Multilingual Literacies: Reading and Writing Different Worlds (Studies in Written Language & Literacy)

MULTILINGUAL LITERACIES

STUDIES IN WRITTEN LANGUAGE AND LITERACY EDITORS BRIAN STREET King’s College, London

LUDO VERHOEVEN Nijmegen University

ASSOCIATE EDITORS FLORIAN COULMAS DANIEL WAGNER Chuo University, Tokyo University of Pennsylvania EDITORIAL BOARD F. Niyi Akinnaso (Temple University, Philadelphia) David Barton (Lancaster University) Paul Bertelson (Université Libre de Bruxelles) Claire Blanche-Benveniste (Université de Provence) Chander J. Daswani (India Council of Educational Research and Training) Emilia Ferreiro (Instituto Polytecnico México) Edward French (University of the Witwatersrand) Uta Frith (Medical Research Council, London) Harvey J. Graff (University of Texas at Dallas) Hartmut Günther (Universität zu Köln) David Olson (Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, Toronto) Clotilde Pontecorvo (University of Rome) Roger Säljo (Linköping University) Michael Stubbs (Universität Trier)

AIM AND SCOPE The aim of this series is to advance insight into the multifaceted character of written language, with special emphasis on its uses in different social and cultural settings. It combines interest in sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic accounts of the acquisition and transmission of literacy. The series focusses on descriptive and theoretical reports in areas such as language codification, cognitive models of written language use, written language acquisition in children and adults, the development and implementation of literacy campaigns, and literacy as a social marker relating to gender, ethnicity, and class. The series is intended to be multi-disciplinary, combining insights from linguistics, psychology, sociology, education, anthropology, and philosophy.

Volume 10 Marilyn Martin-Jones and Kathryn Jones (eds) Multilingual Literacies Reading and writing different worlds

MULTILINGUAL LITERACIES READING AND WRITING DIFFERENT WORLDS

MARILYN MARTIN-JONES KATHRYN JONES

JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY AMSTERDAM/PHILADELPHIA

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The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences — Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Cover design: Françoise Berserik

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Martin-Jones, Marilyn. Multilingual literacies : reading and writing different worlds / Marilyn Martin-Jones, Kathryn Jones p. cm. -- (Studies in written language and literacy, ISSN 0929-7324 ; v. 10) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Literacy. 2. Multilingualism. 3. Sociolinguistics. I. Jones, Kathryn . II. Title. III. Series. P40.5.L58M37 2000 306.44’6--dc21 00-040369 ISBN 90 272 1804 8 (Eur.) / 1 55619 748 9 (US) (Hb; alk. paper) ISBN 90 272 1805 6 (Eur.) / 1 58811 025 7 (US) (Pb; alk. paper) © 2000 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. • P.O.Box 75577 • 1070 AN Amsterdam • The Netherlands John Benjamins North America • P.O.Box 27519 • Philadelphia PA 19118-0519 • USA

Contents Acknowledgements Contributors List of Figures List of Tables

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Foreword David Barton

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INTRODUCTION Multilingual literacies Marilyn Martin-Jones and Kathryn Jones CHAPTER 1 Literacy events and literacy practices: theory and practice in the New Literacy Studies Brian Street SECTION I: CHILDREN’S WORLDS OF LITERACY: HOME, SCHOOL AND COMMUNITY CHAPTER 2 Work or play? ‘Unofficial’ literacies in the lives of two East London communities Eve Gregory and Ann Williams CHAPTER 3 Power relations and the social construction of ‘literacy’ and ‘illiteracy’: the experience of Bangladeshi women in Birmingham Adrian Blackledge CHAPTER 4 Learning to read and write at home: the experience of Chinese families in Britain An Ran

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CHAPTER 5 Language, literacy and world view Viv Edwards and Hubisi Nwenmely

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CHAPTER 6 Language and literacy practices in Gujarati Muslim families Raymonde Sneddon

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CHAPTER 7 Children writing in a multilingual nursery Charmian Kenner

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SECTION II: TEXTS, IDENTITIES AND ADULT WORLDS

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CHAPTER 8 Enterprising women: multilingual literacies in the construction of new identities Marilyn Martin-Jones

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CHAPTER 9 Writing switching in British Creole Mark Sebba

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CHAPTER 10 Mediators and mediation in multilingual literacy events Mike Baynham and Helen Lobanga Masing

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CHAPTER 11 Texts, mediation and social relations in a bureaucratised world Kathryn Jones

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SECTION III: CREATING SPACES FOR MULTILINGUAL LITERACIES IN LOCAL COMMUNITY CONTEXTS

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CHAPTER 12 Languages and literacies for autonomy Ahmed Gurnah

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CHAPTER 13 Gender, literacy and community publishing in a multilingual context Yasmin Alam

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Contents SECTION IV: RESEARCHING LANGUAGES AND LITERACIES IN THEIR SOCIAL CONTEXTS

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CHAPTER 14 Taking account of history and culture in community-based research on multilingual literacy 275 Mukul Saxena CHAPTER 15 Photography in collaborative research on multilingual literacy practices: images and understandings of researcher and researched 299 Rachel Hodge and Kathryn Jones CHAPTER 16 Constructing a critical, dialogic approach to research on multilingual literacy: participant diaries and diary interviews Kathryn Jones, Marilyn Martin-Jones and Arvind Bhatt

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AFTERWORD Multilingual literacies, literacy practices, and the continua of biliteracy 353 Nancy Hornberger Bibliography

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Index

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Acknowledgements As this volume goes to press, our heartfelt thanks go to all those who have contributed to the volume, as single or joint authors. The papers assembled here provide a rich and revealing picture of multilingual literacy practices in different contexts across Britain. Together, we have achieved so much more than one or two authors could have done in a monograph on the same topic. We also wish to thank all those people whose lived experiences with different languages and literacies are documented on the different pages of this book. Without their participation in the research and practice described here, this book project could never have been undertaken. They have enabled us to make contemporary practices of reading and writing in languages other than English more visible and to counter universalising claims about literacy. Special thanks also go to Brian Street, the series editor (and an important contributor to the volume). Throughout this long and complex editing project, he has been behind us at every stage, guiding and encouraging us and providing prompt feedback whenever it was needed. In addition, we would like to acknowledge the support and timely bits of advice we have received from David Barton. We were very pleased when he agreed to write the Foreword for the book, relating this collection to other contemporary work on literacy. Another person who deserves a special mention here is Nancy Hornberger. She gave us meticulous feedback on the whole manuscript as well as writing an excellent Afterword to the book. In her Afterword, she sets the work on multilingual literacies being developed here in Britain in a wider context of research and practice. We are very grateful to her for bringing to this volume insights from her own extensive research on multilingual literacies. Finally, we would also like acknowledge two people who played a crucial role in the final stages of editing and formatting the manuscript. They are Ruthanna Barnett and John Hutchinson. Their technical know-how and their competent handling of this part of the work were very much appreciated. These final stages of the work were supported by a generous grant from the Research Fund of the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. Marilyn Martin-Jones and Kathryn Jones

Contributors Yasmin Alam has been teaching in a further education college in the North of England for the last ten years. In addition, she is involved in community publishing work at Gatehouse Books in Manchester. She is a researcher, writer and poet who has been working with marginalised people all her life. Mike Baynham is currently Professor of Education at the University of Leeds. Before moving to this post, he worked at the University of Technology, Sydney where he was Director of the Language and Literacy academic program. His book Literacy Practices was published by Longman in 1995. He has had a long term research interest in multilingual literacy practices. Arvind Bhatt was a Research Associate at Lancaster University from 1993 to 1996. He worked on two consecutive research projects which were ethnographic in nature and focused on multilingual literacy practices. Arvind Bhatt has served as an Advisory Teacher and Team Leader for Community Languages in Leicestershire. He has also taught Gujarati and Mathematics in local secondary schools. He is currently working as an English language support teacher in a secondary school in a multilingual and multicultural neighbourhood of Leicester. Adrian Blackledge is Senior Lecturer in English at University of Birmingham, Westhill. His research has focused on literacies in multilingual communities, and bilingualism in education. His publications include Literacy, Power and Social Justice, and Teaching Bilingual Children, both from Trentham Books. Viv Edwards is Professor of Language in Education at the University of Reading where she is also Director of the Reading and Language Information Centre. She is co-editor of the journal Language and Education and has researched and published widely in the area of multilingual classrooms. Eve Gregory is Professor of Language and Culture in Education at Gold-

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smiths College, University of London, where she works principally with students on postgraduate and research degrees. She has directed projects supported by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) investigating children’s out-of-school reading and the transfer of cognitive strategies between home and school. In 1997 she was awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship arising from this work. Her books include Making Sense of a New World: Learning to Read in a Second Language (Sage 1996), One Child, Many Worlds: Early Learning in Multicultural Communities (Fulton and Teachers College Press, 1997) and City Literacies: Learning to Read across Generations and Cultures (joint author with Ann Williams) (Routledge, forthcoming). She is currently directing a project entitled: ‘Siblings as mediators of literacy in two East London communities’ funded by the ESRC. Ahmed Gurnah has a BA degree in Politics from the University of Kent and a Ph.D. in Sociology from Leeds University. After completing his Ph.D. he went on to teach at Sheffield Hallam University. From there, he went on to work with Sheffield Local Education Authority as Head of the Sheffield United Multicultural Education Service (SUMES). Ahmed Gurnah was joint author (with Alan Scott) of a book on social theory entitled The Uncertain Science (Routledge, 1992). He has also contributed articles to journals and to edited collections on the following topics: literacy, multilingualism, educational policy, social policy and the struggle against racism. Rachel Hodge has a particular interest in researching social uses of literacy. She is an Education for Development (Ed.Dev.) Consultant, working with the Community Literacy Project Nepal (funded by the Department for International Development, DfID), supporting participatory/ethnographic research on social uses of literacy. She taught TESOL for several years in Blackburn. There she carried out micro-ethnographic research, with members of the South Asian community, for post-graduate sociolinguistic studies at Lancaster University. She also taught on the Bilingualism course at Lancaster and organised and taught Education and Development courses on ‘Researching Literacy’ for participants from different countries. Nancy H. Hornberger is Professor of Education and Director of Educational Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, Philadelphia, USA. She specializes in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology; language planning and educational policy; bilingualism and biliteracy;

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educational policy and practice for indigenous and immigrant language minorities in the United States and internationally. Recent publications include edited volumes on Research Methods in Language and Education (Kluwer, 1997, coedited with D. Corson), Indigenous Literacies in the Americas (Mouton, 1996), and Sociolinguistics and Language Teaching (Cambridge, 1996, co-edited with S. McKay). Kathryn Jones is currently working in Wales. She is Senior Research Consultant at Cwmni Iaith Cyf. (The Language Company Ltd.). She is also a parttime post-doctoral Research Fellow at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth and an honorary Research Fellow at Lancaster University. Her main interests are multilingualism, literacy and language policy and planning. In addition to her work on the literacy practices of Welsh users, her recent research includes a project on language and gender for the Equal Opportunities Commission in Wales and a project on language issues in education for the Tanzanian Ministry of Education and Culture. Charmian Kenner conducted doctoral research into multilingualism and early writing at Southampton University. She is now an Associate Lecturer in Education for the Open University, and a Research Associate with the Culture, Communication and Societies academic group at the Institute of Education, University of London. She is currently conducting a longitudinal study of children learning to write in more than one script system. Her study is funded by the ESRC. She also works as a freelance researcher and lecturer in the areas of bilingualism and literacy, and has contributed to several publications for teachers of bilingual children. Helen Lobanga Tamtam (nee Masing) is a Senior Lecturer at the Vanuatu Teachers College, Port Via, Vanuatu. The research reported on in this chapter was carried out as part of a Master of Arts in TESOL at the University of Technology, Sydney. Hubisi Nwenmely was born in St Lucia and came to the UK at the age of nine. Her experience of teaching Kwéyòl, the unofficial language of St Lucia, is reported in Language Reclamation: French Creole Language Teaching in the UK and the Caribbean (Multilingual Matters, 1996). She is a Lecturer in the Department of Professional Education in Community Studies at the University of Reading.

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Marilyn Martin-Jones is Professor of Bilingualism and Education at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. Her main areas of interest are: bilingualism, codeswitching in bilingual discourse and multilingual literacy. Most of the research that she has conducted over the last twenty years has been of a sociolinguistic and ethnographic nature and, so far, it has been based in multilingual urban contexts in England — in classrooms and in local community contexts. This work has been published in journals such as Applied Linguistics, The International Journal of the Sociology of Language, The Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development and Linguistics and Education. Her most recent publication is a book entitled Voices of Authority: Education and Linguistic Difference (Greenwood, forthcoming, co-edited with Monica Heller). An Ran was a Lecturer in English as a Foreign Language at Guangdong Foreign Studies University in the People’s Republic of China before she came to the UK as a visiting scholar in 1995. Since then, she has been working on a Ph.D. on ‘Learning in two languages and cultures’ which explores the experiences of language and literacy learning at home and in school of Chinese children in Britain. She completed her Ph.D. just before this book went to press. Mukul Saxena is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of English Language and Applied Linguistics at the University of Brunei Darussalam, SE Asia. Prior to this, he worked in Britain for fifteen years, at the University College of Ripon and York St John, at Lancaster University and at York University. In Britain, he was involved in research in a number of areas of sociolinguistics: bilingual classroom interaction, language maintenance and shift, multilingual literacies and forensic linguistics. Mark Sebba is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Linguistics and Modern English Language at Lancaster University since 1989. His interests include language contact, bilingualism, corpus linguistics and orthography. His previous publications include The Syntax of Serial Verbs (John Benjamins, 1987) — a study of verb forms in creoles, West African and other languages, London Jamaican (Longman, 1993), on the language of young Caribbeans born in London and Contact Languages: Pidgins and Creoles (Macmillan, 1997). Raymonde Sneddon is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Education and Community Studies at the University of East London. She was a teacher in

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Hackney, east London for seventeen years during which she taught primary school children from a very wide range of linguistic backgrounds. Raymonde has a special interest in researching and developing the involvement of parents and community organisations in mainstream schooling. The study reported in this volume is part of her PhD thesis. Brian Street is Professor of Language in Education at King’s College, London University and Visiting Professor of Education in the Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania. He undertook anthropological fieldwork on literacy and education in Iran during the 1970’s, and has since written and lectured extensively on literacy practices in countries such as South Africa, Australia, Canada and the U.S. He is best known for Literacy in Theory and Practice (Cambridge University Press 1985). He also edited Cross-Cultural Approaches to Literacy, (Cambridge University Press 1993) and brought out a collection of his essays with Longman under the title Social Literacies (1995), which was cited in his receipt of the David S. Russell award for distinguished research by the National Council for Teaching of English in the U.S. He has written six books and published over 60 scholarly articles. He is currently concerned to link ethnographic-style research on the cultural dimension of literacy with contemporary debates in education. Ann Williams is a Research Fellow at Goldsmiths’ College and King’s College, University of London. Her research interests are in literacy and in the phonological and grammatical aspects of modern urban English. She has carried out funded research projects on home and school literacy practices in multicultural contexts, the influence of non-standard dialects on children’s writing, the role of adolescents in language change and the formation of new town dialects. She is joint author (with Eve Gregory) of City Literacies: Learning to Read across Generations and Cultures (Routledge, forthcoming).

List of figures Chapter 4 (An Ran) Figure 1: Use of different teaching strategies Figure 2: Reading aloud behaviour Figure 3: Use of questions Figure 4: Relative proportions of different type of questions Figure 5: Use of instructions Figure 6: Use of explanation Figure 7: Different explanation strategies Figure 8: Use of review and practice Figure 9: Mother’s responses to their children Figure 10: Page from a standard Chinese textbook Chapter 6 (Sneddon) Figure 1: Mother’s use of three languages across the whole sample (in percentages) Figure 2: Mother’s use of Gujarati and Urdu in the family according to whether the family used the Community Centre (in percentages) Figure 3: Father’s use of Gujarati and Urdu in the family according to whether the family used the Community Centre (in percentages) Figure 4: Children’s use of Gujarati and Urdu in the family according to whether the family used the Community Centre Figure 5: Children’s use of Gujarati and Urdu to their siblings by age and whether the families had Community Centre support Figure 6: Mean index of literacy support experienced by 3½ year old children in Gujarati/Urdu and English Figure 7: Index of literacy support in Gujarati/Urdu and English for children aged 7 Figure 8: Index of literacy support in Gujarati/Urdu and English for children aged 11

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Chapter 7 (Kenner) Figure 1: Airletter in Gujarati, written by Meera’s mother in the nursery (with addition by Meera later that morning) Figure 2: Airletter written by Meera, alongside her mother in the nursery Figure 3a: Extract from an air letter in Thai written by Billy’s mother in the nursery Figure 3b: Symbols written by Billy later that morning: “I write like my mum”; “Mu-ang Thai” Figure 4: Meera’s linguistic world Figure 5: Billy’s linguistic world Chapter 11 (Jones) Figure 1: One page of the IACS Form (English version) Figure 2: Animal Movement form Chapter 14 (Saxena) Figure 1a: Reading skills according to language Figure 1b: Writing skills according to language Figure 2: Language/script choices for writing letters/notes to South Asian friends and relatives in Britain Figure 3: Language/script choices for writing letters/notes to South Asian friends, relatives and officials in India. Figure 4: Language/script choices for reading newspapers, books and magazines Figure 5a: Parents’ preference regarding learning of reading in different languages Figure 5b: Parent’s preference regarding learning of writing in different languages Chapter 15 (Hodge Jones) Figure 1: Fazila’s photographs, recipes and a transcript from Rachel’s study in Blackburn, England. Figure 2: Photographs and a transcript about Zuleka’s literacy practices from Rachel’s study in Blackburn, England. Figure 3: Photographs, transcript and a rap poem by Adil from Rachel’s study in Blackburn, England. Figure 4: Extract of a collaborative photography session with Rhian from

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Kathryn’s study in Wales. Figure 5: Photographs by Kathryn and Rhian from Kathryn’s study in Wales Figure 6: Photographs by Kathryn and Rhian from Kathryn’s study in Wales Chapter 16 (Jones, Martin-Jones, Bhatt) Figure 1: Kathryn’s ‘translation’ of a diary sheet for one of the participants in her study in the Vale of Clwyd, Wales (Dewi Wilkinson). Figure 2: Dewi Wilkinson’s day, Monday 20th February 1995. Figure 3: Diary sheet for one of the participants in Arvind and Marilyn’s study in Leicester, England.

List of tables Chapter 2 (Gregory Williams) Table 1a. Bilingual children and their families Table 1b. Monolingual children and their families Table 2. Bilingual children’s out of school literacy activities Table 3. Monolingual children’s out of school literacy activities Chapter 4 (An Ran) Table 1. Details of the five case study families Chapter 13 (Alam) Table 1. Freire’s comparison of two approaches to education (adapted from Freire 1970)

Foreword David Barton

It is worth pausing for a while and considering the title of this book, Multilingual Literacies: Reading and Writing Different Worlds. The title and the sub-title indicate two important complementary themes, firstly that our understanding of literacies can be furthered by examining multilingual contexts, and, secondly, that the study of multilingual communities can be enhanced by examining the significance of reading and writing. These two directions of influence, that multilingualism sheds light on literacy and that literacy sheds light on multilingualism, are themes throughout the book. This is a very rich volume. It is a unique collection of studies of multilingual language use, primarily in urban communities in Britain. Each study has its own importance and is making its own particular points. These topics are brought together in the introductory chapter and the section introductions. As well as emphasising the situatedness and the particularities of literacy practices, each study is also making statements about the nature of literacy and about the dynamics of bilingual communities and how they are held together by literate activity. As Marilyn Martin-Jones and Kathryn Jones point out in the introduction, the fields of bilingualism and literacy have somewhat different intellectual histories with distinct theoretical framings and methodological approaches. The excitement of this book is in bringing together these fields, in finding commonalities and in creating new directions. The work reported here brings together studies in Britain, as well as complementing studies of literacy in minority communities in the United States (Moss 1994; Perez 1998) and historical studies of literacy in bilingual situations (Boyarin 1992). For me, as someone who has worked mainly in literacy studies, the framing provided by multilingualism has enabled me to see many issues in a new light and to see ways in which the understanding of reading and writing can develop. As a starting-point in this, these are a set of studies of language in

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everyday life. Attention to detail seems to me to be an important common factor in these diverse studies with varied approaches and methodologies, attention to the detail of the dynamics of language use in people’s lives. This is the detail of how parents actually help children learn languages, how people switch between using different written languages in systematic ways, how people change their literacy practices during their lives, and much more. It is this detail which is needed to inform and enrich theories of language use. Equally important, such detail is needed to inform public views and government policies. Whilst much literacy research and bilingualism research has been concerned with children and schooling, one particular strength of this book is the way in which it studies the activities of both children and adults and the way it juxtaposes research in schools and out of schools. The work on children is always contextualised by considerations of adults’ practices, and activities within education are considered in relation to everyday activities. This positioning of educational practice means that the research can contribute to fundamental questions about the changing nature of schooling being posed in Britain and other industrialised countries. School learning is firmly located in children’s lives, with the importance of family and community support clearly recognised. Research on bilingualism raises many questions for the field of literacy studies to address. Crucially the research demonstrates that bilingualism is not something to be added on to literacy studies, creating some secondary area of research, something of marginal significance; rather it is central. Bilingualism research provides concepts, phenomena and ways of researching for all literacy research. Inevitably, the fusion of the two fields also changes them inescapably and provides new avenues for research. There are phenomena which help us understand monolingual and multilingual homes and communities equally, such as the role of grand parents and other family members, the importance of mediation of activities by others, how literate practices are not just to do with reading and writing, the relation of researcher and researched. One concept which is changed by the fusion of bilingualism research and literacy research is the notion of community. Research starting out from spoken language tends to emphasise interactions which are face-to-face and in the same place: consequently, communities are usually thought of as physical locations. Fusing literacy research and bilingualism research provides a more complex picture. Literacy enables us to see that communities can be held

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together by literate practices, not just by face-to-face interaction and physical location. Literacy creates textually mediated worlds and different forms of community. To give an example, in our research in Lancaster (Barton & Hamilton 1998), in a predominantly monolingual community, there were bilingual people, including several speakers of Gujarati, some of Polish, and some of French. They all lived in the same physical neighbourhood and some of their activities related to the neighbourhood and to relations with neighbours. Other activities, such as the religious activities of the Gujarati speakers, revolved around communities of interests and were not identified with the physical location of the neighbourhoods in which the people lived. Literacy was important in sustaining these dispersed activities. Reading and writing provide a powerful way in which communities of interest are held together; and other technologies are likely to create new notions of community. There is a second way in which the notion of community can develop. Communities are seen as physical; they are also seen as minority, and often bounded by minority language use. However, it is also important to research dominant and mainstream practices in the same ways, with the same theories and the same methodologies, seeing how they are located in communities of interest. This point is similar to the principle of symmetry articulated by Pardoe (2000) in relation to student writing. We would see that many of the dynamics of minority communities apply to mainstream communities, and that the dynamics of multilingual interaction throw light upon monolingual interaction. The arguments, models and theories in this book are applicable to all language research. David Barton, Lancaster, January 2000.

INTRODUCTION

Multilingual Literacies Marilyn Martin-Jones and Kathryn Jones

The contributors to this volume all share a social view of language and literacy. The chapters assembled here provide detailed insights into what people do when they read and write in different languages and how they make sense of what they do. The volume as a whole presents a rich picture of how languages and literacies are embedded in different cultural practices and in specific views of the world. It also reveals the complex ways in which people draw on the language and literacy resources available to them as they take on different identities in different domains of their lives. Across the volume, the focus moves from children in home, community and school contexts to women and men in a range of different domains: in their workplaces, in bureaucratic encounters, in adult education contexts and in their own homes and local communities. Since most of the accounts included here are concerned with language and literacy practices among people from linguistic minority groups, a major theme for the volume is that, in a multilingual setting, the acquisition and use of languages and literacies are inevitably bound up with asymmetrical relations of power between ethnolinguistic groups. The power relations in different settings are rooted in specific historical processes, in the development of a post-colonial order, in international labour migration, in the movement of refugees, in minority rights movements or in global changes of a social and political nature, but in the contemporary world, there are broad resonances in the ways in which these power relations are played out in local sites. Tensions arise between parents and local schools about the language and literacy education of their children. The home-school boundary is frequently a site of

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struggle over linguistic and cultural rights and over differing views or discourses about what counts as language and literacy instruction. Conflicts are also evident in other institutional contexts, such as in workplaces where bilingual adults are positioned as linguistic brokers or as mediators of texts produced in the dominant language or in bureaucratic settings where people are faced with texts which originate in a bureaucratic world which is quite unfamiliar to them. The chapters in this volume present illuminating accounts of the issues thrown up by the conflicts in local sites such as these. The links between language, literacy and power are viewed through three different lenses: through research carried out in different multilingual settings (Chapters 2 to 11), through reflections on the relationship between researcher and researched in ethnographic studies of multilingual literacy (Chapters 14 to 16) and through accounts of educational interventions in different urban settings (Chapters 12 and 13). Most of the chapters in the volume focus on linguistic minority groups in different areas of Britain, or more specifically, England and Wales. However, a brief glance at the range of spoken and written languages involved makes it clear that many of the women, men and children whose lived experiences with literacy are described and analysed here have networks of family and friendship which span several continents. Sylheti speakers in the Spitalfields area of London and in the city of Birmingham have family ties with Bangladesh; speakers of Kwéyòl and Jamaican Creole have links with different Caribbean islands, with St. Lucia and Jamaica respectively; speakers of Gujarati in Leicester and London are involved in kinship networks which extend to the west of India and to the south and east of Africa; speakers of Panjabi and Urdu in Manchester and Blackburn have close connections with Pakistan; speakers of Panjabi and Hindi in Southall are involved in a diaspora which stretches from the north west of India to East Africa; Arabic speakers in Sheffield have family links with the Yemen; speakers of different Chinese languages, including Putonghua and Cantonese, who live in Reading and in London keep in close touch with relatives in different regions of China, including Beijing and Hong Kong and many Welsh speakers keep in touch with relatives across an older diaspora which includes England, Canada, Australia, the USA and Argentina. Whilst the focus of this volume is on one national context, readers familiar with debates about the linguistic and cultural rights of linguistic minority groups in other contexts where there is still a powerful monolingual

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ethos will be struck by the resonances with the issues that are addressed here, in educational settings or in other institutional sites. Many of the contributors to this volume have been closely involved in debates about the languages and literacies of the newer and older linguistic minority groups in the British Isles. The publication of this volume will, hopefully, serve to make these languages and literacies, and the issues surrounding their acquisition and use, more visible to researchers and students in the fields of bilingualism and literacy studies and to practitioners in a range of institutional contexts. Most of the research work presented here was developed in the 1990s. This was a period when there was intense interest in research on multilingual literacies and some innovative work was being undertaken. Up until the mid1990s, there had been very little contact between researchers working in different localities and few opportunities for developing a comparative perspective. We therefore felt that, as a first step, we should pursue the possibility of bringing together researchers working in different multilingual settings in Britain. So, we organised a research seminar on Multilingual Literacies at Lancaster University in November 1996 as part of the Occasional Seminar Series of the British Association for Applied Linguistics. Most people involved in this seminar indicated that it had represented a landmark in the development of this field of study in Britain. We therefore decided that it would be useful to assemble a collection of papers which would capture the range and quality of recent work in the field. That is how this book project came into being. As the project unfolded, we saw that other advantages accrue from having a collection of this kind. One distinct advantage of having accounts of research in different sites in one volume is that commonalities and differences emerge which are in themselves illuminating. In addition, the juxtaposition of studies throws issues of theory and method into sharper focus. Whilst the research-based contributions to this volume all put forward a social view of language and literacy, they do so in different ways. They draw on different research traditions within Sociolinguistics and Anthropology and they employ different approaches to the study of multilingual literacy. The starting point for some researchers has been with a particular sociolinguistic approach to the study of Bilingualism/ Multilingualism or Creole Languages and, for others, it has been the New Literacy Studies, with its emphasis on ethnography. A range of research methodologies are therefore represented here. Quite a few of the studies reported in the research-based chapters of the volume are ethnographic in nature and involve participant observation, semi-

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structured interviews, the gathering of literacy materials, diary work or the use of still photography. Two studies have combined ethnography with a smallscale sociolinguistic survey. Others have combined ethnography with audioor video-recording, transcription and analysis of spoken interactions around texts. These analyses of talk around text are of two broad types: conversational analysis, focusing on the ways in which meanings are negotiated in and through interactions, and quantitative analysis aimed at capturing broader interactional patterns, such as the preponderance of different types of contributions made by different participants in an interaction. And, lastly, there are studies included here which are more text-focused and which involve close linguistic analysis, and, in one case, analysis of orthographic conventions and innovations. The research methodologies represented here fall on a broad continuum from relatively detached observation, sometimes combined with analysis which is designed to capture patterns or regularities in the use of texts or in literacy practices, to interactive and reflexive methods of an ethnographic kind. The ethnographic work reported also falls on a continuum, representing different degrees of engagement and collaboration with the research subjects. The studies which involve the greatest collaboration are those which are closest to the concerns of two educational practitioners who write about two innovative educational interventions in multilingual settings that they have been involved in (Chapters 12 and 13).

Why multilingual literacies? Both of the terms in the title of this volume derive from debates that have taken place in adjacent fields of research: in the sociolinguistic study of Bilingualism and in the New Literacy Studies. The terms may have different connotations for different readers, so our aim here is to unpack this inter-textuality and to give brief insights into the debates that led to the increasing use of both terms. We will take each in turn, starting with the term ‘literacies’. Like other academics and practitioners who locate themselves within the New Literacy Studies tradition, we talk about literacies in the plural to signal a critique of the a-social, a-historical skill/ability understanding of reading and writing associated with what Brian Street has called the ‘autonomous’ view of literacy (Street 1984, 1993: Chapter 1, this volume). Literacies are social

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practices: ways of reading and writing and using written texts that are bound up in social processes which locate individual action within social and cultural processes. These practices are partly observable in specific events, but also operate on a socio-cognitive level. They include the values, understandings, and intentions people have, both individually and collectively about what they and others do (Jones 1999: 39). Focusing on the plurality of literacies means recognising the diversity of reading and writing practices and the different genres, styles and types of texts associated with various activities, domains or social identities (see Street 1984; Barton 1994a; Baynham 1995; Gee 1990; Ivanic 1998 for a fuller discussion of these arguments). In multilingual contexts, different languages, language varieties and scripts add other dimensions to the diversity and complexity of literacies (see Hornberger 1989, 1990 for a detailed illustration of this). We use the term ‘multilingual’ rather than ‘bilingual’ in order to capture the multiplicity and complexity of individual and group repertoires. We do this for four main reasons. Firstly, the term multilingual provides the most accurate description of the communicative repertoires of many of the individuals and linguistic groups referred to in this volume: many have more than two spoken or written languages and language varieties within their communicative repertoire. These include the languages and literacies associated with their cultural inheritance, the regional varieties of English spoken in their local neighbourhoods and some form of standard English. Thus, for example, the Welsh speakers in the rural community described in the chapter by Kathryn Jones (Chapter 11) speak a regional variety of Welsh associated with Dyffryn Clwyd (the Vale of Clwyd in north east Wales). They also speak a regional Welsh variety of English. In addition, they read and write standard English. Another, slightly different example comes from the chapters by Eve Gregory and Anne Williams (Chapter 2) and by Adrian Blackledge (Chapter 3). The people whose literacy experiences are presented in these chapters speak Sylheti, a regional language spoken in the Sylhet region of Bangladesh but they read and write Bengali, the standard national language of the country. In the London context, described in Chapter 2, many Sylheti speakers are fluent in the English vernacular of East London, whilst in the Birmingham context, described in Chapter 3, many speak the local West Midlands variety of English. The shaping of the communicative repertoires of local linguistic minority groups of migrant origin depends, in this way, on the patterns of settlement in Britain. Secondly, we have adopted the term ‘multilingual’ because it signals the

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multiplicity and complexity of the communicative purposes that have come to be associated with different spoken and written languages within a group’s repertoire. As with the local vernacular varieties of English mentioned above and standard British English, the languages and literacies in the communicative repertoires of groups of migrant or refugee origin carry traces of the social structures and language ideologies of the country of origin. As Woolard (1998) and Blommaert (1999) have recently emphasised, language ideologies are intimately bound up with people’s day-to-day choices with regard to the languages used for reading and writing in different public domains and for spoken communication in the more private spaces of their lives. Thus, for example, Sylheti speakers see Bengali as having more prestige and as being the ‘appropriate’ language of literacy, whilst Sylheti continues to be used as an important emblem of identity. Similarly, the Panjabi speakers of Pakistani origin introduced in the chapters by Yasmin Alam (Chapter 13) and Rachel Hodge and Kathryn Jones (Chapter 15) speak Panjabi and write in Urdu, the national language of Pakistan. Spoken and written Urdu is seen as carrying greater prestige than Panjabi, a language which is primarily used in its spoken form but one which still commands considerable language loyalty in Britain and in the Panjab area of Pakistan. Some spoken or written languages in a group repertoire are acquired and used for highly specialised purposes. Take, for instance, the languages used for reading religious texts, during different forms of religious observance. Several of the Muslim groups mentioned in the chapters of this volume (Chapters 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 12, 13, 14 and 15) use Qur’anic Arabic for reading aloud from the Qur’an. Urdu and English are also used by some groups of South Asian origin for silent reading of books on the principles of religious practice. People from local Hindu groups, such as the Gujarati and Panjabi speakers introduced in Chapters 8 and 14 respectively, use Hindi and Sanskrit for doing the readings from Hindu epics such as the Gita, Mahabharat and Ramayan which are associated with religious observance. These readings are usually accompanied by religious songs and chants in the same languages. The third reason why we use the term ‘multilingual’ is to take account of the fact that in any linguistic minority household or local group, among speakers of Welsh, Gujarati or Cantonese, there are multiple paths to the acquisition of the spoken and written languages within the group repertoire and people have varying degrees of expertise1 in these languages and literacies. As the chapters in this volume show, the degree of expertise that

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individuals attain depends on how they are positioned with regard to access to different spoken and written varieties. For example, among some groups of migrant origin, such as those from Bangladesh (see Chapters 2 and 3) or Pakistan (see Chapters 13 and 15), women have had fewer opportunities than men to acquire literacy in English, and even the literacies of their local community. Many young people from these linguistic minority groups have not had the opportunity to acquire the literacies of their cultural inheritance because of the lack of provision in Britain for the teaching of languages other than English or the prestigious languages of the European Community. This is an issue which is brought out in the chapters by Raymonde Sneddon (Chapter 7) and Ahmed Gurnah (Chapter 12). Where opportunities are available for young people to learn to read and write in their family’s preferred language(s), they often have insufficient time to develop the expertise required to use the written languages for purposes which are meaningful to them and to other members of their family. Some languages and writing systems demand considerable investment of time and effort in the early stages of learning. An Ran stresses this point in Chapter 4 as she presents her study of Chinese children learning to read and write Chinese with their mothers at home, in an urban British context. The fourth reason why the term ‘multilingual’ is more useful than the term ‘bilingual’ is because it focuses attention on the multiple ways in which people draw on and combine the codes in their communicative repertoire when they speak and write. The term ‘bilingual’ only evokes a two-way distinction between codes whereas, as we have noted above, in multilingual settings, people typically have access to several codes which they move in and out of with considerable fluency and subtlety as they speak and write. Whilst a monolingual norm may operate for the production of texts in an institutional context, the talk around those texts may be ‘multilingual’, incorporating elements of the text and stretches of talk in different language varieties. This phenomenon is captured particularly well in the long extracts of spoken data presented by Mike Baynham and Helen Lobanga Masing in Chapter 10. The contrasts between codes in a multilingual repertoire are often employed by speakers and writers as a meaning making resource. This is what has come to be widely known as the metaphorical function of codeswitching (Blom and Gumperz 1972; Gumperz 1982; Heller 1988). In recent writing on codeswitching, it is acknowledged that the meaning making potential of codeswitching is infinite (Auer 1990). Moreover, as we have seen in recent

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empirical research in Britain (Li Wei 1994; Rampton 1995) the codeswitching practices of individuals and groups are continually shifting, with young people’s practices being the most fluid and changeable. Lastly, we should add that by combining the terms ‘multilingual’ and ‘literacies’ we intend to signal that the configurations of languages and literacies considered here are not viewed in a deterministic light. We also want to stress that specific practices which involve the use of different spoken and written languages are always undergoing a process of reaffirmation and redefinition, both within individual repertoires over individual life spans and at a broader cultural level.

The acquisition and use of languages and literacies in different sites The chapters in this volume examine language and literacy practices in a broad range of sites: from people’s own life worlds, their homes, local community contexts and the spaces they have chosen for creative expression, to institutional contexts such as schools, adult education centres, workplaces and higher education research. In this section of our introduction, we map out these sites and draw attention to some of the themes and issues which emerge from the book as a whole. Most of the themes and issues we mention below cut across the chapters and sections of the volume. Local life worlds Half of the chapters in the volume (Chapters 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 14 and 15) give us glimpses of language and literacy practices which are situated in the homes and local neighbourhoods of children and adults from different linguistic minority groups in Britain. They reveal some of the ways in which specific languages, literacy practices and uses of texts are linked with wider cultural practices and beliefs, reminding us of the importance of cultural and historical analysis in studies of literacy in local multilingual settings. For example, in Chapter 14, using a case study of one Panjabi Hindu family in Southall, Mukul Saxena shows that the history of individual families, their values and their beliefs about literacy and about different scripts, are rooted in the wider history of their region of origin. Chapters 2, 5, 6, 8, 12 and 14 take us into local urban contexts in England

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and introduce individuals and groups who are involved in organising community classes and Saturday schools for the teaching of the languages and literacies of their cultural inheritance. What is striking here is the amount of time and effort vested by parents and other adults from linguistic minority groups in organising and delivering this educational provision, outside of the formal education system, and the wealth of knowledge and expertise they bring to this enterprise. Some bring extensive experience of language maintenance efforts and literacy education in other settings. Take, for instance, the people who came to Britain from the Gujarati and Panjabi communities in East and South Africa during the 1970s. As Mukul Saxena notes in his chapter, their arrival in Britain during this period had a considerable impact on the nature and scope of local provision for the teaching of community languages. The chapters by Raymonde Sneddon (Chapter 6) and Ahmed Gurnah (Chapter 12) document some of the activities involved in setting up and running schools and classes such as these, the types of difficulties encountered by the teachers and organisers, and the benefits which have accrued to the parents and children involved. Chapters 2, 3, 4 and 6 provide insights into the literacy environments of children’s homes and into the ways in which different languages and literacies come to be associated with the relationships between family members. Chapters 3 and 4 detail mothers’ contributions to children’s acquisition of the literacies of their cultural inheritance, while Chapters 2 and 3 draw attention to the crucial role played by older siblings in orienting young children to school literacies. From life worlds to the formal education system Chapters 2–7 draw out a number of themes related to the relationship between the languages and literacies of local life worlds and those which predominate within the formal education system. The first theme has to do with the choice of the spoken and written language which is to be the medium of education and the cultural politics associated with this choice. This theme is taken up by Viv Edwards and Hubisi Nwenmely (Chapter 5) in their account of two educational initiatives: one in St. Lucia and one in Britain. First, they describe attempts that were made in St. Lucia in the 1980s to bring Kwéyòl, the language most widely spoken on the island, into the schools. The development and dissemination of an orthography for Kwéyòl was a focal part of this

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initiative. However, standard Caribbean English has remained the main language of education, despite the launching of a national campaign to promote Kwéyòl and this new orthography. What we see at work here are those cultural and historical processes identified by Bourdieu (1991) which contribute to the reproduction of symbolic power and the imposition of a particular language as the sole ‘legitimate’ language of schooling. The second initiative described by Viv Edwards and Hubisi Nwenmely was situated in the British context. This was a project for the introduction of Kwéyòl literacy in adult education settings in the London area. A small network of classes was established as a result of this initiative and succeeded in drawing in young adults who spoke Kwéyòl and who were already literate in English, but wanted to learn to read and write in Kwéyòl. The authors show how this reclaiming of literacies associated with their cultural inheritance gave these young people a means of contesting the symbolic dominance of standard English within the formal education system in England and in St. Lucia and a new means of affirming their cultural difference. The second broad theme to emerge from these chapters relates to the differences between home and school literacy practices and to differing views about what counts as language and literacy education in the early years. Most of the chapters paint a stark picture of the lack of awareness in schools of the diversity of lived experiences with literacy that bilingual children have in their homes and in local community contexts. They also highlight the tendency for parents’ expertise and their views about language and literacy education to be overlooked. Reading and writing in English is what really counts. As Adrian Blackledge points out in Chapter 3, parents who do not feel comfortable reading and writing in English are sometimes represented as ‘illiterate’, in the dominant discourse of the school, since no account is taken of their expertise in reading and writing other languages. Chapters 2, 3, 4 and 5 draw attention to the educational orthodoxies about early reading which dominate school literacy practices, practices which are now often transported into the home domain. Each of the authors in turn point out that these views about early reading take little or no account of the diversity of paths that young children take into literacy in their life worlds beyond the school or of the different ways in which young children come to see themselves as learners. Chapter 7, by Charmian Kenner, moves us away from this stark picture of the ways in which one language variety and schooled literacies are imposed

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within the mainstream education system. She focuses on one local educational intervention, in a multilingual nursery classroom, where parents were encouraged to bring home languages, literacies and scripts into school. She documents in detail how the children responded to this and shows how this intervention created new learning opportunities for them. At the same time, she provides illuminating insights into children’s developing understanding of literacy as a social practice. Adult education and community publishing Chapters 12 and 13 focus on issues related to adult literacy in two multilingual contexts: in two cities in the north of England. Both chapters chart the development of particular forms of educational intervention designed to tackle marginalisation and social exclusion among local linguistic minority groups and to change the nature of provision for the teaching of English as an additional language to men and women from local groups. The first part of Chapter 12 focuses on a local literacy campaign and Chapter 13 describes a writing and publishing project for women of South Asian origin which is publishing bilingual books by and for women enrolled in English classes. In different ways, the authors both conclude that among the essential pre-conditions for success in educational interventions of this kind is a commitment to drawing on the cultural and linguistic resources of men and women from local linguistic minority groups and working bilingually. They also emphasise the need to plan for the involvement of participants at each stage of the day-to-day organisation of such educational interventions. Both authors insist that involvement in initiatives such as these means engaging in complex cultural politics and necessitates a clear analysis of what is achievable given the social and economic conditions of local minority groups and given the nature of the gender relations within particular local groups. Workplaces and bureaucratic encounters Several chapters in the volume (Chapters 8, 10, 11 and 16) focus our attention on literacy practices and uses of texts in workplaces or in bureaucratic encounters related to people’s work. Some authors deal with rural work settings (Chapters 10, 11 and part of 16) and some with workplaces in multilingual urban settings (Chapter 8 and part of 16).

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A recurring theme in these chapters is that of mediation. The chapters which focus on rural settings foreground the tensions between rural life worlds and bureaucratic worlds and reveal some of the ways in which people are positioned by bureaucratic texts which are produced in metropolitan centres of power. These chapters also describe in detail how bilinguals, who read and write in dominant languages and who are familiar with particular kinds of texts, come to act as literacy mediators in different kinds of literacy events, assisting with the interpretation of texts imbued with bureaucratic authority or assisting with the production of letters addressed to institutions based in distant urban contexts. Mike Baynham and Helen Lobanga Masing (Chapter 10) and Kathryn Jones (Chapter 11) give us close-ups of several literacy events of this kind and show how mediators draw on different languages and on their knowledge of different linguistic registers in bridging different worlds. Chapters 8 and 16 provide brief insights into the workplace literacy experiences of bilinguals in urban settings in England. These are bilinguals who have been recruited to work in local government and voluntary institutions with a specific brief to use their languages and literacies in the provision of local services. Like the literacy mediators studied in rural settings by Kathryn Jones and by Mike Baynham and Helen Lobanga Masing, these bilinguals in urban workplaces are also positioned on the boundaries between the life worlds of people in local communities, the clients for the services provided by local authorities and voluntary bodies, and the institutional worlds in which they work. They frequently speak with clients or with the children in their care in their home or community languages, as when helping people to deal with forms or official letters, but the writing they do is predominantly in English. Adult life worlds Chapters 8 and 9 provide insights into specialised literacy practices and uses of texts associated with the life worlds of adults from two different linguistic minority groups: Gujarati and Creole speakers respectively. From these accounts emerges evidence of creative uses of languages, literacies and orthography in the construction of specific cultural identities. Chapter 8 by Marilyn Martin-Jones focuses on the languages and literacies in the lives of two Gujarati women, one Hindu and one Muslim, who both moved to Britain as young adults. It charts the ways in which particular languages and literacies

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entered their lives at different periods and in different domains. It also shows how, in their contemporary life worlds in Britain, the two women draw on language and literacy resources acquired in earlier periods of their lives in defining new gender identities for themselves. Both women are involved in extensive voluntary work in which they make use of the languages and literacies of their cultural inheritance: one in running a local Saturday school and one in organising an Asian women’s group. These activities give them ample scope for using the full range of spoken and written languages in their communicative repertoires and also for defining how they use them. In the case of one woman, her community-based activities have also opened up opportunities for the creation of new cultural forms, since she has become a composer and performer of Gujarati songs. The songs she writes blend the type of lyrics she learned as a girl in her village of origin in India with some of the new styles currently being fashioned within the Gujarati community in Britain. In Chapter 9, Mark Sebba draws attention to another context in which creative use is being made of linguistic and cultural resources. He provides detailed insights into the ways in which British writers of Caribbean origin represent Creole speech in different written genres, in poetry, plays, fiction and newspaper columns, aimed at an African-Caribbean readership. His close analysis of the codeswitching in texts such as these reveals some of the subtle and intricate ways in which identities are constructed in writing in multilingual contexts. Academic institutions Chapters 14 to 16 address some of the issues of power and method which arise in academic research on languages and literacies in multilingual settings. The six researchers who have contributed to this section reflect on the specific issues that have arisen in the context of their own research. They all point to the fact that their relationship with the participants in their respective studies was embedded in asymmetrical relations of power, between academic institutions as prestigious sites for the production of knowledge and local communities, between linguistic minority groups and dominant linguistic groups. None of the authors actually mention this, but an important related point to be made here is that relatively few speakers of Britain’s minority languages have hitherto gained access to circles where academic research on bilingualism or literacy is conducted.

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The authors of these chapters reflect on the significance of these asymmetries of power for their particular studies and they describe the different ways in which they have attempted to deal with them at different stages of their work. They all point to the value of ethnography, with its emphasis on reflexivity, as a means of establishing an open and dialogic relationship with research participants (see Cameron et al. 1992 for a fuller account of this argument). They also describe in detail how interactive approaches based on the use of diaries, diary interviews, photography and particular kinds of participant observation enabled them to create opportunities to bring the knowledge and experience of the research participants into the research process in a more direct way and to establish a more dialogic approach to knowledge-building. None of the authors use the terms ‘insider’ or ‘outsider’ in referring to the identities of researchers or researched in their different projects. These categories have come to be seen as too fixed and essentialised. Instead, all six researchers reflect, in different ways, on the complex and shifting nature of group membership, emphasising that researcher and research subjects have multiple identities, some of which are shared and some which are not. They also describe the forms of collaboration that they were involved in: collaboration with fellow researchers and with research subjects. They demonstrate in detail how these different forms of collaboration engaged them in dialogues across the boundaries of ethnicity, gender and socio-economic position, and illustrate how this led to the use of different languages and literacies at different stages of the research process. These chapters provide insights into the multilingual nature of ethnographic work in multilingual settings, a dimension of this work which is often obscured in the production of final ethnographic texts. Such texts are usually monolingual and, as Asad (1986) has pointed out, they are often written up in the prestigious languages of Western nations and former colonial powers.

The organisation of this volume Following on from this introduction, Brian Street (Chapter 1) reviews some of the concepts and terms relating to literacy which have been used by researchers and practitioners working broadly within the field of New Literacy Studies. He emphasises the need to avoid reification and to be mindful that culture

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is a process which is negotiated and contested rather than fixed and unchanging. He revisits the notions of ‘literacy events’ and ‘literacy practices’ to assess their value as constructs in a social and ideological model of literacy. He also provides an account of the role that the New Literacy Studies have played in literacy debates in Anthropology, Development Studies, Adult Literacy and Education. He concludes this chapter by indicating that the challenge for the theoretical approaches to literacy put forward in the New Literacy Studies lies in the success of their practical application, particularly in mainstream education. The remaining chapters are organised into four sections: Section I, ‘Children’s worlds of literacy: home, community and school’ brings together the six chapters which deal with the relationship between the languages and literacies of children’s homes, communities and schooled literacies. Section II, entitled ‘Texts, identities and adult worlds’, includes the four chapters which focus on adults’ lived experiences with multilingual literacies in different domains, in their own life worlds and at work. Section III, ‘Creating spaces for multilingual literacies in local community contexts’, consists of the two chapters which describe the community-based projects which were designed as a means of countering the social exclusion and cultural inequity experienced by many men and women from linguistic minority groups. Section IV, entitled ‘Researching multilingual literacies in their social contexts’, presents the three chapters which address some of the methodological issues involved in conducting research at the intersection of recent Critical Studies of Multilingualism and New Literacy Studies. Each of these sections is preceded by a short introduction. The volume ends with an ‘Afterword’ by Nancy Hornberger in which she responds to the themes of the book and maps some of the connections with research on multilingual literacies in other contexts.

Note 1.

We use the term ‘expertise’ here, rather than terms like ‘skill’, ‘proficiency’ or ‘competence’. The latter foreground the cognitive dimension of language and literacy capabilities, whilst we wish to foreground the social and cultural dimensions. The term ‘expertise’ is used by Rampton (1995), along with other terms such as ‘allegiance’ and ‘cultural inheritance’ to “refer to linguistic identities — to cultural interpretations of a person’s relationship to a language” (1995: 340).

CHAPTER 1

Literacy events and literacy practices Theory and practice in the New Literacy Studies Brian Street

What are the terms being used around literacy? A range of terms has emerged in recent years for referring to literacy, particularly amongst those who espouse a ‘social’ view of reading and writing: ‘literacy events’, ‘literacy activities’, ‘literacy patterns’, ‘literacy strategies’, ‘literacy situations’. In this article, I want to argue that the field requires some consideration and refinement of these usages: a lot of the terms blend in and out of each other and tend to be used interchangeably. I want to suggest that we attempt greater precision and, in particular, I would like to put forward the proposal that a more careful use of the term ‘literacy practices’ (Street 1988) can help move forward both research and practice and that this phrase has most salience in attempting to analyse not just describe what is happening in social contexts around the meanings and uses of literacy. More particularly, my question here is how can we get theoretically from accounts of literacy events to accounts of literacy practices? A number of the chapters in this volume employ the phrase ‘literacy practices’ but the question is whether and how they use it differently. It is difficult to answer this because the phrase is often taken for granted and authors do not always explicitly address what that means to them. It has become ‘naturalised’ as Fairclough (1992b) would say — we all assume we know what we mean by it. Such naturalisation is always a dangerous moment in any intellectual endeavour, so I want to try to unpack some of the meanings and assumptions that underlie its use. My route for

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doing so is via a series of questions which I address in a general way to those who plan to undertake research in this area in future. My questions are: 1) 2) 3)

What do you mean by ‘literacy events’ and ‘literacy practices’? How do you use the concepts in your own research? What are the concepts that you have found useful in collecting, describing and analysing your research data?

A number of other terms have appeared in the research literature. These include: ‘literacy behaviours’ (which I take to be the activity of writing and reading itself); ‘multi-literacies’; ‘multiple literacies’; ‘dominant literacies’; ‘texts and practices’. I want to consider the problems or the advantages associated with the different concepts. So, other questions I want to address here are: How have literacy researchers decided on which concept to use and why? What do authors and readers take it to mean? What work has it done? What are the problems it raises in trying to make sense of this complex area? Multiple literacies and multi-literacies I firstly want to take a step back from these terms and try to locate them in a broader debate about literacy. An apt place to begin is with the phrase ‘multiple literacies’. This is a term that I, amongst others, had a hand in developing a decade ago (Street 1984), attempting to contrast it with a reified autonomous notion that there was only one thing called ‘literacy’ — which had a big ‘L’ and a little ‘y’: which was singular and autonomous in the sense that it was a factor that independently had effects on other things. I have argued that the notion of autonomous literacy took a dominant role in a lot of circles, in government circles in the UK, for instance, and in International Agencies such as UNESCO world-wide. The idea of multiple literacies, then, was an important construct in challenging that autonomous singular literacy. However, what I begin to see happening now makes me feel that there is a danger of reification again. In characterising literacy as multiple, it is very easy to slip into then assuming that there is a single literacy associated with a single culture, so that there are multiple literacies just as there are, supposedly, multiple cultures. So when, for example, we find Gujarati culture and Gujarati ‘Literacy’ in Leicester, this autonomous tendency leads to us putting the two together. Arvind Bhatt, David Barton, Marilyn Martin-Jones and Mukul Saxena (1995) have investigated multiple languages and literacies in this particular context and they have been quite aware of that problem and I think their research cuts across

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any reification. Nevertheless, I think the ways in which the term ‘multiple literacies’ gets adopted at times falls into the trap of reification. Like me, Arvind Bhatt and colleagues would prefer to say “Culture is a verb”, (Street 1993b). This usage signals that culture is a process that is contested, not a given inventory of characteristics. This position is now well known in a lot of the literature. Certainly most anthropologists working on literacy and researchers such as Stuart Hall who have developed the field of Cultural Studies are well aware of the multiple, contested, processual nature of culture (Wright 1997; Hallam & Street 1998). A claim to culture is itself a part of the process rather than a given. So in that sense, one cannot simply line up a single ‘literacy’ with a single ‘culture’. Another phrase that emerged more recently, which I also think is problematic, in this larger context is the concept of ‘multi-literacies’. Courtney Cazden and others in the ‘New London Group’ (NLG) (New London Group 1996) have put forward the notion of multi-literacy to refer not to multiple literacies, associated with different cultures, but multiple forms of literacy associated with channels or modes, such as computer literacy, visual literacy. Kress (1997), a member of the NLG, has criticised the further extensions of ‘multi-literacy’ into, for instance, political literacy, or emotional literacy, thereby using the term as a metaphor for competence. That is one of the dangers of this approach. The NLG are especially interested in channels and modes of communication, that can be referred to as ‘literacies’. Gunther Kress, in particular, is interested in the notion of visual literacy, so for him multi-literacy signals a new world in which the reading and writing practices of literacy are only one part of what people are going to have to learn in order to be ‘literate’ (Kress and van Leeuwen 1990). They are going to have to learn to handle the icons and the signs, such as the Word for Windows package with all its combinations of signs, symbols, boundaries, pictures, words, texts, images et cetera. The extreme version of this position is the notion of ‘the end of language’ — that somehow we are no longer talking about language in its rather traditional notion of grammar, lexicon and semantics, but rather we are now talking about semiotic systems that cut across reading, writing, speech, into all these other semiotic forms of communication. This, then, is what is signalled by the term ‘multi-literacies’: a rather different approach from that entailed by the ‘multiple literacies’ view outlined earlier. Despite their differences, the problem with both positions is the same problem of reification, and also that of determination, or determinism. If you identify a literacy with a mode or channel — visual literacy, computer literacy

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— then you are slipping into the danger of reifying it according to form: you are failing to take into account the social practices that go into the construction, uses and meanings of literacy in context. In developing a multi-literacies view, then, it is important to guard against a kind of determinism of channel or technology in which visual literacy, in itself, is seen as having certain effects which may be different from computer literacy. The focus would then be on the mode, on the visual and the computer, rather than on the social practices in which computers, visual media and other kinds of channels are actually given meaning. It is the social practices, I would want to argue, that give meaning and lead to effects, not the channel itself. Literacy events and literacy practices This then leads me to consideration of the other terms cited above that have come to be employed for researching literacy and in applying new social theories to practice. Barton (1994a) notes that the term ‘literacy event’ derived from the sociolinguistic idea of ‘speech event’. It was first used in relation to literacy by A.B. Anderson and Stokes (1980) who defined it as an occasion during which a person “attempts to comprehend graphic signs” (1980: 59–65). Shirley Brice Heath further characterised a ‘literacy event’ as “any occasion in which a piece of writing is integral to the nature of the participants’ interactions and their interpretative processes” (Heath 1982a: 93). I have employed the phrase ‘literacy practices’ (Street 1984: 1) as a means of focussing upon “social practices and conceptions of reading and writing”, although I later elaborated the term to take account both of ‘events’ in Heath’s sense and of the social models of literacy that participants bring to bear upon those events and that give meaning to them (Street 1988). David Barton, in an Introduction to his edited volume on Writing in the Community (Barton & Ivanic 1991: 1), attempted to clarify these debates about literacy events and literacy practices and, in a later collaborative study of everyday literacies in Lancaster, England, Barton and Hamilton begin their account with further refinements of the two phrases (1998: 6). Baynham (1995) entitled his recent book Literacy Practices: Investigating Literacy in Social Contexts. Similarly Prinsloo and Breier’s volume on The Social Uses of Literacy (1996), which is a series of case studies of literacy in South Africa, used the concept of ‘events’ but then extended it to ‘practices’. My own recent book Social Literacies: Critical Perspectives on Literacy in Development, Ethnography and Education (Street 1995) also tries to refine and develop the relations between these terms. So, a literature is emerging that

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directly addresses the issue of the relation between ‘literacy events’ and ‘literacy practices’. I would like to outline here my own view of these relations and their significance for the field of Literacy Studies. ‘Literacy events’ is a helpful concept, I think, because it enables researchers, and also practitioners, to focus on a particular situation where things are happening and you can see them happening. This is the classic literacy event in which we are able to observe an event that involves reading and/or writing and begin to draw out its characteristics: here, we might observe one kind of event, an academic literacy event, and there, another, which is quite different, such as checking timetables and catching the bus, browsing through a magazine, sitting in the barber’s shop, reading signs when negotiating the road. The Lancaster research has made good use of the concept (Barton & Ivanic 1991; Barton & Hamilton 1998; Hamilton, Barton & Ivanic 1994; Ivanic 1997). But there is also a problem if we use the concept on its own in that it remains descriptive and, from an anthropological point of view, it does not tell us how the meanings are constructed. If you were to observe a particular literacy event as a non-participant who was not familiar with its conventions, you would have difficulty following what is going on, such as how to work with the text which provides the focus of the event and how to talk around it. There are clearly underlying conventions and assumptions around literacy events that make them work. So I now come to ‘literacy practices’, which seems to me at the moment the most robust of the various concepts that literacy researchers have been developing. The concept of literacy practices does, I think, attempt to handle the events and the patterns of activity around literacy but to link them to something broader of a cultural and social kind. And part of that broadening involves attending to the fact that in a literacy event we have brought to it concepts, social models regarding what the nature of this practice is and that make it work and give it meaning. Those models we cannot get at simply by sitting on the wall with a video and watching what is happening: you can photograph literacy events but you cannot photograph literacy practices. There is an ethnographic issue here: we have to start talking to people, listening to them and linking their immediate experience of reading and writing out to other things that they do as well. That is why it is often meaningless to just ask people about literacy alone, as in recent surveys (Basic Skills Agency (BSA) 1997; International Adult Literacy Survey, OECD 1995), or even about reading and writing, because what might give meaning to literacy events may actually be something that is not, in the first instance,

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thought of in terms of literacy at all. (Kathryn Jones, Marilyn Martin-Jones and Arvind Bhatt also make this point in their chapter, this volume). For instance, in the case of academic practices, it may be about social relations and the academy. Heath and McLaughlin (1993) found in discussing newspaper reading with urban adolescents in the USA that much of their activity did not count in their minds as literacy at all, so a superficial survey would have missed the significance of their actual literacy practices and perhaps labelled them non-readers, or more insultingly ‘illiterate’ as in much press coverage of this area. So, one cannot predict beforehand what will give meaning to a literacy event and what will link a set of literacy events to literacy practices. Literacy practices refer to this broader cultural conception of particular ways of thinking about and doing reading and writing in cultural contexts. One of the key issues, at both a methodological and an empirical level, is how can we characterise the shift from observing literacy events to conceptualising literacy practices. In my own fieldwork in Iranian villages during the early 1970s (Street 1984), what began to emerge as literacy practices were uses and meanings of literacy that were identifiable around three domains of social activity: maktab literacy practices, associated with the primary Qur’anic school; schooled literacy practices in the more secular and modernising context of the State school; and commercial literacy practices associated with buying and selling fruit for transport to the city and the market. The practices in this third domain of social activity were quite different from either of the other sets of literacy practices. Characterising them as literacy practices helped me to understand those differences, and I could then talk about whether there were certain identities associated with particular practices. In that context, the identity associated with maktab literacy was derived from traditional authority in the village located in Qur’anic learning and with a social hierarchy dominated by men. Schooled literacy, on the other hand, was associated with new learning and with modernisation, leading some village children to urban lives and jobs. Commercial literacy emerged in response to the economic activity of selling fruit to the nearby cities at a time of economic boom and involved writing notes, cheques, lists, names on crates and so on, to facilitate the purchase and sale of quantities of fruit. The framework for understanding literacy that I was developing at this time, including the concept of ‘literacy practices’ (Street 1984), aimed to provide an explanation for why commercial literacy was mainly undertaken by those who had been taught at the Qur’anic school rather than those from the modern State school, even though at first sight one might expect the literacy skills of the latter to be more functionally oriented

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to commercial practices. Those with Qur’anic literacy had the status and authority within the village to carry on these commercial practices, whilst those trained in the State school were seen to be oriented outwards and lacked the integral relations to everyday village life that underpinned the trust necessary for such transactions. In this village context then, literacy was not simply a set of functional skills, as much modern schooling and many Literacy Agencies represent it, but rather it was a set of social practices deeply associated with identity and social position. It is approaching literacy as a social practice that provides a way of making sense of variations in the uses and meanings of literacy in such contexts rather than reliance on the barren notions of literacy skills, rates, levels that dominate contemporary discourse about literacy. Similar analyses are possible of other contexts where multiple literacy practices are associated with different arenas or domains of public life. A literature has emerged that builds upon these insights. We now have a growing body of ethnographic research which describes and explains variation in literacy practices across and within cultures, from outside of the dominant discourse (Barton & Hamilton 1998; Baynham 1995; Heath 1983; Kulick & Stroud 1993; Prinsloo & Breier 1996; Street 1993a; Maybin 1994). As this work develops, so refinements and elaborations of the key concepts highlighted in this paper emerge. Maybin, for instance, has used the terms ‘events’ and ‘practices’ within a broadly ethnographic approach in order to bring out the practical as well as theoretical problems that arise in actual research contexts. With respect to her own study of children’s everyday speech in a UK school (Maybin 1997), she explains: I used the term ‘practices’ to refer to observable patterns of behaviour across events e.g. a contrast between different practices would be between children often using reference books to announce newsworthy bits of information while teachers are using them to frame observation and epistemology. These different behaviours assume different beliefs about what the texts are for, different values and ideologies and, therefore, to me signal different ‘practices’. So I was focussing at the more empirical end of the term (Maybin 1998, email communication).

Maybin identifies a problem with ‘practices’. She says: It seems to cover rather different kinds of stuff within one term, so some aspects of it seem to be amenable to empirical investigation (what people actually do, and recurring patterns within this), while ideological aspects etc. are at a more abstract conceptual level and have to be inferred from observation and interview data (Maybin 1998, e-mail communication).

Brian Street

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In the introduction to her chapter in Situated Literacies (ed. by Barton, Hamilton and Ivanic 2000), Maybin suggests that a number of authors in that volume are extending our thinking about events and practices through more theorising of discourse and intertextuality. She says: The taking on of more complex ideas about discourse and intertextuality in these studies of literacy enables the researchers to more clearly conceptualise the pivotal role of literacy practices in articulating the links between individual people’s everyday experience, and wider social institutions and structures. It also enables them to explore issues of power, through examining the relationship between micro- and macro-level contexts (Maybin 2000: 197).

Some of the authors in the present volume are, likewise, debating the implications of using the terms ‘literacy events’ and literacy practices’ in the contexts of ethnographic-style research on multilingual literacies in comparative perspectives. I conclude this chapter with a brief survey of the domains, practical and academic, in which these debates have taken place. I would argue that any discussion of literacy in education, in the UK as elsewhere, needs to take account of these debates and concepts rather than remaining locked within the ‘autonomous’ model with its focus on literacy rates, levels, ages and skills.

Literacy debates and conflicts: the role of the New Literacy Studies The ‘New Literacy Studies’ (NLS) (Gee 1990; Street 1993a) has provided the basis for intervention in debates about literacy in a number of different fields. By tracking the relationship of NLS to these fields over time, we can see more clearly some of the general principles that NLS raises and identify the areas of current uncertainty and conflict. In each area, I characterise the field and indicate the main topics being debated, I describe the intervention and role of NLS, and I point to the challenges and points of conflict or uncertainty which are currently salient. Out of this overview might come proposals for further intervention in the various fields, as well as developments and refinements within NLS itself. Anthropology Many of the broader debates about literacy originated in suggestions made by Goody (1968, 1977) and other anthropologists about a ‘great divide’ between

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literacy and orality and about the implications of literacy for rationality. Goody (1968, 1977), Olson (1977), Ong (1982) and others have argued that literacy is associated with large advances in cognitive processing, and with radical shifts in the nature of society to such an extent that there is a ‘great divide’ between pre-literate and literate societies. This divide is often also extended to individuals, so that people in ‘modern’ society who score low in traditional literacy tests are seen as also limited in their cognitive and social abilities (OECD 1995; Oakhill, Beard & Vincent 1995). Writers in the New Literacy Studies (Finnegan 1973, 1988; Gee 1990; Barton 1994a; Barton & Ivanic 1991; Street 1985, 1995; Collins 1995) have argued that this position is flawed both empirically and theoretically. Ethnographic accounts (such as the classic study by Scribner and Cole 1981) make it evident that members of societies with little or no literacy can nevertheless perform the complex cognitive processes, achieve the metalinguistic awareness and perform the logical operations that Goody, Ong, Olson and others would attribute to literate society. Literacy practices vary with cultural context, there is not a single, monolithic, autonomous literacy, whose consequences for individuals and societies can be read off as a result of its intrinsic characteristics: rather, there are, as I argued above, ‘literacies’ or rather ‘literacy practices’ whose character and consequences have to be specified for each context. NLS writers and activists have intervened to challenge the great divide both within anthropology and more broadly, as we shall see below, in its practical applications in development and education. Advocating a shift from autonomous to ideological models, from statistical accounts of levels and skills to ethnographies of literacy, they have worked to move the agenda for the anthropology of literacy from the rationality debate to the study of ideology. In this context, literacy is seen as a field for investigating processes of hegemony, power relations, practices and competing discourses rather than for exploring the great divide and the relative rationality of ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’ societies. Development Assumptions regarding literacy and progress have dominated the field of development in the post war era and continue to underpin modernist projects in literacy, education, women’s development and so on. The ideas of the autonomous model of literacy, regarding both individual cognition and social

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progress have underpinned much literacy and development work, programmes and projects. Both UNESCO and national campaigns run by State or non-governmental agencies have based literacy projects on statistics for ‘illiteracy’ from which they have read off ‘autonomous’ consequences, such as that economic development is consequently impaired and that women are disempowered (Street 1998). Again, NLS interventions have mounted a challenge to the dominant development model and currently approaches concerned with ‘real literacies’, participatory literacy and empowerment take a more socially-oriented perspective and focus more precisely on local conditions (Rogers 1994). Current debates in this field include challenges to the apparent change from autonomous to ideological models in such projects and some critics (Prinsloo & Breier 1996) have argued that even the major alternative to dominant models — that based on the work of Paulo Freire (1972, 1985) — turns out to have autonomous tendencies. UNESCO, for instance, appears to have shifted to a more ‘social’ approach, but old skills/ autonomy/ determinism lurks beneath. Adult Literacy In the UK and in some parts of the USA, literacy movements, facilitators and writers about literacy have, for some time, used ‘social’ approaches, independently of the debates in the academic world, often with loose Freirean underpinnings that were mainly student and community centred (Fingeret 1983). These approaches have seen themselves as marginal and in conflict with dominant discourses on ‘illiteracy’, ‘deficit’, top-down, fix-it approaches (Hamilton et al. 1994). In this context, the role of NLS has been to help articulate and give academic voice to an already developed movement that was often anti-academic and felt marginalised (Barton & Hamilton 1998). Not many have been writing ‘academic’ books and articles on adult literacy, but a few pieces provide some point of reference e.g. Street’s (1997) history of Adult Literacy in the UK; Hamilton, Barton & Ivanic’s Worlds of Literacy (1994); and Barton & Ivanic’s Writing in the Community (1991). There remain in this, as in the other fields outlined, challenges and points of conflict or uncertainty. For instance, there is an ambivalent relationship still between ‘practice’ and ‘theory’: many practitioners did MAs with academics in NLS e.g. at Lancaster, Sussex and Pennsylvania, but still spoke for a vernacular voice over academicising tendencies. More recently, Government policy in

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the UK has shifted attention from the student-centred, open learning view that dominated practitioner approaches to a more institutionalised framework of progression, skills, assessment, certification, accreditation that leaves out the ‘traditional’ adult literacy learner of earlier phases of the ‘Literacy Campaign’. Some observers (Mary Hamilton, cited in Street 1997) have noted the beginnings of resistance and indicate the possibility of a ‘new campaign’ amongst practitioners. The role for NLS here, as in development literacy, has been to expose the conceptual underpinnings of the shift and to help articulate alternatives. Schooling This area is the largest in terms of sheer numbers, publicity, effects, popular interest and government concern. Again, the dominant model in the UK is of autonomous, skill-based, delivery. This view of literacy is articulated by the media, Government representatives, Ministers, Agencies (The Office for Standards and Training in Education (OFSTED), The Literacy Task Force (LTF), the Teacher Training Agency (TTA), the Department for Education and Employment (DfEE), the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA), the Basic Skills Agency (BSA) [formerly the Adult Literacy and Basic Skills Unit (ALBSU) but now having dropped both Adult and Literacy from its name, increasingly intervening at school or Further Education level]); and by educational psychologists and researchers (for example those who contributed to the Special Issue of the Journal of Research in Reading, 18 (2), Oakhill, Beard & Vincent (eds) 1995). Newspaper clippings from the last decade of press reports on literacy indicate a focus on ‘falling standards’, ‘deficit’, ‘illiteracy’, skills or lack of them and very little influence from the more ‘social’ approaches discussed above to which lip service has at least been paid in development work (cf. Freebody 1998). Teachers and lecturers tend to be resistant to this dominant discourse and instead use, often implicitly, a ‘socially sensitive’, less skilled-based approach: some have been influenced by Freire, by ‘Critical Literacy’ (in the US this has been influenced by the work of Henry Giroux, Peter McLaren, Colin Lankshear and other critical theorists). In the UK, teachers are now taking account of Critical Language Awareness (CLA) (Fairclough 1992b), but their resistance to the more utilitarian aspects of the autonomous model of literacy, as it affects school work especially in the literature curriculum, is also part of a longer English tradition

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— the critical and dissenting strand from Mathew Arnold through F.R. Leavis, developed and updated by the National Association for Teachers of English (NATE). Those working in Media Studies and Cultural Studies already have a ‘social’ basis in their view of the subject and its content (cf. Buckingham 1993) that likewise eschews ‘skills’ and the ‘autonomous model’ (though they may lurk beneath and are often resurrected in assessment); Media Studies is also sometimes in conflict with more traditional ‘English’ approaches (seen as text-based, specialist, inward-looking, elitist), whilst Media Studies presents itself as clued in to students’ own social and cultural knowledge and experience, for example, of TV. NLS interventions are relatively novel in this area. In the USA Heath and Mangiola (1991) worked with teachers and with professional associations such as the National Council for Teachers of English (NCTE), and the American Educational Research Association (AERA) to develop research and texts that had practical applications. In the UK, teachers have taken up the ideas embedded in CLA, rather than the more ethnographically based NLS, but there is clearly scope for the latter as teachers look for ways to elaborate on the simplicities of the National Curriculum and to enhance ‘culturally sensitive teaching’. In this area, challenges and points of conflict/uncertainty relate to the long history of struggle and conflict in the field already, so there are many factions, nuances, internal differences amongst those opposed to dominant discourses; they call upon a variety of intellectual traditions in opposition to the dominant one (Marshall 1998; Kress 1997). The dominant discourse, however, marshals powerful alliances and resources, between government and its agencies, academic psychologists and media, as we saw above. Parents are ambivalent: they may look both ways and mistrust ‘professionals’ even whilst calling on them to resolve ‘literacy problems’. All parties may ‘buy’ social perspectives at a common-sense, relatively banal level but have different reasons for resisting fuller development of it and its implications. For example, participants in the debates about literacy and schooling have their own positions and traditions to defend: this includes, research in psychology, critical theory, vested interests in ‘English’ teaching in schools (e.g. between media departments and English departments), and government agencies such as QCA, Ofsted and the DfEE. The raising of expectations about ‘literacy’ and the preoccupation with ‘falling standards’ by current Governments in the UK and the USA and the

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media hype, even hysteria, about literacy may create space for alternatives, as the dominant approach fails to ‘deliver’, as has happened to some extent in Development Literacy work. A question for NLS theorists and practitioners is whether they are ready to seize the moment. What do they have prepared with regard to practical applications and the mediating of theory into practice, to take account of the demands that will be made on literacy theorists and practitioners if the present round of interventions proves unsuccessful? The next stage of work in this area, then, is to move beyond simply theoretical critiques of the autonomous model and to develop positive proposals for interventions in curriculum, measurement criteria and teacher education. It will be at this stage that the theoretical perspectives brought together in the ‘New Literacy Studies’ will face their sternest test: that of their practical applications in the field of mainstream education.

SECTION I

Children’s worlds of literacy: home, school and community Most chapters in this section of the book deal in one way or another with the relationship between the literacies of home, community and school. The starting point for most of them is with children’s lived experience of languages and literacies at home and in local community contexts. The literacies of school are then viewed from this vantage point. The six chapters describe in detail the languages and literacies of parents and children from different urban localities and explore the values and beliefs associated with reading and writing in different languages. Most of the accounts focus on bilingual children from linguistic minority groups, but revealing comparisons are also made with the literacy experiences of monolingual children in local working class or religious communities and with the literacy histories of monolingual and bilingual adults. These accounts give us valuable insights into the ways in which children’s experiences with different languages and literacies are bound up with relationships with parents, siblings or other people within their households or local communities. They also provide detailed descriptions of real literacy events in children’s lives where spoken and written languages are intertwined. In some of these events, the talk is centred on a text (e.g. a letter, a story book, a religious text) and written language is foregrounded, and in others, it is in the background, as in storytelling episodes where a parent is drawing on traditional legends or fables. Starting, in this way, from specific events and practices in local households and communities, the chapters build up a rich picture of some of the ways in which languages and literacies are embedded in different cultural practices and how reading and writing practices, and specific uses of texts, are rooted in different world views, in

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Section I

different religious beliefs and in different ideas about what it means to be literate or what counts as reading and writing. These chapters also document the time, effort and expertise invested by parents and other adults in local communities in orienting children to particular languages and literacies outside the formal education system and the time and effort invested by children and young adults in the acquisition, development or reclaiming of the languages and literacies of their cultural inheritance. As readers we gain revealing insights into the local contexts in which children develop a sense of how to learn before they enter the mainstream school. A number of themes emerge as the authors examine the relationship between home, community and school, between the languages and literacies of children’s life worlds and schooled literacies. One recurring theme is that schools take little or no account of home or community literacies or of the knowledge about these languages and literacies that children bring to school. A second theme which is brought out in Chapters 2, 3, 4 and 5 is that only certain approaches to the printed word are considered ‘legitimate’ in the school context. If other approaches to literacy are acknowledged at all, they are cast in a negative light and minority parents who orient their children to literacy in these ways are blamed for their children’s underachievement or for placing an excessive burden on their children’s learning. The expertise of minority parents is overlooked altogether, particularly when they are not confident in using English. And, as we see in Chapter 3, in some schools, it is even assumed that parents are ‘illiterate’ if they do not read and write English. A third theme, explored in Chapter 7, is that of bringing home languages and literacies into the school context and the ways in which children respond to such initiatives. In Chapter 2, Eve Gregory and Ann Williams unpack the notion that story reading experiences at home, shared between parent and child, which are playful and pleasurable in nature and which centre around ‘good books’, provide an essential foundation for later success at school. They argue that this ‘official’ paradigm of early reading takes no account of the diversity of early experiences with literacy that children have in different home and community settings. To support their argument, they draw on extensive ethnographic fieldwork carried out in one neighbourhood in the heart of East London (Spitalfields), with adults and children in thirteen households: seven Sylhetispeaking households and six monolingual English-speaking households. They provide an illuminating comparative account of the ‘unofficial’ literacy activi-

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ties in the lives of these parents and their children and of the diverse strengths which grow out of these activities. In Chapter 3, Adrian Blackledge provides revealing insights into the ways in which school practices can lead to the disempowerment of women from linguistic minority groups as they seek to support their children’s acquisition of literacy in different languages. The author of this chapter focuses on one primary school in Birmingham and on the mothers of 18 six year old children of Bangladeshi origin who were attending the school. Drawing on observations carried out in the school and on interviews with the women in their homes, he describes attempts made by the school to introduce school reading practices into these children’s homes and documents the school’s failure to recognise the cultural and linguistic resources that the mothers were already contributing to their children’s early apprenticeship with literacy. This chapter sets out disturbing evidence of the manner in which parents can be excluded from the process of providing support for their children as they make the transition into primary school, when schools take no account of home or community languages and provide no bilingual materials for reading at home and when there are no bilingual teachers or interpreters present at parents’ evenings or workshops in the school. In Chapter 4, An Ran gives a detailed account of a recent research project which focused on the experiences of Chinese children learning to read Chinese with their mothers at home. She shows how the mothers drew on their own educational experience in China when tutoring their own children at home, since they had no previous experience of teaching reading and writing. The mothers took on a formal ‘teacherly’ role, making extensive use of questions, giving explicit instructions and providing explanations cast as statements or as visual demonstrations, particularly when discussing written Chinese characters with the children. The books they used were Chinese school textbooks rather than story books and reading was constructed as ‘serious work’ rather than a source of enjoyment. Like the other authors in this section, An Ran stresses the need to be aware of the diversity of views in children’s homes and local communities with regard to what counts as language and literacy education. Chapter 5, by Viv Edwards and Hubisi Nwenmely, explores two broad themes related to literacy, education and cultural difference. In the first part of the chapter, the authors highlight the ways in which different world views have shaped different approaches to the printed word. They do this by review-

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Section I

ing studies carried out in the context of religious education (organised by both Christian and Muslim groups) and in the context of secular provision organised by minority parents and community groups (the specific example they take up is that of classes for Chinese children of Hong Kong origin in Britain). From this comparative account, the authors draw out commonalities and differences in the teaching/learning practices of cultural and religious groups and foreground some of the values associated with these practices. They argue that educators need to be aware of the worlds of literacy that children experience outside of school and be prepared to learn about these experiences from parents rather than imposing school models of what counts as reading. They also argue that teachers need to make their own views about literacy explicit to parents and provide clear explanations of the thinking about literacy which underpins the specific teaching/learning approach favoured by their school. The second part of the chapter presents revealing accounts of two educational initiatives relating to Kwéyòl: first, the relatively unsuccessful attempts that were made in the 1980s in St. Lucia to introduce and disseminate a new orthography for Kweyol and to move towards a bilingual (English/Kwéyòl) language policy for the schools; and, second, the relatively successful attempts which were made to introduce provision for the teaching of Kwéyòl literacy in an adult education context in London. By comparing these two initiatives, the authors demonstrate the importance of historical and cultural analysis in accounts of such educational interventions and they provide stark evidence of the ways in which ‘legitimate’ languages prevail in national education systems. They also point to ways in which the legitimacy of languages such as English can be contested within certain sites, making it possible for learners to assert cultural difference and to work towards undoing centuries of symbolic violence imposed upon previous generations in their country of origin. Chapter 6, by Raymonde Sneddon, presents a detailed discussion of sociolinguistic data gathered as part of an ongoing study of Gujarati-speaking households in the north east of London. Drawing on both quantitative and qualitative data, she describes the language and literacy repertoires of the children and adults in these households and their patterns of language use. She shows that Gujarati is the primary language of informal spoken communication in most of the households and argues that this level of language maintenance has been achieved by sustaining close ties of marriage and kinship with Gujarat and through close involvement in local community activities, such as

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the running of a local community centre. She also shows that, because the adults in these households are part of a close-knit Muslim community, their preferred languages of literacy are Urdu and Qur’anic Arabic. These are the languages that the children are learning to read and write in this local community context. In addition, the author informs us that most of the children (36 in all) are doing well in their local school, thereby providing powerful evidence to counter the view that time invested by children in acquiring literacy in languages other than English detracts from their achievements in the mainstream school. The last contribution to this section is by Charmian Kenner (Chapter 7). Her chapter draws on a research project which investigated children’s responses to the introduction of home languages and literacies in a school context: that of a nursery class in a multilingual neighbourhood of London. As part of an educational intervention jointly planned with the teacher of this nursery class, the parents of the bilingual children were asked to bring to the class different types of texts in the children’s home languages. They were also asked to produce texts, like letters and posters, in these languages in the classroom context. The children reacted to this initiative in a range of ways: by commenting on the purpose and significance of home texts, showing that they had already associated these texts with people and places, and by experimenting with writing in their home languages themselves. This chapter shows that it is possible for researchers, teachers, parents and learners to collaborate in making educational interventions and in bringing about change in school practices. Local initiatives such as these can open up valuable new learning opportunities for learners and can also provide a window on children’s developing understanding of literacy as a social practice.

CHAPTER 2

Work or Play? ‘Unofficial’ literacies in the lives of two East London communities Eve Gregory and Ann Williams

Mrs. L. describes her son Simon’s early reading at home: “My dad was a reader. He read anything and everything — from the newspapers. That’s why Simon could read the newspaper; he could pick all the horses out. He was four and a half when he came here and he was reading the newspaper. He still does — back page. At the time he could see what horses were running, what the prizes were, what colours they had, who the jockey was … the lot, he still does…” Parents will be asked to sign an undertaking to read with their children at home for at least 20 minutes per day under government proposals for improving literacy published yesterday …. Stephen Byers, the schools minister said he was fighting back against the dumbing down of British culture exemplified by the Teletubbies and declining standards on Radio 4. (The Guardian 29/7/97)

In late twentieth century Britain, a paradigm of early literacy prevails within which the home story-reading experience providing enjoyment, pleasure or fun to parent and child is seen as an essential prerequisite for later school success. Official reports since the 1970s have left little doubt as to the precise material and form necessary for these early reading experiences. The Bullock Report (1975: 7.2) informed parents that “… the best way to prepare the very young child for reading is to hold him on your lap and read aloud to him stories he likes, over and over again … We

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Eve Gregory and Ann Williams believe that a priority need is…to help parents recognise the value of sharing the experience of books with their children.”

The maxim ‘Babies need books’ changed little in later decades. During the late 1980s, the Cox Report (1989: 16.8) reiterated it in the following way: “We hope that parents will share books with their children from their earliest days, read aloud to them and talk about the stories they have enjoyed together.”

In the 1990s, the School Curriculum and Assessment Authority Report on desirable outcomes for children’s learning in nurseries (SCAA 1996: 7) asked parents to support learning opportunities at home through “reading and sharing books”. Significantly, it is not enjoyment with any type of print which counts. Both the official curriculum and the academic world in which teachers are trained, only sanction and reinforce recognised ‘good literature’ whose titles are provided in the curriculum; it is on these titles that the success of seven year olds will be tested. Experiences like those of Simon, the four year old in our recent study in East London who was reading the sports page of a popular newspaper above, are clearly excluded from the school model of success. This paradigm has variously been referred to as “mainstream” (Heath 1983), “schooled” (Street & Street 1995) or “official” literacy (Dyson 1997). The official view of what counts as literacy has filtered down through the media to become the view of society at large. Headlines such as “Babies brought to book” or “Are you sitting comfortably?” (Times Educational Supplement, 28/6/1996: 2.IV) are amongst many which introduce articles describing the benefits of providing disadvantaged families and their babies with books. Large-scale research projects (Wells 1985) have also provided evidence of a correlation between success in reading at school and storytelling experience from infancy at home. Accounts of shared story-reading events, often written by caregivers about their own children, document precisely the nature of this activity as an organised social routine, specifically framed and separated from other daily events (Butler 1979; Scollon & Scollon 1981; Baghban 1984). Some studies provide ‘precise details’ of the nature of the cognitive and linguistic skills provided by story-reading interactions: linguistically, ‘book-oriented’ children are shown to be able to switch into complex structures involving longer ‘idea units’ or unit length (Scollon & Scollon 1981), as well as ‘appropriate’ collocations and word-groupings e.g. ‘the little red hen … reaped the corn’ (Dombey 1983); cognitively, children

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are shown to learn to ‘detach’ themselves from the immediate audience to operate within the boundaries of the text from ‘situation-dependent’ to ‘textdependent’ thought (Simons & Murphy 1986). However, the success of children who enter school already practised in skills authorised in the classroom can hardly be surprising. What we lack are studies showing how quite different skills might also be valuable if called upon by teachers during early reading lessons. This chapter investigates the ‘unofficial’ literacy practices in families like Simon’s where conventional story-reading might not take place. What other types of reading might be common in children’s homes or in the community? How well-versed in these literacy practices might young children be? How varied are these activities? With whom do they take place and what materials are used? What role might the young child play in the activity? Above all, which skills gained from these practices might be harnessed by teachers in early years’ classrooms?

Living beyond the pump: the families in the study These questions were the starting-point of a study of reading in the lives of thirteen families with children aged five to seven, attending two adjacent primary schools in East London (Gregory & Williams 2000). The district of Spitalfields where the families live, comprises one square mile to the east of the City of London, its separateness emphasised concretely and symbolically by the boundary line of an old water trough or pump at Aldgate (one of the original Roman gates into London). Spitalfields has a long tradition of receiving immigrants; the Huguenots during the eighteenth century, followed by Jews from Eastern Europe during the latter half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Today, their place has been taken by families from Bangladesh and many of the streets in the area reflect their cultural background and Islamic way of life. Seven of the families in the study were Bangladeshi British. The home language used between parent and child was Sylheti, a dialect of Bengali with no modern written form. The remaining six families were monolingual, white Londoners who lived in the same area, and, in some instances in the same blocks of flats as the Bangladeshi British families. The aim of the project was to record the literacy histories of the families in the two communities, to investigate the extent to which these literacy

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practices affected the children’s reading strategies in the mainstream school and to examine the influence of ‘schooled’ learning practices on the learning patterns of the family. The literacy practices of the two mainstream school teachers were also noted and their views on the home literacy of the project families were sought. The data for each child consisted of three semi-structured interviews with a caregiver, in most cases the mother; an interview with the child her/himself; a recorded session of each child reading with the mainstream school teacher and a similar recorded session with a family member. The interviews with the Bangladeshi British parents were conducted by Nasima Rashid, the Sylheti speaking researcher. In addition, classroom observation was carried out in the two mainstream schools for one morning per week throughout the school year. Community classes and mother tongue classes attended by the Bangladeshi British children were also observed. The data was analysed using the method of multi-layering (Bloome & Theodorou 1988). This approach enabled us to combine three layers of analysis, with the focus moving from the outer layer or the social context, through a middle layer in which we examined and quantified the teaching strategies used by teachers, parents and children, to the inner layer which involved an ethnomethodological analysis of the interactions between teachers and children, and between parents and children in individual reading episodes, focusing on the roles assumed by each participant.1 A useful example of the value of combining qualitative and quantitative approaches was found in Rogoff & Gauvain’s (1986) pattern analysis used to examine instructional discourse in mother-child dyads.

The social context The demographic data from our study highlights important factors contributing to differences in the children’s home literacy practices. The family backgrounds of the children are shown below in Tables 1a and 1b.

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Table 1a. Bilingual children and their families

Uzma Maruf Shima Shuma Akhlak Henna Shanaz

Position Position in in family Family 4/5 5/5 5/5 2/4 9/11 3/4 2/3

Father’s Occupation Restaurant-owner Shop worker Unemployed Waiter Unemployed Unemployed Factory owner

Mother’s Education Grade 5* Grade 5 Grade 5 to age 15 Grade 7 Grade 4 Grade 5

Accommodation flat double flat house flat flat flat flat

*grade 5 indicates the final level of primary school and is generally reached by age 11

Table 1b. Monolingual children and their families Position in Family 1/1 3/3

Father’s Occupation Policeman Publican

Mother’s Education Age 16 Age 16

Anne Marie Naomi Richard

1/1

Builder

Age 16

2/2 3/3

Unemployed

Age 16 Age 16

Stewart

2/2

Plumber

Age 16

Susie Sally

Mother’s Occupation Childminder Works in family pub Insurance clerk Unemployed Access course Playleader in children’s playground

Accommodation flat week - flat weekend - house house flat flat flat

First, the different pattern of employment between the two groups reveals the relative isolation of the Bangladeshi British families living in this area in comparison with the monolingual families. No mother in the Bangladeshi British group was in employment outside the home, in contrast with all but one of the monolingual mothers whose work or studies demanded English literacy skills. Three out of seven Bangladeshi British fathers were unemployed and the employment of the remaining fathers was in the immediate vicinity with colleagues from the same country of origin. Second, six out of the seven Bangladeshi British mothers had received their education in Bangladesh and were literate only in Bengali. The seventh mother had attended school in Britain. This contrasted with the monolingual English mothers, three of whom

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had GCE passes. Third, the cramped accommodation of the Bangladeshi British families meant that the array of toys visible in some of the monolingual families would not have been possible. Finally, in contrast with the monolingual children, those of Bangladeshi British origin had a number of older siblings living at home. These siblings constructed a distinctive home literacy practice, which is outlined later in this chapter.

Pleasure and pain: literacy in the lives of the parent generation Although the monolingual mothers who took part in the project were recruited on a random basis, that is we approached all the white monolingual families in Year 2 and included all who agreed to take part, the accounts of their childhood literacy experiences were surprisingly homogeneous. For most of the mothers their ‘schooled’ or formal literacy experiences had been painful and disappointing. All six, whose ages ranged from 23 to 40, felt dissatisfied with their own schooling and wanted their children to have the educational opportunities they felt they had missed. Four out of the six women had truanted regularly from both their primary and secondary schools and had been afraid to go to school because of bullying or encouraged to stay at home by parents. One mother had been dyslexic at school, one fell behind in her work as she was frequently absent, and another left before taking any examinations because of the bullying she suffered. The feeling expressed by four of the mothers, was that the ‘significant adults’, the teachers, had been uninterested in them and that they had not been encouraged to work hard or to strive for success in school. Memories of learning to read in the formal context of school, were therefore painful: “I was never really that good in school. I was partially dyslexic as well and still am with writing. They used to leave me in a corner with a picture book”. (Mrs Tr). “I was slow at reading. I was behind for a long time. My mum used to let me have a lot of time off and then once you fall behind in your work you don’t want to go back any more”. (Mrs W).

In contrast, true learning and reading with real enjoyment took place at home. Thus, Mrs L who left school with no qualifications, when asked about how she learnt to read, responded

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“I’ve always been able to read. My dad was a reader”. (Mrs L).

Mrs Tr who had been dyslexic stated, “Whatever I learned was down to my mum and dad. They were good in that department because my mum’s dyslexic. On Saturday morning we used to get comics through the door. I used to sit there for hours. I used to get all of them — Buster, Beano, Dandy..my mum used to read them”.

Mrs T who had been an indifferent student in school, who “just used to walk out of school a lot of the time”, nevertheless had some “beautiful books” at home and remembers her dad taking her to WH Smith at Elephant and Castle and “buying a load of books”. All the mothers spoke with obvious pleasure of the books and comics they had read at home as children. Enid Blyton was cited by all as a favourite author, along with classics such as Black Beauty and Treasure Island. For these women, it was the home rather than the school literacy practices that shaped their learning. Significantly, in almost every case there was an interested and caring adult, a literacy broker or a “guiding light” (Padmore 1993), who encouraged them and provided books and materials. In the case of Mrs L it was her father who “was a reader”; Mrs Tr’s parents coped with her dyslexia by providing comics and Mrs T’s father took her shopping for books. The love of reading which they remembered so vividly from their childhoods had remained with them and five out of the six mothers spoke with pleasure of the books they now read. Mrs W, who missed about two years of school, “reads a lot now, mainly biography and horror”. Mrs L who left school with no formal qualifications is now a parent governor, chair of her local residents’ association and still an avid reader, sharing and discussing books with a circle of friends. Mrs Tr, once dyslexic, now reads mainly “on a night and at weekends” and on Sundays, she “sits on the settee all day with a book. I don’t move Sundays”. Mrs A the youngest mother at 23, who left school before completing her education, says of her husband, “He’s not really a reader. I’m the reader”. Interestingly there was no suggestion in the interviews that their reading might be educational or ‘improving’ in any sense. Nor was there any mention of ‘good books’. The women read for pleasure and the authors such as Catherine Cookson, Harry Bowling, Virginia Andrews, Ruth Rendell, Agatha Christie whose works they read so avidly would be considered writers of ‘popular fiction’. In this way, the monolingual mothers differed from both the Bangladeshi British mothers and from the two mainstream school teachers. For the latter

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group, there was no ‘pain/ pleasure’ dichotomy attached to learning to read. They had happy memories of both school and home reading, and they listed authors such as Enid Blyton, Noel Streatfield, and Elinor Brent-Dyer. Unlike the monolingual mothers, however, they felt that they had no time to read now, except in school holidays, and even then, it was suggested by one teacher, it was preferable to try to read ‘good’ books. The ‘reading for pleasure’ dimension that had once been part of their childhood reading patterns had now disappeared from their lives. Nor do the dichotomies of ‘work’ and ‘play’, ‘pleasure’ and ‘pain’ have much relevance in the reading memories of the Bangladeshi British mothers in the group. In Bangladesh where six of the seven mothers lived as children, learning to read took place in different schools and in different languages (state school or Arabic class), and was not the responsibility of the parents at home. Mrs. M’s words echo the experience of the other mothers in the group who had been to school in Bangladesh: “Arabic learning took place before school started, very early in the morning … we would have breakfast and go and read for several hours not far from home. Then we would return home, have something to eat and go off to school …”.

Learning to read at Qur’anic school had a strictly religious purpose. The pleasure gained was the inner satisfaction of pleasing Allah and cannot be equated with the enjoyment of the English speaking mothers in reading novels. Learning to read in the normal school was also a serious matter and took place in the same way as learning any other subject. Mrs. M’s words echo the experience of the other mothers: “In the classroom all the children would sit in rows. The master would call out the alphabet, or words, or sentences (it depended on the level) and then the class would repeat in unison… It was successful because there was a cane [she laughs], you couldn’t go far with the master’s cane …”.

Conflict between home and school reading was not an issue, since home reading was viewed as an inappropriate activity for a girl. Indeed, household duties meant that none of the group stayed at school longer than age fifteen. Mrs. S was not alone in the group in her predicament: “I finished Class 5 … and then my mother died just after my engagement, leaving 5 brothers and 2 sisters, so I had some responsibilities …”.

Leaving school early was not a choice made freely, nor did bullying or

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truanting play any role as with the monolingual English mothers. All the Bangladeshi British mothers (including the mother whose secondary schooling was in Britain) left school for either personal responsibilities or lack of money: “The trouble was there was no legal requirement for school attendance and also you had to provide books and stationery. On top of that, parents had to pay 10% of teachers’ salaries, so it was an expensive business sending your children to school, especially for the poor folk, of whom there were many…”. (Mrs. M).

All the mothers viewed learning to read as having a serious purpose, often associated with religion. Although one now borrowed Bengali books from the library, reading generally meant “reading the Qur’an”.2 ‘Pleasure’ was derived from newstelling, a regular, structured occurrence in the women’s lives.3 Both reading and newstelling were group rather than individual or paired activities. None of the mothers in the study worked within the current paradigm of early successful reading as outlined at the beginning of this chapter. The monolingual mothers saw ‘learning to read in school’ as a formal and serious business. Reading for enjoyment was something they did at home. Storyreading did not figure as a prerequisite for successful reading for the Bangladeshi British mothers who all fufilled the requirements of their own community in attending Bengali and Qur’anic classes.

‘Unofficial’ literacy practices in young children’s lives Although the thirteen families participated unevenly in home story-reading, many of the children nevertheless spent more time engaged in reading activities out of school than in the classroom. For the Bangladeshi British children, learning to read in three languages, Arabic, Bengali and English involved three different approaches to the acquisition of literacy. Six year old Nazma4 highlighted clearly the multiple worlds of reading in her life as she talked to Nasima Rashid, a member of our research team, in Sylheti. The following is an English translation of their conversation Nasima: Do you like reading in school? Nazma: Which school? Nasima: This school [English]

Eve Gregory and Ann Williams

46 Nazma: Nasima: Nazma: Nasima: Nazma: Nasima: Nazma: Nasima: Nazma: Nasima: Nazma: Nasima: Nazma: Nasima: Nazma: Nasima: Nazma: Nasima: Nazma:

Yes Why do you like it? Because we do ‘work’ [uses the word for manual work] What work do you do? Um, I don’t know What work do you do in the Bengali school? We read… and write What do you read and write about? Everything. We read all kinds of things What do you do at Mosque school? We read… we learn prayers… Which school do you like best? This… English school Why? Because of story Which story? Any one… I like to hear How do you like hearing, by reading or listening to the teacher? Teacher (Gregory 1996: 36).

Table 2 shows the scope and variety of ‘unofficial’ literacy practices in the lives of children like Nazma outside school. In contrast with the monolingual group, we found that many hours (on average 13 per child each week) were spent in formal classes learning to read and write standard Bengali or to read the Qur’an in Arabic.5 These classes were strikingly different from home story-reading sessions in a number of respects. First, they were group rather than paired activities. Literacy learning was part of ‘belonging’ to a group, and sweets or other rewards would be shared to celebrate a child’s successful progress towards the Qur’an. Second, the notion of ‘pleasure’ in terms of ‘immediate fun’ gained from a story at home was obviously inappropriate. Learning to read and write in Bengali was seen as entering a cultural world and acquiring a language which had been fought over during the violent struggle for independence from Pakistan in 1971. Learning to read the Qur’an was necessary for taking on the Islamic faith. Finally, the task of ‘learning to read’ itself was quite different from the process taking place during home story-reading sessions. Early home storyreading was often characterised by children echoing the words after the older sibling as well as ‘reading’ illustrations to predict the text. In contrast, the excerpt from a Qur’anic class below shows how reading interactions are characterised by a focus on the text, immediate correction of an error by the

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Table 2. Bilingual children’s out of school literacy activities Type of Practice Context

Participants

Qur’anic class

Bengali class

Formal: in classrooms or in someone’s living room Group of 0-30 mixed age range

Formal: in classrooms or someone’s living room Group of mixed age range. Can be children of one family, up to group of 30 Cultural: to learn to read, understand and write Standard Bengali Approx. 6 hours per week

Purpose

Religious: to read and learn the Qur’an

Scope

Approx. 7 hours per week

Materials

Raiel (wooden book stand) Preparatory primers or Qur’an Child listens and repeats (individually or as group). Practises and is tested.

Role of Child

Primers, exercise books, pens

Child listens and repeats (individually or as group). Practises and is tested.

Reading with older siblings Informal: at home

Videos/ Television Informal: at home

Dyad: child + older sibling

Family group

‘Homework’: to learn to speak and read English

Pleasure/ Entertainment

Approx. 3 hours per week English school books

Child repeats, echoes, predicts and finally answers comprehensio n questions

TV in English Videos (often in Hindi)

Child watches and listens. Often listens to and joins in discussions. Sings songs from films.

teacher, followed by repetition by the child. The context is a large classroom in which 30 boys and girls of different ages are sitting cross-legged on the floor. The teacher stands in the centre and calls upon each child in turn to recite the passage which they have reached in their reading of the religious primer or the Qur’an.

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Extract 1 Teacher: Read this, Shuma Shuma: Alif, bah, tah, sayh, [the names of the graphic symbols on the page] Teacher: What was that? Say it again Shuma: Alif, bah, tah, sayh, jim Teacher: Um, that’s it, now carry on Shuma: Jim — jim, hae, kae, d- (hesitates), Teacher: Dal — dal, remember it and repeat Shuma: Dal, zal, rae, zae, sin, shin, swad, dwad, Teacher: [nods], What’s next? Thoy, zoy Shuma: Zoy, thoy, Teacher: No, no, listen carefully. Thoy, zoy, Shuma: [repeats] Teacher: O.K. Say it again from the beginning… (field notes, N. Rashid, April 1995).

Community class reading gives the impression that the children’s ‘unofficial’ reading practices are very different from the ‘authorised’ story-readings taking place in middle-class homes. Nevertheless, the Bangladeshi British children’s worlds of literacy are linked through a very special home reading activity: ‘booksharing’ with older siblings. This practice is unique in that siblings blend strategies learned in both school and Bengali and Arabic classes. What results is a ‘syncretic literacy’ (Gregory 1998) which is characterised by repetitions and a fast-flowing pace similar to that heard in the Qur’anic class, grafted onto echoing, ‘chunking’ of expressions and gradual predictions from the English school. Below is an example of one dyad, six year old Akhlak and his thirteen year old sister (underlining denotes repetition). They are reading a school book, Meg and Mog Catch a Fish, in their living room at home. Extract 2 Child 34 35 36 It’s a whobber. Meg… 37 38 Mog catched a fish 39 40 caught a fish 44 45 46 47

Sibling Okhta [this one] It’s Mog caught

They cook cooked cooked a fish and

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49

and Owl had a rest. Meg was looking looked out

The interaction patterns in siblings’ ‘booksharings’ showed a number of similarities with those of parent/young infant story-readings in mainstream homes (Gibson 1989). From the example above we see ways in which the child echoes words and phrases using telegraphic speech, anticipates and supplies appropriate words and phrases, especially ‘key words’ or tries to ‘chunk’ the sibling’s language through imitation. Nevertheless, there are significant differences between the Bangladeshi British siblings and mainstream infant/caregiver dyads; notably, the focus on print rather than on illustrations, as well as the seriousness with which the activity is treated as shown in the gradual insistence by the older sibling on the young child’s accuracy in reading individual words. This seriousness is also reflected in the way both older and younger siblings view ‘booksharing’ as ‘homework’, as ‘work’ rather than ‘play’ where the roles of ‘learner’ and ‘teacher ‘ are clear and not negotiable. In contrast, many of the home literacy practices of the monolingual children were seen as play, both by the parents and by the children themselves (see Table 3). Thus playing schools was cited as the favourite game of all five girls. This involved writing lists of names, ‘correcting’ children’s work, writing on the blackboard, and reading aloud to the ‘class’. Reading for pleasure and enjoyment was also a regular part of the children’s lives, although unlike the ‘booksharing’ activities of the Bangladeshi British children, reading and writing in the monolingual homes were frequently solitary occupations: “There are times when we want to relax and be quiet and she’ll be gone for an hour and she’ll be down here reading on her own”. Mrs A, mother of Susie. “…she’ll sit in her room and she’ll fold her legs and she’ll write…”. Mrs T mother of Naomi. “…I just read some books to myself in my bedroom…but I’ve read them so many times, I’m fed up with them …”. Sally.

The monolingual children’s tastes in reading were wide-ranging and provided evidence of the diverse cultural traditions embodied in children’s literature. Luke (1992) identifies two main strands: the ‘residual’ tradition, exemplified in fairy tales and works by approved authors; and the ‘emergent’, alternate version, closely bound up with popular culture. Materials which fall into the latter category and which “may run both counter and complementary to

Eve Gregory and Ann Williams

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dominant interests” (Luke 1992: 39) are rarely approved in schools as ‘official’ literature. At home, however, these ‘unofficial’ texts formed a substantial part of the children’s reading, creating “a pattern of mutually reinforcing intertextual references”, with characters who appeared on screen, in comics, in children’s books, and as toys (Luke 1992: 39). Thus Susie, who read the classics such as Little Women and What Katy Did with her mother, claimed nevertheless that her favourite books were based on the Walt Disney films. Richard, whose passion was the Ninja Turtles (an American TV series) was firmly situated in the ‘emergent’ culture tradition: AW: What else do you do after school? Do you ever read books or anything? R: I only read Ghostbusters and Turtle books. Table 3. Monolingual children’s out of school literacy activities g Playing School

PACT*

Informal: at home Group of individual

Informal: at home Dyad: parent/child

Purpose

Play

Scope

Evenings and weekends Blackboard , books, writing materials

Homework: to improve child’s reading Three hours per week

Type of Practice Context Participants

Materials

Role of child

Child imitates teacher and/or pupils

School reading book

Child reads and is corrected by parent using ‘scaffolding' or 'modelling' strategies

*Parents And Children Together: Home reading scheme

y Comics, fiction, non-fiction Informal: at home Individual or dyad (parent or grandparent /child) Pleasure

Variety of comics, fiction, non-fiction books Child as ‘expert’ with comics or books; as interested learner reading adult nonfiction, magazines etc.

Drama class

Computers

Video/ Television

Formal

Informal

Informal

Group

Individual or in dyad with friend or sibling

Family group or individual

Pleasure and to learn skill 2 hours per week

Pleasure

Pleasure/ entertainment

Books: poetry, plays

Child performs in group, recites as individual

TV/videos

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Such texts however rarely meet with the approval of teachers and teacher trainers. Thus while they fulfil the criterion of providing pleasure and fun, they do not meet the necessary requirements to be considered ‘good books’. It would seem that the dichotomy experienced by the parental generation between serious school reading and enjoyable home reading is being reproduced in the next generation of children in the monolingual families.

Literacy brokers and their roles The recent government initiatives to improve literacy standards included plans for a parental reading pledge, i.e. parents will be asked to sign an agreement that they will read for 20 minutes a day with each child, and funds will be allocated to “to run courses for thousands of parents whose own standard of reading is not good enough to provide the necessary help” (The Guardian 29/ 7/97). Admirable though the initiative is, it nevertheless presents story-reading as a panacea for all literacy problems, taking no account of the wide range of activities already taking place in children’s homes. The monolingual mothers in our study, who are now dissatisfied with their own education, were taking steps to ensure that their children did not experience difficulties in school: Susie’s mother had begun teaching her daughter to read with flash cards at the age of 18 months so that by age three she could recognise simple words like cat and dog and “was reading books by the time she came out of reception class”. Mrs T bought Naomi maths and language activity books in order to help with school work. Anne-Marie’s parents enrolled her for speech and drama classes which they felt would “help her with exams later”. Richard’s mother attended special classes organised by the school to demonstrate how reading was taught. Without exception, the monolingual parents involved in the project were anxious that their children should succeed where they felt that they themselves had failed: “I wish I’d stayed on. That’s my big regret. I wouldn’t like her to make the same mistakes as I did”. Mrs C.

Just as in the Bangladeshi British families however, involvement in the children’s learning was not restricted to parents. In the case of the monolingual families it was the grandparents who played a major part in fostering the children’s interest in books and reading. Their roles consisted of:

Eve Gregory and Ann Williams

52 a) buying their grandchildren books:

“Well, my grandad buys all the dinosaur books and I’ve got ninety-nine so when I go today, I’ll have a hundred.” Sally. “She’d brought the atlas home from school and he [grandfather] went out the next day and bought her this [an atlas].” Susie’s mother.

b) providing a role model. Naomi spoke with pride about her grandad’s books: N: He’s got all these books about snakes, about birds, about insects… AW: Does he read them? N: Yes.

c) teaching the children to read. Mrs L’s father had taught her older son to read by reading the racing tips in a tabloid newspaper with him: “When he was three or four he was always with him…watched the horseracing, read the papers, taught him to read when he was in nursery”.

Clearly the transmission of literacy skills in both Bangladeshi British and monolingual English families is not seen solely as the responsibility of parents, but all three generations can play their part.

Towards a new paradigm of early literacy: some conclusions for classroom teachers The differences that children bring to classrooms, therefore, are not simply individual differences or idiosyncrasies…They are the products and constructions of the complex and diverse social learning from the cultures where children grow, live and interact…these, too, are dynamic and hybrid — mixing, matching and blending traditional values and beliefs, children rearing practices and literacy events with those of new, post-modern, popular cultures. (Luke & Kale 1997: 16).

The children and their families introduced in this chapter begin to reveal the multiple home literacy activities of two communities living within one square mile in the centre of London. Their children also show the syncretism or ‘hybridisation’ referred to by Luke and Kale as they mix and blend practices from home and school to unique new patterns and forms. Yet few of these activities fall within the officially recognised paradigm of successful preparation for school literacy, which is story-reading with the parent using a ‘good book’. The extensive and intensive nature of these ‘unofficial’ literacy prac-

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tices in both groups provides a strong argument for a shift in paradigms in the twenty-first century towards one which rethinks the way it authorises the literate and recognises strength in diversity. But what are the strengths of these particular children and how might they successfully be recognised in classrooms? First, children from both groups provide evidence of excellent capacities for memorisation. Research on children learning in Qur’anic classes in Morocco (Wagner 1993) already shows the superior serial memories of youngsters versed in the Qur’an. However, the official drama lessons of one child as well as the unofficial ‘playing school’ activity of the monolingual group reveal how memorising might be an important resource to be called upon by all. Second, these children reveal their ability to work successfully in a larger group. They also show how they can concentrate over an extended period of time. The Bengali and Qur’anic classes lasted two hours without a break, the drama class stretched over an evening, reading serious ‘adult’ books with grandparents as well as ‘booksharing’ with siblings were not fleeting activities which could be simply left unfinished. Official guidelines on Early Years education in Britain at the end of the twentieth century (SCAA 1996: 7) stress the following: When parents and adults in each setting (home and nursery) work together to support children’s learning, the results can have a measurable and lasting effect upon children’s achievement… To be successful this partnership needs to be a two-way process with opportunities for knowledge, expertise and information to flow both ways… .

In Australia and the USA, ‘partnership’ schemes are being recognised through curricula which draw children’s informal home experiences into the classroom (Gray 1984; Edelsky 1996). Redesigning early literacy courses and home reading programmes to make positive recognition of the strengths of children in the communities they serve would be an ‘official’ way to build upon our children’s ‘unofficial’ literacies in school. Acknowledgments Our thanks are due to Nasima Rashid for work carried out with the Bangladeshi British families and the children at home, in their community classes and in school. We should like to acknowledge the support of the Economic and Social Research Council in financing this research (Family Literacy History and Children’s Learning Practices at Home and at School R000 22 1186 (1994–1995).

Eve Gregory and Ann Williams

54 Notes 1.

For examples of Conversational Analysis of interactions between children, and between children and adults in instructional settings see Mishler (1978) and Baker and Freebody (1989).

2.

A fuller explanation of reading in the Islamic world can be found in Wagner (1993).

3.

The special discourse and turn taking used during these sessions led us to refer to this as ‘a living novel’ (see Gregory, Mace, Rashid, & Williams 1996).

4.

All names have been changed to protect the anonymity of the participants.

5.

For a discussion of the Arabic term qara’a meaning to ‘read’ or ‘recite by heart’ see Baynham, M. (1995).

CHAPTER 3

Power relations and the social construction of ‘literacy’ and ‘illiteracy’ The experience of Bangladeshi women in Birmingham Adrian Blackledge

This chapter locates literacy in the context of relations of power between majority and minority groups in society. A crucial aspect of these relations of power relates to the interface between cultural identity and literacy learning. Interviews with the mothers of eighteen six-year-old Bangladeshi children were undertaken as part of a four-year study of home literacy support practices. The children all attended a community primary school in the largest Local Education Authority in England. The mothers’ responses to questions about their attempts to support their children’s literacy acquisition indicated that, despite the school’s attempts to communicate with them, most of the parents were disempowered by their limited English proficiency in their efforts to help their children to learn to read English at home. Also, it became clear that their existing literacies, including literacy in Bengali, and oral literacy activities, were not actively valued by the school. That is, the mothers were regarded as ‘illiterate’ because their particular literacies did not fit with those of the school. The relations of power between dominant-culture school and minority-culture families dictated that the mothers were unable to use their literacies in the home-school learning context, as only the dominant group could decide what constituted an acceptable form of ‘literacy’. This

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Adrian Blackledge

chapter examines the experiences of these Bangladeshi women in a framework which considers that literacies have different meanings for individuals and groups within and between societies, and that ‘literacy’ and ‘illiteracy’ are socially constructed phenomena which are dictated by relations of power in society.

The social process of literacy Literacy does not necessarily have the same meaning or function in all societies, or in all communities within a society. Literacy is not only being able to read and write but being able to utilise these skills in a socially appropriate context (Delgado-Gaitan 1990). The development of an individual’s literacy is shaped by the structure and organisation of the social situations in which literacy is practised. Literacy development, according to this theoretical position, is driven by qualities of individuals’ engagement in particular literacy practices (Reder 1994). By emphasising the patterns of individuals’ access to, and participation in, various roles within specific literacy practices, engagement theory seeks to account for the rich variety and patterning of literacy within and across cultural groups. Literacy is a socioculturally constructed activity which varies because of different configurations that families take in different social and cultural settings (Delgado-Gaitan 1990). This suggests an expansive concept of literacy in which oral language and text-related activities occur in the context of a personally motivated situation. Literacy activities come into being through larger political, economic and cultural forces in a given society; neither their structures nor their function can be understood outside of their societal context (Scribner 1987). In multilingual settings, roles and social meanings should be understood with respect to language and literacy choices. For example, in some U.S. communities becoming literate in the native Spanish language carries negative meanings (in contrast to the positive meanings attached to becoming literate in English), even though spoken use of Spanish is preferred in most situations. Among Hmong refugees in the U.S., on the other hand, there are positive social meanings associated with developing literacy initially in the native language. De Castell et al (1986) provide a historical perspective, arguing that in order to understand literacy, the substantive context of personal, social and political values in which literacy occurs must be explicitly addressed. Literacy does not

‘Literacy’, ‘illiteracy’ and power: Bangladeshi women in Birmingham

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simply consist of a universally defined set of skills constant across time and place. Since cultures differ in what they consider to be their “texts” and in the values they attach to these, they will also differ in what they regard as literate behaviour. The same person may be regarded as ‘illiterate’ in one culture, while appearing to be quite literate in another culture. When a number of cultures co-exist within the same society it is more likely that a range of versions of what constitutes being literate will be encountered (Ferdman 1990). In seeking to understand the literacy support practices of minority groups, then, it is important to identify the social functions, meanings and values attached to literacy in particular communities.

The social construction of illiteracy Only those who have power can decide what constitutes ‘intellectualism’ (Freire and Macedo 1987). Once the intellectual parameters are set, those who want to be considered intellectuals must meet the requirements dictated by the dominant class. The intellectual activity of those without power is always defined as non-intellectual, yet it may be that some of those defined as ‘illiterate’ are refusing to be literate as an act of resistance. That is, members of oppressed groups may consciously or unconsciously refuse to learn the specific cultural codes and competencies authorised by the dominant culture’s view of literacy (Giroux 1987). ‘Illiteracy’ is therefore as much a social construction as ‘literacy’. The notion of ‘illiteracy’ has to be seen, not as an objective description of social fact, but as an ideological, historically located interpretation which is a product of specific interests and which constructs a group of people (Prinsloo and Breier 1996). Street and Street (1991) argue that ‘school literacy’ tends to define what counts as literacy, and that this constructs the lack of school literacy in deficit terms: that is, those who are not literate in the terms determined by the school are seen as illiterate, and therefore lacking essential skills. Adults who lack reading and writing skills are often judged to be intellectually, culturally, and even morally inferior to others. ‘Illiterate’ adults should be seen as members of oral sub-cultures with their own set of values and beliefs, rather than as failing members of the dominant society. ‘Illiterate’ adults see themselves, often, as interdependent, rather than dependent, sharing their skills and knowledge with members of their social networks (Lytle and Landau 1987).

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Contributory factors to some minority group underachievement derive from the sociohistorical relations between dominant and minority groups. South African research (Gibson 1996) found that farm workers who at first sight might be labelled ‘illiterate’ were able to interpret and use complex instructional documents in order to build and maintain irrigation systems. Gibson found that literacy practices among the ‘Coloured’ Afrikaans-speaking workers on three farms in the Western Cape were embedded in relations of power between worker and farmer and between men and women. Knowledge of farming was a male domain, and accessible only to men; knowledge of books was a female domain, and associated with women. Despite women’s greater level of literacy, they were consigned to more menial jobs than the men. Some male farm workers were not literate in the conventional sense, yet their command of certain knowledge gave them access to power, whereas the higher level of ‘schooled’ literacy among the women did not. Being literate in the school’s terms was not an important criterion for access to employment or power among this group. Being male was a much more significant factor. In a study of the perceived illiteracy and actual literacy practices of South African taxi drivers (Breier et al 1996), taxi drivers managed the paperwork required of their job, without having a full and formal knowledge of the kind of literacy demanded by schools. The taxi drivers were widely referred to in official assessments as ‘illiterate’. Indeed, most had little or no formal schooling. Yet, in the course of their work, the drivers were constantly dealing with situations which seemed to require reading and writing. The male farm workers and the taxi drivers were considered illiterate within the conventional model of literacy; but from a culturally sensitive perspective it is clear that they made use of literacy practices for specific purposes, in particular contexts (Street 1996). Kell (1996) reports the case of an ANC activist who operated successfully in a literate environment for many years without becoming literate according to the dominant culture conception of the term. As soon as a literacy programme arrived, however, she was constituted as ‘illiterate’, and internalised this view, so that she perceived herself as illiterate. In fact, she was constantly involved in informal literacy practices, and there was no question that she was literate in terms of her mastery of discourses of oppression during the period of political struggle in South Africa; yet in the terms of conventional, schooled literacy she was regarded as a failure.

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Literacy, illiteracy and relations of power Macro-interactions between dominant and minority groups appear to result in the internalisation by minority groups of a sense of ambivalence with regard to their cultural identity and a sense of powerlessness in relation to the dominant group. Wagner and Grenier (1991) posit a specific phenomenon of minority group illiteracy, which represents the effect of generations of economic, educational and psychological subjugation such that members of the minority group internalise the inferior status attributed to them by the dominant group. Wagner and Grenier distinguish two distinct forms of minority group illiteracy: illiteracy of oppression and illiteracy of resistance. Both derive from the problems of access to appropriate schooling and contact between minority and majority languages. Illiteracy of resistance, although caused by oppression, is to some extent instituted by the minority group itself who, wishing to safeguard its language and culture, and fearing assimilation, turns in on itself and rejects the form of education imposed by the majority group. At the extreme, the minority group would prefer to remain illiterate rather than risk losing its language. The group will cultivate the spoken word and fall back on the oral tradition and other components of its culture. By contrast, illiteracy of oppression is a direct consequence of the process of assimilation at work in schools and society; it results in the slow destruction of identity and of the means of resistance in the minority community; thus, it is brought about by the oppressive action of the majority society. The person who refuses to become literate (as determined by the dominant group) as an act of resistance may be able to read the world (politically and culturally) very clearly, despite refusing to read the word (acquire technical skills) (Freire and Macedo 1987). The illiteracy of certain minority groups can perhaps be best understood not as skills deficiencies but as refusal to internalise the values and attitudes of the literacy practices favoured by the dominant cultural group within society (Devine 1994). For example, those who have been migrants in a new country for ten years, and have not become literate in the majority language of the host country, may realise only too clearly that literacy will not guarantee them economic gains. Greater literacy does not correlate with increased equality and democracy, nor with better conditions for the working class (Street 1984). Yet for migrants an attempt to acquire literacy in the majority language may require them to put at risk their cultural identity. It is this question of the relationship between literacy and

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cultural identity that informs the next section of this chapter.

Literacy and cultural identity As literacy is a culturally defined construct, it follows that it should have close links to cultural identity (Ferdman 1990). When literacy is transferred from a dominant culture to a minority culture which has not historically been literate, majority culture values will be transmitted as part of the “package” of literacy (Street 1987). In order to acquire literacy in the majority language it will be necessary for the learner to adopt some of the cultural behaviours and values of the majority, and risk sacrificing cultural group identity. De Castell and Luke (1987) contend that this process is calculated by majority groups, so that in literacy campaigns reading and writing are secondary concerns, and the primary purpose of institutionally transmitted literacy is rather the creation of a shared sociocultural world view: the construction and dissemination of a dominant national ideology. Such campaigns treat literacy as a universal, culturally neutral information-processing skill that can be broken down into different skills. Skills sufficient for cultural transmission are taught; the bicultural skills essential for minorities to succeed in majority settings are ignored. If the acquisition of majority-culture literacy in a minority-culture context requires the adoption of some of the cultural behaviours and values of the majority group, the individual is faced with making a choice that may have implications for her or his identity as a member of the minority cultural group. The individual must either adopt the perspective of the school (and therefore the majority society), at the risk of developing a negative component to her or his cultural identity, or else resist the pressure to adopt the dominant values and behaviours, at the risk of becoming alienated from the school; whereas for dominant-culture families, the school’s perspective is likely to be consistent with their existing cultural identity.

Literacy and power among Bangladeshi women in Birmingham As part of a broader study of school-related home literacy interactions in a minority language community in an urban setting, 18 Bangladeshi mothers were interviewed in their own homes about their children’s reading. The

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interviews were conducted by the author, in the mothers’ home language, Sylheti, with the assistance of a bilingual/bicultural interpreter who lived in the local community. All of the respondents were born in Bangladesh. They had emigrated to Britain between seven and seventeen years previously. Most of the mothers had attended school for five or six years in Bangladesh, although three had received no schooling. The children’s teachers were also interviewed about their perception of the role of parents in their children’s literacy learning. All of the parents reported that Sylheti was the only language used by them in the home. They reported that their children spoke English to each other, and Sylheti when speaking to parents and other adults at home. The language of literacy for these families was Bengali. Relations of power in literacy learning Relations of power in interactions between dominant group institutions and minority group families are visible in families’ attempts to support children’s reading in school-related home literacy tasks. Literacy interactions can be analysed in terms of their specific detail (at the micro level), and in terms of their relation to power structures in society (at the macro level) (Cummins 1996). It is by an integration of micro and macro analysis of literacy interactions that literacy learning in minority communities can be fully understood. In addition to questions about their children’s home reading practices, parents were therefore also asked about their interactions with the school. These interactions were evident in attendance at parents’ evenings, parents’ workshops and Bangladeshi women’s groups in the school. Parents’ evenings Of the 18 mothers, seven attended parents’ evenings, although another seven said that their husbands attended. Of the seven who attended parents’ evenings, three said that they could not understand the teacher, so their child had to interpret. A typical response from one of the mothers was as follows: “When we go to parents’ evening the children interpret for us, so we can understand what the teacher is saying.”

The relations of power in this context are clear. Information is given in the language of the dominant culture, and interpreted in a correct or incorrect form

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by the child. In this situation it is very difficult for parents to ask searching questions of the teacher about the child’s attainment. At the same time, it is problematic for the teacher to give a full account of the child’s progress and/or academic difficulties. Another parent responded as follows: “If I go to parents’ evening I won’t really understand what’s going on, and I’m embarrassed to ask anyone, so I don’t go.”

In this case the parent is powerless to support her child’s education, because she has limited access to information about the child’s progress. The parent is rendered voiceless by the school’s failure to provide either bilingual teachers or trained interpreters who can provide access to information (Harman 1994). This micro-interaction in the school setting mirrors the experience of many minority groups in their macro-interactions with dominant-culture institutions in society. Parents’ workshops Parents were also asked about their attendance at parents’ workshops. These were morning sessions which had been running in the school to inform parents about the curriculum. Half of the Bangladeshi women interviewed had never attended, while four said that they used to go, but no longer attended. Five parents said that they attended regularly. One of the parents who did not attend gave the following response: “I don’t go to the parents’ workshop at the school because I can’t read and write or understand English, and it’s a bit embarrassing. I know there’s a girl there who will translate, but I feel a bit embarrassed to go. It doesn’t look right, the girl is young. I couldn’t even say a word, I feel so embarrassed about it.”

In this response this parent articulates her lack of empowerment in her relations with the dominant-culture school. School support for home literacy learning Relations of power in interactions between the school and the parents were also visible in the parents’ attempts to support their children’s school-related literacy. Parents were asked whether they had ever received explicit advice from the school about how to support their child’s reading at home. Seven of

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the parents replied that they had received such advice, while eleven replied that they had not. Parents described the advice they had been given as follows: “The teacher has told me that if I can’t understand a book, I can talk about the pictures. But if the book was in Bengali and English I could read the story myself.” “The teacher said make up a story from the pictures. I can’t read English, only Bengali.”

The teacher had given advice to these parents which assumed that they were illiterate. The parents’ responses clearly demonstrated that although they could not read English, they were literate in Bengali, and they could have used this literacy to support their children’s reading. However, this resource was ignored by the school. The parents were also asked whether they would like more advice about how to support their child’s reading. Four of the parents responded that they had been given sufficient advice, and two said they didn’t mind. Twelve of the parents said that they would like further support. Two of the parents responded as follows: “I can’t ask the teachers for help with teaching Rehman to read at home, because I can’t understand their language.” “I did ask the teacher for advice about how to help Shanaz to read, but because I don’t know the language, or read and write, I felt embarrassed and couldn’t understand. I don’t really say anything to the teachers now. I’m a bit frightened because I won’t be able to do it.”

The relations of power in these interactions between school and parents are clear. Parents are excluded from their children’s schooling by an educational structure which fails to value their existing cultural and linguistic resources, and which only involves those parents who are prepared to learn the language and cultural rules of the dominant majority group. These micro-interactions in the educational setting vividly reflect the macro-interactions of power in minority groups’ attempts to participate in majority-culture institutions in society. Parents’ support for English literacy learning Parents were asked whether they actively supported their children’s English literacy learning at home. Of the eighteen parents, one said that she did help

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her child to read English, while one said that she did not. Of the remainder, two said that their husbands helped, while fourteen said that siblings were the main providers of English reading support. There was no evidence that the parents’ lack of reading support was due to apathy. Rather, it was due to a feeling of powerlessness: “It’s very hard to teach the children at home because I don’t speak English. I am trying my very best.”

The link between English language proficiency and empowerment is clear in these data. The parents’ commitment to their children’s education is visible in their responses. As in an earlier example, a parent indicated that the reason she was unable to support her child’s reading was not a deficiency in her, but the unsuitability of the reading resources sent from school: “I would like the story books to be in English and Bengali, because I could explain the stories to the children. I can’t read the English books.”

The parents did their best to resource their children’s English literacy learning. Although none of the families owned more than eight English reading books, fourteen owned two or more. Parents also commonly provided resources for their children to write in English: “The children are always drawing and writing at home, with felt tips and crayons. I have to buy paper and pens all the time, because they use them so much.”

The parents in the study attempted to support their children’s English literacy learning by providing reading and writing resources, and by organising their homes so that siblings were able to offer help to younger children. These activities were largely developed without explicit support from the school. In fact the parents’ attempts to communicate with the school were often frustrated by their lack of English proficiency. These micro-interactions between school and parents reflected the structures of power in society. Despite the school’s attempts to reach the community through school-based involvement programmes, coercive relations of power were reinforced (Cummins 1994), leaving Bangladeshi parents largely voiceless in the schooling of their children.

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The cultural value of literacy Attitudes to children’s English learning Parents were asked about their attitudes to their children’s language learning. In each of the households the children spoke to each other in English, and spoke to their parents in Sylheti. Most of the families were happy with this situation, although one parent was concerned that she could not understand her children’s conversation: “When the children speak English at home I tell them off. I want them to speak Sylheti at home, because I can’t understand English.”

All of the parents were positive about their children learning English at school. A common response was the following: “It is very important that the children learn English, because this is where they live. They need to learn English to do well at school.”

Once again the parents’ commitment to their children’s education is visible in this typical response. Attitudes to children’s use of Sylheti Concomitant with their commitment to their children’s learning of English was the parents’ attitude to the home language, Sylheti, and the community language, Bengali. All of the parents believed that maintenance of Sylheti was important for their children. Their main reason for this was that they wanted to be able to communicate with the children. As Sylheti was the home language, the parents did not indicate a need to teach this language at home. The children acquired it naturally from their parents. The parents were asked whether they told stories to their children in the home language. Fifteen of the parents said that they did, while three said that they did not. These stories were told regularly, and were in a variety of traditions: “I tell the children stories in Sylheti, traditional stories, Islamic stories, and stories I make up myself. I do this two or three times a week.” “I make up stories for my three boys, like ‘there were once three princes who became kings’, and so on.”

These responses make it clear that home-language storytelling was thriving in

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the homes of these families. This oral literacy activity was used to reinforce religious and cultural traditions. A corollary of this interaction was bound to be development of narrative and comprehension skills, and a love of story. These skills would contribute to the children’s literacy learning. There was no evidence in the parents’ responses that this oral literacy activity was recognised or valued by the school. Attitudes to children’s Bengali literacy learning The parents were also asked about their attitude to their children’s Bengali literacy learning. All eighteen parents responded positively to the question of their children learning to read and write in Bengali, a higher status language than Sylheti, but not the language of the home for these families. Typical responses were as follows: “Because we are Bengali, to us it is very important that Kabir learns to read and write Bengali.” “It is very important that my daughter knows how to read and write Bengali because otherwise if she goes back home she won’t know the language or culture.” “It is very important to me that he learns the language because we are Bengali. It is good that he has English as a second language.”

These responses make explicit the links between the community language and cultural identity. Although parents spoke of the importance of Bengali for reading letters from the homeland, the language had a significance beyond its function as a means of communication. It represented the group’s identification as Bengalis, and their difference from the majority culture, and from other minority cultures. To this end, twelve of the eighteen parents took steps to directly support their children’s Bengali literacy learning. Common responses from the parents were as follows: “I read Bengali stories to the children on Saturday and Sunday. They are too tired after school.” “I sit with the children for two hours on Saturdays and Sundays, and I teach them Bengali and Arabic”

Those parents who did not offer support at home for the children to read Bengali said that they would send their children to a tutor for this purpose when they were eight years old. In the homes where children were learning to

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read and write Bengali, there were Bengali literacy instruction books. In most of the households, children owned Bengali reading books. This support for the children’s Bengali literacy learning makes visible the links between language and cultural identity. The parents were able to offer Bengali literacy support to their children without having to acquire a new language, and without having to take on aspects of the majority culture. For these parents, Bengali literacy had a significance quite different from English literacy. There was no evidence, however, that the parents’ Bengali literacy support was recognised or valued by the school. Parental literacy The parents were asked about their ability to read and write Bengali. Of the eighteen parents, twelve reported that they were very good readers, while thirteen said that they were very good writers. One said that she was a good reader, while two said that they were not very good readers or writers. The three parents who had received no schooling reported that they could not read or write Bengali. Most of the parents therefore considered themselves to be fully literate in Bengali. However, there was no evidence that their literacy was valued by the school. Instead, the school mirrored the broader society in devaluing the competence of this minority group, and only attending to those aspects of literacy which were determined by the dominant culture. This pattern of literacy in the community language contrasted sharply with the parents’ reported literacy in English. Of the eighteen parents, none said that they were very good or good readers. Thirteen said that they could not read English at all, while fourteen said they could not write English. While this pattern of illiteracy in English in part explains the parents’ powerlessness to support their children’s English literacy, it also raises questions about the implications of becoming literate in the language of the dominant culture. The picture is yet more striking if the notion of literacy is extended to proficiency in spoken English. Of the eighteen parents, sixteen reported that they could speak no English, while the remaining two said their spoken English was not very good. Five of the parents said that they could understand no spoken English, while thirteen said their comprehension of spoken English was not very good. These responses should be seen in the context of the parents’ residence in England. The most recent immigrant had arrived seven years earlier; the longest resident had been in Britain for seventeen years.

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For these parents Bengali and Sylheti languages were cultural features which helped to define their group. The desire for their children to acquire literacy in Bengali, and to conserve their spoken Sylheti, were strongly stated. These parents were largely regarded by the school as illiterate, as the advice they received about how to support their children’s English literacy was to “talk about the pictures”.

Conclusions Those who want to be considered literate must meet the requirements dictated by the dominant class. ‘Illiteracy’ is therefore as much a social construction as ‘literacy’. These Bangladeshi parents did not have the power to decide what constitutes ‘literacy’ in English society. In their relations with the school, as much as their relations with society, they were rendered voiceless by a definition of literacy which was located solely in the language and culture of the dominant group. In failing to recognise or build on the existing literacy of these parents, this school dictated the same coercive relations of power as exist in broader society, denying a voice to those who are either unable or unwilling to become literate in the language of the dominant group. This was in spite of the school’s efforts to involve minority families in their children’s education by providing parent workshops, and offering advice on how to read with their children to at least some of the parents. These parents of Bangladeshi children were regarded by the school as illiterate because their particular literacies did not fit with the literacy of the school. They had a clear sense of the value of their languages and literacies. Both the spoken Sylheti language and the community language of Bengali were viewed as important features of cultural identity. However, the school was not able to incorporate these values in the education of the children. The parents were ascribed an identity which located them as an illiterate, subordinated group in British society. This left the parents powerless in their concern to support their children’s learning, and left the school powerless to build on the families’ cultural and linguistic capital in the education of their children. Despite the efforts of teachers to involve the parents in their children’s reading, the majority-culture school was unable to make use of the considerable resources of the Bangladeshi community. This breakdown at the local

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level of school and community was likely to be mirrored in the macrostructures of power between minority group family and dominant group institutions in society. This failure to connect the worlds of school and home is not inevitable. Schools can challenge the coercive relations of power which seem to dictate that dominant-culture institutions necessarily oppress minority-language families. Schools can effect such changes when they: a. make concerted attempts to communicate with families in their home languages b. make explicit their understanding that community literacies, including oral literacies, contribute to children’s learning c. affirm families’ cultural identity within and beyond the curriculum d. make genuine attempts to involve parents in their children’s education, including at policy-making level. These interventions lay the foundations for an educational structure which narrows the gulf between dominant-culture school and minority-language home. In so doing, they challenge the relations of power which prevent the involvement of minority-language parents in their children’s schooling, and create collaborative structures in which families are able to use their cultural and linguistic resources to contribute to their children’s learning.

CHAPTER 4

Learning to read and write at home The experience of Chinese families in Britain An Ran

Introduction The Mainland Chinese community in Britain is a transitory one. Most members come either to study for higher degrees or as the dependents of postgraduate students. Although increasing numbers of families are now staying for extended periods of time, the majority will return to the People’s Republic where their children will need to reintegrate into a very different education system. Parents are by far the most important source of help in maintaining the mother tongue in a small and isolated community like that of the Mainland Chinese. This can create enormous pressures on both parents and children. The driving force behind parents’ efforts to maintain Chinese language and literacy is concern about the educational outcomes for their children on the family’s return to China. Very often, however, the parents have no direct experience of teaching young children to read and write. As is the case for many British parents supporting their children at home, all that they have to draw on is their own recollections of learning to read at school. But, whereas British parents are usually in a support role and are able to consult and seek advice from their children’s teachers, many Chinese parents find that they have sole responsibility for teaching their child to read and write Chinese. This chapter is about the role which Chinese mothers play in their children’s language and literacy learning, and the extent to which there is a standard

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approach — or a range of approaches — towards literacy teaching in the Mainland Chinese community.

Reading at home in five Chinese families I observed and video-recorded five mother-child dyads. I also collected data in open-ended, semi-structured interviews with the mothers. As can be seen in Table 1, the children ranged in age from six to ten; they also varied in the length of time that they had been in the UK, from birth to three years. The children’s educational histories were also varied. Thus, although Xiaoman and Mary were both seven years of age, Xiaoman had attended kindergarten in China, whereas Mary’s education had been entirely in the UK. The same textbooks are used throughout much of China for the teaching of reading, although there are some regional differences. In all cases, children’s reading achievement is gauged by the book which they are using. The levels of experience of the children in the present study ranged from Book 1 to Book 6. All five families use Putonghua at home and the children are all fluent Chinese-English bilinguals. All the mothers were university educated. All the reading interactions and interviews took place in Chinese and were then translated into English. The discussion which follows is based on an analysis of the English translations of the transcripts, using NUD.IST (Nonnumerical Unstructured Data Indexing Searching and Theorizing), a software programme which is specially designed for qualitative data analysis. A preTable 1. Details of the five case study families Mother’s name 1 Guiying Jianqi Qinfang Lili Yongjing

child’s name and age Guangyu 8 years old Xuge 10- years old Helen 6 years old Mary 7 years old Xiaoman 7 years old

y child’s education in China one month in primary school one year in primary school none

child’s reading level Book 3

length of stay in UK. three years

Book 6

three years

Book 1

born in UK

none

Book 3

born in UK

kindergarten

Book 1

three years

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liminary tree diagram was constructed based on categories which had emerged during the course of observation and these categories were applied to the mothers’ speech. During the course of the analysis, the categories were sometimes refined by subdividing them further; on other occasions, when an initial category was used only a very small number of times, it was decided that it was not sufficiently robust for the purposes of the analysis and was reassigned to a broader category. The categories which emerged as important in this analysis included the way in which the ‘teacher’ modelled the text; the very direct teaching style with heavy use of instructions; the equally heavy reliance on questions as a teaching technique; the range of strategies which the mothers used for explaining the text to their children; the use of review and practice strategies; and the distinctive patterns of response to children’s efforts. Using the NUD.IST software, a change from one analytical category to another was encoded with a return. In some instances, however it was possible to categorise the same stretch of speech in different ways: for instance, an instruction can also be an example of review and practice. Figure 1 shows the relative frequencies of the different strategies used by mothers in reading interactions with their children. Questioning was by far the most commonly used teaching strategy, though extensive use was also made 25.00%

20.00%

15.00%

10.00%

5.00%

Figure 1. Use of different teaching strategies

Response

Review & Practice

Explanations

Instructions

Questions

Reading Aloud

0.00%

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of instructions and explanations. The mothers spent relatively little time reading the actual text or reviewing and practising material, and only a small proportion of the interactions could be categorised as responses — positive or negative — to the children’s reading. This preliminary quantitative analysis of the data, however, gives only a very limited picture of what was actually happening. In the discussion which follows, further data, both quantitative and qualitative, will be presented on the teaching strategies of individual mothers. Reading aloud In every case, the mothers interpreted the researcher’s request to read with their children by selecting a lesson at an appropriate level from a standard Chinese textbook (see the sample text in Figure 10). As shown in Figure 2 below, the proportion of the interactions where the mother was actually reading from the text varied between 1 and 11 per cent and corresponded closely with the level of experience of the child. Thus, for instance, Qinfang and Yongjing whose children were both reading from Book 1, spent proportionately more time than the other mothers actually reading from the text. There was a clear expectation that children with more advanced reading skills would take greater responsibility for reading the text out loud themselves.

12% 10% 8% 6% 4% 2% 0%

Guiying

Jianqi

Figure 2. Reading aloud behaviour

Lili

Qinfang

Yongjing

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Extracts from the transcripts of the reading interactions illustrate the ways in which the mothers were accommodating to their children’s needs. In the case of Qinfang and Helen, an inexperienced reader, mother and daughter looked at the text together, with the mother pointing to each character with her finger, reading in a loud voice, and the daughter just following the text: Qinfang:

The little boat. The crescent moon, the little boat, the little boat has two pointed sides. I’m sitting in the boat, looking at the twinkling stars and the blue sky.

Yongjing and, her daughter, Xiaoman, another inexperienced reader, approached this in a slightly different way: the mother read the text, then offered prompts and allowed the child to continue. Using the text in Xiaoman’s Chinese book, the following sequence was enacted: Yongjing: Xiaoman: Yongjing: Xiaoman: Yongjing: Xiaoman:

Fishing at the bank together. [repeats] Fishing at the bank together. The little cat… The little cat and the old cat fish at the bank together were unlucky, they didn’t even catch one fish. How … How come there weren’t any fish? Why couldn’t I catch a fish?

Of all the children, only Xuge is still learning to read with the aid of pinyin, a romanised transcription first introduced into the People’s Republic following writing reforms in 1956 (Sheridan 1981; Horvath and Vaughan 1991). His mother used the standard procedure: she read each word and then broke it up into two units: the initial sound and the rest of the syllable. The third word is dang (clank), d-ang, dang. The fourth is tou (steal), t-ou, tou. The fifth is peng (bump), p-eng, peng.

There is an interesting parallel here between well-established Chinese teaching approaches and more recent developments in the UK. Traditional phonics teaching in the UK focused on the relationship between individual sounds and letters. However, with the growing interest in phonological awareness (cf. Goswami & Bryant 1990), attention has shifted from individual sounds to onset (initial sounds) and rime (remaining sounds in word). Questions The mothers made extensive use of questions. Figure 3 shows that the propor-

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tion of utterances in reading interactions which were categorised as questions ranged between 13 and 36 per cent. Differences between the mothers seemed more related to individual style than to the level of experience of the child. Thus, of the two mothers who used the highest proportion of questions, one had a child who was working on Book 6, the other’s child was working on Book 1. 40% 35% 30% 25% 20% 15% 10% 5% 0% Guiying Qianqi

Lili

Qinfang

Yongjing

Figure 3. Use of questions

The main aim of the questions was clearly to elicit whether the children had access to the background knowledge which informed the text as a whole, or had understood the individual components — words, characters, sentences and paragraphs — which made it up. The questions can be further subcategorised, as set out in Figure 4. 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 words

text measure structure child’s conten word idea

Figure 4. Relative proportions of different types of questions

other

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Of the 139 questions, just under half (61) were about words and phrases. Sometimes the mother asked the meaning of a word or phrase, for example, ‘What does da hua mean?’ ‘What does jie dao mean?’ All five mothers made extensive use of this particular strategy. Often questions were about the composition of characters. On other occasions, the mothers asked questions to help the child extend or make a complete sentence: Qinfang: Helen: Qinfang: Helen: Qinfang: Helen:

Now you make a sentence with kan jian [see/ saw/ seen]. I see…. I see a dog. What is the dog doing? Walking. See father. Can you see what he is doing? Driving.

Sometimes the questions were open-ended. Yongjing, for instance, wanted to know which words Xiaoman thought were difficult. More often, however, her questions were intended to elicit a particular response. Another important subcategory of questions focused on the use of measure words such as ge and zhi, a feature of Chinese which causes widespread difficulty for children.2 Typical questions included: Lili: Yongjing:

Can we say one ge (measure word) leave? OK. Next exercise. For example: one zhi (measure word) pen. Can I say ‘one ge book’?

Some 14 per cent of the questions concerned the use of measure words. Such questions, however, were only used by the mothers of the younger children who were still in the process of acquiring this area of grammatical knowledge. The greater emphasis on questions concerning form rather than content is not surprising when we consider that most of the children in this study were relatively young and inexperienced readers. The nature of the Chinese writing system makes it necessary to give considerable attention to the composition and grouping of characters in the early stages of learning to read (HudsonRoss & Dong 1990; Sheridan 1990). This difference in emphasis may well give rise to misunderstanding between teachers and pupils in British classrooms and there is evidence that this is indeed the case. Gregory (1993b), for instance, describes the misunderstanding between a British teacher and a Chinese family about the ways in which reading is taught in British schools. With younger children, the mothers paid more attention to the structure of characters; with older, more experienced readers, they tended to emphasise the structure and meaning of the text as a whole. Thus, Jianqi prepared ten-

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year-old Xuge for a more detailed look at the story of ‘yan re dao ling’ (Stealing a ring by covering your ears) by asking him how many fables he could remember from before. Guiying asked her son who was working on Book 3, ‘What’s the general idea of the story?’ Other questions were directed at specific parts of the story: Jianqi asked the meaning of the second paragraph and explored the feelings of the central character. This use of questioning was, however, relatively rare among mothers in the present study: less than 20 per cent of the questions explored children’s understanding of the content. Even fewer (15 per cent) addressed the children’s own views on what they were reading. This practice is thus very different from what usually takes place in a mainstream school context in Britain where considerable emphasis is placed on encouraging children to relate their own experiences and opinions to the text which they are reading (Chambers 1993; Graham & Kelly 1997). Figure 4 shows the relative proportions of the different categories of questions. However, for an understanding of why and how the mothers asked the questions, we need to look more closely at the qualitative data. The mothers frequently drew on children’s prior knowledge. In many cases, they made use of children’s growing dominance in English to check their understanding of the Chinese text. Yongjing, for instance, read a section of the text: ‘Sister said it looks like salt (yan)’ and then asks Xiaoman, ‘How do you say yan in English?’ Children, too, asked their mothers for an English gloss for a Chinese word or phrase on a number of occasions. At other times, the mothers appealed to children’s general knowledge. Thus Yongjing asked Xiaoman what sheep eat to help her form a sentence using cao (grass), and Lili asked Mary the names of the four seasons. Occasionally, the mothers asked questions to engage their children’s attention. For example, Jianqi told Xuge that yan (cover) was a verb and then asked him, ‘What is yan er (cover ear)?’ Xuge began to cover his ear to show that he had understood. Similarly when Qinfang asked Helen the meaning of twinkle, she gave a clue by opening and closing her fingers. These different strategies are not, of course, used in isolation but form part of a more coherent whole. Take the following extract from the transcript of Qinfang teaching her daughter: Qinfang: Helen: Qinfang:

What’s meaning of wan wan [crescent]? I don’t know. What’s the shape of the moon? You tell me what’s the shape of the

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moon? [Draws a crescent shape]. Is that right? Do you think it’s a crescent? When the moon reaches the fifteenth day of the month, it’s a crescent. What’s a crescent look like? A small boat. What’s the meaning of twinkle? [Opens and closes her fingers to show twinkling]. [singing] Twinkle, twinkle, little star. Yes, the twinkling stars and the blue sky. You can say the crescent moon. What else can you say using wan wan [crescent]? The curved tail. You mean the cock’s curved tail? Yes.

Clearly Qinfang was using a whole range of interrogative strategies to help her daughter understand the meaning of crescent: she asked direct questions, she appealed to prior knowledge, she made allusion to other bodies in the sky and she asked Helen to use the word in another context. Instructions The mothers’ teaching style was, without exception, very direct, with extensive use of instructions to the children which made it very clear what was expected of them. As we see in Figure 5, the proportion of the reading interactions which were categorised as instructions ranged between 4 and 27 per cent. As was the case in the analysis of questions above, the use of 30% 25% 20% 15% 10% 5% 0%

Guiying

Figure 5. Use of instructions

Jianqi

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instructions seemed to vary according to the parents’ individual style rather than the level of experience of their children. In the transcripts of the reading interactions, the following examples are typical of the instructions given by the mothers: Jianqi:

Yes, write the new words and make sentences. Repeat the story. It’s better if you can recite all the text. Next time I’ll ask you to think about your own experience, to say something about what you think after you read the story. Think about it after the class. Now repeat the story. Qinfang: Now read the test again. Yongjing: Now fill in all these words. Guiying: Now answer the question: What did the frog and the bird argue about?

There are similarities between this approach and African-American and African-Caribbean teaching styles. Heath (1983), for instance, examined the way in which the directness associated with African-American language style sometimes gave rise to misunderstanding in a school situation. Middle class white teachers often expressed instructions in the form of questions; when working class white and African American children then fail to comply, their teachers interpreted their behaviour as undisciplined and disrespectful. Callender (1997) discusses the same phenomenon in a British context. Chinese children are normally considered obedient and polite, rather than disrespectful (An 1999). This does not, however, remove the possibility that the very different discourse style of British teachers may give rise to cross-cultural misunderstanding in the classroom. This is an area which would benefit from more research. Strategies for explaining Explanation was another common strategy used by the mothers in the reading interactions. The proportion of ‘points’ categorised as explanations ranged from 11 to 33 per cent. As was the case for instructions and questions, Figure 6 shows that there was no obvious relationship between the mothers use of explanations and the level of experience of the child, leading to the conclusion that variations in use are best attributed to the individual style and preferences of the mothers.

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35% 30% 25% 20% 15% 10% 5% 0.% Guiying

Jianqi

Lili

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Yongjing

Figure 6. Use of explanation

Analysis of the transcripts indicated that explanations could be further subcategorised into statements and demonstrations. The different patterns of behaviour are set out in Figure 7. It would seem, therefore, that there were very large differences in the ways in which the mothers offered explanations to their children. Guiying and Lili relied exclusively or almost exclusively on the use of statements; the other g

p

g

18% 16% 14% 12% 10%

statement demonstration

8% 6% 4% 2% 0% Guiying

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Figure 7. Different explanation strategies

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mothers used both statements and demonstration. Again the mothers did not seem to be responding to the levels of experience of their children; rather their behaviour seemed to reflect their different styles. As was the case for questions and instructions, explanations were offered for many different reasons. Very much in instructional mode, the mothers sometimes anticipated children’s difficulties and offered explanations spontaneously. Jianqi, for instance, in introducing the story of ‘Yan re dao ning’ (Stealing a ring by covering your ears), began by pointing out that: Jianqi:

A fable explains things through a simple story. It uses metaphor, symbol and personification to show the truth or irony of the story. Children like this form and accept it easily.

On other occasions, explanations were offered when children were clearly experiencing difficulties. Thus, Guiying clearly suspected that Guangyu did not know the meaning of guan [observe] in the context of the story they were reading and offered the following explanation: Guiying:

guan means to look at, observe. [Here] it means sitting in a well and looking at the sky.

Most often explanations took the form of a simple statement as in the examples above. However, one of the mothers, Guiying, also made very skilful use of analogy to help Guangyu understand a text in which a frog sitting in a well is talking to a bird. The frog believes that the sky is only as big as the part he can see from his vantage point down the well; he refuses to believe the bird who says it is very much bigger. Guiying expanded on the story, saying: Guiying:

Another example is of an uneducated person who lives in the countryside. When he sees a television screen, he wants to know where the picture is coming from. When someone tells him it is carried by electric waves, he cannot believe it. He doesn’t know that there is any such thing as electric waves because he has no education.

She then made explicit the point of the story: Guiying:

When the frog is in the well he thinks the sky is the same size as the well. We’re talking about people’s attitudes here. Some people just don’t believe things outside their experience.

The second strategy used to explain elements of a text was demonstration, particularly in relation to how characters are written. Yongjing showed how hua [flower] is written with a line, a sweep, a vertical line, a sweep and a right angle; Qinfang demonstrated to Helen that wan wan [crescent] is

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written with two vertical lines first, then two dots. Quite often, the mothers used visualization techniques to help children fix a picture of the character in their memories. Thus, as Yongjing demonstrated the character for diao (to fish), she drew attention to the hook on the left side, and reminded her that you use a hook to fish. Qinfang drew attention to the shape of the character wan wan [crescent]: Qinfang:

wan wan [crescent] has got two pointed sides. [Indicates the points on the crescent shape she has drawn]. It looks like a little boat.

Qinfang explained Qinfang:

zuo [sit] in a similar way,

One side is a ren [person], the other side is a ren [person]. And then you write the tu [soil]. That means two persons sit on the zuo. ground. This is the word

The mothers also used comparison to explain a text, when a child confused two words with similar meaning or similar appearance. For instance, Qinfang said to Helen: ‘You wrote bai [white]. But this is zi (oneself). One line is bai, two lines is zi.’ (cf. Hudson-Ross & Dong 1990: 121). Review & practice Between 4 and 15 per cent of the interactions could be categorised as examples of review and practice. As indicated in Figure 8, all the mothers used this strategy at some point when reading with their children, although its use appears to have been linked more closely to individual teaching style than to children’s level of experience. 16% 14% 12% 10% 8% 6% 4% 2% 0% Guiying

Jianqi

Figure 8. Use of review and practice

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The use of this strategy is deeply embedded in Chinese education. Confucius said ‘You learn new things by reviewing what you know already [wen gu er zhi xin]’ (Legge 1971), underlining the fact that review and practice strategies are a well-established feature of Chinese culture. Revision materials are on display in every bookstore in China. Parents use these materials as the basis for homework which will be used to reinforce the work which takes place in school. A score of 90 or 95 per cent is considered necessary to demonstrate that a child has really understood and, in order to achieve a score of this magnitude, it is essential to keep doing exercises, to keep reviewing and practising. After explaining the text, the mothers used several ways to encourage their children to practise what they had taught and also to remind them of what they already knew. As we have seen, Qinfang had taught the adjective crescent, which can be use to modify moon. She asked her daughter, ‘What else can you say using crescent?’ Qinfang also asked her to make sentences to practise individual words and sentence patterns with which she was already familiar. Some mothers also used more direct techniques to review what they had taught their children: Guiying:

Now say the meaning of these words. What does ‘ zuo jing guan tian’ [Sitting in the well to observe the sky] mean?

Dictation was a common tool for helping children review what they had learned. Sometimes the mothers gave the dictation without prior discussion. However, on other occasions, they first drew attention to words from the lesson which they felt might cause difficulty and then included these in the dictation. Review and practice strategies were used at two main points in the reading interactions. Jianqi, for instance, used this approach at the beginning to help her son recall what he had learned in the previous lesson: Jianqi:

How many fables can you remember from before? What’s a fable all about?’

On most occasions, however, review and practice took place towards the end of the session. The mothers often asked their children to paraphrase the text and check on whether they had understood what they had been reading. They usually expected the children to do the exercises which followed the text to check if they had understood. These exercises most often consisted of answer-

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ing questions about the content of the text; comparing similar words and making sentences; filling in the blanks using words from the text; and practising characters. Responding to the children The parents’ responses to the children, both positive and negative, are another area of interest. As Figure 9 indicates, there were marked differences between the mothers. Guiying, for instance, only made use of praise strategies with her son. Jianqi and Qinfang also made frequent use of praise. Positive responses often took the form of yes or no or a simple evaluative comment: Jianqi: Qinfang:

Yes, one sentence. Now you write it again. [Daughter writes it again]. Right.

On other occasions, however, the praise was more enthusiastic: Yongjing: Good. Do it again. Very good.

I have already noted the direct nature of the mothers’ interactions with their child. There would seem to be a close relationship between the directness of these interactions and the mothers’ use of praise. This is clearly a cultural phenomenon which has been noted in various other situations (Callender

8% 7% 6% 5% positive

4%

negative

3% 2% 1% 0%

Guiying

Jianqi

Lili

Qinfang

Figure 9. Mother’s responses to their children

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1997). Many of the mothers’ responses to their children, including those cited above, might be perceived by a western audience, at best, as unenthusiastic. It is also notewothy that Lili and Yongjing made very critical comments to their children on a number of occasions. By the same token, these negative comments may seem unduly harsh to a western audience influenced by an educational philosophy which attaches great importance to the notion of a positive self-concept for success in learning. Comments such as those which follow were typical. Jianqi:

No, not very good. You’d have a pause between each paragraph. You should practise after class. Lili: You’ve already read all these in your English book. How can you forget everything? Yongjing: You didn’t make a very good job of that.

At no point during the sessions did the children challenge their parents’ negative comments. This is very much in accordance with the belief that parents’ actions are always in their children’s best interests. Rashid and Gregory (1997: 112–13) describe a similar pattern in an account of a Sylhetispeaking girl teaching her brother to read: Jamilla (sister) frequently corrects Maruf’s mistakes as and when they arise, and has no fear of undermining his confidence. To the outsiders, her strategies may appear too probing for a young child… however, knowledge of the community classes allows us to understand that these children are very comfortable with such structures.

Problems can sometimes arise, however, when Chinese families live abroad and children are exposed to rather different cultural assumptions. Accounts written by children in the overseas edition of a Chinese newspaper, (see, for instance, Song 1997: 9) make this point very clearly. Jiaou, who had been in Sweden for five years, described her experience of learning to play the violin thus: My teacher is Swedish. She is patient, kind and friendly. Even when I sometimes play the tunes very poorly, she always encourages me ‘Good! Try it again.’ ….. My mother isn’t nearly as nice as my teacher. When I make mistakes, she tells me off. She treats me very strictly. Sometimes she feels my posture is wrong, sometimes she complains that I am not using the bow as forcefully as I should. When I cheerfully play a new tune to her, she says, ‘Why are you learning to play tunes instead of practising your scales?’ I have to practise the boring ‘open string’ which my mother told me to do as something extra… It’s so difficult to get my mum’s praise. Now that I am getting older, I know my mum is strict because she

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wants me to be good. Perhaps if she was different I wouldn’t be the best in the class. But if my mum gave me more encouragement, just like my teacher, probably I would be even better. Who knows? (People’s Daily, overseas edition, 5 September 1997: 9)

Yao Yuan expresses a similar sentiment: When I see other children playing under the sunshine, how I love it! But I have to do lots of Chinese exercises which they don’t have to. (People’s Daily, overseas edition, 24 January 1998: 3)

Chinese parents, then, would seem to focus mainly on their children’s long term future. In order to achieve their goal, they are prepared to be strict and even to use harsh words to spur their children on. Again a famous saying encapsulates this view: ‘The cloth will get bigger and bigger and the band will get looser, but in the interest of study I don’t mind being thin and pallid.’ Traditional views of study are so deeply ingrained that they still inform the thinking of Chinese parents abroad. For instance, Su (1997), a Chinese graduate student in the USA, describes how her five-year old daughter protested one day that her mother was hurting her feelings. She admits that her first reaction was surprise that a five year old should have hurt feelings. Only on reflection did it occur to her that children’s feelings may have been neglected in the thousand year history of parents as rulers and guardians of the truth.

Conclusions Several general points emerge from this analysis of Chinese mothers’ reading with their children. The first concerns what counts as reading. The mothers took a highly structured instructional approach. They all interpreted the request to read with their children by working from a standard textbook rather than choosing a storybook and reading for pleasure. When reading the selected text, the mothers took a very direct approach, making extensive use of questions to ensure that children had understood the text as a whole as well as its component parts; giving clear instructions about what they expected the child to do; and offering explanations in the form of demonstration, statements and, in the case of one of the mothers, analogy. The emphasis was on the understanding of form and structure and close attention to the text, rather than on reader response and enjoyment, as is the case in British education.

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The mothers in the sample used for this study are all well-educated but have no training in teaching, either in China or the UK. In this respect, the only experience which they can bring to the teaching of Chinese literacy is what they remember from their own schooling in China. At various points in the discussion in this chapter, comparisons have been made between Chinese approaches to teaching with what takes place in mainstream British school. It would, of course, be illuminating to make comparisons between the teaching strategies of Chinese mothers and British mothers; however, I had neither the time nor the resources to explore this avenue as part of the present study. One final point can usefully be made about the teaching strategies of the five women in this study. Although all the mothers adjusted to the needs and experience of their children when actually reading the text aloud, they also showed a great deal of variation in the degree to which they used the different strategies. Thus, while it is possible to make general statements about the approach of Chinese mothers to the teaching of reading, it is important to remember that they are by no means a homogeneous group. Mainland Chinese families invest considerable time and effort in helping their children maintain high levels of achievement in reading and writing Chinese. There can be no doubt as to the very real urgency for children to keep pace with their peers in China so that they will be able to compete on equal terms on their return. Nor can there be any doubt about the impossibility of this task: children who can spend only a few hours a week after school and at weekends cannot be expected to achieve the same levels as children whose entire education is conducted in Chinese. By looking in depth at what happens when five Mainland Chinese mothers set about teaching their children to read and write Chinese at home, it has been possible to show the strategies which are commonly used and the ways in which these vary both according to the needs and stage of development of the child, and the individual style of the mother. Attention has been drawn to the broad differences between approaches to the teaching of reading in these Chinese families and those approached which predominate in British schools. In addition, tentative suggestions have also been made as to similarities with the interactional styles documented for other minority groups, including AfricanAmericans, African-Caribbeans and Bangladeshis. Discussion has focused in particular on the very direct teaching style of Chinese mothers and the ways in which they may seem critical and negative to British observers. The differences between this approach to home tuition and the interac-

10. Page from a standard Chinese textbook

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tional styles documented here and the teaching/learning approaches of the school need to be acknowledged and more fully understood. Such an understanding is clearly essential in multicultural, multilingual classrooms in the UK: teachers need to be aware of the specific literacy experiences of children from different cultural backgrounds and of the different expectations of parents for their children.

Notes 1.

Fictitous names are used throughout this chapter to maintain the anonymity of the participants.

2.

In Chinese, each noun has a specific measure word associated with it, defined by Chao (1968: 584) as ‘a bound morpheme which forms a D-M (determinative and measure) compound with [a] determinative.’ When the noun is used with a demonstrative pronoun, the measure word must always intervene. For example: yi zhang zi (one piece of paper), liu zhang zhuo zi (six tables),wu ba dao (five knives), san ba hua (three bunches of flowers). The specific measure word selected is determined by the nature or shape of the noun The nearest equivalents in English would, for example, be a sheet of paper or, a glass of water.

CHAPTER 5

Language, literacy and worldview1 Viv Edwards and Hubisi Nwenmely

Traditionally, the study of literacy has been conceptualised in technical terms, independent of social context (Goody 1968; Olson 1977; Ong 1982). On the level of the group, control over the written word has been associated with development, progress and modernisation. On the level of the individual, literacy has been presented as moulding cognitive processes. In recent years, there has been a growing dissatisfaction with the crude stereotypes often associated with discussions of this kind (Street 1993a). Literacy is viewed increasingly as a social construct which varies according to cultural context; and researchers are placing growing emphasis on the links between reading and writing and power structures within society. This chapter is offered as a contribution to the debate on ‘new literacies’. It will explore the attitudes and practices of a number of different groups. Discussion of the first of these groups — white fundamentalist Christians in the USA, and settlers from the Indian sub-continent and Hong Kong in the UK — will be based on accounts by a variety of writers, including Heath (1983); Zinsser (1986) and Gregory (1993a; 1993b). The remaining groups — speakers of Kwéyòl, an Afro-French creole, in the Eastern Caribbean and Britain — have been a recent focus for our own research. Different worldviews in each of these settings have produced a range of responses to the printed word. Educationalists and policy makers are only now beginning to understand the implications of these differences.

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92 Fundamentalist Christians

The written word is everywhere in fundamentalist Sunday schools in North America, which draw primarily on white working class populations. Children all have their own Bibles; printed messages are attached to classroom walls. Teachers use curriculum guides which show how Bible truth can be applied to real life situations, and this learning is reflected in the handouts given to the children. So how do children relate to print in this situation? According to Zinsser (1986), non-readers are required to listen carefully. The pattern is always the same: first the teacher says the verse, then the children repeat it several times in unison with her. They take home the printed verse so that parents can help them memorise it by the next meeting, when their efforts are rewarded with a star. Of course, children’s learning is not restricted to Bible knowledge: they are finding out, among other things, how teaching is organised. Zinsser (1986: 64), for instance, shows how children are expected to provide short, ‘correct’ and formulaic answers and not to speculate on alternative interpretations. Anyone who fails to understand this principle is soon put right. Teacher: Child: Teacher:

Did God answer Janie’s prayer? Yes. She wasn’t afraid … (adds thoughtfully) Maybe she did it herself. No God helped her.

Heath (1983) shows how the experience of literacy in church is closely mirrored in the homes of lower class white children. In the community of ‘Trackton’ in the southeastern United States, the stories people tell are based on personal experience and show familiarity with the Bible and church-related stories of Christian life. These stories are expected to be true to the facts and to have an underlying moral. Reading is also held in high regard and the bedtime story is an established ritual. In the main, parents choose nursery rhymes, alphabet books and simplified Bible stories. Children are expected to sit quietly until the end when they are required to answer questions on what they have heard and talk about the moral of the story. Children introduced to literacy in a religious context may find themselves at a disadvantage in mainstream schools where the expectations are very different. Zinsser (1986), for instance, suggests that children from fundamentalist Christian families may have difficulty in getting the floor, holding the floor and introducing news. Heath (1983) shows that fears of this kind are well-founded: teachers often criticised the children from the mainly funda-

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mentalist community in her study. They expressed concern that these children rarely asked questions and gave only minimal answers. Yet these were the very same behaviours which were expected around the printed word both at home and in Sunday school.

Muslims in Britain There are in fact many points of similarity between the religious education of fundamentalist Christians and other religious groups, including Muslims. In traditional religious schools or ‘maktabs’, children learn, among other things, to recite by heart whole passages of the Qur’an. Maktabs have definite boundaries between ‘work’ and ‘play’ which make them distinct from mainstream school. The same principles often spill over from Qur’anic to voluntary classes in community languages such as Urdu, Bengali and Gujarati. Children questioned in a study by Gregory (1993a) were clear that they ‘read and write’ in Bengali school and ‘play’ in English school. In classes which often last for two hours without a break, children remain seated on the floor or at the table and all talk is directed to the task in hand. The typical sequence is demonstration, repeat, practice and then test. As is the case in the American Sunday school, tuition is exact and direct. The child answers and will be told either, “Yes” or “Not like that, like this”. Children from Muslim families may find the approach to literacy learning in mainstream schools confusing: they may dismiss what takes place as frivolous, believing that ‘real’ learning takes place only in more formal settings. By the same token, many teachers in mainstream schools are unaware of the rich literary tradition to which children from the Indian sub-continent are privy.

The Chinese experience of literacy The Hong Kong Chinese community in Britain provides another example of how differences in worldview impinge on literacy practices. In Hong Kong, much importance is attached to the values of Confucianism, including respect for parents and achievement in education. As is the case in the community classes described above, there is a strict division between work and play.

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Children sit in rows and do as the teacher directs them. They practise ideographs over and over until they are perfect. If they forget or misplace a single stroke, they may completely change the meaning of the character, so close attention to detail is essential. These practices continue in the voluntary Chinese community classes in Britain. Children recite words in chorus after the teacher. They learn through repetition, memorisation and careful copying. Books are held in very high esteem but parents believe that children must prove themselves worthy through hard work. In much the same way that Muslim children are given the Qur’an when they have worked their way through Arabic primers, many Chinese children are rewarded with books only when they have learned to read. These very different expectations have serious implications for children in mainstream schooling. Gregory (1993b), for instance, describes the enthusiasm of Tony, and his family from Hong Kong when he starts school. Within a few months, however, Tony has started to reject his teacher’s attempts to help him. He is focusing on individual words and is more interested in labelling the people and things in the illustrations than in trying to predict what comes next. When his teacher makes a visit to his home, she is surprised at the frosty reception she receives from his grandfather: ‘Tony can’t have this book yet. You must keep it and give it to him later.’ ‘But why?’ ‘Because he can’t read the words. First he must read the words, then he can have the book.’

Tony’s grandfather pulls out an exercise book from under the counter and shows it to the teacher. A number of pages have been filled with immaculate ideographs. His grandfather says proudly that Tony has completed these at Chinese Saturday school. With a sceptical look at the teacher, he pulls out a screwed up piece of paper. On one side is a shop advertisement from which it had been recycled. On the other is a drawing of a transformer. Tony’s grandfather then said: ‘This is from his English school. This is rubbish.’

Pointing to the corner where ‘ToNy’ is written, he says: ‘Look. He can’t even write his name yet!’

Caught between the different approaches of the two schools, Tony seems to ‘switch off’. The root of the problem, however, would seem to lie not so much

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in the differences between the two systems as in the fact that Tony’s family assumes that the same principles should operate in both systems. This confusion is exacerbated by the fact that Tony’s teachers have not explained precisely what they are trying to achieve. Children from ‘non-mainstream’ families — fundamentalist Christian, Muslim or Chinese — need to be able to relate their own experiences of literacy to those of the school. The mainstream teacher has a vital role to play in this process. It is possible to trace a common thread through these various communities: differences in worldview shape written traditions. Most important, the worldview of these various groups differs in important respects from that of the middle class speakers whose cultural and linguistic capital (cf. Bourdieu 1966) determines what takes place in school. Inevitably, these differences have important educational implications.

Kwéyòl literacy in St Lucia We turn next to two quite different communities: Kwéyòl speakers in the Eastern Caribbean island of St Lucia, and their second and third generation descendants in the United Kingdom. We will start in the Caribbean. The current linguistic situation in St Lucia is best understood in the context of its very chequered colonial history. The French West Indian Company first established St Lucia as a French colony in 1642. In the next 150 years the island changed hands between the French and the British some fourteen times, but remained under British control from 1803 until its independence in 1979. These extended periods of contact with French at a critical period in the history of the Caribbean have had a lasting effect on the language behaviour of St Lucians. English remains the official language and is used by a small elite in ‘high’ domains such as government and administration, legal institutions and education. Kwéyòl remains the ‘low’ variety, used by the mass of the population in their private lives. However, growing nationalist sentiment has increased pressure for wider acceptance of Kwéyòl and has generated debate around the need for language policy and planning. As various observers (eg Jules 1988; Tollefson 1991) have commented, discussions of language policy and planning cannot be separated from a consideration of the relationship between language and power. St Lucia does not have an official language policy:

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decisions as to which languages are used in which situations are based unquestioningly on an acceptance of attitudes and practices inherited from the previous colonial administration which emphasised the low status and limited range of uses for Kwéyòl. Many people involved in promoting literacy, however, argue that the way forward is to develop a bilingual policy which recognises the value of English but at the same time acknowledges the needs of the Kwéyòl-speaking majority. Such a policy would take account, for instance, of the necessity to use English in meeting development and modernisation needs. At the same time it would take steps to ensure that Kwéyòl makes a significant contribution to national development. The solutions which educators have adopted to date have focused heavily on the use of English. Entry into secondary school is determined by the high degree of competence in English necessary to pass the Common Entrance Exam and it is widely believed that knowledge of Kwéyòl will interfere with the acquisition of English and impede improved life chances in St Lucia. However, there is a basic contradiction in this position. As Samuel (1992) points out: The official scapegoat [for poor educational performance] is the popularity of the ‘Creole dialect’ which is hindering the learning of English and learning in general. Unbelievably, this view comes from the guardians of a system that has spent the last four centuries ensuring that Kwéyòl is debarred from school; yet for them it is now responsible for poor performances in those very same schools. St Lucia can no longer afford such dishonesty in this important area of people’s lives. Facing up to this educational crisis must mean a serious attempt at language education policy reform, which can only be part and parcel of a general commitment to national language policy reform.

The same ambivalence which exists in relation to Kwéyòl in schools is to be found in adult education. High levels of illiteracy seriously hamper national development. Carrington (1980), for instance, estimated that 46 per cent of the population over the age of 15 — approximately 30,000 people — were illiterate. Writers such as Jules (1988) have drawn attention to the important role which Kwéyòl might play in adult literacy programmes. The first official response to the language question came when the 1979– 1982 Labour government initiated a national consultation on education which expressed the view that sufficient numbers of monolingual Kwéyòl speakers were experiencing difficulties with English to justify it being used extensively within the school system (Carrington 1988). The newly elected government also set up a committee to report on the feasibility of a mass literacy pro-

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gramme which would, by extension, address the language problem. The committee recommended that the government adopt an official bilingual language policy encompassing education and other areas of public life (Caribbean Research Centre 1980). The development of an orthography was central to the implementation of a bilingual language policy. Kwéyòl had previously been a spoken language and occasional attempts to commit it to writing had been inconsistent and ad hoc. The first systematic attempts to devise an appropriate system came in the form of two orthography workshops. The first workshop (Folk Research Centre 1981) resulted in the setting up of Mouvman Kwéyòl Sent Lisi, otherwise known as MOKWEYOL, to carry out a number of practical and research initiatives. Members of the group took responsibility for popularising the outcomes of the workshop and noted a number of problems in the course of this work. These problems became the focal point of the next workshop (Folk Research Centre 1982). Three priority areas for follow-up work were agreed upon: training, research and publicity. Members of the committee would become the new cadre of persons fluent in the writing system. They would also take on responsibility for the mass popularisation of the system among the literate population, educators (including literacy facilitators), agricultural officers and community health workers. A two-pronged approach would be adopted to facilitate this work: first, fieldwork among the population recording words, idioms and so forth and, second, the study of these materials to identify anomalies and take decisions on rules. A publicity campaign was identified as central to the acceptance of the new orthography. A number of avenues were targeted including regular discussions on the radio and television, articles on language issues in local newspapers and public discussions. The launching of a bilingual tabloid, Balata, in 1983 was another important development but funding and distribution problems brought publication to a halt after just 14 issues. Today, only a minority of people know and use the writing system or use Kwéyòl in educational settings. A small number of Kwéyòl literacy projects continue to attract enthusiastic support but the impact of such initiatives ‘is severely circumscribed by the lack of a determined political will’ (Jules 1988: 13). The issues surrounding literacy in St Lucia are very different from those in either white fundamentalist or linguistic minority communities in Britain. In the one situation, problems arise because the experiences of less powerful

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communities do not correspond to those of the dominant group. In the St Lucian context, the fact that English is the medium of education for a predominantly Kwéyòl-speaking population represents a major obstacle. In all cases, however, access to power is a central issue.

Kwéyòl literacy in the UK During the period between the mid-1950s and 1970, some ten per cent of the population of St Lucia left their homes to come to Britain. In the early days of immigration, Kwéyòl was the language of the home. With the passing of time, however, there have been important changes. As children went to British schools, the linguistic balance in most families began to swing from Kwéyòl to English. First generation Eastern Caribbeans still make extensive use of Kwéyòl in conversation with peers, and Kwéyòl remains the only acceptable language for important social and family functions. In most cases, however, parents have not chosen to transmit Kwéyòl to their children. As Fasold (1984) points out, this decision is a feature of the late stages of language shift. Britishborn children are thus likely to have a good receptive knowledge of Kwéyòl, but, in most cases, their productive competence is extremely limited. The fact that Eastern Caribbeans form a small and relatively dispersed community within the UK makes the task of language maintenance particularly difficult. In the early years of immigration, Kwéyòl was also the language of solidarity for Caribbean-born children making their way through the British school system. It served to isolate them both from the racist comments of British children and teachers and from derogatory remarks offered by other African-Caribbeans about their speech. The tendency of British people to perceive, and treat, all African-Caribbeans in the same way has inevitably led large numbers of second generation St Lucians to see themselves primarily as part of a larger British Black grouping and British Black English rather than Kwéyòl, is the language of wider currency. While St Lucians undoubtedly share an acceptable degree of comradeship with other Caribbeans, the Kwéyòl language still functions as a marker of solidarity. This is clearly demonstrated in the high incidence of friendship and intermarriage. Kwéyòl also features prominently in social and cultural events. Music and cultural activities, and social settings such as markets, churches, pubs and clubs all help maintain the language. In addition, they ensure that a

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growing number of people from St Lucian backgrounds have access to another cultural identity besides that of being Black British. Education also plays an important role in language maintenance with the development of a small network of Kwéyòl classes as part of adult education provision in London (Nwenmely 1994). Students currently attending classes come from a variety of social class, educational and occupational backgrounds, though there is an increasing white collar bias. They also represent a range of ages, with the largest group falling in the 20 to 30 group. They vary in Kwéyòl competence from absolute beginners to fluent speakers. Students go to Kwéyòl classes for a variety of reasons. The classes are a means of making friends and allowing students to feel more integrated members of the Kwéyòl speech community. They also help to reinforce the status and pride associated with a distinctive cultural identity and contribute to the maintenance of Kwéyòl. Students often talk in terms of the importance of passing down a sense of self from one generation to the next, for children born in a foreign environment. In short, the classes provide a practical course of action for those conscious of the links between the language, national identity and pride. Student comments such as the following are typical: “Teaching or learning the language is not the most important thing. It’s actually giving status in people’s eyes, that’s what the classes mean to me.” “Attending the Kwéyòl classes is very important to me.. [My work mates] always come around to look at the different booklets I read and are always asking questions about the language. It makes me feel so proud.”

The issues surrounding the promotion of Kwéyòl are rather different in the UK context where nearly all members of the classes are literate in English, and where many people are learning Kwéyòl as a second language. The introduction of the Kwéyòl orthography and the development of a Kwéyòl dictionary have generated a great deal of enthusiasm among past and present students. As one student pointed out, activities of this kind have the advantage of: “ … [putting] Kwéyòl on a par with other languages and can be used as a double edged sword. On the one hand, it helps people to learn the language as well as ensuring that the language survives. On the other hand, it is a good argument for legitimising the language as well as a means of forcing the St Lucian government to give the language official recognition.”

The attitudes of students attending Kwéyòl classes in London are much closer to those of the MOKWEYOL intellectuals and activists than to those of the

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majority of St Lucians who accept the exclusive emphasis on English imposed by the political elite. Students in the London classes come from many different backgrounds but they have a shared understanding of the destructive forces of white racism. Kwéyòl has become the focus of their cultural identity. In the Caribbean, English is perceived as the route to social mobility and economic security and Kwéyòl is relegated to less public domains. In Britain, the ability not only to speak but to read and write Kwéyòl has become an important symbol in an ongoing political struggle.

Implications for teachers and policy makers The examples presented in this chapter highlight two very different aspects of the social construction of literacy, both of which are inextricably intertwined with worldview. The first affects the diversity of literacy practices; the second affects the choice of language for literacy. Lower class white fundamentalist Christians in the USA, and Muslim and Chinese families in the UK all prepare their children for encounters with print in ways very different from teachers in mainstream schools. When children from white middle class homes start school, they find the practices of the classroom familiar. Children from minority cultures, however, have to negotiate a complex course between very different approaches to the written word. Researchers and teachers are beginning to move away from the notion that literacy is something which can be studied independently of social context. The growing awareness of different literacies has important implications for teacher’s attitudes towards parents. Traditionally, parents were seen as having little or no part to play in the formal education of their children. More recently, parents who failed to provide the same kinds of literacy experience as the school have been blamed for their children’s underachievement and attempts made to train them in school practices. Researchers such as Auerbach (1989) argue that this response is overly simplistic and that we need rather to draw on parents’ knowledge and experience to transform what is offered in school rather than trying to transfer school practices to the home. The knowledge that the school’s interpretation of reading is only one among many carries other responsibilities for the teacher. When children start school, they bring with them a picture of themselves as learners, based on all that has happened up to this point. It is critical that teachers find ways to

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acknowledge this pre-school experience. In order to do this, they need to create opportunities for discussing previous activities with children, their parents and others with the same background as the children. If parents and school are to work together, teachers must also find ways of making explicit to parents the school’s view of what counts as reading. The practices which have evolved over the last thirty years and which reflect our greater understanding of the reading process are not always clear to white middle class parents. Writers like Gregory (1993b) and Heath (1983) leave no doubt that parents who have grown up in different traditions find these practices even more confusing. The choice of language for literacy represents a second important discussion point. The worldview of St Lucians in the Caribbean and St Lucians in the UK is very different. In the Caribbean, high levels of illiteracy are common place and are probably exacerbated by the fact that the majority of St Lucians have limited access to the standard English of the school. Colonial values are deeply entrenched and English is considered the language of social and economic advancement. While there is a small and committed group of intellectuals committed to the promotion of Kwéyòl literacy, the political elite and the mass of the population unquestioningly accept the pre-eminence of English. This reaction is not, of course, restricted to the Caribbean. Small nation states in many parts of the world are subject to similar pressures and tend to arrive at similar solutions (Barton 1994b). In the UK, most St Lucians have been educated in the British system. Levels of literacy are high and there has been a significant shift from Kwéyòl to English even within the home. Many young people feel unhappy about this rapid language shift: they perceive Kwéyòl as a symbol of their cultural identity in the face of widespread racism. They are enthusiastic about the development of a Kwéyòl orthography and dictionary and are making their own contribution to the production of reading materials in the language. Their worldview is very different from that of their relatives in the Caribbean. In the one case, English is seen as the route to economic success and the wider world. In the other case, English has been a poor defence against the destructive forces of racial discrimination; Kwéyòl has been identified as a rallying point for those who wish to assert a distinctive cultural identity. In both cases, worldview shapes attitudes towards the written word. The study of literacy can no longer be promoted as a phenomenon divorced from social context. The ways in which different groups of people

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use the written word have an ideological dimension, inextricably linked with power issues in society. In all cases, the worldview of the group in question will determine the uses to which literacy is put, the choice of language and the meanings which are attached to this choice.

Notes 1.

The research relating to the Kwéyòl speech community reported in this paper was made possible by award no. R-000-23-3156 from the Economic and Social Research Council for ‘The teaching of Kwéyòl in the UK’ project. An earlier version of this paper was published in the International Journal of Intercultural Relations 19(2): 267–79 (1995).

CHAPTER 6

Language and literacy practices in Gujarati Muslim families Raymonde Sneddon

Children in communities all over Britain live their daily lives in two, three or more languages. The present study investigates the language use and literacy practices of children from Gujarati and Urdu speaking families in a Muslim community in north east London. The language experiences of children aged 3½, 7 and 11 are explored in three settings, in the family, in the community and in school, and they are related to children’s achievements in literacy. The study also considers the role of a community organisation in supporting language maintenance and the impact of current practices in the community on language maintenance and shift. The first section of this paper discusses research findings and theories that have informed the design of the present study and the formulation of the hypotheses which have guided it. The following section provides basic information on this local Gujarati community, the patterns of settlement and local social networks. The work described in this paper forms part of an ongoing sociolinguistic study of the Gujarati community. The structure of the study is outlined, along with the methodology used. Two following sections provide a summary and discussion of some key findings in relation to language use and literacy practices. Conclusions are drawn from the analysis of the findings available at the time of writing.

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Theoretical framework and key hypotheses The present study of language and literacy in this Gujarati community was undertaken to investigate in greater depth the findings of a short research project entitled “Children developing biliteracy at home and at school” (Sneddon 1993). The 1993 study explored parental support for reading in the homes of 11 year old children from five language communities (Bengali, Gujarati, Punjabi, Turkish and Urdu) in a north east London borough. The findings of that study indicated a relationship between support for literacy in the home in first languages and achievement in English literacy as measured by the London Reading Test. That study was informed by the Haringey research project (Tizard, Scofield and Hewison 1982) which found that children who were encouraged to read to their parents regularly in the home achieved significantly higher scores on standardised reading tests than children in control groups. The Haringey study noted that parents helped children by hearing them read even when they did not understand English themselves, and also by arranging for older siblings to do this. No mention was made, however, of parents using or being encouraged to use books in the language of the home. In “Children developing biliteracy at home and at school” (Sneddon 1993) the positive effect of support for home languages was particularly significant for children who had access to support in two home languages. However, a large number of variables could have affected the outcome and the information on language use and literacy practices was insufficiently detailed. Qualitative evidence from the study suggested that sociolinguistic factors in the immediate neighbourhood of some families may have been significant in giving both home languages a higher status in the community. The present study was designed to look more closely at the relationship between language use, literacy practices, educational outcome and the role of formally constituted community organisations. It focused on the group which, in the 1993 study, had produced the most interesting data: the Gujarati Muslim community. Central to the theoretical framework of the present study is the concept of the Common Underlying Proficiency (Cummins 1991, 1980, 1981 and 1984). This was developed to account for the considerable body of evidence that suggests that certain language skills transfer readily from one language to another. A substantial cognitive, cultural and pragmatic knowledge about how language is used is shared and fuels developments in either language. In particular there is evidence to show that the ability to make sense of print

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(Cummins et al 1984; Cummins 1991; Cummins and Mulcahy 1978) transfers from one language to another and that this operates even when writing systems are very different, as, for example, in the case of Japanese and Vietnamese (Cummins et al 1984). Collier (1995: 12) notes that, for children who have the benefit of education in their first language “academic skills, literacy development, concept formation, subject knowledge, and having strategies developed in first language will all transfer to second language”. A large scale review of the factors which predict the educational success in English of bilingual children in the U.S. confirms the importance for children of having the opportunity for cognitive development in their first language (Collier & Thomas 1997). The review also reports that children who have the benefit of academic development in two languages reach parity of achievement in the second language with their monolingual peers at around the age of 11 or 12, and then proceed to outstrip them. The findings of Cummins, Collier and others mentioned above are based on research which compares the educational achievements of children who have had access to some education in their first language with children who have not. Bilingual education for children of linguistic minorities, even in its weakest form, is not available in maintained schools in Britain. The Swann report (DES 1985), in its section on mother tongue education, concluded that home language maintenance was a private matter for families. Local Education Authorities were merely encouraged to support community provision for this if resources were available. Subsequent financial restrictions placed on these authorities and the policy of devolving budgetary control to schools have ensured that public financial support for home language classes is now very limited. In curriculum and policy documents published from 1989 onwards (DES 1990), the issue of bilingualism (except in relation to Wales) is conspicuous by its absence. The needs of bilingual children in the school system are defined (when they are referred to at all) purely in terms of the right of access to English and a very anglo-centric curriculum. Against a background of disinterest in national policy-making, the Linguistic Minorities Project (1985) drew attention to “the role in language maintenance of interpersonal network structures and participation in minority institutions” (LMP 1985: 135). This is particularly well exemplified in the work of Saxena (1994) which documents a community’s strategies for maintaining and extending the role of minority literacies in every day life and the

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developing significance of language choice in terms of personal ideology and group identification (see Chapter 14 of this book too). The present study followed up the indication that social networks, and in particular the presence of a community centre dedicated to the needs of the Gujarati Muslim community, may have been a factor in the greater success of Gujarati Muslim children in school found in the 1993 study of children in five language communities mentioned above. The investigation of social and linguistic networks was based on models provided by the work of Gal, Milroy and Li Wei. Gal’s study of language shift on the Austro-Hungarian border (Gal 1979) demonstrates the possibility of predicting language use by age and habitual social network. Milroy’s research (Milroy 1987) on vernacular language use in Belfast developed measures of density and multiplexity for social networks and found that “a close-knit network structure is an important mechanism of language maintenance” (Milroy 1987: 182). Li Wei’s study (Li Wei 1994) of three generations of the Chinese community in Tyneside provides a useful framework for studying bilingual language use. He notes in particular the impact of kin, community and leisure activities on language choice. The above studies suggested that both the immediate and the wider community may have an impact on language use; that, in a context where the language has no recognised national or educational role, families who have access to greater opportunities for home language use in local community contexts may be encouraged to take active steps to maintain their children’s use of the language; and that a formally constituted support organisation may have a role to play in this process. The present study of language use and literacy practices in the families of Gujarati-speaking children attempts to link this issue to the linguistic theories of Cummins and the educational evidence provided by the Haringey study. The basic hypotheses have been framed as follows: that, as a result of the strengthening of social and linguistic networks, membership of a community organisation would strengthen the linguistic vitality of the community and lead to greater usage of the home language and greater support for children’s acquisition of literacy in this language; that support for reading in the languages of the home (as evidenced by the Haringey research of 1982) would produce, by means of the Common Underlying Proficiency (Cummins 1984), a higher level of achievement for those children in reading in English in school. As in Li Wei’s study, I am concerned with the complex relationship between language use and an individual’s social practices.

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The present study was very much influenced by related research in Britain in the 1980s (Fitzpatrick 1987 and Tosi 1984) and some more recent studies, in particular, the work of Bhatt (1994) on Gujarati literacies in Leicester, of Gregory (1995) on the literacy experiences of Bangladeshi children in Spitalfields, Tower Hamlets, of Yamamoto (1995) on children developing bilingualism in Japanese and English, and Kenner (1997b) on nursery children’s experiences of literacy in multilingual contexts. These other studies provided insights into the kind of language and literacy experiences that needed to be explored. My own study was designed to provide information that could be used to compare practices across communities.

The Gujarati/Urdu speaking community The Linguistic Minorities Project (1985) noted that members of the Gujarati community in Coventry included in their research in the early 1980s were by and large well educated. They tended to be people with small businesses and were particularly noted for their capacity to organise among themselves on a local level. However, the project team also stressed that similar communities living in different areas might be very differently positioned with respect to opportunities for language maintenance. The community which features in this study settled in north and east London in the 1960s and 1970s. Unlike the Hindu Gujaratis (many of whom have settled in Britain via East Africa), most have come directly from rural parts of the district of Surat in Gujarat, and most particularly from the area around Bardoli. They are practising Muslims who speak Gujarati. Urdu, the more prestigious language, is also used and is of great cultural and religious importance to the community. The initial settlers had low levels of education and took mainly factory and transport jobs. Immigration was sponsored by families. Very close links have been maintained with the area of origin. As the community has become more prosperous, contact through family visits has become more frequent and, in some cases, older children are sent to boarding school in Gujarat. In the present study, in all cases where one parent was born in England, their marriage partner has come from Gujarat: this has ensured that Gujarati is still the main language of the home in second generation British families. The community has strong relationships of kinship which are closely

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maintained (one family claimed a hundred relatives resident in the borough). Regular contacts with relatives in Bradford and Leicester are also maintained. The requirement for regular worship at mosque has ensured that the community remains geographically close. The families are distributed throughout the borough, but there is a fairly dense concentration of settlement in the north of the borough. This Gujarati Muslim community is comparatively homogeneous. As families have become more prosperous, education has improved. The large houses bought and shared have been renovated and properly partitioned and a thriving housing association has been created. Members of the community now have more time to spend on leisure activities and with their children. However the virtual disappearance of the clothing and leather manufacturing industry in the area has removed many of the traditional employment opportunities, especially for women in the home, and unemployment is fairly high. This local population of Gujarati speakers has lived up to the general reputation that Gujaratis have for community organisation and, over the years, several groups have emerged that provide religious education and social facilities for their members. One of most notable of these (and the only remaining one focused on this particular community) is the North London Muslim Community Centre. The Centre was founded in a Victorian house in 1980. It catered initially for the needs of boys and men, some women used the nearby Hackney Muslim Women’s Council. This was more focused on Urdu speaking women originating from Pakistan. There has, however, been a change of focus over the last few years. The North London Centre now offers a very wide range of services to men, women and children of all ages, including holiday play schemes and cultural, educational and sporting activities where both Gujarati and Urdu are used and a library where books and newspapers can be obtained in all the languages used by the community. Advice and support in personal and social matters, and in employment and housing are also available to families and religious education and Urdu instruction are available at the mosque next door. During the interviews in the 1992/93 study, the responses I received suggested that the presence of the Community Centre might be a factor in the amount of support that parents provide for the development of education in their languages in the home: that families who make use of the community facilities would have the kind of dense social networks described by Milroy (1987) within which these languages could be used for a wide range of purposes.

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Part of the aim of the present study is to investigate whether, by creating and developing voluntary organisations, the community have built a framework which formalises their networks and may be instrumental in slowing down language shift and loss in the present generation of children.

Structure and methodology In the initial phase of the study, both quantitative and qualitative data were collected through interviews, questionnaires, recordings and observations in the home, in school, in the play centre and a range of community settings. A local population was identified through the Community Centre, the Local Education Authority and schools. This included children who were born in Britain and lived in the borough of Hackney. All children belonged to families who spoke primarily Gujarati in a home where Urdu was also known. The 7 and 11 year old children attended mainstream primary schools in the borough with a similar social and linguistic mix and a comparable approach to the education of bilingual children. The 3½ year old children had just started attending a nursery class attached to a primary school with the same characteristics as those attended by the older children. All children had both parents living in the home (there were few single parent families in the community). All children belonged to families who were practising Muslims. From this population a sample of 36 children (containing equal numbers of 3½ year old, 7 year old and 11 year old children) was selected. Half of the children came from families who made regular use of the Community Centre and half came from families who did not. The study is based on a matched pair design and children were selected who could be matched across these two groups for gender (equal numbers of each in all three age groups), age within 4 months, number of siblings and position in the family, father’s occupation, mother’s level of education, father’s level of education and type and ownership of housing. As much matching information as possible was sought prior to interview. Where informants could not be matched, they were not included in the analysis. The data on language use and literacy practices were obtained by interviewing families at home. This was done by the researcher and Sakina Hafesji, a Gujarati speaking research assistant. Data were obtained on language use in family and community, on literacy practices in the home, on availability of

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classes and attitudes to the learning of language and literacy by children. The researcher then visited all the children in school. The 7 and 11 year olds were interviewed about their language usage using the Three Colour Slide Box (see below). For the purposes of verifying what was essentially self report data, both the researcher and the assistant observed and recorded families and children in a range of settings. To investigate children’s narrative skills, age appropriate dual text story books were left with families. These were to be read to the children in both Gujarati and English. Two to three weeks later the Gujarati speaking researcher visited the home and recorded the child retelling the story in Gujarati. As the English speaking researcher, I visited the school and recorded the child retelling the story in English. As part of the investigation into children’s literacy skills, the 3½ year old children were asked to produce a drawing of themselves, a sample of developmental writing and data on “knowledge about print”. The Local Education Authority provided data on Standard Assessment Tasks for the 7 and 11 year old children in the sample and London Reading Test results for the 11 year olds. The taped stories were transcribed by both researchers and the Gujarati ones were translated into English.

Findings: language use The interview Information on language use in the family was obtained through a questionnaire administered in the home. Information was obtained about how much Gujarati, English and Urdu mothers and fathers spoke to their parents, each other and their children. They were asked to express this in percentages and they were generally confident about doing this. They were also asked about their choice of language in educational, leisure and work situations, while shopping or on the telephone, and the languages in which they used media such as television, video, cassettes or CDs and radio. Information was also sought about the frequency and manner of codeswitching. Mothers described the language use of the three year old children in the sample. The 7 and 11 year old children were interviewed separately, in school, about their language use. Children were asked similar questions, but more detail was requested about usage in the family, the school, the community centre if

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used and the mosque. Knowing that children may develop a non-reciprocal approach to language choice, they were asked in what language key members of their community spoke to them, as well as what they themselves spoke. All 7 and 11 year old children understood the questions. These were extensively piloted with both age groups. I was impressed at the seriousness with which children discussed their language use and made decisions about how much of each language they used. In both groups (Community Centre users and non-users) the children talked with some enthusiasm about their language use and asked a lot of questions about the project. In one of the schools, children interviewed who were not Community Centre users asked me for advice on how to carry out a language research project in their own class. In another school, I was invited to spend a morning with the whole class investigating language issues. A coloured language slide box was devised to assist children in estimating their language use. The children were asked to choose which coloured slide to use for which language and then to slide each one across to estimate how much of each language they used. The researcher then noted a percentage by using the (unnumbered) scale at the side of the box. In the course of the pilot several children guessed the purpose of the dots along the side of the box and volunteered percentages. Most 11 year old and some 7 year old children, after using the box initially to understand the process of estimation, chose to dispense with the box altogether and to express their language use directly in percentages. Parents were asked how important it was to them that their children should learn the three languages of the family. The options offered were “not important, important, essential”. There is very little difference in the responses between the 2 groups: Gujarati was thought to be important or essential by 17 families that made use of the Community Centre and 16 in the group that did not. For Urdu the response was 16 for the Community Centre users and the 15 for the non-users. All families rated English as important or essential. Patterns of language use within the family Women in the sample as a whole reported speaking primarily Gujarati to their parents, considerable amounts of Gujarati to their partners and substantially more English with their children. The use of Urdu as a regular language of communication was restricted to a small number of families.

Raymonde Sneddon

112 100 80 60

Gujarati

40

Urdu

English

20 0 to parents

to partner

to children

Figure 1. Mother’s use of three languages across the whole sample (in percentages)

The results for men were very similar: virtually identical with respect to language use with wives, no English used with elders and slightly more English and Urdu used to children. As one of the main purposes of this part of the study was to ascertain to what extent home languages were used, the use of Gujarati was amalgamated with Urdu usage for the purposes of this analysis. This is referred to as G/U in the figures. The following charts show how parents and children used their languages to communicate across generations. 100 80

Mother's G/U use: Community Centre users

60 40

Mother's G/U use: Community Centre non-users

20 0 to parents

to partner

to children

Figure 2. Mother’s use of Gujarati and Urdu in the family according to whether the family used the Community Centre (in percentages)

The amount of Gujarati and Urdu spoken was substantial and there were only small differences between men and women in both groups, as Figures 3 and 4 illustrate.

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100 Father's G/U use: Community Centre users

80 60

Father's G/U use: Community Centre non-users

40 20 0 to parents

to partner

to children

Figure 3. Father’s use of Gujarati and Urdu in the family according to whether the family used the Community Centre (in percentages)

The children’s language use also followed a clear three generation pattern with almost exclusive use of Gujarati or Urdu to grandparents and substantial amounts spoken to parents. However, the children’s data revealed a substantial difference between the two main groups: those who use the Community Centre spoke more Gujarati to their parents than those who did not, and substantially more to their brothers and sisters. 100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

Children's G/U use: Community Centre users Children's G/U use: Community Centre nonusers

to gra ndm o the r

to pa re nts

to s iblings

Figure 4. Children’s use of Gujarati and Urdu in the family according to whether the family used the Community Centre

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When analysed by age group the children’s use of language to their peers showed a strong and highly significant pattern. The differences increased with age to the point where children in the group whose families did not use the Centre reported relatively little use of Gujarati or Urdu to their siblings. A Mann-Whitney U-test (for non-parametric data) gave a significance level of .0043 for the difference between 11 year old children, indicating considerable statistical significance. 60 50

Mean use of G/U to siblings: Community Centre users

40 30

Mean use of G/U to siblings: Community Centre non-users

20 10 0 3 1/2

7

11

Age of child

Figure 5. Children’s use of Gujarati and Urdu to their siblings by age and whether the families had Community Centre support

Patterns of language use in the community Although patterns of language use within the family were very similar, there were major differences in reported language use outside the home by men and women in both groups. These differences were evident in the returns for both the group that used the Community Centre and the group that did not. Both men and women had opportunities to speak Gujarati or Urdu in the leisure and sporting activities organised by the Centre (the very successful cricket teams, the women’s fitness classes, etc.). Families who did not use the Centre had fewer opportunities of this kind and less contact with other Gujarati or Urdu speakers in the course of their leisure activities (such as swimming or weightwatchers).

Language and literacy in Gujarati Muslim families

115

A similar analysis of the reported language use by children outside the home indicated only one area of major difference between both groups. At school, children reported speaking a little Gujarati to their friends but very few in either group had any opportunity to interact in that language with an adult. None reported speaking Urdu at school. In the environment of the mosque they attended, the children indicated that they spoke both Gujarati, English and a little Urdu with adults and each other. All six of the 11 year olds in the group that made use of the Centre, four 7 year olds and one 3½ year old attended holiday play schemes organised (separately for boys and girls) by the Community Centre. The children spoke a significant amount of Gujarati at the play centre (an average of 37% was reported, varying from one child who spoke mostly Gujarati, to 3 who spoke none at all). This was very informal communication: it involved codeswitching and depended on the activity in which children were engaged. In the group that did not use the Community Centre, only four children attended other play centres and they reported that they spoke only English there. Overall trends The data on language use within the family revealed the expected three generation pattern: Gujarati or Urdu were used almost exclusively to elders, substantially to partners and less to children. An analysis of variance indicates that the strongest predictor of amount of Gujarati or Urdu used was the person who was spoken to (p