Book Review

[Harold F. Schiffman]

From: LINGUIST List 14.382
Thu Feb 6 2003
Review: Sociolinguistics: de Mejia (2002)

de Mejia, Anne-Marie. (2002) Power, Prestige, and Bilingualism:
International Perspectives on Elite Bilingual Education. Multilingual
Matters, paperback ISBN 1-85359-590-X, xiv+325pp, Bilingual Education
and Bilingualism 35.

review by Joseph Sung-Yul Park, University of California, Santa Barbara

This book is devoted to the topic of elite bilingual education,
educational provisions that 'cater mainly for upwardly mobile, highly
educated, higher socio-economic status learners of two or more
internationally useful languages' (x). It surveys the field from various
viewpoints, including educational, sociolinguistic, and cultural
perspectives, and with respect to both the theory and practice of elite
bilingual education, supplemented with ample case sketches in various
nations and educational contexts. However, this book is not merely a
survey of existing information and research; the author also presents her
own arguments as to how the research and policy making on elite bilingual
education should proceed. In sum, this is a comprehensive overview of the
state of the art of elite bilingual education research, a field which has
been largely neglected so far. As the book is written in a clear,
approachable style with few theoretical presuppositions, it will be useful
for a very wide audience, including teachers, students, parents, and
policy makers working in the area of elite bilingual education, not to
mention researchers who want to get a broader perspective on the issue or
need a solid reference on the subject matter.

The book is divided into two parts. Part 1 presents an overview of the
general issues that relate to elite bilingual education from various
perspectives. In chapter 1, the author surveys the major types of
education provisions often discussed under the rubric of elite bilingual
education: international schools, European schools, and Canadian immersion
programs, and also two types which are considered to be more peripheral,
finishing schools and language schools.

Chapter 2 discusses some of the terminology that relates to the field of
bilingualism and bilingual education in general. Central to de Mejia's
discussion is the notion of language as symbolic capital (Bourdieu 1982,
1991), which allows us to see education as powerful means of providing
access to valued symbolic resources (37).

Chapter 3 looks as the issue of elite bilingual education from the point
of view of intercultural communication. Since elite bilingualism and
bilingual education often occur in contexts of cross-cultural contact,
factors such as intercultural marriage, international travel, and
international business are important issues to be considered in
understanding elite bilingual education.

Chapter 4 focuses on language use in elite bilingual education classrooms,
surveying issues in previous research, such as the need to acknowledge
code-switching in immersion classrooms, the relationship between language
and academic content, and how cultural content should be incorporated in
the teaching process. This discussion is given more detail as several
transcripts of instances of code-switching in classrooms in Colombia and
Hong Kong are presented and analyzed.

In Chapter 5, various issues relating to elite bilingual education are
discussed from the perspectives of the different participants in this
process -- parents, administrators, teachers, and students -- and the
expectations and concerns of each group are explained.

Chapter 6 outlines the trends in elite bilingual education research,
noting the shift from research focusing on educational outcomes to an
acceptance of a wider range of directions such as curriculum design or
ethnographic research projects. Based on her own work, the author also
suggests that empowerment of research subjects (teachers and
administrators at an elite bilingual school in de Mejia's case) should be
an integral part of the research process so that the gap between
researchers and practitioners can be reduced.

Part 2 presents in more detail the forms and issues in elite bilingual
education across specific social and historical contexts. In particular,
Chapters 7 through 11 take the reader to five different continents
(Africa, South America, Asia, Europe, and Oceania) and overviews the
bilingual education provisions within several sample nations accompanied
by detailed discussion of their historical and sociolinguistic background.

Chapter 7 deals with two African nations, Morocco and Tanzania. French and
English International Schools are discussed in the Moroccan context. In
the case of Tanzania, the importance of English as a language of prestige
still has strong influence on secondary and post-secondary education
systems, despite growing recognition of Kiswahili as the national
language.

Chapter 8 surveys three South American nations; in Argentina and Colombia,
elite bilingual education, once largely a provision for expatriate
children, is now becoming more of a national concern in the education
system, while in Brazil, foreign language education is still centered
around institutes and language schools.

Chapter 9 deals with Japan, Hong Kong, and Brunei Darussalam, which differ
from each other significantly in colonial history and cultural
heterogeneity, yet whose bilingual education in English is expanding from
its previous private nature into more open provisions.

In chapter 10, four countries in Europe are discussed, Finland, Sweden,
Belgium, and Catalonia (Spain), where, due to different historical and
political circumstances, different language pairs became significant
(Swedish and Finnish in Finland, Swedish and English in Sweden, Flemish
and French in Belgium, Spanish and Catalan in Catalonia), and different
types of modalities of bilingual education developed (immersion programs
in Finland and Catalonia, International Schools in Sweden, and European
Schools in Belgium).

In Chapter 11, Australia is considered among the countries of Oceania.
Here, there is rapid expansion of immersion-type programs for learning
foreign languages, as the country tries to recognize and value its
multilingual nature and establish an anti-isolationist economic and
foreign policy.

After surveying these different countries, the remaining chapters present
two more unique perspectives on elite bilingual education. In chapter 12,
the author presents a critical discourse analysis (based on Fairclough's
(1989, 1992) framework) of the discourse of elite bilingual education.
More specifically, she analyzes several texts of advertisements for elite
bilingual education programs around the world, and also a speech given by
the Bruneian Minister of Education at the ''Bilingualism and National
Development Conference'' in Brunei, 1991, showing how the ideologies
represented through these discourses can be seen as closely linked to
contemporary capitalist ideologies and reproducing existing social
inequalities by appearing to offer equal opportunity of access to the
symbolic capital of language.

Chapter 13, on the other hand, takes the practitioner's perspective and
overviews the common problem areas as identified by teachers working in
elite bilingual education classrooms based on questionnaire research.
Several problems areas, such as motivation and opportunities to use the
foreign language, student language proficiency level, development of
biliteracy, language and content, and parental involvement, are discussed
with case sketches, along with suggestions by the teachers themselves
regarding how to resolve these problems in teaching.

Chapter 14 is the conclusion of the book, where the author reviews the
major themes and makes several recommendations for effective policy and
practice, which include suggestions such as i) formulate explicit
bilingual policy statements based on empirical studies, ii) question
monolingual classroom language practices in bilingual contexts, iii)
situate classroom language use in wider local and global contexts of
language use, iv) increase the scope and reach of bilingual education
teacher development, and v) provide international opportunities to discuss
issues related to elite bilingual education (300-302).

While research on bilingualism and bilingual education in minority
contexts has a long and rich tradition, elite bilingualism and bilingual
education have received little attention so far, with a few exceptions,
most notably that of Canadian Immersion programs. The author suggests
three possible reasons for this gap in the introduction (x-xi). First, for
researchers pursuing a role of advocacy, minority contexts, where
inequality of language rights become a crucial issue, may seem to be a
more worthy area of study. Second, minority bilingual education programs
often receive state or federal funding, and thus need to be under constant
evaluation by authorities, leading to state-funded research or at least
accountability that is open to research (which partly explains the
abundance of research on Canadian Immersion). However, elite bilingual
education is generally offered in the private sector, with less need for
such accountability; in fact, the competitiveness among institutions
causes them to avoid sharing details of their programs, therefore making
research difficult. Third, even in potential contexts for elite bilingual
education, such as International Schools, multilingualism has not been a
prime concern until recently, as the students were often expatriates and
were expected to return to their home countries. Therefore, there has
generally been a lack of interest towards the notion of elite bilingualism
and bilingual education.

However, we can no longer afford to simply ignore elite bilingualism and
bilingual education. As the author suggests, increasing globalization
means an increasing need for international communication, and the major
languages of the world (which, for that reason, also tend to be perceived
as prestigious) are increasingly considered to be important resources for
upward socio-economic mobility. Neither is elite bilingual education for
the select minority of rich people, as the term ^'elite^' might suggest.
Teachers, businessmen, government officials, and other professionals, who
may not necessarily wealthy, all recognize the importance of being
bilingual and strive to learn these major languages. In this sense, elite
bilingualism is no longer a minor phenomenon that applies only to a
closed, privileged group of people. Elite bilingualism and minority
bilingualism are in fact like the two faces of a coin, since both are loci
where one can observe and study the ideologies of language held by the
participants in bilingual education and the society at large. The practice
and discussions surrounding minority bilingual education are important
sites where language ideologies (and based on those ideologies, racial,
political and other group identities) are produced, reproduced,
challenged, and contested, as has been documented, for example, in the
case of bilingual education in North America (cf. Schmid 2001). Similarly,
efforts to acquire and provide access to prestigious world languages in
various contexts can be seen in terms of how they represent language
ideologies that reproduce the hegemony of such languages. The ideological
nature of English language teaching in colonial and postcolonial contexts
and its consequences has been well documented (Pennycook 1994, 1998,
Philipson 1992). While many elite bilingual education provisions seem to
have the effect of 'empowering' learners of prestigious languages by
providing them with access to arenas associated with those languages, it
is also true that the promotion of such languages constitutes an
institutionalized mechanism of reproducing the hegemony of those
languages. Therefore, studying elite bilingual education from an
international perspective allows us to complement our understanding of how
institutionalized practices of language teaching and their ideologies can
have the effect of reproducing those ideologies based on minority
bilingual education. Such knowledge can also contribute to the fields of
sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, where language ideology has
been one of the crucial issues.

de Mejia's book is very welcome in this regard, since, in addition to
providing a rich international perspective with examples from many
different countries and contexts, it also strives to move beyond a purely
educational perspective (without abandoning it) and achieves a more
critical perspective. Following Heller^'s (1990, 1994) suggestion to look
beyond the immediate school situation to understand the social
situatedness of bilingual education, the author widens the horizons of
elite bilingual education research. Her chapter 12, where she presents a
critical discourse analysis of some texts representing elite bilingual
education institutions, is especially interesting for this reason.
Ultimately, I would have liked to see more research in this direction,
especially in combination with ethnographic and interactional data, since
such research will let us observe more clearly how the participants
themselves deal with and are influenced by the ideologies that underpin
the discourses of elite bilingual education. However, of course, due to
the closed nature of the area of elite bilingual education mentioned
above, collection and analysis of such data remain methodologically quite
difficult, so for the time being we can say that the analysis presented in
this volume makes an important contribution in raising the issue. Overall,
given the lack of material written on elite bilingual education, this book
provides an ideal starting point for future research, which promises to
have many implications beyond the immediate field of elite bilingual
education itself.

References

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1982. Ce Que Parler Veut Dire. Paris: Fayard.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1991. Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.

Fairclough, Norman. 1989. Language and Power. London: Longman.

Fairclough, Norman. 1992. Discourse and Social Change. London: Polity
Press.

Heller, Monica. 1990. ''French immersion in Canada: A model for
Switzerland?''
Multilingua 9(1), 67-85.

Heller, Monica. 1994. Crosswords: Language, Education and Ethnicity in
French
Ontario. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Pennycook, Alastair. 1994. The Cultural Politics of English as an
International Language. London: Longman.

Pennycook, Alastair. 1998. English and the Discourses of
Colonialism. London: Routledge.

Phillipson, Robert. 1992. Linguistic Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.

Schmid, Carol L. 2001. The Politics of Language: Conflict, Identity,
and Cultural Pluralism in Comparative Perspective. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Joseph Sung-Yul Park is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of
Linguistics, University of California, Santa Barbara. His research
interests include discourse analysis, interactional linguistics, and
sociolinguistics. His dissertation research focuses on the ideologies
of English in South Korea.