Roxy Harris

The Idealised Native Speaker, Reified Ethnicities, and Classroom Realities

TESOL practice in the schooling sector in England has implicitly assumed that ESL students are linguistic and social outsiders and that there is a neat one-to-one correspondence between ethnicity and language. This perspective has tended to conceptualise L2 learners as a linguistically diverse group (from non-English-speaking backgrounds) but with similar language learning needs. However, demographic and social changes in the past 30 years have rendered such assumptions inadequate and misleading, particularly in multiethnic urban areas. In this article we seek to (a) offer an alternative account of the classroom realities in contemporary multilingual schools where the linguistic profiles and language learning needs of ESL students are not easily understood in terms of fixed concepts of ethnicity and language; (b) draw on recent developments in cultural theory to clarify the shifting and changing relationship among ethnicity, social identity, and language use in the context of postcolonial diaspora; and (c) question the pedagogical relevance of the notion of native speaker and propose that instead TESOL professionals should be concerned with questions about language expertise, language inheritance, and language affiliation.

Creole metaphors in cultural analysis: On the limits and possibilities of (socio-) linguistics

It is sometimes suggested that creole language study provides important concepts and metaphors for the analysis of cultural processes within globalization and transnational flow. This article argues, however, that although it may have served as a useful heuristic in certain cases, most of creole linguistics has been grounded in a set of assumptions and procedures that now look increasingly doubtful, both within linguistics and anthropology more generally. After some critical comments on politics and methodology within this subdisciplinary area, there is an overview of the challenge presented by a number of larger shifts in language study, and the article concludes with a socio-linguistic analysis of situated interaction which, we argue, provides a much better framework for understanding the dynamics of syncretic practice than the study of creole grammar.1

Ethnicities Without Guarantees: An Empirical Approach

What can the close study of everyday interactional life in a multi-ethnic urban setting reveal to us about contemporary ethnicity? Both in public debate and social science research over the last 50 years or so in the UK, the discussion of race and ethnicity has centred on conflict, discrimination, racism/anti-racism, equal opportunities policies and so on, placing ongoing struggle between clearly demarcated dominant and subordinated racial and ethnic groups in the foreground. In the process, overwhelming attention has been given to explicit (and often sincere) propositions and statements, whether these are the utterances or labels produced by social actors in the public arena (e.g. the 2006 Jade Goody/Shilpa Shetty controversy on British TV’s ‘Big Brother’), the views expressed by research subjects in qualitative interviews, or the conclusions drawn by quantitative survey research about race/ethnicity and differential outcomes in, for example, educational achievement.

Multilingualism in England

A great deal has happened in the study and understanding of multilingualism in England since it was last considered in ARAL (Reid 1985). To examine these changes, this review will concentrate on the dynamic and contested relationships among 1) educational policy, 2) academic discourse, and 3) everyday sociolinguistic practice. Our account is limited to England and to its newer heritage languages; due to limitations of space, it also does not provide any detailed discussion of particular languages. For fuller sociolinguistic discussion of thirty one of these, we refer the reader to Alladina and Edwards (1991), a major step forwards in the documentation of linguistic diversity in the British Isles which provides an idea of the wide but uneven spread of multilingualism across a range of institutional sites (including, for example, press and broadcasting as well as education).

Openings, absences and omissions: Aspects of the treatment of ‘race’, culture and ethnicity in British cultural studies

Abstract British cultural studies has, in an innovative and exciting way over the last three or four decades, opened up spaces for the serious analysis of many aspects of culture, including those inextricably related to questions of ‘race’, ethnicity and subordinated groups in urban environments in Britain. However, there have been a number of weaknesses and omissions with regard to Britains black, Caribbean-descended population. Some of these are possibly the result of earlier, unresolved theoretical and methodological disputes within the field of cultural studies; others stem, perhaps, from an over-reliance on approaches arising out of youth subcultural analytical frameworks. Consequently, less than the required attention has been paid to the active cultures of achievement developed by the adult, black working-class population of Caribbean descent in Britain from the 1950s to the 1990s.

BLACK BRITISH, BROWN BRITISH AND BRITISH CULTURAL STUDIES

Caryl Phillips has queried the absence, in British fiction of the 1950s and 1960s, of black and brown people from the British Commonwealth who had migrated to the UK in highly significant numbers in this period. His lament echoes earlier observations by Paul Gilroy critiquing similar ‘strategic silences’ in the work of the widely recognized major figures in British Cultural Studies – Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams and E.P. Thompson. However, puzzlingly, Gilroy appears to exempt Stuart Hall from this critique, despite Halls exceptionally close connections to the three others. This article argues that, rather than being a matter for recriminations against individuals, the ‘strategic silences’ are part of a long and deep tradition in the serious analysis of Anglo-British culture. It is further claimed that this tradition continued in a different way even after the entry of ‘race’ and ethnicity into British Cultural Studies, and even after its later anti-essentialist manifestation. It is suggested that, throughout, a marked reluctance to engage with ordinary black and brown Britons as agentive speaking subjects is discernible. There has been some progress in resolving these problems by aligning the rich theoretical legacy of Hall, Gilroy and others on ‘race’ and ethnicity, with careful empirical work centring black and brown people as thinking social actors. However, these developments have been limited and slow to appear.