Kathleen Heugh

Dreams and realities: developing countries and the English language

are so many other polities from where contributions could have come from. In sum, English medium instruction at universities tells us stories of EMI from across the world. Underlying the stories are lessons for policy-makers and practitioners for doing EMI safely. However, it is not explicit how the book contributes to LPP in which the volume seems to be embedded nor how it takes the field forward. In the two chapters by the editors, there was the opportunity to engage with these issues, but this did not occur, as these chapters are rather short, and are used mostly for description, summary and for drawing practical lessons thereby concealing the empirical insights generated by some of the polity studies.

Into the cauldron: An interplay of indigenous and globalised knowledge with strong and weak notions of literacy and language education in Ethiopia and South Africa

Abstract This article draws attention to a long, pre-colonial as well as contemporary history of successes in mother-tongue literacy and bi/multilingual educational provision in Africa. Two case studies of literacy and language education in Ethiopia and South Africa are presented in order to demonstrate, even under resource-poor conditions, that it is possible to provide bilingual and multilingual education in Africa. System-wide studies in Ethiopia show that such opportunities, developed as a response to the domestic needs of an African country, deliver more successful learning outcomes than do second-language, monolingually driven systems. The South African example shows that although there is a multilingual education policy intent, its application is impelled towards expensive monolingual imperatives which draw on contemporary, external-to-Africa debates on education. Such imperatives have not brought the anticipated educational rewards – rather, the reverse. The data from the case-studies are sufficiently compelling to show that neo- and post-colonial obfuscation in education is outdated.

Epistemologies in Multilingual Education: Translanguaging and Genre--Companions in Conversation with Policy and Practice.

This paper draws attention to the central concern of authors in this issue, which is to offer translanguaging and genre theory as two promising pedagogical responses to education systems characterised by linguistic as well as socio-economic diversity. It also draws attention to the agency of teachers in the processes of engaging with the linguistic diversity of students. What lies at the heart of current provision of multilingual education in South Africa, the site of concern for most of the authors in this volume, is a systemic failure to engage productively with the linguistic and knowledge repertoires of students. On the one hand, there is misunderstanding of multilingualism in southern contexts and the countrys multilingual education policy; on the other hand, there is a reluctance to engage with multilingualism within curriculum and assessment delivery. Translanguaging and genre, although conceptually originating from North Atlantic and Australian contexts, may well offer opportunities for students in southern contexts to expand their own linguistic repertoires and to bridge epistemological difference between community and school.

Multilingual Education Policy in South Africa Constrained by Theoretical and Historical Disconnections

Multilingual education policy has been a controversial affair in South Africa, especially over the last 60 years. Recent research conducted by government-led and independent agencies shows declining student achievement within an education system that employs 11 home languages for education in the first three grades of primary school, followed by a transition to English medium for the majority (approximately 80%) of speakers of African languages. Research that focuses on the linguistic practices of students in urban settings suggests that there is a disjuncture between the construction of multilingualism within contemporary education policy and the multilingual reality of students (e.g., Heugh, 2003; Makoni, 2003; Makoni & Pennycook, 2012; Plüddemann, 2013; Probyn, 2009; Stroud & Heugh, 2011). There is also a disjunction between constitutional and other government policies that advance, on paper, a multilingual policy, yet are implemented through an assimilatory drive towards English (Alexander & Heugh, 1999). As predicted nearly two decades ago, the ideological framing of multilingualism during the negotiations in the early 1990s was to have consequences for the way in which language policy would unfold in the education sector over the next 20 to 30 years (Heugh, 1995, 1999). While poor student achievement in school may be ascribed to a range of socioeconomic indicators, this article draws attention to contributory factors that relate to language(s) in education. These include different constructions of multilingualism in education in relation to sociolinguistic and educational linguistic considerations, contradictory interpretations of multilingual education in a series of education policy documents, pedagogical weaknesses, and recent attempts to strengthen the provision of African languages education alongside English in the first 10 years of school (Grades R and 0–9; e.g., Department of Basic Education (DBE), 2013a, 2013b).

Turbulence and dilemma: implications of diversity and multilingualism in Australian education

An international interest in multilingualism and multilingual education has burgeoned since the turn of the twenty-first century, accompanying apparently significant changes in the physical and virtual mobilities of people, international frameworks, and commitments and goals for socially just education. It has also accompanied major political changes including the unbundling of the Soviet Union and the forging of the European Union. Amongst the social, political and economic turmoil, the visibility of language minority communities has resurfaced as an issue in Europe and North America, while UNESCOs concerns for the Millennium Development Goals, including universal primary education, literacy, school retention and quality education, have exerted pressure on each signatory country to comply with internationally agreed obligations. Australia, recognised internationally as having introduced innovative and progressive language policy in the 1980s, followed by particularly strong language services and language maintenance programmes for migrant community languages in the early 1990s, met with administrative anomie by the mid-1990s. This has led to a trajectory that turned away from linguistic diversity and multilingualism. An attempt is made in this paper to identify the contemporary trends in multilingualism and multilingual education that may inform a repositioning and reconnection with the international debates, particularly as these have relevance to inappropriate and inadequate responses to Indigenous language communities in the country.

Productive engagement with linguistic diversity in tension with globalised discourses in Ethiopia

Language policy and planning tension, between concerns for ethnolinguistic self-determination and the accommodation of plurality on the one hand and participation in global discourses on the other hand, characterises the last two decades of debate in Ethiopia. The discussion in this paper draws attention to linguistically diverse language planning processes in Ethiopia, one of the poorest countries of the world. In particular, it will demonstrate that clear policy and guidelines from above, when unfettered by an over-emphasis of Western models, and coupled with decentralised implementation, allow some degree of localised language planning, or language planning from below. Such practice may result in surprisingly swift and diverse regional responses which accommodate linguistic pluralism over a 10–15-year time frame (early 1990s to 2004/2005). Decentralisation of educational authority to 11 Regional Education Bureaus in Ethiopia has served to encourage capacity-building and increase local and regional participation in educational and language planning and development activities. However, in the absence of clearly formulated implementation plans at the federal level, a change in political leadership with a turn towards ‘international’ advisors and educational models demonstrates the vulnerability of regional and locally implemented policy. In the Ethiopian case, the goal of linguistic diversity has become obscured by the allure of English, and there has been a ‘washback effect’ of this through the system, effectively reversing earlier progressive achievements in the expansion of multilingual education throughout the country.

Discourses from without, discourses from within: women, feminism and voice in Africa

Discourses of development, education, gender, feminism and critical linguistics arrive in Africa from usually well-meaning but often opportunistic agents from other contemporary socio-political and economic contexts. Each of these forms a new layer that veils the earlier discourses and practices. Simultaneously, people in Africa are (re-)positioned as inarticulate; without literacy, literary traditions or education; living in poverty; and thus dependent upon the more ‘developed world’. Women are further positioned as subject to unmediated cultural or religious practices of the African man. Since women clearly lack voice and agency, they need ‘to be spoken for’ or require the intellectual assistance of development agencies, followed soon after by feminist scripts of the centre. These are most often in the international languages of wider communication, which for most women in Africa are at once alluring but impenetrable or undelivering of promised socio-economic or political capital. In this article, counter-hegemonic voice, agency and assertion of linguistic and other forms of citizenship demonstrate that the discourses from without lack the temporal and spatial subtlety required to gauge the business of women in Africa. Often unwittingly, they contrive instead to re-marginalise women.

Language Education Policies in Africa

This article identifies language education policies in Africa and their relationship to development and post-colonial issues. Major language commissions, declarations, reports, and policies concur that the use of indigenous languages in school, alongside a language of wider communication, facilitates education. Yet, with few exceptions, in African schools, indigenous languages are ignored or removed rapidly from classroom learning. Mother-tongue language policies are seldom implemented. Instead, the colonial habitus continues. Policies see-saw between greater and lesser tolerance of African languages, depending on the political party in power.

Educational responses to multilingualism: an introduction

Linguistic and cultural diversity is a feature of most, if not all, modern societies, whether it results from historical processes of state formation, from the aggregation of colonial possessions and their subsequent independence or from human mobility. Diversity therefore shapes the context in which education occurs and the processes through which teaching and learning happen. However, educational systems understand and respond to diversity in different ways. This volume focuses on contemporary implications of linguistic and cultural diversity for education at school level and in higher education. It recognises that different countries and regions have experienced diversity in education at different times and in different ways. In some cases, diversity has become a new, immediate concern for education systems that are unprepared for it, while for others it is the age-old backdrop against which education has been developed. It also recognises that educational responses to diversity change over time and that different countries and regions have different histories of involvement with diversity. The recent increase of diversity in Europe, for example, has produced a sense of urgency, with European educational systems planning for some form of productive coexistence of different linguistic and cultural groups. Despite a parallel increase in diversity in Australia, a similar sense of urgency does not seem to play a role in the education system. In fact, in Australia educational responses to diversity have a longer history, but education seems to have refocused away from linguistic diversity towards a narrower monolingualism. On the other hand, while recognition of diversity in both Europe and Australia is relatively recent, countries in South Asia and Africa have been engaged with the management and mismanagement of diversity in education for centuries. Each of these contexts has a chance to learn from these different histories, trajectories and experiences of linguistic diversity in education. The articles in this volume survey the issue of educational responses to linguistic diversity from a range of perspectives. Each examines a different aspect of education and the role for languages within education. Some engage with general issues, while others examine specific cases. They show educational responses to linguistic diversity to be both complex and problematic and in so doing raise issues for consideration in framing debates around the relationship between linguistic and cultural diversity and education. In their article, Liddicoat and Curnow examine the issues that influence how policy documents position non-dominant languages in schooling. They argue that the curriculum is a space constrained by prevailing ideologies and discourses about languages that consign non-dominant languages to marginalised positions in schooling. These discourses find their origins in monolingual understandings of the nation state: as nation states view schooling as an instrument of state formation, monolingual understandings of the nature of the state inevitably shape education as a monolingual, or rather monolingualising, environment. They also argue that in any society prevailing language ideologies influence the ways that particular languages are seen as being valued or valid for particular purposes and that discourses that construct non-dominant languages as being less ‘useful’ International Journal of Multilingualism, 2014 Vol. 11, No. 3, 269–272, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14790718.2014.921174

Mobility, migration and sustainability: re-figuring languages in diversity

Abstract Global migratory patterns bring about significant changes in the linguistic and cultural ecologies at the local level in both the North and the South. These changes have coincided, for example, with attempts to fashion a European Union via complex legal and administrative instruments in the North. However, political change and conflict result in dislocation and mobility at individual and large-scale community levels. These become apparent through tension exhibited in social networks and structures which are at once centripetal and centrifugal (e.g. Lo Bianco 2010). Change is thus a function of ever evolving diversity as well as of new configurations of structures of restraint (e.g. Foucault 1977; Bourdieu 1991). Debates within Europe, including “super-diversity” (Vertovec 2007), may offer a lens on discourses accompanying change in Australia, located in the geographic South, but with ambivalent aspirations towards the North. Migration from Africa, the Middle East/Afghanistan and Asia brings tangible, unequal movements in the local ecological landscape. As elsewhere, increasing diversification expels urbanized anxiety while civil and public layered responses exert pressure towards both divergence and convergence. Changing identities and “linguistic citizenship” (Stroud 2001) emerge in local narratives of attempts to widen or close spatial divides, and in seams of language shift, maintenance and sustainability.