It was reported by the Northside Secondary School Review, 86 %of the students at Northside were immigrants to Canada, and 60 % reported that their primary language was a language aside from English. The major five primary languages spoken by students were English (by 38 % of the students), Cantonese (35 %), Mandarin (6 %), and Farsi and Korean (4 %). The massive proportion of bilingual and multilingual speakers at the school meant that while English was the language of instruction, everyday talk in classrooms, hallways, and also at the food mess took place in languages other than English as well as English. This was a concern for several individuals at the school.
His team consisted of a co-investigator, research assistants and research teams. Though they did not all work together at one time. There were a total of five research teams: one that was placed for the pilot study in the summer of 1994, and four different research teams that were placed over the four years of the project. The teams audio-recorded speech in classrooms where talk in Cantonese was significantly rife. They also observed the participants, took their interviews and did numerous document analysis connected to those students who were interviewed. The students who were interviewed came from a variety of language, cultural, and racial backgrounds: Anglo-Canadian, Canadian-born Chinese, Euro-Canadian, Hong Kong-born Chinese, Iranian (born both in Canada and in Iran), Taiwan-born Chinese, and South Asian (born both in and outside of Canada).
The desire for institutional monolingualism
Teachers and parents when interviewed asserted that English be the sole language spoken at Northside. The reason appeared to be understanding the linguistic, economic, and social privileges English held for parents, teachers and students. For few others, it lay in understanding the kinds of difficulties, tensions, and dilemmas that students and teachers associated with the use of languages other than English at the school.
In August 1995, very shortly after the School Review was submitted to the principal of the school, the school board to which Northside belonged adopted a new language policy, entitled the Language for Learning Policy. While the Language for Learning Policy explicitly named and legitimized English as the language of instruction in its schools, it also legitimized student use of languages other than English at school in many ways. First, it asserted that effective, “motivating” school programming recognized, respected, and valued students’ linguistic backgrounds. Second, it asserted that first language literacy was vital for second language learning. Third, it asserted that students’ first languages had an important role to play in the classroom and in the school program as a whole.
Peer social capital: extending Pierre Bourdieu’s ideas on capital and language choice
Tara Goldstein analysed the possibility of the development of “peer social capital” among linguistic minority students by discussing the impact of the first and second language on social capital and literacy education.
Developing peer social capital
ESOL students were able to capitalize on ethnic forms of solidarity for both social and academic support by using Cantonese. Instead of using their minority language, culture, and networks to resist the dominant academic culture of the school, the students used them to negotiate and manage the development of their academic competence at school. Tara Goldstein also quotes Stanton-Salazar description of social capital who suggests that it has three fundamental characteristics. First, social capital is a dynamic process based on reciprocal investments in a relationship. To have social capital is to be in a relationship where two or more parties make reciprocal investments and commitments, although not always to the same degree. The second characteristic of peer social capital involves developing trust in the relationship. The third characteristic of peer social capital is the capacity to generate resources.
While the use of Cantonese was associated with the building up of peer social capital, the use of English was associated with losing it and most students in the Hong Kong community at Northside avoided using it with each other.
Dilemmas and tensions associated with using only Cantonese
A discussion of the dilemmas and tensions that appear in a moment of linguistic struggle or contradiction followed. Cantonese Choosing to only use Cantonese with other Cantonese speakers at Northside was problematic for some of the students. These students told us that while working and socializing almost exclusively in Cantonese provided them with friends and helped them succeed in their courses, it did not provide them with many opportunities to “practice” English. These students talked about the educational and socioeconomic benefits, the cultural and economic capital, associated with being able to use English well. English was not only the legitimate language of instruction and evaluation at Northside, but also the legitimate language at the universities they wanted to attend as well. Strong proficiency in English provided students with access to a wider range of programs and courses at university. The students also suggested that strong English skills were required in many of the local labor markets and in such high-status and high-influence professions as law, politics, and upper management positions in both the private and the public sectors.
A second dilemma, or perhaps a tension associated with using Cantonese at school, was that many of the teachers and students did not like hearing it in the classrooms and hallways of the school. Teachers who believed that students’ academic success depended on English monolingualism in the classroom contested the Language for Learning Policy’s acceptance of student multilingualism, and promoted the use of English in a number of ways. To illustrate, some teachers experimented with classroom English-only rules or policies. The findings revealed that while the use of Cantonese contributed to academic and social success in a number of ways, it also created different kinds of linguistic and academic dilemmas for teachers and students in the school.
The capital of attentive silence
Importantly, some students used silence to avoid the risks of losing peer social capital by speaking English in front of Cantonese-speakers and Cantonese in front of English-speakers. Another way Cantonese-speaking students used silence in the classroom was related to the cultural convention of not answering their teachers’ questions in class.
While the practice of attentive silence enabled students at Northside to avoid “showing off” and to access peer social capital, it was also inhibitive. Cantonese-speaking students who chose to keep knowledge in their hearts to avoid drawing negative reactions from their Hong Kong-born friends were placed in another linguistic dilemma.
While the capital of attentive silence allowed students to accumulate and maintain peer social capital, it also jeopardized their accumulation of mainstream linguistic and cultural capital. Students who did not speak English or answer questions in class lost grades and opportunities to develop their English language and literacy skills.
One of the challenges for teachers at Northside, then, was to find ways of working with their students’ practice of attentive-inhibitive silence. In accordance to this, for instance, Mr. Robertson, an English teacher with 33 years of teaching experience, did two things. First, he lowered the stakes of group work by reserving the use of small group work in his classroom for activities that were not graded, but that were designed to help students prepare for individually graded assignments. Second, he provided students with an opportunity to work in a language other than English if they desired.
Bourdieusian sociolinguistic analysis of the Cantonese-speaking students’ language practices
Pierre Bourdieu theorized that people make choices about what languages to use in particular kinds of markets, which he defines as places where different kinds of resources or capital are distributed. Markets allow one form of capital to be converted into another. Linguistic capital can be cashed in for educational qualifications or cultural capital, which in turn can be cashed in for lucrative jobs or economic capital. People assess the market conditions in which their linguistic products will be received and valued by others. This assessment can constrain the way they speak or the way they think they ought to speak. Some linguistic products (e.g., English, the language of instruction at Northside) are more highly valued than others and are endowed with what Bourdieu calls a “legitimacy” that other linguistic products (e.g., Cantonese) are not. Such an analysis helps explain the results of the 1995 Hong Kong survey described above.
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