clear in these data. The parents’ commitment to their children’s education is visible in their responses. As in an earlier example, a parent indicated that the reason she was unable to support her child’s reading was not a deficiency in her, but the unsuitability of the reading resources sent from school: “I would like the story books to be in English and Bengali, because I could explain the stories to the children. I can’t read the English books.”
The parents did their best to resource their children’s English literacy learning. Although none of the families owned more than eight English reading books, fourteen owned two or more. Parents also commonly provided resources for their children to write in English: “The children are always drawing and writing at home, with felt tips and crayons. I have to buy paper and pens all the time, because they use them so much.”
The parents in the study attempted to support their children’s English literacy learning by providing reading and writing resources, and by organising their homes so that siblings were able to offer help to younger children. These activities were largely developed without explicit support from the school. In fact the parents’ attempts to communicate with the school were often frustrated by their lack of English proficiency. These micro-interactions between school and parents reflected the structures of power in society. Despite the school’s attempts to reach the community through school-based involvement programmes, coercive relations of power were reinforced (Cummins 1994), leaving Bangladeshi parents largely voiceless in the schooling of their children.
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The cultural value of literacy Attitudes to children’s English learning Parents were asked about their attitudes to their children’s language learning. In each of the households the children spoke to each other in English, and spoke to their parents in Sylheti. Most of the families were happy with this situation, although one parent was concerned that she could not understand her children’s conversation: “When the children speak English at home I tell them off. I want them to speak Sylheti at home, because I can’t understand English.”
All of the parents were positive about their children learning English at school. A common response was the following: “It is very important that the children learn English, because this is where they live. They need to learn English to do well at school.”
Once again the parents’ commitment to their children’s education is visible in this typical response. Attitudes to children’s use of Sylheti Concomitant with their commitment to their children’s learning of English was the parents’ attitude to the home language, Sylheti, and the community language, Bengali. All of the parents believed that maintenance of Sylheti was important for their children. Their main reason for this was that they wanted to be able to communicate with the children. As Sylheti was the home language, the parents did not indicate a need to teach this language at home. The children acquired it naturally from their parents. The parents were asked whether they told stories to their children in the home language. Fifteen of the parents said that they did, while three said that they did not. These stories were told regularly, and were in a variety of traditions: “I tell the children stories in Sylheti, traditional stories, Islamic stories, and stories I make up myself. I do this two or three times a week.” “I make up stories for my three boys, like ‘there were once three princes who became kings’, and so on.”
These responses make it clear that home-language storytelling was thriving in
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the homes of these families. This oral literacy activity was used to reinforce religious and cultural traditions. A corollary of this interaction was bound to be development of narrative and comprehension skills, and a love of story. These skills would contribute to the children’s literacy learning. There was no evidence in the parents’ responses that this oral literacy activity was recognised or valued by the school. Attitudes to children’s Bengali literacy learning The parents were also asked about their attitude to their children’s Bengali literacy learning. All eighteen parents responded positively to the question of their children learning to read and write in Bengali, a higher status language than Sylheti, but not the language of the home for these families. Typical responses were as follows: “Because we are Bengali, to us it is very important that Kabir learns to read and write Bengali.” “It is very important that my daughter knows how to read and write Bengali because otherwise if she goes back home she won’t know the language or culture.” “It is very important to me that he learns the language because we are Bengali. It is good that he has English as a second language.”
These responses make explicit the links between the community language and cultural identity. Although parents spoke of the importance of Bengali for reading letters from the homeland, the language had a significance beyond its function as a means of communication. It represented the group’s identification as Bengalis, and their difference from the majority culture, and from other minority cultures. To this end, twelve of the eighteen parents took steps to directly support their children’s Bengali literacy learning. Common responses from the parents were as follows: “I read Bengali stories to the children on Saturday and Sunday. They are too tired after school.” “I sit with the children for two hours on Saturdays and Sundays, and I teach them Bengali and Arabic”
Those parents who did not offer support at home for the children to read Bengali said that they would send their children to a tutor for this purpose when they were eight years old. In the homes where children were learning to
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read and write Bengali, there were Bengali literacy instruction books. In most of the households, children owned Bengali reading books. This support for the children’s Bengali literacy learning makes visible the links between language and cultural identity. The parents were able to offer Bengali literacy support to their children without having to acquire a new language, and without having to take on aspects of the majority culture. For these parents, Bengali literacy had a significance quite different from English literacy. There was no evidence, however, that the parents’ Bengali literacy support was recognised or valued by the school. Parental literacy The parents were asked about their ability to read and write Bengali. Of the eighteen parents, twelve reported that they were very good readers, while thirteen said that they were very good writers. One said that she was a good reader, while two said that they were not very good readers or writers. The three parents who had received no schooling reported that they could not read or write Bengali. Most of the parents therefore considered themselves to be fully literate in Bengali. However, there was no evidence that their literacy was valued by the school. Instead, the school mirrored the broader society in devaluing the competence of this minority group, and only attending to those aspects of literacy which were determined by the dominant culture. This pattern of literacy in the community language contrasted sharply with the parents’ reported literacy in English. Of the eighteen parents, none said that they were very good or good readers. Thirteen said that they could not read English at all, while fourteen said they could not write English. While this pattern of illiteracy in English in part explains the parents’ powerlessness to support their children’s English literacy, it also raises questions about the implications of becoming literate in the language of the dominant culture. The picture is yet more striking if the notion of literacy is extended to proficiency in spoken English. Of the eighteen parents, sixteen reported that they could speak no English, while the remaining two said their spoken English was not very good. Five of the parents said that they could understand no spoken English, while thirteen said their comprehension of spoken English was not very good. These responses should be seen in the context of the parents’ residence in England. The most recent immigrant had arrived seven years earlier; the longest resident had been in Britain for seventeen years.
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For these parents Bengali and Sylheti languages were cultural features which helped to define their group. The desire for their children to acquire literacy in Bengali, and to conserve their spoken Sylheti, were strongly stated. These parents were largely regarded by the school as illiterate, as the advice they received about how to support their children’s English literacy was to “talk about the pictures”.
Conclusions Those who want to be considered literate must meet the requirements dictated by the dominant class. ‘Illiteracy’ is therefore as much a social construction as ‘literacy’. These Bangladeshi parents did not have the power to decide what constitutes ‘literacy’ in English society. In their relations with the school, as much as their relations with society, they were rendered voiceless by a definition of literacy which was located solely in the language and culture of the dominant group. In failing to recognise or build on the existing literacy of these parents, this school dictated the same coercive relations of power as exist in broader society, denying a voice to those who are either unable or unwilling to become literate in the language of the dominant group. This was in spite of the school’s efforts to involve minority families in their children’s education by providing parent workshops, and offering advice on how to read with their children to at least some of the parents. These parents of Bangladeshi children were regarded by the school as illiterate because their particular literacies did not fit with the literacy of the school. They had a clear sense of the value of their languages and literacies. Both the spoken Sylheti language and the community language of Bengali were viewed as important features of cultural identity. However, the school was not able to incorporate these values in the education of the children. The parents were ascribed an identity which located them as an illiterate, subordinated group in British society. This left the parents powerless in their concern to support their children’s learning, and left the school powerless to build on the families’ cultural and linguistic capital in the education of their children. Despite the efforts of teachers to involve the parents in their children’s reading, the majority-culture school was unable to make use of the considerable resources of the Bangladeshi community. This breakdown at the local
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level of school and community was likely to be mirrored in the macrostructures of power between minority group family and dominant group institutions in society. This failure to connect the worlds of school and home is not inevitable. Schools can challenge the coercive relations of power which seem to dictate that dominant-culture institutions necessarily oppress minority-language families. Schools can effect such changes when they: a. make concerted attempts to communicate with families in their home languages b. make explicit their understanding that community literacies, including oral literacies, contribute to children’s learning c. affirm families’ cultural identity within and beyond the curriculum d. make genuine attempts to involve parents in their children’s education, including at policy-making level. These interventions lay the foundations for an educational structure which narrows the gulf between dominant-culture school and minority-language home. In so doing, they challenge the relations of power which prevent the involvement of minority-language parents in their children’s schooling, and create collaborative structures in which families are able to use their cultural and linguistic resources to contribute to their children’s learning.
CHAPTER 4
Learning to read and write at home The experience of Chinese families in Britain An Ran
Introduction The Mainland Chinese community in Britain is a transitory one. Most members come either to study for higher degrees or as the dependents of postgraduate students. Although increasing numbers of families are now staying for extended periods of time, the majority will return to the People’s Republic where their children will need to reintegrate into a very different education system. Parents are by far the most important source of help in maintaining the mother tongue in a small and isolated community like that of the Mainland Chinese. This can create enormous pressures on both parents and children. The driving force behind parents’ efforts to maintain Chinese language and literacy is concern about the educational outcomes for their children on the family’s return to China. Very often, however, the parents have no direct experience of teaching young children to read and write. As is the case for many British parents supporting their children at home, all that they have to draw on is their own recollections of learning to read at school. But, whereas British parents are usually in a support role and are able to consult and seek advice from their children’s teachers, many Chinese parents find that they have sole responsibility for teaching their child to read and write Chinese. This chapter is about the role which Chinese mothers play in their children’s language and literacy learning, and the extent to which there is a standard
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approach — or a range of approaches — towards literacy teaching in the Mainland Chinese community.
Reading at home in five Chinese families I observed and video-recorded five mother-child dyads. I also collected data in open-ended, semi-structured interviews with the mothers. As can be seen in Table 1, the children ranged in age from six to ten; they also varied in the length of time that they had been in the UK, from birth to three years. The children’s educational histories were also varied. Thus, although Xiaoman and Mary were both seven years of age, Xiaoman had attended kindergarten in China, whereas Mary’s education had been entirely in the UK. The same textbooks are used throughout much of China for the teaching of reading, although there are some regional differences. In all cases, children’s reading achievement is gauged by the book which they are using. The levels of experience of the children in the present study ranged from Book 1 to Book 6. All five families use Putonghua at home and the children are all fluent Chinese-English bilinguals. All the mothers were university educated. All the reading interactions and interviews took place in Chinese and were then translated into English. The discussion which follows is based on an analysis of the English translations of the transcripts, using NUD.IST (Nonnumerical Unstructured Data Indexing Searching and Theorizing), a software programme which is specially designed for qualitative data analysis. A preTable 1. Details of the five case study families Mother’s name 1 Guiying Jianqi Qinfang Lili Yongjing
child’s name and age Guangyu 8 years old Xuge 10- years old Helen 6 years old Mary 7 years old Xiaoman 7 years old
y child’s education in China one month in primary school one year in primary school none
child’s reading level Book 3
length of stay in UK. three years
Book 6
three years
Book 1
born in UK
none
Book 3
born in UK
kindergarten
Book 1
three years
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liminary tree diagram was constructed based on categories which had emerged during the course of observation and these categories were applied to the mothers’ speech. During the course of the analysis, the categories were sometimes refined by subdividing them further; on other occasions, when an initial category was used only a very small number of times, it was decided that it was not sufficiently robust for the purposes of the analysis and was reassigned to a broader category. The categories which emerged as important in this analysis included the way in which the ‘teacher’ modelled the text; the very direct teaching style with heavy use of instructions; the equally heavy reliance on questions as a teaching technique; the range of strategies which the mothers used for explaining the text to their children; the use of review and practice strategies; and the distinctive patterns of response to children’s efforts. Using the NUD.IST software, a change from one analytical category to another was encoded with a return. In some instances, however it was possible to categorise the same stretch of speech in different ways: for instance, an instruction can also be an example of review and practice. Figure 1 shows the relative frequencies of the different strategies used by mothers in reading interactions with their children. Questioning was by far the most commonly used teaching strategy, though extensive use was also made 25.00%
20.00%
15.00%
10.00%
5.00%
Figure 1. Use of different teaching strategies
Response
Review & Practice
Explanations
Instructions
Questions
Reading Aloud
0.00%
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of instructions and explanations. The mothers spent relatively little time reading the actual text or reviewing and practising material, and only a small proportion of the interactions could be categorised as responses — positive or negative — to the children’s reading. This preliminary quantitative analysis of the data, however, gives only a very limited picture of what was actually happening. In the discussion which follows, further data, both quantitative and qualitative, will be presented on the teaching strategies of individual mothers. Reading aloud In every case, the mothers interpreted the researcher’s request to read with their children by selecting a lesson at an appropriate level from a standard Chinese textbook (see the sample text in Figure 10). As shown in Figure 2 below, the proportion of the interactions where the mother was actually reading from the text varied between 1 and 11 per cent and corresponded closely with the level of experience of the child. Thus, for instance, Qinfang and Yongjing whose children were both reading from Book 1, spent proportionately more time than the other mothers actually reading from the text. There was a clear expectation that children with more advanced reading skills would take greater responsibility for reading the text out loud themselves.
12% 10% 8% 6% 4% 2% 0%
Guiying
Jianqi
Figure 2. Reading aloud behaviour
Lili
Qinfang
Yongjing
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Extracts from the transcripts of the reading interactions illustrate the ways in which the mothers were accommodating to their children’s needs. In the case of Qinfang and Helen, an inexperienced reader, mother and daughter looked at the text together, with the mother pointing to each character with her finger, reading in a loud voice, and the daughter just following the text: Qinfang:
The little boat. The crescent moon, the little boat, the little boat has two pointed sides. I’m sitting in the boat, looking at the twinkling stars and the blue sky.
Yongjing and, her daughter, Xiaoman, another inexperienced reader, approached this in a slightly different way: the mother read the text, then offered prompts and allowed the child to continue. Using the text in Xiaoman’s Chinese book, the following sequence was enacted: Yongjing: Xiaoman: Yongjing: Xiaoman: Yongjing: Xiaoman:
Fishing at the bank together. [repeats] Fishing at the bank together. The little cat… The little cat and the old cat fish at the bank together were unlucky, they didn’t even catch one fish. How … How come there weren’t any fish? Why couldn’t I catch a fish?
Of all the children, only Xuge is still learning to read with the aid of pinyin, a romanised transcription first introduced into the People’s Republic following writing reforms in 1956 (Sheridan 1981; Horvath and Vaughan 1991). His mother used the standard procedure: she read each word and then broke it up into two units: the initial sound and the rest of the syllable. The third word is dang (clank), d-ang, dang. The fourth is tou (steal), t-ou, tou. The fifth is peng (bump), p-eng, peng.
There is an interesting parallel here between well-established Chinese teaching approaches and more recent developments in the UK. Traditional phonics teaching in the UK focused on the relationship between individual sounds and letters. However, with the growing interest in phonological awareness (cf. Goswami & Bryant 1990), attention has shifted from individual sounds to onset (initial sounds) and rime (remaining sounds in word). Questions The mothers made extensive use of questions. Figure 3 shows that the propor-
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tion of utterances in reading interactions which were categorised as questions ranged between 13 and 36 per cent. Differences between the mothers seemed more related to individual style than to the level of experience of the child. Thus, of the two mothers who used the highest proportion of questions, one had a child who was working on Book 6, the other’s child was working on Book 1. 40% 35% 30% 25% 20% 15% 10% 5% 0% Guiying Qianqi
Lili
Qinfang
Yongjing
Figure 3. Use of questions
The main aim of the questions was clearly to elicit whether the children had access to the background knowledge which informed the text as a whole, or had understood the individual components — words, characters, sentences and paragraphs — which made it up. The questions can be further subcategorised, as set out in Figure 4. 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 words
text measure structure child’s conten word idea
Figure 4. Relative proportions of different types of questions
other
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Of the 139 questions, just under half (61) were about words and phrases. Sometimes the mother asked the meaning of a word or phrase, for example, ‘What does da hua mean?’ ‘What does jie dao mean?’ All five mothers made extensive use of this particular strategy. Often questions were about the composition of characters. On other occasions, the mothers asked questions to help the child extend or make a complete sentence: Qinfang: Helen: Qinfang: Helen: Qinfang: Helen:
Now you make a sentence with kan jian [see/ saw/ seen]. I see…. I see a dog. What is the dog doing? Walking. See father. Can you see what he is doing? Driving.
Sometimes the questions were open-ended. Yongjing, for instance, wanted to know which words Xiaoman thought were difficult. More often, however, her questions were intended to elicit a particular response. Another important subcategory of questions focused on the use of measure words such as ge and zhi, a feature of Chinese which causes widespread difficulty for children.2 Typical questions included: Lili: Yongjing:
Can we say one ge (measure word) leave? OK. Next exercise. For example: one zhi (measure word) pen. Can I say ‘one ge book’?
Some 14 per cent of the questions concerned the use of measure words. Such questions, however, were only used by the mothers of the younger children who were still in the process of acquiring this area of grammatical knowledge. The greater emphasis on questions concerning form rather than content is not surprising when we consider that most of the children in this study were relatively young and inexperienced readers. The nature of the Chinese writing system makes it necessary to give considerable attention to the composition and grouping of characters in the early stages of learning to read (HudsonRoss & Dong 1990; Sheridan 1990). This difference in emphasis may well give rise to misunderstanding between teachers and pupils in British classrooms and there is evidence that this is indeed the case. Gregory (1993b), for instance, describes the misunderstanding between a British teacher and a Chinese family about the ways in which reading is taught in British schools. With younger children, the mothers paid more attention to the structure of characters; with older, more experienced readers, they tended to emphasise the structure and meaning of the text as a whole. Thus, Jianqi prepared ten-
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year-old Xuge for a more detailed look at the story of ‘yan re dao ling’ (Stealing a ring by covering your ears) by asking him how many fables he could remember from before. Guiying asked her son who was working on Book 3, ‘What’s the general idea of the story?’ Other questions were directed at specific parts of the story: Jianqi asked the meaning of the second paragraph and explored the feelings of the central character. This use of questioning was, however, relatively rare among mothers in the present study: less than 20 per cent of the questions explored children’s understanding of the content. Even fewer (15 per cent) addressed the children’s own views on what they were reading. This practice is thus very different from what usually takes place in a mainstream school context in Britain where considerable emphasis is placed on encouraging children to relate their own experiences and opinions to the text which they are reading (Chambers 1993; Graham & Kelly 1997). Figure 4 shows the relative proportions of the different categories of questions. However, for an understanding of why and how the mothers asked the questions, we need to look more closely at the qualitative data. The mothers frequently drew on children’s prior knowledge. In many cases, they made use of children’s growing dominance in English to check their understanding of the Chinese text. Yongjing, for instance, read a section of the text: ‘Sister said it looks like salt (yan)’ and then asks Xiaoman, ‘How do you say yan in English?’ Children, too, asked their mothers for an English gloss for a Chinese word or phrase on a number of occasions. At other times, the mothers appealed to children’s general knowledge. Thus Yongjing asked Xiaoman what sheep eat to help her form a sentence using cao (grass), and Lili asked Mary the names of the four seasons. Occasionally, the mothers asked questions to engage their children’s attention. For example, Jianqi told Xuge that yan (cover) was a verb and then asked him, ‘What is yan er (cover ear)?’ Xuge began to cover his ear to show that he had understood. Similarly when Qinfang asked Helen the meaning of twinkle, she gave a clue by opening and closing her fingers. These different strategies are not, of course, used in isolation but form part of a more coherent whole. Take the following extract from the transcript of Qinfang teaching her daughter: Qinfang: Helen: Qinfang:
What’s meaning of wan wan [crescent]? I don’t know. What’s the shape of the moon? You tell me what’s the shape of the
moon? [Draws a crescent shape]. Is that right? Do you think it’s a crescent? When the moon reaches the fifteenth day of the month, it’s a crescent. What’s a crescent look like? A small boat. What’s the meaning of twinkle? [Opens and closes her fingers to show twinkling]. [singing] Twinkle, twinkle, little star. Yes, the twinkling stars and the blue sky. You can say the crescent moon. What else can you say using wan wan [crescent]? The curved tail. You mean the cock’s curved tail? Yes.
Clearly Qinfang was using a whole range of interrogative strategies to help her daughter understand the meaning of crescent: she asked direct questions, she appealed to prior knowledge, she made allusion to other bodies in the sky and she asked Helen to use the word in another context. Instructions The mothers’ teaching style was, without exception, very direct, with extensive use of instructions to the children which made it very clear what was expected of them. As we see in Figure 5, the proportion of the reading interactions which were categorised as instructions ranged between 4 and 27 per cent. As was the case in the analysis of questions above, the use of 30% 25% 20% 15% 10% 5% 0%
Guiying
Figure 5. Use of instructions
Jianqi
Lili
Qinfang
Yongjing
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instructions seemed to vary according to the parents’ individual style rather than the level of experience of their children. In the transcripts of the reading interactions, the following examples are typical of the instructions given by the mothers: Jianqi:
Yes, write the new words and make sentences. Repeat the story. It’s better if you can recite all the text. Next time I’ll ask you to think about your own experience, to say something about what you think after you read the story. Think about it after the class. Now repeat the story. Qinfang: Now read the test again. Yongjing: Now fill in all these words. Guiying: Now answer the question: What did the frog and the bird argue about?
There are similarities between this approach and African-American and African-Caribbean teaching styles. Heath (1983), for instance, examined the way in which the directness associated with African-American language style sometimes gave rise to misunderstanding in a school situation. Middle class white teachers often expressed instructions in the form of questions; when working class white and African American children then fail to comply, their teachers interpreted their behaviour as undisciplined and disrespectful. Callender (1997) discusses the same phenomenon in a British context. Chinese children are normally considered obedient and polite, rather than disrespectful (An 1999). This does not, however, remove the possibility that the very different discourse style of British teachers may give rise to cross-cultural misunderstanding in the classroom. This is an area which would benefit from more research. Strategies for explaining Explanation was another common strategy used by the mothers in the reading interactions. The proportion of ‘points’ categorised as explanations ranged from 11 to 33 per cent. As was the case for instructions and questions, Figure 6 shows that there was no obvious relationship between the mothers use of explanations and the level of experience of the child, leading to the conclusion that variations in use are best attributed to the individual style and preferences of the mothers.
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35% 30% 25% 20% 15% 10% 5% 0.% Guiying
Jianqi
Lili
Qinfang
Yongjing
Figure 6. Use of explanation
Analysis of the transcripts indicated that explanations could be further subcategorised into statements and demonstrations. The different patterns of behaviour are set out in Figure 7. It would seem, therefore, that there were very large differences in the ways in which the mothers offered explanations to their children. Guiying and Lili relied exclusively or almost exclusively on the use of statements; the other g
p
g
18% 16% 14% 12% 10%
statement demonstration
8% 6% 4% 2% 0% Guiying
Jianqi
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Qinfang Yongjing
Figure 7. Different explanation strategies
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mothers used both statements and demonstration. Again the mothers did not seem to be responding to the levels of experience of their children; rather their behaviour seemed to reflect their different styles. As was the case for questions and instructions, explanations were offered for many different reasons. Very much in instructional mode, the mothers sometimes anticipated children’s difficulties and offered explanations spontaneously. Jianqi, for instance, in introducing the story of ‘Yan re dao ning’ (Stealing a ring by covering your ears), began by pointing out that: Jianqi:
A fable explains things through a simple story. It uses metaphor, symbol and personification to show the truth or irony of the story. Children like this form and accept it easily.
On other occasions, explanations were offered when children were clearly experiencing difficulties. Thus, Guiying clearly suspected that Guangyu did not know the meaning of guan [observe] in the context of the story they were reading and offered the following explanation: Guiying:
guan means to look at, observe. [Here] it means sitting in a well and looking at the sky.
Most often explanations took the form of a simple statement as in the examples above. However, one of the mothers, Guiying, also made very skilful use of analogy to help Guangyu understand a text in which a frog sitting in a well is talking to a bird. The frog believes that the sky is only as big as the part he can see from his vantage point down the well; he refuses to believe the bird who says it is very much bigger. Guiying expanded on the story, saying: Guiying:
Another example is of an uneducated person who lives in the countryside. When he sees a television screen, he wants to know where the picture is coming from. When someone tells him it is carried by electric waves, he cannot believe it. He doesn’t know that there is any such thing as electric waves because he has no education.
She then made explicit the point of the story: Guiying:
When the frog is in the well he thinks the sky is the same size as the well. We’re talking about people’s attitudes here. Some people just don’t believe things outside their experience.
The second strategy used to explain elements of a text was demonstration, particularly in relation to how characters are written. Yongjing showed how hua [flower] is written with a line, a sweep, a vertical line, a sweep and a right angle; Qinfang demonstrated to Helen that wan wan [crescent] is
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written with two vertical lines first, then two dots. Quite often, the mothers used visualization techniques to help children fix a picture of the character in their memories. Thus, as Yongjing demonstrated the character for diao (to fish), she drew attention to the hook on the left side, and reminded her that you use a hook to fish. Qinfang drew attention to the shape of the character wan wan [crescent]: Qinfang:
wan wan [crescent] has got two pointed sides. [Indicates the points on the crescent shape she has drawn]. It looks like a little boat.
Qinfang explained Qinfang:
zuo [sit] in a similar way,
One side is a ren [person], the other side is a ren [person]. And then you write the tu [soil]. That means two persons sit on the zuo. ground. This is the word
The mothers also used comparison to explain a text, when a child confused two words with similar meaning or similar appearance. For instance, Qinfang said to Helen: ‘You wrote bai [white]. But this is zi (oneself). One line is bai, two lines is zi.’ (cf. Hudson-Ross & Dong 1990: 121). Review & practice Between 4 and 15 per cent of the interactions could be categorised as examples of review and practice. As indicated in Figure 8, all the mothers used this strategy at some point when reading with their children, although its use appears to have been linked more closely to individual teaching style than to children’s level of experience. 16% 14% 12% 10% 8% 6% 4% 2% 0% Guiying
Jianqi
Figure 8. Use of review and practice
Lili
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The use of this strategy is deeply embedded in Chinese education. Confucius said ‘You learn new things by reviewing what you know already [wen gu er zhi xin]’ (Legge 1971), underlining the fact that review and practice strategies are a well-established feature of Chinese culture. Revision materials are on display in every bookstore in China. Parents use these materials as the basis for homework which will be used to reinforce the work which takes place in school. A score of 90 or 95 per cent is considered necessary to demonstrate that a child has really understood and, in order to achieve a score of this magnitude, it is essential to keep doing exercises, to keep reviewing and practising. After explaining the text, the mothers used several ways to encourage their children to practise what they had taught and also to remind them of what they already knew. As we have seen, Qinfang had taught the adjective crescent, which can be use to modify moon. She asked her daughter, ‘What else can you say using crescent?’ Qinfang also asked her to make sentences to practise individual words and sentence patterns with which she was already familiar. Some mothers also used more direct techniques to review what they had taught their children: Guiying:
Now say the meaning of these words. What does ‘ zuo jing guan tian’ [Sitting in the well to observe the sky] mean?
Dictation was a common tool for helping children review what they had learned. Sometimes the mothers gave the dictation without prior discussion. However, on other occasions, they first drew attention to words from the lesson which they felt might cause difficulty and then included these in the dictation. Review and practice strategies were used at two main points in the reading interactions. Jianqi, for instance, used this approach at the beginning to help her son recall what he had learned in the previous lesson: Jianqi:
How many fables can you remember from before? What’s a fable all about?’
On most occasions, however, review and practice took place towards the end of the session. The mothers often asked their children to paraphrase the text and check on whether they had understood what they had been reading. They usually expected the children to do the exercises which followed the text to check if they had understood. These exercises most often consisted of answer-
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ing questions about the content of the text; comparing similar words and making sentences; filling in the blanks using words from the text; and practising characters. Responding to the children The parents’ responses to the children, both positive and negative, are another area of interest. As Figure 9 indicates, there were marked differences between the mothers. Guiying, for instance, only made use of praise strategies with her son. Jianqi and Qinfang also made frequent use of praise. Positive responses often took the form of yes or no or a simple evaluative comment: Jianqi: Qinfang:
Yes, one sentence. Now you write it again. [Daughter writes it again]. Right.
On other occasions, however, the praise was more enthusiastic: Yongjing: Good. Do it again. Very good.
I have already noted the direct nature of the mothers’ interactions with their child. There would seem to be a close relationship between the directness of these interactions and the mothers’ use of praise. This is clearly a cultural phenomenon which has been noted in various other situations (Callender
8% 7% 6% 5% positive
4%
negative
3% 2% 1% 0%
Guiying
Jianqi
Lili
Qinfang
Figure 9. Mother’s responses to their children
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1997). Many of the mothers’ responses to their children, including those cited above, might be perceived by a western audience, at best, as unenthusiastic. It is also notewothy that Lili and Yongjing made very critical comments to their children on a number of occasions. By the same token, these negative comments may seem unduly harsh to a western audience influenced by an educational philosophy which attaches great importance to the notion of a positive self-concept for success in learning. Comments such as those which follow were typical. Jianqi:
No, not very good. You’d have a pause between each paragraph. You should practise after class. Lili: You’ve already read all these in your English book. How can you forget everything? Yongjing: You didn’t make a very good job of that.
At no point during the sessions did the children challenge their parents’ negative comments. This is very much in accordance with the belief that parents’ actions are always in their children’s best interests. Rashid and Gregory (1997: 112–13) describe a similar pattern in an account of a Sylhetispeaking girl teaching her brother to read: Jamilla (sister) frequently corrects Maruf’s mistakes as and when they arise, and has no fear of undermining his confidence. To the outsiders, her strategies may appear too probing for a young child… however, knowledge of the community classes allows us to understand that these children are very comfortable with such structures.
Problems can sometimes arise, however, when Chinese families live abroad and children are exposed to rather different cultural assumptions. Accounts written by children in the overseas edition of a Chinese newspaper, (see, for instance, Song 1997: 9) make this point very clearly. Jiaou, who had been in Sweden for five years, described her experience of learning to play the violin thus: My teacher is Swedish. She is patient, kind and friendly. Even when I sometimes play the tunes very poorly, she always encourages me ‘Good! Try it again.’ ….. My mother isn’t nearly as nice as my teacher. When I make mistakes, she tells me off. She treats me very strictly. Sometimes she feels my posture is wrong, sometimes she complains that I am not using the bow as forcefully as I should. When I cheerfully play a new tune to her, she says, ‘Why are you learning to play tunes instead of practising your scales?’ I have to practise the boring ‘open string’ which my mother told me to do as something extra… It’s so difficult to get my mum’s praise. Now that I am getting older, I know my mum is strict because she
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wants me to be good. Perhaps if she was different I wouldn’t be the best in the class. But if my mum gave me more encouragement, just like my teacher, probably I would be even better. Who knows? (People’s Daily, overseas edition, 5 September 1997: 9)
Yao Yuan expresses a similar sentiment: When I see other children playing under the sunshine, how I love it! But I have to do lots of Chinese exercises which they don’t have to. (People’s Daily, overseas edition, 24 January 1998: 3)
Chinese parents, then, would seem to focus mainly on their children’s long term future. In order to achieve their goal, they are prepared to be strict and even to use harsh words to spur their children on. Again a famous saying encapsulates this view: ‘The cloth will get bigger and bigger and the band will get looser, but in the interest of study I don’t mind being thin and pallid.’ Traditional views of study are so deeply ingrained that they still inform the thinking of Chinese parents abroad. For instance, Su (1997), a Chinese graduate student in the USA, describes how her five-year old daughter protested one day that her mother was hurting her feelings. She admits that her first reaction was surprise that a five year old should have hurt feelings. Only on reflection did it occur to her that children’s feelings may have been neglected in the thousand year history of parents as rulers and guardians of the truth.
Conclusions Several general points emerge from this analysis of Chinese mothers’ reading with their children. The first concerns what counts as reading. The mothers took a highly structured instructional approach. They all interpreted the request to read with their children by working from a standard textbook rather than choosing a storybook and reading for pleasure. When reading the selected text, the mothers took a very direct approach, making extensive use of questions to ensure that children had understood the text as a whole as well as its component parts; giving clear instructions about what they expected the child to do; and offering explanations in the form of demonstration, statements and, in the case of one of the mothers, analogy. The emphasis was on the understanding of form and structure and close attention to the text, rather than on reader response and enjoyment, as is the case in British education.
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The mothers in the sample used for this study are all well-educated but have no training in teaching, either in China or the UK. In this respect, the only experience which they can bring to the teaching of Chinese literacy is what they remember from their own schooling in China. At various points in the discussion in this chapter, comparisons have been made between Chinese approaches to teaching with what takes place in mainstream British school. It would, of course, be illuminating to make comparisons between the teaching strategies of Chinese mothers and British mothers; however, I had neither the time nor the resources to explore this avenue as part of the present study. One final point can usefully be made about the teaching strategies of the five women in this study. Although all the mothers adjusted to the needs and experience of their children when actually reading the text aloud, they also showed a great deal of variation in the degree to which they used the different strategies. Thus, while it is possible to make general statements about the approach of Chinese mothers to the teaching of reading, it is important to remember that they are by no means a homogeneous group. Mainland Chinese families invest considerable time and effort in helping their children maintain high levels of achievement in reading and writing Chinese. There can be no doubt as to the very real urgency for children to keep pace with their peers in China so that they will be able to compete on equal terms on their return. Nor can there be any doubt about the impossibility of this task: children who can spend only a few hours a week after school and at weekends cannot be expected to achieve the same levels as children whose entire education is conducted in Chinese. By looking in depth at what happens when five Mainland Chinese mothers set about teaching their children to read and write Chinese at home, it has been possible to show the strategies which are commonly used and the ways in which these vary both according to the needs and stage of development of the child, and the individual style of the mother. Attention has been drawn to the broad differences between approaches to the teaching of reading in these Chinese families and those approached which predominate in British schools. In addition, tentative suggestions have also been made as to similarities with the interactional styles documented for other minority groups, including AfricanAmericans, African-Caribbeans and Bangladeshis. Discussion has focused in particular on the very direct teaching style of Chinese mothers and the ways in which they may seem critical and negative to British observers. The differences between this approach to home tuition and the interac-
10. Page from a standard Chinese textbook
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tional styles documented here and the teaching/learning approaches of the school need to be acknowledged and more fully understood. Such an understanding is clearly essential in multicultural, multilingual classrooms in the UK: teachers need to be aware of the specific literacy experiences of children from different cultural backgrounds and of the different expectations of parents for their children.
Notes 1.
Fictitous names are used throughout this chapter to maintain the anonymity of the participants.
2.
In Chinese, each noun has a specific measure word associated with it, defined by Chao (1968: 584) as ‘a bound morpheme which forms a D-M (determinative and measure) compound with [a] determinative.’ When the noun is used with a demonstrative pronoun, the measure word must always intervene. For example: yi zhang zi (one piece of paper), liu zhang zhuo zi (six tables),wu ba dao (five knives), san ba hua (three bunches of flowers). The specific measure word selected is determined by the nature or shape of the noun The nearest equivalents in English would, for example, be a sheet of paper or, a glass of water.
CHAPTER 5
Language, literacy and worldview1 Viv Edwards and Hubisi Nwenmely
Traditionally, the study of literacy has been conceptualised in technical terms, independent of social context (Goody 1968; Olson 1977; Ong 1982). On the level of the group, control over the written word has been associated with development, progress and modernisation. On the level of the individual, literacy has been presented as moulding cognitive processes. In recent years, there has been a growing dissatisfaction with the crude stereotypes often associated with discussions of this kind (Street 1993a). Literacy is viewed increasingly as a social construct which varies according to cultural context; and researchers are placing growing emphasis on the links between reading and writing and power structures within society. This chapter is offered as a contribution to the debate on ‘new literacies’. It will explore the attitudes and practices of a number of different groups. Discussion of the first of these groups — white fundamentalist Christians in the USA, and settlers from the Indian sub-continent and Hong Kong in the UK — will be based on accounts by a variety of writers, including Heath (1983); Zinsser (1986) and Gregory (1993a; 1993b). The remaining groups — speakers of Kwéyòl, an Afro-French creole, in the Eastern Caribbean and Britain — have been a recent focus for our own research. Different worldviews in each of these settings have produced a range of responses to the printed word. Educationalists and policy makers are only now beginning to understand the implications of these differences.
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92 Fundamentalist Christians
The written word is everywhere in fundamentalist Sunday schools in North America, which draw primarily on white working class populations. Children all have their own Bibles; printed messages are attached to classroom walls. Teachers use curriculum guides which show how Bible truth can be applied to real life situations, and this learning is reflected in the handouts given to the children. So how do children relate to print in this situation? According to Zinsser (1986), non-readers are required to listen carefully. The pattern is always the same: first the teacher says the verse, then the children repeat it several times in unison with her. They take home the printed verse so that parents can help them memorise it by the next meeting, when their efforts are rewarded with a star. Of course, children’s learning is not restricted to Bible knowledge: they are finding out, among other things, how teaching is organised. Zinsser (1986: 64), for instance, shows how children are expected to provide short, ‘correct’ and formulaic answers and not to speculate on alternative interpretations. Anyone who fails to understand this principle is soon put right. Teacher: Child: Teacher:
Did God answer Janie’s prayer? Yes. She wasn’t afraid … (adds thoughtfully) Maybe she did it herself. No God helped her.
Heath (1983) shows how the experience of literacy in church is closely mirrored in the homes of lower class white children. In the community of ‘Trackton’ in the southeastern United States, the stories people tell are based on personal experience and show familiarity with the Bible and church-related stories of Christian life. These stories are expected to be true to the facts and to have an underlying moral. Reading is also held in high regard and the bedtime story is an established ritual. In the main, parents choose nursery rhymes, alphabet books and simplified Bible stories. Children are expected to sit quietly until the end when they are required to answer questions on what they have heard and talk about the moral of the story. Children introduced to literacy in a religious context may find themselves at a disadvantage in mainstream schools where the expectations are very different. Zinsser (1986), for instance, suggests that children from fundamentalist Christian families may have difficulty in getting the floor, holding the floor and introducing news. Heath (1983) shows that fears of this kind are well-founded: teachers often criticised the children from the mainly funda-
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mentalist community in her study. They expressed concern that these children rarely asked questions and gave only minimal answers. Yet these were the very same behaviours which were expected around the printed word both at home and in Sunday school.
Muslims in Britain There are in fact many points of similarity between the religious education of fundamentalist Christians and other religious groups, including Muslims. In traditional religious schools or ‘maktabs’, children learn, among other things, to recite by heart whole passages of the Qur’an. Maktabs have definite boundaries between ‘work’ and ‘play’ which make them distinct from mainstream school. The same principles often spill over from Qur’anic to voluntary classes in community languages such as Urdu, Bengali and Gujarati. Children questioned in a study by Gregory (1993a) were clear that they ‘read and write’ in Bengali school and ‘play’ in English school. In classes which often last for two hours without a break, children remain seated on the floor or at the table and all talk is directed to the task in hand. The typical sequence is demonstration, repeat, practice and then test. As is the case in the American Sunday school, tuition is exact and direct. The child answers and will be told either, “Yes” or “Not like that, like this”. Children from Muslim families may find the approach to literacy learning in mainstream schools confusing: they may dismiss what takes place as frivolous, believing that ‘real’ learning takes place only in more formal settings. By the same token, many teachers in mainstream schools are unaware of the rich literary tradition to which children from the Indian sub-continent are privy.
The Chinese experience of literacy The Hong Kong Chinese community in Britain provides another example of how differences in worldview impinge on literacy practices. In Hong Kong, much importance is attached to the values of Confucianism, including respect for parents and achievement in education. As is the case in the community classes described above, there is a strict division between work and play.
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Children sit in rows and do as the teacher directs them. They practise ideographs over and over until they are perfect. If they forget or misplace a single stroke, they may completely change the meaning of the character, so close attention to detail is essential. These practices continue in the voluntary Chinese community classes in Britain. Children recite words in chorus after the teacher. They learn through repetition, memorisation and careful copying. Books are held in very high esteem but parents believe that children must prove themselves worthy through hard work. In much the same way that Muslim children are given the Qur’an when they have worked their way through Arabic primers, many Chinese children are rewarded with books only when they have learned to read. These very different expectations have serious implications for children in mainstream schooling. Gregory (1993b), for instance, describes the enthusiasm of Tony, and his family from Hong Kong when he starts school. Within a few months, however, Tony has started to reject his teacher’s attempts to help him. He is focusing on individual words and is more interested in labelling the people and things in the illustrations than in trying to predict what comes next. When his teacher makes a visit to his home, she is surprised at the frosty reception she receives from his grandfather: ‘Tony can’t have this book yet. You must keep it and give it to him later.’ ‘But why?’ ‘Because he can’t read the words. First he must read the words, then he can have the book.’
Tony’s grandfather pulls out an exercise book from under the counter and shows it to the teacher. A number of pages have been filled with immaculate ideographs. His grandfather says proudly that Tony has completed these at Chinese Saturday school. With a sceptical look at the teacher, he pulls out a screwed up piece of paper. On one side is a shop advertisement from which it had been recycled. On the other is a drawing of a transformer. Tony’s grandfather then said: ‘This is from his English school. This is rubbish.’
Pointing to the corner where ‘ToNy’ is written, he says: ‘Look. He can’t even write his name yet!’
Caught between the different approaches of the two schools, Tony seems to ‘switch off’. The root of the problem, however, would seem to lie not so much
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in the differences between the two systems as in the fact that Tony’s family assumes that the same principles should operate in both systems. This confusion is exacerbated by the fact that Tony’s teachers have not explained precisely what they are trying to achieve. Children from ‘non-mainstream’ families — fundamentalist Christian, Muslim or Chinese — need to be able to relate their own experiences of literacy to those of the school. The mainstream teacher has a vital role to play in this process. It is possible to trace a common thread through these various communities: differences in worldview shape written traditions. Most important, the worldview of these various groups differs in important respects from that of the middle class speakers whose cultural and linguistic capital (cf. Bourdieu 1966) determines what takes place in school. Inevitably, these differences have important educational implications.
Kwéyòl literacy in St Lucia We turn next to two quite different communities: Kwéyòl speakers in the Eastern Caribbean island of St Lucia, and their second and third generation descendants in the United Kingdom. We will start in the Caribbean. The current linguistic situation in St Lucia is best understood in the context of its very chequered colonial history. The French West Indian Company first established St Lucia as a French colony in 1642. In the next 150 years the island changed hands between the French and the British some fourteen times, but remained under British control from 1803 until its independence in 1979. These extended periods of contact with French at a critical period in the history of the Caribbean have had a lasting effect on the language behaviour of St Lucians. English remains the official language and is used by a small elite in ‘high’ domains such as government and administration, legal institutions and education. Kwéyòl remains the ‘low’ variety, used by the mass of the population in their private lives. However, growing nationalist sentiment has increased pressure for wider acceptance of Kwéyòl and has generated debate around the need for language policy and planning. As various observers (eg Jules 1988; Tollefson 1991) have commented, discussions of language policy and planning cannot be separated from a consideration of the relationship between language and power. St Lucia does not have an official language policy:
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decisions as to which languages are used in which situations are based unquestioningly on an acceptance of attitudes and practices inherited from the previous colonial administration which emphasised the low status and limited range of uses for Kwéyòl. Many people involved in promoting literacy, however, argue that the way forward is to develop a bilingual policy which recognises the value of English but at the same time acknowledges the needs of the Kwéyòl-speaking majority. Such a policy would take account, for instance, of the necessity to use English in meeting development and modernisation needs. At the same time it would take steps to ensure that Kwéyòl makes a significant contribution to national development. The solutions which educators have adopted to date have focused heavily on the use of English. Entry into secondary school is determined by the high degree of competence in English necessary to pass the Common Entrance Exam and it is widely believed that knowledge of Kwéyòl will interfere with the acquisition of English and impede improved life chances in St Lucia. However, there is a basic contradiction in this position. As Samuel (1992) points out: The official scapegoat [for poor educational performance] is the popularity of the ‘Creole dialect’ which is hindering the learning of English and learning in general. Unbelievably, this view comes from the guardians of a system that has spent the last four centuries ensuring that Kwéyòl is debarred from school; yet for them it is now responsible for poor performances in those very same schools. St Lucia can no longer afford such dishonesty in this important area of people’s lives. Facing up to this educational crisis must mean a serious attempt at language education policy reform, which can only be part and parcel of a general commitment to national language policy reform.
The same ambivalence which exists in relation to Kwéyòl in schools is to be found in adult education. High levels of illiteracy seriously hamper national development. Carrington (1980), for instance, estimated that 46 per cent of the population over the age of 15 — approximately 30,000 people — were illiterate. Writers such as Jules (1988) have drawn attention to the important role which Kwéyòl might play in adult literacy programmes. The first official response to the language question came when the 1979– 1982 Labour government initiated a national consultation on education which expressed the view that sufficient numbers of monolingual Kwéyòl speakers were experiencing difficulties with English to justify it being used extensively within the school system (Carrington 1988). The newly elected government also set up a committee to report on the feasibility of a mass literacy pro-
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gramme which would, by extension, address the language problem. The committee recommended that the government adopt an official bilingual language policy encompassing education and other areas of public life (Caribbean Research Centre 1980). The development of an orthography was central to the implementation of a bilingual language policy. Kwéyòl had previously been a spoken language and occasional attempts to commit it to writing had been inconsistent and ad hoc. The first systematic attempts to devise an appropriate system came in the form of two orthography workshops. The first workshop (Folk Research Centre 1981) resulted in the setting up of Mouvman Kwéyòl Sent Lisi, otherwise known as MOKWEYOL, to carry out a number of practical and research initiatives. Members of the group took responsibility for popularising the outcomes of the workshop and noted a number of problems in the course of this work. These problems became the focal point of the next workshop (Folk Research Centre 1982). Three priority areas for follow-up work were agreed upon: training, research and publicity. Members of the committee would become the new cadre of persons fluent in the writing system. They would also take on responsibility for the mass popularisation of the system among the literate population, educators (including literacy facilitators), agricultural officers and community health workers. A two-pronged approach would be adopted to facilitate this work: first, fieldwork among the population recording words, idioms and so forth and, second, the study of these materials to identify anomalies and take decisions on rules. A publicity campaign was identified as central to the acceptance of the new orthography. A number of avenues were targeted including regular discussions on the radio and television, articles on language issues in local newspapers and public discussions. The launching of a bilingual tabloid, Balata, in 1983 was another important development but funding and distribution problems brought publication to a halt after just 14 issues. Today, only a minority of people know and use the writing system or use Kwéyòl in educational settings. A small number of Kwéyòl literacy projects continue to attract enthusiastic support but the impact of such initiatives ‘is severely circumscribed by the lack of a determined political will’ (Jules 1988: 13). The issues surrounding literacy in St Lucia are very different from those in either white fundamentalist or linguistic minority communities in Britain. In the one situation, problems arise because the experiences of less powerful
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communities do not correspond to those of the dominant group. In the St Lucian context, the fact that English is the medium of education for a predominantly Kwéyòl-speaking population represents a major obstacle. In all cases, however, access to power is a central issue.
Kwéyòl literacy in the UK During the period between the mid-1950s and 1970, some ten per cent of the population of St Lucia left their homes to come to Britain. In the early days of immigration, Kwéyòl was the language of the home. With the passing of time, however, there have been important changes. As children went to British schools, the linguistic balance in most families began to swing from Kwéyòl to English. First generation Eastern Caribbeans still make extensive use of Kwéyòl in conversation with peers, and Kwéyòl remains the only acceptable language for important social and family functions. In most cases, however, parents have not chosen to transmit Kwéyòl to their children. As Fasold (1984) points out, this decision is a feature of the late stages of language shift. Britishborn children are thus likely to have a good receptive knowledge of Kwéyòl, but, in most cases, their productive competence is extremely limited. The fact that Eastern Caribbeans form a small and relatively dispersed community within the UK makes the task of language maintenance particularly difficult. In the early years of immigration, Kwéyòl was also the language of solidarity for Caribbean-born children making their way through the British school system. It served to isolate them both from the racist comments of British children and teachers and from derogatory remarks offered by other African-Caribbeans about their speech. The tendency of British people to perceive, and treat, all African-Caribbeans in the same way has inevitably led large numbers of second generation St Lucians to see themselves primarily as part of a larger British Black grouping and British Black English rather than Kwéyòl, is the language of wider currency. While St Lucians undoubtedly share an acceptable degree of comradeship with other Caribbeans, the Kwéyòl language still functions as a marker of solidarity. This is clearly demonstrated in the high incidence of friendship and intermarriage. Kwéyòl also features prominently in social and cultural events. Music and cultural activities, and social settings such as markets, churches, pubs and clubs all help maintain the language. In addition, they ensure that a
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growing number of people from St Lucian backgrounds have access to another cultural identity besides that of being Black British. Education also plays an important role in language maintenance with the development of a small network of Kwéyòl classes as part of adult education provision in London (Nwenmely 1994). Students currently attending classes come from a variety of social class, educational and occupational backgrounds, though there is an increasing white collar bias. They also represent a range of ages, with the largest group falling in the 20 to 30 group. They vary in Kwéyòl competence from absolute beginners to fluent speakers. Students go to Kwéyòl classes for a variety of reasons. The classes are a means of making friends and allowing students to feel more integrated members of the Kwéyòl speech community. They also help to reinforce the status and pride associated with a distinctive cultural identity and contribute to the maintenance of Kwéyòl. Students often talk in terms of the importance of passing down a sense of self from one generation to the next, for children born in a foreign environment. In short, the classes provide a practical course of action for those conscious of the links between the language, national identity and pride. Student comments such as the following are typical: “Teaching or learning the language is not the most important thing. It’s actually giving status in people’s eyes, that’s what the classes mean to me.” “Attending the Kwéyòl classes is very important to me.. [My work mates] always come around to look at the different booklets I read and are always asking questions about the language. It makes me feel so proud.”
The issues surrounding the promotion of Kwéyòl are rather different in the UK context where nearly all members of the classes are literate in English, and where many people are learning Kwéyòl as a second language. The introduction of the Kwéyòl orthography and the development of a Kwéyòl dictionary have generated a great deal of enthusiasm among past and present students. As one student pointed out, activities of this kind have the advantage of: “ … [putting] Kwéyòl on a par with other languages and can be used as a double edged sword. On the one hand, it helps people to learn the language as well as ensuring that the language survives. On the other hand, it is a good argument for legitimising the language as well as a means of forcing the St Lucian government to give the language official recognition.”
The attitudes of students attending Kwéyòl classes in London are much closer to those of the MOKWEYOL intellectuals and activists than to those of the
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majority of St Lucians who accept the exclusive emphasis on English imposed by the political elite. Students in the London classes come from many different backgrounds but they have a shared understanding of the destructive forces of white racism. Kwéyòl has become the focus of their cultural identity. In the Caribbean, English is perceived as the route to social mobility and economic security and Kwéyòl is relegated to less public domains. In Britain, the ability not only to speak but to read and write Kwéyòl has become an important symbol in an ongoing political struggle.
Implications for teachers and policy makers The examples presented in this chapter highlight two very different aspects of the social construction of literacy, both of which are inextricably intertwined with worldview. The first affects the diversity of literacy practices; the second affects the choice of language for literacy. Lower class white fundamentalist Christians in the USA, and Muslim and Chinese families in the UK all prepare their children for encounters with print in ways very different from teachers in mainstream schools. When children from white middle class homes start school, they find the practices of the classroom familiar. Children from minority cultures, however, have to negotiate a complex course between very different approaches to the written word. Researchers and teachers are beginning to move away from the notion that literacy is something which can be studied independently of social context. The growing awareness of different literacies has important implications for teacher’s attitudes towards parents. Traditionally, parents were seen as having little or no part to play in the formal education of their children. More recently, parents who failed to provide the same kinds of literacy experience as the school have been blamed for their children’s underachievement and attempts made to train them in school practices. Researchers such as Auerbach (1989) argue that this response is overly simplistic and that we need rather to draw on parents’ knowledge and experience to transform what is offered in school rather than trying to transfer school practices to the home. The knowledge that the school’s interpretation of reading is only one among many carries other responsibilities for the teacher. When children start school, they bring with them a picture of themselves as learners, based on all that has happened up to this point. It is critical that teachers find ways to
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acknowledge this pre-school experience. In order to do this, they need to create opportunities for discussing previous activities with children, their parents and others with the same background as the children. If parents and school are to work together, teachers must also find ways of making explicit to parents the school’s view of what counts as reading. The practices which have evolved over the last thirty years and which reflect our greater understanding of the reading process are not always clear to white middle class parents. Writers like Gregory (1993b) and Heath (1983) leave no doubt that parents who have grown up in different traditions find these practices even more confusing. The choice of language for literacy represents a second important discussion point. The worldview of St Lucians in the Caribbean and St Lucians in the UK is very different. In the Caribbean, high levels of illiteracy are common place and are probably exacerbated by the fact that the majority of St Lucians have limited access to the standard English of the school. Colonial values are deeply entrenched and English is considered the language of social and economic advancement. While there is a small and committed group of intellectuals committed to the promotion of Kwéyòl literacy, the political elite and the mass of the population unquestioningly accept the pre-eminence of English. This reaction is not, of course, restricted to the Caribbean. Small nation states in many parts of the world are subject to similar pressures and tend to arrive at similar solutions (Barton 1994b). In the UK, most St Lucians have been educated in the British system. Levels of literacy are high and there has been a significant shift from Kwéyòl to English even within the home. Many young people feel unhappy about this rapid language shift: they perceive Kwéyòl as a symbol of their cultural identity in the face of widespread racism. They are enthusiastic about the development of a Kwéyòl orthography and dictionary and are making their own contribution to the production of reading materials in the language. Their worldview is very different from that of their relatives in the Caribbean. In the one case, English is seen as the route to economic success and the wider world. In the other case, English has been a poor defence against the destructive forces of racial discrimination; Kwéyòl has been identified as a rallying point for those who wish to assert a distinctive cultural identity. In both cases, worldview shapes attitudes towards the written word. The study of literacy can no longer be promoted as a phenomenon divorced from social context. The ways in which different groups of people
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use the written word have an ideological dimension, inextricably linked with power issues in society. In all cases, the worldview of the group in question will determine the uses to which literacy is put, the choice of language and the meanings which are attached to this choice.
Notes 1.
The research relating to the Kwéyòl speech community reported in this paper was made possible by award no. R-000-23-3156 from the Economic and Social Research Council for ‘The teaching of Kwéyòl in the UK’ project. An earlier version of this paper was published in the International Journal of Intercultural Relations 19(2): 267–79 (1995).
CHAPTER 6
Language and literacy practices in Gujarati Muslim families Raymonde Sneddon
Children in communities all over Britain live their daily lives in two, three or more languages. The present study investigates the language use and literacy practices of children from Gujarati and Urdu speaking families in a Muslim community in north east London. The language experiences of children aged 3½, 7 and 11 are explored in three settings, in the family, in the community and in school, and they are related to children’s achievements in literacy. The study also considers the role of a community organisation in supporting language maintenance and the impact of current practices in the community on language maintenance and shift. The first section of this paper discusses research findings and theories that have informed the design of the present study and the formulation of the hypotheses which have guided it. The following section provides basic information on this local Gujarati community, the patterns of settlement and local social networks. The work described in this paper forms part of an ongoing sociolinguistic study of the Gujarati community. The structure of the study is outlined, along with the methodology used. Two following sections provide a summary and discussion of some key findings in relation to language use and literacy practices. Conclusions are drawn from the analysis of the findings available at the time of writing.
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Theoretical framework and key hypotheses The present study of language and literacy in this Gujarati community was undertaken to investigate in greater depth the findings of a short research project entitled “Children developing biliteracy at home and at school” (Sneddon 1993). The 1993 study explored parental support for reading in the homes of 11 year old children from five language communities (Bengali, Gujarati, Punjabi, Turkish and Urdu) in a north east London borough. The findings of that study indicated a relationship between support for literacy in the home in first languages and achievement in English literacy as measured by the London Reading Test. That study was informed by the Haringey research project (Tizard, Scofield and Hewison 1982) which found that children who were encouraged to read to their parents regularly in the home achieved significantly higher scores on standardised reading tests than children in control groups. The Haringey study noted that parents helped children by hearing them read even when they did not understand English themselves, and also by arranging for older siblings to do this. No mention was made, however, of parents using or being encouraged to use books in the language of the home. In “Children developing biliteracy at home and at school” (Sneddon 1993) the positive effect of support for home languages was particularly significant for children who had access to support in two home languages. However, a large number of variables could have affected the outcome and the information on language use and literacy practices was insufficiently detailed. Qualitative evidence from the study suggested that sociolinguistic factors in the immediate neighbourhood of some families may have been significant in giving both home languages a higher status in the community. The present study was designed to look more closely at the relationship between language use, literacy practices, educational outcome and the role of formally constituted community organisations. It focused on the group which, in the 1993 study, had produced the most interesting data: the Gujarati Muslim community. Central to the theoretical framework of the present study is the concept of the Common Underlying Proficiency (Cummins 1991, 1980, 1981 and 1984). This was developed to account for the considerable body of evidence that suggests that certain language skills transfer readily from one language to another. A substantial cognitive, cultural and pragmatic knowledge about how language is used is shared and fuels developments in either language. In particular there is evidence to show that the ability to make sense of print
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(Cummins et al 1984; Cummins 1991; Cummins and Mulcahy 1978) transfers from one language to another and that this operates even when writing systems are very different, as, for example, in the case of Japanese and Vietnamese (Cummins et al 1984). Collier (1995: 12) notes that, for children who have the benefit of education in their first language “academic skills, literacy development, concept formation, subject knowledge, and having strategies developed in first language will all transfer to second language”. A large scale review of the factors which predict the educational success in English of bilingual children in the U.S. confirms the importance for children of having the opportunity for cognitive development in their first language (Collier & Thomas 1997). The review also reports that children who have the benefit of academic development in two languages reach parity of achievement in the second language with their monolingual peers at around the age of 11 or 12, and then proceed to outstrip them. The findings of Cummins, Collier and others mentioned above are based on research which compares the educational achievements of children who have had access to some education in their first language with children who have not. Bilingual education for children of linguistic minorities, even in its weakest form, is not available in maintained schools in Britain. The Swann report (DES 1985), in its section on mother tongue education, concluded that home language maintenance was a private matter for families. Local Education Authorities were merely encouraged to support community provision for this if resources were available. Subsequent financial restrictions placed on these authorities and the policy of devolving budgetary control to schools have ensured that public financial support for home language classes is now very limited. In curriculum and policy documents published from 1989 onwards (DES 1990), the issue of bilingualism (except in relation to Wales) is conspicuous by its absence. The needs of bilingual children in the school system are defined (when they are referred to at all) purely in terms of the right of access to English and a very anglo-centric curriculum. Against a background of disinterest in national policy-making, the Linguistic Minorities Project (1985) drew attention to “the role in language maintenance of interpersonal network structures and participation in minority institutions” (LMP 1985: 135). This is particularly well exemplified in the work of Saxena (1994) which documents a community’s strategies for maintaining and extending the role of minority literacies in every day life and the
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developing significance of language choice in terms of personal ideology and group identification (see Chapter 14 of this book too). The present study followed up the indication that social networks, and in particular the presence of a community centre dedicated to the needs of the Gujarati Muslim community, may have been a factor in the greater success of Gujarati Muslim children in school found in the 1993 study of children in five language communities mentioned above. The investigation of social and linguistic networks was based on models provided by the work of Gal, Milroy and Li Wei. Gal’s study of language shift on the Austro-Hungarian border (Gal 1979) demonstrates the possibility of predicting language use by age and habitual social network. Milroy’s research (Milroy 1987) on vernacular language use in Belfast developed measures of density and multiplexity for social networks and found that “a close-knit network structure is an important mechanism of language maintenance” (Milroy 1987: 182). Li Wei’s study (Li Wei 1994) of three generations of the Chinese community in Tyneside provides a useful framework for studying bilingual language use. He notes in particular the impact of kin, community and leisure activities on language choice. The above studies suggested that both the immediate and the wider community may have an impact on language use; that, in a context where the language has no recognised national or educational role, families who have access to greater opportunities for home language use in local community contexts may be encouraged to take active steps to maintain their children’s use of the language; and that a formally constituted support organisation may have a role to play in this process. The present study of language use and literacy practices in the families of Gujarati-speaking children attempts to link this issue to the linguistic theories of Cummins and the educational evidence provided by the Haringey study. The basic hypotheses have been framed as follows: that, as a result of the strengthening of social and linguistic networks, membership of a community organisation would strengthen the linguistic vitality of the community and lead to greater usage of the home language and greater support for children’s acquisition of literacy in this language; that support for reading in the languages of the home (as evidenced by the Haringey research of 1982) would produce, by means of the Common Underlying Proficiency (Cummins 1984), a higher level of achievement for those children in reading in English in school. As in Li Wei’s study, I am concerned with the complex relationship between language use and an individual’s social practices.
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The present study was very much influenced by related research in Britain in the 1980s (Fitzpatrick 1987 and Tosi 1984) and some more recent studies, in particular, the work of Bhatt (1994) on Gujarati literacies in Leicester, of Gregory (1995) on the literacy experiences of Bangladeshi children in Spitalfields, Tower Hamlets, of Yamamoto (1995) on children developing bilingualism in Japanese and English, and Kenner (1997b) on nursery children’s experiences of literacy in multilingual contexts. These other studies provided insights into the kind of language and literacy experiences that needed to be explored. My own study was designed to provide information that could be used to compare practices across communities.
The Gujarati/Urdu speaking community The Linguistic Minorities Project (1985) noted that members of the Gujarati community in Coventry included in their research in the early 1980s were by and large well educated. They tended to be people with small businesses and were particularly noted for their capacity to organise among themselves on a local level. However, the project team also stressed that similar communities living in different areas might be very differently positioned with respect to opportunities for language maintenance. The community which features in this study settled in north and east London in the 1960s and 1970s. Unlike the Hindu Gujaratis (many of whom have settled in Britain via East Africa), most have come directly from rural parts of the district of Surat in Gujarat, and most particularly from the area around Bardoli. They are practising Muslims who speak Gujarati. Urdu, the more prestigious language, is also used and is of great cultural and religious importance to the community. The initial settlers had low levels of education and took mainly factory and transport jobs. Immigration was sponsored by families. Very close links have been maintained with the area of origin. As the community has become more prosperous, contact through family visits has become more frequent and, in some cases, older children are sent to boarding school in Gujarat. In the present study, in all cases where one parent was born in England, their marriage partner has come from Gujarat: this has ensured that Gujarati is still the main language of the home in second generation British families. The community has strong relationships of kinship which are closely
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maintained (one family claimed a hundred relatives resident in the borough). Regular contacts with relatives in Bradford and Leicester are also maintained. The requirement for regular worship at mosque has ensured that the community remains geographically close. The families are distributed throughout the borough, but there is a fairly dense concentration of settlement in the north of the borough. This Gujarati Muslim community is comparatively homogeneous. As families have become more prosperous, education has improved. The large houses bought and shared have been renovated and properly partitioned and a thriving housing association has been created. Members of the community now have more time to spend on leisure activities and with their children. However the virtual disappearance of the clothing and leather manufacturing industry in the area has removed many of the traditional employment opportunities, especially for women in the home, and unemployment is fairly high. This local population of Gujarati speakers has lived up to the general reputation that Gujaratis have for community organisation and, over the years, several groups have emerged that provide religious education and social facilities for their members. One of most notable of these (and the only remaining one focused on this particular community) is the North London Muslim Community Centre. The Centre was founded in a Victorian house in 1980. It catered initially for the needs of boys and men, some women used the nearby Hackney Muslim Women’s Council. This was more focused on Urdu speaking women originating from Pakistan. There has, however, been a change of focus over the last few years. The North London Centre now offers a very wide range of services to men, women and children of all ages, including holiday play schemes and cultural, educational and sporting activities where both Gujarati and Urdu are used and a library where books and newspapers can be obtained in all the languages used by the community. Advice and support in personal and social matters, and in employment and housing are also available to families and religious education and Urdu instruction are available at the mosque next door. During the interviews in the 1992/93 study, the responses I received suggested that the presence of the Community Centre might be a factor in the amount of support that parents provide for the development of education in their languages in the home: that families who make use of the community facilities would have the kind of dense social networks described by Milroy (1987) within which these languages could be used for a wide range of purposes.
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Part of the aim of the present study is to investigate whether, by creating and developing voluntary organisations, the community have built a framework which formalises their networks and may be instrumental in slowing down language shift and loss in the present generation of children.
Structure and methodology In the initial phase of the study, both quantitative and qualitative data were collected through interviews, questionnaires, recordings and observations in the home, in school, in the play centre and a range of community settings. A local population was identified through the Community Centre, the Local Education Authority and schools. This included children who were born in Britain and lived in the borough of Hackney. All children belonged to families who spoke primarily Gujarati in a home where Urdu was also known. The 7 and 11 year old children attended mainstream primary schools in the borough with a similar social and linguistic mix and a comparable approach to the education of bilingual children. The 3½ year old children had just started attending a nursery class attached to a primary school with the same characteristics as those attended by the older children. All children had both parents living in the home (there were few single parent families in the community). All children belonged to families who were practising Muslims. From this population a sample of 36 children (containing equal numbers of 3½ year old, 7 year old and 11 year old children) was selected. Half of the children came from families who made regular use of the Community Centre and half came from families who did not. The study is based on a matched pair design and children were selected who could be matched across these two groups for gender (equal numbers of each in all three age groups), age within 4 months, number of siblings and position in the family, father’s occupation, mother’s level of education, father’s level of education and type and ownership of housing. As much matching information as possible was sought prior to interview. Where informants could not be matched, they were not included in the analysis. The data on language use and literacy practices were obtained by interviewing families at home. This was done by the researcher and Sakina Hafesji, a Gujarati speaking research assistant. Data were obtained on language use in family and community, on literacy practices in the home, on availability of
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classes and attitudes to the learning of language and literacy by children. The researcher then visited all the children in school. The 7 and 11 year olds were interviewed about their language usage using the Three Colour Slide Box (see below). For the purposes of verifying what was essentially self report data, both the researcher and the assistant observed and recorded families and children in a range of settings. To investigate children’s narrative skills, age appropriate dual text story books were left with families. These were to be read to the children in both Gujarati and English. Two to three weeks later the Gujarati speaking researcher visited the home and recorded the child retelling the story in Gujarati. As the English speaking researcher, I visited the school and recorded the child retelling the story in English. As part of the investigation into children’s literacy skills, the 3½ year old children were asked to produce a drawing of themselves, a sample of developmental writing and data on “knowledge about print”. The Local Education Authority provided data on Standard Assessment Tasks for the 7 and 11 year old children in the sample and London Reading Test results for the 11 year olds. The taped stories were transcribed by both researchers and the Gujarati ones were translated into English.
Findings: language use The interview Information on language use in the family was obtained through a questionnaire administered in the home. Information was obtained about how much Gujarati, English and Urdu mothers and fathers spoke to their parents, each other and their children. They were asked to express this in percentages and they were generally confident about doing this. They were also asked about their choice of language in educational, leisure and work situations, while shopping or on the telephone, and the languages in which they used media such as television, video, cassettes or CDs and radio. Information was also sought about the frequency and manner of codeswitching. Mothers described the language use of the three year old children in the sample. The 7 and 11 year old children were interviewed separately, in school, about their language use. Children were asked similar questions, but more detail was requested about usage in the family, the school, the community centre if
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used and the mosque. Knowing that children may develop a non-reciprocal approach to language choice, they were asked in what language key members of their community spoke to them, as well as what they themselves spoke. All 7 and 11 year old children understood the questions. These were extensively piloted with both age groups. I was impressed at the seriousness with which children discussed their language use and made decisions about how much of each language they used. In both groups (Community Centre users and non-users) the children talked with some enthusiasm about their language use and asked a lot of questions about the project. In one of the schools, children interviewed who were not Community Centre users asked me for advice on how to carry out a language research project in their own class. In another school, I was invited to spend a morning with the whole class investigating language issues. A coloured language slide box was devised to assist children in estimating their language use. The children were asked to choose which coloured slide to use for which language and then to slide each one across to estimate how much of each language they used. The researcher then noted a percentage by using the (unnumbered) scale at the side of the box. In the course of the pilot several children guessed the purpose of the dots along the side of the box and volunteered percentages. Most 11 year old and some 7 year old children, after using the box initially to understand the process of estimation, chose to dispense with the box altogether and to express their language use directly in percentages. Parents were asked how important it was to them that their children should learn the three languages of the family. The options offered were “not important, important, essential”. There is very little difference in the responses between the 2 groups: Gujarati was thought to be important or essential by 17 families that made use of the Community Centre and 16 in the group that did not. For Urdu the response was 16 for the Community Centre users and the 15 for the non-users. All families rated English as important or essential. Patterns of language use within the family Women in the sample as a whole reported speaking primarily Gujarati to their parents, considerable amounts of Gujarati to their partners and substantially more English with their children. The use of Urdu as a regular language of communication was restricted to a small number of families.
Raymonde Sneddon
112 100 80 60
Gujarati
40
Urdu
English
20 0 to parents
to partner
to children
Figure 1. Mother’s use of three languages across the whole sample (in percentages)
The results for men were very similar: virtually identical with respect to language use with wives, no English used with elders and slightly more English and Urdu used to children. As one of the main purposes of this part of the study was to ascertain to what extent home languages were used, the use of Gujarati was amalgamated with Urdu usage for the purposes of this analysis. This is referred to as G/U in the figures. The following charts show how parents and children used their languages to communicate across generations. 100 80
Mother's G/U use: Community Centre users
60 40
Mother's G/U use: Community Centre non-users
20 0 to parents
to partner
to children
Figure 2. Mother’s use of Gujarati and Urdu in the family according to whether the family used the Community Centre (in percentages)
The amount of Gujarati and Urdu spoken was substantial and there were only small differences between men and women in both groups, as Figures 3 and 4 illustrate.
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100 Father's G/U use: Community Centre users
80 60
Father's G/U use: Community Centre non-users
40 20 0 to parents
to partner
to children
Figure 3. Father’s use of Gujarati and Urdu in the family according to whether the family used the Community Centre (in percentages)
The children’s language use also followed a clear three generation pattern with almost exclusive use of Gujarati or Urdu to grandparents and substantial amounts spoken to parents. However, the children’s data revealed a substantial difference between the two main groups: those who use the Community Centre spoke more Gujarati to their parents than those who did not, and substantially more to their brothers and sisters. 100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0
Children's G/U use: Community Centre users Children's G/U use: Community Centre nonusers
to gra ndm o the r
to pa re nts
to s iblings
Figure 4. Children’s use of Gujarati and Urdu in the family according to whether the family used the Community Centre
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When analysed by age group the children’s use of language to their peers showed a strong and highly significant pattern. The differences increased with age to the point where children in the group whose families did not use the Centre reported relatively little use of Gujarati or Urdu to their siblings. A Mann-Whitney U-test (for non-parametric data) gave a significance level of .0043 for the difference between 11 year old children, indicating considerable statistical significance. 60 50
Mean use of G/U to siblings: Community Centre users
40 30
Mean use of G/U to siblings: Community Centre non-users
20 10 0 3 1/2
7
11
Age of child
Figure 5. Children’s use of Gujarati and Urdu to their siblings by age and whether the families had Community Centre support
Patterns of language use in the community Although patterns of language use within the family were very similar, there were major differences in reported language use outside the home by men and women in both groups. These differences were evident in the returns for both the group that used the Community Centre and the group that did not. Both men and women had opportunities to speak Gujarati or Urdu in the leisure and sporting activities organised by the Centre (the very successful cricket teams, the women’s fitness classes, etc.). Families who did not use the Centre had fewer opportunities of this kind and less contact with other Gujarati or Urdu speakers in the course of their leisure activities (such as swimming or weightwatchers).
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A similar analysis of the reported language use by children outside the home indicated only one area of major difference between both groups. At school, children reported speaking a little Gujarati to their friends but very few in either group had any opportunity to interact in that language with an adult. None reported speaking Urdu at school. In the environment of the mosque they attended, the children indicated that they spoke both Gujarati, English and a little Urdu with adults and each other. All six of the 11 year olds in the group that made use of the Centre, four 7 year olds and one 3½ year old attended holiday play schemes organised (separately for boys and girls) by the Community Centre. The children spoke a significant amount of Gujarati at the play centre (an average of 37% was reported, varying from one child who spoke mostly Gujarati, to 3 who spoke none at all). This was very informal communication: it involved codeswitching and depended on the activity in which children were engaged. In the group that did not use the Community Centre, only four children attended other play centres and they reported that they spoke only English there. Overall trends The data on language use within the family revealed the expected three generation pattern: Gujarati or Urdu were used almost exclusively to elders, substantially to partners and less to children. An analysis of variance indicates that the strongest predictor of amount of Gujarati or Urdu used was the person who was spoken to (p<0.0005) with the person who was speaking also being very significant (p<0.0005). There was a significant interaction effect between speakers’ language choices and whether or not they belonged to the group that made use of the Community Centre. This is probably accounted for by the difference between the children’s use of language in the two groups. All the children in the sample were bilingual to some degree. The older the children, the more competent they had become in two or more languages and for them language choice was not generally constrained by competence. Neither were they constrained by the competence of their interlocutors when in the company of their siblings or peers. For this reason, children’s language use with their siblings was chosen as a measure of their linguistic vitality. Using children’s language use with their siblings as the dependent variable, a multiple regression analysis was carried out to test the following
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reports of parents’ language use in the home reports of language use by teachers and adults at the mosque the language used by children at the play centre whether or not children had been on an extended visit to India.
The analysis indicated that only variables 2 and 3 were related to children’s language use with their siblings. The data obtained on language use revealed comparatively high levels of Gujarati and Urdu use in the parent generation. This use of language was likely to have been reinforced by the marriage pattern: no family in the sample had both parents born and educated in the UK. The increased opportunities for Gujarati and Urdu use in leisure activities provided by the Community Centre for the parent generation were related to a greater level of linguistic vitality outside the home. Contrary to prediction, they did not appear to have any direct impact on language use within the family. Similar opportunities available to children aged 7 and 11, on the other hand, were related to a very much higher level of linguistic vitality as evidenced by language use between siblings in the group whose families made use of the Community Centre. The data indicated that the Community Centre may have been playing a very important role in language maintenance. However, the language used in this context was essentially colloquial and none of the leisure activities for children involved the use of literacy in Gujarati or Urdu or provided opportunities for children to extend or develop their knowledge of the standard language. In the course of the interviews, several families mentioned that although their children were generally fluent in Gujarati, their usage was nonstandard and that they often experienced difficulties when visiting Gujarat. The use of appropriate forms of address was identified as an area of particular concern by elders in the community. With respect to the issue of language maintenance, in two families interviewed, elders present expressed (through the interpreter) great concern at the loss of Gujarati by relatives in South Africa whom they had recently been able to visit but with whom they could not communicate.
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Findings: literacy practices Educational background of parents The levels of education among the present generation of parents were higher than those reported for the original settlers in the UK. in this particular community. All but three of the parents in the sample had been educated to secondary level or above (27 in the UK and the remainder in India, with a few in Pakistan). Whereas those educated in the UK had to rely on community or family for literacy in their home language, those educated in the Indian subcontinent generally had schooling in Gujarati, English, Urdu or Hindi and a few had experience of other languages. In the sample as a whole, two thirds of the men and over one third of the women claimed some literacy in three languages or more. In view of the marriage patterns described earlier, this means that all families in the sample had at least one parent literate in Gujarati and Urdu and one in English. Literacy environment of the home The literacy materials in the homes visited reflect the families’ educational and religious backgrounds and were primarily in four languages: English, Urdu, Gujarati and Arabic. All households had copies of the Qur’an and several also had religious books for adults in Arabic. A few used Arabic primers to instruct their children. One mother of a 3½ year old girl described as follows her daughter’s early orientation to literacy: “From a very early age she has loved books, pens and paper. She tried to hold a pen before she could walk. I have started to teach her some Arabic”. Many households had books in Urdu, for adults and religious books for both adults and children. Many references were made to the Kitab ‘holy book’, used for children’s religious instruction. Newspapers were also to be found in a number of households and some primers for teaching Urdu to children. The mother of an 11 year old girl said: “We read in all languages every day. Her father reads with her every morning in Urdu before school. I read with her for half an hour every day in Gujarati. We help with English too.” Literacy levels did vary and the parents in one family reported “We have books in Urdu, but we don’t read fluently, so we read English translations”. Arabic and Urdu were primarily used for religious purposes (and Urdu
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was also used for reading literature and newspapers and magazines). Gujarati and English, on the other hand, were “working languages”. Not all families have materials in Gujarati, but many reported having books for adults and children. They also talked about using library books, religious books, dictionaries, magazines and newspapers, some primers for teaching early literacy and dual language texts sent home from school (“I like the books in two languages because we can talk about both languages”, said the mother of an 11 year old girl). The mother of a seven year old boy made the following comment: “We read Gujarati and English books at home. I write in Gujarati and he wants to learn. I wish there were classes like in Leicester”. Another mother, this time a mother of a 3½ year old girl, said: “She is taught Gujarati as well as English at home. I always talk Gujarati to her”. One of the main literacy activities in the homes in Gujarati was letter writing to family in India. Children were often involved. Parents’ views on this topic included the following: “My husband writes letters home in Gujarati and reads them to all the family”. “I want the children to learn to read and write in Gujarati because it is our family language. The elders don’t speak English”. All families except one had literacy materials in English. These included adults and children’s books, comics, newspapers, magazines, school books, papers related to parents’ work, textbooks, the homework of older children and encyclopaedias. Children had a great deal of experience of seeing parents and older children writing letters, filling in forms, carrying out business. One mother said the following about her son: “His Dad does a lot of paperwork at home. H. asks for a pen and copies him”(mother of 3½ year old). Some households made use of children’s skills in English. One 11 year old carries out the family correspondence with the bank manager. All except two families interviewed felt that they had an important role to play in supporting their children’s development of English literacy. The parents of the 7 and 11 year old children were asked if they knew how their child was taught to read at school. Half of them reported that they had very good relationships with the school and felt confident about helping: some mothers had visited the classroom to observe teaching, one had helped as a volunteer, many had liaised closely with the teacher “His reading was bad at first, but I worked very closely with the teacher. I got advice on the best way to help and M. has improved a lot. Parents’ evenings are good when they show you how the work is done” (from the mother of M, a 7 year old boy). Some parents divided up the task: “We do have a role. My husband is keen on religion and home language. I get involved in the school side. We have
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divided our help according to what we are able to do. We never worked it out, it just happened” said the mother of a 7 year old girl. One mother (of a 7 year old girl) spoke little English and had had a distressing experience when her eldest child was misdiagnosed as having a learning difficulty because of lack of English. She had worked very hard to help her children in spite of difficult family circumstances: “I tape educational programmes for English, science and maths from the television to help the children, but my husband is not at all supportive and we have little space. We have a computer, but no room to use it,” she reported, speaking through the interpreter. Support for literacy in the home. The parents of all the children were asked whether they told stories to children and read to them. They were also asked whether they heard their 7 and 11 year old children read. This information was requested for Gujarati, Urdu, English and “any other language”. They were asked how often these events occurred and which family members were involved. To facilitate quantitative analysis a literacy support index was prepared for each child for English and for Gujarati/Urdu. This was based on the frequency of occurrence of each event (never: 0, sometimes: 0.1, once a week: 0.4, twice a week: 0.5, every day: 1). Children aged 3½. 0.7 0.6 0.5
Community Centre users
0.4 0.3
Community Centre non-users
0.2 0.1 0 English story
English reading
G/U story
G/U reading
Figure 6. Mean index of literacy support experienced by 3½ year old children in Gujarati/ Urdu and English
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Support for young children in the home consisted almost entirely of story telling for Gujarati and Urdu. The stories told were related to events that had happened during the day, or referred to family members or to life in Surat. Tales were also told to encourage moral and religious development. The reading of stories occurred mainly in English and this may have reflected the greater availability of books for young children in that language. There was substantially more story telling in Gujarati or Urdu in the families that used the Community Centre, but only among those families which did not report telling stories in English. Children aged 7 The data for children aged 7 and 11 is presented in a summarised form with one index only for each language. Equal weighting was given to story telling, story reading and hearing children read (7 and 11 year olds only): 2 1.5 1
Community Centre users
0.5
Community Centre non-users
0 English
Gujarati/ Urdu
Figure 7. Index of literacy support in Gujarati/Urdu and English for children aged 7
The data indicated that 7 year old children in the group who used the Community Centre received substantially more support in Gujarati or Urdu than children in the group that did not. In the latter group, this support was almost negligible. The children in both groups were well supported by their families, for the development of literacy in English. This reflected parents comments about the importance of supporting children when they are learning to read in school.
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Children aged 11 2 1.5
Community Centre users
1
Community Centre non-users
0.5 0 English
Gujarati/ Urdu
Figure 8. Index of literacy support in Gujarati/Urdu and English for children aged 11
The data for 11 year old children was more balanced with regards to literacy support in Gujarati or Urdu. Support in Gujarati was still primarily through story telling, but by this age a few children were receiving substantial amounts of help with reading in Urdu. As for the 7 year old children, levels of support in English were substantial, and higher in the group that made use of the centre. Literacy environment in the community The children in this community started their formal religious education at the age of 5. All children in the sample aged 7 and 11 attended mosque for instruction in the Qur’an. They studied it in Arabic, primarily by rote and only one child reported attending Arabic language classes. Interpretations of the Qur’an and other religious and moral texts were studied in Urdu. The books used were bilingual and sometimes trilingual, with translations and interpretations of the Arabic in both Urdu and English. The classes took place for two hours, 5 evenings a week. A few children also attended on a Saturday morning. Only 2 children in the sample had had access to one hour a week’s instruction in school and 6 were taught at home by their parents. At the time of the 1992/1993 study (Sneddon 1993), Gujarati classes were available during school time, so that many children in this language group had opportunities to learn both home languages and obtain support from
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their parents at home. After the abolition of the Inner London Education Authority, opportunities for the study of Gujarati in school had gradually disappeared. Two children in the study had had access to these classes before they closed and a further six were being taught at home. A neighbouring community organisation had, on occasion, been able to organise a weekly class in one local primary school, but this had not occurred regularly. The literacy experiences of the children were sharply differentiated. Literacy in Urdu was available to almost all the children through their religious education. However, it must be noted that, as few of the children used much Urdu in the home for every day communication, or had any experience of literacy beyond the religious domain, this experience was unlikely to enable them to feel secure about reading secular literature or articles in the Urdu language press, as many of their elders do. A few families indicated at the interview that they anticipated that religious instruction might eventually come to be delivered in English. The paucity of experience of Gujarati literacy was striking. The support in Gujarati which seemed to encourage fairly high levels of linguistic vitality in the children whose families use the Community Centre was almost entirely oral. Very few children were developing literacy skills in the home language that they spoke most fluently. Many families remarked that, when reading stories to their children, they frequently had to interpret the text in more colloquial language and explain less familiar vocabulary to the children. Parents’ reports on children’s problems in communicating in more formal aspects of Gujarati and their difficulty with the language of books indicated that children’s Gujarati use, while still very buoyant (in particular in the group whose families used the Community Centre) were increasingly divergent from the standard language. Children’s story telling Most of the 3½ year old children were in the early stages of learning English. The range of story reading in both Gujarati and English extended from the child who turned pages and pointed to illustrations in silence to the child who told a well structured narrative about the Hungry Caterpillar using words like “cocoon” (Carle 1995). The 7 year old children’s range of skills in English was wide. Many
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children had features in their speech that indicated they were not fully fluent in English even when they were sophisticated story tellers. Narrative skills varied considerably in both languages and some story telling was superb. The story told to me in the school context was The Naughty Mouse (Stone 1989). All children in the 11 year old age group were fluent speakers of English. Any non-standard features in their language tended to reflect general north east London children’s speech. They were confident story tellers and some are outstanding. A number talked about their difficulty with Gujarati “book language” and used some English terms in their Gujarati retelling of The Raja’s Big Ears (Desai 1989). Children’s achievement in school All the 3½ year old children handled books appropriately in the nursery, a few could name English letters and several identified Gujarati print. A notable feature of the nursery visit was the great confidence with which children put pen to paper when asked “write me a story”. Not one said they couldn’t write. A number of children used “pseudo-letters” and it was interesting to note that those children who wrote consistently from right to left were those who received substantial encouragement for literacy in Urdu in the home. In spite of the fact that most of the 7 year old children were not yet fully fluent in English, eight of them were performing at or above the expected level (level 2) for monolinguals on the Standard Assessment Tasks for reading. A few children who were orally very fluent in both languages were significantly behind their peers in reading and one child demonstrated very poor oral skills in both languages. On the London Reading Test, the mean score of the 11 year old children was 105. This compares with an mean for the borough of 97, a mean for children who are speakers of South Asian languages of 95.8 and for Englishonly speakers of 100.3. The range was wide: the lowest score being 93 and the highest 134. The children of the community, as a whole, were performing very well. It is not the purpose of the present chapter to discuss the very complex relationship between children’s experience of literacy in the home and their achievement in school. I will just state here that the findings of this study indicate that the children, who by the age of 11 had received significant amounts of support for literacy in the home in Gujarati or Urdu, were in no way disadvantaged in their achievements in English.
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Conclusions The Gujarati-speaking Muslim community in this area of North London form a cohesive group who value education for their children. They are typified by strong family networks and the maintenance of close links with the region of origin. Extended visits are common and a few children have the opportunity of going to boarding school in Surat. The requirement for regular worship at mosque by men and the religious instruction of the children has ensured that the patterns of residence in this community has remained geographically fairly dense. All of the above factors, added to the particular pattern of marriage within the sample which ensures that all families have a least one parent born and educated in Gujarat, have helped to maintain a high level of linguistic vitality in the parent generation for the group as a whole, whether or not they make use of the Community Centre. The data on language use in the wider community supported my prediction that use of the Community Centre would provide a wider range of opportunities for Gujarati or Urdu to be spoken. There were a number of significant differences between both groups in this respect, with the main impact of the centre being on provision of opportunities for community language use in leisure activities, both for adults and for children. A further prediction was that increased opportunity for Gujarati and Urdu use in the community would result in greater use by adults in the home, which in turn would encourage greater use by children whose families use the Community Centre. This prediction was not supported by the data as there was virtually no difference in Gujarati or Urdu usage by adults within the family between the two groups. The data suggested that the Community Centre may impact directly on language maintenance for children through the provision of a dedicated playcentre staffed by members of the community where children have the opportunity to share their language informally among themselves. The data on literacy practices in the home revealed that both groups were aware of the need to support their children’s learning to read in English and that most did this on a regular basis. It was predicted that the group who make use of the Community Centre would be likely to provide their children with more support for literacy in Gujarati or Urdu. This was clearly confirmed in the case of the children aged 3½ and 7, and may reflect some increased motivation in families who use the Community Centre. It is important to note, however, that support for Gujarati
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in the home for these age groups was primarily in the form of story telling rather than reading. There was no significant difference between the experiences of the older children in the two groups with respect to literacy support in home languages. The children’s achievement in school reflected their developing knowledge of the English language; older children achieved slightly higher reading scores in English at age 11 than the norm for their monolingual peers. Support for literacy in Gujarati and Urdu in the home was in no way detrimental to this. The importance of learning Gujarati and Urdu was rated very highly by parents in both groups in the study: families mentioned the maintenance of relationships with relatives in Gujarat, cultural and religious reasons, as well as opportunities in business and employment generally. All families interviewed had at least one parent literate in Gujarati, in Urdu and in English. Children’s access to literacy was more restricted. Urdu was used comparatively little in most families for communication. While it was studied on a daily basis at mosque, for most children the literacy acquired was mainly embedded in a religious context. The linguistic vitality in Gujarati fostered by use of the Community Centre was essentially oral and colloquial. There were very few literacy classes in Gujarati. The use of Gujarati at play centre was entirely informal and did not include any literacy-related activities. There were few formal means for transmitting literacy in Gujarati, the main language of most homes, to the children. According to the parents, the result of this was an increasing gap between standard Gujarati and the children’s vernacular. The absence of regular access to a standard also meant that some children had increasing difficulties in communicating effectively with relatives in Gujarat. Members of the community are very clear that they consider their language to be of vital importance as a repository of their culture, religion and history. Comparatively high levels of language use have been maintained in the present generation of children who make use of community facilities. It seems likely that those children will transmit the language orally to their children, but few will be able to read to them. The lack of access to standard usage may even diminish the value of their language as a spoken means of communication in Gujarat. It seems likely that this will result in the kind of language loss experienced by Gujarati communities in South Africa that has caused so much concern to some of the elders in the sample interviewed.
CHAPTER 7
Children writing in a multilingual nursery Charmian Kenner
Young children are sharp-eyed observers of the ways in which literacy is used in the world around them. They are also keen participants in literacy activities at home and in the wider community. In a multilingual environment, children will be gaining knowledge about the social organisation of reading and writing events in more than one language. In this chapter, I shall discuss how this kind of knowledge was demonstrated by three- and four-year-olds in a South London nursery class. I shall also suggest that children did not simply reproduce the patterns which they had observed, but actively re-interpreted texts and practices for their own purposes.
Early literacy experience Research into emergent literacy has found a considerable amount of knowledge amongst very young children about the uses of reading and writing in their everyday world. Close examination of texts made by pre-school children at home in the United States (Taylor 1983: 31–32 and 56–58) showed that they were writing their own notes and messages; this activity might go unremarked in the bustle of daily life. The researcher discovered some of her richest data in drawers in children’s rooms, or in waste-bins. A research project in a British nursery class (Wray, Bloom and Hall 1989: 70) found a similar variety of literacy activity; when the home corner (roleplay area) was
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filled with everyday materials for reading and writing, placed around the telephone, desk and cooker, children responded by engaging in 290 literacyrelated events in the space of a week. Recently, researchers have begun to look at early multilingual literacy. For example, Minns (1990) has documented four-year-olds’ experiences of story-reading and story-telling in Panjabi and English. Gregory, Mace, Rashid and Williams (1996) have explored the literacy learning of six-year-olds from families of Bangladeshi origin, in community language classes as well as at home. In both these projects, the focus was largely on book-reading, in order to find out how children’s approach to reading at school was influenced and supported by their families’ social and cultural traditions. The research project described below, which took place in a multilingual primary school in South London, was concerned with children’s knowledge of a range of literacy practices involving different types of text.1 Bilingual children and parents were invited to bring literacy materials from home into school, and to write in different languages in the classroom. I also conducted informal semi-structured interviews with parents about children’s involvement in reading and writing events at home. To give an example of the project’s findings, I shall discuss how two particular children, Meera and Billy, responded when they were given the opportunity to write airletters alongside their parents in the nursery.2 I shall then look briefly at the ‘literacy worlds’ of each of these children, to give an idea of the variety of texts and languages which they would encounter in different domains. I shall also refer to the ways in which monolingual children began to comment on the presence of different languages in the nursery.
Children using literacy for their own purposes In young children’s production and use of texts, evidence can be seen of their personal intentions as writers and readers. Kress (1997) conducted a long-term observation of children’s spontaneous writing activity at home. He concluded that each individual made their own interpretation of key features of texts encountered in the world around them. This interpretation depended on each child’s socio-cultural history, and also on their purpose for writing. I shall discuss how, in this study, Meera and Billy built on their experiences of letterwriting with their parents, by producing a series of varied texts over a subsequent period of time.
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Children have also been found to be alert to the potential of literacy events as ways of negotiating relationships with others. For example, a study by Dyson (1995) of seven-year-olds who were given the opportunity to write stories and direct their classmates in performing these, showed how children recognised the power of their story texts as a source of authority, and tried to use the role of ‘director’ to achieve social status amongst their peers. In the case of the nursery, I shall consider how children quickly identified the authority which was carried by multilingual texts in the classroom, and sought to achieve the newly-available status which was associated with being a multilingual writer.
Finding out about children’s literacy knowledge In the nursery class, children came from a wide variety of language backgrounds, including Arabic, Spanish, Yoruba, Thai, Tigrinya, Gujarati, Cantonese and Filipino. I worked collaboratively with the teacher, spending two days a week in the classroom throughout the school year. As well as interviewing parents about home literacy experiences, I observed children’s spontaneous writing behaviour, particularly in the home corner and writing area, and made audio-recordings of interactions around text. I also collected many of the children’s texts, noting the context in which they had been produced, and any comments made by the writer. When encouraged to bring in texts used at home, bilingual parents and children responded with materials such as calendars, videos, newspapers and alphabet teaching aids. Parents were also invited to act as writers in the nursery, for example by making posters to accompany the videos, and by writing cards for the class ‘postbox’. Children were able to use the home literacy materials and their parents’ texts as a basis for further writing of their own (see Kenner 1996, 1997a for a detailed description of this approach). The teacher took a constant interest in the multilingual activities, and encouraged children to show their writing to the whole nursery group. Bilingual children reacted positively to the presence of home texts in the nursery, and to events which involved parental writing. In most cases, they also produced their own writing, either with their parents or on a later occasion. These responses provided information about children’s knowledge of home language literacy. To illustrate the findings which emerged, I shall
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now consider the example of parents writing airletters in the nursery. Letter-writing: Meera and Billy A number of bilingual parents had told me how their young children would sit alongside them at home as they wrote letters to family in other countries; the children would ask for pen and paper to do their own writing, and talk with their parents about the people to whom the letter was being sent. This seemed to be an experience which held considerable significance for children. In order to investigate this further, the teacher and I created an opportunity to use family letter-writing for a purpose within the nursery. As part of a topic about ‘travel’, we asked parents if they could write to relatives to ask for pictures and information from their home countries. Several parents did so, writing airletters in the classroom with their children beside them. Meera and Billy were two of the children involved. At home, when Meera’s mother wrote in Gujarati to their family in India, Meera sat next to her, doing ‘wavy-line’ writing, and saying ‘I’m writing a letter’. In the nursery, when Meera saw the airletters and airmail paper which I had placed in the writing area, she immediately recognised them, saying ‘My mum’s got those’. As her mother began a letter to Meera’s grandparents, Meera asked for an airletter form of her own, and filled it with a variety of symbols, in both Gujarati and English (see Figures 1 and 2). Meera began with some Gujarati symbols with which she was already familiar: the first two letters of the name of an Indian film. She based these on another text present in the nursery: a poster which her mother had made about one of Meera’s favourite videos. She later commented about the first symbol: ‘That say India — that’s my film’. This seemed to show an understanding of the connection between her mother’s letter and India, and of the need to write in Gujarati. Meera then produced a string of English alphabetic letters. These included her own name, her sister’s, and her parents’; Meera already knew how to write the first two of these, and used her mother’s airletter (which was signed with the family names in both Gujarati and English) as a resource to find out about her parents’ names. Later, Meera read out all these names to me. She obviously thought it was important to include the whole family in her airletter: a recognition of the social relationships involved in writing letters to relatives.
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Figure 1. Airletter in Gujarati, written by Meera’s mother in the nursery (with additions by Meera later that morning)
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Meera’s comments: – top left-hand symbol: “That say India … that’s my film” – English alphabet letters: “That says India, that’s my shop”. She then gave the names of her family Figure 2. Airletter written by Meera, alongside her mother in the nursery
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The remaining alphabet letters were a varied selection. Of this part of her airletter, Meera said to me later ‘That says India, that’s my shop’. Meera’s family ran a small supermarket near the school, which Meera often referred to as ‘my shop’. She seemed to have an idea of the possible themes of family letters: talking about India, and about the shop in London. Meera was also attentive to the visual appearance of her letter. She had written in horizontal straight lines, and filled the entire page. She was concerned because her mother had left a large amount of space at the bottom of her airletter. When her mother had gone home, Meera pointed to the unfilled space, asking ‘What my mummy’s going to write here?’ I suggested that she could write in the space herself, which she did, producing several Gujarati letters based on the first few words written by her mother. She added a picture of me (perhaps because I was part of the interaction) and again emphasised that her mum needed to do more writing to finish the letter. Airletters are characteristically filled up to the last corner, which would account for Meera’s insistence. Billy would also sit next to his mother at home when she wrote letters to her family in Thailand. He would instruct her to ‘write you, Billy, Elizabeth’; Elizabeth was his sister, and he wanted all these names to be included. Meanwhile, he would do various symbols or ‘wavy-line’ writing on his own sheets of paper. In the nursery, Billy’s mother wrote several lines of Thai script on an airletter, as if she was writing to Billy’s grandmother. At the same time, Billy filled an airletter page with lines and symbols in several different colours. As they wrote, they talked together in both Thai and English. Billy’s mother confirmed that this was the kind of response her son would make to letter-writing at home. In the nursery, Billy produced additional writing on the same day. He came to the writing table later that morning, and spent a while doing many different symbols. He pointed to some of the more complex ones, saying ‘I write like my mum’ and ‘Mu-ang Thai’ (Billy used this phrase to refer both to Thailand and to the Thai language). These symbols did not resemble English alphabet letters, of which Billy knew several, but did bear a resemblance to his mother’s Thai script (see Figure 3). In the afternoon, Billy returned to the writing table, this time focussing on English script; one of his activities was to write his name, referring to his mother’s writing of ‘Billy’ in English, which he had also seen her do as part of the letter-writing activity. Meera, therefore, demonstrated an awareness of the content, form and language appropriate for a family airletter to India. Although Billy’s response
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Figure 3a. Extract from air letter in Thai written by Billy’s mother in the nursery
Figure 3b. Symbols written by Billy later that morning: “I write like my mum”; “Mu-ang Thai”.
was less developed than Meera’s, he showed an emergent understanding of similar issues, recognising the language and country represented in his mother’s airletter. Both children wrote bilingually, basing their writing on their parents’, in Gujarati and English, and Thai and English respectively. These reactions, like many others which occurred when multilingual work took place in the nursery, indicated the importance of home literacy experience and parental writing as resources for children’s learning. Children’s linguistic worlds From children’s comments and behaviour around home language texts, and from the information which was given to me by parents, I was able to build up a picture of the ‘linguistic worlds’ of some of the bilingual children. Again, I shall discuss this with reference to Meera and Billy (see Figures 4 and 5). These diagrams are a way of representing the multi-layered worlds of language and literacy experience in which bilingual children live. Each layer represents a domain, such as home or school. I have arranged these to indicate the physical location of each domain with respect to Meera or Billy (centred on ‘home’, with ‘India’ or ‘Thailand’ being the furthest away) and the significance of each domain in terms of the amount of time the child spent there (thus
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‘school’ is placed between ‘home’ and ‘local community’). I have noted some of the people with whom Meera and Billy communicated in each language, and indicated some key locations where literacy events might take place. I have also referred specifically to texts which were part of the children’s lives in languages other than English. These diagrams are by no means exhaustive; they represent only the information which I was able to discover from interviews with parents which took place on the nursery premises, and literacy activity which occurred in the classroom. My project was school-based because it was necessary to devote a large amount of time to building up a multilingual context in the nursery. Such diagrams, therefore, are only the starting-point for more detailed research into young children’s multilingual literacy experience. Also, the diagrams are a highly simplified representation, particularly with regard to the languages used. As Barton (1994a: 71) has pointed out, interactions around literacy in multilingual households are likely to involve more than one language. An in-depth study carried out by Bhatt, Barton, Martin-Jones and Saxena (1996), regarding the use of different languages and literacies in households in Leicester, found a picture of considerable complexF gure 5: Meera s l ngu st c world INDIA Gujarati (grandparents}
LOCAL COMMUNITY shopping, films
SCHOOL
HOME Gujarati (mother) Gujarati (in Tooting)
Gujarati (parents, sister)
Meera
English (sister)
video, calendars, newspapers, letters,
Figure 4. Meera’s linguistic world
English (teacher, peers)
English (shop, everyday activities)
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ity. This would certainly be the case for Meera and Billy; Billy’s mother, for example, described how she and Billy would speak both Thai and English when she was teaching him the Thai alphabet. Taking these limitations into account, I shall discuss each diagram in turn, referring where possible to relevant comments made by Meera and Billy. Meera At home, Meera spoke mainly in Gujarati with her parents and sister as a family. With her sister, who was several years older, Meera talked and played in English as well as in Gujarati. Comments by Meera in the nursery seemed to accurately reflect this situation; she told me that her mum ‘speaks Gujarati’, her dad ‘says in Gujarati’, whilst her sister ‘speaks Gujarati’ and also ‘can’t talk Gujarati’. Meera was being taught to write in English at home, but not yet in Gujarati, since her parents thought it would be too difficult for her to learn both scripts at once. However, she was surrounded by literacy materials in Gujarati, and showed her recognition of these as soon as the multilingual work began in the nursery. When her mother wrote in Gujarati script for a wall display in the classroom, Meera began to talk about ‘films’ and ‘TV’; she was referring to the Indian films which the family watched on video. Meera brought one of these to school, which became the basis for a good deal of writing on her part, in both Gujarati and English. Meera and her mother also brought in calendars which were used at home. One was a Hindu religious calendar; Meera told me that the pictures included ‘Bhagwan’, and also commented ‘numbers are in it’. Another was a calendar in Gujarati, which she said was kept ‘on the wall above the heater’ at home. She identified some of the writing in it as Gujarati, and showed that she knew the purpose of the numbers when she asked ‘Do you know when is my birthday? Eleven — my mummy says eleven’ (her birthday was on the eleventh of the month). Meera’s mother read several Gujarati newspapers at home. When a copy of one of these was brought into the nursery, Meera commented ‘my mum’s got that’. On another occasion, she found the newspaper in my bag and said ‘read to my mum’, and she was also seen carrying the same copy round the nursery, saying ‘mummy mummy mummy!’ It was also Meera’s mother who wrote the family airletters in Gujarati to India; her father only wrote in English. Appropriately, all Meera’s references to Gujarati literacy concerned her mother.
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Meera often mentioned that her family went shopping in Tooting, a nearby area where there was a large South Asian community. She told me, for example, that her mother went to the ‘film shop’ there. This local area would have been a key domain for Meera’s Gujarati language and literacy experience. Finally, her grandparents lived in Gujarat, in north-west India, and Meera participated in her mother’s letter-writing to them, as discussed earlier. She also knew that she would soon visit India for the first time. Billy Billy’s mother came from Thailand, and his father was English. When Billy and his sister were together with their mother, she spoke to them mainly in Thai; Billy communicated in English with his father. Billy’s mother was teaching him the alphabet in both Thai and English, and he had a Thai alphabet book for this purpose, which his mother brought to school. Billy identified this book as having come from home, and said that his mum wrote like this. As I have mentioned above, he also saw his mother writing airletters in Thai, and his comments seemed to indicate that the symbols she used represented Thailand and the Thai language.
THAILAND Thai (grandmother, aunts)
LOCAL COMMUNITY SCHOOL
Thai (temple)
HOME Thai (mother)
Thai (mother, sister)
Billy video, letters, alphabet book
Figure 5. Billy’s linguistic world
English (father)
English (teacher, peers)
English (everyday activities)
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Billy’s favourite text in Thai was audio-visual: a karaoke video of romantic songs performed amongst beautiful river scenery. When we showed this video in the nursery, Billy gave a confident introduction, explaining that it would show boats and fishing. As the Thai script rippled across the screen in time with the singer’s voice, Billy said ‘ABC’; children in the nursery often used this as a general term for ‘writing’. Billy did not have access to a large community of Thai speakers locally, but his mother sometimes took him to the Thai temple in another part of London. According to his mother, Billy said ‘Mu-ang Thai’ (‘Thailand’) when they visited the temple. He may also have been referring to the Thai script which he would have seen in the building. Billy knew that his grandmother and aunts lived in Thailand; when looking at family photos which his mother had brought to the nursery, he said ‘Mu-ang Thai’. He made the same comments about some pages which he and his mother had produced about Thailand for a ‘travel brochure’ in the nursery. The research project therefore showed that these young children were involved in the use of texts in different languages for religious observance, for participation in cultural life, for sustaining kinship ties, and for keeping in touch with the wider home language community. These findings link with those of other research concerning the multilingual literacy practices of adults and older children in Britain (Saxena 1994; Bhatt et al 1996; Martin-Jones and Bhatt 1998). Furthermore, the children demonstrated that they had some awareness of this involvement. Whilst participating in these interactions, the children in my study seemed to have formed associations between people, places and language use which gave a sense of a multi-layered, yet coherent linguistic world. Within this world, there was room for flexibility and change, as shown by Meera’s evaluation of her sister as someone who both spoke Gujarati and did not speak Gujarati. The linguistic world of the nursery The way in which young children can rapidly make connections between language, speaker or writer, and text was highlighted by monolingual children’s comments on changes in the linguistic environment of the nursery itself. Colin, for example, often heard me speaking Spanish to his classmate Danny, who was from Ecuador. He referred to his friend on one occasion as
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‘Spanish Danny’. Vanessa would hail me across the school playground, shouting ‘Chinese! Chinese!’ Although she knew quite well that my name was Charmian, she identified me with Chinese, the first language we had worked with in the nursery. Vanessa also drew a picture of ‘that man who says Chinese’, based on the Chinese cartoon video we had watched at school. Michaela, similarly, had taken note of the language used in the video. Two months later, when doing some writing, she told me ‘I saw the video with the horse and I decided to write Chinese’. Monolingual children also began to comment on the language used by themselves and their own families. Michaela said ‘My daddy’s English — and my mummy is’. Stefanie specified that a piece of her writing was ‘English’, and said ‘Give it to someone English’. Colin, after we had learned a song from the Philippines with Ian’s grandfather, did some writing which he said was ‘Filipino’. When I asked ‘Who speaks Filipino?’ he replied ‘My mum doesn’t’. Through multilingual experience in the nursery, these children were identifying people who could speak and write in different languages. The reactions just described also suggest that children were paying attention to features which characterised language and literacy events, a process which I shall discuss in more detail later in this chapter.
Children re-interpreting texts and practices Meera and Billy: constructing their own texts Both Meera and Billy produced a number of further texts in connection with their mothers’ airletter writing. In each case, it could be seen that the children were making use of experience gained during these literacy events to develop their own writing. On the same day as the letter-writing with her mother had taken place, Meera asked in the afternoon ‘Where’s my mum’s letter?’ With this beside her, she wrote another airletter, containing English alphabet letters and other symbols. Of this, she said ‘it’s about the computer — don’t touch the switch’ (this was currently an important issue in the nursery). On the front of the airletter she wrote her sister’s name and her own ‘PINALMeeRA’. On another envelope, she wrote her mother’s name, ‘PANNA’. These letters retained a
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connection with her family, but the content of the airletter was now related to the nursery context. A month later, when Billy’s mother wrote her airletter in the classroom, Meera also sat down with an airletter, and wrote the entire English alphabet (referring to a frieze on the wall to help her). She sealed up the airletter and, in response to questions from me about the destinee, wrote ‘AHE’ on the front, ‘for the post’. That afternoon, she asked to see the original airletters she and her mother had written. Taking a fresh airletter form, she began to copy writing from the Gujarati video poster onto this, and continued with some symbols of her own. She added a grid for a noughts and crosses game, and offered me the chance to play. The variety of Meera’s responses suggests that she had recognised that letter-writing was a significant literacy event. She therefore used the format of the airletter, or of a sheet of paper plus an envelope, as a setting in which to experiment with both English and Gujarati writing, as well as other visual representations which currently interested her, such as the noughts and crosses game. Billy, meanwhile, produced a great variety of texts which seemed to be a consequence of the letter-writing activity. Prior to this event, Billy had done little writing in the nursery, and his mother was worried because Billy was reluctant to write at home. The only time he showed an interest was when she was writing letters to Thailand. Shortly after his opportunity to write an airletter in the nursery, Billy began to write more at school, and a great deal at home. His mother brought plastic carrier-bags full of pieces of writing to show us in the nursery; on the first occasion, there were 21 of these, and a few days later, 27 more. Billy was using all kinds of material which came to hand for his writing, from McDonalds placemats to old notebooks. The symbols he produced were highly varied; they included English alphabet letters which we had not realised that he knew, other symbols more similar to Thai, numbers, repeated circles, and drawings. For Billy, the public recognition at school that he was a bilingual writer with knowledge of literacy events seemed to be the spur to developing writing on his own account. From the socially situated practice of letter-writing, he moved to explore other formats for writing, and different systems of representation — English, Thai, numerals, and drawings.
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Multilingual literacy practices in the nursery For monolingual children, the multilingual work was an opportunity to study new forms of written language. Symbols designated, for example, as ‘Chinese’ or ‘Gujarati’ began to appear in some children’s writing. Sometimes these were recognisably similar to that particular script. At other times, there seemed to be a different agenda; children had noticed that the teacher and I accorded a high status to people who could write in different languages, and had divined ways of making this status work for them. These effects were particularly pronounced with regard to the use of ‘Chinese writing’. Chinese had a high profile from the beginning of the research project, with the Chinese cartoon video being shown several times; Chinese script was also the most strikingly different from English. ‘Writing Chinese’ began shortly after the first viewing of the video, and became a new kind of literacy practice within the nursery, built up by children themselves. It often took place during play in the home corner, or at the table in the writing area. In the first term, there were 14 instances of children mentioning ‘Chinese’ in connection with their own writing, and during the year, a total of 10 children did what they called ‘Chinese writing’. This writing consisted of a great variety of symbols. Vanessa did ‘wavyline’ writing on one occasion, saying ‘It’s Chinese!’ On another occasion, she did lines in a criss-cross pattern and said ‘Chinese’ and ‘kiss’. Ebony told me in the home corner: ‘I’ve been writing’. When I asked what she had written, she answered ‘Chinese!’ Later she identified a line of circles and non-alphabetic characters as ‘Chinese’. At first, the teacher and I were somewhat bewildered by this range of activity. In my later analysis, I concluded that children were sometimes producing their own versions of Chinese writing which they had seen, as when Ace wrote several symbols based on the title of the cartoon video and told a friend ‘This is how you write Chinese’. However, children would also use the label of ‘Chinese’ to justify experimentation in their writing; it gave them a ‘cover’ as emergent writers, because nobody could say that they were wrong in what they had done. Danielle, for example, was very competent at writing her name in English, but at first seemed reluctant to do other writing in case she made an error. When the practice of ‘writing Chinese’ began, she took part in a cafe role-play involving Chinese food packets and menus, and took my order in ‘Chinese’,
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writing a string of symbols which looked like ‘bODIF’. She seemed to be using the opportunity to explore different combinations of English alphabetic letters. A similar example is reported by Sulzby (1986: 85); six-year-old Nicole, when explaining why she had written the same story with different alphabetic symbols the second time round, said ‘I wrote it in Spanish, in my own way’. Michaela, meanwhile, incorporated ‘Chinese’ throughout her development of emergent writing. At first, she designated ‘corkscrew’ symbols and ‘wavy-line’ writing as ‘Chinese’, along with some elaborate drawings. As she began to write strings of recognisable English alphabet letters, she would still call parts of these ‘Chinese’. This gave her licence for experimentation; Clay (1975) has emphasised children’s desire to explore the limits within which a written sign can vary. Children in the nursery had rapidly realised that ‘Chinese’ writing on their part was unlikely to attract criticism from an adult. In fact, attempts to write in other languages were likely to receive particular attention and to be praised. Children could thus use ‘Chinese writing’ to help negotiate a more powerful position for themselves as writers, compared to their peers and to adults. For example, Megan said when watching me write: ‘You can write fast. My mum can write fast. She can’t write Chinese. I can write Chinese’. This gave Megan a way of gaining status with respect to her mother, despite the latter’s greater speed at writing. The children often commented on what I was writing in my research notebook, and would take it from me in order to join in with a practice which they identified as powerful. When Colin took hold of my notebook to write in it himself, he said ‘We can write here too’, and what he chose to do was ‘Chinese writing’. In the following exchange between three children, the question of who could write Chinese played a key part in the interaction. Stefanie and Ace were already writing together; Michaela sat down to join them, and began writing too (see below). When challenged to justify her presence at the table by writing rather than scribbling, Michaela produced a symbol string which she perhaps could not completely define. Calling it ‘Chinese’ was a safe option, and also gave authority to her writing in this multilingual nursery setting. Stefanie and Ace disputed her claim, with Ace being particularly emphatic, since her mother was Chinese and she had experience of recognising the script. Furthermore, Ace felt a sense of ownership with regard to the language.
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The children’s conversation Ace: (to Michaela, crossly) You’re doing scribbling! Stefanie: We’re not scribbling, we’re writing! (Children argue about this for a while) Michaela: (writes ) I can write Chinese anyway! Stefanie: You can’t write Chinese! Michaela: Yes I can! Then don’t watch me! There it is (writes Ace:
)
Let me see let me see — that’s not Chinese!
This exchange thus demonstrates all three of the aspects involved in ‘Chinese writing’ which I have discussed above: an awareness of the visual appearance of Chinese script, the legitimising of experimentation, and the attempt to gain status as a writer. As can be seen from this evidence, both bilingual and monolingual children in the nursery were sensitive to changes in their language and literacy environment. Events which took place in school and were sanctioned by the teacher and by peers tended to be identified by children as new practices, which could carry significant weight. Vanessa’s mother told me how her daughter had come home from school singing the song ‘Heads Shoulders Knees and Toes’, which we had learned in Filipino as well as English. The words and actions in the Filipino version proceed in the opposite order to those in English, and Vanessa’s brother complained that she was singing the song ‘backwards’. Vanessa, however, replied ‘That’s how we do it at school’. The learning of this song had happened alongside the singing of the English version, with the entire class grouped on the carpet, looking at the written version of each song on a poster in front of them. An Arabic alphabet song had also been learned in similar circumstances. This was a repeated pattern of events involving written text, expressing particular social and cultural meanings. It could therefore be defined as a literacy practice in the terms set out by Street (1993: 12–13) and Barton (1994a: 37), which could account for Vanessa’s insistence on its validity when challenged by her older brother.
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It is likely that children are attending to a variety of features in literacy activity in order to decide how different practices are organised and for what purpose they take place. On one occasion, Michaela gave a verbally explicit account of a set of circumstances which, in her opinion, constituted a regular practice in the nursery. On arrival in the classroom that morning, she announced to her mother ‘We do Chinese, in glittery pen’. Shortly afterwards, sitting with me at the writing table, where the multilingual activities often took place, she wrote a text which she said was Chinese and English, and continued ‘Shall I do some more Chinese? We always do Chinese on this table’. She then added to me, in the tone of an order, ‘When we do Chinese, you get the glittery pens out!’ Thus she had identified a conjunction of language with place (the writing table), people (me) and writing materials (glittery pen) — the elements of a potential literacy practice involving ‘Chinese’ at school. In fact, the use of ‘glittery pens’ for multilingual activities had only occurred once or twice before, but Michaela was trying to establish this aspect as an integral part of the pattern, because she personally enjoyed using these pens, to which there would otherwise be restricted access. Here we can see a child taking a dynamic role in the shaping of a literacy practice, in order to obtain a particular goal of her own. This research project, by connecting with and extending children’s multilingual experience, has illuminated the ways in which three- and four-yearolds build up understandings of literacy practices (who writes or reads certain kinds of texts, to whom, where, when and why). Young children look for patterns in literacy activity, and these patterns are additionally marked for the languages in which they take place. Also, children are constantly alert to the social significance of writing and reading, and will participate in the ongoing development of literacy practices, aiming to make the uses of text work for them as social actors.
Notes 1.
This doctoral research project was funded by the ESRC and Southampton University (School of Education).
2.
Since the children’s emergent writing often included their own first names, permission was gained from parents to use these in published accounts of the research.
SECTION II
Texts, identities and adult worlds The four chapters in this section throw light upon some of the language and literacy practices of multilingual adult worlds. The people described in these chapters carry out the routines of their day-to-day lives at the interface between the ideologies and values of ‘minority’ life worlds, their homes, local communities and places of worship, music and poetry, and the ideologies and values of the worlds of bureaucratic institutions, workplaces, and metropolitan centres of power. In their research, the authors of these chapters investigate the ways in which people are positioned by the asymmetrical power relations between these worlds and show how they manage these positions by taking up some of the opportunities their linguistic and literacy resources offer to them. The author of the chapters share a concern with making visible the way individuals make creative use of their linguistic resources to affirm specific cultural identities and to negotiate their positions with respect to institutional and non-institutional positioning. It is within the power structures and ideologies of these competing worlds that individuals are shown to negotiate and affirm their identities and social relations through their language and literacy practices. Three of the chapters focus on texts, providing a particular dimension of insight into the ways literacy practices are constitutive of social relations and social identities. Together, these chapters make visible the complexity and diversity of adult identities as these are constituted in the language and literacy practices of people’s day-to-day lives. They also provide evidence that identities are not fixed but open to contestation and change. In Chapter 8, Marilyn Martin-Jones writes about two Gujarati women whose life experiences span the cultural worlds of rural India and urban areas of Africa and Britain. In so doing, she reveals the ways in which languages and literacies are drawn upon as symbolic resources in the construction of new identities, in the context of migration and re-settlement. Drawing upon ethno-
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graphic fieldwork in the city of Leicester which was carried out with two women over a period of three years, she begins by presenting detailed accounts of their childhood literacy experiences in Gujarat and Malawi. She then goes on to show how the women have built upon the language and literacy resources in their repertoire in constructing new lives for themselves in this city. These life histories demonstrate how central languages and literacies are to the construction of gendered identities. They illustrate how the two women’s access to different languages and literacies has been shaped by the wider post-colonial context, by the asymmetrical gender relations of their local communities of origin and by the new social contexts in which they find themselves. They also demonstrate how the women have managed the ways in which they were positioned by different gendered ideologies and values. By illustrating the opportunities as well as the constraints in these women’s lives, this chapter provides a challenge to the stereotype of migrant women, found in earlier feminist research, as being triply oppressed by asymmetrical relations of gender, race and class. The symbolic function of orthographic conventions for signaling social identities in written texts is the focus of Chapter 9, by Mark Sebba. His linguistic analysis of examples from the growing body of Creole writing in Britain, pays close attention to the detail of orthographic conventions. He looks to the theories of power and ideology formulated within a social approach to literacy so as to understand how codeswitching in written texts has come to be symbolically meaningful within the British Caribbean community. Mark Sebba shows in detail how writers of Caribbean origin modify the orthographic conventions of Standard (British) English in their representation of Creole talk in poetry, plays, fiction and newspaper columns. Being creative with orthographic conventions enables these writers to make their BritishCaribbean voices and identities visible in a way that is obscured both by the Standard English orthography legitimised in and through the British education system, and by the phonemic orthography developed by academic linguists. While his analysis focuses on the immediate issue of orthographic conventions, at a broader level, Sebba’s analysis engages with issues of representation in multilingual contexts where groups such as London Jamaicans contest their invisible positioning within the dominant white British culture and find ways of representing their own identities in some of their written texts. In Chapter 10, Mike Baynham and Helen Lobanga Masing look at mediators and the process of mediation in multilingual literacy events. Their princi-
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pal aim in this paper is to investigate mediation as a linguistic process and identify how it is accomplished textually in multilingual contexts. Following a review of the way mediation is understood in the research literature, they identify ‘difference’ and ‘distance’ as being essential to the social construct of mediation. Difference and distance, they argue, are created as a result of social inequality and differential access to power and knowledge. This disparity is particularly visible in the data recorded by Masing in a rural village in the south west Pacific island-country of Vanuatu. Here, in this post-colonial context, difference and distance take on a multilingual dimension as mediation involves mediating between English, the most powerful and prestigious language and the official language, Bislama, the national language and Aulua, a non-prestigious local vernacular. As Baynham and Masing’s analysis demonstrates, mediators are therefore crucially positioned at the boundaries of institutional worlds and local lifeworlds where they act as brokers between the discourses and forms of knowledge of the institutionally empowered and the discourses and local knowledge available to the institutionally disempowered. The power dimension to mediation is also emphasised by Kathryn Jones, in a chapter which investigates how the identities of bilingual Welsh farmers are constructed in the texts and discourses of agricultural bureaucracy. Her linguistic analysis of the texts and interaction between farmers and agricultural ministry representatives identifies some of the tensions between the discourses of the mainly English bureaucratic world of the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF) and the mainly Welsh ‘farmworld’ discourses of farmers in north Wales. In this chapter, she presents a comparative analysis of bureaucratic encounters in which farmers are dealing with bureaucratic texts. Her overall aim is to investigate the ways in which impersonal and abstract bureaucratic relations are reproduced and contested in faceto-face encounters.
CHAPTER 8
Enterprising women Multilingual literacies in the construction of new identities Marilyn Martin-Jones
There is a now a considerable body of anthropological and sociological research which focuses on the specific experiences of women in minority groups of migrant or refugee origin in Britain. A substantial proportion of this research has been conducted in communities of South Asian origin (Bachu 1986, 1988, 1993; Brah 1987; Saifullah Khan 1979; Summerfield 1993; Westwood 1988). We now have detailed situated accounts of ways in which minority women of different ages, status and cultural background respond to the social and structural factors which shape their lives. For some women, the experience of migration leads to a narrowing of life chances. For others, it leads to an opening of opportunities. From recent studies in Britain, we know that there are enterprising women in the latter category who are actively responding to the new circumstances in which they find themselves and recasting their own lives on their own terms.1 This involves drawing on and refashioning practices associated with their cultural heritage, redefining cultural values and constructing new identities within the private and public domains of their lives. When we turn to research on bilingualism and literacy among linguistic minority groups in Britain, the picture is a very different one. Women have remained largely invisible in this research. Only now, in the mid-1990s, are we beginning to see the first attempts to document these dimensions of the lived
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experiences of minority women. Three recent case studies have focused on multilingual literacy practices in specific local communities of South Asian origin: Dhami (1994) examined the multilingual literacy experience of two Panjabi women of Indian origin in the West Midlands. Hartley (1994) described the literacy practices of a group of women of Pakistani origin in a small town in the North West of England. Hodge (1994a) documented changes over time in the literacy practices of two women with different linguistic and cultural backgrounds: one Gujarati speaker and one Panjabi speaker. This chapter presents an account of the language and literacy histories of two Gujarati-speaking women and their contemporary literacy practices. This account has been put together, with and for the two women, as part of a wider ethnographic research project based in the city of Leicester, in the East Midlands, from 1993 to 1995.2 The first woman, whom I shall call Firouzaben, is a Gujarati Muslim woman who came to Britain when her family took a decision to leave Malawi.3 The second woman, whom I shall call Shobhanaben, is a Gujarati Hindu woman who came to Britain from India (from the state of Gujarat) after she married. I will begin by building a picture of the gendered values and practices these two women encountered as they grew up and the ways in which their access to different languages and literacies was shaped by asymmetrical gender relations in their local communities. I will then go on to document the specific ways in which these two women have drawn on the language and literacy resources available to them in rebuilding their lives in Leicester and constructing new identities for themselves at home, in the workplace and in diverse community contexts. My aim in writing this chapter is to demonstrate how the analysis of change in the language and literacy practices of individual women can extend and deepen ethnographic research on gender and migration in post-colonial contexts. Gender identities are always open to contestation, change and redefinition. Migration can be an important catalyst for change, and, for some women, it can open up avenues of opportunity. The language and literacy choices that migrant women make in the new circumstances in which they find themselves (including efforts to embrace new languages and literacies) are at the heart of their response to these circumstances. Languages and literacies are crucial symbolic resources for negotiating new relationships and for constructing new identities. The wider context for this chapter is the recent research on gender and migration in the British context. So, in the first section of the chapter, I will
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look at the some of the issues that have emerged in this research. I will focus in particular on the debate about the ways in which women of South Asian origin in Britain have been represented in British migration studies conducted in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In the second section of the chapter, I will give a brief historical overview of Gujarati migration to Leicester. Here, I will emphasise that this ‘community’ includes Gujarati women and men with different migration histories and with diverse cultural and religious orientations. It also includes women and men of different generations who assume different cultural values and who locate themselves in different ways vis-à-vis the cultural practices associated with their place of origin. I will introduce the third section of the chapter with a brief description of the wider ethnographic project in Leicester which provided the starting point for this chapter. I will then show how perspectives on gender were incorporated into this project. I will also indicate how I worked with the two women in building an account of their contemporary literacy practices and their previous literacy experiences. This account is presented in the fourth and final section of the chapter. It traces the interweaving of different languages and literacies with the lives of both Firouzaben and Shobhanaben before and after they moved to Leicester.
Gender and migration Women, migration and work Until the mid-1970s, women were either completely overlooked in migration studies or they were merely mentioned as accessories of a process over which they were seen to have no control. As Morokvasic (1983) points out, in the 1960s and early 1970s, the research literature on migration in Europe represented migrant women in crudely stereotypical ways. In a retrospective account of this research, she says: This literature relies on stereotypes of migrant women as dependants, migrants’ wives or mothers, unproductive, illiterate, isolated, secluded from the outside world and bearers of many children. (1983: 13) (my italics).
Studies only began to be undertaken with migrant women in different parts of Europe when it was acknowledged that many were economically active.
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Migration can lead to considerable changes within individual households. It can entail a gain in status and power for women. If women enter the labour market in the new place of settlement and have a source of independent income, they have a stronger hand in the negotiation of power in the domestic sphere. Over the last two decades, quite high rates of economic activity have been recorded for women in some groups of migrant origin. In Britain, for example, employment statistics recorded in the mid-1980s showed that women of AfroCaribbean and East African Asian origin were more economically active than women in the indigenous white group (Bachu 1993). Patterns of employment among migrant women in Britain are however determined by local economies and the nature of the local labour market. They are also affected by social and structural forces operating within local communities and by gender relations of inequality. Triple oppression? As research with migrant women developed, there was increasing emphasis on the need to take account of the cultural practices of the societies of origin and the ways in which gender relations were being constituted in the context of migration (Simon and Bretell 1986; Morokvasic 1983). It was argued that migrant women experienced triple forms of oppression and were caught up in intersecting relations of asymmetric power: of class, gender and minority group membership. Migrant women’s status in Britain was seen as being simultaneously shaped by the practices associated with the homeland culture, their class locations and impulses within their communities to maintain ethnic boundaries in reaction to different forms of racism. By the late 1980s, a critique of the view of culture in this work was being put forward by Black and Asian writers. They contested the representation of culture as fixed and unchanging practices, traditions and values and argued that it obscured women’s active role in the production and reproduction of culture (Bachu 1986, 1988; Parmar 1982). They pointed to the inadequacy of existing analyses of race and class in the lives of women of Afro-Caribbean and Asian origin in Britain. At the same time, we began to see the emergence of ethnographic research which confirmed the arguments about the heterogeneous nature of the experiences of women in different local minority groups (Brah 1987; Westwood and Bachu 1988).
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Women relocating culture Bachu (1993) takes issue with research by white feminists carried out in Britain during the 1980s which, she argues, has over-emphasised gender asymmetries in local minority groups and has constructed a misleading picture of South Asian women as passive victims of oppressive patriarchal relations unable to exercise any control over their own lives. In her own work with Panjabi women in Britain, Bachu (1986, 1988, 1993) acknowledges the existence of asymmetric gender relations within individual households and within local communities. She also recognises the constraints imposed by arranged marriage practices, by dowry systems, by dress codes and child rearing practices. However, she also notes that other factors shape women’s lives in significant ways, particularly women in the second and third generations: these include women’s experiences of regional British cultures and of specific economic niches. She says: “The way in which they define themselves is an outcome of these experiences” (1993: 109). Bachu argues that, in defining new identities in the context of migration, the Panjabi women she worked with were continually negotiating and transforming cultural practices and values. They were doing this individually and collectively. These identities were “contextualised” (1993: 110), that is, they were located in experiences and opportunities that arose in particular places of settlement. She substantiates this argument by showing how the structure and contents of the daaj ‘dowry’ was being transformed in the British context by the Panjabi Sikh women she was working with. She also notes that this transformation process showed regional variations, reflecting the relative affluence and consumption patterns of Panjabi women in different urban areas in Britain. Language and literacy practices are also subject to change. They are also contextualised and imbued with particular social and cultural meanings. Ways of speaking and ways of reading and writing serve as a powerful means of making statements about identity. They therefore merit closer attention in ethnographic accounts of the ways in which women redefine their identities in the context of migration. To illustrate what I have in mind, I will turn now to the experiences of women in a specific urban context.
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Gujaratis in Leicester The years after the Second World War brought prosperity to the city of Leicester. This prosperity was built on the existing industrial base, the manufacturing of hosiery, knitwear and footwear, and on newer industries such as light engineering, printing, adhesive manufacturing and food processing (Marrett 1989: 1). By 1967, the economic boom was at its height and there were acute labour shortages. This provided the pull factor in the subsequent in-migration from the Caribbean, from East Africa, from Pakistan and from India, notably from the textile city of Ahmedabad in the state of Gujarat. As Bhatt (1994) points out, Gujarati migration to Leicester accelerated in the late 1960s and early 1970s, during the period when Africanisation policies were introduced in East Africa. These years saw the exodus of many South Asians from East and Southern Africa. Many of these were Gujaratis. They were attracted to Leicester, despite hostility from local residents (Marrett 1994: 51–60), because they had kin ties there or because there were niches available in the local economy. In particular, there were work opportunities for women. As in East Africa, the Gujaratis moved into specific economic niches such as the retail trade and industrial entrepreneurship. A considerable number of Gujarati women and men also moved into white collar and public sector employment in the Leicester context. Now, in the mid-1990s, Leicester has the largest Gujarati settlement in Britain. It is difficult to be precise about the overall size of the Gujarati population, because of the absence of census data on languages in England. The only census data available relates to country of origin. According to the 1991 census, 23.7% of the overall population of the city is of South Asian origin (Leicester City Council 1993). With regard to language statistics, all we have are estimates based on an earlier survey (Leicester City and County Council 1987). According to these estimates, approximately 15% of the population identify Gujarati as their first language (Bhatt 1994). Within the city today, there is considerable residential concentration of Gujaratis. This facilitates the provision of goods and services for the local community. There are now a wide range of community organisations, voluntary agencies, shops, printers, restaurants, travel agents and other businesses which cater for the needs of the local communities of South Asian origin. Although Gujarati speakers in Leicester are represented as one ‘community’ in official British discourses or in academic research, there are actually a
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number of different Gujarati communities. These communities are quite diverse because they have different migration histories, different religious affiliations and different local community associations. The largest group of Gujaratis in the local population in Leicester today are the Gujarati Hindus. Most came to Britain from East Africa. A small number also came as direct migrants from India. The second largest group are Gujarati Muslims who came to Leicester from East Africa and from Gujarat. There are also smaller numbers of Jains and Christians in the city (Marrett 1989). All these groups have their roots in the north west of India, in the state of Gujarat. Now, they form part of a wider diaspora of Gujaratis in different parts of the world: in Britain, Canada, the USA, New Zealand, South Africa, East Africa and Portugal. Across this diaspora, there are intersecting networks of kinship, religion and caste or occupational grouping (Dwyer 1994).
The Leicester study As I indicated in the introduction, this chapter grew out of a wider ethnographic project on multilingual literacy practices. The main aim of the wider project was to provide an account of the contemporary literacy practices of a sample of Gujaratis in the city of Leicester and to document their literacy histories. The project incorporated insights from research in two distinct fields: sociolinguistic research on bilingualism and multilingualism, and ethnographic research on literacy. It brought together two fields of research which to a large extent have developed independently. In both fields, a clearly social view of language and literacy has emerged. In recent research on bilingualism, the day to day communicative routines and practices of individuals and local communities are now seen as a crucial means of constituting and sustaining social life. They are also seen as being shaped in significant ways by social and political forces (Gal 1988; Heller 1995). A social and ideological model of literacy is now gaining ground in literacy research (Street 1984, 1993, 1995; Barton 1994a; Baynham 1995). Much of the recent research on literacy has been ethnographic in nature. It has involved close observation, recording and description of language use in specific domains, along with in-depth interviews of participants. This research has begun to reveal the wealth and diversity of local literacy practices which co-exist in the context of urban life.
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Our project in Leicester was carried out with Gujarati-speaking women, men and children in twelve different households. They were first contacted by Arvind Bhatt, the Gujarati-speaking researcher, following up his network of community contacts. The aims and intended outcomes of the project were explained as fully as possible to the members of these households and they were asked if they were willing to participate. The people we worked with had different migration histories, different religious backgrounds and different cultural values. They included Hindus, Muslims and Christians. They also included people in different class positions, people involved in different networks of kinship or caste. There were households with young children, households with older children, households where women worked outside the home and households where women worked primarily at home. Our focus was on literacy practices in home and local community contexts. We wanted to build a picture of people’s literacy experiences and record the ways in which they drew on their languages and literacies in their contemporary lives in Leicester. In the first phase of the project, we carried out indepth, semi-structured interviews with individual household members. All the interviews in the wider project were conducted in Gujarati or English, depending on the preference of the person being interviewed. All the interviews were then transcribed and translated into English. In a later stage of the project, we went on to do follow up visits and ethnographic observation in five households: three Hindu and two Muslim. We focused on individuals in those households and observed them when they were reading, writing or talking about texts of different kinds, in different languages, in different domains of their lives. We also focused on particular literacy events, such as prayers at home, shared letter writing, a conversation about a guest list for a Hindu wedding, meetings at local community associations where minutes were being taken or Gujarati classes at a local Saturday school. We also collected literacy materials: different types of written and printed texts used by people in their homes. Still photography was used to capture details of the print environment in different domains. We also videorecorded selected literacy events to document the talk related to texts in those events. This chapter draws on observational data from two of these households. It also draws on four audio-recorded interviews: two carried out by Arvind Bhatt in the first phase of the project: one interview with Shobhanaben and one joint interview with Firouzaben and Yunusbhai, her husband; and two follow-up
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interviews that I conducted in English with each of the women.4 These interviews were guided by questions that arose after my reading of the transcripts of the first interviews with them. I had already met both women on a number of occasions beforehand and in different places, and I had written to them to ask if they would be willing to be interviewed again. Once the second interviews had been transcribed, I began to put together the two narrative accounts below, checking back with both women during visits to Leicester, over the telephone and in letters exchanged with them.
Firouzaben Her early years in Malawi Firouzaben’s parents moved from Gujarat to Africa before she was born. They settled in a small town in Malawi and became part of the local Gujarati Muslim community. Firouzaben was their first child and she was brought up there. It was a close knit community: there were eighty families from Gujarat and many people had kinship ties. As Firouzaben recalls: “It was all more or less family…we were in and out of each other’s houses. We went to school, went to weddings, everything we did together. That’s how it was down there” (Second interview: 27). People spoke either Gujarati or Kacchi at home. Most people of her parents’ generation also spoke Urdu and some Chichewa, an African language. Most of them could read and write in Gujarati and in Urdu. Firouzaben’s parents did a lot of their leisure reading in both languages. Magazines and books were sent regularly from Gujarat. They also read religious texts in Urdu. From time to time, they also wrote letters in Gujarati to friends and family back in India. Firouzaben’s father could also read and write English. He ran a shop in the town and then later opened a petrol station. He needed to use both spoken and written English for his work. A lot of Firouzaben’s early childhood was spent at home with her mother and her younger sister. Her mother told them stories about the Islamic prophets. She actually told the stories in Gujarati though the books she drew on were written in Urdu. The story telling was a regular event in Firouzaben’s early childhood, before her two brothers were born. She and her sister sat with their mother around the table after supper. She still regrets that her mother never
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taught her to read and write in Gujarati. She first learned to read and write in English. When she was five, she went to an English medium school. She attended this school every day from nine until twelve in the morning. Then, from one until four in the afternoon, she went to the madressa, or religious school, run by the local Gujarati Muslim community. There, she learned to read Urdu and to recite in Arabic from the Qur’an and from other religious texts. As she grew up, Firouzaben gradually became aware of the gendered nature of the cultural practices in her local community. Women and girls were confined to the home and only went out in chauffeur-driven cars. Firouzaben also learned that girls were expected to focus on acquiring good housekeeping skills. Reading was not encouraged. In her words, “it was better to be seen shelling peas than reading” (Second interview: 170). So she read privately in her room. Even then, she recalls her father saying to her: “Putting your head in books…won’t have any benefit. Learn to sew instead” (First interview: 877). When she was older, Firouzaben also learned that providing assistance with childrearing was a key role within the household for girls. As the eldest daughter, she helped her mother by looking after her two younger brothers: she told them stories in Gujarati. She also helped them with their homework, as her mother had done with her and with her sister and shared with them their first experiences with reading and writing in English at school. As she came to the end of her primary schooling, Firouzaben battled against the prevailing view that girls should begin to orientate themselves to a domestic role once they had completed their primary schooling. She wanted to go on to secondary school, but this was unusual for girls in her community and her insistence led her into many confrontations with her father. However, Firouzaben eventually managed to persuade him that it would be alright if she attended the local convent, because it was an all girls school. So, she went on to do seven more years of English-medium education. She was the only Asian girl in the school. All the other students were African. As Firouzaben grew older, reading in English became a real source of pleasure and an important outlet for her. There were few other forms of entertainment and, apart from the school library, there were few books available. Whenever Firouzaben had the chance to accompany her father on his trips to the capital to get supplies for his shop, she would try to get to a bookshop. She, her sister and her cousins would all buy books in turn, and they would pass them round when they had finished with them. None of them
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had much money to spend on books. Firouzaben particularly enjoyed reading romantic fiction. She left school at the age of eighteen and was keen to look for work outside of the home. Her father recognised the benefits accruing from her secondary education: she was now very proficient at reading and writing in English. So, he asked her to be his assistant and help out with his business. From then on, Firouzaben acted as his interpreter, filled in forms related to the business and wrote letters. She also assisted her father with the accounts: she did the ledgers, journals and cashbook and he checked the final accounts. Her father allowed her to drive the car so she could go off alone and do work for the business. This gave her an independence which few other young women in the community enjoyed. The move to Leicester The Africanisation policies of the mid to late 1970’s made it hard for communities of South Asian origin to go on living in Southern and Eastern Africa as they had before. When Firouzaben was in her early twenties, Firouzaben’s family took the decision to move to Britain and they chose to settle in Leicester, because many others from the same community in Malawi had moved to Leicester. In building her new life in Britain, Firouzaben was able to draw on the range of experience that she had had with English literacies at school and in the workplace in Malawi. After the move to Leicester, she began to construct new identities for herself: in the work place, within the local Gujarati-speaking community and, through her marriage, in her new home. At work Firouzaben started out as a trainee office worker through a Youth Training Scheme based in a local company. She was then recruited by the company on a full-time basis and stayed with them for 9 years, ending up as Stores and Transport manager. Once she was established in this post, she was able to help her parents to buy a house. The mortgage was obtained on the strength of her job. Firouzaben then got an administrative post at a local community college. When she took up this post, she began to use a wider range of literacies and technologies in her daily work routines. She continued to develop confidence with the use of a computer for word-processing and for accessing or building
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data-bases. She gradually took on responsibility for computerised college records and accounts and now deputises for the Registrar. Her work at the college also allowed her to combine administrative work with outreach projects, building on her interest in community affairs. Within the local community: assisting with literacies in English Within the local Gujarati Muslim community, Firouzaben now has a number of public roles. She acts as a letter writer, writing letters in English, and she does word processing in English for local community groups. In addition, she still helps her parents deal with all official correspondence, form-filling and so on in English. However, when she needs to write something in Gujarati or Urdu, she turns to her husband, to a Gujarati colleague at work or to a friend who works with the Translation Unit at the County Council. Within the local community: coordinating a women’s group Firouzaben took a major personal initiative once she had settled into life in Leicester. She co-founded a Gujarati women’s group with two friends. The social and cultural activities of the group are funded by the City Council. Firouzaben is the Chairperson of the group and does a good deal of the paperwork and accounts. Her workplace experience here in Britain has given her confidence to undertake outreach work of this kind and a familiarity with the literacies necessary for coordinating community-based ventures. Sometimes, the work includes quite specialised literacies such as producing and distributing circulars and designing posters using a word-processor. Once she arranged for an announcement about the group to be made on the local radio station. To do this, she had to get a bilingual version of the announcement written up for the station. Firouzaben plans and coordinates activities for the group and keeps members informed about upcoming events. She also hires and drives a minibus for days out. The activities range from trips to the theatre to games of badminton. She has succeeded in drawing Hindu and Muslim women together in the group. Her main aim is to get women out of the home and enable them to enjoy themselves. She is concerned about extending opportunities for Gujarati women and improving the quality of their lives. One of the group’s most recent accomplishments was putting together a contribution to a large wall-hanging produced as part of a community outreach project organised through the local Museum Service. The aims of the project were to explore cultural diversity in Leicester through the development of
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museum collections and to make an artistic and visual statement. Over a period of three months, groups and individuals took part in study days at the museum where they looked at objects and textiles from different cultures. They also attended workshops on a range of ways of working with textiles, from machine embroidery and screen printing to silk painting, batik and appliqué work. Different local groups then worked on and contributed different sections. The completed wall hanging now hangs in the foyer of the Leicester Art Museum. As part of her outreach work for the college, Firouzaben coordinated all the contributions that were made to this mural, including the one for her group of Gujarati-speaking women. This involved an intense period of planning and official correspondence. She also learned how to sew and to do screen printing as part of this collective effort. She has now taken up sewing for pleasure and has started making some of her own clothes. At home Firouzaben continues to enjoy reading. It is one of her favourite pastimes. She prefers this to watching television. She is still an avid reader of romantic fiction, just as she was when she lived in Malawi. She and her sister still share books with each other. Their leisure reading is all in English. Firouzaben also reads magazines and does crosswords. Firouzaben married quite late compared to other women in her community. Yunusbhai, her husband, is a Gujarati Muslim from Gujarat, an educated man, who now works as an accountant. He reads and writes Gujarati and Urdu with more ease and fluency than Firouzaben because he received all of his education in Gujarat. They do not have any children. In their household, there is a clear division of labour in terms of who writes what. Firouzaben does most of the writing in English and her husband writes everything that needs to be written in Gujarati or Urdu. Firouzaben takes the lead in structuring the dayto-day cycles of household life and employs different literacies to do this: she keeps shopping lists, she jots down notes about things that she and Yunusbhai need to remember in what she calls “her little book” (Second interview: 421) and she uses a word processor to deal with official correspondence. Firouzaben and her husband are both devout Muslims. They pray at home together and they are both active members of their local Gujarati Muslim association. Firouzaben says that, of late, she has found that she has been reading more about Islam and she has been doing this reading in English. She wants to understand more about the principles behind the daily practice of
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Islam. Having texts available in English allows her to do this. The experience of moving to Leicester has opened up new opportunities for Firouzaben and she has taken them up in enterprising and resourceful ways. She has taken on a job at the local community college which has enabled her to be relatively independent of her family while at the same time providing them with material support. She has also constructed a new identity for herself as founder/coordinator of a Gujarati women’s group. In both of these new capacities and in other types of community-based work, she combines her fluency in spoken Gujarati with an ever-extending repertoire of literacies in English. In the Leicester context, she is redefining for herself what it means to be a Gujarati Muslim woman. This has not entailed an abandonment of the cultural values or the literacies of her community or a rejection of all gendered practices, but rather a recasting of them in a unique mould.
Shobhanaben Her early years in Gujarat Shobhanaben spent the first few years of her life in a village in Gujarat. When she was old enough to go to school, her parents arranged for her to go and live with her grandmother because they were eager for her to have an education. There was no school in their village and neither of her parents could read or write. Shobhanaben’s grandmother could not read or write either but an aunt who lived in the same village as her grandmother had received several years of primary education and was literate in both Gujarati and Hindi. At the school in her grandmother’s village, Shobhanaben learned to read and write in Gujarati, then later, at the same school, she learned Hindi, the national language, and learned to write it in the Devnagari script. She also learned some Sanskrit. The school that Shobhanaben attended in her early years was an all girls school. She was greatly encouraged in her studies by the head teacher, who became a close friend. Shobhanaben often visited her at home in the evening and as Shobhanaben grew older, this teacher would ask her to help out with administrative work for the school. This work mostly involved writing in Gujarati and Hindi. Beyond the school context, Shobhanaben’s literacy activities were closely associated with religious observance. Every evening, after supper, people in
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their part of the village (the fariu) would gather for sandhya ‘evening worship and thanksgiving’. There were readings in Gujarati and Hindi from the Indian epics and Hindu scriptures, from the Gita, Mahabharat and Ramayan. The readings blended in with the singing of arti ‘hymns’ and bhajans ‘religious songs and chants’. Shobhanaben’s aunt was one of the people in their fariu who was literate, so she would lead the readings from the holy books. Shobhanaben began to learn some of the bhajans by heart and, with her aunt’s guidance, she learned the highly specialised literacies associated with the sandhya. The readings and singing at these gatherings had a strong appeal for Shobhanaben. It was sometimes accompanied by bells and tambourines. Shobhanaben particularly remembers the rhythmic nature of the readings. She describes it in these words: “Our reading is more like singing. The reading is in a rhythm as well, you know, when we read the slokas, it’s…not like ordinary books” (Second interview: 94). As a child, Shobhanaben showed considerable talent for performing religious songs and in doing readings from religious texts. Her accomplishments gradually came to be noticed at school. The Hindu festivals were celebrated at the school and children were given prizes for their performances at these events. From an early age, Shobhanaben began to receive prizes for her performances. The prizes were usually small decorated boxes called bakuda (First interview: 94). Her grandmother was so proud of these achievements that she hung Shobhanaben’s prizes on the wall in her house. When Shobhanaben grew older she began composing songs herself. These included children’s songs, folksongs, patriotic songs, raas garba and ghazals. Her grandmother encouraged her as long as the songs were religious in nature. However, Shobhanaben’s grandmother strongly discouraged her from taking up music lessons because she believed that a musical career was not ‘proper’ for girls. Shobhanaben remembers her grandmother saying: “If you do singing and dancing and things then you won’t get a good husband…if people do things like that, they are not up to standard” (Second interview: 236). Shobhanaben learned early on in her life that they were constraints on what girls in her family could do and on what they could wear. For example, Shobhanaben’s grandmother felt that saris were suitable but not skirts (although other girls from the village wore them). Shobhanaben also had to keep her head covered when she went outside of the house. She was also expected to be back home before nightfall. Shobhanaben remembers her grandmother
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being very angry with her on one particular occasion because she visited her teacher’s house and stayed away from home after dark. It was still unusual for girls in the rural areas of Gujarat to go on to secondary school, but, after consultation with the village elders, Shobhanaben’s family decided that she should have this opportunity. Her grandmother was at first concerned about the effect that secondary schooling might have on her grandaughter’s marriage chances. Eighteen was the age at which most girls were married. However, her grandmother also knew that secondary schooling could lead to teacher training and this was seen as a suitable pursuit for a young woman. So, from the age of twelve to sixteen, Shobhanaben attended a private secondary school in the nearest town, about a hundred miles away. She left her grandmother’s house and went to live in a hostel. Her years at secondary school were of crucial importance for her later life in England, because it was during this period that she had access to English. It was taught as a foreign language in a school where the medium of instruction was Gujarati. During this time, she also had exposure to different ways of reading and writing in Hindi. She also took extra Hindi classes outside school and sat for external examinations. For religious purposes, she also studied Sanskrit in much more depth than she had done before. When Shobhanaben was sixteen, she went to a teacher training college in the same town as her secondary school. The decision was made for her. Her family felt that this was a better option than going to university. Doing a university degree would have meant up to four years of study. So, by the age of eighteen, Shobhanaben had already gained a formal qualification as a primary school teacher. Her own personal ambition had been to become a doctor specialising in Ayurvedic medecine. This was what her room-mate at college was planning to do. But, a different path had been planned for her. When she returned to her grandmother’s village as a young woman, she took on several new identities. She became a teacher in the school where she had received her own primary education. Initially, she filled in for another teacher who was on maternity leave. In this new job, she drew on the Gujarati and Hindi literacies she had acquired at school and at teacher training college. In the evenings, after school, she took on the same role at the prayer gatherings, reading from the Hindu epics, singing religious songs and now, increasingly, composing songs in Gujarati and Hindi.
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During this period of her life, Shobhanaben also began to help people in the village with letter writing and translation. Several people had relatives who had gone to Britain to live and work. Because she had learned to read and write in English in secondary school, Shobhanaben was asked to translate letters written in English. She was also asked to write letters in English and in Gujarati for those who could not write themselves. There was little entertainment in the village but there was a library. This was based in the primary school but was open to adults as well as children. Reading in Gujarati became an important outlet for Shobhanaben at this time. She read avidly. One of her favourite pastimes was to lie on a charpoi ‘low bed’ outside her grandmother’s place on cool evenings reading a book. Shobhanaben had not been back in the village very long when her grandmother was approached by a village elder about the possibility of an arranged marriage. Rakeshbhai, the man who was to become her husband, was a Gujarati speaker of East African origin, who had family ties with the village. He had already settled in Britain and had a job in Leicester. He was travelling with his mother in Gujarat when the contact with the village elder was made. Rakeshbhai and his mother came to visit Shobhanaben and her grandmother to discuss the possibility of a marriage. Shobhanaben liked Rakeshbhai and so did her grandmother. The wedding took place while he was still in India but then he had to return to his job, just five days after they were married. They corresponded with each other in Gujarati while they were apart. This turned out to be three months in all. The move to Leicester Once all the arrangements for her move to Britain had been made, Shobhanaben joined her husband in Leicester. There she gradually took on new identities: first, as a wife and mother, then later, as a teacher in a school in Leicester, as the headteacher of a Saturday school organised for Gujarati children and, in her leisure time, as a song writer and performer. In her new home Shobhanaben and Rakeshbhai gradually worked out an informal division of labour with regard to literacy at home. This was partly determined by their language capabilities and partly by their changing patterns of work outside the home. Now, Shobhanaben writes all the letters in Gujarati, including those to
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her family in Gujarat, while her husband deals with everything that is in English: bills, forms and so on. When their two sons were born, Shobhanaben and Rakeshbhai decided that they should be brought up to be bilingual and biliterate. While the boys were young, Shobhanaben spent a great deal of time with her children reading to them in Gujarati and teaching them to write the language. She also shared with them her enthusiasm for writing and performing songs in Gujarati and Hindi. She now writes and performs regularly with her youngest son and they have made a number of recordings together. Moving into the world of work As the children grew older, Shobhanaben began to work outside of the home. She began working in local primary schools as a Bilingual Instructor. Her teaching qualifications from India were not recognised in Britain so she did further study at the University of Leicester to obtain Qualified Teacher Status. She also got a GCSE qualification in Mathematics. And, at the same time, she studied for the Royal Society of Arts Certificate in Community Language Teaching. She now works full-time in a local primary school. In her current professional life, she has taken on a range of new literacies in English: dealing with National Curriculum documents, writing up lesson plans and doing individual student reports. Shobhanaben has also taken on new literacies in Gujarati and Hindi in school: for example, she translates letters to parents from the school, she fills in forms for parents who come in to the school and prepares bilingual notices and displays. She does all the translation work by hand. She has also taken on a number of extra projects. For example, she recently organised a bilingual book fair at the school. In the community context: running a Saturday school In addition to her professional commitments within the mainstream school system, Shobhanaben has also taken on the post of headteacher in a Gujarati Saturday school. In this capacity, she is building on her extensive knowledge of school literacy practices in Gujarat. The school has nearly 200 pupils and eight teachers. All but two are female. It was founded by the members of a Hindu association in Leicester. The aims of the school are to provide support for Gujarati children whose parents want them to learn to read and write Gujarati and to support their learning in a context where there is an emphasis on South Asian culture and on religion. Shobhanaben teaches at the school as
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well as acting as headteacher. She has also produced Gujarati teaching materials and bilingual resources for use in community classes and in mainstream schools. Two booklets and audio-cassettes have been produced commercially and are distributed throughout the United Kingdom. In the community context: acting as interpreter and translator Besides her work as an educator, Shobhanaben contributes in other ways to life in her community in Leicester. One of the roles that she has taken on is helping people to read and write letters in Gujarati. Most of the letters she translates are for members of her extended family. She also does translations of official documents for a friend who is a health visitor, working from English to Gujarati. This role of letter writer and translator is one that has become familiar to her. It is a role she first took on in her grandmother’s village in Gujarat when she returned from college. It has now been extended to the British context. In the community context: composing and performing songs Shobhanaben also writes and performs songs in Gujarati and Hindi. She is booked about once a week, for pre-wedding celebrations, stage shows, birthdays, Diwali, Navratri and New Year’s Eve celebrations. She sings in Gujarati and Hindi with her son. Sometimes they sing unaccompanied and sometimes they are accompanied by a band. She abandons the Western clothes she wears to work and puts on a sari, a Panjabi suit or a lenga. Composing and performing songs is Shobhanaben’s main creative activity, one that gives her a great deal of personal satisfaction. She says: “I only do it for myself” (Second interview: 316). She writes the songs at home and often thinks of new songs at quiet moments of the day such as when she is lying on her bed resting. When she is writing her own songs, she draws on the musical idioms that she is familiar with from her youth and blends these with new cultural forms being fashioned here in Britain (Edwards and Katbamna 1988). Shobhanaben experiments with a range of musical styles. She sometimes performs with the lead singer of the band. Their singing is a blend of Hindi and Urdu. She has also done live performances on a local radio station serving the South Asian communities in Leicester. Through her singing and her writing of new songs here in Britain, Shobhanaben is actively engaged in creating new cultural forms and in refashioning cultural practices she first encountered in her life in Gujarat. Her knowledge of Gujarati and Hindi and of the specialised
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literacy practices associated with the composition of folksongs and devotional music are vital resources in this transformative process.
Literacies in the lives of bilingual women I had two purposes in mind in writing this chapter: first, I wanted to add my contribution to the small collection of case studies of gender and multilingual literacy carried out in local communities in Britain and to help to make the language and literacy experiences of bilingual minority women more visible. Secondly, I wanted to draw attention to the importance of attending to multilingual literacy practices in ethnographic research related to gender and migration. I wanted to show that close analysis of the dynamics of change in language and literacy practices can lead to greater insights into women’s lived experiences and can extend and deepen ethnographic descriptions, since languages and literacies are crucial symbolic resources in the constitution of social life and in the production and negotiation of gender identities. Following Westwood and Bachu (1988), I have chosen to focus on enterprising women, to highlight the active ways in which women respond to the circumstances in which they find themselves as a consequence of migration, drawing on the language and literacy resources available to them, refashioning cultural practices and defining new identities specific to the urban context of settlement. At the same time, I acknowledge the need to take account of the wider social forces and the gender relations of inequality which shape many women’s life chances and which limit access to highly valued cultural resources and to dominant literacies. We now need to extend ethnographic work to encompass the lived experiences of a wider range of bilingual minority women, to achieve greater understanding of how languages and literacies enter their lives, how the experience of migration shapes the life chances of different women and how they draw on the communicative and cultural resources available to them in reconstituting their lives in specific urban settings. Acknowledgement The two women whose language and literacy experiences are described in this chapter have read and commented on earlier drafts. Writing with and for them has been an engaging and rewarding experience. I am also very grateful to my colleagues Arvind Bhatt and David Barton for the helpful comments they gave me on earlier drafts of this chapter. Finally, I
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would like to thank Sally Kedge for transcribing the interviews which were used as the starting point for this chapter.
Notes 1.
The first part of the title of this chapter echoes that of a book edited by Westwood and Bachu (1988). This intertextuality is intentional. I want to highlight the need for interdisciplinary resonances in research focusing on the experiences of minority women. By juxtaposing the phrase “enterprising women” with a different sub-title from that chosen by the above authors, I also want to draw attention to the importance of taking account of literacy practices and values in ethnographic studies of gender and identity.
2.
The ethnographic work was carried out by a group of researchers based at Lancaster University. The members of the team were: Arvind Bhatt (full-time research associate), David Barton, Marilyn Martin-Jones, Sally Kedge, Mukul Saxena and Kantilal Solanki. The project was entitled: “Multilingual Literacy Practices: Home, Community and School”. It was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council from May 1993 to February 1995 (Grant No: R000233833).
3.
Fictitious names have been used from here onwards to preserve confidentiality. An approximate English gloss for the Gujarati suffix -ben would be ‘sister’.
4.
The approximate English gloss for -bhai is ‘brother’.
CHAPTER 9
Writing switching in British Creole Mark Sebba
Introduction This chapter discusses written codeswitching in texts which use both Creole and English. Increasingly, an English-lexicon creole is being used in Britain as a written medium. Typically, writers produce texts which are not wholly in Standard English or wholly in Creole but in a mixture of the two. Sometimes there are clear-cut boundaries separating what is Standard English from what is Creole but often, codeswitching is pervasive and may occur several times even within one written sentence. This chapter addresses the problems of representation of the two codes, given that there is no widely known standard orthography with which to write any English-lexicon Caribbean creole. I will argue that an ‘ideological’ model of orthography can account for the fact that writers use the conventions of Standard English orthography to represent Creole, but modify them in such a way as to create a symbolic distance between the two varieties. This use of modified Standard English orthographic conventions to represent Creole also has the benefit that it allows for the representation of codeswitching in writing in a way which the adoption of a completely independent set of conventions would not.
The language of Caribbeans in Britain The first language of people of Caribbean descent born in Britain is typically the local British English variety spoken in the neighbourhood where they grow
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up. Many British-born Caribbeans, whether or not they have Jamaican ancestry, are also fluent in a locally-developed variety of Jamaican Creole (also known as Patois, although it is an English-lexicon creole) which has become a symbol of identity for Caribbeans in Britain; while some acquire this variety in infancy, it is common for it to be developed later, in early adolescence. Thus the typical spoken language behaviour of British-born Caribbeans from young adulthood onwards involves the use of a local British English variety on the one hand, a local British variety of Jamaican Creole on the other, and codeswitching between the two, according to context. (See Sebba 1993 for further details.) As regards written language, the situation is very different. The only written language supported across the curriculum in the English education system is Standard English. No provision is made for learning to write in any other variety of English or English-lexicon creole in schools; indeed, it is unlikely that a proposal to that effect would be entertained seriously in the current climate. Thus British-born Caribbeans, while bilingual or bidialectal1 in their spoken language among peers and family, are usually monolingual in Standard English when it comes to writing. This is easily explained, given that there is no ‘teachable’ standard variety of any English-lexicon Caribbean creole, and virtually no resource materials or textbooks for literacy teaching in creole languages even in the Caribbean.2 It would be wrong to think, however, that Creole3 is not a written medium. On the contrary, there is a growing body of writing in Creole both in the Caribbean and in Britain. This includes a variety of written genres, especially poetry (some of it originally recited against a musical background — “dub poetry”), plays and fictional dialogue. Some prose fiction is written partly in Creole; it is rare, however, for the Creole to extend beyond the dialogue to the author’s narrative. Other genres also use Creole occasionally, for example, there are humorous newspaper columns (including one in the Jamaican newspaper, the Gleaner) and one serious weekly newspaper column (by Carolyn Cooper, in the Jamaica Observer). In Britain, a number of poets who use Creole are so well known as to be almost household names.4 Most of these are performance poets, who give live or television performances and also distribute their work on records, tapes or compact discs. In addition, their lyrics are often published in printed form, on record album covers or in books, making these some of the main sources of written Creole. The most striking recent development in Britain has been the appearance in the mid-1990s of a genre of inner-city crime fiction, featuring
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Caribbean characters with characteristically Caribbean speech. These novels are widely available in paperback and it is clear that their readership is not confined to people with Caribbean connections. The written representation of Creole poses a number of interesting practical and theoretical problems.5 While as long ago as the 1950s Cassidy (1978) proposed a phonemic orthography suitable for Anglophone Caribbean creoles, this has never gained acceptance outside academic circles. It is probably true to say that the only non-academic use of this orthography has been by Carolyn Cooper in her weekly column in the Jamaica Observer for the last few years.6 This was begun as a deliberate attempt, by an academic, to introduce it to a wider public. The lack of a standard orthography means that virtually everything that is written in Creole, whether in Britain or the Caribbean, uses a modified Standard English orthography. Even so, there are no widely agreed norms. Writers are not necessarily sure how to spell what they want to write, while readers who do not already speak Creole may not always be sure what they are reading. Diverse spellings abound: for example, there are at least seven attested spellings for the Creole word /nɒtin/ “nothing”: notten, notin, nutting, nutin, nutten, not’n’, notin’. Yet surprising as it may seem to linguists, these difficulties have not prevented the use of Creole for a wide range of written genres, as described above.
Conversational codeswitching among British Caribbeans Codeswitching between British English and British Creole is pervasive among British-born Caribbeans in private conversation with others who share their repertoire. Often the Creole element in a conversation is a small proportion, but has a relatively high level of symbolic importance (Sebba 1993; Sebba and Wootton 1998). For some speakers, switching is very rapid and may take place several times within a single utterance. While most stretches of talk are clearly marked as either English or Creole, having all the expected phonological and grammatical features of the language concerned, some segments may have the phonology of one language and the grammar of the other. In extract (1) below, from a conversation between two girls aged about 17 in a London school, we can see examples of all these possibilities.7 In the transcription, typographical features are used to indicate which language variety a word appears to belong to, giving some sense of the
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complexity of the language interaction. Plain type indicates (London) English, i.e. London pronunciation in a sequence with no identifiably non-London (or non-Standard) features of grammar. Bold face type indicates (London) Jamaican Creole, i.e. Jamaican Creole pronunciation in a sequence with no identifiably non-Jamaican features of grammar. Italics indicate a ‘mixed’ element which contains features of both London English and London Jamaican, for example goes (line 5) is pronounced with a half-open rounded short back vowel /ɒ/ (Creole feature), but has the -s ending which signals London English rather than Creole grammar; ge% (line 5) lacks past tense inflection (Creole feature) but has glottal stop where RP has a final /t/ (London feature); say (line 19) lacks past tense marking (Creole feature) but has a diphthong (London feature) rather than the open vowel /ε/ (Creole feature). Underlining is used to mark words which occur at boundary points between clearly English and Creole sequences, where the word in question cannot easily be assigned to either language due to similarity between the languages. Also common, though not occurring in this extract, are vernacular discourse markers such as man, guy or yeah which have currency within the “multi-racial vernacular” of London (Hewitt 1986) but do not have symbolic status and cannot be assigned specifically to either Creole or English. (1) 1
B
5
A B A
10
B
A B 15 A B 20
A B
right well anyway I went down there (1.0) me bring my sister-dem a:ll me sister-dem come wid me y’know (0.9) come all the way down the (.) ah (.) [ party there [ party she goes to me abou% (i%) now when we ge% there (0.2) we walk pas’ the door (to) number fifty-nine — no lights! mhm: (0.4) righ%, (0.6) so (w’) walk up the top of the road: (0.2) couldn’t ‘ear no music at all so my sister-dem start cussin’ me like anything you know (.) ‘bout me bomboklaat [ an’ all dis [ n:hhhn business dere (0.2) well anyway (0.4) go back down dere, right (0.6) an’ we look (‘pon *) now we see (0.6) Jerry (‘bout dem) come tell us [ ‘bout um, aks us where de [ party de (0.6) right? [ m:: [ party is so we say well definitely we come up ‘ere cause Karen say it was ‘ere, right? yeah couldn’ fin’ not’in’ so (0.4) we wen% back down dere
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lookin’ at de gates (0.8) / we find a letter thereso f’ say ‘bout (0.2) party cancel m::
The large overlap of lexis (and some overlap of phonology and grammar) between London English and Jamaican Creole make analysis of conversational data like the above extract very complex. Especially perplexing to the analyst are the many words which hardly differ between English and Creole, even in pronunciation. Sometimes specifically British features, such as a glottal stop for /t/, signal ‘English’ rather than Creole, but where these do not occur, a word such as party could equally well belong to either language. Even this is not a foolproof guide, as the example of ge% in line 5 shows. Where ‘overlapping’ words occur between clear stretches of English and Creole, it is particularly difficult to assign them to either language. In fact, it may be that codeswitching speakers actually trade on the indeterminacy of these words, and use them to effect a smooth transition between languages, as discussed by Clyne for bilingual Dutch/English and German/English speakers (1987: 755).
Representing Creole in writing As mentioned above, most writers using Creole, whether in Britain or elsewhere, are not familiar with the phonemic orthography developed by Cassidy, which is used mainly by linguists. Written representations of Creole usually use a modified (or ‘respelt’) form of the Standard orthography.8 So far, however, there are no agreed norms for such respellings: each writer more or less makes up his or her own, with a resulting high degree of variability. Among words which present particular spelling problems for Creole writers, we can identify the following: (2)
a. b.
c.
Words with no Standard English cognate or source, e.g. /unu/ “you-plural”, with variant spellings unuh, oonoo, unnu, unna, unu, ouno; Words with an (apparent) English source but distinct grammatical function in Creole, e.g. the locative marker /de/ (possibly connected with English there) with variant spellings deh, dey; Words with Standard English cognate/sources but different from British English in phonological structure, for example /kyaan/ “can’t”, with variant spellings cyan, cyaan, cyaant, caan, kean, kaan.
In terms of a model of dialect accommodation developed by Trudgill (1986), certain features of the accent of dialects other than the speaker’s own are more
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noticeable or salient than others, and it is to these that an individual learning a new dialect will adjust first. Of the factors which make a feature salient, the most important (Trudgill 1986: 37) are surface phonemic contrast and the degree of phonetic difference, in that order. In other words, for someone learning a new accent, the most salient features will be those involving a phonemic contrast — points where the sound systems of two varieties, rather than just the sounds themselves, are different. Of lesser importance will be points of pronunciation where the systems themselves are not different, but the sounds representing a particular phoneme are substantially different. If we take Trudgill’s model to represent more generally speakers’ level of awareness of differences between their own phonological system and that of a language which they perceive as related in some way — for example, a variety of British English and Creole — then we would expect writers’ orthographic practices to reflect a similar hierarchy of salience. We would expect to find writers drawing attention to ‘surface phonemic contrasts’ in their respelling of Standard English words. This is in fact the category of words in (2c) above, and there are plenty of examples to show that writers do, in fact, respell words in this category to show that they are different from British English in phonological structure.9 But what of the many words of Creole which are identical with words of British English except for (at most) small pronunciation differences? These differences are of an order comparable to the different pronunciations of a Standard English word in different parts of England, for example the vowel sound of grey as pronounced in the accent of Manchester (/ε:/) as opposed to London (/a/) (Allerton 1982: 61). In Trudgill’s model, these differences are less salient to speakers than those involving a difference in phonological structure. Frequently, such differences are not signalled at all in orthography, unless they had greater salience (e.g. represented phonemic contrasts) at an earlier stage in the history of the language in question.10 For this reason, it is especially striking that exactly these kinds of differences are sometimes signalled by writers using Creole. Words which show very small phonetic differences from British English may, nevertheless, have these differences flagged by orthographic devices, for example: enough/tough you do
‘nuff, enuff, tuff yuh, yu, y’u du, dhu, duh
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Furthermore, there are a number of recorded instances of orthographic used where Standard English orthography has and where there is probably no pronunciation difference at all, for example kool, Jamaka, kum.11 In Sebba (1998), I argue for an ‘ideological’ model of orthographic practice12 which accounts for such spellings in terms of their value as symbols of difference (abstand in the terminology of Kloss 1967) between the Creole and Standard English. In the interests of establishing Creole as different from English, writers focus on small, possibly stereotypical phonetic differences, which could arguably be ignored, and actively look for ‘alternatives’ like for which will signal Creole’s autonomy from the English orthographic system. The motivation is primarily ‘ideological’ rather than ‘phonological’ because the phonetic differences being represented are so small.
Writing switching Extracts (3) and (4) show some typical ways in which writers represent codeswitching in narrative (bold type added to indicate words with Creole features). (3)
‘I t’ink I’ll stay for a while.’ D. leant back on the sofa, grinning confidently. He stretched himself, then looking straight at Donna, ‘I need you to help me. Me deh pon some serious business.’ [Victor Headley 1992, Yardie (novel)]
(4)
“Shit…,” he lost count. “Whe’ me deh? I can’t concentrate on this with them girls watching,” he muttered, shifting his beefy frame uneasily in his seat. Like most of his friends, he spoke in a mixture of Jamaican dialect and English, with a strong Manchester accent. [Karline Smith 1995, Moss Side Massive (novel)]
In the above examples, the third person narrative is all in Standard English, with first person direct speech showing codeswitching between Creole and English. The authors use respellings of Standard English words to indicate Creole forms. Although the sort of switching which is represented here is characteristic of many British Caribbean speakers, it is possible that the authors concerned have ‘made’ their characters switch to English after a fairly short stretch of Creole in order not to tire or confuse their non-Creole-using readers. More interesting for us, though much less common, are texts which involve codeswitching in the narrative rather than in reported speech. Extract
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(5) is from a rare example of a piece of first-person narrative prose — written by a Sixth Form student in a London school — where the narrative as well as the dialogue is written partly in Creole. Bold type is used here to indicate where ‘Creoleness’ has been explicitly signalled in the individual words of the passage, whether in grammar, lexis or spelling. (The original version was typed on a wax stencil, without any use of bold or underlining.) It can be seen that some sentences have a high proportion of words in bold, and can be taken to be mainly Creole, while others do not, and can be taken to be either Standard or London English (the only London features which are explicitly marked are the double negatives and the use of come (StE came) as a past tense (sentence 23) — features which are in fact shared with Creole.) Some sentences appear to involve a switch of code in the middle (for example, sentence 24, where the narrator’s I sey contrasts with the policeman’s he said.) (5) Bull, Babylon, The Wicked13 (anonymous) 1.
5. 6.
One manin in January me and my spars dem was coming from a club in Dalston. We didn’t have no donsi so we a walk go home. De night did cold and di gal dem wi did have wid we couldn’t walk fast. Anyway we must have been walking for about fifteen minutes when dis car pull up, it was this youthman ah know and him woman. We see sey a mini cab him inna. Him sey “How far you ah go”?
7.
Me sey “Not far, you ketch we too late man”.
2. 3. 4.
8.
Anyway before me could close me mout de two gal dem jump inna de car, bout dem say dem nah walk no more. 9. Me an Trevor tell dem fi gwan. 10. An de car pull away.
11. Next ting me know me is about 50 yards from my yard and is the wicked dem just a come down inna dem can. 12. At first me wanted fi run, but Trevor sey “run what” “After we no just kool”. 13. We don’t have no weed or money pon us. 14. Dem can’t do notin. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.
Next ting we know dem grab we anna push we into dem car. Me and Trevor put up a struggle but after a few licks we got pushed in. “Now then you two “Rastas” been ripping off mini cabs haven’t you?” “We aren’t “Rastas” and we don’t know what you are talking about.” “Save all that until we get to the station Rastus my son.”
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20. Den him get pon him radio, and tell the station that him ketch the two responsible for that hold up of the mini cab. 21. Trevor luk pon me I could see that he was worried. Key: bold = Creole feature(s) underline = London feature(s)
Several things are striking about this piece of writing. Firstly, it offers a very close written parallel to the kind of codeswitching found in the speech of Caribbean Londoners of the same generation, as in extract (1) above. Secondly, the writer has very effectively mixed and signalled the two codes (Creole and Standard/London English) both in his first-person narrative and in the reported dialogue. Non-standard spellings are used, though in fact there are not all that many of them (, for Standard
is the most consistent). Yet, at the same time as non-standard spellings and Creole morphology and lexis are being used to signal Creole as different from Standard English, the very ambiguity of the conventional spellings — potentially representing Standard English with a London accent on the one hand, or Creole on the other — is used to create ‘seamless joins’ between the two codes, as in speech. The result is a piece of writing which well portrays its writer’s ability in speech to ‘slide’ from Creole to Standard and back again. Stretches of language which are not specifically marked as Creole by grammar or orthography can be ‘nuanced’ by pronunciation if read aloud, to be either Creole or English, for example line 6, him sey “How far you ah go”? could be [m sε ɔυ fɑ: j a gɒ] (Creole throughout) or [m sε ʔæυ fɑ: j a gɒ] (Creole except for the London pronunciation of how far). Either of these would be possible in speech, as should be clear from examples like extract (1). Thus while the adapted Standard English orthography does not convey precisely the intended code of each word, it is good for portraying the ease with which speakers can move between them in speech, both in pronunciation and in grammar.
The relevance of codeswitching to orthographic choice Most of the linguists who have discussed the orthography of English-lexicon creole have come out strongly in favour of a phonemic orthography.14 However, very few writers who use Creole have shown any interest in using a phonemic orthography up to now. There are some obvious reasons why this might be so: a lack of familiarity with alternatives to the Standard-English
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based orthography, absence of support for such an orthography in the education system, both in the Caribbean and in Britain, and (perhaps very important for writers who publish their works), the desire not to lose their readership among the wider world of readers of English. The text in extract (5) points to another reason why writers may prefer to stick with respelling broadly in keeping with the Standard English conventions. Much of the writer’s ability to slide between English and Creole is dependent on the Creole and Standard codes sharing most of their orthographic conventions. Using strictly different sets of conventions for English and Creole produces a ‘polarisation’ of codes which requires that switches should be much more explicit. For an illustration of this, let us consider the extracts (6), from the dub poem Sonny’s Lettah (originally a dub backed by music, recorded on the 1979 Forces of Victory album) by Linton Kwesi Johnson. In (6a), we have the printed version which appears in the book of collected poems, Inglan is a Bitch (1980).15 In (6b), I give a ‘phonemic’ version which represents my own attempt to use the Cassidy phonemic transcription: (6)
a.
(the printed version) Dear Mama, Good Day. I hope dat wen deze few lines reach y’u, they may find y’u in di bes’ af helt. Mama, I really doan know how fi tell y’u dis, cause I did mek a salim pramis fi tek care a lickle Jim an’ try mi bes’ fi look out fi him.
b.
(using phonemic orthography of Cassidy and Le Page 1967): Dier Mama, Gud die. A huop dat wen diiz fyuu lainz riich yu, dee mee faind yu in di bes av helt. Mama, A rieli duon nuo hou fi tel yu dis, kaaz a did mek a salem pramis, fi tek kier a likl Jim, an trai mi bes fi luk out fi him.
Converting (6a) to a phonemic orthography presents serious difficulties. The main problem is that the first four lines are essentially a polite opening formula in Standard English, while most of the rest of the poem is in something much closer to basilectal (“deep”) Creole. In the printed version (6a), this is shown
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by the fact that in the first four lines the only signals of “difference” from Standard English are orthographic (wen, deze, bes’ etc.), suggesting more or less Standard English grammar with some Creole features of pronunciation. The next four lines are much more strongly marked as Creole, for example, with grammatical markers like fi (basilectal equivalent of infinitive marker to and preposition for), Creole past tense marker did and basilectal pronunciation /likl/ for little. The first four lines fit very uncomfortably in the phonemic orthography of Cassidy, which is framed for the phonology of basilectal Creole and not English. Words like diiz, fyuu, dee and mee are now cast (in my version at any rate) as ‘foreign’ words spelt according to the Creole conventions. The remainder of the poem, being much more strongly Creole, is better suited to the Cassidy orthography. One possible solution to this problem of representation is the one which writers have already adopted, namely to use Standard English spelling with modifications as appropriate to signal Creole words and pronunciations where these seem important. Codeswitching is apparent through modifications to spelling as well as lexis and differences of grammar, but there are many words with standard spelling which could belong to either code. Another possibility would be to use two distinct orthographies to represent the different codes of the poem. The first four lines would use Standard English orthography and the remainder, Creole orthography (for example, Cassidy’s). This would have the effect of making an explicit distinction between what is Creole and what is English, and recognising both as languages in their own right. (6c) below is my attempt at such a “hybrid version”: (6)
c.
Hybrid version: Dear Mama, Good Day. I hope that when these few lines reach you, they may find you in the best of health. Mama, A rieli duon nuo hou fi tel yu dis, kaaz a did mek a salem pramis, fi tek kier a likl Jim, an trai mi bes fi luk out fi him.
A relatively compartmentalised text like Sonny’s Lettah is amenable to this type of treatment, but a piece of writing like Bull, Babylon, the Wicked, where the codes are mixed throughout, is not. Even in a text like Sonny’s Lettah,
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using distinct sets of orthographic conventions makes the boundaries between codes appear clear-cut in a way that they are not in practice. This is not too serious in a text where whole lines, paragraphs or verses are mainly in one code. Where there is a mixture of codes in the same line, there are problems both for the reader and the writer. Where a word potentially belongs to the lexicon of either code, the writer usually has to opt for one or the other because the orthographic conventions are different. This does away with the flexibility which gave (5) much of its realistic feel. It is also arguably much more confusing for the reader, who has to keep switching between ‘readings’ by using a knowledge of which letter combinations are possible in each orthographic tradition, and other contextual clues. Extract (7) is a re-writing of (5), with Creole stretches spelt in the Cassidy orthography. Some choices have had to be made about which code is the correct one for certain words which were indeterminate in the original: (7) 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
Wan maanin in January me and my spaaz dem was coming from a club in Dalston. We didn’t have no donsi so wi a waak go huom. Di nait did kuol an di gal dem wi did hav wid wi couldn’t walk fast. Anyway we must have been walking for about fifteen minutes when dis kyaar pulop, it was this youtman a nuo an im wuman. Wi sii se a mini cab im ina. Im se “How far yu a go”? [or: Im se “Hou faa yu a go”?]
Here there is both potential confusion for the reader (Is the first word of line 1 to be read as Standard English wan ‘pale’ or as Creole wan ‘one’?) and a problem for the writer, who must allocate every word to either Creole or Standard English, apart from a very small number of identically spelt words like so. It is reasonable to ask whether a text like (7) would represent the actual experience of British Creole speakers and writers. Rather, it seems to impose a false division into distinct (and distinctly spelt) codes on the basis of a linguist’s notion of how it should be done. This brings us, at last, to a question of language planning and standardisation. It is quite possible in theory to set up a standard variety of Creole, complete with its own phonemic spelling. But since much of the existing writing in Creole trades on the absence of clearly defined boundaries between Standard English and Creole, the outcome of an insistence on autonomous conventions for Creole may actually be less, rather than more, Creole writing,
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unless other measures are put in place at the same time to encourage writers to use Creole as a written medium.
Déjà vu: writing switching in medieval England Writing switching has a surprisingly long history in England. Texts from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when the Anglo-Norman elite were bilingual but knowledge of French was in decline, show a remarkable potential for mixing the two languages. For example, (8) is an extract from a letter written in 1403 to Henry IV, King of England by his lieutenant Richard Kingston, Dean of Windsor. (8)
Tresexcellent, trespuissant, et tresredoute Seignour, autrement say a present nieez. Jeo prie a la benoit triniteque vous ottroie bone vie ove tresentier sauntee a treslonge durre, and sende yowe sone to ows in help and prosperitee; for in god fey, I hope to almighty god that, yef ye come youre owne persone, ye schulle haue the victorie of alle youre enemyes. And for salvation of youre schire and marches al aboute, treste ye nought to no leutenaunt. Escript a Hereford, en tresgraunte haste, a trois de la clocke apres noone, le tierce jour de Septembre. (Royal and Historical Letters during the reign of Henry IV, I, pp. 155–159.)
Key: Bold face indicates Middle English stretches, plain type indicates AngloNorman (French).
As in the case of Creole and English, we have two languages with a large amount of overlapping vocabulary — although for a different reason: at this stage of development of English, borrowing of words from French was already pervasive. While grammatically the languages remained relatively far apart, there was a great deal of lexical overlap. In the light of these facts it is interesting to note that the orthographic conventions of Norman French and Middle English, which might be expected to be very different, also have a lot in common. Anglo-Norman began to be written in England before continental French orthography was stabilised, by scribes familiar with the West Saxon (English) scribal orthographic tradition. Thus, as described by Scragg (1974: 48): Throughout the three centuries of its existence, Anglo-Norman orthography remained very irregular, and many of the Old English conventions survived in it, alongside French ones. Consequently some of the graphemes which be-
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came popular in chancery English in the fifteenth century were English in origin, though they reached what was to become the standard spelling system via Anglo-Norman rather than direct descent from Old English.
Thus, rather than keeping the Anglo-Norman parts of the text separate from the English parts, this orthographic tradition worked in favour of ‘blending’ them. As in the case of the modern Creole/English switching, the use of largely common orthographic conventions emphasises the indeterminacy of the language of many of the words in the text.16 The endpoint of this process was Modern English, with its heavy complement of French vocabulary but with a grammar showing relatively small signs of French influence.
Conclusion The study of orthographic practices used in representing codeswitching in writing has unexpectedly led to some conclusions about language standardisation and planning. While having a completely independent (possibly phonemic) set of orthographic conventions for Creole may best serve the purposes of standardising Creole as an autonomous language, the kinds of texts which Creole writers in Britain are actually producing at the moment may be best served by just the kind of orthography which the writers themselves have already developed. This orthography uses the conventions of Standard English but modifies and ‘subverts’ them to provide ways of signalling that certain parts of the text are Creole, others are English, and yet others are indeterminate. In a linguistic context where there is a high degree of variability (such as is characteristic of most or all of the English-lexicon creoles in the Caribbean) and/or codeswitching (as in the case of Creole spoken in Britain) orthographic models designed for less variable situations may not be suitable. For one such situation, that of the Creole of Trinidad and Tobago, Winer proposes and evaluates three orthographic models. Concluding that each of them has its appropriate use, she notes that: The fundamental characteristics of the Trinidad and Tobago situation are that both a Creole language and its lexically related standard language co-exist and will continue to co-exist; that the variation typical of such “continuum” situations is salient to its speakers and should be representable; and that language is written for different purposes, from different viewpoints. (Winer 1990: 263)
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This issue of the purpose of writing is one that is sometimes overlooked in discussions of orthography. If the main function of written Creole in Britain or the Caribbean continues to be to represent ‘natural speech’, it may be counterproductive to insist on an orthography which is completely autonomous from that of Standard English. On the other hand, if the aim is to develop Creole as an independent language with a fuller range of functions, in which the representation of speech in novels and the like is a relatively marginal use, then a set of orthographic conventions which are maximally different from those of Standard English may be called for. What seems to be important at this point is to realise that Creole writers, without intervention from linguists, have developed ways of representing Creole in writing which suit their current purposes. Linguists should at least be aware that ‘writers are doing it for themselves’.
Notes 1.
In Sebba (1993) I put forward the suggestion that Jamaican Creole is acquired by many of its users as a ‘second dialect’ rather than a ‘second language’ after a local form of British English. The argument is that such speakers learn it as a set of adaptations to their first language rather than ‘from scratch’, and that this explains certain differences between the Jamaican Creole of British-born speakers and those who learn it in Jamaica. It does not imply that Jamaican Creole is a ‘dialect’ of English.
2.
See Sebba (1993), Chapter 9, for more details.
3.
I shall from now on use this as a collective term to mean Caribbean English-lexicon Caribbean creoles. English-lexicon Creole is also known as Patois (or Patwa) in Jamaica and in Britain.
4.
Probably Ben Zephaniah is the best-known of all. Others who are widely known, not exclusively within the Caribbean community, are Linton Kwesi Johnson, Jean Binta Breeze and Levi Tafari.
5.
See, for example, Hellinger (1986), Schieffelin, B.B. and Doucet, R.C. (1994), Sebba (1998), and, for issues which include but extend beyond orthography, Devonish (1986), Joseph (1987).
6.
First written in a modified Standard orthography, this column now appears in parallel versions, one in the Cassidy orthography.
7.
Transcription conventions: The percent sign <%> is used instead of the conventional orthographic symbol (usually ) to represent a glottal stop in words like righ% /rɑʔ/. Apostrophes <‘> indicate phonemes which are spelt but not pronounced, and is used for /n/ where RP has /ŋ/: runnin’ = /rönn/, RP /rönŋ/. Figures in brackets indicate pauses timed in seconds. Words in brackets represent the ‘best guess’ at a segment which is unclear on the tape.
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8.
Examples of orthography are drawn from the 27000 word machine-readable Corpus of Written British Creole created in 1995 by Mark Sebba and Sally Kedge. This work was supported by a British Academy Small Personal Research Grant, No. BA-AN1735/ APN2007. For Further details see Sebba, Mark, Sally Kedge and Susan Dray (1999): The Corpus of Written British Creole: a user’s guide at http://www.ling.lancs.ac.uk/staff/ mark/cwbc/cwbcman.htm
9.
Notice that we have to assume that Standard English orthography is being treated as an approximate representation of British English pronunciation. There is of course no one ‘standard’ pronunciation which corresponds to written Standard English.
10.
See, for example, Allerton (1982: 59): “The phonetic differences which are really significant for the alphabet-maker are those which affect the number of phonemic distinctions a speaker makes or which relate to the actual words in which he uses each of his phonemes. The precise phonetic value he gives his phonemes (or, better, his allophones) in each of the various phonetic contexts in which they occur is only of minor importance”.
11.
In some cases, it may be that the respelt character is not itself the one that is pronounced differently, but functions as a kind of diacritic, e.g. Jamaka = /jamieka/ (the vowel of the second syllable is a falling diphthong in Jamaican popular speech — Wells (1982: 576). Likewise in tuff and ‘nuff it is the vowel (RP /ö/, JC /ɒ/) rather than the final consonant which is pronounced differently in the two language varieties.
12.
cf. Street’s ‘ideological’ and ‘autonomous’ approaches to literacy (1984).
13.
The line spacing of this text represents the paragraphing of the original typescript. Translation: Bull (the Police), Babylon (The British Establishment / Authorities / Police), The Wicked (the Police). 1. One morning me and my friends were coming from a club in Dalston. 2. We didn’t have any money so we were walking home. 3. The night was cold and the girls we had with us couldn’t walk fast. 4. Anyway we must have been walking for about fifteen minutes when this car pulled up, it was this youth I know and his woman. 5. We saw that he was in a mini cab. 6. He said “How far are you going”? 7. I said “Not far, you caught us too late man”. 8. Anyway before I could close my mouth the two girls jump into the car, saying they weren’t going to walk any more. 9. Me and Trevor told them to go ahead. 10. And the car pulled away. 11. Next thing I knew I was about 50 yards from my home and the wicked (the police) were just coming down in their can. 12. At first I wanted to run, but Trevor said “run what” “After all we’re just cool”. 13. We don’t have any weed or money on us. 14. They can’t do anything. 15. Next thing we know they grab us and push us into their car. 16. Me and Trevor put up a struggle but after a few licks (blows) we got pushed in. 17. “Now then you two “Rastas” been ripping off mini cabs haven’t you?” 18. “We aren’t “Rastas” and we don’t know what you are talking about.” 19. “Save all that until we get to the station Rastus my son.” 20. Then he got on his radio, and told the station that he had caught the two responsible for that hold up of the mini cab. 21. Trevor looked at me I could see that he was worried.
14.
For example, Hellinger (1986), Devonish (1986), and of course Cassidy, who designed the only phonemic orthography in common use by linguists for English-lexicon creole. Hellinger (1986: 67) says of Belizean Creole (English-lexicon): A genuinely Creole orthography will strengthen the structural and psychological identity of the Creole; it may in fact initiate or support a recreoliza-
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tion process; it will provide a source for higher prestige and may therefore facilitate native speakers’ identification with the Creole language and culture. By contrast, she says, a Creole orthography based on English conventions would have the consequences that: – the widespread conception of the Creole as an inferior variety of English would be strengthened; – an English-based orthography would obscure and eventually help to eradicate much of the Creole’s linguistic (phonemic) authenticity; – in no way would linguistic creativity (as in the field of word formation) receive momentum […]; – the decreolisation process would accelerate. 15.
There is also another version of the same lyrics, which appears (apparently hand-lettered) on the cover of a 12-inch disco version of the record. The two versions are identical except for numerous orthographic differences.
16.
Interestingly, Scragg observes (1974: 43) that “throughout the Old English period scribes were trained to copy Latin as well as English material, but little disturbance of the orthography resulted because the two languages were kept very separate, even to the extent of the use of two quite distinct scripts [footnote omitted].” Thus in those days, too, typography could be used to keep languages separate in transcription!
CHAPTER 10
Mediators and mediation in multilingual literacy events Mike Baynham and Helen Lobanga Masing
Introduction The idea of literacy mediator has been a construct of some importance in the New Literacy Studies, but has been treated largely in sociological terms, linked, for example, to related ideas of network (Fingeret 1983) and role (Barton and Ivanic 1991). The notion of mediator of literacy is used in the work of Wagner et al. (1986) on literacy practices in Morocco. Shuman (1986, 1993) describes how teenagers may act as mediators of literacy within the family in her study of communicative practices of Black and Puerto Rican teenagers in a Philadelphia school. Baynham (1993, 1995) presents evidence of the use of mediators as a strategy for achieving literacy purposes in the Moroccan community in London from a sociolinguistic perspective, with mediated literacy events involving codeswitching between languages in multilingual contexts as well as register shifting. Malan (1996), in a study of mediation in Newtown, a coloured settlement in the Eastern Cape, South Africa, identifies processes of mode shifting and codeshifting, but also discursive shifting. Robins (1996) investigates literacy mediation as a form of cultural brokerage. While the focus on the mediator as a social role has been an immensely useful one, we argue in this paper that there is a need to extend it somewhat and look in more detail at mediation as a linguistic process, asking what is mediation and how is it accomplished textually? In this paper, we will there-
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fore explore the notion of mediation as a linguistic process, drawing on work from semiotics, functional linguistics, ethnography of communication and literary theory. We will illustrate the discussion with data from literacy practices in Bislama and Aulua, data gathered in Vanuatu by Masing and reported in Masing (1992). We will conclude by trying to characterise the linguistic processes of mediation at work when participants negotiate meaning around written texts. Joint construction of texts and mediators of literacy One of the effects of the shift to investigating literacy as social practice that characterises the New Literacy Studies (Gee 1990; Street 1993a) is that it foregrounds instances when texts are jointly constructed and interpreted, shifting attention away from idealised solitary reader/writers, to actual reader/ writers who often appear to produce and interpret text as part of ongoing social process. In the Vanuatu data, as we shall see, the social nature of text production is highlighted. Mediation as linguistic process Before going on to consider the data from Masing’s (1992) Vanuatu study, in order to deepen our perspective on mediation as linguistic process, we will examine the place of mediation as a theoretical construct in a range of related theoretical literatures: semiotics, functional linguistics, ethnography of communication and literary theory. Mediation in ritual speech A definition of mediated speech, from an ethnography of communication perspective, can be found in work by John Dubois on mediation in ritual language: Despite the widespread occurrence of mediation in ritual speech, the unity of this phenomenon has scarcely been recognized; hence I devote a somewhat fuller discussion to the matter (but see Hymes 1972: 60–61). What I mean by mediated speech is the passing of the message through an additional link (or links), so that the simple relation between speaker and hearer is made complex. (Dubois 1985: 320)
Dubois describes how Wintu shamans employ an assistant to ‘interpret’ their utterances for the audience. The shaman enters a sort of trance and speaks in a
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ritual language variety characterised by obsolescent words, opaque metaphor and circumlocution, possibly even speaking a foreign language. The interpreter repeats the shaman’s message more simply, elaborating any prophecies made. Dubois describes an official process of mediation lying between the shaman’s utterance and the patient’s understanding. What he also describes is a process of register shifting as the interpreter repeats and glosses the shaman’s utterance in more everyday language. Here mediation involves shifting register or language from unfamiliar to more familiar and everyday. Social role and discourse role In order to highlight the distinction between mediation understood sociologically and as linguistic process, it is useful to introduce the distinction between social role and discourse role made by Thomas (1986) and taken up by Sarangi & Slembrouck (1996) in which discourse role is the distinctive relationships between speaker and utterance. According to Sarangi & Slembrouck, the discourse roles identified by Thomas (1986) are ‘spokespersons’, ‘mouthpieces’, ‘reporters’, ‘overhearers’, ‘bystanders’. It is a fairly easy extension to treat a mediator in the same way, as setting up a special sort of relationship between speaker and utterance. Unpacking social and discourse roles captures the fact that people may act as mediators on occasions, taking up a particular discourse role, not as part of a fixed long standing social role, while other people will have fixed social roles which regularly involve or imply mediation (cf. the Moroccan écrivain publique or public writer described in Wagner et al. (1986), whose sole role is to act as a mediator). If, from the perspective of discourse role, mediation invokes special relationships between reader/writer and utterance/text, how can we characterise these special relationships? Literacy mediation as message transmission or transformation? To characterise mediation as linguistic process, it is useful to distinguish as one dimension of mediational processes the degree of transformation and recontextualization that takes place in the production and interpretation of texts. Is a letter read aloud verbatim, without comment or gloss, does a scribe take down a letter by dictation or is his/her role to create a text out of oral instructions? If the degree of faithfulness or verbatim reproduction across intertextual chains is an issue, what factors control or influence this? Bakhtin (1986) and Volo˘sinov (1973) point to verbatim reproduction as characteristic of authori-
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tative discourses. To reproduce verbatim would thus be a recognition and acceptance of an authoritative discourse as well as, of course, a potential strategic manipulation of it. On the other hand, transformation and recontextualization of material, involving the right to appropriate and rework the words of others, would be a relatively more powerful discursive stance, both powerful, of course, and dangerous. Mediation regularly invokes relationships of power/knowledge and, as Shuman (1986) has pointed out, issues of entitlement and rights to speak. We can capture this with a distinction between scribing and mediation, scribing being a tendency towards the faithful transmission of a message without any intervening shaping on the part of the messenger, mediation involving an active process of transformation /recontextualization. In terms of discourse role, we can distinguish the two in terms of the relationship set up between utterer and utterance and the degree of shaping/reshaping, in Volosinov’s terms, that takes place. Mediation as transmission or transformation: a brief history A mirror does not ‘translate’; it records what struck it just as it is struck … our brain interprets data; a mirror does not interpret an object. (Eco 1984: 207– 208, cited in Gorleé 1994).
Raymond Williams in Keywords (Williams 1983) provides a useful account of the history of the term mediation in its various uses, in philosophy, theology and elsewhere, since the 14th century when its first recorded use occurred. In uses relevant to the discussion here, we will pick it up in the work of Hegel. In a passage approved and quoted by Marx, Hegel writes: Reason is just as cunning as she is powerful. Her cunning consists principally in her mediating activity which, by causing objects to act and react on each other in accordance with their own nature, in this way, without any direct interference in the process, carries out Reason’s intentions (Hegel, cited in Vygotsky 1978: 54).
Mediation in Hegelian philosophy involves the restless dialectical activity of mind. Marx shifts the focus of mediation from Hegel’s idealism to the materiality of practice in characterizing the human being’s mediated and mediating relationship with the world. To the mediational role of tools, Vygotsky adds a theoretical extension to the use of sign systems as mediational means. He assigns “the use of signs to the category of mediated activity, for the essence of sign use consists in man’s [sic] affecting behaviour through signs” (Ibid).
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Vygotsky is however, careful not to resort to a narrow and reductive functionalism in equating sign systems with tools. Importantly, Vygotsky sees the mediated operation as transformative, not just as the transfer of information from A to B via C. Another theoretical context where the term mediation is significant is in Peircean semiotics. For Peirce (1974), the semiotic sign is triadic, not dual as in its Saussurean version. According to Gorlée: For Peirce … genuine sign action is threefold and must involve an interpretant, in addition to a sign and its object. The sign only deploys its meaning (that is, becomes meaningful) in the interpretative act or acts. (Gorlée 1995: 94).
Jakobson endorses the Peircean view of meaning in his paper “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation”: For us, both as linguists and as ordinary word users, the meaning of any linguistic sign is its translation into some further alternative sign, especially a sign “in which it is more fully developed”, as Peirce, the deepest inquirer into the essence of signs insistently stated (Jakobson 1959: 232–233).
The limitless semiosis suggested here, in which the interpretant of each sign mediates the sign and its object only to enter another sign into a further signifying chain, echoes the restless mediating activity of Hegelian reason, synthesising meaning out of thesis and antithesis in the dialectic. We can also perhaps make a connection between the chaining of signifiers and Fairclough’s intertextual chaining (cf. Fairclough 1992a), in which meanings are transformed and remade in a textual series. It is clear, therefore, as Mertz and Parmentier (1985) point out in their book Semiotic Mediation, which focuses on the concept of mediation in the work of Peirce, Vygotsky and Whorf, that language activity intrinsically involves mediation. So, as a backdrop to our discussion of mediation in activity around text, we need to recognise the pervasive mediational role of language in this Peircean/Vygotskyan/Whorfian sense (Barton 1994a: 66– 68). A message which is mediated, in our sense, is thus doubly mediated, firstly as linguistic activity and secondly as sociolinguistic activity achieved indirectly, involving some kind of go-between. Mediation as transmission or transformation: difference and distance The issue of mediation as transmission or transformation is considered in Raymond Williams’ Marxism and Literature, where the term ‘mediation’ is
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used with a high degree of critical caution. Williams saw the term ‘mediation’ as an advance on what he called “reflection theory”, through which art is held to reflect social life. He felt that the term ‘mediation’ emphasised the active, dynamic, transformative character of meaning making. However, in Marxism and Literature, he argues : It is difficult to be sure how much is gained by substituting the metaphor of ‘mediation’ for the metaphor of ‘reflection’. On the one hand it goes beyond the passivity of reflection theory; it indicates an active process of some kind. On the other hand, in almost all cases it perpetuates a basic dualism. Art does not reflect social reality, the superstructure does not reflect the base, directly; culture is a mediation of society. But it is virtually impossible to sustain the metaphor of ‘mediation’ (Vermittlung) without some sense of separate and pre-existent areas or orders of reality, between which the mediating process occurs whether independently or as determined by their prior natures. Within the inheritance of idealist philosophy the process is usually, in practice, seen as a mediation between categories, which have been assumed to be distinct. Mediation, in this range of use, then seems little more than a sophistication of reflection (Williams 1977: 99).
Williams recognises a more dynamic, transformative use of the term mediation, for example in the work of the Frankfurt school, yet concludes: But when the process of mediation is seen as positive and substantial, as a necessary process of the making of meanings and values, in the necessary form of the general social process of signification and communication, it is really only a hindrance to describe it as ‘mediation’ at all. For the metaphor takes us back to the very concept of the ‘intermediary’ which, at its best, this constitutive and constituting sense rejects (Williams 1977: 99- 100).
So we have, again, two quite distinct senses of the term mediation, which parallels the transmission/transformation distinction introduced earlier. According to the transmission model, mediation can be described schematically as: the transfer of A to B via C while in the transformation model, mediation is: the transformation or recontextualization of A into B by means of C. This corresponds to the distinction between the conduit theory of communication, as critiqued by Reddy (1979), and the account of communication and meaning by which the linguistic means radically shapes and constitutes the range of possible messages. So, is mediation a washed-up construct as Williams suggests, irrevocably
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bound to reify the categories it brings into relationship? Williams himself, along with others continued to use mediation despite its problems, perhaps because of some intrinsic Whorfian limitation of the English language to constitute dynamic non-reified relations between objects. What makes mediation a necessary construct, in the contexts considered in this paper, is difference and distance. Mediation comes into play where there is a perception, actual or supposed, of distance between an utterance and its addressee. From this perspective, mediation is to do with closing an information gap, which can be seen as both difference in power/knowledge or social/psychological distance. Mediation as a linguistic process is therefore to do with the linguistic means for closing gaps, crossing distances. These gaps and distances can be across languages (Jakobson’s interlingual translation) or within languages and across registers or modes (Jakobson’s intralingual translation), they can be across semiotic systems (Jakobson’s intersemiotic translation), as when a diagram is used to present something already expressed in language, or language is used to explain a diagram. In the light of recent developments in Critical Linguistics, with its emphasis on discourse(s), we might want to add a further category to Jakobson’s typology, that of ‘interdiscursive translation’. The gaps and distances are created by inequalities, differential access to power/knowledge. Multilingual literacy practices are a special case of something more general, something that works both intralingually as well as interlingually and intersemiotically. Where there is difference, mediation is also required between powerful and less powerful discourses, between technical and common sense knowledges. Mediation as a social and linguistic process thus raises questions of authority and rights to speak, in particular rights to reformulate powerful discourses. It raises the issue of whether mediation is to be constructed as transmission or transformation or whether mediation can be at different moments both transmission and transformation. In the next sections, we will look at mediation processes in a number of multilingual literacy events.
The mediation of Bislama/Aulua literacy events in Vanuatu In this section, we will examine some data gathered by Masing in a study of literacy practices in a village in Vanuatu (Masing 1992). To understand the
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sociolinguistic context of this data, it is important to contextualise it in the multilingual language situation in Vanuatu. The Republic of Vanuatu is a developing nation which achieved its independence from the joint condominium rule of Britain and France two decades ago, in 1980. It has a population of 142,944 scattered in 68 inhabited islands. Vanuatu has a linguistic background of 105 indigenous languages. The ratio is roughly one language for every 1250 inhabitants. Crowley (1989) describe this as the highest linguistic density anywhere in the world. The two official languages are French and English. Bislama is the national language and it has expanded to be the lingua franca of Vanuatu through which the Government can reach out to its entire population in the rural communities, for development purposes in health, agriculture, the economy and politics. Although literacy in this village community is taught in English, Masing noted during her fieldwork that writing was almost entirely done in Bislama, the national language. Moreover, in jointly constructed literacy events, meaning was negotiated in Aulua, the local vernacular language, as well as in Bislama, as will be seen in the following transcript of audio-recorded data. (Aulua data is transcribed in bold, English and Bislama in plain characters and an English translation is provided in italics). A ministerial speech The first sample of data arises from a situation when a government minister came to visit the village to talk about development issues. Masing (1992) describes how a minister came to give a speech in her village when she was doing fieldwork. Feeling that the language used was going over the heads of the village audience, she audio-recorded some of the speech and played it back to members of the village community, pausing the tape at intervals to ask them how much they understood and what they thought that parts of it meant. The speech was delivered in Bislama and here are some examples of utterances that were not understood: Yufala i gat potential blong developmen ples ia (Bislama) You have the potential to develop this area (English translation)
The meaning was not clear, although one person said that ‘to develop’ meant something you do to make it go up. The term ‘potential’ is a borrowing from English into Bislama.
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Polici olsem i adresem situation bilong yumi tedei (Bislama) This type of policy addresses our present situation (English translation)
This sentence places the policy in the ‘doer’ position. Those questioned did not understand what it meant. Niu direcsen we yumi wantem tekem (Bislama) The new direction we want to take up (English translation)
“Direcsen”, derived from the learned Latin-based lexicon of English, is used here in a metaphorical sense: it is not ‘direction’ in geographical space, but rather in the conceptual space of policy formation and implementation. The problem that arises in the minister’s speech arises precisely because of an unmediated gap between the minister’s language, informed by the rhetoric and register of development and national renewal and that audience’s access to that register. It is not hard to imagine what a mediated performance might have sounded like, containing glosses and paraphrases of technical terms. This data confirms the connection established between mediation and social/linguistic/psychological distance. Extract 1: A fund raising letter This literacy event involved the writing of a fund-raising letter to the National Council of Women to obtain funding for the village Women’s Club. Extracts from the beginning of this event are presented below. The letter was something of a last minute effort, written at the airport, while waiting for Helen to fly back to Port Vila. The women hoped to obtain matching funding for the purchase of sewing materials, under a scheme designed to provide financial assistance for projects. The letter was based on hearsay information about the scheme, which one of the women present, Leinasei, had obtained from another woman who had attended meetings of the National Council of Women. As it turned out, the information was inaccurate and the scheme was no longer in operation. Helen, Rodha, Satley, Leinase and Anne were actively involved in its construction in different ways. They were among a larger group of women, who chatted while the letter was being written. Scene: a bench in the Lamap Airport Terminal Building Participants: Helen Rodha and Satley were sitting on the bench with other members of the Village women’s club gathered nearby. Emma, Annia and Anna were sitting on the lawn telling stories and, from time to time, listening to the main group.
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The purpose of the literacy event: to write a letter to go to Port Vila with Helen requesting financial assistance from the National Council of Women to purchase some sewing materials for the Village women’s club. Lei:
Mol tena, mol wula las aung? You say something to write, in that case, you [to Helen] Helen: Ahoo! Mbe yu traem talem program blong wanem ia No! Tell me what is this programme for National Council blong ol Woman mbe I olsem wanem? The National Council of Women, what is it like? ………………………………………………… Rodha: No! Ara mas help, help tager vit, ar tambavrar ren nevit kakas nagaia, sare ar kole susungul 10 No! They want their help, that is to go with this little money to buy some clothes Satley: Nevit hal This money Helen: Inga! Afta se olsem wanem? Then, what happens later? Annie: Mbe olgeta i jes givim faiv tausen a? Eh! Six tausen, mbe olgeta mbae i givim haf long ol ting, ol klos They give five thousand is that right? No! Six thousand, then they will give half of the things, the clothes Rodha: Oli halpem olgeta They will help them Annie: Ol kalico The calico 20 Rodha: Kalico, ol klos, ol samting olsem Calico, clothes, things like that Annie: Pent mo tep Paint and binding tapes Leinase: Tel mana laskal, mol rana, vavol tel mana ti sarak? Ahoo! Tel mana las mbe, aho! We are doing this, think about it, are we going to make it go down? Oh! What are we going to do? Helen: Tel traem Let us try Leinase: Aung su mbu Just as well its you Rodha: Ale, u wul Dear Sir Okay, you write, Dear Sir 30 Satley: Mas ni men I want to laugh Rodha: Ale, Dear Sir Okay, Dear Sir
Mediators and mediation in multilingual literacy events Helen:
Mol wula si ren Bislama Just write in Bislama Others: Avo Yes Leinase: Ka! Wula ia, amuntil sinte tiv te nesagtvogol Write it, some of you say something Rodha: Greeting,uvtena mba, greeting ambu Greetings, say that first, greetings only Helen: Greeting si a? Ale Greetings only? Okay Others: Avo, las ni mbu Yes, that’s right 40 Satley: Greetings Rodha: I go long yufala everiwan long name blong papa To you all in the name of our father Helen: Ahoo! Greeting i go long yufala long nem blong masta nomo No! Greetings to you all in the name of the Master only Others: Avo Yes Rodha: Everiwan? Everyone Leinase: Yufala long nem You all in the name Helen: Yufala everiwan i semak “Yufala everiwan” is just the same 50 Eli: Long nem blong masta In the name of the Master Satley: Mifala i wantem help blong yufala? We want your help Rodha: Hemia 6,000 we mifala i givim [repeats] Here is 6,000 which we are giving We mifala i wantem givim Which we want to give Mifala i givim from mifala i wantem yufala i orderem, a? Mifala i wantem……mifala i givim We give because we want you to order, is that right? We want…we give 60 Helen: Mifala i givim We give Rodha: Blong ordarem sam mater…sam sewing materials…….sewing……..material To order some sewing material Mo mifala i nidim smol help mo………..smol donasen we yufala i save givim…….nidim smol donasen
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And we need a little help and………a little donation which you can give…need a little donation Givim blong…sapotem mifala blong pem of samting [repeats] Give to support us pay the things 70 Ale, vel, u wula, u wula nesagniger. Pem ol samting Okay, here you write, you write all the things. Pay the things Helen: Mol wula meve National Council of Women, ha? Ka! Women’s Club, ha? Mol linga mbo meve. You write on the top National Council of Women, is that right? No! Women’s Club, yes? You leave it at the top Leinese: Avo antap ia That’s right, on top here Satley: Mi putum Womens Club I’m going to put the Women’s Club Rodha: Lumbulbatui National Club 80 [Others laugh] Rodha: Molv tena mbo You say something at least Ale, ritem Women’s Club Okay, write Women’s Club Helen: Mbe yufala, yufala i stap singaoutem yufala olsem wanem ia? But how do you name your group? Rodha: No! Women’s Club………..blong pem ol samting ia The Women’s Club……to pay all these things Leinase: U wula You write Rodha: Fes wan, u listem ra subagani…..listem sam, sam uvtena sam Hemia nao sam samting blong somap…..sam samting blong somap 90 [repeat]…we mbae yufala i pem….. we mbae yufala i sendem The first one, you are going to list them now……list some, say some. These are some of the things to sew [repeats]…..which you will buy……which you will send Satley: Sanem o pem? Send or pay? Rodha: Pem Pay Annie: Mifala i pem wetem yufala We pay you
Satley acted as scribe and was instructed as to what to write, once the wording had been decided on, as seen in Rodha’s directives in lines 29 and 31 above: “Ale u wul Dear Sir” (line 29) and “Ale, Dear Sir” (line 31). Leinase was the senior member of the group and tended to restrict herself to giving more global directions, primarily in Aulua and did not get involved in determining the
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actual wording of the letter, as, for example, in the following utterance: Ka! Wula ia, amuntil sinte tiv te nesagtvogol Write it, some of you say something (Line 34)
Leinase was clearly relieved that Helen was around to help them draft the letter, as she said to Helen: Aung su mbu Just as well it’s you (Line 28)
The main burden of composing the letter fell on Helen and Rodha, with Satley scribing according to their instructions. Helen intervened to suggest to the group that the letter should be written in Bislama. Rodha suggested the word “greeting” which was supported by Helen and agreed by the group. Next, Rodha suggested a wording to complete the sentence (a formulaic religious greeting which occurs at the beginning of letters in Bislama): I go long yufala evriwan long name blong papa To you all in the name of our father (Line 39)
However, Helen challenged Rodha’s wording in two ways. The first was the choice of the pronominal “yufala everiwan”. Helen strongly suggested a rewording to “yufala” alone (Lines 42–49). The second was a rewording of the phrase “long name blong papa” to “long nem blong masta”. Helen notes that her motive in doing this was to make the letter more formal. Rodha then carried on taking the major role in the composition of the letter, with Satley scribing. Interestingly, we see a shift initiated by Satley in the direction of a more formal register: Mo mifala i nidim smol help mo ------- smol donasen And we need little help and ------------ a little donation (Line 64)
She shifted from “smol help” to “small donasen”. Helen intervened to point out what should go at the top of the letter. Interestingly, she did this in Aulua. It seems that the directional language, the language positioning someone to write, was largely in Aulua, while the content of the letter was negotiated in Bislama. In Lines 94–95, Satley queries which wording she should use: “sanem o pem?” (to send or to pay) and Rodha decides: “pem”. Let us first consider this data in terms of discourse role. Satley is playing the scribe role, she is copying down the wordings as instructed by the others. Rodha is actively engaged in producing the wordings in Bislama. Helen is
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mediating, based on her greater knowledge of the system and a more sophisticated sense of audience. As the literacy event progresses, Rodha seems to be taking on, internalizing in the Vygotskian sense, the need for a register shift in the letter, for example in her shift from “smol help” to “smol donasen”. It is suggested, in Baynham (1986), that one sign of mediation is the degree to which the text is saturated with metalinguistic reference. What role does metalinguistic reference play in this literacy event? Firstly, the metalinguistic reference is directional, concerned with what should go in the letter and with the positioning of the scribe to write (“wul”). As we have already noted, this direct positioning takes place almost exclusively in Aulua. Then, Helen raises the question of language choice, thus foregrounding the choice between Bislama and English: Mol wula si ren Bislama Just write in Bislama (Line 32)
The conflicts between Helen and Rodha about wording are interesting, in that they also foreground metalinguistic concerns, this time shades of meaning and register choice. So, what are the discourse roles? If Satley is scribe and Helen is a mediator, what about Rodha? The main characteristic of Rodha’s participation in the writing of the letter is agency: she is active in the process of text construction. So perhaps we could term Rodha an ‘agent’. In the Moroccan literacy event described in Baynham (1986, 1993, 1995), Mike was doubling the roles of mediator and scribe, here the roles are distributed. Helen is well suited to acting as mediator here, because of her experience in Port Vila, her education and specialised knowledge and the others show deference to her. But again the key concept here is difference and distance: distance from the bureaucratically organised practices of Port Vila and associated uses of language. This is what makes Helen’s mediation necessary. Extract 2: Planning work groups The activity in this literacy event was the setting up of work groups to raise funds for the activities of the PWMU (Presbyterian Women, Mother’s Union) in the village. In the section that we will consider here, the group are deciding what tasks they can offer and what prices they will charge for each task. Scene: A meeting of Lumbulbatui Presbyterian Women Mothers Union (PWMU). Participants: Diana, Helen, Leinase, Eli, Lilon, Hannah and Rebecca and others from the Women’s Club.
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The purpose of the literacy event: to write a list of the tasks that the work group can offer and decide on pricing. Possible tasks for the work group include, gathering coconuts; pudding baking [using traditional earth oven] ; clearing new garden patches; outside work [where someone from another village needs their assistance]; weaving palm leaves for traditional roof construction; weaving mats from coconut palm leaves. Eli: Lilon:
As mogk ko i mas antil las mbe ego temes? What about someone elsewhere who needs us? Ka Winnie! Asmagk go i mas antil ren nelong las mbe A temesbar. Avo mbate nage tu tel telif rien go Winnie, what about someone from another village who wants us to make laplap [pudding]. Yes, carrying things on sticks on our shoulders is uncomfortable Nesak bokol tel momora pua 500 One thing is making laplap should be 500 vatu 200 mbo netim mbimo ko Last year was 200 vatu Ka! Diana wula Diana write it down Tel pakus nevus marefref ambu [joking] Tel pakas nevus marefret ker tel taed su biagal We will only get unripe bananas. We are tired of unripe bananas now Nevus mareref. I finis nao Unripe bananas are now finished [Laugh] Ka vavu! Tel wul 500 kole? Grandma, we are going to put down 500 vatu Asmagk ko I mas tel kiskis niet tahen? What about preparing thatch for someone? Niet? Thatch? Nago mbimo intog ren 500 meben tel minga gal At first it was 500 vatu until now Avo. Netim kal ko praes i mbet kole Yes, this year the copra price is pretty low Tel serembosia mbo,mol, mol tena ia We do not know, you say it Molvte bakasa. Molvtena 500 ia? Molvte bakasa Say it well. Do you say 500 vatu? Say it well Mol se ronge ampte nakula i garak cole. Praes ti garak ko tel ling praes nagahaiaker i garak Didn’t you all hear that the copra price will increase? When the price increases, then these work fees can increase Niet ni a? Netim bimbo imsa? Netim nag mbimo 1,000
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It’s only thatch. Last year was how much? The year before that was 1,000 Winnie: Moltena, netim bimo, mbe las praes imbu bakani 40 You can say that, that year the copra price was good Lilon: Tah Veve tah kalvet ko 1,000 bakani Kalvet’s auntie was 1,000 vatu Others: Seven, seven ha! 700 vatu Eli: Tel ling seven handred a… En baka ni We will put 700 vatu Others: Seven ambu Only 700 vatu Lilon: Tel garak ren tu tousen, tri tousen [Laughs] Let’s increase it to 2000 vatu then, 3000 vatu Rachel: Asmagk go i lis mani lobon ti garak ko A person who sees a lot of money should give more 50 Lilon: Tel mana laskal mbe i tombo klo mbene, ka Helen We are doing this, she is looking this way, Helen Rachel: Kamaro nagoko gavman i kole ker ti garak. [Joking] Ego, ka Helen, u tomba kole tah mintil Hey, those whom the government pays should pay more. Yes! Helen you are going to help us pay too Helen: Ti wula mbu Write it down Others: [Laugh] Rachel: Aung mbo, mbe yu metagna It’s your choice, but you will not want to Eli: Asmang temis go i magavas antil seven handred Someone far off who wants us will be 700 vatu Others: Avo, aotsaed work seven handred Yes, outside work is 700 Eli: Niet cole biagal This is thatch again Lilon: Mol man niet mol kiskis tuhunu mbahani If you are going to make that thatch, you will sew mine Leinasei: Molvtena mbo faev ia? Say it, 500 vatu Others: Wul faev mbate tel harak ana tel sarek Yes, write 500 vatu because we go up then come down again 70 Lilon: Bag tirua, ko wan tausen bakani. Ano ni magafsi nagogo koperetiv………..Plastic raes net lombon mbagani siks mbagani 1,000 vatu for two bags, I like the cooperative system, a big rice plastic is paid 600 vatu Rebecca: Antil tambaluk tel stret mia?
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Are there enough of us women? Hannah: Ling tambaluk tah antil ara minga ren skul, tambaluk ara minga ren skul tel lev ra Put down the girls who have left school, we must take them in Lilon: Avo wulra go uvtena. Wula su ka Rebekah ia? 80 Yes, write their names, then tell us. Have they been written Rebekah? Rebekah: Mel se wula timb We haven’t written that yet Eli: Ka Rebekah u leva mbu u vene, a Leinasei imte nesagbokol Take it Rebekah then come here. Leinasei wants to say something Leinasei: Vavol nivtena go u wula [To Diana] I will say it then you write it Rebekah: Ni linga mbav asesten bakani. Uvtena mbo, hen ti wula I will leave it to the assistant chief, you say, then she writes it Hannah: Mol ling tambaluk tah until ker. Mama oli olfala finis 90 Put down our young girls, the mothers are getting old
There are interesting differences between this literacy event and the previous one. The oral interaction around the written text was conducted almost exclusively in Aulua, albeit with lexical borrowing from Bislama. Lindstrom (1993) comments on lexical borrowing from Bislama in the following way: “The mixing of Bislama lexemes … evokes authoritative discourses (e.g. of Christianity and of national development” (Lindstrom 1993: 122). In a sense, although the written text was in Bislama, this was a much more local, vernacular literacy event than the writing of the fund raising letter. The aim of this event was to produce texts for use by the group (a list of women in the two work groups) and the locality (a list of services offered and prices). The fund raising letter can be described as an interface literacy event, bringing the local community in contact with the social practices of the metropolis, Port Vila. Helen’s mediating interventions can be understood in that light. In the extract above, the women were discussing the prices that they could set on their labour. Diana was the scribe. Beside her were Leinasei, Elley and Rebecca. Rebecca’s role was to maintain or control the meeting to fulfil the purpose of making work arrangements so that the group could write the lists. Leinasei and Elley played a similar role to Rebecca. Their concentration, however, was mainly centred on Diana. Many of the utterances initiated by this group were to question the others from time to time about work charges so that a compromise could be reached by everyone. The other participants
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also influenced what should be stated in the work charge list. In this literacy event, the participants have the responsibility of achieving a written document based on consensus. In terms of the discourse roles identified, we have plenty of agency, many voices are involved in the discussion, we have a scribe but do we have any mediation? Before trying to answer that question we will look at some other aspects of this literacy event, first its intertextual chaining and the kinds of discourses that are being transformed in order to compile the price list. First, there is a discourse of personal experience which contributes to the logic of pricing. Distance and heavy burdens need to be a factor in determining prices. Secondly, the discourse of the commodities market has to be brought into play. Others: Rebecca:
Avo. Netim kal ko praes i mbet kole Yes, this year the copra price is pretty low (Line 26) Mol se ronge ampte nakula i garak cole. Praes ti garak ko tel ling praes nagahaiaker i garak. Didn’t you all hear that the copra price will increase? When the price increases, then these work fees can increase (Lines 32–35)
As part of the discussion, the suggestion is raised that those who have more should pay more. This leads on to an interlude of teasing Helen who is paid a government salary. We can see clearly how contingent a discourse role can be. In relation to a letter to go to Port Vila, Helen serves as a key mediator. In this local context, her metropolitan status sets her up for some ribbing. The end result of this process of negotiation and discursive transformation is a pricing for each task. In Jakobson’s (1959) sense the transformation or recontextualization at work here is intersemiotic: the outcome is a price expressed as a mathematical entity. It is tempting to conclude that in this literacy event there is plenty of agency, not much mediation. Although a number of participants have organizing roles and responsibilities and there is a scribe, there doesn’t appear to be a clearly assigned discourse role of mediator, such as we saw in the previous literacy events. Yet there is a broader sense, identified earlier, which goes beyond specific discourse role allocation in which all texts can be said to mediate and be mediated: in the price list, a number of discourses, that of personal experience, the commodities market are mediated, in the humorous banter that accompanies the task, the politics of metropolitan/local and discursive power more generally are dealt with ironically, as they were in the previous literacy event,
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when Rodha jokingly referred to Lumbulbatui National Club. Through a consensual process different voices and interests are mediated to produce the final text. Yet, of course, it is not the final text, but simply the basis for further intertextual activity in the course of negotiating prices for actual work tasks.
Conclusion Mediation as a social process is typically associated with distance (social/ linguistic/psychological) and difference. Where there are sharp differences in power/knowledge, then mediation in the specific sense we have used it here, that is as a sharply identified discourse role, becomes necessary. At a further stage, long standing social roles involving mediation may emerge, in a sense as a further reification of distance and power/knowledge imbalance. But this needs to be seen in the context of a broader sense of mediation, the sense introduced earlier that all language and semiotic systems mediate. As a linguistic process, mediation in the specific sense used here involved the crossing/diminishing of distance linguistically, in terms of shifting to more familiar from more distant registers, or as in Rodha’s example, in the shifting from familiar to more distant ones. There is discursive shifting (in the sense proposed by Malan 1996) in the work group literacy event between discourses of personal experience (the weight of a burden) and of the commodities market. There is also, in the process of text construction, a tendency towards the foregrounding or thematization of metalinguistic aspects of language, of what Matthiessen (1991) calls the grammar of semiosis.
CHAPTER 11
Texts, mediation and social relations in a bureaucratised world Kathryn Jones
Nansi is usually the first to go through the post when it arrives at the farm sometime after the midday meal. A new Animal Movement Book for ‘on farm’ livestock records arrived in today’s post which Nansi showed to Dewi when he came in for his cup of tea in the afternoon. This year’s IACS1 forms also arrived this week, together with the usual farming magazines, a semen catalogue and this month’s milk cheque. Nansi told me she would phone the NFU2 office in Denbigh to arrange for help with filling in the IACS form since it was too complicated for them to do themselves. Wyn [their son] came back from the Ruthin auction in the afternoon with copies of the new ‘Animal Movement forms’ that, from now on, have to be completed when selling any cattle at auction. (Wednesday, 15th February 1995)
The extract above comes from the research diary I kept during my five year ethnographic study of the literacy practices of Welsh/English bilinguals living in the Vale of Clwyd, a rural part of north-east Wales. Like many farm women, dealing with the farm mail and paperwork was one of Nansi’s responsibilities (Ashton 1994; Jones 1999). Nansi and Dewi Wilkinson told me that their gwaith papur (paperwork) had increased tremendously over recent years. Most of this paperwork was generated by MAFF (the Ministry of Agriculture Fisheries and Food) and the European Union (EU) Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). It is a condition of late modernity in postindustrialised countries such as the UK that the communication, action and social relations of people’s day-to-day lives are increasingly textually mediated (Smith 1990: 209). The textualised dimension of people’s day-to-day
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routines is particularly intensified by the extent to which their local practices are shaped by bureaucracy. This is clearly visible in the day-to-day routines of farming families like that of Dewi and Nansi. Welsh farmers lead a farming life intimately molded by global market forces and the EU-defined bureaucracies of CAP and MAFF. The agricultural industry provides a particularly clear example of how European integration is a dominant driving force behind social change in Europe and demonstrates how much of the ongoing bureaucratisation of social life in Britain is a consequence of EU policy making. Since Max Weber’s early work on bureaucracy in the nineteen twenties, the bureaucratisation of social life is acknowledged as having important implications for social relations: both as these relations are constituted within disembedded bureaucratic systems, and how these extend into the face-to-face encounters of people’s day-to-day lives. Bureaucracy ‘delegates’ (Giddens 1990), those people who are employed by bureaucratic organisations to deal with ‘the public’, play a particularly influential role in negotiating the dynamics of social relations since they operate at the meeting point between abstract bureaucratic systems and local lifeworlds. In this chapter, my purpose is to draw upon the insights of an ethnographic approach to the study of people’s language and literacy practices to investigate how bureaucracy shapes and moulds farming identities and social relations. Farmers engage with, and are positioned by, the discourse of MAFF bureaucracy in two main ways. Firstly, by MAFF written texts; the letters, forms and booklets which arrive by post on a regular basis. Secondly, in their face-to-face encounters with bureaucratic representatives when, for example, they sell their cattle at the livestock auction, hand in their IACS forms at the local MAFF office, or go to the NFU for help with form filling. In a section on bureaucracy and social relations, I identify how farmers are positioned by texts such as EU legislation, and the Animal Movement and IACS forms. These texts illustrate how social relations between farmers and MAFF are defined within MAFF’s abstract and disembedded bureaucratic system. In the subsequent section, I turn to identifying some of the people who take on the position of bureaucracy delegates in farmers’ face-to-face encounters with bureaucracy. Because bureaucracies are so dependent upon written texts as a mode of functioning, bureaucracy mediators are principally ‘literacy mediators’. This chapter represents another contribution to the now considerable body of ethnographic research which has provided detailed descriptions of
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literacy mediation based on researcher observation and participant accounts (e.g. Wagner, Messig & Spratt 1986; Baynham 1993; Schiffrin 1994; Malan 1996). My particular contribution to this research is a view of literacy mediators as key brokers in the bureaucratisation of social relations and local social life in the Welsh/European context. There is a growing interest in defining literacy mediation as a linguistic process (Baynham & Masing this volume). In the main section of the chapter, I analyse the discourse of bureaucracy mediation events, drawing principally on a critical discourse analysis framework (Fairclough 1992a), in order to begin to identify how social relations are realised linguistically. I contrast three examples of farmers dealing with CAP-MAFF bureaucracy to see how impersonal and abstract bureaucratic relations are sustained or contested in local face-to-face encounters. To contextualise the locally situated examples of bureaucracy mediation presented in this section, the following section makes some points about bureaucracies in general illustrated with examples from agricultural bureaucracy.
Bureaucracy and farming Max Weber originally defined bureaucracy as “a hierarchical organization designed rationally to co-ordinate the work of many individuals in the pursuit of large-scale administrative tasks and organizational goals” (Weber 1968 cited in Fairclough 1989: 212). For many, the European Union has become the epitome of the bureaucratisation and centralisation which are characteristic of modernity (Weiler 1999). The administrative tasks and organisational goals of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) which formed the centrepiece of the European Community’s legal order continues to intimately shape farming practices across Europe. Historically, CAP had “the purpose of ‘rationalising’ farm holdings” across all EC (now EU) Member States (Weiler 1999: 202). At the heart of CAP bureaucracy is the Integrated Administration and Control System (IACS). This integrated system was set up in 1992 with the primary purpose of enabling “the reform of the common agricultural policy to be implemented efficiently” (Council of the European Communities 1992a: 36) and “to combat fraud in the CAP arable and livestock schemes” (MAFF 1995: 3). The details of the bureaucratic structure to be adopted in each EU Member State are specified in the integrated system rules as they are set out in
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Council Regulation (EEC) No. 3508/92 and Commission Regulation (EEC) No. 3887/92: given the complexity of such a system and the large number of aid applications to be processed, it is essential to use the appropriate technical resources and administration and control methods; .. as a result, the integrated system should comprise, in each Member State, a computerized data base, an alphanumeric identification system for agricultural parcels, aid applications from farmers, a harmonized control system and, in the livestock sector, a system for the identification and recording of animals; (CEC 1992a: 1).
Bureaucracies operate ‘rationally’ (Weber 1978), ‘objectively’ ordering local realities by factualising and disembedding people and processes from their local, historical contexts and re-constituting them within an a-historical organisational framework (cf. Garfinkel et al 1981; Smith 1990; and Jones 1999). I elaborate this point further in the next section on bureaucracy and social relations. The particular point I want to make here is that the capacity of written texts “to crystallize and preserve a definite form of words, detached from their local historicity” (Smith 1990: 210) is essential to the routine processes of bureaucracies which aim to administer and control local practices from the regional offices and (inter)national headquarters of their institutions. Nowadays, contemporary bureaucratic processes are increasingly dependent upon computer technologies for their routine functioning as is apparent from the requirements for each locally administered integrated system set out in the EU legislation above. As computer technologies become more integral to institutional and bureaucratic processes, the genres, discourses and functions of texts and technologies are more closely intertwined. Computerised word processors exploit the capacity of texts to inscribe ‘meaning’ in one local context and reproduce it in a multiplicity of other historically and spatially different contexts. Reproductions of standardised texts facilitate the accomplishment of bureaucratic tasks over wide spans of time and space. Such reconfiguring of administration and control over distanciated time and space configurations has inevitable consequences for the way inter-personal social relations are realised. I now turn to the issue of social relations in bureaucratic contexts in the next section.
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Bureaucracy and social relations As abstract systems, bureaucracies are central to the disembedding processes of late modern societies in which social relations are ‘lifted out’ of their local contexts of interaction and restructured across indefinite spans of space and time (Giddens 1990: 21). People and the places where they live and work, their relationships with others, their possessions, life occasions and daily routines are factualised as objectified categories in order to facilitate the rational purpose of the bureaucratic system and its data base driven methods of administration and control. Within CAP-MAFF bureaucracy, farmers are identified by their initials and surname, their address and their holding number (the unique alphanumeric code which identifies each farm in Britain and all farms in the EU). Farmers’ land is divided into ‘agricultural parcels’, each of which has a unique identification code derived from its co-ordinates on 1:2,500 Ordnance Survey (OS) maps. Farm crops and animals are also coded, with all cattle being assigned individual identification codes. These codes label a series of database cases within the structure of the complex and powerful computerised database now used by the EU. Relations between one farmer and other farmers locally, nationally and internationally are therefore disembedded from their local farmworld contexts where many know each other personally, into an abstract order where they exist only as a sequence of alphanumeric codes. Social relations between farmers and CAP-MAFF employees are also abstract, ‘virtual’ relations since CAP-MAFF staff are usually unidentified and completely unknown to farmers. Although bureaucratic processes are accomplished through the actions of individuals, their individual agency is obscured, subsumed within an un-attributed institutional voice. MAFF texts typically construct a synthetically personalised (cf. Fairclough 1992a)3 relationship between farmers and MAFF bureaucracy. The IACS and Animal Movement forms, for example, are structured using many of the conversational features of oral interaction. These include: asking questions (‘Are you declaring land as forage area towards the Beef Special Premium Scheme?’); giving instructions (‘If no go to question 7(b)’); stating regulations (‘This form must accompany all cattle to market’); and issuing warnings (‘If you knowingly or recklessly make a false statement to obtain payment of aid for yourself or anyone else, you risk prosecution’). Yet the ‘author’ of these texts is not identified. Only the agency of a collective institution is implicit in the
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Figure 1. One page of the IACS form (English version)
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synthesised interaction of the forms. The IACS booklet which advises farmers on how to complete the IACS forms, makes some limited disclosures regarding agency within the bureaucratic process. When disclosed, agents are either local MAFF institutions (the Regional Service Centre (RSC) in England and the Divisional Office (DO) in Wales), or unspecified officials, authorised officers and agents within the institutional hierarchy: Your RSC or DO will be checking every claim. An official from the RSC or DO or their authorised officer or agent may also visit you to verify the onfarm position. (IACS booklet p.10)
The depersonalised agency of the bureaucratic system contributes to the power and authority the bureaucracy holds over the individual farmer. The subject positions set up for farmers within the discourse of EU legislation and CAP-MAFF bureaucratic texts are such that farmers are obliged to comply with all CAP regulations and be routinely monitored, evaluated, and assessed. The potential farmers have for making their own choices with regard to dealing with CAP is very limited and only permitted conditionally according to specified provisos. One example from the IACS booklet states: “An agent may be appointed to complete an area application on behalf of an individual or a business provided that he/she has been properly authorised by that individual or business” (IACS booklet p. 9, my italics). Individual farmers are therefore positioned as having very little power and with no say in the CAP regulation making process. Asymmetrical power relations between farmers and agricultural ministries are nothing new. What is different now, in the late 1990’s, is that farming regulations are more socially and geographically disembedded and therefore abstracted from farmers’ local farmworld contexts because they are defined at an inter-Member State level in Brussels. The abstract interpersonal relations pertaining between bureaucratic systems and a bureaucracy’s ‘clients’ is, in theory, rendered less abstract when farmers and MAFF staff or MAFF representatives meet face-to-face. In face-toface bureaucratic encounters, professional mediators symbolically take on the position of the ‘delegates’ of an institution and accomplish what Giddens (1990) refers to as the ‘facework commitment’ on behalf of the faceless institution which employs them. Encounters between farmers and MAFF bureaucracy delegates provide opportunities for the local anchoring or ‘reembedding’ (Giddens 1990) of the abstract, disembedded social relations constituted by the discourse of MAFF texts. Such encounters therefore provide an important window on the practices involved in this aspect of bureaucratic processes and
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Figure 2. Animal Movement form
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the bureaucratic identities and social relations constituted therein. Before looking at some examples of bureaucratic encounters, the following section gives a brief description of the bureaucracy mediators identified in this study.
Bureaucracy mediators The people identified in this study as farmers’ bureaucracy mediators were all located within professional institutions, rather than operating within informal social networks (cf. Hall 1999; Baynham 1993). The first type of institution was the government ministry MAFF/ WOAD (Welsh Office Agricultural Division) and their regional ministry offices. Local ministry office staff dealt with farmers’ queries, helped farmers to complete forms, and checked the forms handed in to them. These people are positioned within the discourse of their institution to enforce the EU regulations that MAFF has to comply with on a local basis. MAFF staff are supportive of farmers to the extent that they provide information and advice on the bureaucratic procedures farmers are legally required to comply with. However, as the local enforcers of these regulations they are centrally located within the institutional structures of bureaucratic power as they operate with regard to farmers. Located more peripherally, yet still implicated in MAFF power relations with farmers were the bureaucracy mediators of private sector organisations such as the Ruthin Farmers Auction. Over recent years, the auction has found itself being increasingly constructed as a site for operating CAP-MAFF bureaucratic administration and control. Since 1995, for example, the Bovine Animals (Records, Identification and Movement) Order has required all livestock auctions to keep a record of all the cattle brought for sale at their premises. These records have to be stored and kept available for inspection by MAFF officials. Implementing this legislation meant reconfiguring the Ruthin Farmers Auction’s local and internal organisational practices (see Jones 1999). As a result, auction staff took on responsibility for collecting, checking and filling in an Animal Movement form during bwcio mewn (booking in) — the time when farmers register the cattle they bring for sale. Still more independent of MAFF are those who work for the National Farmers Union (NFU) and the Farmers Union of Wales (FUW). Faced with ever changing and increasingly complex textually-mediated practices imposed by CAP-MAFF, farmers like Nansi and Dewi now depend on the
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farming unions to provide assistance as the mediators of agricultural bureaucracy. Farming unions therefore play a particularly supportive mediatory role for all farmers, and farm union employees are an important source of the professional help which farmers are advised to seek in completing CAPrelated application forms. The farming unions provide bureaucratic mediation support by arranging form-filling surgeries in their offices in Ruthin where farmers can take their maps and forms to have help with filling them in. Alternatively, farmers arrange individual appointments when they go to the union offices or local MAFF office (if the farmers do not have their own copies of the 1:2,500 scale maps) themselves. Union staff also visit individual farms to do the same work. Of the three kinds of bureaucracy mediator, union employees are symbolically, at least, positioned as the most supportive of farmers. Nevertheless, their mediatory position still involves them directly in the CAP-MAFF bureaucratic control exerted over farmers and their farming activities. In the following section, I look in turn at three examples of bureaucratic mediation in action, one from each of the institutional contexts mentioned above.
Bureaucratic mediation Handing in an IACS form at the local MAFF office This first example is taken from the occasion when I accompanied Mair Jones (MJ) on her final trip to the local MAFF office in Ruthin to hand in her IACS forms. Mair and her family had a farm in Cyffylliog. Like Nansi, Mair took on the responsibility for dealing with the farm paperwork. She told me that she had started off trying to fill the forms in herself. She had then arranged to see someone from the FUW to help her with those parts of the forms which she was unable to do on her own. This involved going with him to the MAFF office to consult the 1:2,500 maps kept there, in order to re-assign numbers to some of the fields her family farmed. This extract is taken from her final visit to hand in the completed forms. She gave her forms in to DO (Divisional Officer), the MAFF employee working in the reception of the local office in Ruthin. A translation of the Welsh part of the initial greetings appears in brackets following each utterance. My commentary appears in italics and square brackets; pauses are marked with a full stop; and = indicates overlapping talk.
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DO: morning MJ: helo . dyma ni et=o . . ‘dwi . . (hello. here we are again . . I’m ..) DO: =dewch i me=wn ‘te . . caewch= y drws (come in then . . close the door) MJ: =o =reit da . iawn (oh right . ok) [MJ goes through the inner door to the small office space behind the counter and I follow] DO: na . na . .um . do you farm any other land?[sound of me getting the camera out of my bag obscures what WO and MJ are saying] at all? . . do you have any new field numbers? [sound of pages turning] right . . . um . these two= up here . do you get the bee=f premium? MJ: =no =no DO: you do=n’t? MJ: =no DO: what about the suckler c=ow? MJ: =no no= DO: = you don’=t ? MJ: =n=o DO: =[xxxxxxxxxx] the same with these two . yes? . . [silence as WO reads through form] four nine two yes ? . . that’s fine [silence again as WO continues looking through the form] . you don’t . . obviously you don’t have that for seven months between those two dates . . but you do . . are you counting it in your total as forage = area? . . . . MJ: =er . it’s ju . . . er . fourteen point two =one DO: =that is you=r MJ: =and fifteen point two oh . um . . . mm . . I don’t know how Mr Williams [of the FUW] . um . Mel . Mel William=s has dealt with it . = . DO: =mhm . . . =yes MJ: um . its that piece . that field that is shared equally that’s . er . that’s the one= DO: =right . ye=s MJ: =um DO: this one is amalgamated with that one . is= it? MJ: =mm= DO: =and that’s the new number for= it? MJ: =yes that’s it . yes . .= DO: =so that and that should be tha=t . MJ: =yes= [counts quietly] =two . three [end of tape] DO:
Figure 3
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DO’s mediation of CAP-MAFF bureaucracy in this event involved checking that Mair had completed her form correctly. The process of bureaucratic mediation was conducted in English, a decision initiated by DO as he switched to English to read aloud from the form (t. 4). His switch marked a transition from the greetings and a negotiation concerning my presence with my request for permission to take photographs (not included in transcript) conducted in Welsh, to the business of form checking. DO could have initiated this switch for a number of reasons including, perhaps, his own familiarity with using English rather than Welsh for bureaucratic purposes, or to reassert his authority after his complying with Mair’s use of Welsh helo . dyma ni eto following his initial greeting ‘morning’ in English (t. 1 & 2). Whatever the reason, his switch symbolically established English as the code for his mediation of bureaucratic discourse in this event and Mair complied with this. While bureaucracy mediators are all positioned as the delegates of MAFF bureaucracy in face-to-face encounters, individual mediators have some scope for negotiating an institutional identity which shares more or less ‘affinity’ (see Hodge & Kress 1988) with MAFF’s bureaucratic voice. In this example, DO made no use of the pronominals ‘I’ or ‘we’ and consequently held no subject position in this interaction. Neither did he use the pronouns ‘they’, ‘them’ and ‘their’ or any modality markers (see Halliday 1985: 85–9) which would signal a possible lack of personal affinity on his part with the bureaucratic formulations he articulated. That is to say, he does not actively align or distance himself from the bureaucratic voice he was mediating. DO consistently maintained impersonal and distant social relations with Mair as he articulated the voice of MAFF bureaucracy. The interaction between them thus mirrored the synthetic interaction between MAFF and the farmer which is implicit in the written IACS form. Just as farmers are assigned the only subject position in IACS forms, Mair was positioned in the same way in this face-to-face encounter by DO, both in the questions he read aloud from the text: ‘do you farm any other land?’ And in those questions which he formulated himself: ‘are you counting it in your total as forage area?’ For the most part, Mair’s replies were the same minimal replies of ‘yes’ or ‘no’ as those required on the form. In this face-to-face encounter, the institutional bureaucratic subject position was implicit in the interaction rather than grammatically visible. This grammatical invisibility of Mair’s interlocutor contributes to the maintenance of the synthetically simulated yet abstract and impersonal social relations between MAFF bureaucrats and local farmers, even in locally contextualised face-to-face encounters.
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As might be expected in bureaucratic mediation, an asymmetry of knowledge and authority is manifest in this encounter. Turn-taking and topic control, two common indices of power asymmetry in social relations (Fairclough 1992a) were entirely controlled by DO. This asymmetry within the local interactional order echoes the power asymmetry between institution and farmer constructed through the MAFF texts. As in the IACS form, DO’s questions were all unmitigated and ‘bald’ (Brown & Levinson 1987). Fairclough (1992a: 143) attributes the absence of the niceties of interpersonal meaning such as politeness in doctor-patient interviews as suggesting a scientific orientation to the patient as a case rather than treating the patient as a person. A similar interpretation could be sustained for the interaction between DO and MJ, whereby DO adopted a bureaucratic orientation to Mair whom he treated as another farmer application rather than as a person. Again, this is comparable to the way that all farmers are positioned as just another case within MAFF’s data base system. In her contributions to this interaction, Mair went along with this depersonalised positioning. This does not seem to be a particularly gendered position since other data of mine also shows male farmers being equally compliant with this institutional positioning. Face-to face interactions are occasions when abstract disembedded social relations become reembedded in local farmworld contexts. This encounter provides an example of the way local farmworld discourse is being colonised by the ideology, values and social relations of MAFF bureaucracy. In the following example, tensions between bureaucratic and farmworld discourses are apparent in the discoursal hybridity of the interaction. Completing an Animal Movement form at the livestock auction I recorded this second example during bwcio mewn ‘booking in’ at the Ruthin Farmers Auction. In this extract, Stan Jones (SJ) was filling out an Animal Movement form for a young farmer I will call Iwan Roberts, in his twenties (IR). My transcription of the original encounter appears on the left of the page. In the English version on the right, the use of bold indicates where Welsh was used in the original. My commentary appears in italics in square brackets; (xxx) represents unintelligible speech; a pause is marked with a full stop. In his mediation of MAFF bureaucracy, as it is constituted in the discourse of the Animal Movement form, Stan Jones articulated the textual categories into talk using two strategies (see Jones 1999 and 2000 for a fuller
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account). The first of these involved reformulating nouns and noun phrases printed in English on the form into oral questions of relational processes of identification in Welsh. This reformulation either re-articulated the English bureaucratic voice of the form as a Welsh bureaucratic voice. For example ‘Name’ on the form becomes be ‘di’r enw? ‘what’s the name?’ (t.7). Or his reformulation re-articulated the voice of English bureaucracy as the Welsh voice of local farmworld discourses e.g. ‘Official Ear Tag’ as [be ‘di] number ‘i chlust ‘i? ‘[what’s] her ear number?’ (t. 18) or ‘Age (Cattle)’ as be ‘di hoed ‘nw ‘how old are they?’ (t. 27). Stan’s second strategy was to read out noun phrases directly from the form as elliptical questions or prompts in English. These are: ‘BSE free?’ (t. 31) and ‘holding number’ (t. 14). Stan made very limited use of this strategy in all the data I recorded at the auction and
Transcript of original encounter
English version of original encounter
1.
SJ: su’dach chi . tywydd garw
1.
2. 3.
IR: (xxx) SJ: ‘dach chi ‘di dod â form do? IR: na s’gyn ‘ ai ‘run SJ: [os] s’gyn chi ‘run . na’i roi rei i chi at (xx) sydd yn hollol (xx) IR:.s’im isio roi roi [y lawr ffor’ ‘cw IR:.s’im gwartheg] ? ffor’ ‘cw?’ lawr SJ: lawr ffor hyn . . be ‘di’r enw ? IR: I. G. Roberts SJ: [wrth ysgrifennu] I.G. ? IR: ia . wel [buwch yn brefu] I G B a S ‘dwch ? SJ: [ysgrifennu enwau yn y rhan o’r fform ar gyfer enwau gwerthwyr] SJ [i IR]: Cae Afon? IR: Cae Afon SJ: number (xx). . holding number three six IR: o double nine . triple nine SJ: triple nine . o double nine ? . IR: ia . nine wedyn SJ: y . number ‘i chlust ‘i ?
2. 3.
4. 5.
6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.
4. 5.
6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.
SJ: how are you . dreadful weather IR: (xxx) SJ: you’ve brought a form have you? IR: no I haven’t got one SJ: [if] you haven’t got one . I’ll give you some for (xx) which is completely (xx) IR: don’t want to put [the cows] down that way? SJ: down this way . . what’s the name? IR: I. G. Roberts SJ: [while writing] I.G. ? IR: yes . well [cow lowing] I G B and S ? SJ: [writing names in section of form which requires the sellers’ names] SJ [to IR]: Cae Afon? IR: Cae Afon SJ: number (xx). . holding number three six IR: oh double nine . triple nine SJ: triple nine . oh double nine ? . IR: yes . then nine SJ: er . her ear number ?
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19. IR: ‘dach chisio’r herd neu’r
19. IR: d’you want the herd [number]
llall ? . herd number dach chi isio ia ? SJ: y . ia IR: ‘A’ seven one five seven SJ: ‘A’ seven one five seven ia (xxx) number seven one five seven IR: y . saith tri pump ‘dio SJ: saith tri pump IR: tri pump . saith dau un dau
or the other ? .the herd number you want is it? 20. SJ: er . yes 21. IR: ‘A’ seven one five seven 22. SJ: ‘A’ seven one five seven yes (xxx) number seven one five seven
26. SJ: saith dau un dau . iawn .
26. SJ: seven two one two . right
[darllen y golofn nesa ar y ffurflen] breed . fresian SJ: be ‘di hoed nw ? IR: no idea SJ: saith saith . wyth . ‘beth felly ? IR: (xx) ia SJ: BSE free? IR: na ‘dyn SJ: nagoedd . [swn troi tudalenau]
[reading the next column on the form] breed . fresian SJ: how old are they ? IR: no idea SJ: seven seven . eight . something like that? IR: (xx) yes SJ: BSE free? IR: no they’re not SJ: no they weren’t . [sound of pages turning]
20. 21. 22.
23. 24. 25.
23. IR: er . it’s seven three five 24. SJ: seven three five 25. IR: three five . seven two one
two
27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.
27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.
Figure 4
therefore, in comparison with DO, appears to be more resistant to the English voice of MAFF bureaucracy. Stan’s articulation of elements of the Animal Movement form accomplished the local reembedding of MAFF’s disembedded identificational categories. Unlike, DO in the previous example, Stan’s use of Welsh and use of elements of farmworld discourse re-contextualised MAFF bureaucracy within locally appropriate farmworld social relations so that this instance of re-embedding represents some local resistance to disembedded and abstract social relations. This interaction between Stan and Iwan Roberts differs from the previous example in its intertextuality, by being a more hybrid combination of elements of bureaucratic and farmworld discourses in Welsh and English. The hybridity of intertextual references is symptomatic of the more complex negotiation and display of identities and social relations than that which appears in the bureaucratically oriented interaction and social relations in the example at the MAFF office. Research on codeswitching has shown how bilinguals and multilin-
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guals make subtle use of the languages in their repertoire to negotiate and display different identities and social relations (e.g. Myers-Scotton 1988, 1993; Heller 1982, 1988). The use of Welsh in this local bureaucratic context seems to have a symbolic effect upon the way people perceive social relations to be more cartrefol (homely) or agos ati (literally, ‘close to you’). The auctioneer I spoke to was certainly very clear that it was important for them to employ Welsh speaking staff in order to avoid the tensions a monolingual English speaker may exacerbate when positioned as MAFF delegate with farmers, the majority of whom were Welsh speakers. Apart from the question ‘dach chi ‘di dod â fform do? ‘you’ve brought a form have you?’ (t. 3), all of Stan’s questions were ‘bald’ and unmitigated like those of DO in the previous example. This is also true of the instances where he re-articulated bureaucratic categories as elements of ‘agos ati’ local farmworld discourse (see turns 18 and 27 above). This illustrates how the use of Welsh in bureaucratic contexts is complex, symbolising both agos atrwydd (closeness) and distance, and being both the code of local familial relations and socially controlling bureaucratic relations. While Stan’s use of Welsh may on one level signal a shared local Welsh identity, his discourse position as MAFF delegate also means that he was complicit in MAFF’s bureaucratic control of farmers. As in the previous example, Stan personally occupied no subject position in the grammar of the interaction, thus maintaining a depersonalised institutional relationship with the farmer whom he does not know personally. This was not always the case, however. In his interaction with some farmers, they addressed Stan directly using either chi (the second person plural) or ti (the second person singular). For example, the first farmer to arrive at the auction one morning (someone Stan knew well) brought his forms over to Stan saying: ti’r ddwy gynta ‘here’s the first two for you’ (PDDSMO21/2/A060–068). This mixture of personal and impersonal, bureaucratic and local farmworld social relations is characteristic of Stan’s more ambivalent positioning as MAFF delegate in a local farmworld context where he knew most of the farmers he dealt with, some of them very well indeed. A similar conflict between the position of MAFF delegate and the position of a member of the local farming community is also negotiated in mediation encounters between farming union representatives and farmers as in the following example.
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Getting professional help with IACS forms from farming unions In this final example, Gareth Williams (GW) a farmer in his twenties and his father Meirion Williams (MW) had arranged to have help with completing their IACS forms from Aled Rees (AR) who worked for the NFU. I joined them at the MAFF office in Ruthin to observe and document this event. Gareth and Meirion Williams and Aled Rees are all neighbours and this extract therefore provides an example of bureaucracy mediation where the mediator and farmers know each other quite well. In Figure 5, my transcription of the original encounter appears on the left of the page. In the English version on the right, the use of bold indicates where Welsh was used in the original. My commentary appears in italics in square brackets; (xxx) represents unintelligible speech; a pause is marked with a full stop. In contrast with the first two examples, this bureaucratic encounter is particularly striking in that the social relations are more anchored in local farmworld discourse than in the disembedded and impersonal discourse of MAFF bureaucracy. In his position of power as bureaucracy mediator, Aled Rees maintained overall control over the interaction by structuring the different stages of the form filling process and making decisions based on his knowledge and authority within the bureaucratic system. Nevertheless, turntaking appears collaboratively managed rather than overtly asymmetrically controlled by Aled. In contrast with the previous examples, the farmers were less powerlessly positioned and took on some of the interactional control. For example, Gareth Williams gives directions to Aled reit wyt ti isio four six two eight ‘right you want four six two eight’ (t.13); he also asked questions ti ‘di cael two seven two five do? ‘you’ve got two seven two five have you?’ (t. 9). Aled and Gareth positioned themselves as collaborators in this textual process. This was realised linguistically in their use of ni (we) as articulated by Aled as follows: gadwn ni hwne ar ben ‘i hun fel y mae o … ‘we’ll leave that on its own as it is …’ (not in transcript). This excerpt provides an example of the complex social relations that are negotiated by people like Stan and Aled when they are positioned as bureaucracy mediators for farmers whom they know quite well. The use of personal pronouns is a useful indicator of social relations. This is more apparent in Welsh than in English where the second person singular pronoun ‘you’ can be articulated using either the plural form chi to confer deference and mark social distance, or the singular form ti which signals familiarity and social proximity.
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Transcript of original encounter 1. GW: lle ‘dan ni’n mynd i wan? ‘se’n well i orffen y tir . ym ni Sgeibion Fawr gynta? 2. AR: wel na ‘dio’m yn gneud gwahaniaeth ynde 3. GW: ‘dach chi’m yn gwybod lle mae nymbars fifty (xxx) nac’dach? 4. AR: na ‘den . ‘nai adio nw [i’w restr] fel mae nw’n dod 5. GW: reit . ym ….. 6.
7. 8.
GW: [yn symud ei fysedd dros y map wrth chwilio am eu caeau] ym . ym ym . three two four oh . yn un cae . mae hwnnw ‘fath a llynnedd siwr AR: ydi? GW: y . ia . ‘ma three four five five ‘run fath
….. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.
English version of original encounter 1. GW: where do we go to now? would it be better to finish the land . um ours Sgeibion Fawr first? 2. AR: well no it doesn’t make any difference you know 3. GW: you don’t know where numbers fifty are do you? 4. 5.
AR: no we don’t . I’ll add them [to his list] as they come GW: right. um
….. 6.
7. 8.
GW: [moving his finger across the map searching for fields of theirs] um . um um . three two four oh . is one field . that’s the same as last year surely AR: is it? GW: er . yes . three four five is the same
….. GW: mae . ti ‘di cael two seven two five do? AR: [yn edrych drwy ei restr] ym . do ‘dwi ‘di cael honno GW: ma’ four oh one seven ‘run fath AR: ia GW: reit wyt ti isio four six two eight . wan mae hwn yn wahanol
Figure 5
9. 10. 11. 12. 13.
GW: [ ] is . you’ve got two seven two five have you? AR: [looking through his list] um . yes I’ve had that one GW: four oh one seven is the same AR: yes GW: right you want four six two eight . now this is different
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The management of conflicting subject positions and social identities is apparent in the way Aled and Gareth mixed their use of personal pronouns as they addressed each other. Most of the time they made use of the familial pronoun ti as in Gareth’s turns 9 and 13 above and Aled’s turn: so be ‘ti’n neud ‘lly . six seven four five . a six seven four six hefo’i gilydd? ‘so what are you doing then . six seven four five . and six seven four six together ?’(not included in transcript). On other occasions, Gareth positioned Aled as a MAFF bureaucracy delegate as in ‘dach chi’m yn gwybod lle mae nymbars fifty (xxx) nac’dach? ‘you (pl) don’t know where numbers fifty are do you?’ (t. 3). Aled’s response na ‘den ‘no we don’t’ in turn 4 reinforced this position and identified himself as someone who was familiar with the bureaucratic system. Depending upon how well they know the farmers they are mediating for, union staff and auction staff like Stan Jones negotiate complex institutional identities which mix a socially distant bureaucratic position with a socially closer position as neighbour, friend or even relative. As bureaucracy mediators, Aled Rees and Stan Jones both mitigate the controlling dimension of MAFF bureaucracy. At the same time, local farmworld social relations take on a controlling dimension when community members become, through their work, positioned as MAFF delegates.
Concluding remarks In this chapter, my purpose has been to investigate how bureaucracy shapes and moulds local identities and social relations. The farmworld of Welsh farmers and people employed within the local agricultural industry is heavily influenced by the pressures of global economics and EU common agricultural policy reforms. The resulting increase in the bureaucratisation of the agricultural industry has a direct effect upon local farming social relations. I have shown how, in CAP-MAFF’s bureaucratic discourse, farmers are disembedded from their local contexts of action and interaction. Taking on the voice of written bureaucratic discourse in bureaucracy mediation events accomplishes the reembedding of bureaucratic social relations in local contexts of interaction. Face-to-face encounters between MAFF delegates and farmers can become objectified to the extent that a person may exist physically in a local context but not have their subjectivity articulated within the discourse of the
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local encounter. The disembedded social relations which operate within abstract bureaucratic systems then also become a feature of local social relations. Giddens (1990) talks about the disembedding of social relations in terms of physical and temporal presence/absence configurations. What a linguistic analysis of the talk and texts in bureaucratic encounters reveals is that physicality is not, in itself a guarantor of subject ‘presence’. It reveals that using the language of bureaucratic discourse accomplishes the disembedding of social relations even when the people involved in a particular activity are physically located in the same local time and space. This ultimately has quite profound implications for human relations; people’s notions of self and their interaction with others. However, bureaucratic discourse is not monolithic in its colonisation of local farmworld discourse and some of the data presented here shows local resistance to bureaucratic positioning. Bureaucratic values, ideologies and social relations are also locally recontextualised, revealing some of the tensions between the identities and social relations of abstract bureaucratic and local farmworld discourses. As institutional delegates with institutional power and knowledge, bureaucracy mediators play a very significant role in shaping the extent to which local relations become bureaucratised.
Acknowledgments I collaborated closely with a number of people in the research and analysis of this study. For the purposes of this chapter, I want to thank in particular: Dewi and Nansi Wilkinson, Mair Jones, Stan Jones, Emyr Roberts, Paul Roberts, Aled Rees, Emyr Owen, Mel Williams and Meirion and Gareth Williams who have checked the contents of this chapter and given their permission for its publication.
Notes 1.
IACS stands for ‘Integrated Administration and Control System’.
2.
NFU is the ‘National Farmers Union’.
3.
Fairclough uses the term ‘synthetic personalisation’ to refer to “all phenomena in strategic discourse, whether in its consumerist or bureaucratic varieties, where relational and subjective values are manipulated for instrumental reasons. This may be a matter of constructing fictitious individual persons, for instance as the addresser and addressee in an advertisement, or of manipulating the subject positions of, or the relationships between, actual individual persona (in the direction of equality, solidarity, intimacy or whatever), as in interviews” (1989: 217).
SECTION III
Creating spaces for multilingual literacies in local community contexts The two chapters in this section present detailed accounts of community-based projects in two multilingual urban contexts in the North of England: in Sheffield and Manchester, respectively. Both accounts are set within a wider social and political context. In contrast to the research-based chapters in this volume, these two chapters draw on the experience and reflections of educational practitioners who have worked on different kinds of community projects, designed for adults and for children from local linguistic minority groups. What these two chapters bring to the volume is illuminating insights into the cultural politics involved in developing such projects in multilingual urban contexts. The chapter by Ahmed Gurnah (Chapter 12) describes two forms of community-based educational intervention which were initiated in Sheffield in the late 1980s and which have been developed over the last decade. The first form of intervention was a literacy campaign which was launched in collaboration with the local Yemeni community. The campaign was a response to demands from a community faced with growing unemployment and social exclusion. The existing provision for the teaching of English as a Second Language to adults was not widely taken up by members of this community and it was felt that a different form of educational intervention was needed. The main focus of the campaign was on the development of English literacy so as to widen employment opportunities for those involved. In this chapter, Ahmed Gurnah charts the planning and development of the campaign and attributes its success to the close involvement of members of the community from the outset, the recruitment of young people from the community as literacy tutors, the emphasis on building on the cultural knowledge of those involved and the bilingual (Arabic/English) approach adopted.
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He shows how other community initiatives took off in this local Yemeni community as a result of the literacy campaign and how the Yemeni campaign came to provide a model for similar work with other linguistic minority groups in the city. The second form of educational intervention discussed in this chapter is the establishment of a local association of community language schools. Ahmed Gurnah describes how this association contributed to the work of voluntary schools and classes in the city run by linguistic minority groups, by helping to coordinate bids for funding, by countering the negative image of this form of educational provision within the mainstream schools, and by providing a meeting-place for children and young people from linguistic minority groups scattered across the city. The chapter by Yasmin Alam provides an account of a community publishing initiative aimed at women of South Asian origin in the Manchester area, called the Asian Women’s Writing and Publishing Project. This was initiated by Gatehouse Books, a community publishing collective in the city which works with adult literacy students to publish their writing, to make it available for others to read and to democratise the publishing process. The chapter therefore opens with a brief history of Gatehouse, charting the development of some of its working practices. The main body of the chapter is then devoted to an account of the way in which the Asian Women’s Writing and Publishing Project has unfolded. Yasmin Alam, one of the two bilingual tutoreditors on the project, describes the books that are currently being published, presents profiles of women who have been involved in the project and outlines some of the issues that have arisen from this collective work. She draws attention in particular to the constraints on the participation of some women of South Asian origin and to the issues relating to the development of work of this kind in a multilingual context. The authors of both these chapters draw attention to the social, economic and political contexts in which their respective projects have been developed. They describe the social exclusion and cultural inequity faced by many men and women from local minority groups, in a more immediate and powerful way than in the research-based chapters. Ahmed Gurnah focuses his attention in particular on the social class dimension of inequality, while Yasmin Alam foregrounds the gender dimension, providing revealing insights into the ways in which some South Asian women are positioned within their own households and local communities. She reminds us of the need to take account of asymmetrical relations of power in both private and public domains of life.
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The authors of both chapters draw on the work of Paulo Freire, demonstrating its relevance to work on literacy with linguistic minority groups in multilingual urban contexts. The educational interventions that both authors have been involved in have set emancipatory goals and have prioritised social justice and cultural rights. The projects they describe are examples of attempts to create alternative spaces within local community contexts for learning, reading and writing in English and in the other languages of Britain. As the authors demonstrate, such spaces offer considerable potential for the affirmation of cultural difference and for enabling women to have a voice in the public domain.
CHAPTER 12
Languages and literacies for autonomy Ahmed Gurnah
Simba mwenda kimya, ndio mlaye nyama (A Kiswahili proverb) The lion that moves quietly is the one that eats the meat
Local literacy campaigns: challenging cultural inequity Those of us who campaign for the rights of minority ethnic groups are constantly having to challenge the inequalities in contemporary institutions. When we look at the treatment of non-European languages in the academy, we are disturbed by the absence of cultural equity there. We are also outraged to see how many youngsters from minority ethnic groups in Britain end up not acquiring the literacies of their cultural inheritance. When we talk of all these inequalities, we are, in fact, seeking redress against linguistic and cultural discrimination. However, in our campaigns for linguistic and cultural rights, it is important to remember that people from minority groups do not just passively accept the conditions they find themselves in but are often actively engaged, both individually and collectively, in struggles against these conditions. It is crucial therefore that in analysing each local experience of educational inequality and in opting for particular forms of intervention, this important transformative potential should not be overlooked. The potential for transforming lives is nowhere more evident than in the efforts of adults and children from minority ethnic groups to learn to read and write, either in the dominant language or in local community languages. By seeking to ensure that their children learn the languages and literacies of their
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cultural inheritance, parents from minority groups often engage in difficult struggles of an educational, political and economic nature. In addition to engaging in the cultural politics associated with the teaching of the languages and literacies which form part of their cultural inheritance, they also have to face discrimination and institutional barriers. When they seek fluency for themselves in the spoken language of the dominant group or when they attempt to acquire literacy in that language, they begin to tackle their social exclusion. In this chapter, I wish to portray the liberating energy which emerges from such struggles by looking at two specific types of projects undertaken in the city of Sheffield between the late 1980s and the early 1990s. These are: 1. The Yemeni Literacy Campaign and subsequent Community Literacy Campaigns launched with other minority ethnic groups; 2. The establishment of the Association of Sheffield Community Language Schools. Projects of this kind are not exclusive to Sheffield. They are to be found in many other cities in Britain and in other parts of Europe; cities which, for twenty or thirty years, have been the destination for refugees and for migrant workers from the weaker economies of Europe and of the countries of the South. Such projects are also to be found in the newer cities of Australia and New Zealand and in the large North American cities, with their Hispanic minorities and with their populations of South East Asian and East Asian origin. Millions of new urban settlers around the world are determined to preserve their original languages, in addition to acquiring the languages of their new countries. In the contemporary world, with greater intensity of people movement and with rapid changes in communication, it has become much easier for people to maintain and develop cultural and family ties across diasporas. That, in turn, is playing an important part in the formation of new global cultures (Gurnah 1997). The power of struggles over languages is nowhere more obvious than when linked to social and communal demands and to competing knowledge claims. It is clear to me that self-help efforts by community groups make real the argument that language is political. The social and communal struggles over languages, literacies and culture in Britain have been long and difficult. I am well aware of the commitment and the personal costs for those who have been involved in such struggles. It is a privilege to have witnessed some of them at close quarters.
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In addition to challenging social exclusion, local struggles for educational rights constitute a powerful strategy for the affirmation of identity and the regeneration of community life. Involvement in such local struggles widens people’s outlook, creates a genuine political mobilisation and an awareness of citizenship rights. People confident in their own cultural inheritance and language of origin are in a better position to learn new languages and take on new cultural practices and, even, new forms of employment. It is in this context that we should view the modest efforts made by working class people from minority ethnic groups in British cities to preserve their languages and to learn English. By describing two local educational initiatives in Sheffield in the 1980s, I hope to be able to demonstrate the potential of such initiatives for community regeneration, even in the bleakest of social and economic conditions.
The Yemeni Literacy Campaign in Sheffield The first example I would like to turn to is the Yemeni Literacy Campaign in Sheffield. This Campaign was started in 1988 in response to demands from the Yemeni community (Gurnah 1992). In the previous decade and a half, the city had been through massive industrial and economic changes. The closure of large numbers of engineering and steel plants had led to the loss of more than 40,000 jobs. Many working class families were affected by these changes, but particularly unskilled workers from minority ethnic groups. As many Yemeni men had worked in these industries, they represented, proportionally, the largest numbers of unemployed people in the city. The need for some form of educational intervention became evident in the 1980s. Very few Yemeni men and women had acquired literacy skills in English. In February 1987, a local survey carried out by Sheffield City Council (1988a), reported that 82% of the Yemeni men interviewed had indicated that they were not literate in English and, at the same time, 67% of the Yemeni women respondents had reported low levels of English literacy. Furthermore, 72% of the men and 75% of the women were unemployed (Sheffield City Council 1988b). 87% of the men had settled in Britain before 1965 and had therefore been residents of the city for over two decades. Their family members had come to join them later. The implications of those statistics were incalculable. Whilst the men
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were still in work, they had been contributing to the economic life of the city and paying local taxes, but they had had few opportunities to learn to read and write English. This left them in a very difficult position with regard to opportunities for seeking new forms of employment. While the community had no obvious solution to the problem at the time, it was certainly vigorously searching for one, hence the request for some kind of educational intervention. In 1987, when the need for English literacy was discussed with them, the idea of launching a literacy campaign was first mooted. It soon began to gather support and to generate considerable enthusiasm among people in different age groups in the Yemeni community. Working with the local education authority, the Campaign started with just twelve Yemeni literacy assistants in 1988. It was decided that, for sustainable success, the Campaign should involve young, unemployed people from the Yemeni community between the ages of 18–26 who could support the learning of the adults. All twelve of the literacy assistants who were recruited were from this age group and they included men and women. The aim was to provide an opportunity for these young people to participate in something socially meaningful, from which they would also benefit. The scheme that was eventually devised was that, for half a week, they would receive training in supporting English literacy learning (half a day) and also be directly involved in working with adult learners in their community. During the other half of the week, they would attend specialised classes at a local university to provide them with an orientation to academic studies. The programme was to run for a year, in the first instance, then, on successful completion of this programme, the literacy assistants would be offered a place in a university programme of their choice, in Social Sciences, Education or Humanities at one of the local universities. In the event, many sought not to go straight into a university course and got jobs instead, but this experience gave them a taster, and later on, a number of them did go on to do a university degree (Gurnah 1992). The approach adopted in the campaign We first investigated why adult literacy classes had previously been unsuccessful. This was done through consultation with learners already enrolled in local classes and with people who had chosen not to attend the classes. We asked why they thought the classes had not met their needs and took account of their responses in planning the literacy campaign. We had, in fact, predicted
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many of the responses we received: many said that what they sought was respect as people, they also wanted real content in the curriculum and they expected their lessons to be given by experienced tutors with a broad cultural background. The fact that some of the people responsible for launching the Campaign already had previous experience of literacy campaigns in South countries and/or an awareness of the forms of cultural knowledge brought to the class by the learners proved to be an advantage. It helped to define the principles that were to underpin the Campaign, to pay attention to the recruitment of appropriate staff, to cultivate enabling attitudes and to offer culturally appropriate provision. After we had done some initial work in the community, we identified a number of principles which were to guide our practice throughout the campaign. I discuss each one of these in turn below. They will, I am sure, have resonances for anybody who has worked in the adult literacy field. Community leadership and a self help ethos The first principle we recognised was that, unless members of the Yemeni community took the lead in organising the day to day running of the campaign themselves and unless they exerted their full support for it, contributed their own resources and drew on their own networks to encourage participation, it would fail, as many others before it had done. This meant, for example, using the family and community contacts of the literacy assistants and working closely with some community leaders for the purpose of gaining the support of the wider community. Public meetings were addressed by community leaders, people were visited in their homes and had ample opportunity to voice their concerns and the aims of the Campaign were clearly explained. For it to work well, we felt that it was necessary to make sure there was real community leadership where it mattered. To achieve this, we set up a Campaign management group. The group was made up of a majority of Yemenis and a minority of teachers and local education authority staff. What this group did was to make policy and decide on the direction and conduct of the Campaign. The group included two representatives of the literacy assistants and two community leaders, one of whom chaired the meetings. The role of the education authority staff was to advise. Since public resources were involved, the Campaign had to be run in a properly accountable fashion under community leadership (Gurnah 1992).
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Literacy assistants from the community The second principle we followed was that of identifying the most suitable people to be the literacy workers on the Campaign. As I have indicated above, we decided that young people from the learners’ local community would be assigned the role of literacy assistants. This strategy went a long way towards creating trust. There was a symbiosis between ‘teacher’ and ‘student’ which benefitted the young assistants as much as it did their parents, relatives and fellow members of the community. A bilingual approach The third principle we worked with was to build on the existing literacy capabilities and the bilingual experience of the learners. Most of them were fluent in spoken Yemeni Arabic and could also read and write Modern Standard Arabic. Most of the young people were also fluent in spoken Arabic but few were literate and they were certainly not as comfortable with writing in Arabic as the older people were. The young people had a good command of written English. They therefore had a lot to share with their elders, but they also had something to learn. So the campaign was conceived of as an exchange of learning experiences, with the young tutors learning about the literacies of their cultural inheritance while the older learners developed their confidence in reading and writing in English. Cultural relevance The principle of cultural relevance was central to the whole enterprise. We gave particular attention to it. We did our best to ensure that any materials we used were relevant to the daily lives and cultural background of the learners. We also tried to build on the cultural knowledge that the learners brought to the learning process and attempted to provide them with the English literacies that they felt they needed. From the Yemeni literacy campaign to a wider community development programme Further developments flowed from this initial educational intervention with the older members of the community and this new kind of investment in young people. Over the next ten years, we saw the gradual unfolding of a community development programme which was to have a considerable impact on the lives
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of Yemenis in Sheffield. The achievements of the programme can be briefly summed up as follows: The emancipation of young Yemeni women Eight of the twelve literacy assistants recruited to the Campaign had been women. In the beginning, we had anticipated that there would be little likelihood of getting women involved. Our success in recruiting women was largely due to the fact that those of us who were trying to get the campaign off the ground were bilingual and knew many local families. Once the eight women were recruited, they found that, by working closely with community leaders, they were able to negotiate to run classes in a range of community venues, including male preserves such as Mosques and cafes, without too much protest from older men in the community. Indeed, by the end of the first year, most of the fathers of the women who were recruited as literacy assistants were boasting openly about how intelligent and enterprising their daughters were. The impact of the Campaign on Yemeni women was far-reaching. Not only did it change the lives of the eight literacy assistants, but those of other young women in the community too. Previously, their main expectation was that they would never seek employment and would merely await an early marriage. Within a period of five years, young Yemeni women in this community had become self confident seekers of education and employment outside the home. Marriage was still expected, but only as a choice among others and as complimentary to those choices. The impact of this transformation on the working class Yemeni families in Sheffield is difficult to assess, but this is what the community programme had helped to bring about. The eight women literacy assistants were the mainstay of the Campaign in the first year. After that, a number of them went on to university or got jobs in the local college or in one of the local authorities in the region. This happened without a major upheaval in gender relations within the Yemeni community. The women’s bid for change in their own lives was strengthened by the development of a Yemeni Centre. And, it is to the development of this Centre which I now turn. The Yemeni Economic and Training Centre The development of this Centre was a key dimension of the community development work stimulated by the Campaign. An old Vestry Hall was identified as a possible site for this Centre and, with the support of Sheffield
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City Council, an application for funds was put forward for Urban Programme funding from central government. The bid was successful and this made it possible to turn the crumbling nineteenth century building into a Yemeni community centre. The main aims of the centre were to stimulate the economic development of the community and to provide education and training. Numerous education programmes were organised at the new Centre. These programmes were targeted, in particular, at those people who had not benefited very much from going to local drop-in centres. Through these programmes, close collaboration was developed with the local colleges. The creation of new opportunities for young Yemenis Through the various projects initiated at the Centre, new jobs were created and, even more importantly, young Yemenis began to get a sense that there were future employment opportunities for them despite the massive closures of local heavy industries and the high levels of unemployment in the city. There was now more optimism after a bleak ten to fifteen years of mass unemployment for the older Yemeni steel workers. For the first time too, young Yemenis came to have expectations about their futures which included higher education. A decade prior to this, such expectations would not have been expressed, despite the fact that education has always been highly regarded by Muslim families. A move towards new forms of political participation Another perceptible outcome of the Campaign and the community development work which followed it was a change in the nature of the participation of members of this community in local politics. Up to this point, the Yemeni community in Sheffield had been closely involved with the local Communist Party and had thus become isolated from the local City Council and also from other minority group organisations. Through the Campaign, community leaders came to establish new contacts and to engage in new forms of political participation, while still maintaining an independent radical perspective. New forms of engagement with the local authority allowed members of the community to become significant players in local politics, as seekers of resources. They also became aware of other sources of community support, from public charities, national foundations and the European Social Fund.
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The development of literacy campaigns in other minority communities The success of the Yemeni literacy programme generated considerable interest in other minority communities in Sheffield. The idea of launching further campaigns came to be seen as a workable one. Similar educational interventions took place in other local communities, using different written languages such as Bengali, Chinese, Creole, Somali and Urdu. By 1996, the original team of twelve literacy assistants had grown to a team of 84, with participants from all the largest minority populations in Sheffield. This reflected both the amount of English literacy education for adults needed in the city and the minority community organisations’ determination to do something about it. Each of these communities mobilised their own meagre social resources to contribute to the local campaigns. Young people were involved in each of the subsequent campaigns, as they had been in the original Yemeni initiative. An emerging model for working with minority communities The Yemeni Literacy Campaign provided a new model for the delivery of educational support to adults from minority communities. The Campaign had an evident impact on the thinking of the local college, the local authority, and, to a lesser extent, the outreach division of one of the local universities. From the outset, the Campaign worked for change in the nature of local provision for the teaching and learning of English as a Second Language. This particular impact has been lasting and positive. In addition to the impact on local educational services, a number of other departments within the local authority became aware of the effectiveness of our general approach and applied some of its principles in services as diverse as: the Careers Service, the Youth Service and Housing (through its Environmental Stewardship project). I think there might also have been a ripple effect in other local authorities and in the adult education sector more generally, given the number of enquiries we received about the Campaign and given the number of visitors who came to Sheffield to see what we were doing. But, the most important achievement of the Campaign has to be that, in their struggle against disadvantage and racism, members of local minority communities took bold steps to improve their lives and transform their conditions.
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The Association of Sheffield Community Language Schools I turn now to the second community-based project that has been developed in Sheffield over the last decade. This is my second example of how community development can flow from urban educational programmes which take languages and literacies as their starting point. This second project was related to the teaching of minority community languages to children. It culminated in the setting up of the Association of Sheffield Community Language Schools in the late 1980s. The main aim of this initiative was to try to support and coordinate the activities of about 60 voluntary language schools and classes in the city which were teaching about 16 different languages. These schools and classes were run by groups from different linguistic minority communities. They catered for approximately 2,000 students, with about one sixth of these being over 16 years of age. Some of this educational provision had been in existence since the 1960s and early 1970s (Alioua and Tomazou 1996). The story of such groups is around us in all major cities in Britain and has been documented in some detail (Linguistic Minorities Project 1985; Turner 1989; Geach and Broadbent 1989; Alladina and Edwards 1991; Li Wei 1993). The Association in Sheffield was born from discussions that took place over several years between various community groups and local education authority officers who managed their grants and supported their work. In the years before the setting up of the Association, the dominant climate in the city was one of scepticism about the educational contribution made by the voluntary schools. Local teachers generally considered the voluntary classes to be out of touch with the broad aims of education as defined by the state schools. Their main complaint was that the voluntary classes were run by teachers who had not been trained in Britain and some classes for children from Muslim families were organised by Mullahs whose main concern was religious instruction and not language education. In addition, the state school teachers expressed worries about the children getting tired because they had to handle a double dose of learning, at the state school and then in after-school classes. A number of mainstream teachers argued that the teaching methods of the voluntary classes left the learners feeling bored and that the content of some of the classes was somewhat political. The response of minority parents and local community associations to these criticisms was that these were the views of monolingual educators who did not recognise the importance for children of learning the languages and
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literacies of their cultural inheritance. They also argued that working class parents from minority groups had the right to seek additional learning opportunities for their children since the provision in the state schools was not meeting their needs. And lastly, they drew attention to the double standard which seemed to be operating, which meant that additional work at home for middle class children or attendance at Sunday school in local churches were never presented as ‘problem’. Minority parents and community groups were also concerned about the precariousness of the funding that came from the local education authority to support the schools. From a relatively small budget came enough money to help with, for example, the purchase of books for the children in their classes. But, the local education authority periodically came under pressure to cut back this budget. So, when the Association of Community Language Schools was first set up, its mission was to enable different groups to pull together, defend their interests, create a progressive curriculum and train their volunteer tutors, and to seek more stable funding. An office was provided free of charge by a local school and four part-time staff were appointed: an Administrative Assistant, a Development Worker, an Academic Officer and a Volunteer Tutor Training Organiser (Alioua and Tomazou 1996). Working with different partners, the Association showed great skill and effectiveness in obtaining funds from different sources, such as the Further Education Funding Council and the European Social Regeneration Fund. Working with the local education authority and the adult education college, it also developed training for volunteer tutors and did some curriculum development work. Since it has been set up, this Association has established a substantial presence in the city. Much still needs to be done for it to realise its full potential. The ways in which the voluntary schools and classes contribute to community life The main, and rather modest, aim of the voluntary language classes and schools in Sheffield, and elsewhere, is to make sure that children who were born in Britain learn the languages and literacies of their parents and grandparents. Despite the fact that they have been poorly resourced over the years, they have, on the whole, been more successful than state schools in enabling students to learn to speak, read and write languages other than English.
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Secondly, they make a very important social contribution to the life of local communities and have done so for the last thirty years. They bring together children who have a similar cultural heritage on a regular basis. Many children from linguistic minority groups in Britain’s cities live within the same local area. But, a substantial minority do not and children with similar backgrounds can also be scattered across different state schools. The voluntary language schools have therefore helped to reduce the sense of isolation that some minority students experience and offer Afro-Caribbean and Asian students a crucial counter-weight to the pressures of dealing with racism. Thirdly, these voluntary schools have contributed to the affirmation of distinct cultural identities and to the building of learners’ self-confidence. One of the most corrosive experiences for students from all minority groups is the constant questioning, and even ridiculing, of their basic cultural, social and moral concerns by members of the dominant ethnic group. This is what Pierre Bourdieu (1991) captures so well in his notion of “symbolic violence”. Fourthly, the voluntary schools offer a focus for the growing social and political awareness of students from minority ethnic groups. They provide an alternative forum for young people to explore their own histories and those of members of their community, Thus, students get the opportunity to acquire different perspectives from the ones they encounter in their state school. A striking example of this emerged in the late 1960s, when young Yemenis were learning about the recent history of Yemen at school from the point of view of the colonial power. This account was contradicted by their parents, who had themselves been witnesses to or participated in the political events which had unfolded in Yemen a few years beforehand. At first, the young people were more inclined to accept the accounts of their teachers than those of their own parents. During this period, the local community schools were able to play a key role in legimitising the parents’ accounts. It would not be an exaggeration to say that these schools continue to serve the important function of challenging post-colonial attitudes here in Britain.
Concluding comments I have focused on these two local initiatives: the Yemeni Literacy Campaign and the establishment of the Association of Community Language Schools in Sheffield because I feel that they provide illuminating examples of the ways in
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which local community-based projects, which begin with a focus on the teaching of minority languages and literacies can also contribute to the creation of greater cultural equity, to the dismantling of the social and institutional barriers that have long been in place for some minority groups and to the facilitation of greater dialogue across generations within those groups. Such educational interventions have considerable emancipatory potential. Paulo Freire’s profound insights into the role of literacy in working for social justice and emancipation are as relevant today in inner city contexts such as Sheffield as they were in the rural hinterland of Brazil in the 1960s. As Freire put it: “the fundamental effort of education is to help with the liberation of people, never their domestication. You must be convinced that when people reflect on their domination they begin a first step in changing their relationship to the world” (Freire 1971, cited in Shor 1993: 25).
CHAPTER 13
Gender, literacy and community publishing in a multilingual context Yasmin Alam
Introduction This chapter is a description and a reflection upon a community publishing project based at Gatehouse Books in Manchester. The project is specifically aimed at women of South Asian origin who are enrolled in classes of English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) in the Manchester area and has been running since January 1997. It is known as the Asian Women’s Writing and Publishing Project and I am one of two bilingual tutor-editors. In the first section of the chapter, I present a brief overview of the history of Gatehouse, tracing the roots of its philosophy and providing a brief description of its working practices. This section is based on interviews I conducted with Gatehouse staff, on research I have done into the history of community publishing and working class writers’ workshops. The quotations in this section are all taken from my interviews with Gatehouse staff In the second section of the chapter, I turn to my account of the Asian Women’s Writing and Publishing Project. Throughout this section, I reflect on my experience of being a bilingual literacy tutor and editor at Gatehouse. I describe the way in which we have been working, give brief profiles of the women involved and present the six books by student-writers which we are preparing for publication. My account also refers to some of the issues that I have faced as a bilingual tutor-editor. I focus, in particular, on the factors militating against women’s participation in the project. I argue that the diffi-
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culties faced by the project so far stem from the fact that Gatehouse’s philosophy and work practices do not take full account of the ways in which the politics of literacy are gendered among minority groups of South Asian origin in this urban context. I point out that there are still key issues that we need to address if Gatehouse is to broaden its work from a largely monolingual context to a multilingual one and take account of cultural and linguistic difference. Up to now, as issues have arisen from the Asian Women’s Writing and Publishing Project, there has been an admirable openness and willingness to address them, but there has been insufficient time for discussion and reflection across the organisation as a whole. As one of the founder members of Gatehouse recently remarked to me, whilst we were discussing the challenges involved in encouraging writing by bilingual women who are ESOL students: “The learning is happening because it has to, but the time to reflect is very scarce”. It is my hope that the writing of this chapter can contribute to this ongoing discussion and reflection.
The context of Gatehouse’s emergence and development The Gatehouse Project was established in the late 1970s, in recognition of the quality of the work being written by students attending Adult Basic Education classes at the Abraham Moss Centre, in Manchester. According to one of the original Abraham Moss literacy tutors, it was the quality of this writing that “called for publication” because it reflected the lives and experiences of people, who had, up till then, had relatively little opportunity to develop their literacy skills in English (their mother tongue). As a founding member of Gatehouse recently reflected, “there was, at that time, virtually nothing for people reading at beginner level in Adult Basic education, only children’s books”. The Curriculum Development Leader for Adult Literacy within Manchester’s Local Education Authority was also very concerned about this issue and, indeed, he played an influential role in the formation of Gatehouse and in helping to obtain the funding for employing nine workers. Three of these were adult literacy tutors and three were adult literacy students. One of the literacy students had been active in the production of a student magazine at the Abraham Moss Centre. There was also an administrative worker and an art teacher. Initially, the funds to support Gatehouse came from the local education authority. Once charitable status was obtained, the organisation’s grant
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from the local authority came to be supplemented by financial support from a wide range of charities. From the beginning, the whole team were involved in developing ways of working with adult literacy students (later termed ‘Basic Skills’ students1). Students were encouraged to produce writing, some of which was then selected for publication as illustrated books for adults with reading and writing difficulties. In their refusal to label such students as ‘deficient’ or ‘defective’ and in the act of encouraging and valuing the self-expression of these students, this work was at the forefront of progressive educational thinking in Britain. One of the Gatehouse editors described her role as: “working with individuals who have difficulties with reading and writing in English, both in order to help them improve their skills but also, crucially, to help them overcome the sense of inferiority and isolation that they experience, so that they begin to see themselves as a part of a bigger group — as basic education students, as women, and so on. Such students are encouraged to connect, to join or form groups as they become more confident”. Projects at Gatehouse have ranged from working with white and AfricanCaribbean women and men from working-class backgrounds, to work with older people, people with mental health problems and, more recently, between 1994 and 1997, two family literacy Projects which mainly attracted Somali refugees from an inner city area of Manchester. As another founder member of Gatehouse explained, the main purpose of these two most recent projects was: “to foster fruitful interaction between family members in the school setting, using work the children were doing in school as a stimulus. These projects also set out to build the adults’ confidence in speaking, reading and writing English, using a language experience approach”. The central aim of all these Projects has been the same: to develop literacy abilities “with working-class and other marginalised people” (Woodin 1999). The ideal which Gatehouse workers have striven to achieve has been the production of books interesting enough on a human level to have a wide appeal, with clear writing in English which, at the same time, does not standardise the writer’s language beyond recognition. Furthermore, texts have been chosen for publication on the basis of whether they are representative enough to be relevant to specific communities, while still expressing the individuality and needs of the particular adult learner/writer of the text. As their work developed, Gatehouse staff came up against some difficult questions: which students’ writing was to be chosen for publication? Who was
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to decide what constitutes ‘good’ writing? The working-class readers and ‘Basic Skills’ students at whom the writing was aimed, or middle-class literacy tutors and book reviewers? Echoing the democratic and collectivist practices that were becoming established in working-class writers’ workshops and community publishers during the 1970s, Gatehouse staff came up with a series of stages for book production and set up a ‘Book Selection Group’. The primary influence for the development of this procedure was the example of Write First Time, a national literacy paper distributed for ten years (1975– 1985) to literacy centres throughout Britain. This paper published writing by adult literacy students and pioneered the involvement of students as equal members of the editorial team. From the outset, the Book Selection Group, formulated for each publication project, has been largely composed of ‘Basic Skills’ students, along with one or two tutors and the Gatehouse editor. This group reads all the writing submitted within the terms of a particular project, and, then, selects particular pieces of writing which are to be put into draft booklet form, for the next stage. This, the piloting stage, involves ‘Basic Skills’ groups along with their tutors in activities such as reading the booklets and answering a questionnaire on how interesting a story is, how easy or difficult the words are. The editor then collates the results of the questionnaires from the various piloting groups and makes recommendations which are then considered by the Management Committee of Gatehouse. The final decision as to which writing will be produced as a Gatehouse book rests with the Management Committee. The Committee includes Adult Basic Education student/writers as well as tutors and other professionals. Since 1992, these production stages have been extended with the addition of an audio-recorded reading of each piece of writing to accompany each book in the beginner reader series.
The Asian Women’s Writing and Publishing Project The inception of the project The idea of setting up the Asian Women’s Writing and Publishing Project (AWWPP) first emerged after one of the founding members of Gatehouse had attended a ‘Women and Literacy’ conference. This international conference focused on the literacy needs of women in situations of extreme material
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exploitation and political oppression, such as Black women in the South African context. Following the inspirational lead of this member of Gatehouse, the staff decided that the area of need that should be prioritised in the British context was that of women of South Asian origin in ESOL classes. At the initial planning stage, it had been hoped that a woman of South Asian descent who had also attended the conference would be able to provide some input to the project design. However, she was not available. So it was that Gatehouse staff (who were most accustomed to working with monolingual ‘Basic Skills’ students, in a monolingual institutional setting) initiated a project involving multilingual staff and students. They were committed to getting the project off the ground and put in over 50 bids for funding. Questions were raised within Gatehouse about whether the model developed for working with ‘Basic Skills’ students could be translated more or less exactly to working with women ESOL students. In the early planning phase, consultations were made with organisations such as the Language and Literacy Unit in London, as well as ESOL tutors in Manchester. Gatehouse was eventually persuaded that there was little, if any, difference between ways of working with ‘Basic Skills’ students and ESOL students, that is Gathouse’s way, of working in encouraging students to speak and write about their own experiences were appropriate to ESOL students too. The proposal for the Asian Women’s Writing and Publishing Project recommended that the staff recruited should be female and of South Asian origin. The aim was to encourage writing by women students of similar background and that, following the usual procedures for selection and piloting, six books would be produced during the three years of the project. So, for the first time in Gatehouse’s history, an ethnic minority worker was to be employed and bilingual books were to be produced (the English text published would have a translation into the heritage language of the student writer). However, the audio-recordings accompanying the books were to be produced only in English, as the books and cassettes were planned for use in the ESOL/ ‘Basic Skills’ context. The educational implications of asking students to write (or speak, with their words being transcribed) in the language they are learning (as opposed to their strongest language, with that being translated into English) were not considered. I will return to this point later in this chapter. The discussion on issues concerning staffing of the new project related to such questions as the importance of the worker being a woman, being of South
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Asian origin and having fluency in one or more South Asian language. However, the question of how to weigh up the relevance of such worker characteristics with other job requirements was not fully considered, for example, the importance of the worker having competence in such areas as administrative and organisational capabilities. Moreover, issues such as the class background and current class affiliation of staff were also not fully considered. The first bilingual worker of South Asian origin was appointed to work on the Asian Women’s Writing and Publishing Project in January 1997. Working within the terms of the planning and funding requirements outlined above, she began by undertaking research on the types of reading materials currently available for adult ESOL classes and on the specific reading needs and preferences of women students of South Asian descent. To do this, she conducted a survey of women students at ESOL centres in Manchester and in ten other cities in Britain. A questionnaire was also devised for tutors in which they were asked about the types of materials available at the time and about the type of reading resources they would like to see developed. Following this initial research stage, this bilingual worker engaged in several months of developing writing by students, and this was followed by the usual Gatehouse procedures for setting up a Book Selection Group. Shortlisted texts were then piloted and, when I was appointed in 1998, two books were in the process of being produced, with translations into Bengali and Urdu, the heritage languages of the two writers. Between us, my bilingual colleague and I cover several spoken and written languages and scripts. I speak English and Panjabi and I read some Urdu, whilst my colleague speaks English and Hindi and reads Hindi fluently. Although we have lived on different continents, our education has been through the medium of English, hers in India and mine in the North East of England. Working with a new group of student-writers All of the women we have been working with live in the greater Manchester area. Most of the women are of Pakistani origin and speak Panjabi. A number of these women are literate in Urdu, but their experience of education through the medium of Urdu in Pakistan differs considerably. Some of the women are of Bangladeshi origin and speak Sylheti. A number of these are literate in
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Bengali, but, again, there are considerable differences in educational experience between the women. In addition to these two broad sub-groups, there are smaller numbers of women who speak other South Asian languages. Three of the women involved in the project There is a long story to be told about each of the women involved in the project. I am unable to tell these stories in their fullness here, but I will present a brief profile of three of the women I have worked most closely with, in order to give my readers a sense of the diversity of life experiences (including literacy experiences) that the women were drawing on in their learning of English. I will call the first woman Nazira, the second one Atia and the third one, Leila.2 Nazira grew up in Pakistan and attended a local primary school until she was nine years old. However, she says she learned very little at school. She was afraid of the teacher who was “horrible” with the children and beat them, so she stayed away from school without her parents’ knowledge. She spoke Katchi at home and found it very hard to learn to read and write in a second language, Urdu, at school. When she was sixteen, a marriage was arranged for her to a male cousin in Britain. When I met her in Manchester, she was in her mid-thirties and had three children. She told me that she was not literate in any language, so when we worked on her book for the project, I acted as her scribe. She was very committed to getting her message across concerning the health problems which can result from generations of marriage between cousins. She has been fortunate in her marriage since her husband has encouraged her to go to English classes and he is happy for her to be involved in contributing one of the six books for the project. She is particularly dependent on him since she is not in paid employment and has no financial resources of her own. Atia also grew up in Pakistan and was encouraged by her parents to continue her education beyond the primary level. She not only completed her secondary schooling but also studied at a tertiary level college. She speaks Panjabi and reads and writes Urdu with ease and confidence. Urdu is her strongest language, being the medium for instruction at school and college in Pakistan. Atia also came to Britain as a result of an arranged marriage to a man based in Manchester. She is presently in paid employment outside the home, teaching Asian cookery in a community college in Manchester. Like Nazira, Atia has also had support from her husband in undertaking the work on her book for the project.
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Leila is a young woman of Pakistani origin who came to Britain when she married a man who lives in the Manchester area. Like Atia, she was educated up to college level in Pakistan, so she is literate in Urdu. Her tutor remarked to me that she is a highly motivated student, but her attendance at the ESOL classes is not as regular as it could be. As I got to know her, I began to realise that her current personal circumstances are not conducive to learning. Her husband and her in-laws are very controlling, not even allowing her to have a key to the house where they all live. None of her own family members live in Britain and she has had little opportunity to build friendships outside of the home. She does, however, have some economic independence since she is in paid employment sewing clothes. As I will show later, Leila withdrew from the project despite showing considerable enthusiasm at the outset. Constraints on the participation of some of the women The selection and production of six student-generated books has been a long and complex process. When the six bilingual texts are finally published, this will represent an important new resource for ESOL classes organised for Asian women. However, the production process has not been without difficulties. In this section, I discuss some of the difficulties we encountered along the way. Here, I draw primarily on my own work on the project and I attempt to analyse the issues which lie behind some of the difficulties that I came up against. My guess is that similar issues are likely to crop up in any context where community publishing work is extended from a predominantly monolingual setting to a multilingual one, especially when the focus is on women from minority ethnic groups. At the initial ‘developing writing’ stage, the ESOL tutors were admirably supportive of Gatehouse’s aim of developing books by and for ESOL students, but the attendance of some of the Asian women students at the ESOL classes was erratic. In the first two classes I worked in, some of the women attended regularly for a while and, then, simply did not turn up again. What could the tutors and I do, when students who were attending and who were highly enthusiastic about their creative writing work, returned at a later date, somewhat embarrassed and crestfallen, to say that their husband/son/in-laws did not want them to participate? Women who had been attending for weeks, with whom I had spent a lot of time supporting and guiding their writing, suddenly withdrew. I found that this was occurring across the categories of
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age, religion and caste. There was a 62-year old Sikh woman who said she would have to ask her son if it was acceptable for her to write about her experience of adapting to this country following the death of her husband. There was also a 45-year old Hindu woman who said she would check with her husband to see whether he would mind if she got her writing published as a book. However, most of those who withdrew were insecure young brides who, just a short while before I met them, had exchanged the comfort and security of their own families in Bangladesh, India or Pakistan for marriage to a man of South Asian origin in England. Difficulties also arose with the Book Selection Group. Seven ESOL women students had committed themselves to attending the meetings of this Group, for two hours a week, over a six week period. I had agreed that I would be responsible for working with the Book Selection Group to choose four pieces of writing to go forward for the next phase of editing and publication. However, several women withdrew from this group before its first meeting. Despite the initial interest and enthusiasm, these women said that they had found that their domestic duties had to take precedence. The most disturbing reason for not being able to participate was that given by Leila. She contacted me by phone to let me know she could not attend the first meeting. The gist of the conversation was as follows: Leila: Yasmin, about the meeting today. I can’t take part because I haven’t got a key. Yasmin: What do you mean, you haven’t got a key. Look, Gatehouse will pay for a taxi or your bus fare. Gatehouse can also pay for child care costs. There will be drinks and refreshments during the break. Leila: But I can’t come because only my husband and my mother-in-law have the key to the house and they are out. I can’t leave the house because I can’t lock up. Yasmin: [Several seconds of silence and bewilderment later] Oh. I see.
And indeed, suddenly I did. Leila was not confined to the home or locked in. There were no physical barriers to her participation. The barriers lay in her own acceptance of her positioning with the hierarchy of this family. This was a telling moment in my own thinking about the difficulties I was encountering on the project. I began to set the women’s erratic attendance at class and their withdrawal from meetings in a wider social context. It is this wider social context which I explore below.
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Asian women: being for others Leila’s withdrawal from the Book Selection Group and the conversation reproduced above represented a turning point in my understanding of the actual terms and conditions under which I was attempting to put into practice Gatehouse’s model for developing English literacy for Asian women students in ESOL classes. Gatehouse’s goal of affirming the role of language and literacy in the construction of new identities and relationships was proving somewhat paradoxical for the women who began withdrawing from both the process of writing and the possibility of getting published. I began to try to identify the barriers preventing the Asian women from following their interests and aspirations, because, as Lewis (1993) suggests, ‘locating the barriers we need to speak beyond is the first step in dismantling them’ (1993: 4). It seems that for many Asian women students, the aspiration to learn and develop frequently collides with their positioning within the extended family structure, and with associated community structures. They are positioned as ‘being for others’. This positioning begins at an early age when girls find that they are expected do the housework and/or help run the family business while such demands are not made on their brothers’ time. For adult women, this positioning takes different forms. It is sometimes conveyed in subtle forms and is only experienced as a strong sense of obligation. But, sometimes, it is overtly expressed and women can find themselves caught up in highly exploitative relations. Some women, after years of successful coaxing and cajoling of parents/ husbands/in-laws or after finding themselves in exceptional circumstances, appear to be able to become ‘enterprising’ (see the chapter by Marilyn MartinJones, in this volume). They achieve their goals despite all manner of class, race and gender-based discrimination. Others’ achievements are more modest. Among the women I have met in ESOL classes over the years, success in learning English seems to have been directly related to the extent of support, or at least, tolerance shown by the husbands/sons/in-laws for their educational aspirations. In some home environments, women’s command of English for everyday purposes is accepted or even valued and so, women are permitted to attend ESOL classes if this does not interfere with their duties at home. In other households, the development of women’s competency in English is valued only insofar as it releases their husbands or in-laws from irksome duties, such as taking aged parents to the doctor’s surgery.
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The worst scenario is where relations within an Asian family are constructed within a heavily patriarchal mould. In these kinds of family settings, Asian men find it threatening for ‘their’ women to be able to communicate in the wider society independently of them. Such men prefer to obtain their bride/daughter-in-law from their country of origin and actually believe that the less educated they are, the better (i.e. they will be more dependent and, therefore, easier to control). The burden of the ‘illiteracy of resistance’ (see Adrian Blackledge’s chapter, in this volume) is, in the case of some highly patriarchal households of South Asian origin in Britain, chosen by men for ‘their’ womenfolk. The encroachment of the dominant language and culture is stemmed in such households by limiting opportunities for women. The male heads of such households cite the ‘dangers’ of assimilation and loss of cultural identity to justify the constraints placed on women. By controlling women’s access to knowledge and resources, they are in a better position to maintain their power over them. At the same time, their own sons may wear jeans, go to nightclubs and have relations with goree (white) girls. The unequal relations of power in such households are reinforced by patriarchal definitions of religion and custom. What I have tried to convey here is that the positioning of women as ‘being for others’ is manifested in different ways and can, in some cases, be realised through highly exploitative and oppressive practices. There is, of course, enormous diversity. No local community is a homogeneous entity. A comparison of the experiences of Leila, Nazira and Atia demonstrates this diversity. Despite her education and her enthusiasm for the project, Leila found herself overwhelmingly positioned as ‘being for others’ and had to withdraw from the work we were doing together; while Atia, who is also well educated, was able to assume a more self-affirming stance and went on to contribute one of the six books to the project. Despite her lack of education, Nazira was able to combine a high motivation to improve her own life since she found herself in a supportive personal relationship. She also went on to produce a book for the project. Thus, it appears to be the nature of the relationships that the women are involved in within their home environments, not their own educational background or their economic standing, which takes the women in opposite directions. No wonder then, that the first question one Asian woman asks another is: “Are you married?” And, if the answer is “yes”, “who to?” And, more personally still, “what is he like?”. These women know
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that the nature of the husband is the main factor determining their freedom of expression, their freedom of movement and their freedom to learn. Other minority women, in other settings There are strong resonances between the experiences of some of the women I have met through my work with this project and Kathleen Rockhill’s (1993) account of the experiences of Hispanic women in East Los Angeles. Rockhill recounts how many women dropped out of classes saying they had ‘pressures’ of a domestic kind, while at the same time expressing a yearning for education and a desire to be ‘somebody’. It seems that for these minority women too, moving into the world of education posed a threat to the gender relations they were involved in at home, the only world with which they were familiar. Rockhill sums this up neatly in the following words: Literacy is caught up in the material, racial and sexual oppression of women, and it embodies their hope for escape. For women, it is experienced as both, a threat and a desire: to learn English means to go to school, to enter a world that holds the promise of change and, because of this, threatens all that they know (Rockhill 1993: 171).
Like many of the women I have met during the course of the project, the women in Rockhill’s study were confined primarily to the private sphere. Their learning of English was tolerated to the extent that it enabled them to deal with the everyday literacy ‘work’ involved in running the home and in taking on other chores such as dealing with the social services, public utilities, health care and children’s schooling. The implications for adult education and community publishing As Rockhill points out, a recurring theme in equal opportunities discourse is that “the way through structural inequities is to bring ‘marginal’ adults into the mainstream” (1993: 162). And, the adult educator’s responsibility is often framed as mobilising and motivating adults to take up opportunities that are provided within mainstream institutions. Empowerment goals are defined in terms of participation in the public sphere. Insufficient account is taken of structural and cultural inequalities within the private sphere. But, as Rockhill has shown in her study and as I have shown in this chapter, these are particularly important considerations in the case of minority women.
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How does this relate to equal opportunities policies such as those formulated by Gatehouse and other similar organisations? And how does it shape the work that can be done with women who accept such parameters of control and with those who do not? Certainly, it is clear that, when planning local initiatives aimed at minority women, adult educators and community publishers such as Gatehouse need to be aware of the specific ways in which the politics of literacy are gendered in each local community context. In the case of the Asian Women’s Writing and Publishing Project at Gatehouse, an opening was forged through the vision, energy and commitment of the Gatehouse workers. But, in retrospect, we can see that it was assumed that women would participate freely. As I have shown, not all Asian women are free to act according to their own needs and desires. Many must first seek the approval/permission of their sons/husbands/in-laws in fulfillment of the definition of womanhood, within the private sphere, as dependent on and subject to male authority. So, there are very real barriers to the type of equal opportunities goals to which Gatehouse is committed: goals such as taking seriously Asian women’s needs for self expression and self confidence, and generally working towards the empowerment that developing a person’s literacy can bring. In the context of ESOL classes in Adult Education centres, Gatehouse’s work is seen as innovatory and designed to affirm students’ learning goals while, at the same time, being congruent with the ESOL teacher’s purposes and needs. But, for the women involved in the project, the progressive educational practice of Gatehouse staff presented them with a dilemma. Following the values and norms of different societies in South Asia, women must not only be available to fulfill the role assigned as wife/mother/daughter-in-law, but they should also not exceed the achievements of the men in their environment. Defined as dependents, they are not supposed to have an identity independent of that of their father/husband/son. Accordingly, learning English can be acceptable; becoming an author is rather less so. To what extent is it possible to work with women to dismantle such barriers? How far is it possible to talk of education or freedom of expression as a right for women who are involved in such unequal power relations? I believe that it is possible within organisations such as Gatehouse to contribute in some ways to dismantling barriers such as the ones I have described above. But, to do this, it is necessary to have overt discussion and a robust analysis of the nature of power relations in the public and private spheres of life in different
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local neighbourhoods and communities. As Rockhill (1993) puts it: To seriously act upon the principle of literacy or learning as a right — or even a possibility — for women, it is necessary to re-conceptualise how ‘the political’ and ‘the educational’ are constituted so that the primary sites of oppression in their lives are not systematically excluded from our politics or our classrooms (1993: 172).
Asian women writers: taking on a self-affirming role and being with others Through the Asian Women’s Writing and Publishing Project, we are starting to recognise that the provision of child care costs, travel expenses, a room in which to work and a sympathetic, supportive worker are not enough to enable the most marginalised of Asian women to participate, to benefit and to be empowered. The women who finally put pen to paper and were able to participate in the Project and enjoy all the facilities provided were women, such as Nazira and Atia, who happened to be in warm, supportive family environments where not only did they nurture, but they were nurtured too. In the Gatehouse team, we are beginning to realise that we need to develop a different strategy to reach out to the Asian women who are most affected by being at the interstices of class, race and gender oppression. For the most part, these are the women who were sent as brides by their families to escape poverty, arriving in Britain with little formal education. These women are highly dependent on the ‘goodwill’ of their husbands and in-laws. One of the moves that Gatehouse is, at present, considering is future project work with an Asian women’s refuge. This would entail going to the alternative spaces where women who suffer domestic violence may have been brave enough to go. Changes in the mode, manner and terms of engagement are being forged, on a day-to-day, issue-by-issue basis, as work within the Asian Women’s Writing and Publishing Project has evolved. This is an indication of the strength and responsiveness of Gatehouse’s democratic work practices.
The six books As I indicated above, two books by South Asian women authors were ready to be published by October 1998, when I joined the project. The first of these was a book written by a woman of Pakistani descent called My Deaf Son. Pub-
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lished in English and Urdu, the book relates the experiences of the author and her husband after they learned that their first child was deaf. It deals movingly with the initial discovery and then the steps that they took as a family to deal with this challenge. These included learning Sign Language and attending special music classes for deaf children. The second book, entitled Oceans Apart, is by a young woman of Bangladeshi heritage who was married at the age of thirteen. The book has been published in English and Bengali and tells the story of how the author and her youngest child came to be living in Britain, while her husband and her two oldest children are still living in Bangladesh. Four other books are still going through the production stages I described above. At the time of writing, they are being piloted in ESOL classes in Manchester, Rochdale and Huddersfield. The titles have not yet been finalised, so I will just mention the topic covered in each one. The first is provisionally entitled: Taking Some Honey Home. It has been written by a woman of Pakistani origin. The book provides a humorous personal account of the author’s changing relationship with her village of origin in Pakistan. The main action in the story centres on the author’s return to the village as an adult and her attempt to climb a fruit tree that she used to climb as a child. Half way up the tree, she realises that there is a huge bee-hive in the tree and scrambles back down quickly. The tree provides a focal point for exploring her memories of childhood. She was the only girl in the village who was allowed to go to primary school and she was the only girl who dared to climb to the top of the highest tree in the village As an adult now living in Britain, she still visits the village from time to time and her story begins with her description of the preparations for one of these visits. Over the years, she has begun to provide support for some of the poorest families in the village. While she is in Britain, she saves whatever money she can and buys things to take to these families each time she goes to Pakistan for a visit A strong message that comes over in the book is that she is not interested in flaunting the wealth that she has acquired in Britain, but in ‘taking some honey home’. The second book is about marriage. This has also been written by a woman of Pakistani origin, based on her own experience of an arranged marriage. This book was well received at the book selection and piloting stages, generating the most interest and discussion. Despite this, there has been some debate within Gatehouse about whether the book should be published. As a result of this controversy, the text has now been through several drafts. The second draft dealt with the topic in a detached and general way.
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The third draft ended up as a fictional account of three sisters, who all have different experiences of marriage. Although this is a fictional account, it captures the range of marriage experiences that women like the author actually have. The third book, also by a Pakistani author, is provisionally entitled: The Custom of Marrying Cousins. It presents the story of a sixteen year old girl, married to a cousin in England, who finds, ten years later, that their daughter has a form of thalassaemia. She relates the medical information from her doctor to her knowledge of the pattern of stillbirths and/or disabilities among her own extended family. The author then suggests that the custom of marrying cousins or close relatives over a number of generations is the main cause of this, not conventional explanations such as claims that this is evidence of ‘God’s will’ at work or that it represents punishment of parents or children for their sins. The fourth book is provisionally entitled: My First Day at College. This was written by a Pakistani woman who completed secondary education through the medium of Urdu in Pakistan and then went on to college. She gives a humorous account of her first experience on entering a women’s college. The story centres around an episode during which new students were ‘initiated’ to college life by third year students. The author describes how the third year students played a prank on the first-years. They were able to identify the firstyears by the colour of the dupatta ‘scarf’ that they wore. On her first day at college, a group of third-year students ushered all the new arrivals into the hall and one third-year student wore a dupatta of the colour that lecturers usually wore. She then ‘ordered’ the new students to sing a song aloud, one by one. The real lecturers eventually came in and ended the new students’ ordeal just as the author’s turn was coming round. The Book Selection Group had several criteria in mind in taking up these particular pieces of writing for publication: we wished to raise powerful moral and ethical issues, but, at the same time, wanted some light-hearted humorous accounts of Asian women’s lives. We also hoped to present certain types of life experiences as normal, such as that of a young woman going to college. The authors of the six books soon to be published by Gatehouse were all women who were able to assume a self-affirming role because of their personal circumstances. At present, it is with these women that the Gatehouse way of working can come into its own and create a space for dialogue. In fact, two of the six texts put forward for publication, the one about marriage and the
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one on The Custom of Marrying Cousins, have given rise to considerable debate within Gatehouse. Initially, there was opposition to the selection of these two texts on the grounds that the choice of topics was possibly ‘culturally insensitive’ and could be construed as ‘pandering to racists’ Fortunately, this argument was not accepted and, after the usual editorial stages, the books will be published. To give voice in the public domain to women who are sincerely committed to addressing such issues is an act of empowerment. It also enables ESOL students to come together with others and encounter different views on such issues. The nature of the opposition that has already arisen in the case of these two texts demonstrates how difficult it is for those who have historically been powerless and marginalised to give voice to experiences normally suppressed, despite the fact that they are receiving full support from their husbands and families in their questioning of the validity of customs that have had a harmful influence on their lives. The writer of The Custom of Marrying Cousins gained access to medical knowledge that was not available to her in Pakistan. She then used the opportunity and the resources provided by the project to put her views to an audience that was wider than just her immediate family. Because of the risks involved in challenging such conventions, this author has asked to remain anonymous and, of course, Gatehouse is committed to ensuring anonymity when requested.
The multilingual dimension of the work In this section of the chapter, I focus on issues which arose due to the fact that the context for the project was a multilingual one and because the two project workers were bilingual. As I indicated earlier, in my account of the early planning stages of the project, there was general agreement that the Gatehouse model for publishing books by monolingual student-writers could be adapted for work in a multilingual context. Yet, as bilingual workers on the project, we have faced two broad types of problems: The first type of problem arose during the book production stages which involved one-to-one work between bilingual tutor-editor and bilingual student, for example, during the developing writing and editorial stages. The second type of problem arose when decisions had to be made about translation of both the final text and the audio-recorded version of the text. I will take each one of these problems in turn and I will also consider the underlying issues.
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One-to-one work between bilingual tutor-editors and student-writers Because the project was based in ESOL classes, the original aim was to encourage creative writing in English in this context, as a means of extending the students’ experience of writing in English. However, in cases where women were already highly literate in their home or community language, I found that the process of creative writing was greatly facilitated when the student was invited to write in the language of her choice and, then, do the translation into English herself. This is not a very surprising discovery given that, as some authors have argued: “the relationship between a person’s thoughts and their way of expressing these in writing is very close to their sense of self” (Davies, et al. 1994: 162). The first draft of the book, My First Day at College was first written in Urdu and, then, the author produced an English version. In this particular case, the English version needed to be edited and ‘simplified’ to suit the format of English books for students at beginner level. When we were working with students who had had little or no experience of reading and writing in their home or community language, we adopted different strategies. For instance, in working with the author of The Custom of Marrying Cousins, I found that we were moving back and forth between English and Panjabi in our conversations. As the story unfolded, I acted as scribe and wrote down a monolingual English version. In this situation, I was not able to scribe in Urdu since I have not had the opportunity during my education here in Britain to develop my own writing abilities in Urdu, though, I do have a reading knowledge of the language. As I mentioned earlier, my bilingual colleague and I could not cover between us all the spoken and written languages of the South Asian women involved in the different ESOL classes we worked with. This is the kind of issue that needs to be addressed at the planning stages of a project. The advantages and disadvantages of focusing on just one language group need to be weighed up. A further related issue here is that of the time available. Working bilingually takes longer than working monolingually. The time set aside for the developing writing stage was already fairly limited. During this time, we had to form working relationships with women we had not met before. While the ESOL tutors had had time to establish a relationship with their students, we were newcomers to their classes.
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Producing bilingual texts The last stage of book production is to translate the final version of each book and to type this up in the appropriate South Asian script. The translation is designed to serve a number of purposes, some of which conflict with each other. Originally, the main purpose was conceived as affirming the bilingual identity of the writer. In this case, the choice of language was relatively straightforward. The two first books to have been published have been translated into Urdu and Bengali, reflecting the linguistic background of the writers. However, since the aim of the project is to produce a general set of reading materials for women of South Asian origin in ESOL classes in Manchester and elsewhere, the translations of the four remaining books will need to include languages other than Urdu and Bengali, even if these are not the preferred languages of the writers. This is a particularly difficult issue to resolve, particularly in the light of the positive responses recorded during the survey of ESOL students with regard to the prospect of working with bilingual texts. One question that has come up is: should each story appear with several translations into different South Asian languages, so as to be as inclusive as possible? While this appears to offer a solution, there are a number of constraining factors, such as the expense involved in the translation (this work is done by professional translators outside Gatehouse). A number of decisions also need to be taken about how many languages to work in and in what sequence. In addition, there are a number of key design and translation issues to bear in mind in the production of dual language texts. The making of books in English, with a translation added, is, then, the form of cultural production which is currently permissible in the ESOL context within which the Asian Women’s Writing and Publishing Project at Gatehouse is operating. As I have shown in this chapter, a number of complex issues have arisen as a result of organising the production process in this way. Gatehouse has now begun to recognise that the bilingual texts generated by women ESOL students could be an equally valuable resource in the teaching of South Asian languages. That is, just as students who are literate in a South Asian language can use the text in that language to help them understand the adjacent English text, so too, students who are speakers of South Asian languages who want to develop their literacy skills in one of those languages can use their fluency in English to support their learning. This would facilitate a two-way flow of language, literacy and cultural knowledge.
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Teachers of South Asian languages, some of whom also work as ESOL teachers, have expressed enthusiasm for the two bilingual books produced so far. Given the dearth of not only ESOL material, but also dual language books, books such as these represent a valuable new resource for teaching and learning language in an adult education context. Pedagogy and attitudes towards such texts may well change as more bilingual ESOL tutors enter the field. So far, this area of language education has been dominated by monolingual speakers of English.
Community publishing as a path to empowerment In this final section of the chapter, I use terms that Paulo Freire has developed as an analytical tool with which to understand Gatehouse’s work practices. I focus on the way they have evolved over the years of Gatehouse’s existence, and on the ways that we have developed for working with the women of South Asian origin who were contacted within the terms of the project. In Table 1 below, I have summarised Freire’s (1970) analysis of the ‘banking’ form of educational practice and compared it with his dialogic approach. Both monolingual and bilingual student writers at Gatehouse are provided with the opportunity to use their own reality as a basis for literacy development. They are invited to engage in creative writing about any aspect of their own lived experience. They also receive one-to-one attention from the Gatehouse editor during the lengthy editorial process. It is this quality of real respect for working and other marginalised people’s life experiences, combined with the aim of democratising as far as possible the whole process of writing, selecting, editing and producing a book that demonstrates that Gatehouse’s work practices and philosophy are based on a rejection of the ‘banking’ form of educational practice. Furthermore, Gatehouse affirms Basic Skills students’ mode of expression and use of English by refusing to invalidate them in favour of standard English. The dominant educational framework of definitions and measurements of value and performance are discarded in favour of affirming the students’ needs and reality, and it is their peers who are involved in the process of assessing, and then selecting a piece of writing on the basis of whether it is a ‘good read’. This process itself becomes a means by which students can apply and develop their reading, writing and critiquing abilities in a social and
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Table 1. Freire’s comparison of two approaches to education (adapted from Freire 1970) The ‘banking’ approach to education
Problem-posing dialogue
Conceals facts which explain how people come to be where they are in the world
Aims to identify causes and connections and reasons for present state of affairs
Resists dialogue, provides instructions, explanations, information as the teacher sees fit
Regards dialogue as central to the act of learning, as a way of unveiling reality as experienced by the teachers and students
Students are seen as objects to be assisted in gaining a position in society
Students encouraged to become critical thinkers and awake to their own powers as human beings
Inhibits creativity and controls consciousness by isolating it from the world, thereby denying human capacities for becoming more fully aware
Bases itself on creativity, attempts to stimulate true reflection and action, so as to enable learners to become more fully aware
Recreates the status quo, keeping people ‘in their place’
Affirms people, culture and society in the process of becoming - education as an ongoing activity
Emphasises performance and is normative in nature
Roots itself in the dynamic present, sees people as able to transcend themselves and society’s norms
Directly or indirectly reinforces passivity and fatalistic perceptions of self and situation
Problem-posing method which presents situations as open to transformation and change
Tends to reinforce individualism and vertical relations of power
Problem-posing through dialogue with others and affirmation of fellowship and solidarity
Tends to reinforce domination and oppression
Is part of a struggle against domination and oppression, aiming for emancipation
cooperative setting rather than in an individualistic and competitive one. Such aspects of Gatehouse’s procedures and work practices are, accordingly, dialogic in that there is a consistent attempt to be open and accountable and to respond to students’ needs in ways which resonate with a humanist and empowering philosophy. By affirming students’ capacity to learn and grow, regardless of past failure, Gatehouse challenges passivity and fatalistic perceptions of self and
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situation. In that sense, Gatehouse affirms people, culture and society in the process of becoming rather than as being fixed or constant. In contrast to the individualism and asymmetrical relations of power which typify most educational practice in Britain, a central aspect of Gatehouse’s work practices involves the development of connections between students, tutors and, to a certain extent, the managers of educational provision too, during the book selection and piloting stages. This is also achieved by putting an emphasis on bringing the student whose writing has been selected into Gatehouse’s work environment for the one-to-one weekly meetings with the Gatehouse editor. These meetings usually extend over a three or four month period and some student/writers have been moved to comment that never before had they had anyone engage with them and their thoughts, ideas and experience with so much attention and respect. These student/writers contrast their learning during the editorial process with their experience of schooling. It is during the lengthy and intricate editorial process then, that trust and rapport are built between editor and student/writer, such that many of Freire’s criteria for the development of ‘problem-posing’ education can be seen to be taken into account. During the editorial process, involving sustained one-to-one attention, the student/writer is encouraged by the Gatehouse editor to play a central role in the decision-making process about which aspects of their writing to alter or remove, and how much to take into account the suggestions of the Book Selection Group and the Management Committee. Nevertheless, it does seem that overt discussion of the nature of power relations in the public and private spheres of the lives of both editor and student/writer has so far been avoided. Gatehouse editors’ concern about imposing asymmetrical relations of power, along such dimensions as class, ethnicity, gender and educational status has sometimes led to an attempt at taking a ‘neutral’ stance. This has created a somewhat contradictory approach: on the one hand, there is an open espousal of the rights of working class and marginalised people, yet Gatehouse workers have not always sustained a political analysis and have not always challenged dominant representations of the social world or dominant ideologies. So, whilst Gatehouse’s activity has been based on encouraging the creativity of Basic Skills student/writers, whilst its philosophy and work practices attempt to stimulate their reflection and action, it seems to me that the workers/editors seem to hold themselves somewhat aloof and detached from this process perhaps in a well-meaning desire not to impose their power and
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influence, particularly during the editing stage. But the net effect of this could be to convey a lack of faith in the strengths of the student/writer and a lack of faith in their own integrity. The former sometimes appear to be seen as needing assistance in overcoming their lack of self esteem, low confidence and lack of literacy experience, so that they can, as individuals improve their position in the present structure of society. It is in this sense that, at the editorial stage, Gatehouse’s work practices can be said to be somewhat individualising and isolating. If the Gatehouse experience proves to be emancipatory for particular individuals and if they choose to change their lives or distance themselves from conditions which oppress them, they could, if rejected by those in their community setting, end up fitting in to neither camp. For, if people question and want to change the pattern their lives have been thread into, beginning with the domestic sphere, and if ‘liberatory’ educational practices help them to formulate critical questions which reveal to them the conditions which oppress them, what is the educationalist’s responsibility, once that spark is lit? Do we leave them to deal with the consequent explosions in their lives? If the conformist, banking type of educationalist is preparing students for their pre-assigned role in life (merely transmitting pre-digested bits of knowledge) and for certificated success or failure, what exactly are we preparing our student/writers at Gatehouse for? An egalitarian utopia which does not yet exist? Or are we involved in developing a tapestry of new meanings and new connections? Who would willingly want to become estranged from their family and social relations, if that is to be the cost of articulating their views about issues such as arranged marriages, often treated as taboo? What support structures can Gatehouse realistically provide? Currently, for instance, there is no support structure for student/writers during the editorial process. Nor are there any structures of support following publication. What happens if the writer has chosen to address something controversial, as in the case of the book about The Custom of Marrying Cousins, that could lead to possible negative consequences for them. As I stressed earlier in this chapter, it is necessary to fully realise and reflexively apply the tenet that ‘the personal is political’. As I have shown, many of the difficulties that were experienced with the Asian Women’s Writing and Publishing Project stemmed from the fact that we did not, at first, recognise the need to take account of the specific conditions of the lives of ESOL student/ writers outside the classroom context. This tenet and other related ideas were certainly being articulated in adult
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literacy circles and in feminist groups at the time when Gatehouse was first founded. The first workers, volunteers and members of Gatehouse, whether as professionals in adult education or literacy students, had connections with the newly formed Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers and with Common Word, an organisation struggling to promote the rationale for women-only writer groups and feminist consciousness-raising groups. However, the staff at Gatehouse remained monolingual for some time. None of the tutor/editors involved at Gatehouse were from the African-Caribbean or Asian communities. During most of Gatehouse’s two decades of experience, a philosophy and work practice had developed which focused on those monolingual, Englishspeaking citizens who found themselves marginalised in society as a consequence of not having learned to read and write at school. It must be said then, that well beyond those newly-recognised margins of society, have lain the literacy needs of migrant labourers, called to Britain from its former colonies. Migrant labourers such as my father, literate in Urdu, speaking Panjabi, and initially knowing no English whatsoever. I make this connection here in order to demonstrate that, even with the best of intentions, we are all prisoners of our times, as well as of our personal experiences. In other words, an espousal of the profound insight of the feminist movement that ‘the personal is political’ by Gatehouse workers, or the application of this insight only to students and their writing, remains inadequate. Work practices that are fully dialogic would have to pose the questions: ‘who are the members of the team of tutor/editors?’ ‘what are their politics?’ It is difficult to adequately represent others’ experiences or articulate others’ needs, when you have no direct connection with them. Yet, not to attempt to do so, would mean contributing to the reproduction of social exclusion. It was within the terms of this contradiction that the Asian Women’s Writing and Publishing Project was developed at Gatehouse. In the context of funding cuts by the local authority and the increasingly conservative national educational practices that have been re-establishing themselves over the past decade or so, Gatehouse’s survival must be regarded as an admirable achievement. It has not only continued to survive, but has actually managed to diversify. It is also a testimony to the commitment of the long-standing members and workers at Gatehouse to continue to engage in the attempt to construct a tight-rope for change.
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Bilingual texts at the interface between self, cultural identity and literacy learning This, then, is the form of ‘cultural production’ permissible within the present socio-political and educational terrain within which Gatehouse operates. Accordingly, it has to be said that ‘we can’t do more as we haven’t got that key!’. In other words, it is not only the Asian bride who is locked in by husband and in-laws, but also we at Gatehouse who are locked out by structural forms of inequalities, divided not only by class, custom, and religious laws but also the dynamics of intimate relations that shape the limit of our affective and perceptual horizons. So, although not able to reach the most marginalised of Asian women, nevertheless, Gatehouse is in the midst of engaging in liberatory literacy work practices whereby those less marginalised, as learners, teachers and editors, create texts with a bilingual format. Cultural and political dynamics can begin to shift in the process of producing these texts. The subsequent readings and engagement with these bilingual texts, both inside and outside the ESOL classroom take place at the interface between cultural identity, knowledge and literacy learning, extending and empowering both learners and teachers; indeed, blurring the distinctions between teachers and learners, for monolingual teachers, by virtue of being faced in their teaching practice with minority languages, are likely to stand in relation to their history, culture and language, as learners. Not only the learning of literacies is encouraged by Gatehouse’s work; the transmission of knowledge is also taking place and shifting fossilised cultural forms and practices so that the voices of the silenced can start to be heard. And so, the potential for dialogue across, through and around gender, class and cultural differences, is being developed through the process of addressing literacy needs. In doing so, “reading the word” is becoming, as Freire has suggested, a means of “reading the world” (Freire and Macedo 1987).
Notes 1.
This shift, from the term ‘adult literacy’ to ‘Basic Skills’ reflects changes that were taking place in the discourse and culture of Adult Basic Education in Britain in the 1980s: changes that led in a more functional and technicist direction.
2.
I have used fictitious names here, and elsewhere, in this chapter, to preserve confidentiality.
SECTION IV
Researching languages and literacies in their social contexts As we pointed out in the introduction to this volume, the research discussed here represents a variety of methodological approaches to the study of multilingualism and literacy. It also incorporates different perspectives. Some researchers have been broadly located within their own ethnic boundaries while others have worked across them. A number of chapters in the volume have been written from the experience of research partnerships: between colleagues in a research team and, in some cases, between researchers and ‘researched’. These partnerships have generated dialogues across gender identities, ethnicities, socioeconomic positions and worldviews. These dialogues challenge a ‘single’ or ‘mono’ understanding and interpretation of cultural practices and values. These partnerships draw attention to the multiple identities of those engaged in research. In some anthropological and sociological research, the positions of the ‘outsider’ researcher ‘objectively’ researching a ‘community’ with some (or all) of its ‘insider’ members, subjects and informants have been thought of as unproblematic. More recently, researchers in this field (such as Cameron et al., 1992) have problematised this view and have emphasised how researcher and researched have multiple identities. They have also pointed out that their mutual positionings and identities are complex and shifting and not fixed and straightforward as the terms ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ suggest. Researchers and researched alike are members of ethnic groups which are diverse and complex with both shared and different histories, values and practices. The authors in this section each reflect upon their positions as researchers, their research relations and identify some of the values of working with ethnographic methodologies, arguing that they allow the possibility of gaining more detailed insights into the complexities of language and literacy practices in multilingual contexts.
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Section IV
In Chapter 14, Mukul Saxena reflects upon his research into the language and literacy practices of Panjabi speakers in Southall, West London, carried out over a period of almost 7 years. He provides a frank account of the first phase of his research in which he conducted a small-scale survey of language and literacy use in different domains. By presenting some of the findings from his quantitative analysis of this data, he identifies some of the limitations of survey methodology. Saxena then goes on to describe how he turned to working more ethnographically and to addressing the history of this particular South Asian community in Southall. His account of the way that religiopolitical affiliations in Panjab and in the wider diaspora have shaped people’s language and literacy values provides compelling evidence of the importance of taking account of culture and history if we are to understand the diversity and tensions within ethnolinguistic groups. Saxena also demonstrates how his own cultural history and experiences as a Hindi and Panjabi speaker who grew up in Delhi, rather than in London, shaped his research relations and his interpretation of his research data. In Chapter 15, Rachel Hodge and Kathryn Jones report upon their use of photography in their separate studies of multilingual literacies. Their account highlights the way their cultural backgrounds and identities had a bearing on the way they worked. In their accounts of their research, they describe how they sought to work collaboratively with their ‘co-researchers’ in an attempt to make their research more democratic and dialogic and to incorporate their coresearchers’ self-representations and understandings into their investigation of language and literacy practices. They show how the photographs taken by their co-researchers revealed insights into the co-researchers’ practices and values which they as researchers could not have become aware of by themselves. The dialogic possibilities in ethnographic research are also taken up in Chapter 16. Here, Kathryn Jones, Marilyn Martin-Jones and Arvind Bhatt report on their explorations of the use of participant diaries and diary interviews in their respective studies of multilingual literacies. They show how these research strategies enabled them to access their research participants’ knowledge and experience in a more direct way than they had found possible using semi-structured interviews. The chapter outlines different dimensions of dialogue and collaboration opened up through the use of diaries and diary interviews and points to future possibilities for the development of ethnographic work of this type.
CHAPTER 14
Taking account of history and culture in community-based research on multilingual literacy Mukul Saxena
Introduction The first studies in Britain to take account of multilingual literacy practices among local linguistic minority populations were the school and communitybased surveys that were carried out in the late seventies and eighties (e.g. Rosen and Burgess 1980; Linguistic Minorities Project 1985). These were the first studies to document the extent and nature of linguistic diversity in urban Britain. The research conducted by the Linguistic Minorities Project (LMP) (1985) was the fullest in scope, combining surveys of school populations with sociolinguistic survey work in local community contexts. The LMP research team provided both quantitative and qualitative information on the background and history of local linguistic minority populations in three British cities: Bradford, Coventry and London. They also captured broad trends in patterns of language and literacy use, as well as attitudes towards language maintenance and towards provision for the teaching of different languages in these three urban areas. Ethnographic research on literacy began to be developed in Britain in the 1980s, but it was not until the early 1990s that work of this type began to be undertaken in multilingual settings. In the last decade, there has been intense interest in this particular sub-field of research on literacy. Studies have now
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been carried out in a range of bilingual and multilingual community contexts. Two local accounts of literacy practices in quite different Panjabi-speaking communities (Saxena 1994; Hartley 1994) were published in an early volume on Worlds of Literacy, edited by Mary Hamilton, David Barton and Roz Ivanic. Other research, among other linguistic minority groups, forms the basis of some of the chapters included in this volume. Most of these local studies have been based on qualitative data gathered through participant observation and in-depth interviews and sometimes through the use of audiorecording and/or video-recording and/or still photography. The methodological shift towards ethnographic research on literacy was due to a broad change in thinking about the nature of literacy and to the development of the “New Literacy Studies” (Street 1994a: 4). For the last two decades, it has been increasingly acknowledged that literacy is not a single unified competence (Levine 1985), but changes from place to place and varies in different social contexts. Despite the fact that there are different writing systems that are used in different ways in different contexts, the differences between them are no longer seen as primarily technical. The differences that do exist between literacies are seen as being due to differences in ‘cultural practices’, ‘values’ (Graff 1979; Heath 1983) and ‘ideologies’ (Street 1984). The ideological model of literacy proposed by Street (1994a) looks at literacy practices as being context-bound and dependent on ideology. This is contrasted with the ‘autonomous’ model, which views the advent of literacy as a relatively autonomous phenomenon promoting abstract thinking, philosophy, scepticism and democracy. Street says: I prefer to work from what I term the ‘ideological’ model of literacy, that recognises a multiplicity of literacies; that the meaning and uses of literacy practices are related to specific cultural contexts; and that these practices are always associated with relations of power and ideology, they are not simply neutral technologies. (Street 1994a: 139).
Barton (1991, 1994a) also approaches literacy as a social activity which is embedded in particular cultural contexts. Following Heath (1983), he argues that literacy needs to be described in terms of cultural practices which people draw upon in specific literacy events. He has also drawn attention to the fact that people have a range of literacies which are associated with different contexts of life, such as home, work and school and, drawing on his own ethnographic research, he has observed that people’s literacy practices are situated in broader social relations, so that, for example, they have networks of
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support and take on roles within these networks. In addition, he highlights the fact that people’s attitudes towards literacy often guide their actions. Barton (1994a) has proposed an ecological approach to the everyday practices of reading and writing. He argues for this as follows: Rather than isolate literacy activities from everything else in order to understand them, an ecological approach aims to understand how literacy is embedded in other human activity, its embeddedness in social life and in thought, and its position in history, language and learning (1994: 32).
Ethnographic approaches to literacy, such as those developed by Heath (1983), Street (1984), Barton (1991, 1994a) and others, are therefore based on the dayto-day uses of written language(s) by specific groups and subgroups in a specific locality. According to Graff, these approaches to literacy provide “both new and better cases for study, opportunity for explanations, and approaches to literacy’s variable historical meaning and contribution” (1986: 127). My own research on multilingual literacy has grown out of a wider study of language and literacy use carried out with speakers of Panjabi in Southall, in West London. This research unfolded over almost seven years and spanned the period when research paradigms in the sociolinguistics of multilingualism were shifting. I began my fieldwork with a small scale survey of Panjabi Hindus, focusing on language and literacy choices in a range of different domains of social life. I then did a quantitative analysis of this data. My original plan was to go on to pursue some of the issues that emerged from this initial survey in greater depth, employing a more qualitative approach. However, during this first phase of my research, I was confronted with the limitations of the survey methodology I had adopted and with the questions which remained unanswered about the ‘patterns’ of literacy use I had documented for the Panjabis in my sample. I also began to be keenly aware of the heterogeneous nature of this local minority group. From this time onwards, I began to work in a more ethnographic vein, taking more account of the range of cultural practices I encountered and people’s stances with respect to the religio-political conflicts which have surfaced from time to time in Panjab. I also incorporated an additional historical dimension in my work, taking account of not only the migration history of particular sub-groups within this local population, and their regional origins, but also the history of the Southall community as a whole since the 1950s. I began to learn about the changes that had taken place in local social and economic conditions and, also, in local social networks and group boundaries.
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In this chapter, I will begin by describing the first stages of my research and the issues that emerged from the initial survey work. Then, I will go on to illustrate some of the benefits which accrued from incorporating an additional historical dimension and from adopting an ethnographic approach. I will also touch on the ways in which my own cultural background and my own lived experiences as a Hindi and Panjabi speaker brought up in Delhi (India), rather than in Britain, had a bearing on the relationships that I developed during my fieldwork in Southall and on my interpretation and analysis of the quantitative and qualitative data I was gathering. But, first, in the following sections of this chapter, I will provide a brief historical overview of the ways in which languages and literacies have been caught up with religion and politics in the Panjab since the period of British colonial rule. I am including this historical account because, as I will go on to show, this historical dimension was crucial to my understanding of the complexities of the situation I was investigating in Southall. My aim here is to show how different languages, Panjabi, Hindi and Urdu, and different scripts, Gurmukhi, Devanagari and the Perso-Arabic script, came to be imbued with different religio-political values at different points in the history of this part of South Asia.
Languages, literacies and religio-political affiliations in Panjab There is now a substantial body of literature which charts the religio-political conflicts among Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims in the Panjab, during this century (Gopal 1968; Das Gupta 1970; Brass 1974; Jones 1976; Pandit 1978; Khubchandani 1979; 1989). As a consequence of these conflicts, three ethnolinguistic groups have come to be differentiated and referred to as the ‘Panjabi Sikhs’, the ‘Panjabi Hindus’ and the ‘Panjabi Muslims’, respectively. The three groups have continued to speak Panjabi, but only the Panjabi Sikhs have continued to develop Panjabi as a written language, using the Gurmukhi script. The other two groups have come to use other languages and other scripts for written purposes. Many Panjabi Hindus have developed a strong preference for writing Hindi in the Devanagari script, while Panjabi Muslims choose to write in Urdu, employing the Persian-Arabic script. Scripts have thus become potent symbols of this conflict, although, on occasion, both the Devanagari and the Perso-Arabic scripts are used to write Panjabi.
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There have been three broad phases in the history of Panjab during which people have been mobilised around language and literacy issues: the latter years of British colonial rule, from the turn of the century to the Independence of India in 1947; the two decades from Independence to the re-organisation of the boundaries of the state of Panjab in 1966; and from 1966 to the present. I will briefly describe each of these phases in turn: The first phase saw the emergence of Hindu and Sikh religious revival movements and the promotion of literature associated with these traditions. These movements grew in response to the dominant role accorded to Islam, the Urdu language and the Perso-Arabic script. During this phase, there were calls for the use of Panjabi and Hindi in schools, law courts and official institutions, instead of Urdu. Already in this first phase, there were signs of rivalries between those promoting literacy in Panjabi and the use of the Gurmukhi script and those promoting the use of Hindi and the Devanagari script. In the twenty years or so after Independence, these rivalries intensified. After the partition of Panjab, the majority of Panjabi Muslims found themselves on the Pakistani side of the Panjab and so, from then onwards, the main competition within the Indian Panjab was between Panjabi Sikhs and Panjabi Hindus. This competition was felt both in the urban and rural areas of the state and peaked at key moments such as during the gathering of language census data. In fact, the census was a key focus for conflict. According to Khubchandani (1989): In the 1951 Indian Census, language tabulation in the northern states (now comprising Panjab, Haryana, HP [Himachal Pradesh], Chandigarh and Delhi) was abandoned because of the emotionally-charged atmosphere surrounding the language issue at that time” (1989: 171).
Nevertheless, the education curriculum in Indian Panjab was still organised in such a way that parents could opt for either Panjabi or Hindi as media of instruction. The choices they made for their children clearly reflected their religio-political orientations. The re-organisation of the state boundaries in 1966 led to Panjabi (written in the Gurmukhi script) being adopted as the official language in the northern region of Panjab. This ushered in new secular roles for writing in Panjabi in the Gurmukhi script. At the same time, Hindi was chosen as the official language in Haryana, to the south, where Hindus were in a majority. There were now new choices for parents to make regarding the education of their children. Inevitably, some families found themselves on the ‘wrong’ side of
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the new state boundaries. For example, in Panjab, Panjabi Hindu parents found that the status of Hindi was considerably diminished and their children only had the opportunity to learn this (and the Devanagari script) in the third year of their schooling. They thus had to invest in Panjabi-medium education for their children to ensure that they had educational opportunities that were equal to those of children from Panjabi Sikh homes. After the partition of India, there had also been an influx into Delhi of Panjabi refugees fleeing from the communal strife. These included both Panjabi Hindus and Panjabi Sikhs. Hindi became the national language and the medium of instruction in the schools in Delhi from Independence onwards. Panjabi Sikhs, and even those Panjabi Hindus who had strong loyalty to Panjabi, had little choice but to invest in Hindi-medium education for their children in this urban context, whereas Panjabi Hindus who identified with the Hindi-Hindu tradition found the new language and literacy situation in Delhi working in their favour. Studies of Panjabi-speaking groups in Delhi carried out at a later date drew attention to the sociolinguistic outcomes of the religiopolitical conflicts that had surfaced in Panjab in the post-Independence era (Pandit 1978; Mukherjee 1980). For example, Pandit (1978) notes: “The Panjabi Hindus in India are shifting away from Panjabi…The Panjabi Hindu of Delhi is prepared to give up Panjabi in order not to be identified with the Sikh” (1978: 107).
Languages and literacies in the diaspora Panjabi speakers in East Africa There has been a long history of emigration from Panjab to East Africa. Emigration began when East Africa was still under British colonial rule and when indentured labourers were recruited from other colonies, such as India. The East African Panjabis included Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs. Over the generations, different Panjabi communities were established, primarily in Uganda and Kenya, but they retained close ties with South Asia through intersecting networks of kinship and religion. In addition to learning Kiswahili, they were also successful in maintaining their languages and distinctive literacies and in passing them on to their children, through community-run schools (Neale 1971, 1974). Their children also had access to English-medium education.
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However, the Africanisation policies of the late 1960s and early 1970s led to a major exodus of East African Asians. Many Panjabis from East Africa came to Britain and, during this period, Southall saw a sizeable influx of people from these East African communities. Panjabi speakers in Southall When I began my fieldwork in Southall in the late 1980s, Southall’s total population was about 120,000 and about 69,000 people were estimated to be of South Asian origin. Approximately 77 per cent of these were Panjabi Sikh, 20 per cent Hindus and the remainder included smaller groups of Muslims who spoke Panjabi, Gujarati and/or Urdu and other Hindus who spoke Gujarati or Tamil. Apart from English, Panjabi was, and still is, the most widely spoken language in this area of West London. Over the years, Southall has been transformed into a sizeable Panjabi community, as a result of patterns of employment, chain migration and the arrival of refugees from East Africa. The community is served by a retail sector which provides specialised goods and services for the community. Numerous cultural and religious activities take place locally and voluntary language classes are organised for local children, after school hours or on weekends, in local gurudwaras, mosques and temples. The legacy of the ethnolinguistic conflicts which emerged in Panjab at the turn of this century has, to some extent, been carried over into the diaspora and is still evident in the language and literacy practices of some of the Panjabis in the Southall community. There are still distinct ethnolinguistic groups which are referred to as Panjabi Sikhs and Panjabi Hindus. However, within each group, there is also considerable diversity. The people I worked with had different origins: the majority originated from villages and cities in Panjab, some were from Delhi or East Africa and a few had their family origins in Haryana. And, as I was to discover during the course of my fieldwork, they also had different views about the languages and literacies of their cultural inheritance.
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My study in Southall Preparing for and carrying out a small-scale community-based survey I began to lay the groundwork for a community-based study in the mid-1980s. During my second visit to Southall, I managed to find accommodation in a Hindu temple, where I began to make contact with Panjabi Hindus. My first move was to carry out a small pilot survey of thirty seven Panjabi Hindu adults which focused on their ‘patterns’ of language and literacy use. At that time, I expected this pilot survey to confirm that there was a strong Hindi/Hinduism association among Panjabi Hindus in this area of London. I also anticipated that attitudes towards Hindi literacy would be very positive. My predictions were indeed borne out by the findings of this pilot survey. For the time being, I remained satisfied with the sample of respondents that I had established through my contacts at the temple. During my later visits to Southall, I began staying with the families of some of the early acquaintances I had made. On one occasion, I was taken by one of these acquaintances to a political meeting held in Southall in support of the strikes organised by British coal miners. This meeting made it possible to widen my circle of contacts with local Panjabi Hindus. This was a turning point in my research. Through these new contacts, I began to gain further insights into the sociolinguistic situation in Southall. Contrary to my earlier findings, I learned that some Panjabi Hindus in Southall associated themselves with Panjabi and wanted their children to learn Panjabi. This invaluable period of participant observation had begun to reveal to me the degree of heterogeneity in this local ‘community’. There had clearly been a flaw in the way in which I had perceived and approached the ‘community’ initially, i.e. through the Hindu temple network. And this was detected as a result of a chance contact with other Panjabi Hindus who were not part of the temple network. This discovery did not make me abandon my plan of carrying out a fuller community-based survey, but it did alert me to the dangers of establishing a sample without doing participant observation beforehand. My ethnographic work also made it clear to me that my original sample had not taken account of the diverse places of origin of these Panjabis. With the eventual aim of constructing a wider sample which included people with different origins and migration histories and also individuals in different age groups, I then began making contact with local schools and interviewing local school children. In
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this way, I got to know a further twenty Panjabi Hindu families. I conducted interviews with the children, their parents and other adult members of their families. There were eighty six people in the overall sample. This included sixty adults and twenty six children. All the adult interviews were conducted at home. Some of the children were interviewed at school and some at home. My interviews were guided by a questionnaire and were generally audio-recorded. However, the interviews were not always carried out in a single sitting. Sometimes, I made a second or a third visit. My questions focused on language and literacy choices and attitudes. If the respondent elaborated on the reasons behind a particular choice or set of attitudes, I allowed ample space in the interview for this to happen. Completing the questionnaire was seldom the main activity of the meeting. As mentioned earlier, since I was staying with some of my informants and spending long periods of time in Southall, it was possible to carry out the interviews at times which were convenient for the informants. The interviews were often combined with some kind of social occasion.
Literacy repertoires, language/script choices and attitudes to children’s language and literacy learning: the ‘patterns’ documented by the survey This section presents the survey findings. The quantitative data below is based on self reports by the eighty six Panjabi Hindu respondents about their literacies, their language and script choices and their preferences with regard to literacy learning.
reading skills
100 80 not at all
60
only a little 40
quite well
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language
Figure 1a. Reading skills according to language
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writing skills
100 80 not at all
60
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Gujarati Gujerati
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Figure 1b. Writing skills according to language
My aim in this part of the survey was to identify the range of literacies that my respondents had access to. The respondents were asked how well they thought they read and wrote in the languages they knew. As Figures 1a and 1b above show, a much higher percentage of respondents claimed a knowledge of reading and writing in Panjabi, Hindi and English than in any other language reported. The highest proportion claimed literacy in English, followed by Hindi and Panjabi, respectively. Those who reported a knowledge of Swahili and Gujarati literacy were from the first generation of families who had emigrated from East Africa. Literacy in Urdu was only claimed by first generation respondents.
100 80 60
to friends in Britain
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don't write w rite
Figure 2. Language/script choices for writing letters/notes to South Asian friends and relatives in Britain
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Figure 2 shows a preference for English in written correspondence with friends and relatives in Britain1. Among those who did report using Hindi or Panjabi in addition to English, a significantly higher proportion said that they used Hindi. No other South Asian languages were reported to be used for correspondence. My ethnographic observations in the Southall context also confirmed that little or no use was being made of Swahili or Gujarati literacies. I did observe Urdu being used in some reading and writing activities, but only by members of the older generation. 80 60
to friends in India
40
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to officials in India
0 Panjabi
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don't write w rite
Figure 3. Language/script choices for writing letters/notes to South Asian friends, relatives and officials in India
Figure 3 shows the findings for correspondence with a range of people in India. The first intriguing finding here was the proportion of respondents who reported that they did not write at all, as compared with the pattern I documented for correspondence with South Asian friends and relatives in the British context. One possible explanation for this is the alternative practice that I observed of exchanging audio-tapes, video-tapes and photographs with friends and relatives in India and the use of the telephone. It is also interesting to note that, where people did say they wrote letters to friends and relatives in India, a higher proportion of respondents reported the use of South Asian languages than in the case of correspondence with friends and relatives in the British context. Hindi dominated in the responses to this question, while the percentage of respondents reporting English and Panjabi was broadly similar. The fact that the use of Panjabi in correspondence with friends and family is mentioned at all is quite significant, especially when viewed against the historical background that I outlined in the second section of this chapter and the long association of Panjabi Hindus with the Hindi-Hinduism tradition. My survey data also revealed that it was not just people from the older generation, but also from the younger generation who indicated that they were writing
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20 0 Daily
Weekly
Fortnightly
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Figure 4. Language/script choices for reading newspapers, books and magazines
letters and notes in Panjabi and Hindi to relatives and friends in both Britain and India (see Saxena 1995 for further details). Figure 4 sets out my findings regarding language/script choice of reading materials. A very high percentage of the respondents reported reading materials in English (90%) and well over half (55.6%) of respondents reported reading newspapers, magazines and books in English on a daily basis. However, these findings need to be considered in the light of the fact that reading materials in Panjabi and Hindi are not readily available in Britain. The fact that a significant proportion of respondents actually mentioned Panjabi (27.2 %) and an even larger proportion (41.9 %) mentioned Hindi is in itself noteworthy. 80 60 40
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Figure 5a. parents’ preference regarding learning of reading in different languages 80 60 40 20 0
Panjabi Hindi English 1st choice
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Figure 5b. Parents’ preference regarding learning of writing in different languages
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There were separate questionnaires for the children and for the adults (parents). Figures 5a and 5b present the preferences shown by the parents (starting from the first and moving to the third choice) regarding the learning of reading and writing in different languages by their children.2 English and Hindi emerged as almost co-equal first choices, with reported preferences being weighted slightly towards English. However, almost one third of the respondents opted for Panjabi as a first choice. This showed again that not all Panjabi Hindus in Southall show a primary allegiance to Hindi. The quantitative data presented above allowed me to capture some general trends among Panjabi Hindus in Southall with respect to knowledge and use of different literacies as well as attitudes towards the teaching of different languages and literacies. I was interested not only in what dominated the trends (i.e., the higher percentages in particular cells), but also the less significant components (i.e., the lower percentages). The ‘patterns’ documented through this small-scale survey gave me a broad synchronic snapshot of the language and literacy repertoires, the language and literacy choices and the attitudes of eighty six people in this local population. However, I also needed to explain why the literacy choices and attitudes of these Panjabi Hindus were the way they were at that point in time and how they had developed over time. I also needed to gain further insights into how people actually used the different literacies in their repertoires and I still needed to deepen my understanding of the values generated by their day-today literacy practices. As Martin-Jones (1991) pointed out in her retrospective account of the survey work carried out by the Linguistic Minorities Project in the early 1980s: Sociolinguistic survey work slants observations toward the what rather than the how or why of bilingual communication. Researchers who are primarily concerned with addressing how- or why-type questions will be drawn toward a more ethnographic approach and to micro-level studies of language in use (1991: 53).
I found two ‘patterns’ documented by the survey particularly intriguing. First, I was struck by the strong aspirations expressed by my respondents for children in this local community to learn to read and write a South Asian language as well as English. Just by spending time in the community, I had become aware that the different groups of Panjabis in Southall were actively involved in organising classes in different South Asian languages and litera-
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cies. I had also been struck by the fact that many young people in this area of London spoke Panjabi and could also read and write at least one South Asian language. I realised that this degree of ethnolinguistic vitality could be partly due to the sheer size of the local Panjabi-speaking population and to the opportunities available locally for using either Panjabi or Hindi on a daily basis. But I also had the impression that there were other factors at work that I had not yet identified. The second ‘pattern’ which intrigued me in the survey findings was one which recurred across the items in the questionnaire: that is, the reporting of the use of Panjabi (in the Gurmukhi script) in reading and in correspondence by a small percentage of the respondents and the reporting of Panjabi as the first choice language for children’s language and literacy learning by almost one third of the respondents.
Asking why questions: incorporating an additional historical dimension In order to find explanations for these and other ‘patterns’ in the survey data, I decided to look into the history of the community in Southall. I did this in a number of ways: by reading the written accounts that were available, by returning to the audio-recordings I had of my respondents’ responses to my open-ended questions during the interviews and by carrying out further indepth interviews. I identified four different periods in the history of Southall, which spanned the four decades from the arrival of the first Panjabis in this area of London in the early 1950s. I have described these periods in detail elsewhere (Saxena 1994), so here I will focus on two periods, the 1970s and the 1980s, which are particularly pertinent to my aim of explaining the two ‘patterns’ of survey findings I have mentioned above.
The 1970s in Southall: racism, external threats, new arrivals and the revival of Panjabi and Hindi literacies As I began to build a picture of the recent history of Southall, I came to realise that one major factor underlying the ethnolinguistic vitality in the Panjabi community was the economic recession in Britain in the early 1970s. As a consequence of the recession, various social and political forces were un-
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leashed and this led to discrimination against minorities in the labour market and, then later, to racist attacks which were specifically directed towards the residents of Southall. In response, the Panjabi community fought back and many young Panjabis were involved in direct action. These political and economic developments provoked a powerful cultural response: younger and older Panjabis in Southall (Sikhs and Hindus alike) re-affirmed their distinct identities during this period. The revival of the local minority languages was part of this broader cultural response to the changing political and socioeconomic conditions. Another major factor was the growing perception among members of the older generation that young people were experiencing alienation from their cultural roots. Parents began to argue that this was due to the prevailing monolingual ethos within the education system. This led to demands for language provision in the local schools and to various community-led efforts to maintain and reproduce the languages and the literacies associated with different religious and cultural traditions. A third factor was the arrival of Panjabis from East Africa, as political refugees. As I have indicated earlier, they had had a long tradition of maintaining their languages, literacies and distinct cultural practices in the East Africa context. Their arrival was a considerable boost to local efforts. They made valuable financial and organisational contributions to the building up of the infrastructure required for a new range of linguistic and cultural activities to flourish. New religio-political conflicts in India in the 1980s and their impact on Panjabis in Southall By piecing together the history of the Southall community, I also came to understand how much impact the political events in India in the mid-1980s had had on the local population. Religio-political conflicts had flared up again: a small faction of Sikhs in the Panjab had begun to voice demands for an independent nation. This led to communal violence between Sikhs and Hindus which rapidly spread to other parts of India, especially Delhi. These political conflicts ultimately led to the assassination of Indira Gandhi, the then Prime Minister of India, by her Sikh bodyguard. The consequent backlash against the Sikhs by Hindus in India had a profound effect on community relations in Southall. For the first time since the arrival of Panjabis in this part
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of London, the boundary between Sikhs and Hindus came to be much more sharply drawn. Local tensions were exacerbated by the fact that the man who aspired to the presidency of the imagined Sikh nation, or Khalistan, had an office in Southall. In addition, a local Sikh temple became the main centre for the promotion of the separatist Sikh cause. As a result of these religio-political tensions, some people, particularly those who had deep religious convictions, began to re-affirm distinctive identities based on religion. This inevitably had implications for the choices people made in terms of language and literacy classes for their children. Many more Panjabi Hindus opted for Hindi classes for their children from then on. However, by the time I arrived in Southall, the events of the mid-eighties had also given rise to another grouping of Panjabis, which included both Sikhs and Hindus. These were people who espoused the use of Panjabi because they saw it as representing a pan-Panjabi culture and they were active in mediating in the conflict between the two religious groups. The individuals I had encountered on the evening when I went to the meeting in support of the miners’ strike associated with this group. Since that evening, I had been aware that there were different groups of Panjabis in Southall, with different discourses about language and literacy. This diversity had also been reflected in my survey data. Now, I was able to set my quantitative and qualitative findings in a wider political and historical context and add a more explanatory dimension to the study. Over the remainder of my time in Southall, I identified four broad groups of Panjabis: Sikhs who said they wanted to use Panjabi on religious grounds; Hindus who indicated they wanted to use Hindi on religious grounds; Panjabi Hindus who said they had a preference for Hindi because it was the national language of India; and, the fourth group was the one I have already mentioned: that is, both Sikhs and Hindus, who felt they wanted to use Panjabi, because, for them, it symbolised a pan-Panjabi culture. The latter group was also more politically aware and took an active interest in left wing politics. While these were not discrete groupings, people often differentiated themselves from others in these ways.
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Asking how questions: extending the ethnographic work and investigating the literacy practices of the members of one extended family As I have already mentioned, I developed a close relationship with some of the Panjabi speakers I was working with. I was visiting Southall regularly and staying with a number of families, for different lengths of time. Among those families, there was one family, in particular, with whom I stayed most often. I decided to start observing and documenting the literacy practices of each of the members of this family more closely so that I could gain further insights into the ways in which they drew on their literacies and deepen my understanding of the meanings and values generated by their day-to-day practices. This family was a microcosm of the wider community of Panjabi Hindus in Southall: they had had different migration experiences, they had diverse places of origin, they had different views on language and literacy and there was considerable variation in their uses of different languages and literacies. There were three generations in the family: grandparents, parents and a four year old son. I will introduce each member of the family in turn below, focusing on their language and literacy repertoires, their educational experiences, their interests and their language values and the ways in which they drew on their literacies in their daily lives. The grandfather spoke five languages: Panjabi, Hindi, Urdu, English and Kiswahili. He had been brought up in Panjab and received his education there in the pre-Independence period. He had learned to read and write Panjabi and Urdu at school and Hindi at home. He later moved to East Africa to get married. He and his wife and children then moved to Britain while the children were still quite young and settled in Southall. When I first met him, he had already retired. He had worked as a clerk in the railways in East Africa and, after arriving in Britain, he had worked as a ticket collector for British Rail. He was an avid reader. He made regular visits to the local Community Club for the elderly so that he could read the newspapers there, in Urdu and in English. He was also interested in politics, in Britain, India and Pakistan and also the local politics in Southall. He associated with the group in Southall I have mentioned above who were socialist-leaning. The grandmother spoke Panjabi, Hindi and Kiswahili and a little English. She had been brought up in East Africa in a devout Hindi household. She had had little formal education, but she had learned to read and write Hindi in the Devanagari script. She was also well versed in the literacy activities associ-
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ated with religious observance, such as the readings from the Indian epics and the Hindu scriptures. She had never worked outside the home either in East Africa or in Southall, but in East Africa, she had been involved in managing a Hindu temple. When she arrived in Southall, moves were already afoot to establish a Hindu temple, so her prior experience proved to be a useful resource and, again, she became involved in local temple management. The father spoke Panjabi, Hindi and English. As I indicated above, he had been born in East Africa but came to Britain at an early age and received all of his education through the medium of English. He could read some Hindi, having learned it at home, but he did most of his reading in English. When I met him, he was working as a supervisor at a local factory, where most of the employees were of South Asian origin. He occasionally used Panjabi and Hindi at work with these employees, especially when an interpreter was needed. He was also responsible for the provision of bilingual materials (in English and a range of local languages) on safety regulations, medical benefits and workers’ legal rights. Outside of work, his other main commitment was to the local Hindu temple. Along with his mother, he was a member of the executive committee of the temple. The mother spoke Panjabi, Hindi and some English. She had been brought up and educated in Panjab just after the period when the state boundaries were re-organised and when the conflicts over the two languages had subsided. This could well have influenced her attitudes to the two languages, since she had a strong orientation to the secular uses of Hindi and Panjabi. The medium of instruction in her school had been Panjabi, and Hindi had been taught as a second language. She could read and write both languages with ease, but still had some difficulty in reading English. She would, for example, ask other members of her family for assistance in reading official letters written in English. At four years of age, the son already spoke both Panjabi and English. He had just started nursery school, so he was beginning to learn to read and write English. In addition, he could already recognise and name the different writing systems he encountered at home and in local community contexts. Some events in the daily lives of the members of this household One of the ways in which I organised my fieldwork at this stage of the project was by carrying out focused observations of particular events. I wrote up notes
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for myself after each of these events and sometimes asked questions to those who had participated in the events about the significance of particular things which were said or done. Some of these events were ‘literacy events’, in the sense originally defined by Heath (1982b), that is occasions “in which a piece of writing is integral to the nature of the participants’ interactions and their interpretive processes” (1982b: 50 ). A discussion over dinner about the son’s language education One of the topics discussed over dinner one evening was whether the son should be encouraged to learn Hindi or Panjabi and where he should do his language studies. Both languages were offered as extra-curricular options in his local primary school as well as at local voluntary classes. Different views were expressed by different family members: The grandfather wanted his grandson to learn Panjabi, written in the Gurmukhi script at school, but not in the Sikh temple. He said that, this way, his grandson could develop his Panjabi and have access to Panjabi culture. He also favoured Panjabi because it was the official language of the state of Panjab. However, his grandmother, his mother and his father expressed the view that he should learn Hindi and learn to read and write it in the Devanagari script. In putting forward their arguments, his grandmother and his father took more of a religious stance, emphasising their concern about passing on to the boy an understanding and appreciation of Hindu culture and religion; whereas his mother took a secular stance, stressing that Hindi was the national language of India. A further argument put forward in favour of Hindi related to correspondence with relatives in Delhi as well as in the Panjab. So, the grandfather was outvoted, and it was decided that the child should initially go to the Hindi classes taught in the Hindu temple and that, later, he could also opt for secular instruction in Hindi in his local school. Two letter-writing activities at home On one occasion, I observed the two women in the family, the grandmother and the mother, while they were writing letters to India. This event happened one evening, in the front room of the house, where most of the literacy activities took place. This was where different members of the family came to read or to deal with bills or official correspondence as well as private correspondence. And this was where all the magazines and newspapers in Hindi and English were usually kept. As the women worked on the letter together, I
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sat reading on the other side of the room. The two women had just completed their household chores and they were sitting on the sofa, with their legs tucked underneath them, and with the writing materials on the coffee table in front of them. They were going to write a letter to a Panjabi-speaking relative in Delhi who could only read and write Hindi, so the letter was going to be written in Devanagari. They discussed the content of the letter first, in both Panjabi and Hindi. The grandmother then acted as scribe, writing out the text on a writing pad with lined paper. Every now and then she stopped while they discussed further details of the content, particular items of news about the family, recent events in Southall and so on. The letter was in the Devanagari script but Hindi and Panjabi were intricately intertwined in the text. The grandmother then moved away to another room and the mother began a second letter, this time to a personal friend of hers in Panjab, who had been in the same age cohort as her at school. The mother told me afterwards that this friend could read both Panjabi and Hindi, but she chose to write the letter to her in Panjabi since that is the language they had always used together at school. A meeting at the Hindu temple in Southall I was invited by two members of the family, the grandmother and the son, to attend a meeting of the executive committee of the Hindu temple. The meeting was held in an upstairs room at the temple and eight people, two women and six men, were present, including my two hosts. There was a large dhurry on the floor and everyone was seated on this. The discussions took place in Panjabi, with occasional switches into Hindi and into English. The committee members first prepared a draft letter in English about the forthcoming annual general meeting. The letter was to be sent out to all the registered members of the temple. When the letter was finished, someone made the suggestion that bilingual letters should be sent out, in English and in Hindi. This issue was discussed at some length and one person present reminded the others that the temple only had English typewriters. Eventually, it was agreed that when the temple had enough funds, the committee would send bilingual circulars and notices to its members, since one of the functions of the temple was to promote Hindi. After this, the committee went on to prepare some handwritten notices in Hindi for the temple noticeboard which set out the agenda for the annual general meeting.
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Several benefits accrued from extending the ethnographic work in this way: first, I was able to gain much more detailed insights into the ways in which different literacies were embedded in the lives of a small group of Panjabi Hindus, in different domains, and I got a better grasp of the complexities of the literacy choices they made. For example, I was able to capture the fact that the letter written to a relative in Delhi by the two women was a bilingual letter, with stretches of Panjabi incorporated into a predominantly Hindi text. This bilingual style of letter-writing reminded me of letters received by other Panjabis in Southall. These details relating to the stylistic choices writers make can only be captured by means of observation and not by means of questions about practices. In addition to gaining more detailed insights into practices, I was also able to get a clearer sense of how the beliefs, values and interests of different members of the family guided their literacy choices. The strong orientation of the grandmother and the father to Hindi clearly stemmed from their religious convictions and their public affirmation of a Hindu identity through their work on the temple committee. This orientation to Hindi also looked set to be passed on to the son, through the decisions that were taken about his language education. The third point that I would like to make here is that doing detailed ethnographic work in this particular household, where different family members had recent experience of migration from India and from East Africa, helped to throw into sharper focus the wider historical processes which impinged on the development of their language and literacy repertoires. Access to different literacies had clearly been determined, for the men and women in different generations, by the social and political changes occurring around them and by the migratory movements that they were caught up in.
My background as ethnographer: fieldwork relationships and changes over time in my own understanding of the lived experiences of Panjabis in Southall In this section, with the help of a couple of examples, I will now go on to show how my own personal experiences of living in Britain and in Southall helped to deepen my understanding of the significance of the changing social and political environment (in Britain and India) for the lives of the people in my
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study. In the initial stages of my fieldwork, when some of the Panjabis I met made casual references to racism in the wider society, I could not see its relevance to my study. I had just arrived in Britain, so my experience of racism was limited. However, as the study proceeded and I gave more weight to ethnographic work, I began to pay more attention to the accounts of racism that I was hearing and to take a closer look at how racism can shape peoples’ practices and views of the world. I found that this helped me to deepen my understanding of the lived experience of minority groups and hence the importance they attach, in some circumstances, to preserving the languages and literacies of their cultural inheritance. The second point I would like to make is that, as a person of Indian origin having friends and relatives of Panjabi Hindu and Sikh backgrounds, I also felt the repercussions of the wider religio-political conflicts that had erupted in India in the mid-1980s. I therefore found myself living through very similar experiences to those around me in Southall. One example will illustrate this particularly well. One of the Panjabi Hindu women who participated in my study was married to a Sikh. As a result of the Hindu-Sikh communal disturbances in India, the social contact between the Sikh son-in-law and her own family was suspended. Her experience had strong resonances for me: my close relationship with a Sikh family from India, living in Britain at the time, had also come under severe strain during this period. However, the political events of the 1980s were not felt in the same way across the entire Panjabi community in Southall, nor did they shape attitudes and practices in a rigid way. For instance, when I went to interview the editor of a newspaper run by a Sikh militant organisation in Southall at the height of the political tensions, I came across the sub-editor who turned out to be a Sikh who had grown up in an area not very far from where I came from in Delhi. I did not recall ever talking to him in Delhi, but we found ourselves locked into a very pleasant conversation, during which we exchanged memories of the place we had come from. What was striking was that, this conversation was taking place against the background that I was a Hindu and he was a Sikh, and one who had been involved in mobilising Sikhs around the idea of a separate homeland carved out of India.
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Conclusion To conclude, I will briefly summarise some of the main issues that I feel need to be taken into account when conducting research on multilingual literacy with linguistic minority groups: firstly, some linguistic minority populations, in Britain and elsewhere, are much more heterogeneous in nature than others. This definitely needs to be taken into account in planning empirical work. As I have tried to show in this chapter, some research methods, like small scale surveys based on samples established through personal networks can obscure significant differences among a local population. Such multilingual contexts require one to take a broader approach, an ecological approach (Barton 1994a), which incorporates a historical perspective and draws on qualitative/ ethnographic data to illuminate micro-level practices. Secondly, a community-based study of multilingual literacy needs to take account of the ways in which a local community is linked to a wider diaspora. The contemporary literacy practices of many groups often have their roots in practices which have long been established elsewhere and in different forms of cultural and/or religio-political traditions. However, it is also important to bear in mind that practices are continually changing and being re-invented and that the strength of cultural, and religious affiliations comes and goes over time. And, lastly, the cultural and linguistic backgrounds of the researchers need to be made fully visible. Their language and literacy repertoire, their communicative competence, their background knowledge of, and past experiences with various subgroups of the community all have a bearing on the way in which both quantitative and ethnographic data is elicited and interpreted. One of the main responsibilities of researchers is to engage in reflexive work, to continually check on ‘what they know’ and ‘how they know it’ and, wherever possible, to check their own interpretations of events and practices with those of the people they are working with. Acknowledgements I am grateful to Marilyn Martin-Jones for her insightful comments on the reorganisation of this chapter. I am also thankful to Charmian Kenner for her useful comments on an earlier draft of this chapter.
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298 Notes 1.
‘Don’t write’ here means that the respondents chose not to write. This does not mean ‘unable to write’.
2.
Two school subjects, French and German were also included in this part of the questionnaire, but the responses related to these languages have not been included in Figures 5a and 5b. For this reason, the percentages do not add up to 100%.
CHAPTER 15
Photography in collaborative research on multilingual literacy practices Images and understandings of researcher and researched Rachel Hodge and Kathryn Jones
Introduction This is a jointly written chapter about our use of collaborative photography as a research tool and as data in literacy research. We think that there is an important role for collaboratively produced and interpreted photographs in image-based research. We intend to use this chapter to explain our ideas and by so doing contribute to the debate on issues related to image-based research on literacy. In this chapter, we set out the background and links with our research. We then describe the two different contexts in which we worked. We go on to explain the collaborative approach, which is located within a theoretical framework for democratic research. In the following sections, we describe why and how we used photography collaboratively, making detailed references to our data. Finally, we draw out some conclusions about the validity and usefulness of photography as a collaborative research tool and as data. Our references are always to our own research on literacy practices, but we think our experience of collaborative photography can be equally relevant to other kinds of research involving images. In the next section, we relate our
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own work to previous research involving the use of images and particularly to work on photographing literacy practices.
Background and links Image-based research Photographs, film and other kinds of images are widely used in Social Sciences research. In diverse disciplines such as Educational Research, Media Studies, Anthropology, Sociolinguistics and Sociology researchers are: a) addressing issues which arise from using photography and film as research tools and as data; b) exploring the academic potential and validity of using visual images in research and ways of presenting this visual data to others; and c) working to develop methodologies and practices for using and interpreting images. There has been, to date, very little explicit discussion of research which is collaborative and which makes use of photography. Photographing literacy practices In our research, we are working within a social and ideological view of literacy (Street 1984, 1993a; Barton 1994; Saxena 1994). The focus of this approach is the study of people’s literacy practices in their social and historical contexts. Photographing individual and community literacy practices in bilingual and multilingual settings fits with this social view of literacy because, as we will illustrate in the course of this chapter, it provides a way of documenting people’s literacy practices and texts within the activities of their daily lives. Photography has been used as a research tool in Anthropology since the mid-nineteenth century (Edwards 1992). Ethnographic approaches to the study of literacy that draw upon this anthropological tradition are using photography as a research method. However, relatively little has been published about the use of photography in literacy research. As members of The Lancaster Literacy Research Group, our work draws in particular on that of other research group members. David Barton, Mary Hamilton and Sarah Padmore’s Literacy in the Community project1 involved the use of photography to document the visual environment of the community, as part of their
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data collection. A subsequent project entitled Multilingual Literacies: Home, Community and School by Arvind Bhatt, Marilyn Martin-Jones and David Barton2 also used photos to document the visual literacy environment and literacy practices of Gujarati people they were working with in Leicester. Some members of the Lancaster Literacy Research Group have written a paper about their use of photos to document literacy (Barton et al., 1993). This paper focused on what photos of literacy in different social and cultural contexts can reveal about the nature of literacy and the pedagogical implications of using photos in literacy research. The concept of using photography collaboratively as a research tool is newly emerging in this field. A collaborative approach to research is an attempt to challenge power relationships between ‘researchers’ and the people ‘being researched’, by developing collaborative and participative ways of working. We tried to do this by involving some of those with whom we were researching as co-researchers rather than ‘researchees’, which is the more orthodox positioning of those ‘being researched’. In this way, we attempted to share with our co-researchers as much control as possible for defining the research agenda for the projects and collecting and interpreting data. Working as co-researchers in this way can be located within a democratic approach to research. We explain these ideas and where they come from, in more depth in another section of this chapter on Democratic Research. In subsequent sections, we illustrate how photography can be used within a collaborative approach. Our chapter seeks to extend the work already carried out in imagebased research (e.g. Prosser 1998) and particularly in literacy research by describing and evaluating our use of collaborative photography as a research tool and as data in two different research contexts.
Two contexts for ethnographic research Kathryn I used collaborative photography as part of an ethnographic study of the bilingual literacy practices of Welsh speakers. To collect data for this research project, I spent twelve months over a period of two years living in a rural district in the Vale of Clwyd, in north-east Wales, some five miles from the place where I grew up as a Welsh speaker myself and where my parents are
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still living. The main aims of my study were to investigate Welsh speakers’ language and literacy practices in Welsh and English and to analyse the way they codeswitch and use oral and written language in specific literacy events. I therefore wanted to collect data that documented the range of people’s literacy practices, in various local institutional and social settings, as well as data that would enable me to document people’s uses of literacy in specific events. I worked collaboratively with different people in various ways at each stage of this research. In this chapter, I refer to one co-researcher, then a sixteen year old college student called Rhian Roberts. Rhian and I used photography to document her literacy practices in conjunction with her diaries, samples of literacy materials and audio recordings of our discussions and specific literacy events. Rachel In three separate ethnographic case studies, I took photographs in a Blackburn Muslim community of South Asian origin. I worked with co-researchers from that community who were interested in taking part. In the first study, I worked with Zuleka,3 an East-African Gujarati woman who came to Britain at the age of twelve. In another study, Zuleka’s nine-year-old daughter, Fazila was the co-researcher. In the final study Adil, Mushy, Rohale and Natalie, a group of friends aged 18–20 years who were all born in Britain worked with me. I wanted to find out about the literacy practices in people’s daily lives, the linguistic resources they drew on and the possible social meanings, related to migration and resettlement, which informed their practices. Photography was one of several research tools used in the study. I live in Blackburn and have worked with bilingual students and teachers in the community for several years. Aside from the broad research aim outlined above, as an outsider to the community, I did not feel able or want to plan in detail what to document and how. Instead, the research process was developmental and a research agenda for the study evolved from discussions I had with the co-researchers. I was inspired to start taking photos of the community visual environment at the time when Zuleka and I were carrying out investigation into her patterns of spoken language in different domains. Our interest in researching Zuleka’s literacy practices grew out of discussions around these photos. This then led on to similar work with Fazila, Adil and his friends.
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Democratic research Where do our ideas related to a democratic model of research stem from? We are drawing on ideas developed and set out by Cameron et al (1992 p. 22). ‘Empowering’ and ‘democratic’ research is explained as research ‘on, for and with’ (Cameron et al 1992: 22). It implies interactive and dialogic research methods (rather than a positivist model that puts distance between the researcher who observes and the researched who are observed). It is a way of researching which is guided by three main principles: Persons are not objects and should not be treated as objects. Subjects have their own agendas and research should try to address them. If knowledge is worth having it is worth sharing. (Cameron et al 1992: 131)
Another principle the authors recognise as important is that of validation, that is, checking the researchees intentions and feeding back the results. The ‘empowering’ research model is a useful framework but we would argue that it implies that it is the researcher who is empowering the ‘researchees’. It does not fully explain a ‘collaborative’ approach which has evolved out of the tradition of participatory research in recently emerged fields of Social Science such as Women’s’ Studies (see Hamilton, Ivanic and Barton 1992). A ‘collaborative’ approach implies an attempt to share as much control for the research as possible with the co-researchers. ‘Shared research’ (Hamilton et al, ibid.) allows for the inclusion of different sources of information and the assigning of equal status to each type of information. It values first hand ‘insider’ experience as a valid source of data and an essential complement to ‘outsider’ sources and understandings. Co-researchers share in the process of research as active decision-makers, not as objects of it. This may be in every aspect of the research or only in some stages of the process, according to the possibilities and constraints. Because her study involved many people, Kathryn collaborated on specific aspects of the study with a selection of people at each stage of the research. Working on a smaller scale with an adult, a child and a group of four young people, Rachel collaborated with them at every level from the planning stage onwards, except during the writing up phase. Rachel’s close collaboration with her co-researchers was in part due to her constrained position as a monolingual researcher. We would argue that this collaborative, democratic model implies that the knowledge production and meaning making of ethnographic research is done jointly by the re-
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searcher and researched and is, therefore, more power-sharing than if controlled mainly by the researcher. It positions the researcher as ‘learner’ rather than as ‘expert’. In our view, an effective way to carry out valid, reliable and ethically sound research, particularly within an ethnographic framework, is to work collaboratively with the people involved at every possible level. In the following sections, we shall describe in more detail the work we carried out. We show in what ways it can be said to be democratic and collaborative and how it can provide a greater understanding of people’s literacy practices.
Photography as a research tool For both of us, our reasons for using photography as a research tool derived from our respective research contexts, the ways in which we were positioned in those contexts and our research agendas. Rachel’s starting point, as a person from outside the community’s cultural and linguistic context, was to learn as much as possible about the literacy environment which later led to documenting literacy practices. For this reason, she explored a range of possibilities for collecting data, which included photography. Although it was not planned from the start, taking photos in the community became the main way in which she got to know different people. This aroused their interest and opened doors for documenting not only the visual environment but also literacy practices and events, such as in a mosque school. The experience and perspective of community members became very important in the research. Kathryn, on the other hand, set out from the outset with more specific plans for including photography as a tool in documenting a range of literacy practices and recording literacy events in an environment with cultural and linguistic roots which she herself shared. Photography captures the visual quality of literacy and complements the way that other research tools such as written fieldnotes and audio recordings can document literacy practices and texts. As indicated previously, both of us had an interest in a ‘democratic’ approach to research. Rachel as an ‘outsider’ could not have carried out the study without close collaboration with community members. We both found that photography offered another possibility for people in the two communities to be more involved in the research. The camera was an accessible research tool for people who were already familiar
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with the practice of taking photos. Taking photos was therefore an easy and enjoyable research method which could be carried out by young children as well as by adults. As a participant observer in many of the events she wanted to document, Kathryn found that photography was less intrusive than writing fieldnotes. Using a camera to document events also meant that other participants could, and in fact sometimes did, use her camera to take photographs of the event that she was documenting. We both found that photographs were also a much more accessible representation than fieldnote accounts that we could later show to many of the people who had taken part. They could be shown, passed around, discussed, kept and displayed, whether we or our co-researchers themselves had taken the photos. Photographs were more highly valued than our written accounts as keepsakes and momentos. Taking photographs to collect data was, for both of us, a way of involving more people in the process of research than if we had just relied on tape recording and writing fieldnotes. For Kathryn, in a study involving a large number of people, photography was one way of making as much of the research as collaborative as was practical and possible.
What kind of photographs did we take? In both contexts, after explaining to the participants in our respective studies what we meant by a social view of literacy and the way in which that might relate to their own literacy environment and practices, all the participants took whatever photographs they wanted to. Rhian took photos of literacies at her college and at home. Kathryn photographed Rhian engaged in various literacies at home and at college, and they both took photos of the literacy materials Rhian referred to in the participant diary she kept for several weeks. Zuleka chose to photograph her family in ‘moments of literacy’ at home as well as shop literacies and signs in her community. Rachel was able to take photographs of other people in the community such as in the shops and mosque school that Zuleka, as a community member, did not feel comfortable taking herself. Nine year old Fazila and Adil, one of the young people, asked friends and family to take photographs of them carrying out literacy practices. It was interesting that neither Rhian nor Adil took any photos of their family but Fazila included photos with her mother and grandmother but not with her
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father and grandfather. Working collaboratively in this way enabled us to collect a wide range of both public and private images of literacy.
Photographs as data In this section we provide more detail about the kinds of photographs we took and their validity and status as data. Rachel In my research, photos sometimes provide further ethnographic evidence to support related data that has been recorded in other ways. Zuleka took the photograph in Figure 1 of Fazila and her grandmother engaged in a common literacy practice, writing in their personal recipe books in English and Gujarati respectively. Although you can see the shape of the text in the photo, it is not clear enough to decode. Copies of the recipes in Figure 1 provide a clear version of the text. The transcript extract also included in Figure 1 is evidence of the discussion about the literacy event. The photo of Fazila and her grandmother also has the effect of making visible the ownership of the data so that the recipe texts can be seen as having been produced by Fazila and her grandmother during a particular literacy event. We feel that in this way, collaborative photography can lessen the distancing of ‘the researched’ and the facelessness of isolated pieces of text data. The collaboratively collected photos provided the catalyst for gathering further ethnographic detail about this literacy event. They stimulated the kinds of questions from myself, an outsider, which led to detail the family may not otherwise have thought significant to mention. Discussion about the photos revealed that this was a common literacy event. Fazila explained that cooking was a favourite hobby of hers and that she often did this with her grandmother and in the literacy diary she kept, she recorded other cooking activities with her grandmother. A page of Fazila’s diary where she mentioned cooking with her grandmother is also included in Figure 1. Fazila’s language of literacy is English and her grandmother’s is Gujarati, which is related to where they were each brought up and educated. A visiting relative from Gujarat had passed on the recipe for barfe (South Asian sweet) orally in Gujarati to Fazila’s grandmother. Fazila can speak and understand
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Fazila’s English version of her Grandmother’s recipe
Transcript excerpt from audiorecorded conversation between Zuleka, Fazila and Rachel F: … cooking is the main thing I like .. it’s my best hobby … I mainly do cooking with my Granma
Zuleka’s photo of Fazila and her grandmother writing recipes
Z: yes this was when a relative of ours came from Gujarat .. she brought this food for us and my mother asked her for the recipe…she told it to my mother.. R: in Gujarati? Z: yes in Gujarati she told it ..then er .. my mother wrote it down in her book in Gujarati and Fazila wrote it in her book in English .. she doesn’t know how to write Gujarati
A page from Fazila’s diary in which she mentions making a cup cakes with her grandmother Figure 1. Fazila’s photographs, recipes and a transcript from Rachel’s study in Blackburn, England.
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Gujarati but she cannot write it and so she wrote the recipe in English, whereas her grandmother wrote it in Gujarati. Whilst cooking together they spoke Gujarati. Fazila’s grandmother does not speak English. During our conversation, Fazila showed me the recipe books and Zuleka suggested making a copy of the texts that, she said, would show the different languages more clearly than the photos. In working collaboratively with Zuleka and Fazila to analyse the data they themselves had chosen to collect, we were able to draw social meaning from a wealth of ethnographic detail which I would otherwise not have had access to. I learnt about the importance of shared literacy practices in the extended family, the different shifting linguistic resources of this family group related to migration and resettlement and the ways in which these resources are creatively managed. Sometimes my own researcher photos became important in the research. For example, I took the photos in Figure 2 of a travel agent in the community. I asked Zuleka if she used that particular travel agent and was amazed to discover that she herself acted as a travel agent for several friends and contacts in the community, a very significant dimension of her literacy practices that she had not thought to mention. The photos were useful for texts that could not be collected. Zuleka was able to explain the hand-written Urdu notices (photo 2 in Figure 2) which had caught my attention: “No gossip in here”, “No political meetings”, “This is a place of business”. She explained this as the proprietor trying to manage the different cultural expectations related to small local businesses in England as opposed to those in South Asia where a local business is often a place where men, in particular, meet socially. This collaborative analysis then, revealed not only details of personal literacy practices related to community resources, cultural and gender issues but also interesting dimensions of cross-cultural institutional practices. In Figure 3, there are two posed photos of Adil that re-create important everyday literacy moments in his life. They ‘set the scene’ in which other data from these literacy moments are located. These two photos are part of a set taken in his home. Other photos depicted Arabic prayers on the wall and one of his younger sisters praying with her head covered. Without seeing these other photos you would not, for example, necessarily know that Adil belonged to a family of practicing Muslims. This is an important point to make: a photo can be an entity in itself but it can also be a part of a set and one particular literacy moment needs to be understood not only for itself but also in relation to other
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Photo 1: Travel agent (by Rachel)
Photo 2: Travel agent (by Rachel)
Figure 2. Photographs and a transcript about Zuleka’s literacy practices from Rachel’s study in Blackburn, England.
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Adil reading a rap poem
Adil reading CEEFAX
Adil’s rap poem
Figure 3. Photographs, transcripts and a rap poem by Adil from Rachel’s study in Blackburn, England.
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everyday moments. It was particularly important for Adil to ‘set the scene’ for me as I did not meet with him at home. It seems clear from this example that a collaborative approach increases the range and quality of photographic data. Like the photo in Figure 1, Adil’s photos are also part of a wider corpus of literacy data. The ‘Fuck the Nazis’ poem reproduced in Figure 3 is the text Adil was reading in the ‘reading a rap poem’ photo. Excerpts of the transcripts of his audio-recorded diary and one of our recorded conversations refer to this text. Interestingly, my interest in his rap poems generated several more. He would often spontaneously give me a copy of the latest one when we met informally. A collaborative approach then, generated more data spontaneously. In analysing the photo and rap poem texts together, I learned about the socio-cultural/historical influences on Adil’s writing. For example, he was inspired by his cousin in Pakistan who wrote Urdu poetry, and he relates closely to the themes of Black American Rap as a young person who feels disenfranchised and marginalised in this society and he writes rap because he wants to express his anger. The photo of Adil reading CEEFAX sparked off a discussion about how different generations with both different and shared values in the same family need to manage their cultural space and signify their identities whilst carrying out literacy practices, sometimes in the same room. For example, Adil said he often needed to turn the sound of the TV down or read subtitles if his father was praying in the same room. Kathryn As in Rachel’s research, the photos Rhian and I took are a part of our corpus of ethnographic data about Rhian’s language and literacy practices. We took photos together of Rhian’s literacy texts. The extracts in Figure 4 have been transcribed from our first collaborative session. We took the photos in Figure 4 and others like them during our discussions about Rhian’s participant diary(see Jones, Martin-Jones and Bhatt, this volume, for details), in order to have some visual record of the literacy texts which Rhian was not able to collect or personal ones which she did not want to part with. In taking these photos we tried to make sure that we were producing a readable version of the original text. This meant we were able to analyse the discourses and genres of texts as well as just documenting the range of different types of texts Rhian engaged with in different contexts and in specific events. Rhian took photos with her own camera to record some of the literacy
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Photo 8: Rhian’s photo of the Sunday Express magazine
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Photo 9: Rhian’s photo of the Sunday Express magazine held up by Kathryn
Figure 4. Extract of a collaborative photography session with Rhian from Kathryn’s study in Wales.
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texts she engaged with and the visual environment of her personal spaces at home. As Rachel had also found, these photos stimulated my questions and gave me additional insights into Rhian’s day-to-day routine, and were a catalyst for gathering more ethnographic detail about her literacy practices. I also took several photos of Rhian engaged in some of her home literacies. Photo 3 in Figure 5 is one example of Rhian’s literacies associated with music. She and her friends often borrowed and made copies of each others’ tapes and CD’s. Rhian made labels for her tapes on her word processor and made lists of the tapes she had and the ones she wanted to have. In photo 3, Rhian was labelling the tape she had made of her favourite musician’s CD lent to her by one of her best friends. I also took one or two ‘posed’ photos of Rhian recreating a particular literacy activity. The photo of Rhian lying on her bed reading a letter from a friend is one of these photos. It is a re-creation of one of Rhian’s personal literacy practices rather than a photo of an actual literacy
Photo 1: Rhian’s photo of her study
Photo 2: Rhian’s photo of the texts on her bedroom wall
Photo 3: Kathryn’s photo of Rhian labelling her tape of a friend’s CD
Photo 4: Kathryn’s ‘posed’ photo of Rhian reading a letter from her friend
Figure 5. Photographs by Kathryn and Rhian from Kathryn’s study in Wales.
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practice or literacy event ‘in action’.5 Both photos were taken as further documentation of the examples of literacy practices and texts that Rhian wrote about in her diaries and described to me in our meetings. Rhian took her own camera with her to college to document some of her college literacies. In college, Rhian took photos of the signs and noticeboards and many photographs of her friends (see Figure 6). These photos of Rhian’s were important to our collaborative research. Rhian’s photos of signs and noticeboards provided evidence of the constellation of texts and languages in her college. Most of the ‘official’ notices produced by the college authorities and Student’s Union were produced in both Welsh and English, whilst most of the notices produced by students were produced in English.6 These photos made it easier for Rhian to explain to me what her activities and literacies at college involved and helped me to visualise the college life she described to
Photo 1: Rhian’s photo of a college noticeboard
Photo 2: Rhian’s photo of some of her friends in the college caffeteria
Photo 3: Kathryn’s photo of Rhian in a business Studies class
Photo 4: Kathryn’s photo of Rhian looking at a clothes magazine with her friend
Figure 6. Photographs by Kathryn and Rian from Kathryn’s study in Wales.
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me. Reflecting on the photos she had taken highlighted for us Rhian’s difficulty in taking photos which provided evidence of herself engaged in her college literacy practices. We overcame this difficulty by my spending a day taking photos of Rhian involved in her college literacies. The other photos in Figure 6 are two of the photos I took of Rhian at her college. I took these to document Rhian engaged in actual literacy events and practices. The photos are part of a set that I took as a ‘visual diary’ of Rhian’s day at college. They supplement my audio recordings and ‘observer’ fieldnotes. Rhian’s photos and my own together provide a more varied and comprehensive collection of images of literacy than either of us could have collected on our own.
Some reflections on our collaborative photography We have illustrated in the previous sections the way in which our research involved several layers of collaboration. We have grouped these under the four headings below. Planning and discussion Planning together what to photograph and how to take the photos involved us in making democratic decisions that took account of the agendas of everyone involved. We, as initiators of our respective research projects both became involved in discussions with our co-researchers in which we were (1) making our own intentions as researchers explicit, (2) learning about our co-researchers’ understanding and experiences of literacy, (3) explaining our own understandings of a social view of language and of literacy, and (4) discussing the methodological practicalities and issues around documenting language and literacy practices. These discussions reflected both our shared and also our different positions as participants in the research. Selecting images Our use of collaborative photography meant making decisions, independently and sometimes in negotiation with others about what to photograph. On occasions this involved joint photography sessions for Rhian and Kathryn (as in Figure 4) but mostly we each took our own photos, collaborating in the
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planning and analysis. It seems clear from our experience that selecting what images (of literacy) to photograph, like any other part of a research process, is highly interpretative and complex. It would follow therefore, that the strength of doing this collaboratively allows for different perspectives to be taken account of with broader, richer data as a result. Collaborative work allows for both ‘researcher’ and ‘researched’ perspectives and interpretations. It allows for people’s own questions to be answered and their own experience to be taken account of, as Hamilton, Ivanic and Barton (1992) have already argued. Ownership of data In taking their own photos, Zuleka, Fazila, Adil and Rhian made their own decisions about the kinds of literacies they wanted to document with photographs. In doing this, they determined the way they themselves and their families were represented and, when writing about these photographs, we have been careful to check that we have continued to represent them in the way that they intended. We think that the strength of people’s own photos is that their depiction of their own literacies challenges any ‘outsider’ stereotypes of the literacies of particular groups of people, for example ‘teenagers’ or ‘Asians’. The ‘public’ and ‘private’ images, collaboratively collected, enriched these ethnographic studies. The danger of intrusion and disruption which may be real if ethnographic work is controlled by one outside researcher is in this way reduced. Photography also seems to be a particularly effective way to facilitate a child’s ownership of research into her own social practices. A collaborative and democratic approach enabled participants to work creatively to their own styles, personalities, age and preferences. Discussion and analysis We found that discussing the photos we and our co-researchers had taken was a crucial part of our collaborative analysis of community and personal literacy practices. Looking at photographs together provided another opportunity for discussing our co-researcher’s personal literacy practices in more detail and, in so doing, we developed an understanding of what possible social meanings may be drawn from these. What then is the importance of a collaborative approach using photography? In our view it seems clear that our co-researchers’ input into the process
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of documenting and analysing literacy practices through photography provides a more detailed study with broader perspectives. This could not have been achieved in the same way by a single researcher. We feel that this process has, therefore, led to a deeper and more valid understanding of the multilingual literacy practices of the people we were working with.
Summary: the use and status of photos in collaborative literacy research – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
they are evidence of what literacy materials look like they are evidence to support related data collected in other ways they are evidence of the genres, discourses and languages of texts they are evidence of the constellation of texts and languages in community contexts they are evidence of people engaged in actual literacy events they can provide access to literacy events which would otherwise be closed to a single researcher they are useful replicas of texts that cannot be collected they can be used to re-create literacy moments they are part of a corpus of different types of ‘researcher’ and ‘researched’ data and they enhance that data they can stand as a single photo but they usually need to be interpreted as part of a set of personal and/or public photos they can ‘set the scene’ and contextualise related data they can be a catalyst for more detailed micro-ethnographic investigation they stimulate the questions of the ‘outsider’ co-researcher they are our co-researchers’ own visual representations of themselves and their families’ literacy practices they make ownership of data visible and they personalise rather than objectify and isolate they allow for the ‘eye’ and observations of the ‘insider’ co-researchers they make research more interactive and dialogic, and more fun!
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We would both like to thank Adil, Fazila, Rhian and Zuleka for their collaboration on this project and for giving their permission for us to describe their practices and publish their photographs.
Notes 1.
ESRC project R000233149 Final Report, 1992.
2.
ESRC project R000233833.
3.
All the names in Rachel’s work are pseudonyms.
4.
One of the issues concerning the reliability and validity of photographs as data, is the ease with which photographs can be ‘staged’ and altered. One way of addressing this issue is by being rigorous and honest about the how and why particular photographs are taken, and what they were taken to represent. Hence our emphasis on the difference between ‘posed’ and ‘non posed’ photos.
5.
Only a small minority of the students at this college were Welsh speakers.
CHAPTER 16
Constructing a critical, dialogic approach to research on multilingual literacies Participant diaries and diary interviews Kathryn Jones, Marilyn Martin-Jones and Arvind Bhatt
Introduction This chapter explores the value of using participant diaries and diary interviews in ethnographic studies of multilingual literacies. Relatively little has been written in the social science literature about the use of diaries in qualitative research. The potential of this research strategy for gaining insights into the participants’ own understandings of their day-to-day lives remains largely unexplored. In the first sections of the chapter, we review the way diaries have been used in ethnographic and linguistic fieldwork. We argue that participant diaries can be used interactively with research participants and can thus provide a means of developing a critical and dialogic research approach which engages with the perceptions and values of the research participants. Drawing directly upon the knowledge and experience of research participants is particularly relevant for research on multilingual literacy where different cultural values and world views are associated with different language and literacy practices (see the chapter by Edwards & Nwenmely, this volume). In the main body of the chapter, we describe in some detail how we developed the use of participant diary work in two different ethnographic projects. We then go on to reflect upon this fieldwork experience, outlining
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the advantages accruing from participant diary work and drawing attention to some of the issues related to the design and conduct of this type of work. Before we present our reasons for including the use of participant diaries and diary interviews in our respective projects, we begin by providing a brief description of the projects and by sketching out the social and political contexts in which the research was located.
Two ethnographies Kathryn’s ethnographic study of bilingual literacies in rural Wales Between 1994 and 1998, I carried out an ethnographic study of the literacy practices of Welsh/English bilinguals. The study was located in the Vale of Clwyd in north-east Wales,1 the part of Wales I come from myself. The main phase of fieldwork was carried out during the first two years of the study. During this period, I moved to live in the area for six months of each year and observed and documented a wide range of local events. In the second year of fieldwork, I worked particularly closely with a core group of 12 research participants, documenting in detail the routines of their day-to-day lives and investigating how their routines were linguistically and textually-mediated. In Wales, the struggle over the relative status of English and Welsh as the languages of communicative encounters in institutional contexts has been going on for decades (cf. Davies 1993; Jones 1999). In the year prior to the commencement of this study, the 1993 Welsh Language Act legislated that all public sector bodies in Wales had to prepare a ‘language scheme’ which set out how they would treat Welsh on an equal basis with English in the provision of their service to the public (HMSO: 1993). Of all the legislation this century, this Act has the most potential for bringing about radical change in the language of institutional interaction. One of the purposes of this study, therefore, was to document how the wider context of social and linguistic change, both locally in Wales and more globally, was visible in local language and literacy practices. More specifically, I wanted to document the language and literacy dimensions of people’s involvement with public sector institutions in the routines of their day-to-day lives in order to assess the impact of the 1993 Welsh Language Act upon people’s opportunities for using Welsh in institutional contexts.
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Arvind and Marilyn’s ethnographic study of workplace literacies in a multilingual city From 1995 to 1996, we carried out a small-scale ethnographic study of workplace literacy practices in a multilingual urban setting in England, in the city of Leicester in the East Midlands.2 The study focused on ten people who are bilingual in Gujarati and English and provided an account of the ways in which they drew on their languages and literacies in dealing with the communicative demands of their work. We chose to work with Gujarati speakers since they constitute the largest linguistic minority group in the city3 and since Arvind is bilingual in English and Gujarati. The last two decades have seen the formulation of various types of policy responses to the increasing linguistic diversity in urban areas in Britain. One type of response has been the recruitment of bilinguals to local government and voluntary institutions to assist in developing multilingual services, such as interpreting and translation units, or to assist in producing multilingual texts such as information leaflets on health and social welfare or bilingual materials for schools and libraries. When we began this project in Leicester in 1995, a number of bilingual staff from local linguistic minority groups had already been appointed to public and voluntary institutions across the city with a brief to use the languages in their spoken and written repertoires as part of their work. We wanted to document the lived experiences of some of these bilingual staff and identify the language and literacy demands placed on them as they moved into work environments which had previously been monolingual. In particular, we wanted to gain insights into the ways in which they were positioned as mediators of different types of texts produced in English by these institutions, the ways in which they responded to this positioning and the ways in which different spoken and written languages were intertwined across the communicative events of their working lives.
Our reasons for using participant diaries in our own research Whilst the research sites for our respective projects have been very different, what the projects have had in common is the commitment to exploring the potential of participant diaries and diary-focused interviews as fieldwork
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strategies. Each of us had already done some ethnographic fieldwork which involved semi-structured interviews, but we had reached the stage in our work where we needed to gain different insights into individual use of languages and literacies from those which could be obtained from the semi-structured interview. As a research tool, the semi-structured interview has been widely used in oral history (Barton & Hamilton 1998). More recently, it has been incorporated into ethnographic studies of literacy (e.g. Barton and Hamilton 1992, 1998; Saxena 1994; Bhatt et al. 1995). Combining semi-structured interviews with a researcher’s participant observation is intended to balance the account of the researcher with the experience and reflections of the researched. Semistructured interviews usually involve compiling an aide-mémoire of questions which aim to cover all aspects of a participant’s experience which are likely to shed light upon a particular phenomenon, such as literacy. In the semi-structured interviews developed within this strand of ethnographic work, research participants are encouraged to remember and reflect upon their experiences of literacy at different stages in their lives, as well as describing the present. As such, these interviews are particularly valuable for charting life histories and change over time for individuals (Barton & Hamilton 1998). This is especially relevant for people whose migration histories involves them in taking on language and literacy practices which can be culturally very different from those they were socialised into at an earlier stage in their lives (Bhatt, Barton & Martin-Jones 1994; Martin-Jones, this volume). Such interviews provide a means of gaining general insights into people’s language and literacy practices and the values which shape their practices. A discourse analysis of the transcripts of audio-recorded interviews can then provide additional insights into interviewees’ values and the locally situated meanings which shape their bilingual literacy and language practices (cf. Baynham 1995). However, these types of interviews tend to impose the researcher’s agenda, even though researchers are supposed to make a conscious effort to encourage interviewees to develop topics that are particularly meaningful to them. Interviews also tend to construct unequal relationships because the interviewer asks the questions and the interviewee, as the final morpheme indicates, is positioned more passively in this knowledge-building process, although this effect can be mitigated by the type of questions asked. In our respective projects, we were concerned with documenting actual
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events within participants’ current daily routines rather than with compiling a detailed account of their literacy practices over the course of their lifetime or gleaning generalised insights into the role of literacy in their lives. We therefore felt that the ‘talk about literacies’ which emerged during semistructured interviews with participants was too decontextualised, abstract and generalised for our specific research purposes. For us, the use of participant diaries represented a means of locating each participant’s language and literacy practices spatially and temporally within the emerging routine of a specific day and at a specific time in their life. Participant diaries also offered the possibility of having the participants’ own record of their day-to-day routines. This could then provide a context for our observations of individual events and a focus for discussion in diary-focused interviews. To sum up, then, we decided to explore the potential of participant diary work for two main reasons: we wanted to shift the positioning of researcher and researched, so as to try to minimise the possibility of imposing our agendas as researchers and so as to be able to collaborate as far as possible on equal terms with the participants in our studies. We also wanted to situate the language and literacy practices of the participants in space and time, focusing on routines and specific events in people’s lives.
Diaries in ethnographic and linguistic research As we began to design a diary component for our respective projects, we turned to the research literature to see how and to what extent the potential of diary work had already been explored by other researchers. We limited our focus to accounts of ethnographic and linguistic fieldwork and to recent writing on qualitative research in the social sciences. We found that, in this extensive literature, only occasional references are made to diaries. When they are referred to, the writers have two rather different types of diaries in mind: participants’ diaries and researchers’ diaries. Moreover, researchers’ understandings of the nature and function of diary-keeping have changed substantially over time. These changes serve as a barometer for wider shifts in thinking about research as a knowledge-building enterprise. We chart them briefly in this section of our chapter, as a way of sketching the wider context in which our own ideas were developing.
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Researchers’ diaries Researchers’ diaries have long been thought of as written for a “one person audience” (Sanjek 1990: 111). Ethnographers have, however, varied considerably in the ways in which they have used diaries. Some have kept journals, with brief records of daily research activities. Others have written long entries in personal diaries, engaging in extensive introspection and reflection. In the early anthropological research conducted within the British empiricist tradition, the dominant view of the role of ethnographers’ diaries was that they served as a “safety valve” (Kuper 1977: 27): a place for ethnographers to vent their frustrations or to record subjective impressions of the experience of doing fieldwork. Thus, personal diary-keeping was seen as set apart from the main fieldwork and from other writing being done in the field, such as jotting down and organising fieldnotes, transcribing interviews with participants or keeping records of data being gathered. The classic example of a personal diary of this kind is the one kept by Malinowski (1967). In this empiricist era of anthropological research, ethnography was seen as detached, objective and scientific. The overall authority of the ethnographer’s account of the functioning of social life in a particular cultural context was not questioned. While some space was allotted in this early ethnographic writing to the ‘native’s’ point of view, the ethnographer retained control over the processes of data gathering, interpretation and analysis. With the reflexive turn in anthropology, and in the other social sciences, much more attention came to be paid to what Clifford (1990) has called the “basic processes of recording and constructing cultural accounts in the field” (1990: 52). It is now widely recognised that ethnographic data, and other textual material assembled during fieldwork, are the products of interactions between researcher and researched and the researchers’ subjective understandings of those interactions. For this reason, as the research process unfolds, the researcher needs to engage in continual internal dialogue about ‘what s/he knows’ and ‘how s/he came to know it’ (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Van Maanen 1988, 1995; Hertz 1997). The ethnographer’s diary is one place where this internal dialogue can take place. Participants’ diaries When they are mentioned in the literature on research methods in the social
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sciences, participants’ diaries are generally represented as a supplementary source of data, gathered alongside the main body of data generated by observation and interviews (see, for example, Hammersley and Atkinson 1983; Long 1983 and Layden 1993). They are sometimes characterised as a useful means of checking participants’ self-reports (Hammersley and Atkinson 1983) and, sometimes, as a way of gauging frequency of contacts or identifying the patterning of particular activities across space and time (Layder 1993). Participants’ diaries appear to have been used across the social sciences, in studies with adults and in studies with children, and in different fields of research: in education or in the study of gender relations, social networks or participation in labour markets. As a written genre, the participant diary is very different from the classic researcher diary described above. While the latter is written primarily for a one-person audience, the former is produced for multiple audiences, with most readers being unknown to the writer. The function of this writing is primarily to document, not to engage in internal dialogue. The only participant diary work we know which actually gives primacy to introspection and reflection is that which was developed within Applied Linguistics in the late 1970s/early 1980s (for details of these studies, see Allwright & Bailey 1991). In some of the early diary studies conducted in this field (e.g. Schumann & Schumann 1977; Bailey 1983), language learners engaged in detailed introspection and self scrutiny about the learning experience they were going through and about their relationship with their teacher and with other learners. The value of these studies is that they drew attention to the complexity of the interactions which take place in the language classroom “through the eyes of the language learner” (Bailey 1983: 98). The focus of this diary writing was generally on the affective and cognitive aspects of this experience. In an early review of this research, Long (1983) notes: “the diarists’ principal object of study has been themselves, introspection thus supplementing observation as a data-gathering device” (1983: 19). Long’s (1983) use of the term ‘diarist’, in the quotation above, is revealing since it evokes an image of a writer who can engage in introspection and reflection, just as the researcher does. This is a different kind of subject position from that typically open to participants in their diary-keeping. In fact, the majority of the learner-diarists in these early diary studies were themselves researchers, who were involved in learning a new language and in disclosing their reactions to this process. Whilst these diaries were initially written for a
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one-person audience, ultimately, the diary contents were to be shared with a wider research readership.
Constructing a critical, dialogic approach to research on language and literacy: the potential of participant diaries and diary-focused interviews Our own work builds on the theoretical and methodological insights of research developed during the 1980s and 1990s in two overlapping fields: critical sociolinguistic studies of bilingualism/multilingualism and the New Literacy Studies. In both fields, a social view of language and literacy predominates: language is seen as crucial to the constitution and reproduction of social life. Language and literacy practices are seen as being shaped by local social and economic conditions and by social, political and technological changes of a global nature. The foregrounding of the social in this body of work has been accompanied by a critical turn in research practice and by the development of critical approaches to ethnographic fieldwork. Ethnographic work remains focused on day-to-day communicative routines and practices, and, in addition to interpreting these practices, the ethnographer also seeks to shed light on the ways in which language and literacy practices contribute to the reproduction of asymmetrical relations of power (or resistance to them). Setting critical goals also involves working for change and for the empowerment of those participating in the research. As May (1997) has observed, critical ethnographic research is “simultaneously hermeneutic and emancipatory” (1997: 196). Among those concerned with developing a critical approach to language and literacy research, a powerful critique has emerged of the ways in which researchers and the researched have traditionally been positioned, with the former being active, reflecting ‘subjects’ and the latter being passive ‘objects’ of inquiry (Cameron et al. 1992; 1993). In recent critical research on language and literacy, various attempts have therefore been made to redress the balance, and to identify ways of moving away from imposing the researcher’s agenda and to creating more dialogic means of conducting ethnographic and linguistic research. Dialogic methods are seen as having two major advantages: they are a means of shifting the positioning of researcher and researched and they also facilitate the development of deeper understandings of particular language and
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literacy practices. As Cameron et al. (1993) have put it: The use of interactive and non-objectifying methods enables us to gain richer insights into subjects’ own understandings of their behaviour, and to engage in dialogue about those understandings. This, we believe, is to our mutual benefit (1993: 94).
We would argue that, in a multilingual setting, the case for developing interactive research methods is a particularly strong one, since different values come to be associated with different language and literacy practices. In contexts such as these, research methods which allow participants’ understandings to be brought to the fore can come into their own (see the chapter by Hodge & Jones, this volume). In classic anthropological practice, such methods included the transcription of narrative accounts by participants and the incorporation of the words of participants in the ethnographer’s text. As Clifford (1990) has noted, in reviewing this research: “Greater prominence given to transcribed materials can produce a more polyphonic final ethnography” (1990: 57). In our respective projects, we have found that the participant diary genre lends itself particularly well to the study of the action and interaction of people’s day-to-day lives and the ways in which spoken and written languages are intertwined in different types of literacy events. In combination with diaryfocused interviews, participant diaries can also help to create fieldwork spaces within which dialogue can be initiated and fostered. In the remainder of this chapter, we give a detailed account and assessment of the ways in which we have attempted to do this.
How we developed the use of participant diaries in our research Kathryn’s research In my research, the use of participant diaries formed one part of the range of data collection strategies which I used in collaboration with the core group of 12 research participants during the second year of fieldwork (see Jones 1999 for a more detailed account of the fieldwork strategies used in this research). This group of twelve people included: Olwenna Evans,4 a retired primary school teacher; Stan Jones a retired shop worker; Mona Jones also of retirement age but who continues to be responsible for all the housework; Angharad
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Williams, a radiographer who had taken early retirement; Dewi and Nansi Wilkinson a farming couple; Bethan Lloyd who was working as a community nurse; Eifion Lloyd who was a self-employed agricultural contractor; Arwyn Jones, the head librarian of Rhuthun library and a musician; Marian Rees who worked as a secretary in a bilingual secondary school; Aled Rees who worked for the NFU; and, finally, Rhian Roberts, a sixth form college student doing a GNVQ in Business Studies. After explaining and discussing with each participant individually the aims of the research and what a social view of language and literacy entailed, we agreed upon a method of documenting their day-to-day routines. Although the amount of time each participant could commit to the research varied, the same combination of research strategies was used with each person. This combination involved the participants keeping a written record of their day-today routine for a period of up to four weeks5 and keeping some examples of their reading and writing texts. We then planned to meet at the end of each week to discuss and audio-record our discussion of their diaries. Between the weekly meetings, I took the previous week’s diaries and examples of written texts away to analyse. This gave me the opportunity to compare the content of different participant diaries and diary-focused interviews and often led me to think of further questions that I wanted to ask. During this phase of the research, we also arranged for me to spend time, where possible, with the participants to observe and document some of the activities which recurred in their diaries. We then discussed these documented activities as part of our weekly diary-focused interviews. Designing the diaries In planning the use of participant diaries, I was conscious of the fact that not everyone would necessarily be comfortable with the practice of keeping a daily diary. When I first introduced the idea with each participant, I was prepared to be flexible about the way they kept an account of their day-to-day routines. I had prepared paper and exercise books for people to use or a grid layout diary sheet for people to fill in each day. As Figure 1 shows, the diary sheets were designed to organise participants’ record of their routines during the morning, afternoon and evening of each day. They were asked to record their activities: noting where they had taken place and whether other people were involved (in column 1). They were also asked to record whether they had
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Figure 1. Kathryn’s ‘translation’ of a diary sheet for one of the participants in her study in the Vale of Clwyd, Wales (Dewi Wilkinson).
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spoken Welsh and/or English during the activity (in column 2), and what they had written or read, noting the language of the written texts (in column 3). I was also prepared for people to audio record themselves describing their activities on tape or for me to telephone them each evening and take brief notes about their day over the phone. Most people opted to use the grid layout type of diary format, indicating that this genre of diary-keeping would be ‘easier’ and less time consuming for them. The two people who did not want to use the grids were Rhian Roberts, who used various blank sheets of paper, and Olwena Evans, who chose to write her diary in an exercise book. I used Welsh for the headings of the diary sheet columns because Welsh was the language the participants and I all used when talking to each other. Since I had observed that some participants made more use of English than Welsh in their day-to-day uses of reading and writing, I encouraged them to use Welsh and/or English, according to their own preference, in writing their diary. Everyone apart from Rhian kept their diary in Welsh. Rhian made her language choice after checking with me that my research would be written up in English with any quotations from people’s diaries being translated from the Welsh original. She decided to keep her diary in English in order to save me the trouble of translation even though I told her that this was not necessary. She kept to her decision during the first week. However, in the second week, she made extensive use of both languages and, in the third and fourth weeks, her diaries were predominantly written in Welsh. Some participants had more time than others did for filling in the diaries and talking to me about them. Some people wrote a lot of detail about their day-to-day routines, others did not write so much. Although most participants wrote down the principal activities that they did each day (see Figure 1), a couple of them just recorded the activities which involved reading and writing and not the activities which did not. I felt that it did not matter a great deal how much or how little the participants wrote in their diaries since I could always get a fuller picture of what they did by discussing it with them at the end of the week. In this respect, participants’ diaries could just be notes to remind them of the things they had done each day rather than a detailed account of their routine and its language and literacy dimension. While some diaries were more detailed than others, on the whole, they only provided a very skeletal record of language and literacy practices. If the written diaries had been my only source of participants’ account of their routines, their value would have been quite limited. The full value of the participant diary data depended upon their being used in combination with diary-focused interviews.
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Diary-focused interviews The diary-focused interviews were very informal occasions, with each session taking two to three hours with most participants. Apart from Arwyn Jones, whom I interviewed at the library, all interviews were carried out in participants’ homes. Our discussions during these interviews covered a wide range of diary and non-diary related matters and often involved our having a meal and spending an afternoon or an evening together. We went over the content of their diaries and the written texts they had kept to show me and we audio recorded our discussion. They explained what they had done and I questioned them further on the detail of some of their remarks. In comparison with the semi-structured interviews which I had conducted in the first year of fieldwork, I felt that the participant diaries and diary-focused interviews produced more collaboratively generated data. Our discussions about their uses of language and literacy were developed from participants’ personally articulated accounts of their day-to-day routines rather than being in response to my stimulus questions. At times, I had to ask specific questions to understand the detail of what people had been doing. These were usually questions about activities which I had not experienced myself such as selling cattle at auction, or written texts that I was unfamiliar with, like the computerised systems community nurses have to use to manage data about their patients. Otherwise, the discussion was more of a collaborative sense making of the role of reading and writing and the use of Welsh and English in each individual’s day-to-day routine specifically, and in contemporary Wales more generally. I felt more comfortable with the positions set up for the ‘researcher’ and ‘researched’ during these discussions about people’s diaries. The relationship between the participants and myself seemed less hierarchical because the content of their diaries set the agenda for our meetings. It was always obvious that much of the time I had a lot to learn about the things they did. As Welsh speakers who had grown up or lived in this area for many years, we shared experiences of reading and writing which we had in common and talked about the way we did things differently and why that was so. People often defined what they did themselves in relation to other people’s practices. Much of our wide-ranging discussion established a historical perspective to personal practices as we compared the practices and values of friends and relatives from different generations. Comparing practices in this way highlighted how the participants’ language and literacy histories and current practices were shaped
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by the way wider sociolinguistic factors affected their personal experiences. The decision for me to accompany participants on some of the activities of their day-to-day routines grew out of our shared perception that we could document the detail and dynamics of their activities more precisely if I were able to experience or observe some of them myself. I documented these events or activities with a combination of photographs, audio recordings, fieldnotes and a collection of written texts. Without these observations of mine, the diaries and diary-focused interviews could have been abstract and decontextualised accounts of language and literacy practices rather like the semistructured interviews. Combining participant diaries with diary-focused interviews The combination of personally kept diaries and diary-focused interviews provided the detailed account of personal day-to-day routines which located people’s practices in time and space. Within each participant’s routine it was possible to identify where texts were centrally constitutive of social action and social processes, where texts mediated a particular dimension of a particular social process or where they played no part at all. The diary interviews provided a means of building up a more detailed understanding of the activities recorded in the diaries as well as an opportunity for the introspection and reflection which was missing in the written diaries. My participation in a selection of events in a participant’s weekly routine gave me the opportunity to develop my own understanding of an event. By showing them my photos and written account of the event, I could then discuss my observations and interpretations with the participants and compare these with their own accounts of their routines. I found that specific insights into language and literacy practices were to be gained from the use of participant diaries with diary interviews. It became clear in the course of my analysis that this combination of data sources was particularly valuable for identifying change in language and literacy practices over time. I had designed the participant diaries in order to provide a means of documenting the activities of people’s current day-to-day routines. The diary interviews opened up an additional historical dimension to this data. I found that when participants reflected on their current practices in the diary-focused interviews, they frequently mentioned, by way of explanation, how they were doing something now which was different from what they had been doing
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previously. For example, when I was talking to Dewi Wilkinson about the process of milking cattle, he explained that the dip stick he had used for years to measure the amount of milk in the milk tank had been replaced by a computerised system which measured the volume of milk as it was transferred into the milk tanker which came to collect the milk. A plastic swipe card was now used to register Dewi’s farm identity in the tanker’s computer system, and the computer printouts generated by this mobile computerised system had replaced the hand written ledger that had previously been used to record the quantity of milk collected from each farm. As in this example, most of the changes in people’s ways of using literacy had come about through the technologisation and computerisation of many aspects of social life. This process of reflecting upon present and past practice through diaries and diary interviews led to the emergence of key themes of change, technologisation and bureaucratisation. These themes were grounded in participants’ perceptions of, and reflection upon, their own routines and practices. Maintaining a dialogue between researcher and researched perspectives in the process of data analysis and research writing A ‘mixed strategy’ (Douglas 1976) approach to data collection is usually viewed as a means of cross-checking observations and ensuring the validity of qualitative data (Layder 1993). The cross-referencing of researcher and participant-generated data can also be used as a means of sustaining a dialogue between researcher and research participant perspectives in the process of data analysis and research writing (Jones 1999: 105). The perceptions and understandings of the research participants were documented in the diaries and diary interviews. These represented the core data for my analysis of local language and literacy practices. These were compared and contrasted with my own perceptions and interpretation of their practices recorded in my research diary and in my analysis of examples of written texts and my audio recordings and photographs of actual events. I used the coding facilities available in Word 6 Bookmark6 to cross-reference the data categories and sub-categories I identified in the written diaries and diary interview transcripts. In the process of identifying and developing themes and commonalities across the fieldwork data, my starting point was always the diaries and diary interviews. The data analysis proceeded in a cyclical fashion as I moved back and forth between the different data sets, maintaining a dialogic relationship between the voices and
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Figure 2. Dewi Wilkonson’s Day, Monday 20th February 1995
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interpretations of the research participants and my own. I also worked out a means of incorporating participant diary accounts directly into the final research text, creating what Clifford (1990) has referred to as a polyphonic ethnography. In order to keep the description of patterns in local language and literacy practices situated within the emergence of participants’ day-to-day routines, I organised my written account around a single day in the life of 4 of the participants. An account of each participant’s day was retold in English using a combination of their voice and my own. A reproduction of one of these ‘one day accounts’ appears in Figure 2. In this text, the words written in the participant’s diary is represented with a handwriting style of font. This text is embellished with words transcribed from the diary-focused interview and identified with the Arial font used to demarcate excerpts of participant talk incorporated into the written ethnography. Where necessary, I supplemented the participant’s account with words of my own (represented in the Times Roman font) that were taken from my fieldwork diary and observation ‘headnotes’. My purpose in producing an account of a single day in this way was to emphasise how my account and analysis of each participant’s language and literacy practices was grounded in the participants’ own articulation of the languages and literacies of their day-to-day routine. I also used this device to juxtapose the discourse of their ‘lifeworld’ account of their uses of Welsh and English, and reading and writing with the more academic discourse of my ethnographic description and interpretation of their practices. Arvind and Marilyn’s research Arvind began the ethnographic fieldwork in Leicester by carrying out semistructured interviews with all ten of the Gujarati speakers who had agreed to work with us. These interviews focused on their language and literacy histories, on their past experiences of using more than one spoken or written language at work and on the language and literacy demands of their current work situation. Once we had completed a preliminary analysis of these ten interviews, we moved into a second phase of the project during which we wanted to look in more detail at people’s daily work routines and the ways in which their language choices and literacy practices were tied up with these. To do this in the relatively short time available, Marilyn joined Arvind in ‘the field’ in Leicester, and we began to work closely with a core group of six people, four women and two men. We introduce each of them here before we
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go on to describe the way we worked with them. Bijalben7 was a care assistant who worked with elderly women of South Asian origin. She spoke English, Gujarati and Hindi and she could read and write English and Gujarati, though English had become her preferred language of literacy for formal purposes. Firouzaben was a secretary who worked in the office of a multilingual community college in an inner city neighbourhood of Leicester. She spoke English, Gujarati and Urdu, and English was her main language of literacy. Hansaben had two jobs. She worked part-time as a community librarian and, during the rest of the week, she worked as a bilingual classroom assistant in a local primary school. She spoke English, Gujarati and Hindi and she could read and write English and Gujarati, though English was her preferred language of literacy. Manubhai8 also had two jobs: he worked as a part-time alcohol counsellor for a local voluntary organisation and, the rest of the week, he worked for the local BBC radio station, as a presenter on the Gujarati evening programme. He spoke English, Gujarati and Hindi and he could also read and write English and Gujarati. Ramanlal9 was a full-time Gujarati teacher who worked at the same community college as Firouzaben, the secretary. He spoke English, Gujarati and Hindi and he also read and wrote English and Gujarati. Shobhanaben was a full-time bilingual support teacher at a local primary school. She spoke English, Gujarati and Hindi and could also read and write in all three languages. We approached each of these people and asked if they were willing to participate in this second phase of the project and they all agreed to do so. Rather than conducting a second round of semi-structured interviews and combining these with observations, we wanted to document the participants’ own accounts of their daily routines. So, we needed to work out a new fieldwork strategy for doing this. We were aware that, in her research in Wales, Kathryn Jones (1999) had explored the idea of asking participants to keep their own diaries and combining this with interviews based on their diaries. We were working in a very different research site, in public and voluntary sector workplaces in a multilingual setting in England, but we felt that this approach would be well suited to this stage of the project, with its specific focus on people’s day-to-day routines.
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The diaries and the participants’ diary-keeping Arvind met with each of the participants in turn and explained the aims of this phase of the project to them. He asked them to keep a workplace literacy diary for every working day over a two week period, including Saturdays, where relevant. Following the procedure established by Kathryn, the participants were given the option of keeping their records in their own notebooks or on audio-cassette or using the diary sheets which we had prepared. The diary sheets were based on the same grid style layout as that first devised by Kathryn for her project. The different columns and rows of our grid were similar to hers and had similar functions. A sample sheet is shown in Figure 3. The main difference was that the sections of our grid were labelled in both Gujarati and English. We chose to do this because we knew from the semistructured interviews that the six people who had agreed to be ‘diarists’ had not all had the same opportunities to develop their reading and writing abilities in Gujarati. All six participants chose to use the diary sheets. Five people kept their diaries in English and one in Gujarati. We will return to this point in a later section of this chapter. The person who chose Gujarati was Ramanlal, the Gujarati teacher. As in Kathryn’s study, people varied in the amount of detail they included in their daily records. Most people jotted down brief notes. Some gave details of the types of the reading and writing they had been involved in, and others did not. We were not too concerned about this, since we knew that we would be able to build a fuller account of their daily routines and the languages and literacies associated with them when we discussed the diaries with them later on. Three-way dialogues: preparing for and carrying out the diary-focused interviews From this point onwards, the research involved a complex three-way dialogue: a dialogue between us as co-researchers with different linguistic and cultural backgrounds and a dialogue between us and the participants in our study. This was an important feature of the way we prepared for and then carried out the diary interviews. At the end of the two-week period of participant diary-keeping, Arvind collected the diary sheets (10–12 sheets from each participant). He translated
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Figure 3. Diary sheet for one of the participants in Arvind and Marilyn’s study in Leicester, England
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Ramanlal’s diary notes into English, along with the words and phrases written in Gujarati in one other diary (Hansaben’s diary). We discussed the details of the translation and, then, we both read through the diary entries for each participant and the literacy materials that each one had gathered. To begin with, we each kept separate notes about points we wanted to explore in more depth in the diary interview. We then compared notes and came up with a final joint list of points to cover in each interview. We found that we had kept notes of two different kinds: first, we had made lists of specific workplace practices that we needed to understand better, such as the organisation of a local library bus, particular office routines or the ways in which a radio station keeps records (for royalty purposes) of songs in languages other than English which are broadcast each week. Secondly, we had notes about the cultural practices of local groups of Gujarati speakers that we were not familiar with and needed to know more about in order to interpret the diary data. Marilyn had more notes of the latter type than Arvind, though he too had some things he needed to ask.10 At this stage and during later stages of the project, the discussions we had between ourselves as co-researchers provided a valuable way of reflecting on the cultural account we were building with the participants and on the means we were employing to do this. Looking back on the research process, we now feel that we should have audio-recorded and transcribed all these discussions, since they served a similar function to the researchers’ diaries discussed above. They gave us a fieldwork space for reflection and for scrutiny of the knowledge-building we were engaging in. They also provided a way of acknowledging our own reactions to the fieldwork experience. Once we had prepared for the diary interviews in the ways we have described above, we made arrangements to meet with each participant in turn. Each diary interview lasted between one to two hours and was audio-recorded in full. All the participants chose to be interviewed at home rather than at work. Arvind carried out four of the interviews. The other two interviews were jointly conducted. These were the interviews with Firouzaben and Shobhanaben, the two women who Marilyn had been working with as part of our earlier project (see the chapter by Martin-Jones, this volume for further details). The joint interviews were in English while the ones carried out by Arvind were either in Gujarati or in English and Gujarati. As each of these interviews was being transcribed, Arvind translated the Gujarati sections into English
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The exchanges which took place during these diary-focused interviews were substantially different from the earlier semi-structured interviews. The diary interviews were organised around the diary sheets and the collection of literacy materials that each person had put together. We raised all the points we had listed beforehand. In addition, the participants elaborated on particular things they had mentioned in their diaries and we left them ample time to do this. As a result, they made longer and more substantive contributions on these occasions than they had during the semi-structured interviews. The introduction of topics was also more evenly distributed. We found that the questions we were asking were less of the ‘data eliciting’ kind and more of the ‘genuinely seeking information’ kind, because the person being interviewed was the expert and we, as researchers, were learning something new. For example, during the diary interview with Manubhai, the presenter of the evening programme in Gujarati on the local BBC radio station, Arvind asked about how the computer screen in the studio was used when Manubhai’s programme was on air. Manubhai’s response to this and subsequent questions provided revealing insights into the ways in which talk in Gujarati was intertwined with written English in the workplace literacy practices of several people on this programme. The computer screen in the studio was Manubhai’s main communication link with two Gujaratispeaking women who took all telephone calls from listeners which came in during the programme. Most of the calls came in Gujarati, but the details were typed in English, partly because there was no software available for typing in Gujarati and partly because one of the women was not literate in Gujarati. While his programme was on air, Manubhai checked the screen from time to time, read the messages typed in English and, then, translated them back to Gujarati, on the spot, for the listeners. Unexpected insights such as these helped us to plan focused observations of selected literacy events in Manubhai’s workplace and in the workplaces of the other five participants. Our planning of these observations was done in collaboration with them, since our presence in their workplace had to be negotiated with their colleagues. Extending the three-way dialogue: the data analysis The data from the diaries and the diary-focused interviews described above was the richest of all the textual and ethnographic material we had assembled, so we concentrated primarily on this data in the first stages of our data
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analysis. Our first reading of the diary entries, the conversations we had had about them and the diary interviews with the participants had enabled us to identify several themes that could be pursued in the analysis. We coded all the material in the diaries and diary-interviews that linked with these themes and cross-referenced this material with other data, such as fieldnotes from our observations of workplace literacy events and the initial interviews. Following the same procedure as we had followed in our previous project in Leicester,11 we also used the facilities of the word processing package Word 6 for Windows, such as Bookmark, to build links across the different kinds of data. Since we are focusing on issues related to ethnographic method in this chapter, it is not our intention to discuss here the themes that we have been pursuing in the analysis. Instead, we want to show how our attention was initially drawn to two of the themes by the way in which entries were made by the participants in their diaries and by particular contributions that participants made to the diary interviews. First of all, on reading through the diary sheets, we were struck at how often people had noted things that they had been reading and writing in English in the second column, while, at the same time, recording in the third column that they were speaking in Gujarati (or another South Asian language) (see Figure 3). The only exception to this was Ramanlal, the Gujarati teacher. We had anticipated this division of labour between languages and had included a third column on the diary sheet with this in mind. However, we had not anticipated that the reporting of this would occur so frequently. When we followed up on this in the diary interviews, the participants gave us accounts of particular events that had occurred during those two weeks where the texts they had been dealing with had been in English but where most of the talk around the text had been in a South Asian language. For example, Firouzaben, the secretary in the community college described for us an event where she had had to explain the enrolment procedure for the community college to a student’s parents in Gujarati whilst helping them to fill in the enrolment form in English. Following on from accounts of specific events like this, the participants also expressed their views, during the diary interviews, about the roles that they were expected to assume in their respective workplaces. For example, Bijalben said that she felt her use of Gujarati with elderly clients (and the use of other South Asian languages by her bilingual colleagues) was not noticed or valued ‘as work’, because there was no record of this work “on paper”. She
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said: “The divisional manager still doesn’t see us as an important resource. He doesn’t think we do enough work because it is not work that you can put down on paper” [Interview with Bijalben 27/7/95, turn 527]. The second thing that we both noticed as we were reading through the diary sheets was that all six participants, especially the women, had a wide range of work commitments. We knew from the semi-structured interviews that three out of the six people had two kinds of paid employment and worked in the evenings and on Saturdays. We had designed the layout of the diary sheets with this in mind. What we had not anticipated was the range of commitments that people had in addition to their paid employment. When we asked for more details about this voluntary work in the diary interviews, we found that people drew on a wider range of languages and literacies in this work than in their paid employment and they read, wrote and talked about very different kinds of texts. We also found that they had more scope for defining how they used their languages and literacies and for what purposes. For example, Bijalben, the care assistant working with the elderly, and Hansaben, the librarian, were sisters. Together, they ran a Gujarati class which met three nights a week in the early evening. Shobhanaben, the bilingual support teacher who worked full-time in a local primary school, was also the head teacher of a Gujarati Saturday school with an enrolment of nearly 200 children. Firouzaben, the secretary in the local community college was a coordinator and founding member of an Asian women’s group which planned regular leisure activities for local women with a view to giving them opportunities to get out of the home. Ramanlal, the Gujarati teacher, was a member of the local branch of Gujarati Shikshan Sangh, a national organisation which promotes the teaching of Gujarati in Britain. He did all the work for this organisation outside his hours at the community college.
Reflecting on the experience of working with participant diaries Advantages In this section, we describe some of the ways in which our expectations about diary work were confirmed and we outline some of the advantages which accrued from adding a diary component to the fieldwork we did in these two projects.
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Shifting positionings In both projects, we found that, in their diaries, participants developed their own individual ways of recording and describing their routines. We saw this as one of the main advantages of this fieldwork strategy because it enabled us to gain access to participants’ own representations of their day-to-day lives. This helped our data collection to be grounded in a theoretical and methodological perspective which gives emphasis to the participant’s world view. Because they described their routines from their own perspective, participants’ diary records often made no mention of literacy, even though their routines were intensely textually-mediated. For example, Dewi Wilkinson, whose diary is reproduced in Figure 1, did not see milking as a practice involving literacy. For him milking was his favourite part of farming; time spent with his herd, checking up on their health and managing their milk production. When Kathryn helped out with the milking for a few weeks, it was quite clear to her that there were a good deal of literacy practices associated with milking. These included: having a Feed Requirements Chart up on the milking parlour wall, writing each day’s milk total onto a Herd Monthly Costing Record, and checking the milk quality test report sent on a weekly basis from Milk Marque (the company who collected milk from the farm each day). A quite different example comes from Arvind and Marilyn’s project in Leicester. Firouzaben, the secretary in the local community college wrote “did the post” in her diary for every afternoon of the two-week period of diarykeeping. When we asked her, during the diary interview, what this amounted to, she gave a detailed account of the steps she followed in ‘doing the post’, making no reference to reading or writing. When we asked again whether this involved any reading or writing, Firouzaben then gave examples of the detailed daily record keeping that took place in this office around the purchase and use of stamps. She elaborated as follows, offering an explanation for the preoccupation with this record keeping in the office: F-ben: Arvind: F-ben:
I’ve got to write down every stamp I use Mm So, I’ve got to say ‘fifteen stamps at 25p’ and then tot it up and then at the end of the page I’ve got to tot up what I spend, what I’m holding and what I’ve bought Marilyn: It’s a very tight budget then
344 F-ben:
Kathryn Jones, Marilyn Martin-Jones and Arvind Bhatt Oh yeah … the auditors check that first whenever they come in. If your stamp book is up to date, the rest of your accounts should be up to date [laughs] [Diary interview with Firouzaben, 21/12/95, turns 37–45]
Later on in this diary interview, it also emerged that these particular literacy activities could only be undertaken by those who assumed most responsibility in the office: herself and the registrar of the college. When we moved on to the diary interviews, using participants’ diaries, rather than a list of researcher questions as the starting point, this meant that our ethnographic work was grounded in a theoretical perspective which emphasises routines, values and relationships as being central to social processes and social life. The participant diary approach provided a different ‘way in’ to understanding multilingual language and literacy practices: literacy was the end point rather than the starting point. Participants’ actual experiences steered the direction of the interviews. We found that we had to fit our interpretation of literacy and language practices around the participants’ accounts of their dayto-day routines rather than expect them to produce accounts of their situated language use from our literacy-oriented questions. In this respect, we felt that the diary-focused interviews constituted a more collaborative means of knowledge-building than the semi-structured interviews. In their diaries, participants sometimes drew our attention to things we had not focused on ourselves. As compared with the semi-structured interviews, this was one of the strengths of the participant diary work. We found that moving from the specific to the general, rather than from general to the specific forced us to re-examine our own assumptions and categories. As we saw earlier, Arvind and Marilyn found that asking participants to record their routines in the evenings as well as during the day drew their attention to the range of work commitments the participants in the study had taken on. This, in turn, led to a broadening of the way in which ‘work’ was defined in this project. Situating language and literacy practices Because of the way in which they were written, the participant diaries served a useful mnemonic function. They provided a record which reminded participants of the detail of their week’s activities. The talk about languages and literacies
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which took place during the diary-focused interviews was anchored in temporally and spatially situated events. Using diaries as a basis for interviewing participants, enables researchers to keep the research grounded in identifiable events. The other dimensions of our fieldwork were also grounded, in this way, in identifiable events, since the diary-keeping and diary-focused interviews were arranged in conjunction with our participant observation and audio/visual recording of some of the events mentioned in each participant’s diary. The diaries helped us to identify the precise patterning of a participant’s routine. One of the limitations of semi-structured interviews is they tend to generate self-reports of activities which are abstracted from daily routines. While our diary-focused interviews were still primarily based on self-reports of language and literacy use, by getting participants to keep a diary over more than a week, we were able to foreground activities which recurred and it was possible to identify the specific times when certain things get done, as in the case of Firouzaben’s daily entries about ‘doing the post’. The frequencies marked in interview talk with adverbs such as ‘always’, ‘often’ and ‘sometimes’ can be identified more precisely in this way. A participant diary is also a means of triangulating and of cross-checking participants’ self reported accounts. For example, Aled Rees who worked for the National Farmers Union told Kathryn that he used Welsh and English to fill in IACS forms with farmers (see Chapter 11 for details). In his literacy diary, Aled recorded helping 14 farmers with their IACS forms in one week. Of these, he noted speaking Welsh while filling in English forms with seven farmers, speaking Welsh and filling in Welsh IACS forms with three farmers and speaking English and filling in English IACS forms with two farmers. On the other two occasions, he did not specify the language of his conversation with the farmers or the language of the forms. Issues that emerged while designing and carrying out the diary work Now that we have outlined some of the advantages that accrued from working with participant diaries and the interviews based on these diaries, we turn, in this section, to some of the issues which arose while we were designing and carrying out the diary work. We will discuss each of these below and illustrate some of the ways in which we attempted to deal with them. The first issue we had to deal with in our respective projects had to do with the form that the participant diaries would take. As we indicated above,
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we gave the participants several options as to how they could keep records of their daily activities: they could either do this on the daily diary sheets that we had prepared or in they could do this in the way they chose. We had designed the diary sheets because we knew that people had limited time available. They all had busy lives. And, in fact, most of the people we worked with chose to use the diary sheets. However, from Figure 1 and Figure 3 above, it will be clear that, to some extent, our agendas, as researchers, and our categories were built into the participants’ diaries through the layout of the diary sheets. We were aware of this, but we felt that the framing that we did through this layout and labelling was sufficiently open to allow the participants’ to provide their own accounts of their daily routines. The main feature of the layout of the diary sheets used in both projects was that it guided the participants to record their activities and the reading and writing they did at particular times of the day. In addition, it separated reading and writing and language choices from the general patterning of activities. The relative openness of the framing was demonstrated by the fact that the diary sheets completed by the participants in the project undertaken by Arvind and Marilyn included responses that they had not anticipated, responses which drew their attention to the wide range of work commitments that people had. A second issue which concerned us was that we might be imposing a new literacy practice upon our research participants, a research-oriented practice, which was not a naturally occurring aspect of their day-to-day lives. This is an important issue, since, in some fieldwork settings, making such demands could make participants feel disempowered. We attempted to address this issue by discussing with participants the idea of diary-keeping and the different types of diaries they might keep. This provided a means of opening up a dialogue about different ways of writing and of establishing how familiar the participants were with this particular type of writing. In both projects, participant collaboration was an important principle. The participants’ took on an active role as participant researchers. Although keeping a diary involved imposing a new way of writing, it was also a fieldwork strategy which facilitated active involvement of participants, along with other strategies such as collaborative analysis, reflection on practices, photo taking, and collecting written texts. The third issue which arose from the bilingual/multilingual settings in which we were working, related to the language that we should use in
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designing the diary sheets. Kathryn made the decision to use Welsh in her diary sheets, since this is the language she always used when talking to the participants. In Arvind and Marilyn’s project, the situation was more complex. All the participants in this study were fluent speakers of Gujarati and regularly used Gujarati when speaking with Arvind, but a couple of them had had fewer opportunities than others to develop their reading and writing abilities in Gujarati. They felt most comfortable writing in English, especially about their work. For this reason, Arvind and Marilyn decided that their diary sheets should be bilingual. Despite having bilingual diary sheets, all except one of the participants filled out the diary sheet in English. With hindsight, we feel that the bilingual labelling of the sheets made the academic readers of the diaries and the academic context of the diary-keeping more visible. English was taken to be the main working language of the project, since even those who we knew could write fluently in Gujarati, chose to write in English, though four of the six participants did write their names in both Gujarati and English on every diary sheet. As we indicated above, one participant, Hansaben, also codeswitched into Gujarati to write several terms which referred to specific cultural practices. The only person who wrote his whole diary in Gujarati was Ramanlal, the Gujarati teacher. Of the six participants, he was the one who did most writing in Gujarati during the course of his work. So, despite Arvind’s efforts to redress the balance and to give Gujarati status within the context of the project, English was assumed by most participants to be the language which really counted in the research process. The fourth issue we confronted related to the timetabling of the diarykeeping. This had implications for the kind of data collected. There were two sets of decisions to be made: first of all, there were decisions about when the diary-keeping would be scheduled. Diaries usually aim to capture the typical pattern of a participant’s day-to-day routine. This means avoiding special occasions or times of the year, such as festivals and public holidays, unless there is a particular research reason for focusing on those occasions. The second set of timetabling decisions related to the length of time the diaries were to be kept and the number of diary interviews to be held with each participant. We found that these decisions needed to be based on knowledge gleaned during prior ethnographic work. The fifth issue we had to address was how we were going to ensure comparability of data and depth of detail across all participant diaries. As we
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indicated earlier, in semi-structured interviews, an aide mémoire specifies the topics which need to be covered in each interview and therefore it is possible to check that the same aspects of a person’s life are covered with each interviewee. Diaries of day-to-day routines are potentially much less homogenous in the range of data they produce. The diary interviews played a useful role in this regard. As we have shown above, we went over the diaries before meeting with people and wrote down questions that we wanted to ask. In this way, we were able to ensure some level of comparability across the data from each research participant. Because the diary interviews generated such productive dialogues, Kathryn opted to hold a diary interview with each participant after every week of the diary-keeping. By doing this, it was possible to follow up on insights gleaned from previous interviews. The participants in Arvind and Marilyn’s project had considerable time constraints and so only one round of diary interviews could be organised. In their project, it would have been more useful to have had at least two diary interviews with each participant, one for each week of diary-keeping.
The scope for further explorations of diary work In this chapter, we have described in detail the ways in which we have explored the potential of participant diary work. There is still ample scope for further exploration. It is, of course, possible to extend and deepen the dialogue with participants by sharing with them the interpretation and analysis of the data and getting their feedback. These discussions can be audio-recorded and analysed in turn, building on the practice established by those working on the Ethnography of Communication (Gumperz 1982a, 1982b; Rampton 1992). The cycles of checking back with participants can begin in the diary interviews, if several interviews are held with each participant, as in Kathryn’s project. Other researchers have come up with other ways of extending the discussions about participants’ diaries and creating further opportunities for dialogue. For example, in a recent study of the bilingual literacy practices of four Chinese secondary school students in their lives outside the classroom in Hong Kong, Tse (1998) arranged for the participants to meet and compare notes with each other on the diaries that they had completed. The discussions which took place at this meeting were recorded with their permission. This
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fieldwork strategy was facilitated by the fact that the number of participants in this study was quite small and by the fact that they already knew each other, and the researcher, quite well. Some researchers have also explored the possibility of working with audio-recorded participant diaries. In some studies, audio-recording has been the expressed preference of participants who undertook to keep diaries. This was the case in a recent study by Hodge (1994b). In other studies, the use of audio-recorded diaries was necessitated by the fact that there was an uneven distribution of literacy abilities among participants. In a study of Laotian women in the city of Philadelphia, in the United States, which is still in progress, Daryl Gordon has chosen to use audio-recorded diaries, because some of the women in her study have not had the chance to develop their reading and writing abilities in English and others cannot yet read or write in Laotian or English (personal communication). There is also a case for bringing together participants’ diaries with researchers’ diaries. If a researcher keeps a diary alongside those of the participants, researcher and participants could then meet and compare notes, extending the dialogue and building trust through an open exchange of experiences and views. An approach similar to this was adopted in a study of the bilingual literacy practices of Portuguese migrant women carried out in London by Maria Clara Keating (personal communication). Keating had two diaries: a “research diary” where she wrote her own personal reflections about the research she was doing, and a “field diary” which had a primarily mnemonic function. She carried the latter around with her while she was doing fieldwork. From time to time, during her interviews with the women in her study, she showed them the field diary and asked them to add notes to it or to correct things that she had written. As Cameron et al. (1992) have observed, a researcher’s willingness to engage in “disclosure” (1992: 23) is a necessary ingredient of research which aims to be empowering. The approaches to diary work that we have outlined above are all based on the fundamental principle that ethnographic research should aim to be as collaborative and dialogic as possible. It is particularly important to observe this principle in ethnographic research on literacy in multilingual settings, because language and literacy practices are bound up with different values and different world views. As we have tried to show in this chapter, dialogic research methods such as participant diary work offer a means of bringing different voices into the ethnographer’s account, thereby providing a richer
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and more insightful cultural account of multilingual literacy practices in a particular context.
Acknowledgements We would like to thank Olwenna Evans, Stan Jones, Mona Jones, Angharad Williams, Dewi Wilkinson, Nansi Wilkinson, Bethan Lloyd, Eifion Lloyd, Arwyn Jones, Marian Rees, Aled Rees, Rhian Roberts, Bijalben, Firouzaben, Hansaben, Manubhai, Ramanlal and Shobhanaben for their part in this research. Without them, this chapter could not have been written.
Notes 1.
This research was funded for one year by Lancaster University and funded for three years by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).
2.
This study was entitled: “Literacies at Work in a Multilingual City”. It was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) from March 1995 to February 1996.
3.
Leicester has the largest Gujarati population in Britain. It is difficult to be precise about the overall size of this population, because of the absence of census data on languages in England. The only census data available relates to country of origin. According to the 1991 census, 23.7% of the overall population of the city is of South Asian origin (Leicester City Council 1993). With regard to language statistics, all we have is estimates based on an earlier survey (Leicester City and County Council 1983). According to these estimates, approximately 15% of the total population of Leicester identifies Gujarati as their first language. However, recent informal estimates suggest that this figure is now much higher (Bhatt 1994).
4.
All names mentioned in connection with Kathryn’s research are real names. Following a collective decision by the research participants it was decided that real names be used.
5.
While most participants in Kathryn’s project kept diaries for the full four weeks, others kept them for shorter periods due to their work pressures.
6.
A number of computer software packages such as Ethnograph and NUDIST are available for coding and analysing extensive interview data. I decided, however, that Bookmark in Word 6 was adequate for the categorising and coding purposes of this study since the main focus of my analysis became the transcripts of audio recordings of literacy events. David Barton and Sally Kedge at Lancaster University first explored the potential of the facilities of Word 6 for Windows for coding and classifying qualitative data in the Multilingual Literacy Practices: Home, Community and School project, funded by the ESRC.
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7.
Here and elsewhere, Arvind and Marilyn have used fictitious names for the participants in their study to preserve confidentiality. The suffix — ben, at the end of women’s first names, is roughly translated into English as ‘sister’.
8.
The suffix -bhai, at the end of men’s first names, is roughly translated into English as ‘brother’.
9.
-lal is an honorific suffix.
10.
Although Gujarati speakers in Leicester are often represented as one ‘community’ in official British discourse or in academic research, there are actually a number of different Gujarati-speaking groups in the city. These groups are quite diverse: they have different migration histories, different religious affiliations and different local community associations.
11.
This ethnographic project was also based in Leicester. It has already been mentioned in note 5 above. It was entitled “Multilingual Literacy Practices: Home, Community and School” and was funded from 1993–1995 by the ESRC. The members of the research team were: Arvind Bhatt, David Barton, Marilyn Martin-Jones, Sally Kedge, Kantilal Solanki and Mukul Saxena.
AFTERWORD
Multilingual literacies, literacy practices, and the continua of biliteracy Nancy H. Hornberger
As Martin-Jones and Jones point out in their introduction, literacy acquisition and use in multilingual settings is not only ubiquitous in our world, but deserving of more focused attention by educational researchers, policy-makers, and practitioners. As I read through this collection of fascinating accounts of multilingual literacy practices and identities in a range of sites primarily in Britain, I encountered many resonances with my own and others’ empirical work in the United States, South America, South Africa and elsewhere, as well as with my conceptual work on the continua model of biliteracy over the past decade and more. Street (Chapter 1) urges those of us involved in literacy research and development to pay more consistent attention to the terms we use, such as literacy practices and literacy events, multiple literacies and multiliteracies. I would like to use these pages to explore some dimensions of meaning of these terms and of the title term(s) of this volume, multilingual literacies, as they relate to biliteracy and to other terms such as local literacies, indigenous literacies, and everyday literacies which have appeared in the literature as well. As I do so, I will point to cases from around the world which bear similarities (or differences) to those collected here. I will close with brief comments on the power of research, policy, and practice initiatives which draw on multilingual literacies/biliteracy to subvert social inequities.
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Multilingual literacies and the continua of biliteracy The term multilingual literacies is laden with meaning, as the editors emphasise and explain. Literacies in the plural signals, from within the New Literacy Studies, an understanding of literacies as social practices first and foremost, and a critique of the notion of a reified, autonomous Literacy with “a big L and a little y” (Street, Chapter 1). Likewise, multilingual, rather than bilingual, signals, from within the sociolinguistic study of bilingualism, an awareness of the multiplicity and complexity of communicative repertoires in multilingual settings. Further, the combined meaning of the phrase multilingual literacies is greater than the sum of its parts and is intended to convey that configurations of language and literacy undergo continual processes of reaffirmation and redefinition (Martin-Jones & Jones, Introduction). There is great resonance between the notion of multilingual literacies developed here and the continua of biliteracy, a comprehensive framework I have proposed as a way to situate research, teaching, and language planning in multilingual settings. The continua of biliteracy model defines biliteracy as “any and all instances in which communication occurs in two (or more) languages in or around writing” (Hornberger 1990: 213) and describes it in terms of four nested sets of continua characterizing the media, contexts, development, and content of biliteracy (Hornberger 1989; Hornberger & Skilton-Sylvester 2000). The notion of continuum conveys that all points on a particular continuum are interrelated, and the model suggests that the more their learning contexts and contexts of use allow learners and users to draw from across the whole of each and every continuum, the greater are the chances for their full biliterate development and expression (Hornberger 1989: 289). There is, first of all, a clear parallel in the language-as-resource orientation (cf. Ruiz 1984) which both the multilingual literacies and continua of biliteracy formulations share; both take the view that multiple languages and literacies, and the cultural practices and views of the world in which they are embedded, are resources on which individuals and groups may draw as they “take on different identities in different domains of their lives” (Martin-Jones & Jones, Introduction). More specifically, there are striking parallels between the four reasons Martin-Jones and Jones offer for using the term multilingual literacies, and the four sets of continua in the continua of biliteracy model. First, Martin-Jones and Jones tell us, multilingual describes the commu-
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nicative repertoires of individuals and groups more accurately than the term bilingual would. The use of multi rather than bi signals that these repertoires include not just two, but many, communicative means (languages, dialects, styles, registers, channels, modes of expression, etc.). Media in the continua of biliteracy model refer precisely to the description of these repertoires — specifically, the language varieties and scripts through which multilingual literacies are expressed and the sequence or configurations in which they are acquired and used. The model defines these in terms of structures of the languages involved (on a continuum from similar to dissimilar), their scripts (from convergent to divergent) and the sequence of exposure to or acquisition of the languages/literacies (ranging from simultaneous to successive). Of such complex and multiple repertoires we have not only the examples in this volume, but also other cases documented in the literature, of which I cite here only a few. For example, there are the languages and literacy practices used and developed in Billy and Meera’s nursery class (Kenner, Chapter 7); and Firouzaben’s and Shobhanaben’s uses of Gujarati, Urdu, Hindi, English or other languages and literacies in their construction of new identities in Britain after migrating from Malawi and India, respectively (Martin-Jones, Chapter 8). There are the cases of British-born Caribbeans using modified Standard English orthography to represent Creole (Sebba, Chapter 9); and the mediated uses of English (the language of literacy), the national language Bislama, and the local vernacular Aulua in literacy events in Vanuatu in the south west Pacific (Baynham & Masing, Chapter 10). In her recent book, Zentella describes the repertoire of spoken and written Spanish and English varieties on New York City’s el bloque (Zentella 1997: 41). Another case is that of the multiple indigenous languages and literacies in play as professores índios ‘indigenous teachers’ from eight different Amazonian ethnic groups author teaching materials in their own languages, mediating across the languages and also through Portuguese, as part of the teacher education course in Rio Branco, Brazil (Hornberger 1998: 440). A second reason for using the term multilingual rather than bilingual, according to Martin-Jones and Jones, is that it signals the multiplicity and complexity of communicative purposes associated with the repertoire of languages and literacies. Communicative purpose is inextricably bound up with communicative context and is accounted for in the continua of biliteracy model along the dimensions of micro to macro, oral to literate, and monolingual to bi(multi)lingual contexts. At the macrolevel, global and societal sociopolitical,
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socioeconomic, sociocultural, sociopsychological, and sociolinguistic statuses and processes affect the purposes to which spoken and written languages are put, and at the microlevel, oral and literate, monolingual and multilingual interaction in specific institutional, neighborhood, home, and family contexts plays a role in defining communicative purpose as well. So, for example, a “multi-layered analysis” of literacy histories and practices of seven Bangladeshi British families reveals how the practices and purposes surrounding learning to read in three languages (Arabic, Bengali, and English) differ from those in the British schools these children attend (Gregory & Williams, Chapter 2). The promotion of Kwéyòl literacy and of a Kwéyòl orthography and dictionary generates enthusiasm in the UK context where nearly all members of literacy classes are literate in English and many are learning Kwéyòl as a second language, but not for native Kwéyòl speakers in the Caribbean island of St. Lucia where access to English is limited and highly valued and the purpose of education and literacy is equated with learning English (Edwards & Nwenmely, Chapter 5). Within a Gujarati-speaking Muslim community of North London, those families that use the Muslim Community Centre experience a wider range of opportunities for Gujarati or Urdu to be spoken, particularly for leisure purposes, and also more support for children’s literacy in Gujarati or Urdu, than those families who do not (Sneddon, Chapter 6). Similarly, Quechua speakers in rural communities of the Andean highlands associate Spanish with formal, written purposes and Quechua with more informal, oral ones, while code switching fulfills its own unique set of communicative purposes, according to domains and situations (Hornberger 1988: 81–115). Third, the notion of multilingual literacies takes account of multiple paths of acquisition and varying degrees of expertise within individuals’ and groups’ communicative repertoires. In the continua of biliteracy model, the development continua offer a way of conceptualizing these paths of acquisition and degrees of expertise, along the dimensions of first language-to-second language (and third, fourth, fifth languages, etc.), receptive-to-productive and oral-towritten skills, uses, and practices. Chinese mothers’ highly structured instructional approach to teaching their children to read and write Chinese at home in Britain and the relatively low levels of expertise the children can attain on the basis of a few hours a week represent one pattern of development (Ran, Chapter 4). Three case studies of Peruvian Quechua-speaking adults’ paths to functional Quechua literacy use, via self-instruction, church affiliation, and bilingual education materials development, respectively, represent others (Hornberger 1994).
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Finally, the term multilingual focuses attention on the multiple ways people draw on and combine the codes in their communicative repertoires to make meaning as they negotiate and display cultural identities and social relationships. In the continua of biliteracy model, this use of codes as meaning-making resources is characterised in terms of the expression of majorityto-minority, literary-to-vernacular, and decontextualised-to-contextualised content. For example, a minority group member refuses to become literate as an act of resistance, because acquisition of majority-culture literacy requires the adoption of some of the cultural behaviors and values of the majority group (Blackledge, framing the experience of Bangladeshi women in Birmingham UK, Chapter 3). Or interactions between a young Welsh farmer and a delegate of the Ministry of Agriculture Fisheries and Food (as they fill out an Animal Movement form) reflect a hybrid combination of elements of bureaucratic and farmworld discourses in Welsh and English (Jones, Chapter 11). Likewise, children and adults in Cambodian refugee families in Philadelphia develop new social relations of collaboration as they work together to meet their communicative needs in a new context, making use of combinations of oral and written Khmer and English (Hardman 1998). Biliteracy, then, as I have formulated it in the continua model, encompasses multilingual literacies, as well as related notions such as multiple literacies–the multiple social and cultural constructions of literacy in practice (Street 1993a); vernacular literacies — literacy practices associated with culture which is neither elite nor institutional (Camitta 1993: 228; Shuman 1993: 267; Street 1993a: 1, 223); local literacies — literacy practices closely connected with local and regional identities (Barton 1994b; Street 1994b; Barton and Hamilton 1998); indigenous literacies — literacy development and practices in indigenous languages and contexts (Hornberger 1996); everyday literacies — adolescent students’ literacy practices in their everyday lives (Knobel 1999); and even multiliteracies — although my use of the term is somewhat different from its more recent use by the New London Group (New London Group 1996; Cope & Kalantzis 2000). Whereas my use of the term multiliteracies was intended to more clearly convey that the term biliteracy connotes multiple, and not just two, languages and literacies (Hornberger 1994: 77), the New London Group’s usage refers primarily to the multiple communications channels and media in our changing world (and only secondarily to the increasing saliency of cultural and linguistic diversity which is more centrally the focus of my use of the term in relation to biliteracy); the concept of multiliteracies in the New
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London Group (NLG) sense extends literacy beyond reading and writing to other domains, such as the visual, audio, spatial, and behavioral (an extension which Street questions, Chapter 1). What all of the above terms (save perhaps multiliteracies in the NLG sense) have in common are notions of a variety and diversity of literacies and literacy practices, reflective and constitutive of specific contexts and identities.
Literacy events and interactions, practices and activities as instances of biliteracy Like the above definitions, a number of chapters in this volume make use of the notion of literacy practices (e.g. Chapters 6, 7, 8, 11, 15, 16). Related notions also appear: literacy events (e.g. Chapters 10, 11), literacy activities (e.g. Chapters 2, 6), and literacy interactions (e.g. Chapters 3, 11). While these terms are closely tied to each other in meaning, there are nuances of difference which relate perhaps to their origins in different disciplinary (and interdisciplinary) perspectives on literacy. Whereas the concepts of literacy events and interactions come primarily out of sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology — in particular the ethnography of communication and interactional sociolinguistics, notions about literacy practices and activities find their primary roots in cross-cultural psychology, social and cultural anthropology, and sociocultural theory. Sociolinguistics broke new ground in the 1960s by moving the analysis of language beyond a focus on structure to one on language use in social context. Rather than study homogeneous languages, sociolinguists took up the study of speech communities and their verbal repertoires, described in terms of speech (or, more broadly, communicative) domains, situations, events, and acts. In his introduction to the 1964 special publication of the American Anthropologist, “The Ethnography of Communication,” Hymes proposed that the speech act should replace the linguistic code as the focus of attention in the study of languages: “[The ethnography of communication] must take as context a community, investigating its communicative habits as a whole, so that any given use of channel and code takes its place as but part of the resources upon which the members of the community draw… The starting point is the ethnographic analysis of the communicative habits of a community in their totality, determining what count as communicative events, and as their components… The
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communicative event thus is central. (In terms of language proper, the statement means that the linguistic code is displaced by the speech act as focus of attention.)” (Hymes 1964: 3, 13).
Building from communicative theory and work by Roman Jakobson, he suggested an array of components that might serve as heuristic for the ethnographic study of communicative events, where such events refer to activities, or aspects of activities, that are directly governed by rules or norms for the use of language. This array of components included participants, settings, topics, purposes, codes and channels, norms for interaction and interpretation, etc. and was later formulated by Hymes into the mnemonic SPEAKING (Setting, Participants, Ends, Act, Key, Instrumentalities, Norms, Genres; 1974a: 53–62). From within the ethnography of communication have come calls for the ethnography of writing (Basso 1974) and the ethnography of literacy (Szwed 1981), as well as the notion of literacy event, defined as any “occasion[ ] in which written language is integral to the nature of participants’ interactions and their interpretive processes and strategies” (Heath 1982b: 50). Hymes’ notion of channel includes written, as well as oral, telegraphic, and other channels of communication; Saville-Troike elaborates this into a grid made up of the intersection of vocal and nonvocal channels with verbal and nonverbal codes, thus including such communicative modes as paralinguistic and prosodic features (vocal, nonverbal), silence, kinesics, and proxemics (nonvocal, nonverbal), and written and sign languages (nonvocal, verbal), as well as spoken language (vocal, verbal) (Saville-Troike 1989: 145). Analysis of literacy events, then, involves describing the range of ways in which people “do” literacy, in terms of participants, settings, topics, language varieties, purposes, norms, genres, and the like. The notion of interaction has also come into literacy studies via sociolinguistic work, primarily that of Gumperz, who in turn built on work by sociologist Erving Goffman on face-to-face interaction. “The key to Gumperz’s sociolinguistics of verbal communication is a view of language as a socially and culturally constructed symbol system that is used in ways that reflect macrolevel social meanings (e.g. group identity, status differences) but also create microlevel social meanings (i.e., what one is saying and doing at a particular moment in time)” (Schiffrin 1996: 315). This work, referred to as interactional sociolinguistics, investigates how contextualization cues, that is “signalling mechanisms such as intonation, speech rhythm, and choice among lexical, phonetic, and syntactic options” (Gumperz 1982: 16), relate what is said to
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participants’ background knowledge, enabling them to make situated inferences about their interlocutors’ meaning. A literacy interaction, then, would be a face-to-face interaction involving a piece of writing, a notion closely related to literacy event, in that the focus is on the “doing” of literacy, but with perhaps greater emphasis on the evolution of the interaction in real time, as for example the three face-to-face interactions documented in Chapter 11. What of literacy practices and activities? Cross-cultural psychologists Scribner and Cole are generally credited with introducing the term literacy practices, based on their ethnographic work among the Vai in Liberia. They came to see “literacy as a set of socially organised practices”, arguing that “literacy is not simply learning how to read and write a particular script but applying this knowledge for specific purposes in specific contexts of use” (1981: 236). On this view, “cultural groups are said to have specific literacy practices in the same sense they are said to have specific religious practices, house-building practices, medicinal practices, and so forth” (Reder 1994: 36). The notion of practices, in this sense, appears to have its roots in the traditional ethnographies of cultural anthropology; but as developed in literacy studies, it also gains sustenance from more recent “anthropological and sociological theorizing” about social practice, beginning from Bourdieu’s 1977 Outline of a Theory of Practice (Lave & Wenger 1991: 50). Street, who used and developed the concept of literacy practices early on in his ethnographic work in Iran (1984), defines literacy practices as the “broader cultural conception of particular ways of thinking about and doing reading and writing in cultural contexts” and suggests that the notion includes both observable patterns of behavior across events (at the more empirical end) and the more ideological aspects which are not directly observable (Chapter 1). In some respects, the term literacy practices appears to encompass what sociolinguists refer to as “language uses and attitudes” — or more specifically, uses of and attitudes toward language and literacy, i.e. not only the observable uses but also the underlying norms, values, and conventions associated with those uses. Street, Barton and others distinguish between literacy events and literacy practices, characterizing the former as a descriptive category of observable occurrences and the latter as the cultural meanings behind them. On this view, bedtime story reading in U.S. middle class homes (Heath 1982b), for example, is a literacy event (a parent/caregiver and child at home reading a book together at bedtime) undergirded by a set of literacy practices (story reading
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conventions, attitudes toward books and literacy, expectations about parentchild relationships, among others). Barton writes “Literacy events are the particular activities where reading and writing have a role; literacy practices are the general cultural ways of using reading and writing which people draw upon in a literacy event” (1994a:viii). Reder suggests “literacy events are culturally patterned into recurring units, which Scribner and Cole (1981) have termed literacy practices” (1994: 36). These are useful distinctions, although I think it worth pointing out, for the sake of the sociolinguistic record, that in both Hymes’ heuristic and Fishman’s formulation of the field (i.e. the sociology of language with its primary focuses being language usage, language attitudes, and language behaviors, 1971), there is explicit attention not only to the observable uses of language and literacy, but also to the norms, values, and conventions underlying them (i.e. practices). Hymes’ phrase “ways of speaking” (1974b) and Heath’s “ways with words” (1983) capture this dimension. In conventional usage, practice (as a noun) carries connotations of both frequent doing and learning by doing. The salient meaning of activity, on the other hand, is that of the active doing of a specific action. In recent years, though, activity has taken on special meanings more closely linked to the “learning” connotation, in association with work in psychology, in particular sociocultural theory and activity theory building on the writings of Soviet psychologist Vygotsky (Wertsch 1981, 1991: 19). As Measures et al. have observed, in Vygotsky’s approach to mental functioning, “jointly undertaken goal-oriented activity was primary. At any time, a culture is constituted by the systems of social activity that have developed historically through the use and improvements of tools and practices to mediate humans’ action and interaction in the world. Each individual enters the world with a biologically given potential; but the development of a full human being is dependent on the ‘appropriation’, or taking over, of the tools and practices already in use in the culture. Vygotsky focused specifically on the development of what he called the higher mental functions, such as voluntary memory and reasoning. These functions, he argued, are mediated by the use of semiotic tools, chief among which is language. Individual intellectual development is thus to be understood, in large part, in terms of the appropriation of the ways in which language is used in social interaction in the context of joint activity” (Measures et al. 1997: 21–22).
Based on these understandings and assumptions, then, it seems to me that a focus on literacy activities implies attention to the ways in which engagement in literacy events, interactions, and practices enable participants to
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appropriate the ways of speaking and writing already in use in the culture. Inquiry into which skills young children might gain from literacy activities in their homes in East London, such as booksharing with older siblings or playing school (Gregory & Williams, Chapter 2); or the association Gujaratispeaking parents make between letter-writing in the home and their children’s learning of Gujarati (Sneddon, Chapter 6) are consistent with the use of the term literacy activities in these chapters. While the four terms events, interactions, practices, and activities have their nuances of difference in meaning, they nevertheless all come into play in describing and understanding the acquisition and use of multilingual literacies, as this volume gives abundant evidence. The continua of biliteracy model uses the term instance to cover the whole range of occurrences and analytical focuses, “whether it is a child using an L1-L2 dictionary to learn her L2 at the micro end or a language minority population making only minimal use of its L1 in written form at the macro end” (Hornberger 1989: 277); whether it be “an individual, a situation, [or] a society” (Hornberger 1990: 213); or more recently, “an individual biliterate actor, interaction, practice, program, situation, or society” (Hornberger & Skilton-Sylvester 2000). An instance of biliteracy (or multilingual literacy), then, might be an event, a practice, an interaction, or an activity at the micro end. Similarly, at the macro end, an instance of biliteracy might refer to a program, situation, or society; a speech community or communicative domain; or, too, in the words of the editors and contributors here, a site or world.
Sites and worlds of biliteracy In the Introduction, Martin-Jones and Jones provide an overview of the broad range of sites in which multilingual literacies are examined in the volume, including both people’s own life worlds (homes, local community contexts) as well as institutional contexts (such as schools, workplaces, etc.). Literacy worlds (Kenner, Chapter 7), linguistic worlds (Kenner, Chapter 7), multilingual adult worlds (Martin-Jones & Jones, Section II introduction), and farmworld (Jones, Chapter 11) are also mentioned. The authors do not explicitly define these terms, but they seem to be drawing on recent interdisciplinary work where lifeworld refers to “spaces for community life where local and specific meanings can be made” (New London Group 1996: 70) and worlds of
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literacy refers to “the distinct literacies which exist alongside each other” in complex societies today, each world having its own literacy practices and events (Barton 1994c:x). “There are the separate worlds of adults and children, of people speaking different languages, of men and women. There are also various public worlds of literacy, defined by the social institutions we participate in — including school, work and official bureaucracies” (Barton 1994c:x; cf. Gee’s notion of discourses, 1996). Sites and worlds are appealing terms, perhaps because they appear to refer to concrete, identifiable, observable spaces and take us away from more abstract terms like domains (Fishman 1971) or ideologically laden ones like discourses (Gee 1996). However, sites are often associated with “struggle” and worlds “collide”, and it is here that notions of mediation (cf. Chapters 10 & 11) and hybridity (cf. Chapters 2 & 13) become crucial. I mentioned earlier that sociolinguistics as it emerged in the 1960s shifted our analytical focus in the study of language from language structure to language use, and our unit of study from linguistic code to speech community; a more recent shift is toward a focus on locating linguistic practices as parts of larger systems of social inequality (Gal 1989: 347), taking contexts of crosscultural or intercultural communication as the unit of study, “for instance, speakers in institutions who do not share interpretative rules; local populations of speakers viewed in relation to the policies or discourses of states; and contrasting groups of speakers differentially located within a political economic region” (Gal 1989: 349). It is precisely in these contexts of crosscultural or intercultural communication, where “notions of group membership and community can no longer be accepted as fixed characteristics and welldefined totalities” (Rampton 1992: 54), that relationships among differing language and literacy practices are most evident (in the same way that sociolinguistic norms of interaction are most salient when they are breached and the existence of speech situations and events is most observable at their boundaries, cf. Hymes 1968: 123; Hymes 1972: 56; Saville-Troike 1989: 135–136). This focus and these units of study are adopted in this volume, where notions of mediation and hybridity come to the fore. The role of literacy mediator is a recurring one as local people negotiate with ‘outsiders’ or government bureaucracies and their languages and literacies, as seen in the letter-writing and work-group planning literacy events in Vanuatu, where participants adopt scribing, mediating, and agent discourse roles to jointly accomplish their language and literacy needs (Baynham & Masing, Chap-
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ter 10), or in Welsh farmers’ face-to-face encounters with the ministry bureaucracy via form-filling events mediated by staff of the local ministry office, private sector organizations, or the farmers union (Jones, Chapter 11). Similarly, in a comparative ethnographic study of functional literacy development in Eskimo, Hmong, and Latino communities in the United States, Reder (1987: 259) described three modes of engagement in literacy practices — technological, functional, and social, in which the latter two modes of engagement are mediated by the first, in encounters with written text. Or university professors at a formerly white institution in South Africa explore ways to induct their increasingly diverse student population into academic literacy conventions, while at the same time encouraging the voices and literacy practices they bring with them to their studies (Adendorff & Chick 1998). Hybridity, a notion derived from the work of another Russian, the philosopher Bakhtin (1981: 358–359), is evidenced by children mixing and blending literacy practices from home and school to unique new patterns and forms (Gregory & Williams, Chapter 2), and by the mix of discourses in Welsh farmers’ interactions with bureaucratic mediators (Jones, Chapter 11). Hybridity is also evident in a 2nd-3rd grade two-way Spanish immersion classroom in Los Angeles as described by Gutiérrez, Baquedano-López, and Tejeda, who argue that the teacher’s and students’ acceptance and encouragement of hybrid language practices (including multiple languages and registers, unauthorised side-talk, movement, spontaneous interaction and collaboration) promote children’s learning. Using activity theory and Vygotsky’s “zones of proximal development” (Vygotsky 1962) as frames for closely analyzing one six-week learning event, the authors show how the participants reorganise the activity and incorporate local knowledge, thereby creating “third spaces in which alternative and competing discourses and positionings transform conflict and difference into rich zones of collaboration and learning” (Gutiérrez et al., in press). Literacy events and interactions, practices and activities, sites and worlds, are then somewhat different kinds of things, with relative emphases perhaps on ‘doing’ (events and interactions), ‘learning’ (practices and activities) and ‘becoming or transforming’ (sites and worlds), respectively. Yet, they are all also essentially the same kind of thing, literacies in their social contexts, and all must come into play in our consideration of biliteracy/ multilingual literacies.
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Multilingual literacies, biliteracy, and power: educational research, policy and practice Themes running through this volume are the ways in which multilingual literacy practices become sites for contesting asymmetrical relations of power, ways such as countering dominant school literacies by bringing home literacies into schools, constructing and transforming cultural and social identities through multilingual literacy interactions, and drawing on the wealth of knowledge and expertise in local communities in collaborative efforts with researchers and teachers. Again, I was struck as I read by parallels with my own work on indigenous literacies and the continua of biliteracy. My edited volume on Indigenous Literacies in the Americas highlighted themes paralleling those above, namely: indigenous literacies as language planning from the bottom up, as an avenue for cultural expression, and as a door of opportunity for the disempowered (Hornberger 1996: 357–366). Along the same lines, Skilton-Sylvester and I have recently argued for the need to contest the imbalanced (asymmetrical) power weighting of the continua of biliteracy in educational research, policy, and practice, through initiatives which explicitly pay attention to and grant agency and voice to actors and practices at what have traditionally been the less powerful ends of the continua (Hornberger & Skilton-Sylvester 2000). Particularly rich and inspiring examples of the ways in which research, policy, and practice in multilingual literacies can challenge social inequities and open spaces for the construction of new identities by researchers, teachers, and community members alike are the accounts in the final sections of the volume, which again strike resonances with multilingual literacy efforts elsewhere. The literacy campaign in the Yemeni community of Sheffield (Gurnah, Chapter 12), like the Guarani literacy campaign in Bolivia (López 1996), drew strength and success from closely involving community members from the outset, recruiting young people from the community as literacy tutors, building on the cultural knowledge of those involved, and taking a bilingual approach. The Asian Women’s Writing and Publishing Project has resonances with the experiences of Hispanic women in adult education in East Los Angeles (Rockhill 1993) in that, for the women who participate, their “aspiration to learn and develop frequently collides with their positioning within the extended family structure” (Alam, Chapter 13). In its explicitly Freirean critical
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pedagogical approach, this Project resembles New York City’s El Barrio Popular Education Program, an adult education program for Latina women (mostly Puerto Rican and Dominican) which enacts critical pedagogy through a bilingual curriculum in which popular research projects are conducted, involvement of participants and former participants as popular teachers, and integration of video technology as an emancipatory tool (Rivera 1999: 486). In the production of books written by local authors and published in local languages, the Asian Women’s Writing and Publishing Project bears some similarities to the Centro Editorial de Literatura Indígena ‘Editorial Center for Indigenous Literature’ in Mexico (Bernard 1996; González 1996; Salinas 1996), although the latter explicitly seeks to publish works originally written in the indigenous languages, while the former publishes books written in English and subsequently translated into the different South Asian languages. In addition to these policy and practice initiatives, the volume also documents research efforts which aim for collaboration and dialogue with participants and community members. The evolving research agenda on multilingual literacies among Panjabi-speakers in Southall, West London, which became, over time, more ethnographic in method, more historic in scope, and which carried reverberations for the researcher’s own identity (Saxena, Chapter 14) is reminiscent of Delgado-Gaitan’s (1993) account of the evolution of both her research and her researcher identity as Mexican immigrant researcher working with Mexican immigrant parents around issues of bilingual education in southern California. The thoroughly collaborative approach to documenting multilingual literacy practices through photography adopted by researchers in the Vale of Clwyd in northeast Wales and in a Blackburn Muslim community of South Asian origin (Hodge & Jones, Chapter 15) recalls Skilton-Sylvester’s closely collaborative research with Cambodian girls, including the girls’ taking photos of their everyday lives as documentation of their multilingual literacies and identities (Skilton-Sylvester 1997: 57–59). The use of participant diaries and diary-focused interviews as a means of shifting the positioning of researcher and researched and of situating the language and literacy practices of the participants in space and time (Jones, Martin-Jones & Bhatt, Chapter 16) brings to mind Peirce’s (1995) diary-based study of the English language learning experiences of five immigrant women in Canada, vis a vis their multiple and changing social identities, their investment in the second language, and their awareness of the right to speak. Heller has recently argued for the relevance of code switching to the
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politics of language, i.e. “the ways in which language practices are bound up in the creation, exercise, maintenance or change of relations of power” (Heller 1995: 159). Although she was writing primarily about oral, conversational uses of language, the argument and framework she puts forth are equally applicable to the multilingual literacy/bilteracy practices so richly described in this volume. Drawing on Barth’s (1969) work on ethnic boundaries, she emphasises that the strategies disadvantaged social actors adopt, individually or collectively, to cope with the differential distribution of access to and control over resources, include both what they do “when they decide that their best bet is to go after the resources of another group” and “what they do when they decide that their best bet is to develop an alternative resource base of their own” (Heller 1995: 166). This volume provides a revealing glimpse into some of the infinitely creative and resourceful strategies adopted, by both disadvantaged and advantaged social actors alike working in collaboration and in dialogue, in drawing on multilingual literacies to subvert asymmetrical relations and social inequities in our world(s).
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bureaucracy agricultural bureaucracy 147, 211, 218 bureaucracy mediators 147, 209–228, 364 bureaucratic discourse 220, 227, 228 bureaucratisation of social life 210 disembedded bureaucratic systems 210 C calendars 129, 135 Cantonese 2, 129 children 9, 10, 33, 34, 39, 45, 71, 80, 95, 120, 127–144, 156, 305, 362 China 2, 33, 71, 72, 84, 88 Chinese classes 34, 94 community (Mainland Chinese) 71 community (Hong Kong Chinese) 93, 106 culture 84 families 72, 86, 88, 100 Chinese language(s) 2, 71, 77, 90 newspaper(s) 86 parents 87, 88 teaching approaches 75, 88 text books 33, 74, 75, 78 writing system 7, 71, 82, 83 Christian(s)/Christianity 92, 93, 100– 102, 155, 156 codeswitching 7, 8, 13, 146, 171–185, 189, 223 collaborative research 299–317, 366 common underlying proficiency 104, 106 communicative purposes 6, 354, 356
390 communicative repertoires 5, 6, 13, 354, 356, 357 community associations 155, 242–244 community-based activities 13, 24, 34, 160 community centre(s) 108–125, 239, 240 classes/community provision 9, 40, 48, 53, 86, 93, 94, 105, 128, 166, 167, 242–244, 280 community contexts 8, 10, 15, 32, 362 community development 238 community languages 9, 12, 33, 65– 68, 93, 233, 242–244, 264–266 community outreach project 160 community publishing 11, 230, 247– 271 the concept of ‘community’ 154, 155, 273, 358, 363 rural communities 5, 189–207, 209– 228, 301, 302, 320 urban communities 37–54, 55–69, 71– 90, 98–100, 103–105, 155–168, 171–173, 235–241, 281, 302, 321 Creole 2, 3, 12, 13, 91, 96, 146, 171– 187, 241, 354 critical research approach(es) 319, 326 critical pedagogy 366 cultural inequity 15, 230, 233 culture and history 274, 275, 297 as a process 14, 18, 19, 268 as systems of social activity 361, 362 dominant culture(s) 55, 57–63, 66–69, 146, 271, 357 minority group culture(s) 59, 60, 66, 125, 166, 290, 293 popular culture 49 relocating culture 153 residual vs. emergent cultural traditions 50 D democratic research 299, 301, 303
Index dialect 39, 96, 175–177, 185 dialogic research methods 14, 274, 303, 318–351 diaries 14, 274, 302, 306, 314, 319–351, 366 diary interviews 14, 274, 319–351 diaspora(s) 2, 234, 297 discourse bureaucratic discourse 209–228 discourse analysis of interviews 322 discourse role 189–207 discourse style (of teachers) 80 dominant discourse(s) 10, 23, 27, 28, 192, 195, 363 farmworld discourse 221, 223–225, 228 instructional discourse 40 lifeworld discourse 335 theorising discourse 24 vernacular discourse markers 174 domains domains of public life 6, 23, 149, 230 ‘high’ domains 95 public and private domains 149, 230 sites, worlds and domains 363 dyslexia 43 E East Africa 2, 107, 154, 155, 280, 281, 284, 289, 291, 292, 295 East London 5, 32, 37–39, 103, 104, 107, 123, 362 educational research 28, 300, 365 English achievement and proficiency in English 123, 284 British Black English 98 Caribbean English 10 English as a Second Language (ESOL) classes 11, 229, 235, 241, 247–271 English as the language of power 95– 98, 147, 196 English as the medium of instruction 98, 158, 280
Index English for bureaucratic purposes 220–224 English language proficiency and empowerment 64 English-lexicon Caribbean Creole 171–185 English-speaking households 32, 37– 54, 92, 93 English-teaching in schools 28 English translations of interview and diary data 72, 337–339 limited English proficiency 55, 235 regional varieties of English 5, 6 school perceptions of parents’ literacy in English 55–69 standard (British) English 6, 101 the English tradition (literature curriculum) 27, 28 use of spoken English in the home 112 values associated with literacy in English 32, 56, 101 writing and translating letters in English 165, 284, 285 ethnography 3, 4, 14, 20, 37–54, 149– 169, 190, 209–228, 299–318, 319– 351, 358, 359 European Community/European Union 209–228 F families 37–54, 55–69, 71–90, 93–95, 249, 291–297 farmers 147, 209–228, 345, 364 fathers 41, 110, 239 G Gatehouse Books 230, 247 gender and literacy 11, 13, 14, 149–169, 230, 239, 247–271 generations 34, 52, 59, 106, 112, 151, 153, 245, 253, 262, 280, 291, 295, 311, 331 grandparents 51, 53, 113, 130, 136, 162, 243, 291, 306–308, 292–293
391 ‘guiding lights’ 43 Gujarat 34, 107, 116, 124, 125, 136, 146, 150, 154, 155, 157, 161, 162, 164–167, 306 Gujarati 102–125, 130–137, 139, 140, 149–169, 283, 284, 302, 306–309, 335–342, 347 H Hindi 2, 6, 117, 162–164, 166, 167, 252, 274, 278–280, 282, 284–288, 290– 295, 336, 354 Hinduism 282, 285 home literacy 37–54, 55, 60–62, 71–90, 103–126, 129, 133 home literacy materials 129 Hong Kong 2, 34, 91, 93, 94, 348 hybridisation 52 hybridity 221, 223, 363, 364 I identities farming identities 210 gendered identities 149–169, 247–271 new identities 145, 149–169, 256, 354, 365 language/script choices and identities 153, 291–295 texts and identities 15, 145–228 illiteracy of oppression 59 illiteracy of resistance 59, 257 images of literacy 306, 315 India 2, 13, 116–118, 130, 135, 136, 145, 150, 154, 155, 157, 165, 166, 252, 255, 278–296 indigenous literacies 353, 357, 365 Islam 161, 162, 279 J joint construction of texts 190 K Kacchi 157 Kitab 117 Kwéyòl 2, 9, 10, 34, 91, 95–102, 356
Index
392 L language maintenance 9, 34, 98, 99, 103, 105–107, 116, 124, 275 language policy 34, 95–97 Leicester 2, 18, 107, 108, 118, 134, 146, 149–169, 301, 321, 335–342, 350, 351 lifeworlds/local lifeworlds 145–147, 210, 362–363 linguistic minorities 105, 107, 242, 275, 287 literacies dominant literacies 18, 168 local literacies 353, 357 new literacies 91, 149–169 the plurality of literacies 4–15, 18–20, 24–26, 353–358, 362–367 vernacular literacies 357 literacy acquisition of literacy 6, 8, 9, 32, 45, 55, 60, 106, 353, 356, 357, 362 autonomous model of literacy 4, 25, 27 emergent literacy 37, 52, 53, 118, 127–144 ideological model of literacy 4, 15, 25, 155, 276 literacy activities 17, 32, 52, 55, 56, 118, 127, 162, 277, 291, 293, 344, 358–362 literacy brokers 51 literacy campaigns 60, 233–245 literacy and development 25 literacy environment of the home 117–119 literacy events 17–24, 31, 189–207, 209–228, 293, 358–362 literacy interactions 60, 61, 358, 360, 365 literacy patterns 17 literacy practices 17–24, 39, 40, 100, 145, 153, 300, 301, 358–362 maktab literacy 22, 93 visual literacy 19, 20, 301 livestock auctions 217
Index parents drawing on parents’ knowledge 100– 101 literacy and parent-child relationships 37–54 parents’ ambivalence about literacy debates 28 parents and home language literacy at school 129–140 parents as teachers at home 71–90, 92, 93 parent/child story reading 37–39 parents’ language and literacy choices for their children 103–125, 286– 290, 293 parents’ own literacy experiences 42– 45 parents’ patterns of language use 111– 114, 157–159, 162–165, 291–293 parents’ support for English literacy learning 33, 63–65, 119–123 parents’ support for home language literacy 62, 63, 66–67, 71–90, 103– 125, 119–123, 127–144, 293 participant diaries 274, 319–351, 366 pattern analysis 40 phonology 173, 175, 181 photographs/photography photographs as data 156, 306–318 photography in collaborative research 14, 274, 299–318 policy education policy/policy makers 91, 353, 365–367 European Union (EU) Common Agricultural Policy 209–211, 227, 228 involving parents in policy making 69 language and literacy policy 34, 95– 97, 100 policy of the UK Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF) 209–211, 227, 228 policy responses to linguistic diversity 105, 127–144, 232–235
393 UK government policy (and impact of) 26, 105 politics of language 95–98, 278–281, 367 power gender asymmetries of power 149– 155, 158, 159, 163–165, 253–271 discourse, intertextuality and power 24 language, power and policy 95–98, 100–102, 362–366 literacy, power relations and historical processes 1, 2, 25, 58, 91, 244, 276 metropolitan centres of power 12, 45, 195–207, 209–228 migration and changes in status and power 151–153 power asymmetries and discourses about literacy and ‘illiteracy’ 55–69 power asymmetries between lifeworlds and institutional worlds 145–147 power and authority of bureaucracy 209–228 power and method in academic research 13, 299–318, 319–351, 366–367 relationship of power/knowledge 192, 195 practitioners 3, 4, 14, 21, 26, 27, 29, 229, 353 Putonghua 72 Q quantitative analysis 4, 74, 119, 274, 277 R re-interpreting texts and practices 138 Reading (city of) 2, 71–90 reading adults reading at home 43, 161 children reading school texts at home 33 different views on what counts as reading 37–54, 71–90, 91–102
394 early reading 32, 37–54 language/script preferences for reading 286, 291–293 multilingual reading abilities 283, 291–293 performance on standardised reading tests 104, 110 reading aloud 6, 49, 74 reading as a shared activity 49, 158, 159 reading at work 159–161, 166, 167, 336, 341, 342 reading for pleasure 37–39, 42–45, 158, 161, 165 reading from religious texts 92–94, 163, 164, 291, 292 reading needs of adult learners 252 ‘reading the world’ 271 school model(s) of reading 27, 37–54, 100 story reading 37–54, 120, 122, 360 religion and literacy 45, 92, 93, 100– 101, 118, 125, 155, 166, 255, 257, 278–280, 290, 293 researcher and researched 2, 14, 273, 299, 323, 324, 326, 333, 366 S Saturday school(s) 9, 13, 66, 166, 242– 244 scribing 192, 201, 363 semi-structured interviews 40, 72, 128, 156, 274, 321–348 Sheffield 2, 229, 234–245, 365 siblings 9, 31, 42, 48, 49, 53, 64, 104, 109, 114–116, 362 Sikhism 278–281, 288–290, 295–296 social justice 231, 245 social networks 106 Sociolinguistics/sociolinguistic study of bilingualism 4, 13, 149, 155, 326, 354, 358 Southall 2, 8, 274, 275–298, 366 South London 128 Spitalfields 2, 32, 39, 107 St. Lucia 95–98, 100–102
Index story telling 120, 157 Surat 107, 120, 124 Sylheti 2, 5, 6, 32, 39, 40, 45, 61, 65, 66, 68, 86, 252 syncretism 52 T texts bureaucratic texts 2, 12, 209–228 children constructing texts 139 codeswitching in written texts 13, 171–187 different understandings of the value and purpose of texts 23, 57 dual language/bilingual/multilingual texts 118, 254, 265, 271, 321 ethnographic texts 14 events involving written texts 143, 197–207, 209–228, 332 home language texts 127–144 photographs of texts 306–315 religious texts 6, 121, 157, 158, 162, 163 story texts 129 talk around texts 4, 7, 21, 31, 156, 205, 341 texts and discourse(s) 147 texts and images 19, 146 texts and practices 18, 127, 128, 300, 304 texts by and for adult learners 247– 271 text-focused activities 4 transformation and re-contextualisation of texts 191, 206 ‘unofficial texts’ 50 uses of written texts 5, 8, 11 textually mediated 209 Thai 129–140 Tower Hamlets 107 U ‘unofficial’ literacy practices 37–54 Urdu 2, 6, 35, 93, 103–125, 157–167, 241, 252–271, 278–291, 308, 311, 336, 354, 356
395 parents’ writing 129–134 representing speech in writing 171– 187, 197–202 song writing 166–168 speaking one language, writing another 5, 12, 197–207, 218–225, 341 women’s writing 166–168, 172, 173, 247–271, 308–311 writing about photographs 316 writing as a shared activity 49, 118, 130, 166 writing at work 159–161, 166, 167, 202–207, 336, 341, 342 writing fieldnotes 305 writing in a lingua franca 196 writing reforms 75 writing systems/scripts 77, 97, 105, 276, 278–280 writing up research 14, 303, 335 Y Yemen 2, 244 Yemeni Literacy Campaign 234–241, 244, 245
In the STUDIES IN WRITTEN LANGUAGE AND LITERACY the following titles have been published thus far: 1. VERHOEVEN, Ludo (ed.): Functional Literacy: Theoretical issues and educational implications. 1995 2. KAPITZKE, Cushla: Literacy and Religion: The textual politics and practice of Seventh-day Adventism. 1995. 3. TAYLOR, Insup, and M. Martin Taylor: Writing and literacy in Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. 1995. 4. PRINSLOO, Mastin and Mignonne BREIER (eds): The Social Uses of Literacy. Theory and Practice in Contemporary South Africa. 1996. 5. IVANIC, Roz: Writing and Identity. The discoursal construction of identity in academic writing. 1998. 6. PONTECORVO, Clotilde (ed.): Writing Development. An interdisciplinary view. 1997. 7. AIKMAN, Sheila: Intercultural Education and Literacy. An ethnographic study of indigenous knowledge and learning in the Peruvian Amazon. 1999. 8. JONES, Carys, Joan TURNER and Brian STREET (eds.): Students Writing in the University. Cultural and epistemological issues. 1999. 9. BARTON, David and Nigel HALL (eds.): Letter Writing as a Social Practice. 2000. 10. MARTIN-JONES, Marilyn and Kathryn JONES (eds.): Multilingual Literacies. Reading and writing different worlds. 2000.
