Obituary - Robert Cooper

Sun Oct 21 06:42:09 UTC 2012

>From Bernard Spolsky...
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.

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