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Bilingualism and Inclusion: more than just rhetoric?
Carrie Cable, Ian Eyres and Janet Collins
The Open University
Paper presented at the 2004 British Educational Research Association Annual Conference, University of Manchester.
Abstract
Within education policy in England the principle of inclusion has been established as a goal and a factor on which improvements in overall standards are seen to depend. Prominent within the drive to raise standards has been a demonstrable need to improve the National Curriculum attainment of members of certain minority ethnic groups, some of which are characteristically bilingual. In the context of education in England, this paper explores the relationship between bilingualism and inclusion, examining, on the one hand official attitudes to bilingualism, and bilingual support as expressed in the publications of the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) and Office for Standards in Education (OFSTED) and on the other on the reflections of a number of bilingual teaching assistants.
Introduction: Bilingualism, bilingual assistants and inclusion
We use the term bilingual to mean ‘having the ability to live one’s life through more than one language’ (and thus the definition encompasses the term ‘multilingual’). In using this definition we make no assumption of equality of proficiency in this definition: whatever proportion of the child’s interactions are in one language or the other, whether the languages are in any sense ‘balanced’ whether the child’s use is primarily productive or receptive, and whether or not literacy is involved, we consider a child whose life experience regularly involves two languages to be bilingual. Most pupils receiving support from bilingual and monolingual teaching assistants or teachers, will be developing English competence in school having first acquired their home language with their family. Clearly, some of these are at a much earlier stage of developing English than they are in developing their home language. However, by defining bilingualism in this way we aim to emphasise the positive benefits of fostering pupils’ proficiency in two (or more) languages and distance ourselves from any connotations of a deficit model.
Rather than use the term bilingual, government publications prefer to talk of pupils with English as an additional language (EAL). Provisional Pupil Level Annual School Census (PLASC) figures for England in 2004 suggest that approximately 11% of primary students and 9.1 % of secondary students have English as an additional language (DfES, 2004a). These students come from a wide range of linguistic, social and ethnic backgrounds.
Bilingual teaching assistants have worked in primary schools in the UK for many years but their employment and deployment has varied around the UK. Many assistants in England were employed through Section 11 funding (Section 11 of the Local Government Act 1966 made monies available to Local Authorities to support children from countries in the new Commonwealth. This was extended to cover all ethnic minority pupils through a Private Members Bill in 1993) and worked as part of Local education Authority (LEA) centralised support teams alongside teachers of English as a second/additional language. Bourne (1989) found that some bilingual provision was being made in schools in more than a third of LEAs in England and suggested that the figure was probably higher.
The reorganisation of Section 11 funding in the late 1990s and the establishment of the Ethnic Minority and Traveller Achievement (EMTA) grant and more recently Ethnic Minority Achievement (EMA) grant led to the disbanding of many of these centralised teams as funding was devolved to schools. Schools could then choose how to spend the money, on bilingual or monolingual teachers and teaching assistants or on resources to support learning.
In English government documents ‘inclusion’ and ‘inclusive education’ are currently used to describe the inclusion of all children within schools. Inclusion embraces all children who have been excluded or feel they have been excluded from schools in the past whatever their age, gender, ethnicity, attainment and background. Inclusion is associated with equal opportunities for all children and about promoting the practice that will make it a reality with a strong focus on achievement (DfEE, 1999). The National Curriculum 2000 describes the aim of inclusion as ‘providing effective learning opportunities for all pupils’ and suggests this includes: ‘setting suitable learning challenges, responding to pupils’ diverse needs and overcoming potential barriers to learning and assessment for individuals and groups of pupils’ (DfES, 2002b)
Many definitions of inclusion exist but for the purposes of this paper we will use the following one which, in our view, reflects much current thinking:
Inclusion describes the process by which a school attempts to respond to all pupils as individuals by reconsidering its school organisation and provision. Through this process, the school builds its capacity to accept all pupils from the local community who wish to attend and, in so doing, reduces the need to exclude pupils.
(Sebba & Ainscow, 1996, p.9)
Sebba and Aiscow put the onus on schools to respond to pupils rather than asking the pupils themselves to adapt; in the case of bilingual pupils we must ask to what extent schools do, and are expected to, interpret this responsibility in a way which enables children to make full use of their home language.
Interviews with bilingual teaching assistants
We are currently involved in developing a new distance learning course for primary teaching assistants and other support staff at the Open University. Audio and video resources form part of the study materials students will be able to draw on. In developing these resources we visited and filmed in many schools in the UK between 2000 and 2004. Five of the schools we visited had bilingual teaching assistants who drew on their knowledge of their first languages in supporting pupils’ learning. We observed and filmed 12 bilingual teaching assistants at work and recorded interviews with them about what we had observed them doing and their roles in the school. The interviewees knew in advance what the focus of the interviews would be but we tried to make the process as relaxed as possible and allow the assistants to make the points that they felt were important. The interviews varied in length and were constrained, sometimes by the location, sometimes by the time available and sometimes, and not surprisingly, by the fact that the interviewees were being filmed. However, the bilingual assistants spoke enthusiastically about their work and some felt able to express concerns about a range of issues including the security of their future employment. The interviews were transcribed and analysed in terms of the roles the assistants talked about and how they utilised their first languages in supporting bilingual pupils.
Assimilation, Integration or Inclusion?
A historical perspective
Historically, the official approach to linguistic and cultural diversity has been based on principles of assimilation (and later of integration) rather than inclusion (Mullard, 1982, Stubbs, 1991). In the 1950s and 1960s the languages and cultures of people who migrated to the UK were largely ignored and it was assumed that their children would ‘pick up’ English in schools. Parents were encouraged not to speak languages other than English to their children at home and children were discouraged or even expressly forbidden to speak these languages in school. Some of the bilingual teaching assistants we spoke to are now angry that in following this advice they have denied their children access to their community language.
We get with their grandparents, auntie’s, uncles, made me sad a lot, so I think their own language is important, I taught my children English, and that’s all they know now, so they are kind of isolated. – And my Mum and Dad last year, and they couldn’t talk to each other, they just smile, and they nod yes or no, - they understand every word of it, but they won’t speak it. So I know what it feels like. I get so angry.
(Kalma)
However, as long ago as 1966, the then Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins had advocated:
not a flattening process of assimilation but equal opportunity, accompanied by cultural diversity, in an atmosphere of mutual tolerance.
(Gilborn, 2001, p14)
This speech acknowledged the existence of inequality and spoke of a need to bring to an end an assumption of white cultural supremacy. There is little doubt that in these views, Jenkins was ahead of his time. In the 1970s and 80s, in the wake of protests from parents and some educationalists, there was some revision in terms of rhetoric and government policy statements. By 1976 the Race Relations Act was passed and the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) was established. In 1975, in this new climate of what has been described as ‘cultural pluralism’, the much-quoted Bullock Report (Department of Education and Science, 1975) proclaimed that:
No child should be expected to cast off the language and culture of the home as he crosses the school threshold … (p. 286)
The school should adopt a positive attitude to its pupils’ bilingualism and whenever possible should help maintain and deepen their knowledge of their mother-tongues. (p. 294)
In practice, however, throughout the 1960s and 1970s the educational system perceived the first languages of immigrant pupils to be, if not actually a hindrance, then merely a stepping stone to learning English and, assuming their language was visible at all to teachers (children were often described as arriving with ‘no language’), its use was discouraged or banned.
The development of policy and practice throughout the 1980s and 1990s was left very much to LEAs, schools, teachers and other classroom practitioners. Some schools employed bilingual teachers and assistants but many were funded through Section 11 of the Local Government Act 1966, employed by centralised language support services and deployed to schools to meet what were perceived of as short term needs. Throughout this period the focus of support was on the development of pupils’ proficiency in English language, although some local initiatives, did focus explicitly on the use of children’s home languages. One such project ‘The Bradford Mother Tongue and English Teaching Project’ (MOTET), funded by the Department for Education and Science (DES), aimed to develop children’s literacy in their first language as well as English. The results indicated no differences in achievement between the children taught bilingually and the control group taught only in English. These findings reflected research in other countries (Edwards, 2003). The Schools Council, the Inner London Education Authority and other Local Education Authorities (LEAs) also ran projects in the late 1970s and early 1980s but funding tended to be short term and the results were not widely disseminated or taken up.
However, the publication of the Swann report (Department of Education and Science, 1985), whose language section focuses on the teaching of English, effectively curtailed the development of bilingual approaches in the UK. Home languages are relegated to a place in the MFL curriculum (i.e. viewed as foreign) and for use by teaching assistants (described as a ‘bilingual resource’) to meet the transitional needs of young children starting school.
Recent official perspectives
In 1996 the School Curriculum and Assessment Authority produced a guidance document ‘Teaching English as an Additional Language: A framework for Policy’. This guidance showed that thinking had not changed significantly, as the ability to speak another language was seen as a resource to support the learning of English; any intrinsic value associated with being bilingual received little acknowledgement.
The National Curriculum recognises variety of language is a rich resource which can support learning in English. Where appropriate, pupils should be encouraged to make use of their understanding and skills in other languages in learning English…As the medium of instruction in all maintained schools is English, pupils for whom English is an additional language need to become competent in its use as quickly and effectively as possible, and have access to the full national Curriculum in order to raise their standard of achievement in all subjects.
(School Curriculum and Assessment Authority, 1996, p.2)
National Curriculum documents and statements by ministers now include some references to the importance of encouraging children to use their first language. Welcome though they are, they continue to focus on the transition to monolingual competence in English rather than on the goal of bilingualism.
Within the Primary Strategy, guidance (Department for Education and Employment, 1998, p 106), for those working with children with EAL in the literacy hour asserts that:
The Literacy Hour benefits new learners of English, when teaching is well matched to their needs, because:
· it promotes focused attention to language learning;
· whole class sessions can give many opportunities for pupils to hear English spoken often and distinctly, to speak to the teacher and to each other, and to develop their knowledge about language in a shared and familiar context;
· whole class sessions give helpful adult models of spoken English; and
· group work provides opportunities for intensive and focused teaching.
It seems unlikely that, in the mind of the authors, ‘language learning’ here means anything other than ‘English language learning’ and that this is the overarching goal for bilingual pupils.