Language Planning and Student Experiences: Intention, Rhetoric and Implementation

1   Remaking a Nation Through Language Policy

there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new….

Niccolò Machiavelli, 1515:The Prince, Chapter VI

Texts, Debate, Behaviour

The Machiavelli quote underscores the view, too often neglected in language planning theory, that making and implementing language policies is a political act, intended to introduce a ‘new order of things’. Any desired ‘new order’ will give rise to a complicated and shifting group of positions, in both support and opposition. Success will depend on cleverness of design and on pragmatic constraints, but also on the interplay between supporters and opponents. In this work we focus on language planning in Australia and the introduction of two particular new orders of things: Asia literacy and multiculturalism. The first is an umbrella term used to describe the linguistic reconstruction of Australia as linked to Asia, of Australia as a ‘part of’ Asia or of Australia as having a population of citizens who know about and identify with ‘the region’. The second is also an umbrella term, one which has aimed to reconstruct Australian society as culturally and linguistically plural, or, rather, to invoke policies that reflect and sustain the demographic pluralism of the population. To some readers it will appear that these are essentially the same, or varieties of the same, vision. However, in the specific context of Australia the two policy ambitions of Asia literacy and multiculturalism have different origins, different audiences, different histories and a complex and not always comfortable history of interaction. At times they have constituted antagonistic policy discourses, while at other times they have been complementary visions of social improvement.

The term ‘language policy’ is not as straightforward as it first appears. Mostly we look for something called ‘policy’ on or about ‘language’ in laws, constitutions or regulations. But governments, states and regulations are not the sole means by which and where language teaching is influenced and regulated. If we look deeper, it soon becomes clear that decisions influencing language teaching are made outside the realm of government or officialdom. In the present discussion we are concerned only with the recent history and current reality of second language education, but it should be acknowledged at the outset that all language policy actions are ultimately interrelated, so that decisions about English and communication in general cannot be divorced from decisions about minority or foreign languages. While it is certainly true that language policy is usually located in official texts, that is, in the laws, proclamations and regulations, it is too limiting to take these as the totality of what constitutes language policy. Much analysis of language education policy is weakened by relying on such a narrow view of where language policy is made and by whom.

To get a clearer picture of language policy it is important to extend analysis to include public debates, civil society discourse and citizen advocacy. This is especially clear when debate or public action contradicts or only half-heartedly supports what official texts declare. This more inclusive view of where language policy resides also renders analysis of its effects more realistic, because taking official statements as the sum total of language policy provides only a mechanistic account of what is really going on in practice, and reduces teachers and administrators to the status of mere implementers of external plans. Including debates and discourse in our interpretation of what constitutes language policy is, however, still insufficient, because language policy, as this volume shows, is also made in the personal communicative behaviours of individuals and groups. Actual language behaviours – what people do when speaking or not speaking in particular ways, what teachers and students actually do in classroom interaction – is a neglected part of much language policy analysis. This wider view we call ‘language planning policy’, an approach that embraces all levels and layers where the intention to change language is encountered.

The language choices and attitudes of critical parties – teachers as implementers of language policy and learners as subjects and objects of language plans, but also parents and community members – form a complex ecological ensemble of communication choices essential to a comprehensive account of language planning. Whether these parties are adult citizens, students or new arrivals (i.e. current full members of the polity or future ones), their linguistic choices, in English and in the target languages of public policy, are like sovereign acts of decision-making, offering models available to be emulated or rejected by others. The daily interaction between those tasked to implement policy and those expected to acquire the skills envisaged by policy is a semi-autonomous domain where language use patterns are never entirely the result of official texts or public discourse alone, but are shaped and developed in local interaction, as well as in the professional roles occupied by the participants, and are influenced by the lived world of ordinary interaction in the communities in which the schools are located (Lo Bianco, 2010a, 2010b).

Intention, interpretation, implementation

Here we are proposing a dynamic model of analysis of this network of ‘language planning policy’. The entire process can be seen as a chain of texts around intended language futures: texts with authority, issued by categories of people charged juridically with the control of public resources; texts of debate, interpretation, contestation or affirmation of the official texts; and texts of implementation and reception, but which have the power to confirm, modify and even subvert or redirect the language policy plans. Official texts distil decisions and are issued by bodies with formally constituted authority to allocate resources and manage implementation. Debates and discussion about those texts or rival ones arise because the official texts require public legitimacy and confirmation to succeed. The texts of implementation and reception are mainly those of professional categories of implementers – teachers and others – but, importantly, also of students, and these texts include communications in schools and in the community. That is, these three levels – the official, the civic and the interpersonal – are respectively manifested as formal texts, iterative debate and communicative behaviour. The formal texts are declarations of intention; iterative debate involves interpretation and refinement, confirmation or modification, repudiation or subversion; while actual experience in the form of communicative behaviour in schooling encompasses a wide range of activity, from realisation and full enactment, through half-heartedness and formulaic implementation, all the way to subversion and transgression. Each of the three levels is discussed in the present volume with the intention of providing a rounded account of current second language education planning in Australia.

The present chapter sets the scene for a detailed examination of language education planning as enacted in schools, a domain often far removed from the direct influence of policy-makers. Much of the evidence reported in later chapters was collected through a methodology called Q-research but also in focus groups, interviews and observations. The data serve to move the discussion of language policy into classrooms and the daily lives of learners. In our understanding, the school (or, more minutely, the classroom; and, most minutely, the interaction between teacher and learner) is a practice of language policy-making encompassed in the third modality proposed above. In her ethnography of language planning in Luxembourg, Davis (1994) identified levels similar to ours. This tiny country had seen a shift from an industrial to a service-based economy and from the stable and traditional trilingualism of French, German and Lëtzebuergesch to a dynamic, globally oriented and migrant-influenced multilingualism. The economic changes, especially the labour mobility of services, rewarded a wider and deeper set of language skills, and created a need for institutions to supply these to the labour market. Davis notes major disjunctures between three layers of language policy: its expression, essentially a set of intentions, at the national/official level; its implementation at the school level; and how policy was experienced, specifically how it differed in the lives of upper-, middle- and lower-class families. In general, elites embraced the official policy and met with success. In contrast, lower-class schoolchildren (from families lacking the necessary cultural capital and material resources) had a radically different experience: the more demanding language policy was interpreted negatively and rejected; it came to mark their exclusion from institutions and alienation.

The three levels of language policy and planning – intention, implementation and experience – traversed in this volume are mutually constituting, or interacting, though over different time frames. For example, it tends to be only over the medium to longer term that what occurs at the level of implementation comes to influence what the policy intentions declare. This can happen through politics and argument, or through programme evaluation and review, so both citizens and professionals generate texts of assessment and judgement to inform debate and discussion and ultimately influence policy intentions. Public debate and discourse are an ‘agitational space’ filled with vested interests, professional and political, who engage in argument to modify what the official texts say and influence what the implementers do.

In the Luxembourg case, the new language policy was expanding an existing official and society-wide multilingualism. Australia’s policy tills more arid and problematic soil. Australia’s multilingualism is stratified hierarchically and is intergenerationally vulnerable. For the most part, it resides among immigrants and Indigenous people, and in both cases this bilingualism is vulnerable to language shift and loss. The bilingualism of professionals such as language teachers is not usually passed on intergenerationally, and in any case is numerically small. The official domains of society, and the ‘mainstream’ population, remain monolingual (in English). This pattern of distribution of language abilities is broadly common to English-speaking countries. Policy intentions in the Australian setting are further complicated by the overlapping jurisdiction for education (state and federal) and contradictory policy signals, whereas Luxembourg’s policy intentions were succinct and precise, although in both cases the socio-economic circumstances of schools and families play a critical role. In Australia, differences at the level of intention are compounded at the level of implementation.

Again, the third layer of policy refers to how it is experienced differentially by various groups and individuals, and is treated in a dynamic and reflexive way in this book. We access this through Q-methodology, which allows us to probe the deep feelings and responses of learners to the experience of language learning, that is, to the implementation of the plans of the policy-makers. The relation of the policy levels, and especially the interaction between intentions and experiences, mediated by interpretation, forms the central argument of the book. It explores aspects of agency, argument, alienation and the complexity of the lived world of school language teaching and learning, the arguments surrounding it and the desires of the ‘far away’ writers of policy reports.

Language policies in non-English-dominant nations are supported by much less justificatory rhetoric to persuade learners to be interested in language learning, whereas in English-speaking settings a predictable feature of language policy texts, raised constantly in public debate, are arguments rehearsing the value of language learning, always dealing directly or implicitly with the disincentive posed by the international demand for English. Advocates of multilingualism tend to adopt a range of argumentative strategies, such as minimising or critiquing the world role of English, or acknowledging it but citing instances in which English monolingualism is disadvantageous (for example in trade negotiations or security arrangements), or projecting a decline in the future importance of English, or arguing that the primary reasons for learning languages are cultural, intellectual and humanistic.

These efforts to justify the teaching and learning of languages some times merge into claims about the need for a more equitable global communication arrangement, demanding that English native speakers take more responsibility, a ‘fairer share of the load’ as one teacher described it to us. Indeed, a desire to bring about a more fairly distributed global communication effort is often present in both declared policy and the conceptions of teachers enacting language policy in schools. In the Australian case, language learning has also deployed an additional series of legitimations, invoking new kinds of citizenship and new formations of national identity. A dramatic recent instalment was the Australia 2020 Summit, a national ‘visioning’ exercise which took place on 19–20 April 2008 (discussed below) and which represented a stark display of how language learning, especially Asian language study, has come to represent a deep-seated ambition to create a new and desirable national character, a unique amalgam of moral purpose, economic destiny and political security.

Australia is perhaps not unique in this respect; language education policies often imply or explicitly aim to direct national futures in particular ways. The language choices of any nation reveal whom the interlocutors for future citizens are imagined to be, and the level of investment in a programme suggests which party in imagined future relationships will be expected to make the greater effort to facilitate communication. What is perhaps unique to Australia, other than the particular mix of languages involved, is the frequency with which new imagined futures and new imagined future citizens have been invoked in language policy. For instance, Lo Bianco and Gvozdenko (2006) identified 67 language education statements, plans, policies or declarations at the federal level in the preceding four decades. Also possibly unique to Australia is how ambitious, and often how unrealistic, have been the aims of language policy. The disparity between intention and implementation exposes the critical mediating role of the interpretation, the debate, argument and discourse that surround public texts and that influence school implementation. Exposing the gap between the intentions of policy-makers and the achievement in schools of the aims of policy also opens up language policy-making to a new kind of analysis, one which sees schools and schooling, and the actors located there (teachers and learners principally), as agents capable of far more effect on language planning than those charged with issuing policy statements acknowledge. This is one of the reasons we have selected to focus the current analysis at the three levels of intention, interpretation and implementation.

As stated, public discussion of language education options reveals something of a community’s vision of its future conversations, whom its future citizens will be speaking to, since, ultimately, language learning aims to facilitate interaction with others, and language plans are based on the priority selections from all possible interactants. This selection of potential future conversational partners for ‘modern’ languages reverses the classical construction of ‘conversation’ partners, in which the choice of the languages of the past, Latin principally in western societies, involved accessing past texts to listen in on past conversations, with socially improving and moral purposes in the present. Language education plans therefore reveal the working out of our ideas about preferred interlocutors, those deemed most profitable, admirable or probable, and so language education planning is an activity with wide-ranging cultural, ideological and even moral implications.

The Problem of English and Global Communication

English is a problem for foreign language educators in English-speaking countries. In a study of the role of English in school curricula across the world over the past 155 years Cha and Ham (2008) show how it overtook its expansionist European rivals, French and German, to dominate language education choices (see also Byram et al., 2010). Cha and Ham’s survey of world foreign language choices serves as a reminder of two critically important facts: that the high prevalence of English is relatively recent; and that language education choices are tied to ‘world events’. The fortunes of French and German, the rivals of English since the middle of the 19th century, have fluctuated according to the economic, political and military turbulence of international relations. The shifts were most dramatic at the end of the First and Second World Wars and the end of the Cold War with the symbolically resonant collapse of the Berlin Wall (Table 1.1). At each of these junctures German ceded to French and French to English, with only an interval of presence for Russian in the latter two periods. The number of countries represented in the data increased from 15 and 12 for primary and secondary schools in 1850–74, to 151 and 154 for 1990–2005. In Asia, the proportion of schools with English on their curriculum grew from 33% of primary schools during 1945–69 to 83% by 2005; by 2005 all the Asian secondary schools taught English. For an extended discussion of Cha and Ham’s survey, see Lo Bianco and Slaughter (2009).

At about the beginning point of Cha and Ham’s survey, the mid-19th century, intellectuals in Europe perceived the onset of a