[lg policy] Obituary - Robert Cooper

Mon Oct 22 14:32:37 UTC 2012

Forwarded From:  <lpren at caltalk.cal.org>
Date: Sat, Oct 20, 2012 at 12:02 PM

Obituary - Robert Cooper

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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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 Harold F. Schiffman

Professor Emeritus of
 Dravidian Linguistics and Culture
Dept. of South Asia Studies
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305

Phone:  (215) 898-7475
Fax:  (215) 573-2138

Email:  haroldfs at gmail.com
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/

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