Bilingual Education and Socio‐Political Issues

Abstract

The term 'socio-political issues' is a superordinate category in applied linguistics collecting together discussions of power within the disci-pline. Socio invokes the setting, including culture; political introduces considerations of power, interests and conflict, while issues casts a wide net of applications and problems. Recently, theorists of realpolitik have introduced the term soft power into their descriptions of world affairs and global conflict. In contrast to the more easily recognised hard power, which suggests coercion (revealing its origins in economic might or military force), soft power operates through persuasion to attract the neutral and neutralise the hos-tile (Nye, 2004). Because language in society performs multiple func-tions socio-political issues involve applied linguists in the complex 'discourses of power' (Hindess, 1996) that have occupied political philosophy from ancient times. Bilingual education involves both soft and hard power consequences. This paper addresses some intersections among bilingual education, power and politics, discussing both theoretical advances and some actual case studies. Bilingual education arises mostly in multilingual societies in which various languages are ranked sociopolitically and economically. However, immersion education and foreign language teaching, even in essentially monolingual societies, can also be subject to socio-political critique since elite investment in prestigious foreign language competence can entrench asymmetrical social status in society. Monolingual and multilingual societies can also give rise to 'socio-political issues' not related to different languages at all. In such cases intra-language issues can produce conflict, e.g. over privileging particular dialects in language standardisation (Haugen, 1966) or selec-tions of orthographic conventions (Chen, 2001). However, the present discussion mostly addresses bilingual education in multilingual con-texts. The language ecologies in which most bilingual education occurs involve relations between minority and majority groups. The minorities can be speakers of regional, immigrant or indigenous (autochthonous) languages, contrasted with majorities speaking and identifying with socially dominant or officially designated languages. Many streams of thought and action have contributed to debates and understandings of bilingual education today. In the decolonising con-text of the 1950s and 1960s new African and Asian countries were guided by an influential United Nations Educational Scientific and Cul-tural Organization (UNESCO, 1953) declaration supporting vernacular languages over inherited colonial languages as media of instruction, claiming that it was 'axiomatic' that the best teaching language is a child's mother tongue (MT). Research findings from evaluations of bilingual education have long been linked with socio-political debates. During the late 1960s contro-versy erupted concerning the appropriate staging of instructional language for immigrant children in Scandinavia. In a 1976 report to the Finnish National Commission for UNESCO on the educational pros-pects of Finnish immigrant children in Sweden, Skutnabb-Kangas and Toukomaa (1976) pointed out that immigrant children's verbal fluency in their MT was related to their rate of acquisition of Swedish, suggest-ing that such children's 'semilingualism' denied them educational equality. The writers recommended that the MT should be bolstered in the interests of both the languages of the child, and his or her general academic development. The issue had arisen from a paper (Hansegard, 1975, cited in Skutnabb-Kangas, 1981), which had described some children from dual-language backgrounds as having deficient competencies in school-appropriate intellectual functioning compared with monolin-gual counterparts. These 'deficiencies' seemed to hold back bilingual children because they were seen to command a smaller lexical range, to take time translating between their languages and therefore to be slow in giving replies in class, and to possess a limited expressive range. Skutnabb-Kangas (1981) described this as 'double' semilingualism provoking extensive discussion about the importance of MT literacy and language capability beyond domestic domains and settings. For Skutnabb-Kangas 'double semilingualism is one of the ways in which the shortcomings of the school system are projected on to the individual child' (1981, p. 249). A commonly recommended response to this problem was for extended schooling in the MT, provoking intense opposition from interests hostile to continuous and long-term use of minority lan-guages in mainstream education, especially prominently in the USA (Crawford, 2002). The Scandinavian reports also provoked criticism of the semilingualism notion from sociolinguists. In a robust critique Martin-Jones and Romaine (1986) described semilingualism as socio-linguistically untenable, arguing that even when a child does not speak 36