TESOL Scotland 21st Annual Conference Proceedings
15th November 2003, University of Abertay Dundee
"Englishes - Whose English?"
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Plenary 2: Language Planning for Educational and Social Change
Rebecca Freeman Field (Language Education Division, Caslon Publishing and Consulting, USA)
This presentation was based on Rebecca Freeman Field's research and practice with ESL, bilingual, and mainstream teachers, administrators, and policymakers in the United States and internationally. She emphasized that educators have choices in the ways that they organize their programs and practices for English language learners (ELLs), and the choices they make have implications for the students and communities they serve.
Because there is some conflict and controversy over terminology used in the field, the speaker began by explaining her use of the term English language learner or ELL. She uses the term ELL generically to refer to any student who comes from a home where one or more languages other than English are used, and who is learning English as an additional language. The ELL may live in an English-speaking society (e.g., in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand), or in a society in which English is not one of the languages used for wider communication (e.g., Italy, China, Brazil, Morocco) [1]. That ELL may be a child or an adult, and he or she may be enrolled in a primary, secondary, university, or adult education program. That ELL may need to learn social, academic, and/or workplace English to meet his or her short-term and longer-range goals, and he or she may or may not have a strong language, literacy, and educational background in his or her home language(s). Field emphasized that an English language learner's opportunities to acquire English are strongly influenced by his or her prior language, literacy, and educational experiences, and by the nature of the learning contexts that educators create. This means that educators who work with ELLs must think carefully about their students' strengths and needs, and critically about their educational policies, programs, and practices.
The speaker then provided a brief theoretical orientation that highlighted the important role that schools play as socializing agents. She referred to ethnographic research on (language) minority students in schools to argue that schools can either reflect and perpetuate the dominant social order, or challenge and potentially transform that social order. Her examples from research on language minority students in mainstream schools showed that mainstream schools are constituted by policies, programs, and practices that 1) privilege white middle class standard English speakers and the languages they speak, 2) see languages other than standard English and speakers of those languages as problems to be overcome, and 3) limit (language) minority students' access to educational opportunities (e.g., Heath, 1983; Philips, 1983; Ruiz, 1984). She also referred to the growing body of research that illustrates how educators at some schools have chosen to develop policies, programs, and practices that positively evaluate linguistic and cultural diversity, and that provide more opportunities to (language) minority students than have traditionally been available to them (e.g., Freeman, 1998; see Freeman, 2004 for review of this literature).
Field built on this theoretical orientation in the second part of the presentation, and she provided a series of guiding questions for educators to use as they consider how their own schools' language policies, programs, and practices shape the kinds of opportunities they make available to their students. Drawing on her work with school-based teams in the United States and in Europe, Field described a self-study process in which educators work together and ask themselves:
- Who are our students? What are their language and education backgrounds, strengths, and needs?
- What are our goals? Do we want our ELLs to maintain and develop expertise in their home languages while they learn English? What kinds of spoken and written English (and/or other languages) do we want them to learn?
- What is currently happening at our school (in terms of language policy, program structure, organization of classroom practice, assessments, outcomes) relative to our goals?
- What challenges, ideological and practical, do we face as we work toward our goals?
- How can we address those challenges?
As teams of educators explore the strengths and needs of their students, clarify their goals, and think critically about their policies, programs, and practices, they can identify the specific challenges that they face. More importantly, they can make informed choices about how they can address those challenges based on a realistic understanding of their particular sociolinguistic and school context and on a solid research base about language teaching and learning. Field emphasized that this is not a simple or straightforward process, but a recursive process that takes time, energy, and commitment.
When educators identify policies, programs, and/or practices that limit their ELLs' opportunities (e.g., policies that exclude languages other than English or non-standard varieties of English; a curriculum that excludes minority contributions, perspectives, histories, literatures; classroom organizations that do not give ELLs opportunities to speak and participate as equals; assessment practices that identify student deficits), they can work together to create alternatives that build on the linguistic and cultural strengths that students bring with them to school. Field provided examples of some of the ways that she has worked with school-based teams to create such alternatives (see Freeman, 2004 for extensive discussion) in ESL and bilingual education programs. She concluded the presentation by advocating language planning for educational and social change on the local school and community levels in other contexts, and addressed audience questions about how they could begin work toward this end in their own schools.
References
Freeman, R. (1998). Bilingual Education and Social Change. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters
Freeman, R. (2004). Building on Community Bilingualism. Philadelphia, PA: Caslon Publishing
Heath, S.B. (1983)Ways with Words: Language, Life, and Work in Communities and Classrooms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Philips, S.U. (1983) The Invisible Culture: Communication in the Classroom and Community on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation. New York: Longman
Ruíz, R. (1984). Orientations in language planning. NABE Journal, 8(2), 15-34
Footnotes:
[1] Field's use of the term ELL thus includes the terms English as a second language (ESL), English as an additional language (EAL) and English as a foreign language (EFL) as they are generally used in the literature. The terms ESL and EFL have traditionally been used to distinguish the societal contexts in which the ELLs learn English: ESL students learn English as a second language in an English-speaking society and EFL students learn English as a foreign language in a society in which English is not a primary language. While the term ESL is still common in the United States, in the United Kingdom it is being increasingly replaced by the term EAL. This latter term reflects the recognition that ELLs may come to school speaking more than one home language, and it highlights the goal of adding English to the students' linguistic repertoire rather than replacing the home language with English. (back to text)
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