24.625, Review: Applied Linguistics: Leung & Street (2012)

[linguist at linguistlist.org]

LINGUIST List: Vol-24-625. Sun Feb 03 2013. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 24.625, Review: Applied Linguistics: Leung & Street (2012)

Moderators: Anthony Aristar, Eastern Michigan U <aristar at linguistlist.org>
            Helen Aristar-Dry, Eastern Michigan U <hdry at linguistlist.org>

Reviews: Veronika Drake, U of Wisconsin Madison
Monica Macaulay, U of Wisconsin Madison
Rajiv Rao, U of Wisconsin Madison
Joseph Salmons, U of Wisconsin Madison
Anja Wanner, U of Wisconsin Madison
       <reviews at linguistlist.org>

Homepage: http://linguistlist.org

Do you want to donate to LINGUIST without spending an extra penny? Bookmark
the Amazon link for your country below; then use it whenever you buy from
Amazon!

USA: http://www.amazon.com/?_encoding=UTF8&tag=linguistlist-20
Britain: http://www.amazon.co.uk/?_encoding=UTF8&tag=linguistlist-21
Germany: http://www.amazon.de/?_encoding=UTF8&tag=linguistlistd-21
Japan: http://www.amazon.co.jp/?_encoding=UTF8&tag=linguistlist-22
Canada: http://www.amazon.ca/?_encoding=UTF8&tag=linguistlistc-20
France: http://www.amazon.fr/?_encoding=UTF8&tag=linguistlistf-21

For more information on the LINGUIST Amazon store please visit our
FAQ at http://linguistlist.org/amazon-faq.cfm.

Editor for this issue: Rajiv Rao <rajiv at linguistlist.org>
================================================================  


Date: Sun, 03 Feb 2013 13:53:07
From: Kun Zhang [kunzhang at hku.hk]
Subject: English - A Changing Medium for Education

E-mail this message to a friend:
http://linguistlist.org/issues/emailmessage/verification.cfm?iss=24-625.html&submissionid=5926877&topicid=9&msgnumber=1
 
Discuss this message: 
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?subid=5926877


Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/23/23-3224.html

EDITOR: Constant  Leung
EDITOR: Brian V. Street
TITLE: English - A Changing Medium for Education
SERIES TITLE: New Perspectives on Language and Education
PUBLISHER: Multilingual Matters
YEAR: 2012

REVIEWER: Kun Zhang, University of Hong Kong

SUMMARY

This book is a collection of papers on English as a medium of instruction in
various contexts around the world, with particular focus on English
communicative competence and its use as a situated social practice. Edited by
Constant Leung and Brian V. Street, renowned experts on language and literacy,
the book draws readers’ attention to English language education in an era of
English being a lingua franca or an additional language, and brings scholars
from different parts of the world together to contribute to our understanding
of medium of instruction, language policy, literacy and education.

The book is composed of seven chapters, each of which focuses on different
aspects of English medium education, ranging from language curriculum and
language policy, to arguments on theoretical conceptualizations.

Chapter 1, contributed by the editors, is entitled “Introduction: English in
the curriculum--Norms and Practices”. Drawing on the work of Halliday (1973,
1975) and Hymes (1972, 1977), the authors review the concept of communicative
competence and its influence on the fields of language teaching and literacy,
and then suggest a practical view of language rather than a norm-based view.
In order to further illustrate this point, Leung and Street offer an
ethnographic case study of English practice in a classroom conducted in a
London school, showing how English was taught in combination with digital and
visual methods in order to help students understand and learn it in a variety
of forms (e.g. spoken, written, etc.). As indicated by the authors, the very
first chapter “helps set the scene for the discussions by subsequent authors
in the volume” (p. xiv).

Chapter 2, “What counts as English?”, written by Mastin Prinsloo, focuses on
examining the discrepancy between what educational policy (in relation to
language learning and use) stipulates in South Africa and what has actually
taken place in schools there. Assuming the interactional sociolinguistic and
ethnographic research approaches, Prinsloo first reviews what language policy
in education is like at the national level before explaining research on real
English language practice in three different schools in South Africa. At the
policy level, the author finds the language policy problematic because it is
based on an autonomous and boundarized understanding of language, without
taking daily language practices at schools into account. When Prinsloo looked
at classroom data (i.e. students’ and teachers’ English practice), he found
that the use of English differed in the three schools “depending on the
situated resources and intention of social actors” (p. 38). Towards the end of
this chapter, Prinsloo suggests that an effective language policy should be
based on a deep understanding of how language is practiced so that the
divergences between language policy and language practices in reality can be
minimized.

In Chapter 3, Ilana Synder and Denise Beale systematically review the
developments and changes of bilingual education policy in indigenous
communities in Australia in response to the rise of English as the medium of
instruction. It has been argued that language policy in Australia in general,
and bilingual education in indigenous areas in particular, indicate the
intervention of politics, power, and ideology, which can be reflected in the
Northern Territory, where English is the settlers’ language, associated with
economic and political profits, whereas indigenous languages index local
cultures and identities. Meanwhile, the authors of this paper address the
roles of literacy and testing in the amendment and implementation of bilingual
education policy. It is their hope that future policy for indigenous education
can be more pluralistic so that it “recognises and respects the importance of
local languages and cultures as foundational to educational achievement” (p.
54).

Chapter 4, entitled “Re(Writing) English: Putting English in translation”, is
contributed by Bruce Horner and Min-Zhan Lu. They focus on a new understanding
of English as a medium in composition classes taught in colleges and
universities in the United States by challenging the English Only ideology
within the frameworks of English as a lingua franca and World Englishes. Based
on their observations and review of literature, the authors explore how
research on ELF (English as a lingua franca) and World Englishes reinforces
the tenets of a monolingual ideology and ignores the agency of both native and
non-native speakers of English in writing. Alternatively, Horner and Lu
propose a translingual approach to language that emphasizes the hybridity and
fluidity of language, a speaker’s agency in negotiating meanings, and
cooperation. To illustrate this new pedagogy, they analyze a case study
showing how their translingual approach helps both native speakers and
non-native speakers of English understand the “errors” produced in their
writing through collaborative experiences with teachers.

In Chapter 5, “Multilingual and multimodal resources in genre-based
pedagogical approaches to L2 English content classrooms”, Angel Lin explores
the ways by which we can tackle the difficulties and dilemmas in outer and
expanding circles, where English is gradually adopted as a medium of
instruction in schools. Situating her study in the context of Hong Kong, the
author first offers a historical overview of changing language policies in
school education and pinpoints the impacts of the recent changes of MOI policy
by questioning how students’ English proficiency can be improved when
Chinese-medium instruction is changed to English-medium instruction in some
school subjects. Then, Lin introduces four directions that may be used to
innovatively meet the challenges mentioned above: (i) developing multiple
flexible approaches to content-based second language (L2) instruction; (ii)
breaking away from the traditional immersional model as the best approach to
designing L2 English content programmes; (iii) drawing on multimodal and
continua theories of language and communication; and (iv) drawing on
genre-based multilingual, multimodal and popular cultural resources to provide
basic-L2-proficiency students with access to L2 academic content and literacy.
Drawing on Hallidayan linguistics (such as Halliday, 1998), the Sydney School
of genre analysis, and Gibbon (2009), Lin proposes a genre-based multilingual
and multimodal bridging pedagogy for integrated science in Hong Kong junior
secondary schools and tested it out in a pilot study. It is the author’s hope
that this genre-based multilingual and multimodal pedagogy can be applied to
other L2 English content subjects and in other L2 contexts in the future.

Chapter 6, “Multimodal literacies and assessment: Uncharted challenges in the
English classroom”, by Heather Lotherington and Natalia Sinitskaya Ronda,
provides a picture of how the advent of new media and digital communication
challenges our traditional understanding of language and literacy in English
classrooms and examines how the current assessment executed by higher
authorities hinders students’ multimodal literacy development in schools.
Drawing on the theories of the New London Group and others, the authors
suggest shifting from a narrow understanding of literacy as reading and
writing English print to a new understanding of literacy in the pixelized
world, where digital communication plays a prominent role. Then, they offer
two case studies that successfully practicized multimodal literacies in
English classrooms in Canada by pinpointing the lack of a suitable language
and literacy assessment. Lotherington and Ronda conclude the chapter by
proposing some basics for the assessment of multimodal literacies and calling
for more attention to be placed on classroom learning and real social
communication needs.

In the last chapter of this book, “Beyond labels and categories in English
Language Teaching: Critical reflections on popular conceptualizations”, Martin
Dewey starts to rethink the concept of English in light of the changing,
complex sociocultural contexts surrounding its use. He has found that terms
such as EFL (English as a Foreign Language) and ESL (English as a Second
Language) “are heavily laden with traditional intellectual assumptions about
language that do not adequately reflect current realities regarding the global
sociolinguistics of English” (p. 130). Those dominant assumptions in ELT
(English in Language Teaching) are often manifested in CLT (Communicative
Language Teaching) and Tasked Based Learning methodologies in ELT, where
English is regarded as a unitary and stable phenomenon. Drawing on the
theories of ELF, Dewey tries to highlight the heterogeneous and unboundarized
sides of English because, in his view, this approach helps us cross the
boundaries between Kachru’s (1992) three circles and sees ELF interactions
taking place in highly variable socio/linguacultural networks that may operate
independently of physical setting. Continuing this line of thinking, Dewey
then discusses the major implicatoins for language learning and teaching in
reference to Canagarajah’s (2005) multi-norm approach to English, and finally,
concludes the chapter.

EVALUATION

As a whole, this edited book explores the major issues of English as a medium
for education in the fields of language and literacy with a global
perspective. All the contributors in the book take a practical view of
language and then apply it to discussions on either language and literacy
curriculum or language policy, while taking sociocultural, political, and
ideological contexts into account. The case studies reported were conducted in
different places around the world, ranging from countries in the inner circle,
such as England and the United States, to countries in the expanding circle,
like Hong Kong, which reinforces the idea that English as a medium for
education has gained global attention. The cooperation among the researchers
in the book advances our understanding of English language and literacy, both
theoretically and practically. In particular, the first and last chapters are
theoretically insightful and important in that they lay a strong foundation
for further development in the field. For instance, in the first chapter, the
view that English is part of social and language practice, proposed by Leung
and Street, can help us build a rich and more complex picture of language and
literacy in education; and in the last chapter, the demystification of some
prevailing language labels in ELT challenges the very nature of our beliefs
about what the English language is. It is these ideas that are taken up by the
authors of the remaining chapters, all of which map out the direction for our
future research. Therefore, this book can be regarded as a timely addition to
the emerging literature on language and literacy education.

One minor criticism of the book is the lack of careful editing work prior to
publication, as there are occasional typos throughout the book (e.g. p. xxi,
in line 8, “Del” should be spelled “Dell”; p. 24, in line 7, “ideologues”
should be “ideologies”, etc.).  However, these minor items do not in any way
affect the overall quality of this excellent volume, which will be of great
value, not only to researchers and students of language education, but also to
language policy-makers and teaching professionals in schools or universities.

REFERENCES

Canagarajah, A. S. (2005). Introduction. In A. S. Canagarajah (Ed.),
Reclaiming the local in language policy and practice (pp. xiii-xxx). Mahwah,
NJ: Lawrence Earlbaum Associates.

Gibbon, P. (2009). English learners, academic literacy, and thinking: Learning
in the challenge zone. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Halliday, M. A. K. (1973). Explorations in the functions of language. London:
Edward Arnold.

Halliday, M. A. K. (1975). Learning how to mean: Explorations in the
development of language. London: Edward Arnold.

Halliday, M. A. K. (1998). Things and relations: Regrammaticising experience
as scientific knowledge. In J. R. Martin and R. Veel (Eds.), Reading science:
Critical and functional perspectives on discourse of science (pp. 185-235).
London: Routledge.

Hymes, D. (1972). On communicative competence. In J. Maybin (Ed.), Language
and literacy in social practice (pp. 11-22). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters,
in association with Open University.

Hymes, D. (1977). Foundations in sociolinguistics: An ethnographic approach.
London: Tavistock Publications.

Kachru, B. (Ed.). (1992). The other tongue: English across cultures (2 ed.).
Urbana: University of Illinois Press.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Zhang Kun is a PhD candidate in the Centre for Applied English Studies at the
University of Hong Kong, where he is working on his doctoral dissertation
about Mainland Chinese Students’ language use and identity construction in
Hong Kong and Macao. His research interests include sociolinguistics,
discourse analysis, and multilingualism.








----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-24-625	
----------------------------------------------------------