1995 Global Cultural Diversity Conference Proceedings, Sydney
Language, Power and Development
The Significance of Doing What Comes UNnaturally
Professor Courtney B. Cazden
Charles William Eliot Professor of Education,
Graduate School of Education, Harvard University, USA
On a single day last month, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts hosted an art exhibit and a movie that conveyed opposing previews of the world of global cultural diversity. In a temporary exhibit of abstract paintings, one installation by artist Lawrence Weiner stood out for its composition of words alone. On either side of a corner wall, separated by the vertical corner line, two large pairs of words were painted directly on the wall:
NITER-BRIMSTONEKEPT-APART
Understood literally, niter and brimstone (the latter an obsolete term for sulphur) are the elements that, when combined, make gunpowder. Understood metaphorically, the entire piece, by its words and their placement, refers to the danger and probable violence of putting together any two unlike elements, or cultures.
Down the hall from this exhibit was the premiere showing of a documentary film "Oasis of Peace", about a village in Israel midway between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, where 100 people half Israelis, half Palestinians have since 1978 been building an intentional community to demonstrate exactly what Weiner's wall art denies: that people from two different cultures, two historic competitors for the same land, two different "nations" as the villagers refer to themselves, can indeed live together in what the film director calls "active harmony". In the Oasis of Peace village, no matter how many of each nation are on the waiting list, the village population is kept evenly divided, so that no one is in a majority or minority, neither group has more or less power. In the primary school, the language of instruction is Hebrew half the time and Arabic half the time to avoid the otherwise inevitable situation in which the non-dominant group (here Palestinian) learns the language of the dominant group (here Israeli) and becomes bilingual, while the dominant group remains monolingual. In this village, everyone has to be bilingual.
Near the end of the film five girls, 6 or 7 years old and clearly friends, stand posing for the camera. Someone asks them which group they are from. One speaks for three on the right: "We're Jewish." And one speaks for two on the left: "We're Palestinian." As soon as this is said, the Jewish girl laughingly moves her friends into an integrated line:
to warm laughter and applause from the theatre audience. Evidently such a mixture was not the most natural way to assemble, but it could easily and happily be done.
These two images of Niter and Brimstone on the one hand and five village girls on the other together serve as the epigram for the relation among the three terms in my title "Language, Power and Development." The three words were selected by the organizers of this conference; the suggested relation among them is mine: Peoples of different cultures and nations can live together in ways that enhance the development of individuals and of society. But doing so, in our world with so many fault lines of differential power, does not come naturally. Our desired global diversity as end requires seemingly unnatural policies and practices as deliberate means especially with respect to the most "natural" human activity of all, our uses of language.
"Natural" here means simply what fits with "common sense" in a particular time and place; what is built into our individual and social patterns of behaviour as the "default option" (to use a computer metaphor); and what happens under "deregulation" (to use a policy metaphor). "UNnatural" means, by contrast, understandings that contradict common sense (as does much scientific knowledge), NON-standard operating procedures that override the default option in our individual and social patterns of behaviour, and UN-conventional policies that regulate such patterns for the sake of desired social ends.
I will exemplify the need for seemingly UNnatural policies and practices with examples from education for immigrant, indigenous, and dominant group children and adults in three countries: United States, Aotearoa/New Zealand and Australia.
Language Education for Children from Immigrant Groups
In Italy, a primary school principal describes a situation in her home country, which has changed since the early 1980s from being traditionally a country of emigrants to become one of immigrants. A middle school in Florence, where 13.4% of the students are Chinese, claims to promote mutual appreciation among all students, but the actual program description belies this goal. The school's detailed plan concerns only how to teach the Chinese children to speak Italian, presumably as fast as possible. "The program is not, in fact, multicultural and reveals a pedagogy which is substantively assimilationist in purpose" (Cifone, 1994, pp. 1-2).
In the United States, the challenge to our educational institutions is sharply posed by a grim statistic at least within the largest immigrant groups, people from Spanish-speaking countries in Central and South America. First generation immigrant children are more successful in school than children in the second and third generations perhaps because of later generations' increasing awareness of the gap between democratic rhetoric and the reality of ethnic tension and discrimination (Suarez-Orozzo, lecture April 7, 1995; Suarez-Orozco & SuarezOrozco, 1995). Whatever the complex reasons, the challenge for change lies not in the cultures of immigrant families but in social policies and practices, including those in our public schools.
In the 1980s, the US administration had the same goal as that school in Florence immigrant children should be assimilated as fast as possible. To obtain research evidence that what they called "structured immersion" in English produced faster second language learning than any kind of bilingual education, Reagan's Department of Education initiated and financed a large national comparison of three types of programs for Spanish-speaking children. It has come to be known as the Ramirez study after its research director, David Ramirez (Ramirez, Yuen & Ramsey, Executive Summary [ES] and Vols I and II, 1991; Cazden, 1992). "Both opponents and advocates of bilingual education have recognized this study as the most comprehensive national evaluation study of bilingual education programs in US history" (Beykont, 1994, p. 33).
The three programs compared in the Ramirez research are immersion (modelled after the French-immersion schools in Canada), early-exit transitional bilingual (the most common type of bilingual program in the US, usually of three years' duration), and late-exit maintenance bilingual (rare in the US, continuing through the primary school):
All Instruction in an Immersion Strategy Program is in English...
In an early-exit program there is some initial instruction in the child's primary language...This is usually limited to the introduction of initial reading skills. All other instruction is in English… [and] instruction in the primary language is quickly phased out...so that by grade two, virtually all instruction is in English...
In contrast, students in the late-exit program receive a minimum of forty percent of their total instructional time in Spanish...Students are to remain in the program through the sixth grade [the end of primary school]... (Ramirez, Yuen, & Ramey, 1991, Executive Summary, hereafter ES, p. 2). Figure 1 (from ES, p. 5) shows that in classrooms of the three program types, the actual proportion of teacher utterances in English fit the definitions that guided the initial program selection. On the dimension of teacher English language use, these are three markedly different programs.
Ramirez measured program effectiveness by children's scores on tests in English language arts, reading and mathematics, all administered in English. The most conservative conclusion of the study is that while the English immersion programs gave the youngest students an advantage on these English tests, this advantage completely disappeared by third grade. And there is strong evidence that children in the late-exit programs that best fit the model described above were learning English best of all. This result is especially noteworthy because in the late-exit site in which the students made the most rapid growth in English academic achievement (seven schools in New York City), the largely Puerto Rican students lived in the "community with the most needs " (Ramirez et al, Vol II, p. 553).
From this and other studies, it is now a well-documented conclusion, even if seemingly UNnatural, that the amount of time spent using a second language in school is not the most important influence on learning it, and fast assimilation to the dominant language is not the most effective means to academic success. It is less clear from this study alone what explains these surprising results, which certainly were not what the Reagan administration anticipated when they initiated the research.
Empirically, Ramirez et al provide evidence of superior bilingual proficiency among the late-exit teachers, and of more parental involvement in the late-exit children's education.
Conceptually, "The success of the late-exit program [can be] attributed to the maintenance and development of native literacy skills in addition to English literacy skills throughout the elementary school years (e.g. Cummins, 1981; Hakuta, 1986)....The premise of the late-exit bilingual program is that academic skills developed in the native language transfer to the second language, provided bilingual instruction is continued for five to seven years" (Beykont, p. 44).
Ramirez collected data on children's growth in Spanish language and literacy as well as English. But the Reagan government (like that Italian school in Florence) was interested only in the children's assimilation into the national language and refused to fund any Spanish analysis. In a subsequent Harvard doctoral thesis using a sophisticated statistical program, Beykont (1994) has conducted a detailed re-analysis of Ramirez data on Puerto Rican children's growth in reading in both languages in the most successful late-exit New York programs.
This is a rare study of within-group differences in the growth of bilingual competencies through the primary school, and thereby can test in finer detail the theoretical principle that native language development supports the development of second language proficiency. Controlling for social class differences within the Puerto Rican group, Beykont shows that those children with higher levels of initial Spanish literacy developed faster in English literacy, and that this beneficial effect became more pronounced year by year through the primary school.
As Beykont points out, we cannot tell from this study what will happen to the children's literacy development, especially in Spanish, in middle and high school. Bilingual programs at that level are, unfortunately, rare in the US. (At this conference, Peter James, principal of Tempe High Languages School here in Sydney will describe the development and success of this multilingual high school.)
Another important aspect of Beykont's research is her analysis of differences within the Puerto Rican group in parental attitudes toward bilingual education, and presumably thereby to bilingualism itself. Those children who made the most progress in English and Spanish literacy had parents with the most favourable attitudes toward bilingual education.
Two different, but compatible, policy implications can be suggested from this fact. First, no one program is the best for all children in all groups, and parental attitudes and values must be taken into account in program design (Corson, 1992). Second, we should recognize that parental attitudes and beliefs are themselves the result of social policies and practices. Ambivalence among non-dominant, and relatively powerless, groups about the status of their language and culture in the larger society is entirely understandableeven when that language is a world language such as Spanish. But when we realize the harmful effect such ambivalence ultimately has on children's progress in school, we understand better how discrimination in the public sphere infiltrates the development of even the youngest children. This too may seem an Unnatural conclusion.
These research conclusions pertain to children from any non-dominant group in any society. The term "non-dominant" refers to peopleschildren and adultswho speak a language different from the official, prestige language of the society, and/or who have historically been oppressed in that society. The term thus includes indigenous peoples (Maori in New Zealand and Aborigines here in Australia) and immigrants, majority (Black South Africans) as well as minorities. That's where the role of that middle term in my title"power"comes in. The term "non-dominant" is more widely applicable and more accurately reflects the underlying mechanism than the more common term "minority". No matter how widely political power and numerical status are correlated, the vivid example of South Africa reminds us that it is political power that counts.
The Special Language Situation of Indigenous Peoples
Even more than immigrants, indigenous peoplesinvoluntarily non-dominant in their own landhave a special claim on public advocacy on their behalf. In the US, Aotearoa/New Zealand and Australiathe three countries I am familiar with in this respectindigenous peoples' languages and cultures are severely endangered where not already lost (Fishman, 1991; Hale et al, 1992; Leap, 1988).
Indigenous demands for public support for language and culture revitalization efforts are justified as a matter of the rights of peoples under UN covenants. (Parenthetically, I recognize that the relation in international law between group rights and individual rights is complex, and am only asserting here that language is inherently a group right; it is meaningless to the solo individual.) Indigenous demands are also justified in the interest of the healthy development of individuals and society. (That is the message of the powerful Maori film "Once Were Warriors", now playing in Sydney.)
Of these three countries, the situation of the Maori people is the most hopeful, because of the force of their demands and the response of the dominant Pakeha society. Because Maori are a much larger proportion (13%)of the Aotearoa/New Zealand population than Native Americans are in the US or Aborigines are in Australia, because they share a single language, and because the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi committed the Crown to a partnership with Maori chiefsfor all these reasons, the Maori are less powerless (not powerful, but less powerless) than are Native Americans or Aborigines.
By the late 1970s, survival of the Maori language had become a major Maori concern. Governmental school policies of discouraging or even forbidding use of the language, migration from rural Maori communities in search of jobs, and television had all taken their toll. National meetings of Maori elders in 1979 and 1980 affirmed the importance of their language, Te Reo, and asked the Department of Maori affairs to make language a policy priority.
In response, Maori immersion preschoolsTe Kohanga Reo or "language nests"were created. Here, under Maori community control, native speakers of the grandparent generation care for the young in a context wholly Maori in language and culture (summarized in Cazden, Snow & Heise-Baigorria, 1990). There are now 865 Kohanga Reo throughout the country (Donna Awatere-Huata, personal communication, April, 1995).
As the graduates of these preschools began to reach school age, Maori parents and elders demanded special primary school programs in which their children could continue to develop as bilingual and bi-literate citizenseither bilingual programs within the public system, or immersion schools under Maori control though supported by public funds, following the precedent of religious schools. Both bilingual and immersion schools have been established, but not nearly enough. In what is clearly a race against time, Maori language is still endangered, and its total loss is still threatened. Schools alone cannot overcome the powerful hegemony of the national language in the wider society, and additional UNnatural efforts at both the community and national levels are needed. (Peters & Marshall, 1989, describe an innovative assessment of the oral Maori language component of the national School Certificate Examination that is conducted more authentically in contexts governed by Maori protocol and values.)
Sad to say, the language situation of indigenous peoples in the US and Australia is even worse. (Holm & Holm, 1990, document an inspiring K-12 community school under Native American Navajo control in the US; Walton & Egginton, 1990, report a bi-cultural conference on Aboriginal education in Australia's Northern Territory; see Cazden, in press for book review.)
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