Review of Australian Policy Activism in Language and Literacy

Tue Jan 20 12:43:33 UTC 2004

I think this is the second in the series. The first was on "Voices from
Pnomh Penh...' also edited by Joseph Lo Bianco. The review was done by me.
Dipo.
Meanwhile, could I ask for an urgent help: I hope to attend Sociolinguistic
Symposium 15 in Newcastle (UK) in April but I come from a country (Nigeria)
where higher education is heavily underfunded (both by government and the
private sector) and I have no hope of getting a govt/private grant from my
home university. Could someone please advise where I  can send in an
application for urgent assistance.
Thanks,
Dipo

>From: "Harold F. Schiffman" <haroldfs at ccat.sas.upenn.edu>
>Reply-To: lgpolicy-list at ccat.sas.upenn.edu
>To: Language Policy-List <lgpolicy-list at ccat.sas.upenn.edu>
>Subject: Review of Australian Policy Activism in Language and Literacy
>Date: Fri, 16 Jan 2004 11:26:29 -0500 (EST)
>
>This review is the first in a series that we are inaugurating for the
>Language Policy List.  If others of you have books you'd like to see
>reviewed for this constituency, please let me know.
>
>Reviewer: Joyce Milambiling, University of Northern Iowa (USA)
>Book Title: Australian Policy Activism in Language and Literacy
>Book Editors: Joseph Lo Bianco and Rosie Wickert
>Publisher: Language Australia
>Linguistic Field(s): Language Policy and Planning, Language and
>Politics/Activism
>
>Review
>
>Lo Bianco, J., & Wickert, R., eds. (2001) Australian Policy Activism in
>Language and Literacy. Melbourne: Language Australia, xii + 401 pp,
>paperback ISBN: 1-878768-31-2, AUS$ 45.00.  Available for order from:
>www.languageaustralia.com.au
>
>Synopsis:
>
>Australian Policy Activism in Language and Literacy chronicles the
>processes and alliances associated with recent language policy in
>Australia. It is an edited volume that consists of 17 separate chapters
>divided into an introduction and five parts.
>
>The introduction, "Activists and Policy Politics," is written by the two
>editors, and outlines for the reader the period dealt with in this book
>(1972-1996), as well as the intellectual and political territory that the
>editors and the other authors intend to cover in this description and
>analysis of policy activism as applied to language and literacy in
>Australia.
>
>Part 1, "Openings," contains one chapter written by Joseph Lo Bianco, one
>of the editors. This chapter sets one of the dominant themes of the book,
>the tone of which is summed up in the title: ">From policy to anti-policy:
>How fear of language rights took policy-making out of community hands."
>The author states that the article has two functions within this volume:
>1) To provide a framework and define terms for the entire discussion
>throughout the book; and 2) for Lo Bianco, the author not only of this
>chapter but also of the 1987 National Policy on Languages, to give his
>"take" on what has happened in Australian language policy (and why), the
>consequences of policies which he terms "anti-pluralist," and some
>predictions for the future of language policy in that country.
>
>Part 2, "Processes, Politics and the Effects of Policy Text Production,"
>includes three articles written by insiders to the policy-making process.
>Two of the authors, Rosie Wickert (Chapter 3), and Helen Moore (Chapter
>4), write from, among other perspectives, those of activists in adult
>literacy and migrant education respectively. Paul Brock, in Chapter 2,
>describes his role as a consultant to the government in 1990-1991 during
>the creation of one of the major Australian language policies.
>
>Part 3, "Policy Positions," consists of three articles that, according to
>the introduction, represent "different approaches to understanding how
>policy problems and solutions are constituted in particular kinds of ways
>with an intention to generate different solutions" (p. 6). Singh's
>contribution (Chapter 5) is concerned with the issues of immigration,
>multiculturalism, relations between Australia and Asia, and Australian
>identity. In Chapter 6, Taylor addresses Indigenous Australian language
>and literacy, including the overt and covert conflicts over the teaching
>and learning of Standard Australian English. Castleton (Chapter 7)
>analyzes the content of adult literacy policy in Australia by focusing on
>a government report on workplace literacy to see, in the author's words,
>"how knowledge about workplace literacy has been constructed in Australia,
>and the consequences of this particular construction" (p.165).
>
>Part 4, "Policy and the Contexts of Practice," is the longest section of
>this book, consisting of nine chapters. The purpose of this section is
>summed up in the introduction as illustrating "what happens in different
>contexts as an application of the wider principles" (p.7). In Chapter 10,
>for example, McKay describes the effects that a 1998 national literacy
>plan and literacy benchmarks associated with this plan have had on English
>as a Second Language learners. The author focuses not only on concrete
>aspects of the literacy plan, but also on its underlying ideology and
>potential long-term effects. This section of the book also includes an
>article on the effect of language policy on the field of interpreting and
>translating (Ozolins, Chapter 12), another article that considers how sign
>language and Deafness have been represented in language policy documents
>(Power, Chapter 13), and one contribution near the end of this section
>that looks at which languages have been characterized as "priority
>languages" in Australia during a recent 12 year period (Scarino &
>Papademetre, Chapter 15).
>
>Part 5, "New Openings," like the first part of the book, consists of a
>single article. In this final chapter Jack Frawley "explores the concept
>of print literacy as being socially and culturally driven, and its
>positioning as a variable social technology within the context of an
>Aboriginal community" (p. 345). The co-editors state in the introduction
>that they chose this article as the final one because it contributes "new
>theorizations, perspectives and possibilities" (p. 9).
>
>Evaluation:
>Australian Policy Activism in Language and Literacy is an impressive
>contribution to the language policy literature. As an outsider to the
>Australian language policy debate, I was thoroughly informed by the
>different chapters in this volume on the issues and chronology as well as
>the theoretical and practical debates in this area of Australian policy
>during the last 30 years. The contributors come from a wide range of
>academic institutions and represent many different disciplines and areas
>of experience in providing service to the Australian public. As a result
>of reading this book, I was better able to understand and even to
>recognize some shortcomings in a recent journal article on minority
>language education in Australia.
>
>The book, as described in the synopsis, is subdivided into an introduction
>and five parts. The first and the last parts (also referred to as
>"sections" in this review), each consists of single chapters. As I was
>reading, I found the differences in the subject matter of the content of
>the articles in the three middle sections to be quite subtle. In
>evaluating the structure of the book I could not always tell why one
>article was put in one section rather than another. It appeared to me that
>the Singh article, "Advocating the Sustainability of Linguistic
>Diversity," to take one example, could have just as well been placed in
>the "Policy and the Contexts of Practice" section.
>
>That said, the organization did not in the least detract from the value of
>the book overall and its 17 individual chapters. The most fascinating, and
>to my mind worthwhile contributions in the volume paired a discussion and
>analysis of language policy with an area in which the author was
>well-versed and for which he/she provided specific examples from the
>field. Wickert's description in Chapter 3 of the role of literacy
>activists in the production of language policies benefited greatly from
>the author's more than 20 year involvement in adult basic education.
>Similarly, Power's excellent analysis in Chapter 13 of the representation
>of deafness and sign language in Australian government policy documents
>over a seven year period (1983-1990), would not have been possible nor as
>effective had the author not had such a long association with research in
>the field. The most interesting material in the book, exemplified in most
>of the chapters, was on how different programs and populations have been
>impacted (directly or indirectly) by the various language policies enacted
>during the period covered by the book, and what effect the policies and
>policy-making processes have had on the individual actors.
>
>The writing and clear presentation/justification of often controversial
>views are both strong points of this book. Ozolins' account of the
>interpreting translation (I/T) field in Chapter 12 provides a
>comprehensive picture of this field and how it has been affected, not
>always positively, by recent language policy decisions in Australia. The
>author's use of four examples on pages 270-273 plainly shows how the state
>and federal governments have had different effects on I/T, with the
>national level, in the author's view, proving to be the crucial one (p.
>272). Several of the articles are good examples of how to take strong
>positions on a topic, and how to argue individual points convincingly. For
>example, Nicholls (Chapter 16) critiques the decision by the government of
>the Northern Territory to eliminate bilingual education programs for
>Indigenous language speakers. She argues that the decision was based on
>the "cultural logic of elimination," a logic that the author says goes
>against the rhetoric of reconciliation. As another example, Singh, in
>"Advocating the Sustainability of Linguistic Diversity," presents the
>concept of what he terms "White Australian Politics" in support of his
>contention that earlier "colonialist thinking" is still exerting an effect
>on language education policies in Australia (p.124).
>
>There were only a few points throughout the book when I thought that the
>writing could have been more succinct, or when the different parts of one
>article did not fit together smoothly. Chapter 2 by Brock, for example,
>could have benefited from some editing to cut out redundancy and
>overabundance of detail (at least in my opinion) regarding what it means
>to be an insider to the policy-making process, and regarding some of the
>idiosyncrasies of the different actors in the account he is presenting.
>Also, although the interview data was integral to Moore's discussion of
>policy intervention in the Adult Migrant English Program in Chapter 4,
>some of the excerpts were very long, and the author did not provide enough
>information on who the individual interviewees were (not their actual
>identities but rather their particular positioning within the discussion)
>and why their comments (rather than someone else's) were being provided at
>that particular point in the article.
>
>Although some of the contributions contained technical or field-specific
>language, this did not generally interfere with the readability of the
>text. Although it was not clear either within or on the cover of the book
>itself or on the publisher's website what the intended audience of this
>book is, I assume that readers will come to this volume with experience
>either in linguistics, policymaking, individual fields like literacy or
>deafness, or that some (many?) of the readers will be from Australia and
>therefore familiar with much of the terminology and references within
>individual articles.
>
>The articles in this volume cover many different topics and, even though
>the authors represent some diversity in terms of their opinions on the
>past, present and future of language policy in Australia, I didn't find
>much support for the editors' claim on page 9 that "There is a wide
>variety of viewpoints represented in this book." For the most part, the
>authors seem to agree that the 1987 National Policy on Languages (NPL) was
>more firmly grounded in pluralist principles and for that and other
>reasons preferable to later legislation, especially the 1991 Australian
>Language and Literacy Policy (ALLP). Most of the authors in Australian
>Policy Activism in Language and Literacy maintain that policies after 1987
>have retreated from the earlier stance and principles, and I think it is
>fair to say that most of the authors in this volume also view the earlier
>policy positions as superior. Personally, I happen to be sympathetic to
>the ideology behind the 1987 policy, especially the idea that everyone (in
>Australia or anywhere else) should be bilingual or multilingual. I also
>believe that several authors in this book (including the two editors) make
>a convincing case for the greater desirability of the tenets of the NPL,
>especially as applied to specific populations. However, despite the fact
>that one of the chapters is authored by a consultant on the 1991 ALLP
>(Brock  in Chapter 2 ), and that some of the other authors of this volume
>under review bring up some minor criticisms of the 1987 NPL (e.g.,
>Nicholls on p. 338, Powers on pp. 284-285, and Ozolins on p. 268), it does
>not appear that, overall, the book contains what could truly be considered
>"a variety of viewpoints."
>
>The content of the articles is well-documented, and I found no case of
>missing references or contradictory dates or facts. The supporting parts
>of the volume, namely the table of contents, abbreviation list, list of
>contributors and reference list, are clearly written and organized. The
>abbreviation and reference lists in particular are potentially useful to a
>wide variety of readers, especially those who are unfamiliar with language
>policy in Australia and who may need guidance through the plethora of
>abbreviations and acronyms common in institutional contexts, or who would
>like to read further on language policy in general and language policy in
>Australia. One feature that would have been helpful is an index of terms
>and names used throughout. An index would have been valuable in a book
>such as this one for locating the specific topics in which the reader is
>interested, and because of the editors' claim that different perspectives
>are represented here. An index would guide the reader to all mentions of a
>term or proper name throughout the book, thus helping to focus the reading
>and enabling the reader to make comparisons more easily.
>
>In sum, Australian Policy Activism in Language and Literacy is an
>important contribution to the field of language policy because it covers
>so many different facets of how policy is formulated and by whom, how
>individual policy problems are constituted and often adjusted, and what
>actually happens in different contexts when policy is engaged to solve
>problems and/or improve situations. The concentration on language policy
>in one country, although the global context is certainly referenced
>throughout the book, focuses attention on how a "single" case is really
>much more than that due to the complexity of the issues and the lack of
>consensus in such a diverse nation as Australia. Finally, the book makes
>abundantly clear the statement that "Policy dialogue is both necessary and
>possible, and indeed, has been a feature of the Australian language and
>literacy policy experience" (p.3)
>
>About the Reviewer:
>Joyce Milambiling is Associate Professor in the English Department, TESOL
>Section, University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls. Her research centers on
>the educational applications of linguistics in the U.S. and Southeast
>Asia, including second/foreign language learning and teaching, language
>policy, bilingualism and bilingual education, and language teacher
>education. Among her publications are articles in TESOL Quarterly, Theory
>into Practice, and Language Magazine.
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