Sue Creagh

Education policy as numbers: Data categories and two Australian cases of misrecognition

While numbers, data and statistics have been part of the bureaucracy since the emergence of the nation state, the paper argues that the governance turn has seen the enhancement of the significance of numbers in policy. The policy as numbers phenomenon is exemplified through two Australian cases in education policy, linked to the national schooling reform agenda. The first case deals with the category of students called Language Backgrounds Other than English (LBOTE) in Australian schooling policy – students with LBOTE. The second deals with the ‘closing the gap’ approach to Indigenous schooling. The LBOTE case demonstrates an attempt at recognition, but one that fails to create a category useful for policy-makers and teachers in relation to the language needs of Australian students. The Indigenous case of policy misrecognition confirms Gillborn’s analysis of gap talk and its effects; a focus on closing the gap, as with the new politics of recognition, elides structural inequalities and the historical effects of colonisation. With this case, there is a misrecognition that denies Indigenous knowledges, epistemologies and cultural rights. The contribution of the paper to policy sociology is twofold: first in showing how ostensive politics of recognition can work as misrecognition with the potential to deny redistribution and secondly that we need to be aware of the socially constructed nature of categories that underpin contemporary policy as numbers and evidence-based policy.

Language Background Other than English: A Problem NAPLAN Test Category for Australian Students of Refugee Background.

Since 2008 Australia has held the National Assessment Program: Literacy and Numeracy (known as NAPLAN) for all students in years 3, 5, 7 and 9. Despite the multilingual character of the Australian population, these standardized literacy and numeracy tests are built on an assumption of English as a first language competency. The capacity for monitoring the performance of students who speak languages other than English is achieved through the disaggregation of test data using a category labelled Language Background Other than English (LBOTE). A student is classified as LBOTE if they or their parents speak a language other than English at home. The category definition is so broad that the disaggregated national data suggest that LBOTE students are outperforming English speaking students, on most test domains, though the LBOTE category shows greater variance of results. Drawing on Foucault’s theory of governmentality, this article explores the possible implications of LBOTE categorisation for English as a Second Language (ESL) students of refugee background. The article uses a quantitative research project, carried out in Queensland, Australia, to demonstrate the potential inequities resultant from such a poorly constructed data category.

Multiple ways of speaking back to the monolingual mindset

Understanding how research disciplines have contributed to the study of second language acquisition (SLA) is essential context for appreciating the relevance of Stephen May’s edited collection, The Multilingual Turn: Implications for SLA, TESOL and Bilingual Education. The aim of this review essay is to contextualise May’s book within the broader shifting orientations of SLA theory, and to highlight how each of the contributors provides insight into most recent emerging trends within the field. Why is this book important? A central debate in the field of SLA rests on whether the process of acquiring an additional language is measured against monolingual native speaker competencies, or whether multilingualism might be viewed as a legitimate ‘alternative bilingual perspective’ (Cook, 2016). The implications of the latter are profound for education systems in which standardised testing and measures of student performance are normed on monolingualism (Creagh, 2014). Each chapter in the book contributes to the view of bi/multilingualism as multicompetence (Cook, 1999, 2016) and has much to contribute to theoretical and practical understandings of SLA. SLA refers to the field of study concerned with learning a second language once a first language has been established (Ortega, 2009). The field of SLA was established in the 1960s and has an interdisciplinary history, initially bringing together language teaching, linguistics, child language acquisition and psychology; and more recently, bilingualism, education, anthropology and sociology (Cook, 2008; Ortega, 2009). These various disciplines sit within SLA and are interested in the process and endpoints of second language (L2) acquisition. The most mainstream of the SLA disciplines, cognitive-interactionist perspectives, have, since the 1980s, recognised second language learning as a process which involves an interaction between the internal ‘cognitive’ processes of the learner and their external environment. Cognitive accounts of language learning are concerned with the way in which the human mind processes second language learning, whilst environmental factors might include the types of input the learner receives, the opportunities and settings in which output is produced, the attitude the learner holds towards learning the

A critical analysis of the Language Background Other Than English (LBOTE) category in the Australian national testing system: a Foucauldian perspective

Abstract This article presents a Foucauldian analysis of the political rationalities of national testing and accountability practices in Australia, and their inconsistencies for students for whom English is a second or additional language. It focuses on a problem associated with the statistical data category ‘Language Background Other Than English’ (LBOTE) in the Australian national testing system. There is large variation in the performance of LBOTE students, but the average score of the group serves to homogenise the category and silence the association between language and test performance. Using Foucault’s ideas about governmentality and disciplinary power, this article examines the technologies of power evident in the Australian education reforms, in order to challenge a particular version of reality, created by the LBOTE category. The impact of disciplinary power on English as a Second Language (ESL) teachers is signalled, as they navigate the dual demands of meeting education accountabilities whilst supporting high needs ESL learners. This article challenges the idea that current accountabilities are able to address the goal of equity for all Australian students, rather suggesting that a focus on test performance, represented by statistical categories like LBOTE, undermines implementation of specialist pedagogy, and demands that teachers transform their practice to satisfy systemic need rather than student need.