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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 10/20/2012 12:03 PM, Bernard Spolsky
wrote:<br>
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cite="mid:CAGhRcsTC7C4NaSF3NmZiUtzReMhd=4BW4419Ve_gojz5PySmbA@mail.gmail.com"
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<p class="MsoNormal">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.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> His classic book, <i>Language planning
and social change</i>, 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. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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 <i>barrio.</i> 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. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">In 1982, he edited a pioneering
collection on <i>Language Spread </i>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 <i>The
Languages of Jerusalem</i>.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Cooper’s magisterial <i>Language planning
and social change (</i>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. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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,
<i>Around the world with Mark Twain</i>,
published in 2000 by Arcade Publishing.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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 <i>Anchises: an
old man’s journal</i> appeared on the Internet three times a
week until illness
finally intervened.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<h2>References</h2>
<p class="MsoNormal">Bender,
M. Lionel, J. Donald Bowen, Robert L. Cooper, and Charles A.
Ferguson, (ed.)
(1976). <i>Language in Ethiopia</i>. London:
Oxford University Press.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Cooper, Robert L. (1968). An
elaborated language testing model. <i>Language
Learning</i> (Special issue No. 7): 57-72.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Cooper, Robert L. (Ed.). (1982). <i>Language
Spread:
Studies in diffusion and social change</i>. Bloomington, IN:
Indiana
University Press.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Cooper, Robert L. (1984). A framework
for the description of language spread: the case of modern
Hebrew. <i>International Social Science Journal</i> 36
( 1): 87-112.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Cooper, Robert L. (1989). <i>Language
planning and social change</i>. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Fishman, Joshua A., Robert L.
Cooper, and A.W. Conrad (1977). <i>The spread of English:
the sociology of
English as an additional language</i>. Rowley, Mass.:
Newbury House. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Fishman, Joshua A., Robert L.
Cooper, and Roxana Ma (1971). <i>Bilingualism in the barrio</i>.
Bloomington:
Research Center for the Language Sciences, Indiana University.
</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Spolsky, Bernard, and Robert L.
Cooper, (ed.) (1977). <i>Frontiers of
bilingual education</i>. Rowley, MA.: Newbury House
Publishers.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Spolsky, Bernard, and Robert L.
Cooper (1991). <i>The languages of Jerusalem</i>. Oxford:
Clarendon Press. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<div><br>
</div>
-- <br>
<div dir="ltr">Bernard Spolsky <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="mailto:bspolsky@gmail.com" target="_blank">bspolsky@gmail.com</a> <br>
</div>
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</blockquote>
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.<br>
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<br>
for the loss of all of us. Sincerely, Carol Myers-Scotton<br>
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