Obituary - Robert Cooper

Sun Oct 21 06:54:12 UTC 2012

2002 should be 2012.  Sorry
Bernard Spolsky

On Sun, Oct 21, 2012 at 8:42 AM, Francis Hult <Francis.Hult at englund.lu.se>wrote:

>  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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>
>
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