Inspired by Max's last post, I went online in search of a site that commented on the connection between language instruction and policy with regard to "power" languages. We had spent the past week in class talking about European languages dominating Africa during the colonial and post-colonial eras, and we speculated about the current prowess of English.
Well it turns out that the world outside Duke is also interested in these kinds of issues. One blog post describes the difficulties in teaching English today. I was particularly interested in his discussion of English in the Soviet Union, where he describes the "havoc" that teaching English to younger and younger students wreaked on the educational system as a whole. Instead of teaching students fundamental skills in their local languages, instruction of the most economically viable language often takes away from students' other courses while adding a marginal amount if "power language" [my words] instruction.
So, should a government promote power-language instruction to increase the economic viability of its young citizens, or should a government promote multilingualism? To me, the answer falls somewhere in between either extreme (didn't we agree that binary models never really work?). To respond to my own question with an example by Haarman, I think that while a country like the Soviet Union should have promoted Russian language acquisition, I feel they failed at adequately supporting local languages, and therefore promoted an "us vs. them" mentality. In the same way, I don't think English should dominate schools abroad at the cost of creating a regional, ethnic, or cultural divide.
This is just my own hypothesis, but I think the degree to which a government should promote power-language instruction (or whether or not it should promote it at all) depends mostly on three things: (1) public sentiment—how much has the population bought into the benefits of learning a new language; (2) how stable is the nation—will people revolt and see the state as an oppressive body that is selling out/conceding to U.S. hegemony; and (3) how beneficial would it actually be for citizens to learn this so-called “power language” – does it come at too high a cost of losing an indigenous language (Brendan, you addressed this concern at the end of your post; however, I wonder how easy it is to gauge the cost of implementing English instruction in schools. For instance, can we predict whether or not children who are taught solely in English will continue to use their mother tongue at home and in the school yard with their friends? I would say no, it's almost impossible to predict.)
ReplyDeleteIn general, I believe some countries are not “ready” to accept a strong push for English instruction in primary education. In particular, if we are dealing with a newly established nation-state, forcing people to learn English, even if in conjunction with the local language, might ignite some “centrifugal forces” of delimiting society across linguistic boundaries. Big rifts might form between older generations unable to acquire a new language and younger generations who realize the value of English in the global economy and gravitate towards English language use. Social stratification caused by how well individuals acquire this new power-language may ensue. On the flip side, it might serve as a unifying force. In Garde’s article about the Serbo-Croatian linguistic sphere, he discussed the use of language as a tool for political unification, as well as one for political division, “used by diverse nationalist representatives who seek to pursue their own design” (228).
I think Japan is a good example of a country that is culturally, socially and linguistically stable enough to reap benefits from promoting English language use. In 1985, the Japanese government instituted the Japan Exchange and Teaching Program (JET); native English speakers taught alongside Japanese high school English teachers. Recently, there has been a push for the “communicative language teaching” (CLT) model for English language instruction; the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology published a document that stated its aims to cultivate “Japanese with English abilities”, which notably retains Japanese as the central, unyielding official language of Japan. In the Japanese case, English has a very specific place in business transactions, which explains the emphasis on communicative skills. There seems to be no threat to the dominance of Japanese in other domains like literature and politics, for instance.