[lg policy] obituary : Robert Cooper

Sat Oct 20 17:13:30 UTC 2012

On 10/20/2012 12:03 PM, Bernard Spolsky wrote:
>
> It is with great sadness that we learn of the death on Friday October 
> 19 2002 of Robert L. Cooper, formerly professor at the Hebrew 
> University of Jerusalem, after a long illness.
>
>  His classic book, /Language planning and social change/, first 
> published by Cambridge University Press in 1989, is at the moment 
> being translated into Chinese, a clear sign that his work is still 
> widely appreciated. Although Cooper retired from his professorship at 
> the Hebrew University shortly after its publication and spent the next 
> two decades on activities other than sociolinguistics, his book has 
> continued to introduce those fortunate enough to read it to the field 
> of language policy.
>
> The book selects four examples of language policy, analyzes them, and 
> uses them as the basis for an exploration of the social conditions for 
> language management. The four cases he chose are significant ones: the 
> foundation of Académie française, the re-establishment of Hebrew as a 
> vital vernacular in Palestine, the contemporary efforts to modify the 
> chauvinism of grammatical gender, and the program to establish mass 
> literacy in Ethiopia. On this basis, he set out the nature of the 
> major processes of classical language planning -- the management of 
> the status of a language variety, its cultivation for the required 
> purposes, and (a new element in the analysis of the field) the 
> development of language teaching policy.
>
> Trained originally as an educational psychologist, Cooper essentially 
> mapped the sociolinguistic aspects of educational linguistics, showing 
> the need to incorporate social dimensions in the notion of language 
> ability, and spelling out the place of language educational policy 
> (which he labeled "language acquisition planning") as a critical 
> element in the social changes associated with language planning and 
> management.
>
> After undergraduate training at Harvard and graduate study at the 
> University of Pennsylvania, he studied educational psychology with 
> R.L. Thorndike and W. MacGinitie at Teachers College and Columbia. 
> From 1966-8, he worked with Joshua Fishman, one of the founders of the 
> sociology of language and still its leading scholar, on the 
> epoch-making study of bilingualism and diglossia in the Jersey City 
> /barrio./ His seminal paper "An elaborated language testing model" 
> drew on that experience. It was the first clear statement that 
> language testing and teaching needed to take into account the 
> communicative competence proposed by Dell Hymes rather than the 
> rigorous but more narrowly focussed notion of linguistic competence 
> being popularized by Noam Chomsky and his followers.
>
> Cooper then spent a year with the pioneering Ford Foundation sponsored 
> study of language in Ethiopia. There, along with Charles Ferguson, J. 
> Donald Bowen and M. L. Bender, he helped sketch the goals for language 
> policy and language education in a complex multilingual society.
>
> After spells of teaching at Yeshiva University, Stanford University, 
> and California State University, Cooper moved to Israel in 1972 to 
> join Fishman again for the first major study of the spread of English. 
> He remained in Israel, and for the rest of his academic career, he was 
> a professor in both education and sociology at the Hebrew University, 
> where he trained students and carried out sociolinguistic research 
> that helped bridge the fields of sociolinguistics and education.
>
> In the late 1970s, he co-edited two key collections of papers on 
> bilingual education.  He also took part in a study for the Israeli 
> Defense Forces of language testing as part of his reserve army duties, 
> finding this more congenial than the guarding of buildings he would 
> otherwise have been required to do.
>
> In 1982, he edited a pioneering collection on /Language Spread /that 
> had been presented at an international conference in 1978. Continuing 
> his study of urban sociolinguistics, he co-directed between 1983 and 
> 1986 a sociolinguistic survey of the Old City of Jerusalem; the result 
> was published in 1991 by Clarendon Press as a book with the title /The 
> Languages of Jerusalem/.
>
> Cooper's magisterial /Language planning and social change (/Cambridge 
> University Press 1989) rounded out a career of research and 
> publications that has established the key relationships between 
> sociolinguistics and educational linguistics. It marks the high point 
> of classical language policy studies, preparing the way for studies 
> that move to domains other than governmental.
>
> After his retirement, he decided he had spent enough time on 
> sociolinguistics, and set out to satisfy his desire for travel by 
> retracing the 1895 voyage around the world of Mark Twain (Samuel 
> Langhorne Clemens), traveling where possible by ship, visiting the 
> sites where Mark Twain lectured and finding in the local libraries 
> newspaper accounts of his visits.  The result was another book, 
> /Around the world with Mark Twain/, published in 2000 by Arcade 
> Publishing.
>
> For the last few years, Cooper and his wife Alice lived in Brooklyn, 
> New York, where he could be close to his children and grandchildren. 
> But he did not stop writing: he ventured into the newest medium, and 
> his blog /Anchises: an old man's journal/ appeared on the Internet 
> three times a week until illness finally intervened.
>
>
>     References
>
> Bender, M. Lionel, J. Donald Bowen, Robert L. Cooper, and Charles A. 
> Ferguson, (ed.) (1976). /Language in Ethiopia/. London: Oxford 
> University Press.
>
> Cooper, Robert L. (1968). An elaborated language testing model. 
> /Language Learning/ (Special issue No. 7): 57-72.
>
> Cooper, Robert L. (Ed.). (1982). /Language Spread: Studies in 
> diffusion and social change/. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
>
> Cooper, Robert L. (1984). A framework for the description of language 
> spread: the case of modern Hebrew. /International Social Science 
> Journal/ 36 ( 1): 87-112.
>
> Cooper, Robert L.  (1989). /Language planning and social change/. 
> Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
>
> Fishman, Joshua A., Robert L. Cooper, and A.W. Conrad  (1977). /The 
> spread of English: the sociology of English as an additional 
> language/. Rowley, Mass.: Newbury House.
>
> Fishman, Joshua A., Robert L. Cooper, and Roxana Ma  (1971). 
> /Bilingualism in the barrio/. Bloomington: Research Center for the 
> Language Sciences, Indiana University.
>
> Spolsky, Bernard, and Robert L. Cooper, (ed.) (1977). /Frontiers of 
> bilingual education/. Rowley, MA.: Newbury House Publishers.
>
> Spolsky, Bernard, and Robert L. Cooper  (1991). /The languages of 
> Jerusalem/. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
>
>
> -- 
> Bernard Spolsky bspolsky at gmail.com <mailto:bspolsky at gmail.com>
>
>
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dear Bernard, I feel great sadness about Bob Cooper! He was much too 
young to go!    But thank you for your message.  It is a fitting 
tribute, but this is not a happy occasion.
I remember Bob well as such a friendly, open person as well as a great 
scholar.   Please give my sympathies to his family.  I am very sorry
for the loss of all of us.  Sincerely, Carol Myers-Scotton
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