Symbolic domination and postcolonial contestation: Resources and conditions

ELSEVIER Journal of Pragmatics 34 (2002) 285-330

www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma

Review article

Symbolic domination and postcolonial contestation: Resources and conditions*

Jacob L. Mey*

University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark

Received 20 March 2001; revised version 2 May 2001

1. Introduction

Schools are the primary arenas of today’s struggle for linguistic domination, both in the developed countries of the Western world, where minorities (indigenous or immigrant) claim for recognition and equal opportunities, and in the post- or neocolonial world, where the struggle for a national consciousness of identity is partly carried on through the medium of education.

Voices of auh_w-ity highlights various aspects of this battle for the ‘soul of language’, which is neither taken to be an essential, innate quality, nor seen as constructed purely through interaction. Instead, the focus is on concrete cases of chal- lenges to the social order, as embodied in educational practices. Case studies from a wide variety of national and international settings, in Europe and elsewhere, form the background for an investigation of their theoretical implications.

2. Safetalk and legitimacy

The collection of essays opens with an ‘Introduction’ by the editors, Monica Heller and Marilyn Martin-Jones (Chapter 1, l-26). As the subtitle says, this contribution raises the questions of ‘Symbolic domination, education, and linguistic

* E-mail: [email protected] * Review of Monica Heller and Marilyn Martin-Jones, eds., Voices of authority: Education and linguistic difference. (Contemporary Studies in Linguistics and Education, edited by David Bloome and Jay Lemke, vol. 1) Westport, CT: Ablex Publishing, 2001. ix+442 pp. Price: $79.05 (hardcover), $34.95 (paperback).

0378-2166/02/$ - see front matter 0 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PII: SO378-2 166(01)00034-O

286 J.L. Mey I Journal of Pragmatics 34 (2002) 285-330

difference’ and in addition, provides a brief overview of the 17 remaining chapters. I will discuss the theoretical and practical implications of the issues raised in this introduction (in particular the notion of ‘legitimate’ language and educational inequality) at the end of the present review (Section 5), where I also will comment on the editors’ ‘Conclusion’ (which forms the ultimate chapter of the book).

After this ‘Introduction’, Part I of the book, entitled ‘Constructing legitimate language: Ritualization and safetalk’, opens with a contribution by Nancy J. Hom- berger and J. Keith Chick: ‘Co-constructing school safetime: Safetalk practices in Peruvian and South African classrooms’ (Chapter 2, 31-55). The notions of ‘safetime’ and ‘safetalk’ were first introduced by Chick and may need some explanation. It is a common trait of much teaching in developing countries that it takes place through a medium that is not the students’ own. In the case at hand, native Peruvians are taught in Spanish (their own language being Quechua), while native South Africans (who belong to one of a number of language groups and languages such as Zulu, Xhosa, Sotho and other Bantu languages) receive instruction in English (earlier also Afrikaans, and - maybe surprisingly to some - Bantu; more on this below).

While the use of such an alien medium poses grave problems both to the teachers and the students, it is important, for a variety of reasons, that it not be recognized openly that these students actually learn very little in school; the loss of dignity (and for the teachers, the potential loss of their jobs) that could result from such a recognition are to be avoided at all cost. Hence, the school practices have to do with letting the students through ‘safely’, without being ‘caught’ as non-learners, and letting the teachers pretend that they fulfill their roles in accordance with the curriculum, while hiding the fact that they in fact do not teach anything at all. The resulting interaction is called ‘safetalk’; it takes place during classroom hours where a ‘safe haven’ is created for all, called ‘safetime’.

The authors demonstrate how this works in practice by providing and comparing transcripts (video and audio, respectively) of two lessons: one in a South African mathematics class (seventh grade, taught in 1985 by a Zulu-speaking teacher to native speakers of Zulu) and the other in a Spanish class, in which the teacher, a native speaker of Spanish, taught that language to her first/second grade students in Peru in 1983. The rationale for comparing these two classes is, as the authors remark, the fact that both types of classroom interaction rely heavily on the creation of ‘safetime’ through ‘safetalk’ in the form of cued responses, chorus-like answers to questions, and the obligatory taking of ‘notes’ for home study and review. What is characteristic for both classrooms is the extent to which ‘participation’ takes prece- dence over ‘learning’, and also that the talking mainly is done by the teacher. ‘Teacher volubility’ and ‘student taciturnity’ are not, however, to be attributed mainly or uniquely to cultural factors (as has been suggested), but to the “asymmet- rical distribution of social power and knowledge between teachers and students” (p. 34), and thus should not be considered typical for the ‘(post-)colonial’ situation.

An interesting difference between the two situations (at least as far as I can judge from the transcripts provided) is that there is no use at all of any native tongue in this South African classroom, while in the Peruvian case, the Spanish-speaking teacher regularly switches into Quechua (not her native tongue) using this “codeswitching to

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‘scaffold’ knowledge building, or, to put it differently, to bridge the gap between the knowledge acquired by the student through the medium of their first language(s) and the knowledge of the school mediated through the language of instruction” (Martin- Jones and Heller, 1996: 9, quoted on p. 41). No explanation is given for this curious fact (which apparently has not even been noted by the authors); it seems all the more strange, since the South African classroom in fact is a homogeneous ‘safe place’, operating wholly within an environment of native Zulu speakers.

While the transcripts give us enough information to confirm the authors’ hunch that this kind of socializing and face-saving indeed has common roots in the students’ and teachers’ shared wish to ‘get through’ with the school day and years (but of course with damaging results, which may extend into the entire life of the students; more on this aspect below), the quality of the transcripts themselves is rather poor. Some explanation of the transcription conventions is offered in an endnote (with some information given twice, while other conventions are either not explained at all, such as the use of the ‘+‘, or the use of double commas (possibly a recurrent typo), or not maintained. Thus, the announced switch between plain type (for (trans- lated) English), boldface (for Quechua), and italics (for Spanish) does not always correspond to what we see in the text, where both italics and italicized boldface occur in the Quechua parts without any explanation, while one finds Spanish in plain text instead of the expected italics; underlining, said to “signal rising intonation on stressed words” (p. 53), is provided erratically, and mostly only in the translations; and the asterisk, supposed to denote “simultaneous talk by two or more speakers” (ibid.), does not occur anywhere). There is a misplaced sentence on p. 37, lines 6-8 up; this sentence is repeated on the next page, where it properly belongs, but the confusion is discouraging.

Language-wise, one wonders about the translation of the Spanish Zes ha quitado todo on p. 36, line 9 of Extract 3, which comes out in translation as ‘somebody has taken everything of yours’ - clearly a mistaken reading of todo as a singular neu- n-urn, where it should be read as the plural todos (understood cadernos, with the usual, elided final -s in South American and other dialects of Spanish) in order to make sense (see below; cf. also footnote 1). Similarly, the “double purpose” of the rising tone (mentioned on p. 40), serving as both student prompt and emphasis, is not at all observable at the place quoted in the transcript (Extract 5, lines 54-56), where what we have is clearly and uniquely a ‘prompt’, witness the students’ chorusing . .lar, on the teacher’s cue of sin.. .~LL. Jar.

This lack of care in providing the data detracts some from the overall trustworthi- ness and merits of the chapter. But before I go on to an evaluation, let me note three more issues on which I must confess to having some doubts as to the views taken by the authors. The first is connected with their expression “a language entirely foreign to the child” (p. 41). From the transcripts, it would appear that the students are at least able to understand the language of instruction, and to a certain extent, also use it. Thus, in the Peruvian classroom, when the teacher wants to introduce her Quechua students to the correct use of the singular/plural distinction, she prefaces this by remarking on a “bad habit” that some of her students have: they confuse singular and plural in nouns and adjectives. The illustrations the teacher provides of the


students’ incorrect use of the number distinction, as well as the accompanying instruction, are given in Spanish, not Quechua (Seiiorita, me ha quitudo mi cuaderno, dicen a veces, cuando les ha quitado todo “‘Miss, somebody took my notebook”, you sometimes say, when somebody has taken everything of yours’; pp. 36-37).’ Here at least, the assertion that Spanish is an “entirely foreign” idiom for these children is not borne out by observation.

Second, as to the South African lesson in math, we have a related problem. It is true that the student responses in this case are even more mechanized and ‘chorus- like’ than in the case of the Peruvian students. However, the entire interaction is conducted in English, and I have a hard time seeing this as mere ‘mimicking’ participation, at least as far as the language aspect is concerned. What is at stake here is more a matter of content. The teacher is using a method of teaching mathematics which became very popular during the sixties in the US, and was called ‘new math’. The idea was that if one started from basics (such as the principles of set theory), the students would be able to grasp math in a different way. Rather than mindlessly doing ‘sums’, they would obtain insight in the wonderful world of numbers. I remember the many talks I had with despairing parents, who in meetings at the schools and at parties confessed to their being utterly confused: if they, the parents, were unable to understand, let alone solve, the problems their children were set to solve, how could their children be expected to understand, and acquire, the basic concepts and techniques of math?

Whereas in the ‘center’, this fad went the way of all fads, it apparently lingered on in the ‘periphery’, and so the poor South African children were plagued with a method of teaching math that had proven to be unsatisfactory decades earlier in the countries of its origin. After all, I had to wait myself until I had turned forty before I was initiated into the mysteries of the ‘union set’ and its elements, and that was only because the turn to formal linguistics of those days required a smattering of set theoretical notions in its would-be practitioners. Not many of those South African students will probably ever have to work with those concepts, even if they perchance had grasped them in their elementary school years.

My third problem with the authors’ data collection and elaboration concerns their assertion that nothing ever was learned in those school contexts; specifically, I object to the way they go about motivating their negative view. They do this by inspecting the children’s class notebooks, where they only find meaningless copying, no real notes-taking. The question to raise here is, of course, if it is fair to import a typical Western tradition (‘taking notes in class’) into a society that is barely literate, and where writing as the expression of our thoughts or impressions is something that has to be learned the way a Westerner would have to learn to express him- or herself in the oral tradition of another culture (think of that late and still somewhat rare bird, the white rapper). Ideally, what you do is to take notes for reviewing the lesson at

’ In the context, the pupils are berated for incorrectly using the (Spanish) singular (cuaa’erno ), where they should have used the plural (cuadernos). The correct rendering of this contrast is therefore ‘somebody took my notebook’ vs. ‘somebody took all [my notebooks]’ (me ha quitado mi cuaderno vs. [me] les ha quitado todo[s mis cuadernos]; my correction and translation).


home, preferably in your own room with your books nearby. In the South African context, this may seem a bit out of place, to say the least. And as to making notes that you don’t understand, let me recount a personal anecdote. As a hopeful first- year student of medicine, I decided that I would take down verbatim everything the professors said, and in order to be able to do that, I taught myself stenography. Tak- ing home those notes, I thought, would spare me the trouble of worrying too much about the books; I could just play the professor’s words back to him at exam time, and maybe even share my notes with other, less fortunate students, who didn’t mas- ter the noble art of stenographing. Little did I know that when exam time came around, I would have to borrow my friends’ notes because I was utterly unable to read my own stenograms. Maybe if I had taken the pains of elaborating the notes at home after each class, I would have been able to reap the fruits of my labor; but, even though (unlike the South African students) I was in a position to do this, both by tradition and on account of my domestic and cultural context, I never did; consequently, according to the criteria posited by the authors of the chapter, I would have been deemed to have ‘learned nothing in class’.*

That said, I will now turn to the second part of the chapter, in which the authors go on to evaluate the practice of ‘safetalk’. They conclude that it (despite the clear advantages of creating a ‘safe’ social environment for people who often live in conflict-tom environments) in the end “reinforce[s] the inequalities that led to widespread use of such practices [i.e. safetalk] in the first place” (p. 44). In other words, safetalk has no future; it does not contribute to the emancipation of the students and only serves to confirm the status quo. But one could ask oneself, in a thought exper- iment, what the classroom situation would be like, if - rather than using the languages of the (post-)colonial ‘oppressors’ - the teachers were to teach their lessons in the native languages of the students (and not just limited themselves to codeswitching in cases of necessity)?

As to the South African situation, the irony is that the use of a native (Bantu) language in the homelands was in fact instituted by the colonialist regime under Nation- alist rule, but had to be abandoned after the 1976 Soweto uprisings (p. 48). When the black communities were given the choice, they all massively opted for English as the language of instruction. With the advent of the latter language, newer teaching practices were also introduced, in particular ‘communicative language teaching’ and the later ‘critical language awareness’ approach. For various reasons, these approaches were not too successful, perhaps mainly because they placed too great a burden on the shoulders of the students (not to speak of the teachers, who had to battle with lack of teaching materials and mostly with their own lack of experience in this kind of very demanding classroom interaction; see p. 50).

As to the fate and future of teaching in the native tongues of the country, the authors remark that “apartheid continues to cast a long shadow”; as a consequence, “[mlother tongue instruction is still viewed with deep suspicion and English is still

2 It belongs to the story that I did pass those fmal first-year exams, but having developed an interest in ‘higher things’, along with a convenient propensity to faint at the sight of blood, I decided that the medical profession perhaps was not for me, after all.


the overwhelming preference as the language of instruction” (p. 51). The authors dwell on the unfortunate effects of having all teaching done in English, as it would “contribute to the emergence of a small English-speaking elite [rather] than to the economic and social advancement of the mass of the people” (ibid.), just like we have seen it happen in other countries of anglophone Africa.

The situation in Peru has developed in more complex ways. Traditionally, the Quechua people have resented the intrusion of Spanish culture into their midst; Span- ish was deemed acceptable only as a “possible avenue to social mobility” (p. 45). With the 1980’s ‘Experimental Bilingual Education Project’, teaching in Quechua became an option, resulting in an improvement in classroom activities: students wrote and read with understanding, and expressed themselves freely on a number of subjects (p. 46). Eventually, however, the changing political and social contexts in Peru led to the demise of the project. Two different strands of thought also contributed to the project’s failing: on the one hand, the feeling that bilingual education was something that the Quechua community had to organize itself, on its own conditions, rather than having it introduced “from the top down” (cf. p. 46); and two, that the accepted role of Spanish as a social mobility instrument was not in keeping with teaching academic subjects in the mother tongue: a physicist fluent in Quechua would still have problems getting accepted in the broader community of science.

Today, even with the setbacks due to the political instability of the country and an increasingly ‘language-as-a-problem’-oriented public and governmental opinion as regards Quechua (p. 46), private initiatives seem to hold out more of a promise than do the official policies, as incorporated in the Bilingual Education Unit of the National Directorate of Primary [ !] Education of 1996 (p. 47). Nevertheless, the experiences gathered in the Experimental Bilingual Project, along with similar efforts in neighboring Bolivia, have substantially contributed to asserting the ‘official’ status of Quechua in Peru, also in the educational domain.

In their summing up, the authors conclude that pedagogical innovations among underprivileged language users cannot be realized without major changes in the social, economic, and political structures of the countries involved. But policies are not the only thing that changes are made out of. The Quechua language was ‘offi- cialized’ in Peru as early as 1975; yet the official education policy (also accepted among parts of the Quechua population) is to promote literacy in Spanish. Similarly in South Africa, with its wide array of local languages, English seems the only viable alternative for inter-community and international communication.

Developing a healthy ‘national’ language educational policy is thus not so much a matter of a particular ‘mind-set’ as it is part of political and economic reality. As long as the dominant ideologies (including those dealing with language) remain underpinned by, and dependent on, the dominant economic interests controlling the access to higher education and better jobs, ‘safetalk’ and ‘safetime’ will continue to prevail over engaged and interested teaching and learning.

A similar problematic is raised in Chapter 3 by Jo Arthur in her contribution ‘Codeswitching and collusion: Classroom interaction in Botswana primary schools’ (pp. 57-75). The author, herself a teacher educator who has worked in Botswana for six years, analyzes (based on actual audio recordings) her experience with the

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language policies and practices of English-only instruction in the primary schools of that country, where the situation in many respects resembles that of neighboring South Africa (as discussed in Chapter 2). Among the differences are that the ‘national language’, Setswana, is used as the medium of education for the first four years (other native tongues being “not accorded a classroom role”, p. 57), and that codeswitching occurs more widely and freely here (as opposed to its apparent absence in the South African context, and its scarce use in the Peruvian classrooms referred to in the preceding chapter).

Similar to the situation described by Canagarajah for the Jaffna (Sri Lanka/Tamil Eelam) schools (as we will see in chapter 9), codeswitching fulfills the role of ‘scaffolding’, or as Arthur puts it, Setswana is the language of ‘backstage’ activity, when teachers “‘step out’ of the pedagogic frame of the current lesson” to deal with a problem, or to comment on the ongoing activities (p. 69). This use of codeswitching, however, is strictly limited to the teachers: when pupils attempt to answer a prompt in Setswana by starting a reply in that language, the teacher cuts them off by saying “In English. Uhuh.” (p. 63).

While it thus may seem correct not to attribute too much of a ‘solidarity’ function to the use of the native language (p. 72; Arthur does use this notion elsewhere, e.g. p. 63), I would not go so far as to talk of ‘complicity’ in its use (p. 72). McDermott and Tylbor’s (1995) notion of ‘collusion’ that figures in the title (also referred to on p. 71) is supposedly covered by the use of this term; ‘complicity’ serves, according to the author, the purpose of “mutual face-saving over the adequacy of the classroom interaction” (pp. 71-71); here, she draws an analogy to the creation of ‘safetime’ by ‘safetalk’ as described by Chick (1996; cf. Chapter 2).

While it is true that the codeswitching in Botswana schools is essentially ‘partic- ipant-oriented’ (as opposed to ‘discourse-related’; p. 62), this need not necessarily implicate any collusive activity. I much prefer to stick to Arthur’s own explanation of Setswana as the ‘repair language’, used ‘backstage’ (cf. p. 66), not so much to sweep problems under the rug as to pry them loose from their dominant context and solve them on a ‘solidarity basis’. Talking about the lesson, rather than doing it (cf. p. 69) thus need not always be a case of ‘safetalk’ : as every teacher of foreign languages knows, it is absolutely necessary for an instructor to be able to rely on the native tongues of his or her students in order to erect the proper ‘scaffolding’ when needed.

The author, in this chapter, refers several times to work done by other authors in the volume; however, references to the chapters in which the latter’s more recent findings are discussed, are absent. Thus, Chick is only represented by a 1996 article, while Lin is not quoted for her research described in Chapter 7, but only for her 1990 dissertation. Some obvious parallels between the use of English as a medium of instruction between South Africa and its neighbor, Botswana, are not highlighted (as could have been the case, had the author been able to study Homberger and Chick’s Chapter 2). Such a lack of cross-reference unfortunately detracts from the overall cohesion of the volume.

Chapter 4, by Grace Bunyi, deals with ‘Language and educational inequality in primary classrooms in Kenya’ (pp. 77-100).


The fact that Kenya officially is declared to be an egalitarian society, where education serves the purposes of “promoting social equality” (as the author remarks on p. 77, quoting official Kenyan documents) does not prevent Kenyan children from having very different access to the means of education, and consequently to realizing the goals of social equality. The author has studied primary school teaching in two widely divergent neighborhoods: one, a village where the language spoken locally is Gikuyu (also known as Kikuyu; the initial g- is not phonemic, but due to positional voicing known as ‘Dahl’s law’), and the other a Nairobi upscale neighborhood, where the languages spoken are Kiswahili (abroad also known as Swahili, omitting the prefix), the national language, and English, the official language of Kenya (cf. p. 79).

As several authors have remarked, language is constitutive of our daily activities, and the role of language in the school must be taken into consideration, whenever we discuss the social reproduction that is going on the schools (Heller, 1996, quoted on p. 79). Bunyi’s study aims therefore at exploring the “links between language, education, and social mobility in Kenyan society”, and how this linkage is realized in the “language practices of different socioeconomic and political groups” (ibid.)

Traditionally, English in Kenya has been the ‘language of power’. During colonial times, knowledge of English was indispensable for those who wanted to move up in society, but very few African children had any opportunity of picking up Eng- lish at school until the curriculum reforms instituted towards the end of the colonial period (independence was obtained in 1963). Beginning 1962, an English-only policy of instruction was adopted for Kenya (from 1976 on, starting only with grade 4 of elementary school (‘Standard 4’; p. 81); the first three years, instruction takes place in the indigenous language of the region, or in Kiswahili and English, whenever there is great linguistic diversity).

As to the teaching and learning of English, the author shows that there is considerable diversity not only as to the quality of teaching and the language available for teaching, but also in the access that the students have to the various modes of instruction. In one region studied, the local language is Gikuyu, and English is never heard spoken outside the school (and, one might add, rarely inside). The village where the author did her field work is completely rural; the villagers have little education and the common feeling is that going to school is not really too useful, except in a few cases where some villagers have ‘made it’ in the big world of Nairobi (cf. p. 84). The socio-economic background of the children going to school in this area, as well as the educational practices that they are subjected to (partly as a result of this background) are such that real learning hardly takes place. Similar to the situation in Botswana discussed in Chapter 3, or to that in South African schools, discussed in Chapter 2, the teaching of English is often a mere passive training of the children in repeating words and sentences that the teacher pronounces for them. The rule that officially prohibits the use of Gikuyu in grades 4-8 is seldom enforced, and most of the classroom interaction happens in that language (p. 83), with at best a lot of codeswitching. Interestingly, the headmaster of the Gikuyu school himself codeswitches freely, when interviewed by the author (I counted seven English glosses in three lines of speech; p. 98), even though the author remarks that in class,


such practices have to be avoided because they hinder true language acquisition

(p. 84). As I remarked earlier, the reason that the children in the Gikuyu speaking region

do not advance in their knowledge of English is probably not the language instruction per se, but the students’ general lack of experience in dealing with the symbolic values represented by language, and in particular their limited access to linguistic ‘capital’. There is no social ‘backup’ for these speakers, and the language they use is not an accepted, let alone a powerful, instrument of expression except in the local area. When speakers of Gikuyu come to Nairobi and talk to people there, they must use Kiswahili or English; in addition, the access to schooling materials (textbooks, even such lowly items as paper and pencil) is difficult for these children. Being socially and linguistically underprivileged and deprived, they are from the beginning “negatively positioned in respect to literacy”, and in general, education (p. 84); the deficient teaching practices in the school are a symptom rather than the cause of these deficiencies.

The contrast between the “monolingual lives” in this village (p. 85) and the “multilingual environment” (p. 88) of the urban area studied, an affluent neighborhood in Nairobi, is striking. The two schools could just as well be situated in different countries. English is not only the language of the schools, it is also the lingua franca of the community and the working language of most individuals (even though many speak their indigenous languages with members of the same ethnolinguistic groups). In addition, the life style of the urban neighborhood is “literacy-related” (p. 88): in particular, “children are exposed to literacy in English” (ibid.), and education is seen as a high priority.

The author goes on to describe and discuss actual teaching practices in the two schools. Reading aloud and repeating, rather than actual reading from the written text, characterized the village school. The ‘chorusing’ that was typical of the Botswana teaching environment was practiced here to mindlessness. The children were “learning how to read, by repeating individual words and sentences in chorus after the teacher from texts they barely understood and from texts that had little rel- evance to their lives” (p. 95). Little wonder, then, that the method of instruction created the same type of resistance that one observes in other environments of the same kind: lack of attention, refusing to participate in the chanting, and in general “resist[ing] school authority and reject[ing] its values” (p. 78).

In contrast, in the urban school environment, the teacher could capitalize on the children’s social and intellectual backgrounds, and on the support the schooling activities had from the homes. Chanting and shouting were discouraged, true individual reading was rewarded. In this school, as opposed to the village school “the children were clearly being intellectually challenged” (p. 97).

In situations like these, where a language (English) is both the medium and the target of instruction, it is difficult, when the teaching fails, to pinpoint exactly what went wrong. As I said above, I do not think that the language or the teaching per se is the only, or a major cause of failure: neither is the availability of English, or the access to school materials, and so on. Rather, I would agree with the author that the intrinsic origin of the poor school performance of the village children is to be sought


in their poor socio-economic conditions, which both prevent their learning from being seen as something worthwhile, and demean linguistic proficiency (as seen through the prism of their own language) as insufficient for the purposes of achieving social and personal success. As the author remarks, “the school defines [the] children as deficient in the linguistic and intellectual attributes required for academic success. In line with that definition, the school offers [the] children limited and lim- iting educational experiences” (p. 99).

In other words, Bunyi states, paraphrasing Giddens (1984: xvi), “the verbal interactions that accompany everyday activities constitute the doing of social processes, while the social processes provide the social context within which the interactions take place, and therefore have an impact on the interactions” (pp. 78-79). Clearly, whenever the social processes or the social context are defined negatively, the impact on education will likewise be negative. This is true not only for the African context, but to a high degree also for the situation of other underprivileged children, such as those belonging to minorities of whatever color or whatever race, wherever in the world: those living in the urban ghettos of the US, the immigrant communities of Western Europe, the Native Americans on their reservations, or the urban dropouts in the fuvelas of Brazil.

Whereas the preceding chapters mostly dealt with problems regarding the status of English as ‘post-colonial’ language, Chapter 5, by Lin Ndayipfukamiye (pp. 101-l 15) concentrates on the role of French in one of the francophone African countries, Burundi. There, another language from the Bantu family, Kirundi, is the national and (with French) official language of the country; to a certain degree, the relationship between the two languages is similar to that encountered in other countries of Africa between the language of the (majority) of the indigenous population and the language that used to be associated with local prestige and international contact.

Teaching French in Burundi begins later than does that of English in some of the countries that have been discussed in earlier chapters, viz., at grade 5 of the primary schools, As in the anglophone African countries, also in Burundi the language of teaching is at the same time the target language of (part of) the schooling process; likewise, it is the language of the erstwhile colonizers (in the case of Burundi, the French). The difference is that, while in the other countries the technique of codeswitching was frowned upon, and mostly only tolerated, in Burundi the situation seems to be somewhat different. Here, according to the author, codeswitching, although “not officially acknowledged, yet . . . is an unavoidable reality in lessons in Burundi primary schools, . ..” (p. 105106). Elsewhere, the author remarks that, while codeswitching is mainly “a resource for managing the local communicative demands of the classroom situation, . . . it also serve[s] to reinforce the social and linguistic order in Burundi society” (p. 102; I’ll come back to the latter statement below).

Going by the transcripts of the audiotaped lessons that the author provides, we notice that there is indeed a considerable amount of codeswitching going on in the Burundi schools, as compared to what we saw in the case of South Africa, Botswana, and Kenya. The interaction in three lessons has been transcribed, the first


one taught by an urban teacher (with ten years of teaching experience), the last two by a teacher in a rural school (whose experience stretched over six years); all the classes were given in the year 1991. As the author notes, “[the explanations in Kirundi were quite long, but they were interspersed with switches into French, . . . , creating an overall impression of teaching in French” (p. 111). As far as your reviewer is concerned, these lessons did not at all strike me as being given in French; rather, I would call them lessons given in Kinmdi, mixed with French sentences (e.g. introducing the theme of the lesson) or words (e.g. representing the theme of the lesson (e.g. ‘thatch’, French paille), with an occasional discourse marker of the type hein, n’est-ce pas ‘OK?’ thrown in for good measure (pp. 108-109; a rapid word count for Extract 1 revealed a ratio of 1:2.7 for French to Kirundi words).

The first question to ask (and one that is not answered by the author) is: Why does codeswitching occur so freely in Burundi, while it seems to be (at least theoretically) ostracized in the anglophone countries? Observe also that the codeswitching is done by the Burundi teachers, not by the students; the teachers (not unlike their colleagues in the other countries observed) are usually monologuing, extracting chorused answers to their questions only. Interestingly, too, the only teacher who seems to be able to somehow interact with his or her students is the ‘rural’ teacher in Extracts 2 and 3. Also, compared to the ‘urban’ teacher figuring in the previously quoted Extract 1, the ratio of French to Kirundi in the case of the ‘rural’ teacher is significantly higher: from roughly 1:2 in Extract 2, to a reversal of the ratio in Extract 3, with a whopping 2.5: 1. In other words, it would seem that the teaching of French through French is practiced with greater consistency and success in the rural areas of Burundi than in the urban districts; a result which flatly contradicts the ten- dencies uncovered by Bunyi in her Chapter 4 about Kenya. I leave it to the readers to worry about the explanation of this phenomenon, as I am in no way an expert on second language education in Africa.

The chapter makes the valid point that codeswitching is necessary to help the students along in their study of French; and that (when it comes to teaching other subjects) one simply could not do this solely though the French medium. Thus, “the teachers were endeavoring to bridge the gap between the world of the textbook and the students’ existing knowledge . . .” (p. 110). In my view, this ‘scaffolding’ is typical of second language instruction everywhere, as a minimal condition (albeit not a sufficient one) for its success; Burundi is no exception in this regard. And while it certainly is the case that (as elsewhere in Africa) the language of the (post)-colonizers is still the required medium for advancement in private and political life, the point that the author makes, viz., that the teaching of French, as documented by the extracts, cements the existing class differences and reinforces the privileges of the elite, is only indirectly underpinned by the samples provided. With the more relaxed attitude to codeswitching in the audiotaped lessons that we are shown in the chapter, I would rather say that the oppressive character of primary schooling in French is considerably mitigated.

A further question is how this educational practice relates to the ‘double standard’ of Burundi school policies (a standard which is similar to that found in other African


countries). By the author’s own account, I do not quite see how the promotion of a national language in all areas of life, public and private, home and school, business and leisure, professional and personal, can be combined, in an advanced educational environment, with the imposing of very high standards for the teaching of French and for passing the necessary examinations in French. Somewhere along the line, the schools must make some kind of ‘transition’, where the students are taken from the ‘safe place’ that codeswitching has created, out into the brutal reality of ‘adult’ life. Or else, there must be other mechanisms in place that allow the (admittedly few) students who are going to make it into the upper layers of business, administration, and education, to pass from mixed code discussions about ‘thatched’ vs. ‘multistory’ houses (the theme of the chapter’s lessons), to a discourse at the highest level, where one’s efforts and achievements are measured according to French-inspired standards of academic and professional excellence.3 Still, I do not think the material offered bears out a ‘reversal’ of the official policy of ‘Kirundisation’ (p. 106); but since the data were collected back in 1991, one could perhaps learn more by consulting some recent documentation.

On another, minor note: the chapter could have done with more careful proof- reading. The texts given in the extracts are not always true to the orthographic dis- tinctions established for the various codes by the use of different fonts (plain, boldface, italics); many French accents are wrong or missing (e.g. French oti ‘where?’ is constantly misspelled as the word for ‘or’, ou; hyphens are missing in many places (e.g. n’est ce pus, rez de chausse’e); the text and the references do not distinguish between lefranpis ‘the French language’ and le Frunpis ‘the Frenchman’; and so on. The transcription notes at the end of the chapter are somewhat repetitious. Oth- erwise, a positive trait of this contribution is that it (unlike its predecessors) makes explicit reference to the work done by the authors of the other chapters (see e.g. p. 102).

The penultimate Chapter 6 in Part I is entitled ‘Turn-taking and the positioning of bilingual participants in classroom discourse in British primary schools’ (pp. 117-138), by Marilyn Martin-Jones and Mukul Saxena. In a way, this chapter is rather different from the preceding ones (and also from the following Chapter 7) in that it deals not with an oppressive language belonging to a minority of (ex-)colonizers, but with languages that have to fight for their existence and recognition vis- a-vis the powerful, symbolically dominating ‘language of the realm’ (here, English), a ‘realm’ in which the speakers of other languages (in the case at hand, immigrant children from Pakistan) by definition are the outsiders, ‘marked’ by social customs, religion, language and so on. (“They even laugh differently”, as an acquaintance of mine, a New Jersey suburban housewife, once remarked when speaking about Black people in her neighborhood). For this reason, it would perhaps have been appropriate to have the present chapter switch places with its successor, as it points up certain aspects of bilingualism that are typical of the situation in many European ‘host’ countries, where the whole environment of bilingual education is a vastly different

3 I’m thinking here of institutions such as the Japanese home study ‘cram rooms’, where students are coached after hours to pass the exacting specifications for entrance to the good colleges and universities.


one from that seen in the ‘developing’ countries of Africa and other continents. In the Burundi case, for instance (cf. Chapter 5, above), we observe a ‘double vision’ of the national language: on the one hand, Kirundi as the chief medium of communication among the local population; on the other hand, and secondarily, Kirundi as an instrument geared towards acquiring competence in a foreign language that is crucial in other important, ‘official’ contexts. By contrast, in a European country that has to deal with an immigrant population of various origins, there is never any question. Specifically in the school context, the ‘indigenous’ languages are considered mere ‘scaffolding’ devices. What the children speak at home, with parents and relatives, is no concern of the school, and is not considered a ‘resource’, except insofar as it provides a means for ‘bridging’ the gap between what the children can say and know in their home languages and what they are supposed to acquire in and through English.

Consequently, a ‘bilingual resource [person]’ (‘eduspeak’ for an unofficial ‘ethnic’ teacher aide) is, in the wording of the British ‘Swarm report’ on bilingual education, quoted on p. 120, seen “as providing a degree of continuity between the home and school environment by . . . being able to explain simple educational concepts in a child’s mother tongue, if the need arises, but always working within the mainstream classroom and alongside the class teacher”. (Department of Education, Education for all, 1985, p. 407; emphasis added).

This ‘ancillary’ status of the students’ own languages is reflected in what the authors call the ‘positioning’ in the school hierarchy of the people providing ‘bilingual support’ in the classrooms (p. 119). These people have no teacher status, and their role is a purely facilitating one. As becomes clear when one peruses the extracts in the chapter (from videotaped classroom sessions in a Lancashire school), the control of the teaching normally rests with the class teacher; the support people are called upon to explain the teaching material to the pupils in their own language, sometimes before, sometimes after, the interaction in the main classroom. Central to this ‘educational discourse’ is the notion that children from other ethnic origins should not be discriminated against by being assigned to special classes or schools, but rather are to be integrated as soon as possible in the mainstream of education. In other words, the role of the ‘home language’ is a supportive one, and moreover, one that fades (hopefully, some would say) out with time.

It follows that the behavior of the various personae in the multilingual educational setting is rather predictable. The codeswitching that is practiced is not fraught with any feelings of ‘guilt’ or ‘impropriety’: it is simple the way the immigrant children have to learn how to make the ‘transition’ and to become full participants in the ‘regular’ classroom life. Moreover, only the bilingual support person switches; the classroom teacher never does (and in many of the cases at hand, probably not even could).

From the instrumental nature of the ‘home language’ it also follows that its status is non-permanent; it is clearly not encouraged as a resource by the classroom teacher. A significant interlude from Extract 7 (p. 14) shows how the main classroom teacher (even though she was on friendly terms with the ‘support’, and the two women seemed to respect each other and each other’s roles to a very high degree) cuts a student short when she thinks there is too much ‘home language’ going on in


the interchange; clearly a sign that she either didn’t understand, or didn’t approve of, the continued code switch, or maybe both.

In a broader context, one should discuss what the schools want to use the home language of the immigrant children for. As it is now, the dominant ideology is that of ‘transition’ (cf. p. 120: “easing the bilingual child’s transition to school”). What happens after hours is none of our concerns. Such things as that the children are unable to share their school experiences with their parents, that the parents cannot provide the usual support because of language deficiencies, that the children are rarely motivated to perform well in school (a symmetrical parallel to the situation in the ‘developing’ countries vis-a-vis the teaching of English or French), all these factors tend to reinforce the schools’ understanding of the bilingual child as a ‘problem case’. The sooner the child makes the transition, and the more completely he or she does it, the greater his or her chances of success in terms of school achievement. The ideology and strategies adopted here are clearly those of ‘assimilation’ (actually a more honest descriptive metaphor than the celebrated US ‘melting pot’, in which nothing interesting happens except that at least in theory, everybody should come out one color and the same consistency - the realities of US immigrant life are and have always been very different! ).

The other ideological stance is where one considers the fact of being bilingual an asset, rather than a problem. The child can partake in two cultural lives, ‘like living two lives in one go’, as it is called elsewhere in the book (cf. Chapter 8). But what if neither of these lives are fully satisfactory for the child or his or her surroundings? What if a culture other than the standard one is not only not accepted (except maybe for culinary purposes), but downgraded and/or outright rejected? What if the cultural and religious representations of the other culture clash with those accepted by, and acceptable to, the majority of the population? Evidently, no matter how hard well- meaning educators may try to persuade the child that he or she is not suffering from a handicap, but that pluriculturalism is a resource, it still takes a lot of energy on the part of the child to internalize this message, and to externalize this attitude in an appropriate, independent behavior. Most children either cannot muster the energy to do this, or otherwise they simply don’t want to: their only desire is to be like everybody else. For several years, my own children expressly forbade the use of the ‘home languages’ (Norwegian and English) in contexts where other pupils were present, such as getting them to and from school, participating in school activities, and so on. For a time, we even had to codeswitch to Danish in our table conversation, whenever the children had guests staying for dinner. And here we’re talking about some of the closest related and decidedly congenial European cultures and languages !

The trouble with the ‘multicultural’ approach is that it does not really follow up on what it promises. It is easy enough to say to a child: “Don’t be ashamed of your language: it’s a positive thing, something you have that others don’t”; but to make the child feel appreciated because of his or her language, and to extend this appreciation into the surrounding society is quite another cup of tea. A multicultural society, as I see it, is a living together of people who have ‘cultivated’ the same soil, metaphorically speaking, and have grown their ‘cultures’ in the same physical

J.L. Mey I Journal of Pragmutics 34 (2002) 285-330 299

environments of a country or a region. But culture isn’t something you just pick up and ‘port’ around the world like a piece of luggage or a set of clothes. The culture, in order to survive in a foreign soil, needs constant attention and a deliberate effort on the part of its ‘bearers’ in order to survive. What happened in the ‘big melting pot’, a.k.a. the US, was that imported cultures actually did survive in many places (such as the Germans in the Midwest, the Scandinavians in Minnesota, the Central European Jews in New York, the Czechs in Texas and so on) precisely because of the concerted effort on the part of their members to sustain and develop the cultural life of the community as something that belonged to them, and to them only. At the latest during the fourth generation, the cultures had been assimilated: as soon as either the influx from the old homeland stopped, or the young people started to marry out of their culture, or there weren’t any priests or ministers around any longer that could perform services in the ‘old’ language, or the home language press died, and the language itself began to be taught in the schools as an optional subject, the fate of those cultures was sealed.

It seems clear to me that the only way of providing true support for the multicultural model and to encourage the bilingual children in their search for an identity is to promote the indigenous cultures and build a ‘scaffolding’ around them - not only for the children, but also for the adult members of the community. By any other means we are placing the children in a double bind situation: on the one hand, they are told that their languages are worth keeping and developing; on the other hand, through tacit everyday messaging, we’re telling them that they better learn the language of the larger community or else they won’t be able to make it in the mainstream culture. But that also means that successful bilingualism always will be restricted to those members of the community who are motivated to ‘strike out’ on their own and try their luck outside of their culture. One can regard these individuals either as role models or as renegades; the truth is that generalizing from these cases will invariably result in either frustration or resentment on the part of those who ‘didn’t make it’.

Thus, the success or failure of any form of ‘multiculturalism’ depends on the willingness of the majority to admit that theirs is not the only valid, viable, or worthwhile culture around, and that the minorities have a right to a fully developed, autonomous system of cultural and political institutions. Basically, that’s what the Basque conflict is all about, to name just one example. But by the same token, this solution seems rather unrealistic when it comes to the small ethnic communities of a few hundred people at most that dot the cities of the West; but even if the immigrant populations are numbered in the tens and hundreds of thousands, as in the case of the Kurds and the Turks in Germany and Scandinavia, an official acceptance of their diversity as the basis of a right to (even the smallest form of) independence would without any doubt result in a ‘culture clash’ of massive dimensions.

Going back to the chapter in question, I can follow the authors in their conclusion that the negotiation of pedagogic practices has its roots in the “power asym- metries” and “the monolingual teachers’ views about ‘bilingual support”’ (p. 136). What the authors do not explicitly thematize, however, is the undercurrent of these ‘educational practices’, as sketched and illustrated through the medium of the two


videotaped classroom episodes. The teachers and their ‘supports’ act in accordance with the official view that “the main purpose of using the [bilingual] children’s home language was to provide access to the curriculum until the children had developed sufficient confidence with English to switch over to English as the sole medium of instruction” (p. 135). The positioning of the teachers vs. the bilingual assistants is in accordance with this view, and with “the relative value of the languages being used” (ibid.) What is interesting in this ‘positioning’ is the way it reflects the power structures of the surrounding society, in particular as regards the status of bilinguals and their cultural and linguistic ‘resources’. The voices of authority that speak through the teachers are the voices of society. To change these author- itarian patterns, we will have to subvert the power inherent in the hierarchy. It is the authors’ merit to have made this perfectly clear to any readers who are willing to read between the lines and ‘deconstruct’ “the official pedagogic discourse” that seeks to contain “the bilingual resources . . . within a primarily monolingual order of discourse” (p. 136).

Chapter 7, by Angel M.Y. Lin, is entitled ‘Symbolic domination and bilingual classroom practices in Hong Kong’ (pp. 139-168). Using a terminology mainly due to Bourdieu, the author identifies many of the current and historical problems of the former British colony with the existence of a symbolic dominance of a second language, English, over the majority population’s first language, Chinese. “English has long been the language of educational and socioeconomic advancement, that is, the dominant symbolic resource in the symbolic market (Bourdieu, 1991) in Hong Kong” (p. 143). And because of the importance of keeping up high standards of English, thought to be necessary in order to maintain Hong Kong’s unique status as the main industrial and trading center of South East Asia, the educational system is geared towards production of that symbolic capital, while Chinese is looked down upon as a second best solution (for those who cannot attain sufficient proficiency in English); the use of ‘Chinglish’, the Chinese-English pidgin (a more ambitious term would be ‘Chinese-English interlanguage’, otherwise considered to be a legitimate step in second language acquisition) is frowned upon by everybody in authority, and banned altogether from the school environment (p. 140).

But how about code switching, rather than code-mixing? While most schools consider English as an important subject, and assign “a large portion of school time to [it]” (p, 145), it remains a fact that most pupils live in a ‘life world’ of Chinese, where the opportunities of practicing and learning English in “authentic communicative events” (p. 144) are almost nil. Thus, unlike the children of the “bilingual elite”, most Hong Kong students have a background where the use of English is not only unnatural, but downright impossible (ibid.). They will not be able to secure entry into the track that feeds into the high-quality English-medium ‘stream’ of education, the indispensable condition for prestigious and well-paid employment.

Analyzing earlier studies by Johnson (1983), the author examines what really goes on in an English-medium school, and finds that despite the official, English- only pedagogic frame, the teachers on many occasions depart from the English-only requirement to deal with matters in Chinese (which in this context is to be understood as ‘Cantonese’; see below). Switches such as these serve different functions:


the teacher may want to affirm the ‘cultural membership’ that he or she shares with the pupils, and by which common notions of duty and behavior are reaffirmed; or to stress the urgency of a request (e.g. to ‘quickly sit down’, said to latecomers; p. 149); but mainly to establish what the author calls “bilingual academic knowledge”, better understood as “English dominant academic bilingualism” (p. 152).

English is seen as the medium of expression that contains the key to the ‘real’ thing: knowledge that is worth something in terms of ‘symbolic capital’. Cantonese may be all right when you talk to your friends, but English opens the doors to business at higher levels. The teacher may also use Cantonese to impart to his or her students the notion that Chinese indeed can be used to express ‘academic’ notions, such as scientific definitions; but often, the teacher then tells the students more or less explicitly that this is knowledge that doesn’t count towards their future examinations (e.g. p. 152). Thus, while in a way resisting the English-dominant academic acquisition of knowledge, the teacher indirectly affirms its importance. Hence the author’s conclusion that “[wlhat is most frequently reflected in the [viz., Johnson’s] classroom data . . . is what I call ‘Cantonese-annotated English academic monolingualism”’ (p. 153).

The main purpose of Hong Kong secondary instruction is not to establish an independent body of Cantonese scientific terms, but to facilitate the acquisition of scientific concepts mediating their English equivalents, since “Chinese academic knowledge does not have legitimate status in the curriculum” (p. 155). The role of the teacher is that of an ‘academic broker’, a go-between, brokering transfer of knowledge from one (dominant) culture to another (dominated). If the teachers resort to the use of Chinese, the ensuing bilingual situation (which strictly speaking is unlawful according to the new ‘streaming’ policy of the SAR authorities, by which schools have to opt either for Chinese or for English) is not one where codes are switched freely, according to personal needs, but one that makes the classroom situation “more bearable and less alienating for the students”; however, “[it] also con- tributes[s] to the teachers’ acquiescence to the dominance of English academic monolingualism” (p. 158).

The author rightfully remarks that the native social scientists (and I include here the people who apply the findings of those scientists in educational practice and legislation) must draw “on the same interpretive resources that the social interactants themselves depend on to make sense of and to one another” (p. 147). That is to say that one cannot ‘export’ a particular model of codeswitching and bilingual education to a culture whose basic social and economic conditions are different from the original one. The influential work of Swain (1986) with its distinction between the ‘mixing approach’ and the ‘separation’ approach’ (the latter best known through its realization in the famous ‘immersion’ policies of French-speaking Canada) has been used as a theoretical justification for the official ‘streaming policies’ that have come to characterize the secondary and tertiary educational systems in Hong Kong (p. 159). In practice, this means that only students with sufficient English-language background will be admitted into the decreasing number of prestigious, English-only secondary schools (university education is officially imparted in English only).


The problem with such an approach is that it does not take the particular character of the Hong Kong bilingual situation into account: “[tlhe historical and socioeconomic origins of classroom code switching in Hong Kong . . . have been completely ignored” (pp. 159-160). In the former colony, we do not just have ‘elitism’, but “elitism without meritocracy” (p. 160; italics in original), that is, “a system of social injustice by which only the children of the elite can become members of the elite”. And, the author concludes, “the objective effect of such a streaming policy will be the segregation of children in terms of social class” (p. 160).

But the high status of English has also another, indirect effect: the low prestige that is attributed to Chinese. While a small number of people actually wish to keep English as a boundary protection against China, there is unanimous assent to the status of English as “being socioeconomically more important than Chinese” (p. 163). As a result of this low confidence in Chinese, English remains the language of power, the one with high ‘symbolic value’. This partly explains the “poor mastery of Chinese among the majority of students” (p. 163); and, by the same token, “they do not achieve a mastery of English, either” (ibid.).

In this connection, a problem arises. The author does not make it quite clear which ‘dialect’ she is referring to: Cantonese of Putonghua (earlier also called Man- darin), when she talks about Chinese in the above quotations, or when she ends her chapter with a plea for “a balanced bilingual competence in both Chinese (usually meaning spoken Putonghua and written Standard Chinese) and English” (p. 163; my emphasis). Even if such a balance “is becoming increasingly economically important”, the question is what it has got to do with the presence of ‘Chinese’ vs. Eng- lish in the (bilingual) classroom. Lin’s contribution draws heavily on classroom data collected by Johnson for Cantonese (which is the normal language of 95% of the population). Clearly, the use of Putonghua in the classroom would bring along some of the same problems as does that of English.

As to Putonghua, it is virtually non-existent in Hong Kong as a vehicle of oral communication. Hence, if a scientific subject were going to be taught in ‘classroom Chinese’ (read: Cantonese), that would mean that one would have to create (or revive) an entire terminology (there are some examples of teachers being able to do just that, but their practice is an exception, and in the course of the teaching session, it plays mostly the role of an aside; see e.g. p. 151). As to teaching a subject in Stan- dard Chinese (meaning: having all the textbooks in Mandarin, but all classroom interaction in Cantonese), that would create a bilingual situation curiously reminis- cent of the one prevalent today in English-only secondary and tertiary education in Hong Kong. At present, the language there is English, but that strictly regards only the textbook and the classroom lectures (Cantonese asides aside). The students are not able to discuss the subjects freely in English; for that, they (and their teachers) have to use Cantonese. This has repercussions not only at exam time, but indirectly also for the way knowledge and insight are currently acquired and (re)produced: just as the students now have to reproduce the English text more or less verbatim in order to pass, they will have to learn the correct way of expressing their classroom/oral internalized Cantonese-medium knowledge in written Standard Chinese. Theoreti- cally, one thus could be able to pass an exam if it were given orally, but would, with


exactly the same knowledge, be liable to fail the written version of exactly the same test. The problem is compounded by the fact that (undergraduate) grading will have to be done (as is usual practice nowadays) by teaching assistants who are no better than their fellow students at mastering this peculiar bilingual oral/written system, as it actually operates today for big undergraduate classes at institutions such as the Medical Faculty of Hong Kong University.

In order to prevent what the author calls “the total subordination of ourselves to commercialism”, it is of course important to have a language policy that does not play directly into the hands of those who want to perpetuate the symbolic domination of English as a precondition for the present division of classes, where English is only material in reproducing the workforce and the managerial (sub-)elite. On the other hand, it is doubtful if the introduction of Standard Chinese (Putonghua) will work in the opposite direction. At least, the question should be raised in public debate - which, I’m afraid, is practically impossible, given the current political situation.

3. Changing the rules: Resources and autonomy

Part II, whose title ‘Coping with contradiction and creating ambiguity’ actually itself contains an ambiguity, opens with a contribution by Celia Roberts and Srikant Sarangi, “‘Like you’re living two lives in one go”: Negotiating different social conditions for classroom learning in a Further Education context in Britain’. This chapter (8, pp. 171-192) is a remake of an earlier article that appeared in 1995 in Multi- lingua. The authors thank the editors of the volume for their “meticulous editorial feedback” (p. 189); this makes one wonder what the chapter looked like before it was edited. As we all know, reworking your own writings is no small task, and the present chapter bears all the markings of the process, among other things by its inconsistent formats and spellings. For instance, square brackets for publication years within round bracketed quotations are sometimes used, sometimes not; the word ‘contextualization’ is spelled differently every time it occurs, even on the same page (p. 178). Many of the footnotes do not correspond to the text they are supposed to elucidate, something which finally becomes clear when the reader gets to footnote 6 on p. 190, where we are promised some information on Bakhtin, to be given in footnote 8; when we look for it there, however, it turns out that this note deals instead with some of the students’ social background. Similarly, footnote 9 on p. 179 which, according to the text, should contain information on Bourdieu’s concept of class identity, deals in reality with transcription conventions (Bourdieu’s notion of class is mentioned in footnote 5); and so on. One notices, incidentally, that the footnotes stop, rather abruptly, at p. 179; here, the chapter embarks on a new section, which in reality inaugurates the second half of the article (see below on this). All of which confirms my impression that the chapter’s conversion from the original article has been performed less than successfully.

As to the content of the chapter, there are two main parts. The first is more theoretically oriented, and deals with the theories of Bourdieu, said to function as part of

304 J.L. Mey I Journal of Pragmatics 34 (2002) 28.5-330

the “theoretical backdrop” of the chapter (p. 173); the other component of this backdrop is formed by “ethnographic approaches to the fine-grained detail of interaction” (judging from the context and the sequel, this seems to imply a kind of “interactional sociolinguistics” (ibid.) a la Gumperz; I will come back to this when I discuss the second, practice-based part of the chapter).

Bourdieu’s concepts of ‘symbolic capital , ’ ‘field’, and ‘habitus’ are introduced on p. 174 and expanded into a discussion of the ‘legitimate language’, especially as applied to the ‘field’ of education. Here, the ‘habitus’ consists in knowing your way around the ‘linguistic market’, in understanding the ‘game’ and knowing how to play it according to the rules (p. 175). While the authors criticize Bourdieu for being ‘overdetermining’ in his notions, they themselves, on the other hand, seem to think that his notion of game is rather ‘underdetermined’; “the idea of the ‘game’ cries out for analysis of the rules . ..” (p. 176).

The trouble here is that Bourdieu, in referring to the ‘social context’, never instated the notion of ‘game’ as being uniquely different from either ‘field’ or market’. As Thompson remarks, in his introduction to Bourdieu’s (1991) Language and symbolic power: “Bourdieu uses different terms to refer to the social context or field of actions: ‘field’ (champ) is his preferred technical term, but the terms ‘market’ and ‘game’ are also commonly used, . . . ” (Thompson 1991: 14; the very location from which the authors also take their quote in this chapter). Hence, it is not quite correct to talk about “the notion of the ‘game’ as derived from Bourdieu’s concept of the market and the field” (p. 176; emphasis mine) without specifying that this notion of ‘game’ is different from, and comprises more than, what Bourdieu probably had in mind when he coined the expression. For Bourdieu, the ‘field’ is not different from the ‘game’; if we want to change the social context, the field, we must try and change the rules of the game. But how is this done?

When it comes to changing the rules, the authors remark that these “are in place to maintain the dominant position of a particular class, but the rules themselves are constructions of that class and so have the potential to be changed” (p. 176). I wonder what Bourdieu would have said to the last part of this sentence; in any case, we are never told how Bourdieu sees this ‘potential of change’. In contrast, the authors have some suggestions themselves, and outline four different ways of dealing with the social game, basically distinguished by the different ways one either adheres to, or criticizes, or ‘unmasks’, or even altogether abolishes, the rules.

While I agree with the authors that it is of the highest priority to unmask (or ‘unveil’, as I call it; Mey, 1985) the hidden realities of social oppression, I have a bit of a problem with the facile assertion of a ‘potential of change’, as far as the ‘rules of the game’ are concerned. The game, for Bourdieu, is a matter of ‘take it or leave it’: you either have or don’t have ‘the feel for the game’ that is required in order to successfully participate (Bourdieu, 1990: 76, 80). This ‘feel’ is not something that depends on rules (‘codification’; Bourdieu 1990: 76ff.); quite the contrary. Coditi- cation and rule-governed behavior are precisely the opposite of the improvisation that comes with this ‘feel for the game’ which, being intimately bound up with Bour- dieu’s notion of ‘habitus’, cannot really be ‘constructed’, as the authors seem to believe; cf. their expression: “constructing a certain type of student with a certain


habitus” (p. 187). If confronted with this kind of statement, Bourdieu would probably exclaim, with his typical French gesture of despair, throwing his hands up in the air: “But people apply to my analysis the very alternatives that my notion of habitus is meant to exclude!” (1990: 10).

But let’s go back to the roles, and to the potential for changing the classroom, the ‘social situation’, that the authors define as the aim of their study. In any social ‘game’ whose rules serve the interest of the dominant class, the dominated class will have to change the class relations before they can do anything with the class-dominated rules. Here, the problem is first, that Bourdieu advocates a rather watered- down notion of class (“as sets of agents who occupy similar positions in social space”; footnote 5 on p. 189), as compared to the Marxian notion of class, which is firmly rooted in the socio-economic and political relations of society. This has implications for the notion of ‘dominance’ (cf. the authors’ expression “the dominant social class”; p. 189), which cannot just be explained by appealing to a haphazard collocation of individuals sharing the same interests, without at least providing some ideological underpinning.

Second, one could question the usefulness of Bourdieu’s notions for practicing social changes, when after all, his central concept of habitus is something that cannot be learned or taught, only “acquired through experience” (Bourdieu, 1990: 9; emphasis in original), as ‘dispositions’; alternatively, the habitus as “socially consti- tuted nature” is something that the ‘dominant agents’ are born into, possess as their birth right, inherent in a “position that is distinguished positively” (1990: 1 l), in the right social conditions (the same applies, mututis mutandis, to Bourdieu’s notion of ‘distinction’, the title of an earlier work; Bourdieu, 1984). Bourdieu is, by his own confession, a critical sociologist; he wants to explain things, and does not “seek to formulate political programmes or policies for particular social groups” (Thompson, 1991: 31). In other words, without wanting to call Bourdieu a philosopher in the pre- Feuerbachian tradition, I still would agree with Thompson that the “critical potential” of his work remains mostly implicit (cf. Thompson, ibid.).

And finally, and most importantly from an internal-critical point of view, the notion of ‘game’ that the authors say they owe to Bourdieu could in reality have been obtained quite independently, by basing oneself on the difference in power between those who define the rules and keep them ‘under cover’ and those who simply have to execute them, unless and until such time as they ‘unmask’ the game. This kind of discourse is in no way specific to Bourdieu, in fact, it seems to be pretty far from his views; so why use them as pegs to hang one’s own views on?4

The authors also refer to the criticisms leveled at Bourdieu for not providing an opening for “redefining social relationships” (p. 178). But while such a redefinition, by their own account, does not appear to be particularly feasible on Bourdieu’s terms, what they do have to say about unmasking social dominance, on the other hand, makes a lot of sense; except that it has not much to do with Bourdieu, nor with the attitudes the authors display in the second part of the chapter. One may question

’ On the notion of ‘veiled power’ in the educational setting, especially regarding the ‘hidden curriculum’ and the unseen power relations in the classroom, see Mey (1985: Ch. 2).


the wisdom of bringing in an author just to criticize him and reject (explicitly or implicitly) his ideas; compare the authors’ conclusion, where it is said that “we have used Bourdieu’s notions . . . to suggest, in the cumulative interactions of classrooms, that such notions need not be as determining as Bourdieu’s work seems to imply” (p. 189). I have no beef with this as such; still, I find the position taken here: to use an author in order to prove that he is not really very useful, a bit odd.

The explanation for this apparent volte-face regarding Bourdieu’s importance for the authors’ study may be found in the circumstance that the empirical part of this chapter in reality has very little to do with the ‘theoretical backdrop’ outlined above. Exit Bourdieu, enter Gumperz (whose notion of the “social conditions for classroom learning” is quoted at last four times, if one includes the title and headings: pp. 179, 182, 185). And while I have no problem recognizing the fertile input of Gumperz’ writings for studies of interaction in various environments, I have great difficulty in seeing Gumperz as a “bridge” between Bourdieu and Conversation Analysis (p. 178); no proper CA’er will buy into that, and I’m not at all sure that Bourdieu himself would be pleased.

The ‘social conditions’ that are alluded to, are exemplified by contrasting two entirely different classrooms in the same pedagogical setting: that of ‘Further Edu- cation’ (‘FE’; basically, continued education for 16-year olds who have failed to enter the higher education stream in the British school system). Typically, the vast majority of the population of FE classrooms is allochthonic and non-white, and the demands on the teachers’ dedication are unusually high. The authors distinguish between two approaches: the ‘tight-ship’ classroom and the ‘little mother hen’ environment (the latter being an ironic self-description by the teacher in question). In the first type of teaching, the emphasis is on rules and results; the second type concentrates on creating a nurturing environment in which the process of learning is of paramount interest. In neither of the classrooms, however, can I see any approach to what the authors call the “unmasking of educational games” (p. 179): ‘Liz’, the first teacher-type, conforms to the realities of life and society and tells the pupils to either shape up or ship out; ‘Frances’, the ‘hen mother’, creates a ‘safe space’ from the ugly surrounding society and indeed obtains better results with her students: fewer dropouts, and more students who finish the course successfully, by getting their diploma. The crucial question of course is what happens in later life, and which of the students will be able to land the good jobs (or any job at all, for that matter). We have no information on this question; but to me, the dichotomy displayed here represents the eternal dilemma between the no-nonsense approach of saving the few, and the bleeding-heart approach of getting as many into the fold as possible: ‘Love It Or Leave It’ vs. ‘Love And Be Loved’.

The authors place great weight on the importance of ‘talk’ in the classroom; talk (especially what they call ‘meta-talk’) is seen as representative of the educational approach taken by the teachers. With regard to the distinction they make between ‘content talk’ and ‘procedural talk’ (p. 182), the placement of ‘metatalk’ remains a bit fuzzy (p. 185 brings some clarification); but despite this methodological short- coming, the authors manage quite well to convey a sense of what is happening in these classrooms, also by including extracts from discussions with the teachers upon


viewing the videotaped recordings of their teaching. Here especially, the issue of “reflexive politics” (p. 189, where it is mentioned explicitly for the first time) could be expanded upon and deepened a bit.

Summing up, then, I find myself in the strange position of agreeing with almost everything the authors say they do and say they want to do, and yet finding their approach curiously unsatisfactory. With a thorough rethinking and updating of their framework, in particular incorporating their theoretical backdrop better into the observed practice, this chapter could be a useful contribution to the debates on the educational practices in dealing with underprivileged students that rage in many Western and Westernized countries. As it is, unfortunately, I find the chapter not quite up to par, both as regards methodology, data, and content.

Chapter 9 is entitled ‘Constructing hybrid postcolonial subjects: Codeswitching in Jaffna classrooms’, by Suresh Canagarajah (pp. 193-212). The Jaffna peninsula, situated on the northern tip of Sri Lanka, has been the site of acrimonious dispute between the native Tamil population and the central, Sinhalese-speaking government of the country. The militant organization called the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) has long controlled, and still controls, parts of the peninsula, where they enforce a strict “Tamil-only [language] policy” (p. 194). As the author remarks, one observes a clash of ideologies here, as the official school policy for ESL classrooms is “English-only” (ibid.). The resulting conflict reproduces the opposition between the nationalist, monolingual policy that has been instated in many postcolonial countries, and the need to teach, and learn, a language which is intimately related to the colonial powers that still maintain a grip on many areas such as culture, commerce, international contacts, and so on. The conflict is acted out on the personal level by the speaking subjects, who “in their day-to-day classroom conversations are compelled to negotiate the tension between the two opposing ideologies” (ibid.).

Due to the relative autonomy that institutions like schools have (even under oppressive social systems), there is a certain amount of freedom in the way individuals organize their linguistic lives. Since language is a key element in the affirmation of one’s identity, in order to understand the way people take on different identities, one has to appeal to the way the conflict between the dominant and the dominated ideology is handled in the language of everyday life. Conversely, as the author remarks, “the linguistic strategies that subjects adopt to negotiate dominant ideologies can reveal modes of resistance, and they can also provide insights into the communicative processes involved in the construction of alternative ideologies and sub- jectivities” (p. 195; cf. p. 208: “... codeswitching practices . . . constitute a subtle resistance to the agendas of those who control policy in both the political and educational domain. “).

While I agree with the latter thesis, I think the author is carrying the role of language too far, when he declares that “language is at the root of the sociopolitical malaise there [viz. in Jaffna]” (p. 194). This ‘malaise’ (a euphemism for the “decade of ferocious warfare between majority Sinhalese and minority Tamil” (ibid.)) may be an ideological conflict, but one should not forget that at the root of ideology is dominance: the dominant ideology is the ideology of the dominant, as Marx and Engels told us more than one and a half century ago (1845-46).


The author had access, for his fieldwork, to ‘practicum’ sessions where ESL teachers (who had been enrolled in an ELT course at Jaffna university, given by the author) taught English for a period of two months as part of their curriculum. The classroom sessions were recorded, and subsequently discussed. In these classrooms, extensive codeswitching could be observed, despite the official policy of monolingualism (in this case, of English).

As to the background of this codeswitching and its being frowned upon by the official bodies, one has to remember that English used to be the dominant language before independence in 1956. With the installation of the Sri Lankan state, the government promoted a ‘Sinhala-only’ policy, which of course alienated the Tamils, who had been using English and Tamil in their part of the country. This, in turn, resulted in the well-known trend in situations like these, viz., to ‘purify’ and codify the national language as symbol of identity against the oppressors; but at the same time, the importance of having an international language like English for business and official use could not be denied. Thus, the Tamils were forced to adopt two identities: one for home use, one for outside; but in addition, it became important for the LTEE government to keep the home language as uncontaminated as possible (among other things, by not allowing codeswitching; the author has an entertaining example of this on p. 198), because of the external pressure on the political, cultural, and later also the military front. As a side-effect, the purist tendency spilled over into the domain of the second language classroom, where codeswitching officially is not per- mitted, but takes place extensively: “codeswitching is what the learners got most exposure to and practice in during their English classes” (p. 207).

More importantly, though, one should realize that Sri Lanka still is a country of the ‘periphery’, suffering from the ideological and economic domination of the ‘center’. Center-based ideologies, in particular those relevant to language instruction, still have higher official status than local norms and attitudes. Characteristically, the author’s attempts to encourage the use of the ‘nativized’ variety of English known as “(educated) Jaffna English” (p. 200) into the classrooms “to facilitate L2 acquisition,” were “vigorously rejected by the teachers” (p. 201).

This brings us to the problem of what kind of codeswitching really is going on in these ESL classrooms. Tamil is used for normal interaction between the students, with English as the “marked code”, the author says (p. 206). On the other hand, the teacher codeswitches from the ‘official’ classroom language, English, to Tam& the “marked code for the context” (p. 203). This raises the question of the nature of the codeswitching, and on whose premises it takes place.

In this connection, the author appeals to a broader context of understanding. If (as he remarks) in Tamil society, codeswitching has long been a “pervasive feature of social life” (p. 208), with people continuously switching between “different codes: Tamil and Tamilized English” (ibid.), then the classroom interaction is of a different kind. Note that the teacher usually feels s/he must stick to the official variant of Eng- lish (in an attempt at practicing ‘monolingualism’, to use Phillipson’s (1992) expression, quoted on p. 200); hence, most of her or his codeswitching will be between Tamil (carrying “affective connotations”; p. 203) and English (the language to be taught). Typically, the question is asked in English (e.g. ‘What is the past tense form


of ‘swim’?’ When no answers are produced, the teacher first says (in English) ‘Come on.‘, and when still nothing happens, she says (in Tamil): ‘What, children, you don’t know this? You told me in the last class’. Only then, finally, two student responses are forthcoming: ‘swimmed’ and ‘swam’. These student responses are similar to the pre-set questions and answers they have to reproduce in class (‘Who are you? ’ ‘I am a policeman’ [sic ! 1, said by a girl holding a picture of a policeman in a role play exercise), and have little or nothing to do with communication and codeswitching: the code is preset and external to the students, and the language is used solely to produce acceptable utterances, fitted to a standardized situation from the book. Thus, while it may be true that codeswitching is a “valuable resource for communicating in Tamil society” (p. 209), I doubt that this notion applies to the use of English in the classroom. And while it also may be correct to say that the Tamils “use English on their own terms” (p. 209), this certainly is not the case for the Tamil pupils whose classroom interaction we are observing. Given the acknowledged purpose of teaching English as a second language (international contacts, a broader out- look, practical uses, etc., as mentioned by the author on pp. 207-209), one could ask on whose terms that kind of English will have to be defined. And as for classroom codeswitching, when for example a student addresses the teacher to explain that she hasn’t done her homework, the reason may simply be that she is unable to express herself in English, and not that she is intentionally switching codes in order to implicitly “ask the teacher to step out of her institutional role . . . and to employ the values of in-group solidarity” (p. 204).

Summing up, I think Canagarajah’s study is a valuable eye-opener onto the prospects of bilingual education in a postcolonial setting. While on the one hand respecting the values of solidarity and resistance to a dominant foreign or intema- tionalist ideology, one should not, on the other hand, overlook the inherent dangers of creating ‘safe spaces’ (“classroom underlife”, as the author calls it on p. 204). There is a world beyond the classroom, and indeed beyond the indigenous language community; to move out into that world may require leaving one’s safe space behind. Codeswitching as a ‘valuable resource’ has to be contextualized as to what this value represents, and on whose conditions it can be realized. While it may be true, as the author asserts on p. 210, that a “hybrid subjectivity is a position of strength”, this strength should preferably not be confined to the subjective level. No amount of postcolonial rhetoric can neutralize the real conditions of life in capitalist postcolonial society, in which minorities, like endangered species everywhere, will not be able to survive exclusively “on their own terms” (p. 209).

Antoinette Camilleri Grima, a native of Malta, writes on ‘Language values and identities: Code switching in secondary classrooms in Malta’ (Chapter 10; pp. 213- 234). The linguistic situation in Malta is rather complex, in that the native tongue (Maltese, a Semitic language) until rather recently did not have status as a symbol of national identity. While in the 19th century, the educated classes preferred to speak Italian, with English as the language of the administration, the 20th century saw an increasing dominance of English, especially after World War II. Thus caught in a trilingual fire, the Maltese gradually started to think about a language policy of their own, and thus the role of language education in Malta ceased to be a “non-issue”


(p. 213). But even though a Maltese language board was set up by the Ministry of Education in 1995, “to date no official language policy has been drawn up for [the Maltese] schools”, says the author (p. 214), even though the 1974 Constitution of the Republic of Malta specifies that “the national language of Malta is the Maltese language” (p. 216).

Because of the long tradition of English administration and rule (from Napoleonic times until 1974), English has always been an important language on the island. In many respects, today’s English has the same prestige that Italian had earlier: it is increasingly becoming a status symbol, besides having been, and still being, the language of the civil administration and, naturally, of the tourist industry. Even so, Mal- tese continues to be the language of daily interaction among people (p. 217). As to the (secondary) schools, this situation has resulted in a large degree of codeswitching, since the use of English in the schools is encouraged passively, both by the parents, who want their children to be as much exposed to English as possible, and by the teenagers themselves, who see English as a vehicle of social upward mobility. On the other side, there are those who consider the use of English as a fad: “Maltese people who prefer to speak English are labeled ‘snobs’, or in Maltese, tal-pep? by the ‘purists’, “ who insist on using standard Maltese” (p. 219).

As to national identity and its indices, Maltese, or rather some dialect of Maltese, has always proven to be a sign of loyalty to the Maltese traditions, and also posed “a challenge to the symbolic dominance [Bourdieu’s term] of English” (p. 221). Even so, the presence of English in the schools, within and outside the classroom, is considerable, and informal use of language between teachers and school children is often marked by a large degree of codeswitching. And since there is no explicit language policy for the schools, the use of Maltese vs. English and the extent of codeswitching are largely up to the interactants themselves, that is, mainly the teachers, but to some degree also the students. On top of this, there is a tendency to attribute higher prestige to English: Maltese is often considered the language of the young people, while educated adults speak English. In the schools, many teachers preferred to use English with stronger learners, while Maltese was the medium of interaction with those that were weaker scholastically (p. 223). This may have something to do with the fact that most written subjects have to be dealt with in English, while Maltese is only used in written exams in Maltese language and culture.

The author has carried out extensive fieldwork in the early nineties in five different secondary schools in Malta to study the extent of codeswitching in classrooms. It turned out that the switches most often occurred when the ‘stage’ was changed: e.g. from a lecture on a technical subject in English to response-eliciting in Maltese, or from a teaching-related discussion to an aside about everyday things. “Codeswitches co-occurred with an aside or with a change in topic, or served to distinguish different kinds of talk at different stages in the interaction” (p. 230). Thus, the use of different codes can be seen as a communicative resource, one that enables interactants to choose the medium that is best suited to the ongoing interaction. By the same token, the building up of a local identity, and in extension of this, a common national identity as Maltese, is also executed through language use. But at the same time, because of the overall dominant position of English, the codeswitching that went on


also “served to reproduce the dominance of English in the daily cycles of life in these classrooms” (p. 232).

In general, the author’s findings confirm the commonly established assumption that codeswitching is a powerful means of negotiating one’s identity in a multilingual environment. In Malta, “[b]y codeswitching, one can appear to know enough English to be considered an educated person while espousing a Maltese identity” (p. 232).

Chapter 11, by Lorenza Mondada and Laurent Gajo, deals with ‘Classroom interaction and the bilingual resources of migrant students in Switzerland’ (pp. 235-268). The question they take up is one discussed in many of the other chapters of the book (see, e.g., Chapter 6) of the value of bilingualism: resource or handicap? The answer they give is that bilingualism cannot be truly evaluated in isolation; one needs a situation of interaction to value its potential. As an instance, they study the ‘social lab- oratory’ of immigrant classrooms in the French-speaking portions of Switzerland (p. 236), where the processes of identity formation and categorization (both of the - mainly Portuguese-speaking - immigrants themselves, and of the surrounding community vis-a-vis the immigrants) can be studied in a more or less well-defined context, the multilingual classroom.

In this connection, it is important to distinguish between the value of a language as an instrument of expressing oneself correctly, and as a strategic resource in interaction. The authors list three dimensions in interaction in schools: failure or success in the social context of the school; categorization and identification of students according to their linguistic abilities and sociolinguistic competences; and finally, learning itself. Here, it is said that “... [Ilinguistic knowledge, in particular, is acquired in a situated manner, through interaction inside and outside the classroom” (pp. 241-242).

But how are bilingual children to be positively evaluated in terms of these types of interaction, and in particular, how to measure their success along the ‘learning dimension’, which after all, is the traditional objective of the school? Specifically, how does language learning proceed in an interlingual environment such as the multilingual classroom? The authors provide ample evidence, in the form of transcripts of actually occurring classroom conversations, that much of the interaction in the schools is hampered by the students’ failure to communicate in the ‘official’ language of the school, French. Time and again, the teacher must allow the students to use their own resources, especially their own language, in order for them to be able to interact at all, not necessarily on the premises of, and in according with the pro- gram established by, the teacher.

It may be true that “bilingualism entails an increased metalinguistic capacity” (p. 243); but this is of little help to the students who must express themselves in a concrete situation, where the language used does not match the students’ own resources in reproducing memories, expressing feelings, providing adequate responses to questions, initiating conversational turns, and so on. While the students thus can maintain a certain communicative interaction, their strategies are not sufficient to fulfill the aims set by the schools, as represented by the teacher in the classroom. There is no doubt that linguistic knowledge has to be acquired through


interaction in situated encounters; however, the mere fact that one knows how to interact in a classroom situation does not guarantee that a sufficient command of a language has been acquired. As the authors say, “... communicative behavior . . . . while being very efficient for solving communicative difficulties, does not necessarily lead to successful language acquisition” (p. 245).

This brings up the problem of the “possible sedimentation of normative frames” (p. 263), where rigidified patterns of classroom interaction turn into fossilized linguistic behavior, with all the stigmas attached to it. The world outside the school- room is one where quite different ‘normative frames’ are in force. Even though we all pay lip service to the desirability, nay even the unavoidability, of the multicultural society (as do even conservative German politicians like former chancellor Hel- mut Kohl), reality tells us something different. By merely professing our faith in multiculturalism, we risk to pass on the onus of realizing the pluralistic society to those who are least equipped to take on that task, the immigrants themselves. If ever the old adage was valid, it is in this case: ‘Saying it don’t make it so’.

This pessimism is partly confirmed by the fact (as the authors report) that those Portuguese-speaking students who are best at managing their interaction within and outside the classroom are also those whose academic failure is the most conspicuous (pp. 239-240). Success at managing the classroom, using bilingual resources, evidently does not project into success later in life, when the ‘scaffolding’ of the classroom is removed and many students are in for a free fall all the way down to the lowest levels of society. While bilingualism certainly is a resource in the school, its appreciation in society at large depends to a large extent on those who are able to create, or reject, the culturally different in their midst. That task is not one that the schools can undertake, and it is not even likely that they are able to prepare their bilingual students for it.

Alexandra Jaffe, in her study ‘Authority and authenticity: Corsican discourse on bilingual education’ (Chapter 12; pp. 269-296) focuses on the problems that an oppressed idiom such as Corsican has to face when its speakers try to raise it to the status of “co-officiality” (p. 291). Corsican is historically an Italian dialect and has very little to do with French, which so far is the only official language of the island, and has been for centuries. Efforts on the part of those in favor of regional autonomy (or even full separation) always contained some linguistic component, often in the form of claiming full access to using Corsican in educational and official contexts. Based on extensive fieldwork (including many interviews with local speakers), the author is able to identify the contradictions that beset such efforts, attested by the fact that even a moderate language policy, which would leave the position of French as official language intact, has been unable to collect sufficient votes in the Corsican regional Assemble’e. Proposals to make the teaching of Corsican mandatory throughout the school system have similarly failed.

Jaffe distinguishes between the views of those who consider Corsican as part and parcel of the national identity, more or less synonymous with the ‘soul of the people’, in a return to romantic, Herderian notions of language and its relation to ‘the people’, compared to those who defend a more pragmatic, society-related understanding of the interplay between language and its speakers. She points out that to


insist on the value of language as residing in the system, rather than in its use, logi- cally entails the demand for its standardization and codification.

Precisely this aspect seems to be one of the major obstacles to those who consider their language as basically a mark of identity, not to be bothered by external constraints : ‘Leave your language alone’, as an American linguist (the late Robert A. Hall) once expressed it. In contrast, the value of the language in the linguistic ‘market’ (to borrow Bourdieu’s metaphor) cannot make us overlook the fact that there are ‘minority’ as well as ‘dominant’ language markets (p. 295), and that, in campaign- ing for a particular language’s revival, one has to take the latter’s ‘value’ into account - and an object’s value in the marketplace, a.k.a. its price, as we all know since Marx, is determined by the market: “The value of a thing/Is just as much as it will bring” (1974: 44; the expression is originally Samuel Butler’s). The market, in its turn, underlies the impact of socio-economic macro-processes that are not under the control of those who want to give people a choice, or even constrain them to having to make a choice (p. 294). Thus, the language users’ internal contradiction between wanting to speak Corsican and therefore rejecting French (as the language of oppression), on the one hand, and wanting to speak Corsican and therefore embracing French (as the language of success) is typical for the language situation in this community, as it is elsewhere (Jaffe quotes Wales, Brittany, francophone Ontario, but the examples could be multiplied). As always, these ideological contradictions are masked by the dominant economic and societal structures, and any solution to the conflict is dependent on the existence, and recognition, of a ‘pragmatic clout’ which so far has been missing in the debates (p. 295).

Donna Patrick, in the book’s Chapter 13, ‘Languages of state and social categorization in an Arctic Quebec community’ (pp. 297-314) discusses the problems that beset the users of the native languages of what formerly was called ‘New Quebec’ (now Nunavik).

The early white explorers and traders (of the Hudson Bay Company) mostly introduced and promoted the use of English as a lingua franca (which, in a way, it still is, says the author; p. 298). The second half of the last century, however, witnessed the rise of nationalism within Quebec itself, and this has not been without repercussions also in the former northern part of the province, where French has become, to an increasing degree, the ‘language of state’, of the administration and the official contacts with the government. While the autochthonous languages (mostly Cree and Inuktitut, the latter basically identical to the Inuit language spoken in (West) Green- land) have official status, too (“standardized Inuktitut has become a legitimate state language in the [sic] Arctic Quebec”; p. 298) the competition with the two other (semi-)official languages, English and French, is fierce. And it is not just a battle over linguistic territory; rather, one could compare it to a struggle for the soul.

Inuktitut is the language of the home, of the family, and since 1964 also (at least in part) of the schools (p. 302). Although it is recognized as the language through which the Inuit establish and maintain their cultural identity, its maintenance and growth pose vexing problems to its users and to the people planning its future development. One is faced with a paradox: on the one hand, in order to enable the language and its users to fully participate in the fruits of modem civilization, the


language has to be ‘modernized’; but at the same time, this entails an assimilation to the dominant languages and cultures that constitutes a grave threat to the identity and independence of the Inuit as a community of native language users.

On another dimension, the question which of the two dominant languages, Eng- lish or French, to teach in the schools along with Inuktitut, is not an easy one to deal with. Strange as it may seem, the use of English, rather than French, is often seen as a sign of “solidarity between Inuit speakers, when they are interacting with non- Native French-speaking interlocutors” (p. 307) - as if French, considered as the official language of Quebec, historically (and also recently) were seen as representing an extraneous political power, centered around the capital of the province, while Eng- lish (besides being the language of popular culture, and as such attractive especially to younger people) supposedly has a certain air of ‘neutrality’ about it. In any case, the theoretically ‘best’ solution, that of adopting not only an official stance on, but also a practical form of, trilingualism, seems fraught with difficulties, as long as certain services (e.g. health care) are conducted mainly in English, and even students who follow the French ‘stream’ in their schools lack the opportunities that are necessary to acquire and exercise that language in interaction.

While many of the people that the author interviewed (pp. 310ff.) expressed their conviction that French was necessary, very few actually used the language; some even said they would “rather learn English than French” (p. 310). The author hypothesizes that the future development of Nunavik will bring with it a greater interest in studies of and in French, such that “[clhildren enrolled in French now are . . . a parental investment in that future” (p. 312); much will depend here on the political developments in the area.

In this connection, it is worth mentioning the recently (1999) acquired autonomy of the adjacent region of Nunavut (formerly part of the North West Territories), an area about one fifth of the total Canadian territory and inhabited by about 21,000 Inuit (out of a total population of 25,000). No mention is made of this fact in the chapter - which is certainly understandable, considering that Patrick’s fieldwork was carried out in 1993-1994 (pp. 299, 303) and that her dissertation dates from 1998, both periods being prior to Nunavut’s autonomous status as a new territory, which was obtained on April 1, 1999. Even so, the author might have drawn the readers’ attention to this recent event, and given us her views on whether developments in Nunavut (with presumably just one dominant language, English, next to the ‘common’ language, Inuktitut) might somehow affect the trilingual status of Nunavik. One would be interested to know, for instance, if the new Inuit government had adopted, or was going to adopt, any official policies concerning the status and promotion of Inuktitut as ‘territorial language’. A footnote or addendum on this new and fascinating development would have been welcome.

4. Roadblocks and gatekeepers

Part III of the book, entitled ‘Contestation and Struggle’, opens with Chapter 14: ‘Collusion, resistance and reflexivity: Indigenous teacher education in Brazil’, by

J.L. Mey I Journal of Pragmtics 34 (2002) 28.5-330 315

Marilda C. Cavalcanti (pp. 317-333). The author discusses the experiences that a group of university teachers had in organizing ‘action research’ in a Guarani community in the state of S5o Paulo in Southern Brazil. The original aim of the project was to promote the formation of indigenous teachers, in the framework of the Brazilian Ministry of Education’s new (1991) policy for such activities. Interest- ingly, the first approach to this project stemmed from the indigenous people themselves (there are about 3,000 Guarani speakers in Brazil, and 200 out of these live in a village, situated about 100 km from the university where the project was based).

Initially, there seemed to be consensus about the goals and aims of the project: the indigenous participants (six young Guarani men) were supposed to acquire experience in teaching primary school, as there is a great need for this kind of teachers, and there are very few non-natives who speak the indigenous languages well enough to function in that role. (Compare that all interaction on the project had to be conducted in the dominant language, Portuguese, as the researchers were unable to speak with the natives in their own language - a factor that the researchers realized could be part of the reasons for the difficulties that developed.)

As the project went on, there was growing frustration among the researchers about how they realized their aims. They felt ‘used’ (p. 329) and complained about the lack of interest that the Guarani showed for the topics the researchers brought up, and the way they developed them. One of the main obstacles here was the culturally different interpretation of culture-specific interactional parameters such as ‘silence’ (the researchers initially could not handle long periods without verbal interaction (from 5 to 25 seconds; p. 325); lack of eye contact was interpreted as indifference on the part of the interlocutors (ibid.); topic shifts that were natural to the Brazilians were not acknowledged by the natives (p. 326-327); and so on.

In the end, the educators discovered that there in reality was a mismatch between what they saw as the goal of the project: preparing the indigenous men for a teacher role, and what the natives themselves thought they were doing: acquiring communicative skills to act as leaders in their community (which included having to deal with the Brazilian authorities in Portuguese). Following repeated frustrations and clashes, the focus of ‘doing research on the natives in order to improve their conditions’ was shifted to ‘collaborating with the indigenous people with a view towards realizing common aims’. But in order to perform this shift, the educators had to reflect critically on their own positions (“reflexivity is [an] essential element of this kind of work”; p. 331), and be aware of happenings outside the classroom as background for their frustrations, not least by realizing the importance of “the wider power relations that we were caught up in” (p. 330), as well as of the “resistance” that traditionally characterizes Guarani culture in any context that is informed by the dominant language and culture (p. 321).

Most importantly, a conclusion (which should be borne in mind by all researchers) came to be formulated as one of the main experiences of the project: viz., that “[rlesearch can be a tool for exploring what it means to listen to the other” (p. 33 1, italics in original). In this way, Calvacanti’s and her colleagues’ experiences far transcend the local context in which they were made, and should be incorporated


in the life- and research styles of everybody who wants to actively participate in cross-cultural and intercultural projects of this kind.

Chapter 15 bears the title ‘Telling what is real: Competing views in assessing ESL development in Australia’. In this long and well-written piece (pp. 335-379), the author, Helen Moore, discusses what she calls a “dis-ease” with “what people are” (p. 335). The quotes (which actually are the author’s own) go back to a citation from a work by Bourdieu (an author already quoted many times), in which he constructs the ‘educated’ child’s habitus as the result of people telling him [sic] what he is, rather than what he must do, “and thus leads him to become durably what he has to be” (Bourdieu, 1991: 52). In the course of the chapter, Bourdieu will turn out to be a sounding board off which the author bounces some of her own ideas, not without critique and reservations, however.

Despite its rather meager, descriptive subtitle, the chapter in question is much more than just an assessment of teaching technologies for ESL (‘English as a Second Language’) in the Australian context. True, the text is well-documented with extracts from official documents concerning the development of the teaching of English to speakers of other languages - a topic that has become increasingly vital and sensi- tive in Australian society, where immigration has continued to grow throughout the nineteen eighties and nineties. In particular, we are treated to a horror tale of how bureaucracy and tunnel view have tried to limit the possibilities of developing a decent curriculum for ESL: the bureaucrats being interested in ‘outcomes’ (preferably testable, or “codified and countable”, as the author says; p. 366), the teachers themselves and their organizations being more concerned about the students’ growth and achievements (p. 369; cf. also p. 357: “Learner maturity is seen as crucial”). But not only that: the official bureaucracy of the Australian Education Council’s CURASS (Curriculum and Assessment Committee) did everything in its power to make sure that the ‘competition’, the NLLIA (National Languages and Literacy Institute of Australia), did not get their materials out on time and that their suggestions for curriculum assessment were either given low priority or simply eliminated from the official Guidelines, in an “extraordinary duplication and willingness to abandon a publicly funded project”, as the author wryly remarks (p. 356).

Against the backdrop of shifting governments and government policies, the author paints a chilling picture of a process that is not unfamiliar to Western educators: the big testing debates of the seventies and eighties, with the ensuing struggle for domination of the assessment process. Given that education is a power game, it is important to control the outcome of this struggle for domination, and one way to do this efficiently is to control the output of the educational process. There are many issues involved and entangled here; in the following, I will try to tease them out as I see their connections.

First off, one could ask what the purpose is of educating people, generally speaking (and in particular, teaching them ESL). Listening to educators, one often has the impression that the most important thing in their lives is to ‘cover’ the material that is assigned to a course, and to produce ‘good’ results. What is being taught, and how

it is taught, is not so much the concern of the educators as it is of some central board or organ that decides on curriculum and content. Of course, we do have guidelines


for any particular type of education, where we are told that the purpose of education is to create individuals who are “ready to take their place in a well-functioning democracy” (according to the official Danish 1976 guidelines for primary schools); in the discourse of Australian Labor (as quoted p. 349), education guidelines are said to have to embody a “just and equal society”. But guidelines have to be lived in order to be effective; and how do we recognize their effects?

While assessing the teaching process and its outcomes is an essential part of educational policy, the question is what kind of assessment is to be practiced: a ‘norm’- based or a ‘criterion’-based one (cf. p. 339). Taking the first route is tantamount to admitting that what we are able to test are mostly “facts and basic skills”, while “leaving thoughtfulness, imagination, and pursuit untapped” (Wolf et al., 1991: 3 1; quoted p. 338), as the latter qualities are recognized as being unfit for quantitative measuring and testing.

Second, one could ask what those ‘basic skills and facts’ are that we consider necessary for the students to acquire. Is it the ability to fill out a form in a state or municipal office? Or the ability to express oneself freely and fluently on topics of real interest? If one follows the lead of the development in testing techniques that we have been witness to over the past seventy years or so, there is no doubt about the answer. The test and its outcome have become more important than the teaching and the knowledge it imparts.

One contemporary educator, Schank (founder of Northwestern University’s Institute for the Learning Sciences) has expressed this ‘fear of testing’ admirably in his little book Scrooge meets Dick and June (2001), a fable in which the well- known figure of Scrooge reappears as head of a highly successful testing service. In the story, Scrooge is walked through the history and effects of testing, guided by different Spirits of Education Past, Present and Future, much like in the original Dickensian tale on which Schank’s book is based. Here is a dialogue between two students, a boy and a girl and the last remaining of the old teachers, a man called Joe.

‘You mean there used to be grades for courses instead of test scores?’ asked the girl. ‘Yes, there were,’ replied Joe. ‘There was once a time when what the teacher taught was different from what the Testing authorities tested.’ ‘Really? What possible sense could that make? Why would anyone learn something if it wasn’t going to be on the test?’ asked the boy. ‘When the tests were just seen as a part of school certainly there was much more to learn than could ever be tested. Gradually, as politicians demanded more measures and more accountability for the money they were spending, the Testing authorities began to make lists of Learning Objectives and things every third grader should know. Once they started to pay teachers according to the test scores their teaching produced, all pretense of education was gone. Now it was just tests, tests, and more tests. Soon, there was no instruction, only tests’ replied Joe. (&hank, 2001: 96; on tests as “disguised roadblocks”, see also the chapter entitled ‘Who’s afraid of the Big Bad Test?’ in Mey, 2001: 291-293)

Third, while testing as such (or at least, some form of assessment) may be unavoidable, it is important to keep one’s eyes on the purpose and results of assessment techniques in general, and in particular, as they apply to the learning and teaching of ESL.

318 J.L. Mey I Journal of Pragmatics 34 (2002) 285330

There has been a widespread belief that the role of standardized tests should be reduced and replaced by alternative forms of assessment, such as ‘profiling’ (based on longitudinal classroom bookkeeping; p. 339), self-assessment, and evaluation of performance, rather than just ‘making’ the test. Here, the author (basing herself on Broadfoot’s (1996) work) warns us against the “romantic illusion” that merely changing the forms of assessment is the cure for all educational evil.

First of all, some form of assessment is necessary in our current ‘meritocratic’ system, where an individual’s competence as a member of society often is essential for a successful performance, and not only on tests. But second, and worse, one can equally well question the fairness of alternative procedures of assessment. Competi- tion is the name of the game, and domination is its twin sister. What makes tests or assessment techniques better or worse, is not their intrinsic content or their current shapes, but the way they are integrated into the overall hegemonic system of society. Here, the “covert nature” of many alternative practices of testing “disempowers both teachers and learners, since it is difficult to contest and, at a deeper level, its content goes unrecognized” (p. 343).

The basic question is therefore, “What precisely is and could be made real (or denied reality) by assessments ?” (p. 348). Here, the ‘colonizing’ presence of posi- tivistic science (with its purely quantitative measuring methods) proves to be particularly nefarious in an ESL context, where developmental levels or ‘bands’ (cf. p. 353) are being replaced by strictly ‘countable’ (and hence supposed to be ‘accountable’) descriptive parameters (see the Table on p. 358,5 where the two approaches, the NLLIA ‘bands’ project and the CURASS scales) are compared in tabular form).

In contrast to the ‘scales’, the ‘bands’ take into account such factors as the learners’ previous knowledge of the world, of their ‘home language’ (Ll), and not least their diversity, both as to the amount and type of their previous and current learning. One of the biggest and most crucial differences between the two approaches is that in the CURASS scales, listening and speaking are collapsed into one “unified construct” called ‘Oral Interaction’- in spite of the fact that, as everybody knows, proficiency in listening usually lags far behind in L2 learners as compared to their speaking abilities (p. 363-364). Also, the ‘scaffolding’ role of the students’ Ll (which also is the subject of many earlier chapters) is totally discounted in this tech- nocratic view of assessment: what cannot be measured according to the standards of the CURASS guidelines, simply doesn’t exist. “In contrast, the NLLIA band scales describe Ll as a legitimate and crucial means of communication and learning” (p. 363).

Fourth, and finally, we should heed the author’s warning against an all too ‘mono- lithic’ view of domination in a societal context. Here, Bourdieu, talking about the ‘inevitability’ of social dominance, might be misread as leaving us only with two solutions: quietism (Euissez-faire) or revolution (p. 348). What the author proposes

5 Somewhat misleadingly numbered ‘15.1’; the chapter itself is a reworking of an earlier (1996) article (see footnote 1, p. 373)


to focus on is the role educators and teachers have in determining access. She correctly observes that every assessment, by its very nature, creates the position of a ‘gatekeeper’, a person who decides on (‘assesses’) the capabilities of a potential can- didate for further education. The mechanical (especially ‘multiple choice’) type of test such as the ones practiced in the SAT or GRE exams in the US6 is a notorious example of this activity; but it is implicit in every, however ‘alternative’, form of assessment. Typical for these cases is that they construct their own realities; as Bourdieu puts it (quoted on p. 367), “gatekeepers ‘produce the need for [tlheir own services and products’ (1991: 61)“. To separate out the realities constructed by the gatekeepers from “what precisely is and could be made real (or denied reality) by assessments” is the true issue for any consideration of ‘gatekeeping’ and its ‘dis- eases’ (cf. pp. 335-336).

So the crucial question is “What learners have to be” (p. 367, with a take-off on Bourdieu (1991: 52)). If we exclusively focus on the fact that domination exists (as it certainly does, also in ESL environments ! ), we may risk closing our eyes to “the options that gatekeepers have and that affect what the dominated can achieve” (p. 368). While it is true that ESL, by its very nature, tends to reaffirm the dominance of English as the ‘world language’, it is not necessarily the case that teaching English as a second language always entails “condescension that keeps people [read: the immigrants] in place” (p. 368). There is always room for choice, and for different modes of access; gatekeepers can both open and close gates, make available and exclude, “deny, neglect, or facilitate their [the learners’] access to English” (ibid.). Naturally, if we stick to a mechanistic division of learners into ‘achievement groups’, depending on quantifiable criteria of success (‘Can X do Y? If yes, how fast? Assign a number from 1 to 5’, and so on), we will indulge in what Moore calls “exclusionary practices”, excluding both the learners themselves, and their experiences and previous knowledge. In particular, the learners’ Ll is moved from the level of a ‘resource’ to that of a ‘problem’, as we have seen it happen in other contexts (such as the teaching of a former colonial language to people in developing countries).

In other words, and this may serve as the conclusion to the whole discussion, “norms are not self-contained” and independent; they do not represent readily quantifiable levels or values of achievement. Rather, they are “constructed and contested across different sites”; the pluralist approach to ESL allows for the different groups “to make and pursue their claims” (p. 371). One of the sites of social struggle is precisely that of ESL; it is no use obscuring this fact, but one should not let oneself fall into despondency, caused by a too deterministic, pessimistic view of the opportunities

The SAT, or Scholastic Aptitude Test, is required of all students wanting to enter college. The GRE

(Graduate Record Examination) has a similar ‘gate-keeping’ role in regard to graduate studies. With test-

ing rampant in the US, these tests fulfill other (such as corporate) functions as well. Thus, according to

Schank, “Andersen Consulting requires SAT scores of new applicants and considers them seriously

despite the fact that these applicants have already graduated college” (2001: 9, fn. 2).

Schank’s book throws an interesting sidelight on the billion-dollar testing ‘industry’ and is highly

recommended reading for all educators who want to take a critical look at the institution of ‘assessment’.


that are inherent in “the recognition of development of non-dominant groups’ linguistic and cultural resources in the dominant society”, as the author herself remarks in the concluding section of the chapter (p. 372).

Summing up, this chapter reaches far wider in its approach than a mere discussion of possibilities and prospects for ESL teaching. By providing a broad, but still very concrete background for the discussion, it situates the debates where they belong: at ground level. At the same time, it opens our eyes for the implicit assumptions present in these debates, and for the implicit ways in which the assumptions are handled (or mis-handled) in those debates. If I had anything to say in the matter, I would require that the present chapter be made obligatory reading for everybody active in the field of language pedagogy, especially as regards teaching a dominant second language like English.

Chapter 16 (pp. 381-402) is contributed by Monica Heller, one of the editors of the volume, and bears the title ‘Legitimate language in a multilingual school’.

The author (who is well known for her ground-breaking work on the linguistic and social situation of the French minority in Ontario province, Canada), discusses the implications of the official “French-English bilingualism as a counterbalance to Quebec francophone nationalism” that the Canadian federal government has “symbolically invested in” (p. 381). As the author is able to show, the stakes of the game are not just being bilingual, but being bilingual the right way and in the right places (an issue discussed in greater depth in Chapter 18, ‘Conclusion’, by the editors). One of these places is the school.

In order to capture the fleeting concepts of ‘right language’, ‘right situation’, and so on, the author turns (as many of the contributors to the volume have done) to the French sociologist-cum-linguist Pierre Bourdieu. His notions of ‘legitimate discourse’ and ‘legitimate producer’ (1977: 650) are displayed prominently at the beginning of the chapter (p. 382), where also the ‘legitimate definition’ of these concepts is brought up. The trouble is that Bourdieu, in his ‘definition’, appeals to another concept, that of ‘appropriateness’; however, as Fairclough has shown (1992, 1995), this concept itself relies on previously established notions that remain implicit in our society. And, as the sequel of Heller’s piece demonstrates, the ‘deconstruc- tion’ of this notion always takes us to the matter of power or social ‘hegemony’ (p. 383; cf. Fairclough, 1992: 52) and to what I call the ‘Big Wh-Questions’. Thus, in the Ontario situation, “language choice . . . is not simply a question of French versus other languages; it is also a question of what French, or perhaps more accurately whose French” (p. 387, italics original); cf.: “. . . the game of doing school . . . is about learning who has the right to define [the] rules, as well as about what can and cannot be said, by whom, and under what circumstances” (p. 388; italics mine). And in general, in minority education, one has to raise “the question of whom that education is for. Who has a right to be in this school? Whose interests are to be considered paramount? Whose interests are to be served?” (p. 386, italics mine).7

’ See also my own, earlier book, which addresses the same problematic, as subsumed under its title Whose language? (Mey, 1985).


In the Ontarian context, where a French-language minority struggles to survive in the face of a steadily more dominant ‘power language’, English, the French-language schools have as their primary function to provide “monolingual education . . . in a bilingual, and frequently multilingual context”; an education, moreover, that “aims at achieving individual bilingualism through institutional monolingualism” (p. 383).

The author’s discussion bases itself on field work in such a school, situated in the Toronto area, in the early 1990s a school that, like the entire France-Ontarian school system, “is principally designed to maintain the French language and culture in Ontario, to resist the crushing domination of English” (p. 384). The paradoxes inherent in this definition and the institutional aims it incorporates are very well described by the author: on the one hand, French must be protected and furthered; on the other, one needs English to make it in Ontario, as elsewhere in anglophone Canada (or even in the world at large). The paradox “lies in the principle that francophones can only successfully enter the modem world as equals [understood: to the anglo- phones, JM] if they can fall back on institutions that are monolingual and belong to them” (p. 384).

A further paradox lies in the fact (as already adumbrated) that ‘French’ is not just one thing, and that along with French and its local varieties, also other languages clamor for ‘a place in the sun’: for instance, in the school that Heller worked with, there was a sizable minority of Somali speaking immigrant children, many of who didn’t quite seem to understand what they were doing there (p. 385). The same goes for those who come from French-speaking environments that do not reflect the current European or Canadian standards : ‘Acadiens’ (people from the Atlantic seaboard that speak French), Haitians, people from the former French-African colonies, and so on.

As the chapter clearly shows, the ongoing discourse in the school is one of power. The school is institutionally bound to further and reinforce the use of French on all levels; however, not all French varieties are legitimate in the eyes of the school authorities. Even though one now can speak of a Canadian French ‘standard’, there is still a ‘choice’ involved; for the author, this is primarily a matter of form, “the how of speaking” (p. 387). However, as the author demonstrates further on in the chapter, such a choice in addition ‘indexes’ the speaker’s stance towards the language chosen, and its social and other connotations; the choice of English vs. French can thus be an expression of resistance to the ‘inside’ power that the school tries to establish as a counterweight to the prevailing power of the ‘outside’, English-speaking society.

A final paradox is the following. While many students feel (or are made to feel) that they must fight the linguistic oppression that objectively holds them down, sub- jectively they may not be too interested in such a fight. What they perceive as the immediate oppressive force, by contrast, is the school’s authority, outlawing their choice of a non-French medium or their own, non-standard French. The school knows this, and thus there is a kind of tacit understanding that the rule of ‘French- only’ is not enforced except at the upper, visible plan; as long as one only whispers in English, the teacher won’t say anything (p. 394). In this way, the choice becomes


much more than a matter of form, as I said above: the choice of English in an officially monolingual French school is “a means of contesting [school] authority” (p. 389) and “any use of English must be seen as a direct contestation of the legitimacy of French and by extension of the teacher’s authority” (p. 394).

One must be careful, though, not to reduce the teaching of (foreign) languages to a mere matter of power. Generally speaking, any instruction requires an authority: the person who knows, and is prepared to ‘show and tell’. Even in situations of unbalanced power, communication does happen, and even in the face of rampant ‘contestation’, the irony is that the contester often pays indirect tribute to what he contests, by showing off an ability to ‘go against the grain’, just as in order to really sing out of tune all the time, you have to have a pretty good ear, and know where to hit the wrong notes for maximum discordance. Heller gives an amusing example of this on p. 393, where a student, next to his picture in the school’s yearbook, has a clever and somewhat self-contradictory protestation of his inability to acquire French: “kum vous save tousse, la frensaix ne fue jammait une cujais dent lake1 je sui d’ouwer” - to mean, “as you all know, French was never a subject in which I am gifted” (in ‘good’ French: comme vous savez tous, 1efranGais nefit jamais un sujet dans lequel je suis doue’ - the ‘translation’ has exactly three small words in common with the student’s ‘idiolect’).

Another facet of legitimacy (and consequently, of power) is the way turn-taking is organized. “[Tlum-taking is a window onto interlocutors’ struggles to be heard” (p. 387), and it shows us “manifestations of both power and powerlessness” (ibid.). One has to be careful here, too, not to attribute all manifestations of power (or its lack) to what actually happens in turn-taking. Powerful players in many (sub-)cultures (for instance, the Italian mafia’s (as depicted in the popular Hollywood movies The Godfather I, II, III); the Japanese (cf. any short guide to ‘How to do business in Japan’); the Native North American (e.g. Athabaskan; cf. Scollon and Scollon, 1981); the Pacific (e.g. Pohnpei; cf. Keating, 1998); and so on) may gain or manifest power through not participating in discussions or expressing themselves only in ritualized, (non-)tum-taking ways (as in the case of the Central American Kuna; cf. Sherzer, 1989, 1999). But when the chips are down, and a decision has to be taken, the ‘silent’ partner often turns out to be the one who makes (or has already made) all the decisions and ‘the offer you cannot refuse’. Therefore, it is important to study the micro-structure of this turn-taking as it actually happens, and this is precisely what the author does with regard to the school she has been working with.

Heller distinguishes two kinds of ‘floors’ : ‘sequential’ and ‘competing’. The first is your regular CA type conversation: “each person takes the floor in turn, and everyone participates” (p. 394). In contrast, the “competing floor is multivocal and nonsequential” (ibid.). The teacher has little control over what happens on this floor, and whenever control is exercised, it ends up disturbing the free flow of interchange that is taking place on the floor.

The problem is that such a ‘flow’ not always runs in the prescribed language; but rather than disparaging this mixing and switching of codes, a teacher may profit by attending to the fact that the confusion and mixing that unavoidably reigns here, still partly functions in the language that has to be taught and used, viz., French. Part of


the ‘scaffolding’ (to use the familiar Vygotskian term) that the teacher should erect around the development of second-language skills consists precisely in the acceptance of irregular utterances (vulgar, incorrect, ‘out-of-turn’, and so on), rather than trying to reestablish order in the classroom and revert to the teaching agenda. (Good examples are provided on pp. 395-398.)

In her conclusion, the author again stresses that we must focus on language use (even of ‘illegitimate’ kind) as a “linguistic resource” on which “people draw . . . to accomplish their aims” (p. 400). As she puts it succinctly, “[blilingual education is . . . about more than simply maintaining and learning a language. It is about constructing the value of the different languages . . . and about defining who has the right to use them under what circumstances” (p. 401). While I agree with this in principle, it still needs to be stressed (varying Calvin Coolidge) that ‘the business of education is education’ and that even under adverse socio-economic conditions, the bilingual show must go on.

A minor quibble: the sentence on p. 384 beginning line 15 up doesn’t make sense; something must have been left out and the syntax is all garbled. Also, the author is not too consistent in the use of her (French) capitals: for ‘French’ as a language one finds both Fran~ais and franc& (e.g. pp. 395, 391); the status of the hybrid “general level Francais” (pass.) is murky: English capitalization of a French word in a kind of ‘spelling switching? (Compare the unspeakable “Francais general class”, mentioned on p. 399). In contrast, ‘English’ (the language) is always correctly spelled with a lower case initial: angluis (pp. 390, 392).

Ben Rampton, in Chapter 17, tackles a subject that so far has not received much attention: the ‘inverse’ codeswitching and ‘language crossing’ that is practiced by young speakers of (vernacular) English whose lineage is (mainly) Asian (Indian and Pakistani, although individuals of Afro-Caribbean and White origin also were part of the group examined by the author; the members’ age range was from 11-12 to 15-16 years of age, with a male-to-female ratio of 2: 1.

What happens is that these speakers, when addressing a person in authority, affect a ‘code’, dubbed by Rampton ‘stylized Indian English’ (p. 404) or (elsewhere in the chapter) ‘stylized Asian English‘ (SAE; not to be confused with Whorf’s well- known acronym for ‘Standard Average European’).

It would be too simplistic, says Rampton, to simply take the use of this code as a sign of ‘resistance’ to the authorities (‘testing out’ a new teacher, rejecting a teacher’s attempt to engage the class in some activity, or simply expressing one’s lack of interest in the classroom situation by making fun of it: p. 405). What we are witnessing here are acts of “political significance” (ibid.); but what precisely is their ‘significance’?

Since many of these switches occur in ‘opening encounters’ (and in general, interactions that involve ‘access’ of some kind), the author suggests to look at the use of SAE in these situations in the light of a distinction due to Goffman (197 1). who distinguishes between an ‘internal’ recognition of the interactant (by which he or she is positioned in one’s own personal, cognitive framework), and a ‘social’ recognition, which overtly signalizes that (and how) one desires to interact with the person, acknowledg- ing his or her ‘shared relationship’ with oneself (p. 411; Goffman, 1971: 78).


By switching to SAE, the students (who normally speak a perfectly good English) manifest to the teacher that they position him or her in a socially recognized category (of authority, which they resist), but moreover that they position themselves in the category that is the ‘mirror image’ of the teacher’s (and society’s in general) categorization of the immigrant population, more or less along the lines of:

‘OK, so you think I’m a dumb Pakistani/Indian/whatever? I’ll give you a dumb Pakistani/Indian/whatever.’

In this way, the use of SAE ‘destabilizes’ the “transition to comfortable interaction, to the working consensus that phatic activity normally facilitates” (p. 412).

The political significance of these ‘moves’ has to do with the fact that the young immigrants feel themselves ‘marginalized’ in relation to mainstream society, and that the implicit statements they are making by using SAE, signal what Rampton calls their “cognitive template” for multiracial interaction. As in the case of ESL learners, they know, on the one hand, that they need to learn the language in order to make headway in society; on the other hand, as we have seen time and again in the chapters of Part I, the ESL enterprise is vitiated from the very beginning by assumptions and implicit confirmations of authority. Whenever the native learners (or in this case, the ethnic users) are reminded of their status as dominated, this ‘template’ springs into effect, the trigger usually being of a language related kind. And inasmuch the status of the learners, as of the young immigrants in general, has everything to do with their (lack of) societal power, I would regard their use of SAB (especially since it is a ‘free’ choice) as an effort to deal with this powerlessness.

An analogy may be helpful. In dealing with, immigrants, ‘mainstreamers’ often use what is called ‘foreigner talk’ (or ‘Tarzanese’; Mey, 1985: 79): they speak a ‘simplified’ language (dropping articles, endings, inflections etc.) that they suppose is easier for the foreigner to understand. When Hussein, the Lebanese owner of a South Austin, Texas, car repair shop, wants to tell his Chinese welder, ‘Uncle Ahm’, that the subframe he is looking for to weld onto a wrecked car, already is available from another wreck, he uses typical ‘foreigner talk’:

“Hussein: Uncle Ahm! We got subframe here! Uncle Ahm: (unintelligible) Hussein: We have subframe same thing. Uncle Ahm: Same kind? Hussein: Same thing all. All this side same subframe. Uncle Ahm: Pontiac yeah? Hussein: Huh? Uncle Ahm: Pontiac huh? Hussein: Pontiac yeah but subframe the same. Uncle Ahm: (unintelligible) Hussein: Subframe the same.” (And so on: videotaped data collected and transcribed by Jtirgen Streeck; personal communication, 2001.

Using ‘foreigner talk’ to an immigrant shows one’s evaluation of the person as one who is not able to interact ‘normally’, that is, on the premises of the society he


or she lives in. And this has nothing to do with a user’s actual knowledge of the language in question, or his/her ability to speak it. Traveling on the (West) Berlin city railway, I once was witness to a native speaker interacting with a foreigner in a perfectly normal way, with both speaking the standard language (in this case German), until it suddenly dawned upon the native speaker (by the turn their conversation was taking) that his interlocutor was not German, but Turkish. At the drop of a hat, he then switched into ‘foreigner talk’, much to the dismay of his conversational partner. What the German speaker did here was to manifest his ‘social (mis)recognition’ of the non-native speaker in unmistakable and (probably politically motivated) debas- ing ways.

Similarly, when the young people in Rampton’s corpus start addressing their teachers or other personnel in heavy Panjabi accents, or using ‘foreignese’ (e.g. “excuse me Miss me no understanding”; p. 405), the implication is that they thereby ‘position’ their interlocutor as somebody who is supposed to use this kind of language to them; and preempting that, so to speak, they use the ‘inverse foreigner talk’ that the above sample shows. In this way, they deconstruct the negative power that is inherent in the mainstream speaker’s dialect; for this reason, one could label their SAE ‘foreigner talk to the negative power of one’ (just like the number Item, raised to the power of minus one, results in the inverse value of lone over ten1 : 10-l = l/10). The purpose of this ‘inverse’ use of the language could then be a ‘subversive’ “political socialization of the non-Panjabis”, as the author calls it (p. 413).

Concluding, the author points to the wider implications of adolescent participation in adult and same-age activities through unusual means. Using language is not just employing words: the words change and shape the world, as we all know. What this chapter beautifully illustrates is how the adolescents invite their interlocutors to “read their acts as symptoms” (p. 413). I would go two steps further, and say that reading the act us symptom is itself an act that has to be, and is read, in an environment such as the one sketched here, as politically meaningful. The meaning resides not only in the verbal interaction, but also, and mainly, in the way this interaction shapes the environment, here: the classroom or the youth club, or just ‘the gang hanging out’.

In addition, and this is a point well worth remembering, no response is without effect on the stimulus that has provoked it. Or, in other words, you don’t know what you’ve said until you’ve got an answer. 8 “Responses not only display the recipient’s understanding, they also retrospectively affect the first speaker’s own interpretation of the significance of what he or she has said” (p. 414). This also implies that the way we talk is not ‘over-determined’: there are always loopholes and escape hatches built into the maze of our discourse. And again, this reflects on the construction of our own identities, enabling us to “build forms of solidarity and identification that make common struggle and resistance possible without suppressing the real hetero- geneity of interests and identities” (p. 415; the quote is from Hall, 1988: 28). In this way, we may be coming a bit closer to solving the eternal dilemma inherent in the

’ In the words of the Danish linguist Hermann, talking about reader response to writing: “An author does not know what he has written until somebody has understood it for him.” (1990: 90)


‘voices of authority’ that speak to us through language, in particular in the case of ESL: to acknowledge the power-that-is without losing our soul to it.

5. Conclusion: The limits of education

Chapter 18 is entitled ‘Conclusion: Education in multilingual settings: Stakes, conditions and consequences’, written by the editors of the volume, Monica Heller and Marilyn Martin-Jones (pp. 419-424). In this chapter (which I suppose must be what the authors refer to as ‘Part IV’ of the book elsewhere (p. 7)), the authors draw together “a number of generalizations and raise a number of questions” (p. 419); and they emphasize that linguistic education is about much more than just how “to achieve linguistic proficiency” (ibid.). They identify three main themes emerging from the studies reported in the book; these are:

First, the eternal problem of collaboration vs. contestation. The ‘ritualized practices’ of interaction in education (having to do with such things as floors, footings, interactional practices and so on, mentioned earlier, p. 9) may be instrumental in the construction and use of social categories, but it still will be necessary to inquire into the conditions that determine and constrain those categories in action, that is to say, in the real life activities of collaborating with, or contesting, the educational-social order.

The second theme expands on the first: to what extent can we speak of a homogeneous social-educational order? Isn’t it rather the case that conflicting ideologies and interests cut through the educational continuum at various angles, as most clearly seen in cases where the dominance of the hegemonic language conflicts with the solidarity built into the use of the vernacular?

Third, the educational setting can clearly not be considered in splendid isolation. There are important and essential links to the community as a whole; the social categories that the school constructs and respects are not sufficient to explain, and deal with, the social order outside of the institution. In particular, the question of ‘whose language’ obtains legitimacy is an important one, and one that cannot be resolved in the context of the school alone, as most clearly demonstrated in the case of what was called ‘safetalk’ earlier (especially in Chapters 2 and 3).

Precisely the creation of ‘safe spaces’ in the school context points up one of the ambivalences that riddle second language education in a postcolonial or neocolonial setting. While such educational practices undoubtedly contribute to the production of ‘school knowledge’ (p. 421), they “may have the effect of erecting a barrier between the students’ lifeworld and the world of the school” (ibid.), thus reinforcing the mar- ginalization of the students that is taking place in society-at-large. But even the presence of a bona-fide, well-functioning vernacular that has obtained legitimacy in its own right is not sufficient to counterbalance the effects of these students’ marginal- ization vis-a-vis the dominant language and culture. And so the feeling that one’s language, no matter what, is not going to help one in later life, while the dominant language, in whatever guise: true colonial, postcolonial, or even an established vernacular variety, remains out of one’s reach (as is the case for at least the majority of


bilingual students), may lead to reactions of resistance such as those described in the chapters of Part III (the case of the Guarani ‘subversion’ described in Chapter 14 is particularly illuminating here).

An intriguing further perspective is that of the ‘social construction’ of identities through a chosen language, both for the “individual life trajectories” (p. 422) and for the ways that linguistic educational practices help establish and cement social orga- nizational principles, such as having to do with ethnicity, class, race, and so on, and expressed through officially recognized, or at least condoned, labels such as ‘immigrant’ vs. ‘native-born’ (note that ‘native’ usually implies a different categorization), ‘citizens’ vs. ‘aliens’, ‘indigenous’ vs. ‘civilized’, ‘allochthonous’ vs. ‘autochthonous , ’ ‘refugees’ vs. ‘residents’, and so on. But, as the authors say, a study of those wider aspects would entail “broaden[ing] the lens of school ethnography and also to link schooling to other arenas of social life” (p. 423).

It is precisely to those wider perspectives that I would like to devote some space, in a final overview of the book’s topics and how they relate to the authors’ professed aim: to “overcome the relations of inequality” (p. 424).

As the editors say in their ‘Introduction’ (subtitled: ‘Symbolic domination, education and linguistic difference’; pp. l-28), the volume is about multilingualism, and the various ways of developing it, especially in the schools. And the immediate con- tinuation and concretization of this problematic touches upon the educational sector as the place (a ‘key site’, as the editors call it; p. 3 and elsewhere) where one deals with the presence of several idioms that are unequal in many important respects, despite official proclamations to the contrary.

Central to the issue of multilingualism (as in general to that of language use) is the question who defines what is ‘good’ multilingualism (respectively ‘appropriate’, legitimate (use of) language; Fairclough, 1995). In other (to wit, the editors’ own) words, “in whose interests is it to be bilingual or multilingual?” (p. 26). In times when the word ‘bilingual’ in some languages (e.g. Danish) has become almost synonymous with ‘problematic’, ‘ill-adapted’, etc.),9 the issue of ‘good’ bilingualism is intimately connected to the question of who defines the concept and its use, or, as the editors query, “Who says people should learn which language varieties and why? ” (ibid.).

In formulating their suggestion for an answer, the editors draw heavily on Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of ‘symbolic domination’. In the present context, this domination is one that “masks its concrete sources, that works because it appears not to work” (p. 6); lo and it works precisely “by convincing all participants in an activity

y In a recent article in Mugisterbladet (the official organ of the Danish university teachers’ union; No. 4, February 2001, p. 8), the term ‘bilingual’ (tosproget) is used synonymously with ‘of immigrant descent’. And the circumstance that many of these people (if they enter university at all) choose the technical or scientific disciplines, is explained by the fact that the ‘bilinguals’ do not have a sufficient command of Danish to participate fully in a ‘humanistic’ discussion. Throughout the article, being ‘bilingual’ is seen as a handicap, not a resource. In the populist discourse of the Danish tabloid press, ‘bilingual youth’ has almost become a synonym of ‘gang member’. I0 The intended reading probably is: ‘because it does not work in an obvious way’. But there could be a hidden pun here (in the sense of: ‘apparently, it doesn’t work - but actually, it does’).


that the rules that are, in fact, defined by one group are natural, normal, universal, and objective, and that it is in everyone’s interests to accept those rules” (ibid.). It is this very ‘naturalization’ (as Fairclough calls it; 1995) that makes symbolic domination so insidious: it all happens behind our backs, so to say, the ideologies becoming “invisible” (Fairclough, 1995: 42). Or, in the immortal phrase coined by Marx, commenting on the ‘natural’ exploitation of the workers by the capitalists: “They do it, but they don’t know it”; the truth being hidden from their eyes, or ‘veiled’, as I have called it in an earlier work (Mey, 1985: Ch. 3).

In the same vein, the editors are right to point out that there is no intrinsic ‘natural’ quality to hegemonic discourses, but that we have to look at how these discourses are interactionally constructed, as the ethnomethodologists always have insisted. Even so, the interactional viewpoint has its limitations, inasmuch as it does not raise the question of why such discourses are hegemonic in the first place, or “why people make the interactional moves they make” (p. 6, my italics). Here, the question of the social motivations of, and constraints on, the societal actors comes to the fore: what underlies the interaction cannot be explained, let alone constructed, by the interaction itself. No discourse can be ascribed uniquely to the individual, or to individuals acting together; in all interaction, society is the ‘sleeping partner’ (Mey, 1985: 336).

Such a viewpoint has consequences when we start looking at what people actually can do with their bilingualism, and how we should deal with the problems inherent in bringing the dominated ‘up’ to linguistic proficiency in the dominant language. Will they, once ‘up there’, remain solidary with their erstwhile co-dominees? Will co-optation limit contestation? Is there, in other words, any truly emancipator-y perspective in training people to emulate ‘Their Masters’ Voice’, by teaching them the ‘voices of authority’?

And what about language itself? Is it just a ‘medium of instruction’, to be changed at will in accordance with the prevailing political situation (as it is happening now in former colonial Hong Kong; see Chapter 9, above, and cf. Tsui et al., 1999)? Or is it (as in the case of the ‘postcolonial’ dominant languages) a resource in a deeper sense than just being part of a ‘cosmopolitan’ personality, an access to wealth and influence, a “ladder to success” (Tsui et al., 1999: 217)? The editors remark (aptly, in my view) that language, being a “central form of social action”, should not be regarded in vucuo, or as the abstract property of some, even more abstractly constructed, body (as in classical sociology’s concepts of nation, people, class, etc.; cf. p. 12). Language needs to be problematized: granted that it is a resource, the question is who puts this resource to work, who controls it, and who is the ‘gatekeeper’ permitting interaction and ‘resource work’ to take place.

A simple analogy will illustrate this. Following an example given by Rothleder (writing about Richard Rorty and his notion of ‘friendship’), imagine that you and your friend are looking for a house to buy or rent. The point is that if you do not belong to the same social formation (class, race, even religion), it may be very difficult to engage in this interaction, or even speak about the project that you say or think you are going to undertake. Yet there can be friendship, provided each party knows the boundaries of the other (Rothleder, 1999: 137).

J.L. h4ey I Journal of Pragmatics 34 (2002) 28.5-330 329

These boundaries are linguistically ‘in-vested’, that is to say, they are ‘clad’ in language (cf. Latin vestis ‘(piece of) clothing’); but language is not the whole game. But neither is the ‘social fatalism’ that Martin-Jones and Heller refer to, as if the discourse of the schools “[were] only about reproducing relations of power” (p. 11). Quite the contrary: “change is possible through the contestation of the interactional and hence of the institutional order”, although, as the authors sagaciously remark, “the consequences may be hard to live with” (ibid.; my emphasis).

It follows that ‘symbolic domination’, as outlined by Bourdieu and his followers, in reality is a Janus-like concept: on the one hand, we do have domination (based on class interests and production relations, as Marx has taught us), but on the other hand, because the domination is symbolic, happening in and through language, we can (and must) use language to defeat its own purpose. “What comes without saying goes without saying”, as Bourdieu himself remarks (1977: 167).

And this is more than a facile quip: ‘What goes up [in language] must come down [in language]‘, in order not to ‘melt into [thin] air’ (to vary another contemporary practical philosopher, Berman (cf. the title of his book; 1982). It is true that symbolic domination is successful because it pretends not to be; a case of ‘how to suc- ceed in business without really trying’, as popular yuppie handbooks for ‘making it’ have it. At the same time, however, this opens this particular domination’s vuhrera- ble flank to ‘symbolic’ attacks: if we stay in the play, the symbols will win out in the end, and friendship will prevail, because “you can’t say you can’t play”, in educator Paley’s (1990) catchy phrase, around which Rothleder builds her book on Rorty and the philosophy of ‘friendship as work’. What goes up through language must come down in language: the knots that language ties in action, can be undone by action through language, in a wider setting of ‘pragmatic acts’ (Mey, 2001: Ch. 8) of friendship and other socially optimistic endeavors.

This, then, in my view, is the ultimate, encouraging message of the collection by Martin-Jones and Heller: viz., that ‘problematizing language’ (cf. p. 12) pays off, because discourse is a social problematic, not just a personal one. The first step towards solving a problem is to ask the right questions; doing that will often make the problem vanish. What came without saying, as a thief in the night, will disappear without saying, without an idle word being wasted, like an impostor leaving town by the back gate. And if anybody wants to know what are the questions that have to be raised in order to undo these social and linguistic knots, let him or her refer to the catalogue at the end of the editors’ ‘ Introduction’ (p. 26), where enough work is outlined to keep us busy throughout, if not the new millennium, at least the present century.

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