The Language Cauldron: Making the Most of Multilingual Britainbritish Academy
The Language Cauldron: Making the most of Multilingual BritainBritish Academy
The British AcademyThe Language Cauldron: Making the most of Multilingual Britain22 November 2012
I.Opening Address
Professor Nigel Vincent of the British Academy and Dr Alastair Niven, Principal of Cumberland Lodge, welcomed participants.
II.The Language Landscape
1.Professor Dick Wiggins
Dick Wiggins, Professor in Quantitative Social Science at the University of London, described a project carried out on language diversity in London, derived from the 2009 school census, which recorded the languages spoken in pupils’ homes. Over 45% of children in London primary schools had recorded a language other than English.
Professor Wiggins commented that the linguistic map of London would continue to change with new migration and settlement patterns. The project had mapped the distribution of pupils speaking different languages across London – for example concentrations of Urdu speakers in Newham and Redbridge, or Polish speakers in Hounslow and Ealing.
The project had also mapped the 32 London Boroughs according to distribution of languages and ethnic diversity. There was a strong correlation between the two, but they were not interchangeable. The project had analysed the distribution of language spoken by Key Stage 2 scores for English, Maths and Science and overlaid them with the distribution of pupils receiving free school meals, and concluded that this indicator helped to explain some differences but not others.
However, Professor Wiggins commented that they were only at the beginning of the work: they needed to get to know the populations better and develop expectations on how ethnolinguistics categorisations of individuals might be reflected in terms of their cultural identities and futures,
2.Professor Itesh Sachdev
Itesh Sachdev, Professor of Language and Communication, SOAS, opened by stating that we live in an era of ‘hyperdiversity’. Populations in the UK and many other places in the world were increasingly diverse, not just in terms of ethnicity and language but also in community and faith terms. The majority of the world was multilingual, and Professor Sachdev quoted Carlos Fuentes’s comment that, ‘Monolingualism is a curable disease.’
National policies, especially in England, were intended to assimilate migrants linguistically and they had come under political pressure to use English at home. However, immigrants, particularly economic migrants, were generally very keen to learn English. Little effort had been expended on trying to maintain the community languages spoken by these migrants and other communities, although multilingualism had been proven to have cognitive, social, instrumental, health and other benefits.
Professor Sachdev introduced a project he had conducted with a team from the Scottish Centre for Information on Language, mapping provision for community languages in higher education, and whether it met the needs of communitylanguage students. This project had found that most higher education institutions were unaware of the needs of language learners. Where provision existed for teaching community languages, they were taught as foreign languages and those who already had experience of speaking the language were discouraged from attending.
In 2008, there had been no degree courses in the four most common community languages in England – Urdu, Cantonese, Punjabi and Bengali. SOAS and the University of Manchester had been working on introducing various community languages, but serious gaps in the provision of higher education courses remained. There was some debate as to whose responsibility it was to teach community languages. Most providers and authorities left it up to the communities themselves and few higher education institutions taught community languages or assessed them in the same way as common European languages. Many had difficulties recruiting suitable teaching staff and finding the necessary teaching resources. Moreover, job opportunities for professional linguists in community languages did not have the status or earning power of European languages.
Professor Sachdev concluded by stating that community languages represented a huge linguistic and cultural capital that had not been exploited, and which could create opportunities for community language speakers. He endorsed a broader vision for language learning, taking into account divergent learner goals and addressing the language needs of community language learners.
3.Professor Yaron Matras
Yaron Matras, Professor of Linguistics, University of Manchester, described research carried out to find out how Manchester City Council chose the languages into which it translated council information leaflets. They had found that this was done on an ad hoc goodwill basis but without any targeting.
Professor Matras commented that some twothirds of the world’s population grew up speaking more than one language, and in many cases the speakers did not clearly differentiate between the two. Therefore census questions asking for ‘main language’ were misleading, and schools struggled to collect data on languages spoken by pupils, often making guesses based on nationality. Many pupils did not selfdeclare their knowledge of languages such as Romany or Yiddish because they did not have a problem with speaking English. He described the Manchester situation as ‘invisible languages, unreliable data, impressionistic approaches, yet a lot of goodwill’.
Sometimes communities took the initiative; Professor Matras commented that many students of Punjabi background were more fluent in Punjabi than their parents: they used it at home with their grandparents, but also online in chat, codeswitching with English and using the Latin alphabet. This was helping expand the domain of community languages. Many languages were also moving into the business sector, for example in advertising for travel or satellite channels. Translation services such as Applied Language Services were capitalising on language speakers, using freelancers who could speak the language rather than certified foreign language translators, although this had caused some upset within the translation profession.
Professor Matras introduced ‘Multilingual Manchester’, which aimed to raise the issue of language skills and resources and realise the potential of languages spoken in Manchester. The project also planned to map language needs to better inform local services and improve communication with communities, and to support schools in addressing particular language issues. In order to achieve this, they were supporting students as they explored aspects of community multilingualism, and gathering what had become the largest online archive of reports on multilingualism in an urban context. A study of GP practices had found that many people preferred to wait for several hours in A&E, where they would be given an interpreter, than go to a GP where they would not. Other studies had looked into language practices in business, language transmission within families, and literacy acquisition.
In addition, the project was mapping tweets in Manchester according to language and location, and would analyse how the tweet map matched residential and activity patterns. The project was studentowned to a large extent and involved collaboration with the education, psychology, environment and development, and media studies disciplines.
4.Questions and Answers
In response to a question on attainment based on ethnicity, Professor Wiggins explained that the analysis he had presented was based on the data as given under the annual school census, with all its constraints. Many of the characteristics identified in the census were proxies for social processes. It could only provide the backdrop: other studies would be needed to fill in the picture. He added that the receipt of free school meals could be used as an indicator to see whether material deprivation explained differences in attainment. However, if differences remained, other disciplines would be required in order to ascertain the reasons for this. A longitudinal perspective would also be valuable.
Dr Dora Alexopolou asked how children and adolescents could be encouraged to value the ability to speak another language and obtain qualifications to prove their skills. Professor Sachdev responded that the main inhibiting factors were resources, the lack of specialised teaching, and the low status often assigned to the language. Most community languages did not have formal GCSE examinations. Macro variables, such as government policy, society and international business and trade also played a role. Richard Hardie of UBS commented on the need to match supply with demand in the business sphere. It was the employer’s role to highlight the opportunities available in the global market. Professor Theo Marinis commented on the dearth of multilingual clinical linguists, such as speech and language therapists.
Amy Thompson of NALDIC commented that English as an Additional Language (EAL) had also never been recognised as a subject specialism and did not have its own curriculum or assessment methodology, meaning that bilingual learners were not well served.
In response to a question about the reliability of community language interpreters, Professor Matras stated that language skills should be recognised as a community–based resource. Moreover, in many languages, including many African languages, Romany and Kurdish there was no institutionalised training available and no professional interpreters and translators.
Rosa Maria Martin raised the issue of student willingness to continue with community languages to a higher level. Many did not see the benefits in doing so. She also highlighted the difficulty of finding trained teachers. Professor Vincent commented that one of the leaders in this area was the New York Police Department, which had been very successful in identifying language resources within the community and building it up within the profession.
III.Multilingualism and Community Languages in Schools
1.Tony Jones
Tony Jones, Senior Advisor to the British Council and Steering Group advisor for Language Rich Europe, commented that although ‘multilingualism is the default setting, globally’ most children in England had a monolingual background, which left them with no understanding of multilingualism. He also lamented that there was little interest in learning Arabic in Britain, except for those learning it for religious reasons, and expressed the wish that children across UK society could learn Arabic, Chinese and Japanese, regardless of their own ethnic background.
Mr Jones described Language Rich Europe, a networking project bringing together 1,200 policymakers and practitioners from across Europe, to develop better policies and practices for multilingualism. The British Council had a long history of supporting the teaching of English overseas, including running the modern foreign language assistant programmes and facilitating school partnerships between the UK and other countries.
To date the project had published one report, Trends in Language Policies and Practices for Multilingualism in Europe, and had held 80 interactive events around Europe. 23 countries and regions had been involved in this research, which had been based on a lengthy questionnaire covering eight domains. The final results would be published in a few weeks’ time and recommendations would be made to the European Commission in March.
In England, one million schoolage children had another language besides English, but provision for languages at primary level was lower than the European average. More learners abandoned language learning at 14 than in any other country surveyed. Mr Jones commented that with the independent sector accounting for 40% of A–level students taking modern foreign languages, languages risked becoming a class issue. He also expressed concern at the commonly expressed view that ‘English is enough,’ being the global lingua franca.
2.Professor Mike Kelly
Professor Mike Kelly, Programme Director for Routes into Languages and Director of the Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies, noted that it was ‘shortsighted to assume that any language, however little spoken or little learnt it is, is not valuable given the right circumstances.’ The Language Rich Europe findings revealed the extent of de facto multilingualism in England, but there had not been enough research on the ‘lived reality’ of that multilingualism.
The need for public service translation and interpreting was rising exponentially, requiring a wide range of minority languages, particularly in the court system and public services. Professor Kelly noted that 50% of criminal gangs operating in London used a language other than English. The issue of lessspoken languages also arose in a diplomatic and national security context: for example the British Army had suffered a serious lack of SerboCroat speakers during the NATO deployment in Bosnia and Herzegovina. However, the need for a wide range of languages was felt most keenly in business, and employers and business consortia often expressed the difficulties that lack of language capacity created. It would be economically and socially desirable to find locallybased resources rather than having to recruit overseas.
The Routes into Languages programme aimed to increase takeup of languages in British schools, although it was often difficult to predict which language the students would become enthused to learn. Professor Kelly expressed concern that only five languages – French, German, Spanish, Chinese and Latin or Greek – would be recognised under the new English Baccalaureate system, which would discourage schools from providing other languages.
Professor Kelly identified three possible ways forward: firstly the importance of intercultural awareness, secondly a stronger focus on communication strategies, and university accreditation of extracurricular activity, or graduate passports, listing other activities, skills and achievements that students had accumulated during their studies.
3.Dr Raymonde Sneddon
Dr Raymonde Sneddon, Research Fellow at the Cass School of Education and Communities, University of East London, addressed the issues of working with young people who used a language other than English in the home. In many cases, the dominance of English at school meant that young people lost their community languages and the benefits of bilingualism.
Some schools did value and encourage community languages. Dr Sneddon described workshops for parents and children in which they created their own books in two languages as ‘some of my happiest memories of primary school teaching’. Often the literacy skills gained in English could be transferred back into literacy in the community language. The CILT languages project had also been instrumental in promoting the development of partnerships between complementary or mothertongue schools and mainstream schools.
The Shpresa Programme, founded by a Kosovan refugee to meet the needs of refugees in East London, had developed a model of negotiating with schools to obtain free premises for language classes by offering trained volunteer teaching assistants and classes for parents in exchange. This model had been employed in nine schools with around 450 children and had made an enormous impact on the children’s language skills and confidence. The organisation had also been funded to mentor activists to set up similar schools for other language communities, such as Somali, Lithuanian and Portuguese African.
Dr Sneddon commented that the Shpresa Programme was very userrun, and allowed even young children to have a say in what happened. It had also inspired a group of teenagers to campaign for a GCSE in Albanian. This had involved petitioning Michael Gove and negotiating with the Chief Executive of OCR. The outcome of this campaigning was a fully costed model for an Asset Language that could be adapted in theory to any community language, but the community needed to raise £100,000 and guarantee a certain number of entries each year. Young people had an incredibly positive attitude, and many were very keen to study their community languages.
- Paul Steer
Paul Steer, Director of Partnerships at OCR, introduced the OCR’s review of Asset Languages. Asset Languages was a range of qualifications in 25 language subjects, in the form of a language ladder in which learners were benchmarked at breakthrough, preliminary, intermediate and advanced stages. There were four separately certificated assessments in writing, reading, listening and speaking.
Mr Steer stressed that OCR was very proud of its programme, but was facing a number of challenges. First among these were the huge reforms planned for GCSEs and A levels, which would reduce the number of assessments and consequently the exam boards’ income. OCR expected to make a loss over the next few years.
The English Baccalaureate had put languages back on the map, increasing demand for language teaching in schools after years of decline. However, Asset Languages did not qualify for this measure and this had led to a significant decline in uptake. Moreover, the EBC would lead to a single exam board for each of the core GCSE subjects, which entailed significant uncertainty in future planning. Mr Steer stressed that OCR was a notforprofit organisation, but the current situation was unsustainable.
OCR had decided that it would continue to offer qualifications in French, German, Spanish, Italian and Mandarin in 2014 and beyond. These languages had been ringfenced, but would no longer be offered to advanced level because most pupils would take A Levels. The future of the other languages was under review and a formal statement would be made by Christmas. They were looking at pricing and possible efficiencies.