The difference between monolinguals and bilinguals is that monolinguals are allowed to deploy all or most of their lexical and structural repertoire mostly freely, whereas bilinguals can only do so in the safety of environments that are sheltered from the prescriptive power of named languages.
- Otheguy et al., 2015, p.295
Introduction
In Chapter 2 I argued for a semiotic repertoire approach to the analysis of learners’ meaning- making processes in a bilingual context such as Success High. My aim is to position learners’ linguistic resources within their full semiotic repertoire and to analyse other modes of meaning-making such as gestures, actions and drawing especially in terms of how they are performed in concert with the linguistic modes. However, in this first chapter in which I present my data, I am limiting my discussion to the language environment of Success High. This is because it is the language environment – ideologies and patterns of practice - which has the most significant impact on which elements of the learners’ semiotic repertoires become resources at school. The kinds of constraints and freedoms placed on the learners’ linguistic resources are stronger than on any other meaning-making tool. So important are these constraints and freedoms that a policy exists to describe them: the language policy which is required by the South African Schools’ Act (1996) and the Language in Education Policy (LiEP) (Department of Education, 1997). Seldom in any school will one find the kinds of constraints and sanctioning being placed on learners’ gestures or drawing as one finds being placed on their linguistic resources. It is also the learner’s oral language repertoire which is the most visible semiotic tool in the eyes of the institution of the school.
The language environment of Success High as I experienced it and participated in it in 2016 is the focus of this chapter. In Chapter 1 I sketched the language policy environment of schooling in South Africa and the history of the school. In this chapter I turn to an examination of language ideologies and patterns of language practices which were in evidence in my data.
This examination will provide an answer to my research question: What shaped the meaning- making practices of the learners? I will draw on fieldnotes, interviews, the language policy document and photographs taken around the school grounds as well as extracts from classroom and study group interactional data which is revealing of participants’ language ideologies. I will focus in particular on the key participants in my study: the Principal, the Natural Science teacher, myself and the learners of Grade 9B. Perspectives from outside of the school community echo through the data at different points, and where they shed light on language practices I discuss them, but my focus is on what I observed during the school day on the school grounds.
I will discuss the following topics as they relate to each key participant: • Language repertoires
• Language for learning
• School language practices: oral and written.
Language repertoires: ideologies and practice
All my data sources contributed to my understanding of participants’ repertoires in three forms: texts (both oral and written) authored by participants; data in which participants discussed other participants’ language repertoires; and direct questioning of participants about their repertoires. I am taking an ideological position by referring to ‘repertoires’, as outlined in Chapter 2. This is not the term I used with the other participants in the study. I became at times clumsy in my effort to use non-limiting but also accessible terms for language repertoires. In my interview with the Principal, my prompt to elicit her language repertoire was: ‘ok, and so your language knowledge and um use, what languages do you speak?’ (Principal Interview). Not wanting to limit her response to only those languages in which she felt proficient, I fumbled through ‘knowledge’, ‘use’ and ‘speak’ in my attempt to spread my net as wide as possible. Participants used the terms ‘language capacities’, ‘languages’ and the names of languages such as ‘English’ or ‘isiXhosa’ referencing a commonplace and more essentialised understanding of peoples’ linguistic make-up. In the analysis which follows I draw attention to the ideologies which underpin the terms we use.
Principal’s repertoire
During my interview with the Principal of Success High which took place right at the start of my fieldwork (Principal Interview) we discussed the three official languages of the Western Cape and the role they played in her repertoire. She began with what she called her ‘home language’:
Extract 4.1: Principal Interview. Principal’s home language P: I am . Afrikaans as
my home language is Afrikaans um so
but I can make myself understood in English
Far from merely being able to make herself understood in English, the Principal is actually highly proficient in this language and it is the dominant language she uses at work. She underplays her strong bilingualism which is a feature of the coloured29 community of the
Western Cape (McCormick, 2002). This backgrounds her linguistic skill in two languages and constructs her as a monolingual, whose identity is bound up with home language (‘I am Afrikaans’). This treatment of her Afrikaans and English was brief, although when I probed her on her use of Afrikaans at school, more detail emerged. I reminded her that I had overheard her speaking Afrikaans to a member of the grounds staff. She responded by indicating that both men responsible for the grounds were isiXhosa speakers who spoke better Afrikaans than isiXhosa. These were men with whom I myself had only spoken isiXhosa and so I had a limited knowledge of their repertoires. A further probe I used was stating that there were other home language speakers of Afrikaans on the staff. She responded to this by explaining the limits she places on using Afrikaans at school. She described how if she were speaking Afrikaans to a fellow speaker in the staff room and someone entered who was not Afrikaans- speaking, she would revert to speaking English ‘just to include everybody and that they know that it’s all above board’. This assumption that languages other than English being used in a multilingual environment such as this staffroom (of the 17 academic staff who were regulars
29 In the Apartheid-designated people groups, ‘Coloured’ was the descriptor given to people who were not
designated as ‘White’ ‘Black’/African’ or Indian. It was also sometimes used to describe people of so-called ‘mixed’ descent.
in the staff room that I polled, only three indicated English as one of their home languages) automatically constitutes exclusion and hints that something unsavoury or illicit is being discussed, is testament to the power of the ideology that English is a neutral lingua franca which includes rather than excludes (Phillipson, 2009).
The story of the Principal’s isiXhosa part of her repertoire is one of language learned formally and informally. She reports having studied isiXhosa at university thirty years ago, but admitted that when ‘you don’t practise it it goes away’ (Principal Interview). She added that the isiXhosa she learned was ‘Oxford isiXhosa’ and different to ‘what I hear spoken here’. However, she reflected that she could ‘get the gist looking at body language’ and was able to respond in English to learners, staff and parents who spoke in isiXhosa.
In her interview, despite claiming a monolingual identity, the Principal reports on her multilingual life in which she uses adaptive strategies to negotiate a working environment in which the majority of the people are isiXhosa-dominant.
Learners’ repertoires
I collected data on learners’ language knowledge and use from the 36 members of Grade 9B through a questionnaire which is attached as Addendum 2. Key results are summarised in Table 4.1 below.
Table 4.1: Grade 9B language data from questionnaire
Linguistic category: open format questions
Number of learners out of 36 Percentage30
Learners identifying isiXhosa as a home language
36 100%
Learners identifying as ‘knowing’ more than one language
36 100%
Learners identifying isiXhosa as their only home language
24 67%
Learners identifying isiXhosa as one of multiple home languages
12 33%
Learners identifying isiXhosa and English as their two home languages
6 17%
Languages ‘spoken’, ‘known’ or ‘loved’ by learners
isiXhosa, English, isiZulu, Sesotho, Siswati, Afrikaans, Sepedi, Japanese31,
Tshivenda, Setswana,
Portuguese
As the table indicates, the questions about language were formulated as open format questions with space for learners to include as many languages as they liked. Some of the questions probed reasons for their answers such as questions 1 and 2 below:
1. What is your home language/s?
2. How did you decide on your answer to 1? (eg. It is the language I use the most/ They are the languages spoken in my home.)
The table summary reveals that learners share much of their linguistic repertoires with all 36 identifying isiXhosa as one of their home languages. They also have highly heteroglossic repertoires with a third of the class (12) reporting having more than one home language and a plethora of languages listed as ‘known’, ‘spoken’ or ‘loved’ by the learners. This multilingual self-identification by the learners stands in stark contrast to the school’s language policy. My exploration of the school’s language policy began during my interview with the Principal. Extract 4.2: Principal Interview. Language policy
Turn Speech
1 Robyn do you have a formal written language policy for the school or not? 2 Principal we do
and it’s basically a very short policy saying that
um although the home language of teacher of the students may be um I can give you a copy of the policy
3 Robyn that would be great, thank you
4 Principal um but the language of learning and teaching will be English
31 The learner who identified ‘Japanese’ as the language he loves the most is a karate buff. This highlights the
The Principal begins to talk about the policy by minimising its significance describing it as ‘basically a very short policy’. This low-priority status of the school language policy aligns with Kgobe and Mbele’s (2001) national study which found that only five out of 27 schools participating in the study had developed language policies (as cited in Probyn et al., 2002). The history of the Success High policy reveals the low profile and lack of interrogation of the policy within the school community - indeed it has not undergone much consultation - but that it serves to fulfil a legal requirement that the school has an official policy. The Principal informed me that the policy was written in 2015, has been ‘seen by the staff’, ‘adopted by the SGB’ and ‘kept on file’ (personal communication, 030216). She indicated that she was the primary author of the policy, but was informed by other schools’ policies and a book on school leadership and management that she had been given. She reported that the learners have not read the policy and allowed that this was ‘a shortcoming that we don’t involve learners more’ (fieldnotes 150416). Tacit language policies are however adopted by all members of the school community and some of these will be discussed in the next section, but the official written policy is revealing in terms of language ideologies in operation in the school.
In the above summary of the school language policy in her interview, the Principal frames the cornerstone of the policy as being the stipulation of the language of learning and teaching: ‘but the language of learning and teaching will be English’. Prior to that there is a concession given towards the home language of the teacher and students: ‘although the home language of the teacher of the students may be…’. Here she acknowledges the mismatch between the policy and the linguistic reality of the learners and teachers. This is consistent with the policy itself which recognises this gap. The policy states that the language of teaching, learning, assessment and communication with learners and parents will be English. It pits the ‘linguistic capacities’ of the learners against this standard in such a way that it sets up the concessions the policy will make to the learners’ linguistic difference from the standard:
Extract 4.3: Success High language policy
While Success High is an institution in which the medium of instruction and language of office is English, it nevertheless enrols learners with divergent linguistic capacities. (emphasis mine, p.1)
This description of learners’ ‘linguistic capacities’ is vague. While I did not ask the Principal about the intended meaning of ‘divergent’, I assume it to be a malapropism with the intended meaning being closer to ‘diverse’. However, either meaning presents a misleading view of the learners. Table 4.1 reveals that the learners of 9B share the linguistic capacities of isiXhosa as a home language and being strongly multilingual in the languages of South Africa. The descriptor ‘divergent’ hides the both the commonality of learners’ repertoires and their richness. It also perpetuates the invisibility of isiXhosa as a main language among the learner body in the language policy. Indeed, there is only one reference to isiXhosa in the policy as a whole and this is in stating that it will be offered as a subject, only at home language level. In this way the language abilities of the learners as isiXhosa-English dominant multilinguals is obscured and replaced with a deficit view of their abilities. This view is repeated further on in the policy: ‘all (sic) of our students do not have English as their Home language’ (p.1). I assume an error above because the sense: ‘not all of our students have English as their Home Language’ is more aligned with the voice of the policy in other places which gives the impression that it is only a portion of the learner body who do not have English as a Home Language instead of the reality that it is a vast majority (see Table 4.1). Indeed, as a self- identified home language speaker of Afrikaans, the Principal herself aligns with the majority of learners in this regard.
Further evidence of the deficit positioning of learners’ linguistic repertoires is the absence of any questions about learners’ languages on the school application form. Also in my early conversation with one of the teachers already reported in Chapter 3, I described my interest in the bilingual learners of the school and he retorted: ‘How do you mean the learners are bilingual?’ His lack of comprehension of my use of bilingual to refer to the learners at Success High indexes the invisibility of the learners’ African language resources and also the dominant designation of ‘bilingual’ in South African education parlance which refers only to official English-Afrikaans bilingual models of education. This also creates a split along racial lines where white and coloured people are labelled ‘bilingual’ but black people are not.
These examples of an ideology which positions learners’ language use as a problem, or deficient, is a common one all the way through the schooling system, as highlighted by McKinney (2017). McKinney argues that:
the intimate relationship between language and power in schools works to position children from dominant backgrounds as legitimate language users while those from non-dominant linguistic, cultural and class backgrounds are frequently positioned as linguistically deficient. (2017, p. 63)
I have discussed how the ‘non-dominant’ isiXhosa resources of the learners are cast as a problem in the policy and the Principal’s interview in that they are not English resources. McKinney also draws our attention to an ideology which positions any variety other than the ‘standard’ (ie. the variety used by the powerful in society, in this case white, middle class South Africans) as deficient and problematic. This ‘monoglossic ideology’ prevents the non- standard resources of the majority of learners being recognised in policy documents, government reports or language tests, where:
the “normal” learner is imagined as already a competent user of the language variety that schools should in fact be giving him/her access to (ibid. p.64).
Overall, the Success High language policy suffers from a vision of its learners which is at a remove from their linguistic realities and the heteroglossic nature of practices in the school. This links to a broader syndrome in post-apartheid education policies as asserted by Christie and McKinney (2017).
Post-apartheid education policies introduced a new narrative for education, based on an idealist vision of a transformed system. This policy narrative depended heavily on its vision, barely acknowledging the existing conditions in schools and classrooms let alone systematically addressing how they could be changed. (Christie & McKinney, 2017, p. 8)
Parents’ repertoires
This monoglossic ideology is seen clearly at work in the Success High policy document when it turns to policy regarding communication with parents:
Extract 4.4: Language policy in relation to parents
The Language of communication with parents shall be English, but steps will be taken to ensure that, while the standard of English is not compromised, the level of English
usage shall not be such that it denies access to communication and comprehension by
those whose linguistic abilities in English are less developed than those of the average English home language speaker (p.1, emphasis mine)
Even in this context on the fringes of academic activity the power of the monoglossic ideology is exerted. In the section in bold, we see the shadowy figure of the ‘normal’ or ‘average’ language user making an appearance. In the context of South Africa those who reported having English as a home language in the 2011 census totalled 9.6% (Statistics South Africa, 2012), the majority of these being white South Africans. It becomes difficult to see how the parents of Success High learners could ever be imagined to be ‘average English home language’ speakers. Furthermore, scholars have critiqued the notion of ‘home language speaker’ (Makoni & Pennycook, 2005) or ‘native speaker’ (Rampton, 1996) especially in a context of African multilingualism. Here I suggest the term is used as a cover for positioning the ethnolinguistic repertoire of Whiteness (McKinney, Carrim, Marshall & Layton, 2015) as the norm and desirable. This figure then only serves to appeal to an unattainable standard which positions parents as deficient. The anxiety about compromising the standard of English is particularly jarring in this context as what is at stake here is not learners’ ability to cope with the curriculum or standardised assessments, but clear communication with parents. In practice, the Principal flouts the English-only parent communication policy and uses languages and speakers resourcefully:
Extract 4.5: Principal Interview. Parent communication
Turn/ Actor
Speech
Turn 1 Principal
(laughing) so um let me talk about the parent-teacher meetings, ne? what I do is I have a teacher next to me to translate so our meetings take long (laughs) because everything is said twice
Turn 2 Robyn
right Turn 3
Principal
and then when a parent wants to communicate to me then I allow them to speak in their mother tongue and I nod and I nod and I keep quiet and I don’t nod if I don’t understand (laughs) but um I allow them to just be free and and speak in their mother tongue and then I’ll have somebody whisper in my ear this is what the parent is actually saying, so I don’t want that to be a a a a sort of a stumbling block in our communication, with um letters I must admit that most of the
letters are in English and I know that I I’ve tried where I translate the letter and I think last year I did couple of the letters but it’s not very consistent