by
Jean-Jacques Weber
Mother
tongue education is often advocated as the ideal system of education
for all children in our late-modern, globalized world. However, in
this blog post I provide a critique of mother tongue education,
arguing that it is not always the panacea it is frequently made out
to be. This is also the theme of my new book, Flexible Multilingual Education: Putting Children’s Needs First,
where I criticize mother tongue education programmes for being too
rigidly fixed upon a particular language (the ‘mother tongue’),
and explore more flexible and more child-focused forms of
multilingual education.
A
first problem with mother tongue education is what could be referred
to as ‘the challenge of superdiverse classrooms’. Indeed, in many
classrooms of today’s globalized world, there may be students with
a wide range of different home languages, which makes mother tongue
education increasingly difficult to implement. This allows
governments to opt out of their responsibilities, by means of the
commonsensical argument that in any case it would be impossible to
organize mother tongue education for each individual child.
A
second problem with the call for mother tongue education is that it
can involve a kind of arrogance on the part of the (frequently white,
Western European or US American) ‘expert’ who tells people what
is good for them – e.g. that they should keep up their minority
language. It has been too easy for researchers to take an attitude of
superiority and to look upon (e.g.) South African parents who prefer
their children to be educated through English rather than an
indigenous African language as ‘victims of false consciousness’
or as ‘afflicted by an attitudinal malaise or syndrome’.
A
third problem is that mother tongue education tends to lead to rather
fixed multilingual education systems, because politicians,
policy-makers and teachers often rely on a discourse of
ethnolinguistic essentialism in attributing a ‘mother tongue’ to the schoolchildren.
In many cases, however, attribution of a single mother tongue
involves at least a simplification of an increasingly complex
multilingual reality. The problem is that ‘mother tongue’ is a
politicized concept, and hence not the best one for a pedagogical
approach to be based upon.
There
is therefore a need to move from rather fixed mother tongue education
programmes to more flexible multilingual education. While mother
tongue education tends to be focused on the standard variety (the
‘mother tongue’) ascribed on the basis of children’s perceived
ethnicity, flexible multilingual education builds upon children’s
actual home linguistic varieties, upon the whole of their
multilingual repertoires including non-standard varieties, urban
vernaculars, etc. Moreover, while mother tongue education tends to
provide delayed access to a global language such as English, flexible
multilingual education prefers very gradual shifts between local and
global languages from an early stage (at least for children with
multilingual repertoires).
Furthermore,
there is a key difference in the primary aims of flexible
multilingual education, as opposed to mother tongue education. The
latter is often concerned with the revitalization of a particular
local language, which is to be achieved through a struggle against
the hegemonic encroachment of (usually) English. In the process, it
sometimes overlooks the needs of particular groups of students such
as migrant students. On the other hand, the primary concern of
flexible multilingual education is to include all schoolchildren and
to provide them with high-quality access to the languages that they
need for educational and professional success. Take, for example, the
mother tongue education systems in francophone Canada or Catalonia.
The fact that the system may impede migrant students’ access to a
global language such as English is ignored by the mother tongue
education advocates, in whose eyes the maintenance of French or the
revitalization of Catalan is the overarching goal, in front of which
everything else pales in significance.
Finally,
with its focus on the standard variety of the assumed ‘mother
tongue’, mother tongue education frequently erases non-standard
varieties or ‘dialects’, which as a result are not seen as worth
preserving. This has happened in Singapore, where the focus on the
‘official’ mother tongue – Mandarin in the case of the Chinese
community – involves the deliberate eradication of all other
varieties of Chinese. Somewhat surprisingly, even academics tend to
look upon this as a highly successful language policy to the extent
that it has managed to supplant the different varieties – Hokkien,
Teochew, Cantonese, etc. – with the standard variety, Mandarin. The
same is happening in China, where nation-building efforts involve the
imposition of standard Chinese – here referred to as Putonghua –
and the marginalization of the other varieties of Chinese. In light
of the political nature of the distinction between language and
dialect, these are very disturbing policies and attitudes that seem
to be encouraged by mother tongue education: only the standard
variety is perceived as being in need of protection and preservation,
whereas non-standard varieties are largely erased and considered to
be worthless. Another example of this can be found in parts of South
Africa, where some mother tongue advocates object to the use of mixed
Xhosa-English varieties in the classroom – though these
correspond to many urban children’s actual home linguistic
resources – and aim to enforce instead the use of a ‘pure’,
standard variety of Xhosa, even though this may seem like a foreign
language to many students.
In my
book, I explore these and numerous other case studies from around the
world and show that flexible and child-centred multilingual education
programmes would be preferable to mother tongue education, in that
they would allow a full acknowledgement of the hybrid and
transnational linguistic repertoires that people actually deploy
in our late-modern, superdiverse societies.
Jean-Jacques Weber
is Professor of English and Education at the University of
Luxembourg. He has published widely in the areas of discourse
analysis, multilingualism and education, including Flexible Multilingual Education: Putting Children’s Needs First
(2014), Multilingualism and Mobility in Europe (2014), Multilingualism and Multimodality
(2013) and Introducing Multilingualism: A Social Approach (2012).
© Jean-Jacques
Weber 2014
Next post: Some languages are more languages than others. Saturday 26th July 2014.