The Languages of Africa and the Diaspora: Educating for Language Awareness

by Jo Anne Kleifgen (Editor), George C. Bond (Editor)

Overview

This book examines the social cost of linguistic exceptionalism for the education of speakers of nondominant/subordinated languages in Africa and the African diaspora. The contributors take the languages of Africa, the Caribbean, and the US as cases in point to illustrate the effects of exceptionalist beliefs that these languages are inadequate for instructional purposes. They describe contravening movements toward various forms of linguistic diversity both inside and outside of school settings across these regions. Different theoretical lenses and a range of empirical data are brought to bear on investigating the role of these languages in educational policies and practices. Collectively, the chapters in this volume make the case for a comprehensive language awareness to remedy the myths of linguistic exceptionalism and to advance the affirmative dimensions of linguistic diversity.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781788920865
Publisher:	Multilingual Matters Ltd.
Publication date:	02/17/2009
Series:	New Perspectives on Language and Education , #12
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	312
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

Jo Anne Kleifgen is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and Education, Teachers College, Columbia University, USA. Her publications include Educating Emergent Bilinguals: Policies, Programs, and Practices for English Language Learners (with Ofelia García; Teachers College Press, 2010) and Languages of Africa and the Diaspora: Educating for Language Awareness (with George C. Bond; Multilingual Matters, 2009).

George Clement Bond is the Director of the Center for African Education and William F. Russell Professor for Anthropology and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. His interests include education and elite formation in the United States and Africa, African studies, African religions and politics, agrarian transformations and cultural dimensions of urban and minority populations.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Discourses of Linguistic Exceptionalism and Linguistic Diversity in Education

JO ANNE KLEIFGEN

This book was initially inspired by Michel DeGraff's (2005) article in Language in Society, which challenges the theoretical assumptions and dogmas in the linguistic sciences and in popular culture about the nature and origins of Creole languages. DeGraff argues that, in Creole-origins discourse, these languages have been considered 'exceptional' – different from'normal' languages. Such linguistic exceptionalism is not reserved for Creoles alone: exceptionalist discourse is pervasive, and it contributes to the marginalization of a great number of vernacular varieties. In this volume, the contributors pay attention to the social cost of these myths of linguistic exceptionalism in education. In spite of years of research that sets out to refute these myths, many languages and language varieties still are considered exceptional in today's educational institutions, and by extension, students who speak these languages still are treated as 'exceptional', 'abnormal' and 'deficient', and thus in need of 'repair'. The authors in this volume take the languages of Africa and the African diaspora as cases in point to address several related issues. They argue that all languages have value – that is, they are all 'normal' and realized out of humans' innate linguistic potential – and that they are potentially powerful resources for learning. They demonstrate that, like all languages, African and diasporic languages are subject to change with people's increased contact in a globalized world – in this case within and between the African continent, the Caribbean and the United States – and these processes must be taken into account by educators and educational policy makers. Given these changing contexts, the authors highlight relationships between local and global dynamics of language and education within and between Africa and the diaspora. The problems related to exceptionalist beliefs in education and contravening movements toward various forms of diversity are common themes running through the chapters; the authors use different theoretical lenses and a range of empirical data to examine this diversity of voices in and out of the classroom.

From Africa to the Diaspora and Back Again

The African continent began to be linked to the western hemisphere through European trade routes from the 15th century, leading to language contact and change on both sides of the Atlantic. In the 21st century, movements of people between Africa, the Caribbean and the Americas (and elsewhere) have intensified and, as a result, educators today work with increasingly diverse language groups. The chapters in this volume are arranged to address this linguistic complexity in two parts: 'Language and Education in Africa' and 'Language and Education in the Diaspora'. Contributors to the first part address the overarching concerns that educators on the African continent are confronting about the role of European languages – a legacy of the colonial era – and the use of Africa's own languages in education. In the second part, the authors examine the role of diasporic languages in educating students in the Caribbean and the US, focusing on Creole speakers in both the Caribbean and the US, recent immigrants to the US who speak African languages and speakers of African American English. The authors make both historical and contemporary connections between the African continent and diasporic milieux.

The vision for this volume is embodied in three thematic strands: paradigms, practices and policies of language in education. In terms of paradigms, contributors pose theoretical and empirical arguments for a shift from exceptionalist to inclusionary thinking, thus opening the doors for everyone to a high quality education through schools that understand the complexities of linguistic diversity. With regard to practices, the book aims to help educators formulate informed views about language and innovative teaching for the students they serve. Finally, in terms of policies, contributors suggest ways in which policy makers can reshape education so that students' linguistic resources can be considered for their learning potential.

In this introductory chapter, I discuss the three themes recurring throughout the volume. In terms of paradigms, I survey the theoretical terrain, paying particular attention to the discourses of exceptionalism and diversity. This brief examination of exceptionalist discourse and its critics covers Creoles, African American English (AAE) and African languages. I trace the discourses of diversity by addressing how selected language scholars have grappled with this question since the end of the 19th century. I also refer readers to two key theorizing chapters in the volume, one on exceptionalism and the other on diversity. This overview of paradigms prepares the ground for a discussion of the other two themes: practices and policies in education. I argue that the ideas and facts assembled in these chapters constitute a call for concerted action to provide theoretically-informed pedagogy, including teacher preparation and classroom instruction, as well as enlightened language-education policies on behalf of students from diverse language backgrounds. Together, these action-oriented goals constitute a comprehensive and dynamic form of language awareness that leads to a high quality education for students on both sides of the Atlantic.

Transforming Paradigms

The discourse of exceptionalism

Linguistic exceptionalism myths abound in linguistic and educational literature as well as in society in general. DeGraff, in a series of publications (e.g. DeGraff, 2001, 2003, 2005) focuses on the theoretical flaws existing in Creole studies. He and others (e.g. Chaudenson, 2001; Mufwene, 2001; Muysken, 1988) write about linguistic and sociohistorical aspects of Creole languages. They provide linguistic evidence to show that Creole languages are not typologically 'unusual' in terms of morphosyntactic structure; in other words, they are neither 'impoverished' nor 'built from scratch'. They argue that Creoles are instead products of language contact and change as are all other human languages. As Mufwene (2001: 1) clearly states, 'Creoles have developed by the same restructuring processes that mark the evolutions of non-creole languages.' Further, these authors offer sociohistorical evidence showing that exceptionalist fallacies, with roots in early Creole-genesis theories and developed around languages that emerged out of colonialism and slavery, ultimately are related to theories of race (cf. Hill, 2001). DeGraff puts it succinctly: 'Creoles are no more and no less the result of extraordinary external factors [language contact through African enslavement] coupled with ordinary internal factors [humans' innate capacity for language]' (DeGraff, 1999: 477).

Exceptionalist myths have also been spread with regard to African American English (AAE), considered by many educators as 'bad English' or 'slang' needing to be corrected in school (e.g. Bereiter & Englemann, 1966). Speakers of AAE were regarded as 'disadvantaged' or 'culturally deprived' because of their purported 'linguistic deficits' (e.g. Deutsch, 1964) until William Labov's (1972) groundbreaking work, 'The logic of nonstandard English', demonstrated that AAE is a rule-governed variety of English. Unfortunately, despite the robust body of research on AAE, which grew out of Labov's work and continues to this day (e.g. Lanehart, 2001; Discourses of Linguistic Exceptionalism and Linguistic Diversity 3 Lippi-Green, 1997; Morgan, 1994; Rickford, 1999a; Spears, 1999; Wolfram & Thomas, 2002), the stigma attached to AAE remains, as borne out by more recent phenomena such as the contentious responses to the penetration of Hip Hop verbal art into popular discourse (e.g. Alim, 2006; Richardson, 2006; Yasin, 2001) and the 'Ebonics controversy' about the role of AAE in educating its speakers (e.g. Baugh, 2000; Richardson, 1997; Rickford, 1999b).

In the African sociolinguistic context, similar myths of linguistic exceptionalism are found. What counts as an African 'language' is based largely on linguistic descriptions by 19th century European missionaries and shaped by religious, territorial and other colonialist frames (cf. Errington, 2001). This 'invention' of languages, as Makoni and Pennycook (2006) put it, has been critiqued by a number of scholars (e.g. Harries, 1988; Irvine&Gal, 2000; Makoni&Mashiri, 2006). Makoni and Mashiri (2006: 68) point out that those who classified African languages did not take the speakers' own perspectives into account, and they 'excluded "mixed language" contact, vehicular languages and Creoles, which went undescribed because they were treated as ideologically marginal.' Given the neglect of these varieties, the languages of the colonizers became the default languages in government affairs and schooling in most countries. More recently, African scholars have begun to demonstrate the value of mother-tongue education in certain contexts, but they continue to grapple with decisions regarding which languages should have priority as languages of instruction (e.g. Brock-Utne & Hopson, 2005). Besides the disregard for local community languages and language varieties, many of Africa's urban-hybrid languages are targeted today as 'illegitimate' speech that interferes with the education of youth (e.g. Cook, 2002 and this volume; Githiora, 2002; Spitulnik, 1998; Swigart, 2001). In sum, language practices across the continent cover a whole spectrum of languages, varieties, mixtures and registers that are part of students' lived experiences and potentially relevant to their academic achievement. One effect of the colonial legacy is that many speakers of Africa's marginalized languages have themselves espoused the discourse of exceptionalism and look upon the colonizers' languages as languages of power and African languages as having no educational, social, or economic value (Stroud, 2001). (We elaborate on this problem inmore detail in our introductions to Part 1 and Part 2.)

In Chapter 7 of this volume, Michel DeGraff critically examines the concept of linguistic exceptionalism. He presents data from his native Haitian Creole to invalidate three canonical tropes in the exceptionalist discourse on Creoles:

(1) they are considered degenerate varieties of European languages;

(2) they are described as hybrids created by mapping the lexicon of a European language onto the syntax of an African language;

(3) they are said to have emerged suddenly in a catastrophic break in transmission, i.e. their structures were developed 'from scratch'.

He disproves these myths and discusses their social cost for the education of children in Haiti, where Haitian Creole is generally not considered a viable language of instruction, in spite of the fact that virtually all Haitians speak the language. DeGraff argues that a Cartesian-Uniformitarian theory of language puts speakers of Creole and African languages on a par with European languages because they are all based on universal properties of the human mind.

As DeGraff's chapter demonstrates, one way to delegitimize the discourse of exceptionalism and to dismantle false beliefs about languages is to expose their fallacies. As part of this exposure, work in generative linguistics shows that all humans possess the same linguistic capital, a Universal Grammar-based capital (cf. Chomsky, 1966). In this view, people everywhere possess the same linguistic capacity; thus their languages merit consideration as potentially legitimate vehicles for learning and other human endeavors.

The discourse of diversity

A second way to delegitimize the discourse of exceptionalism is by establishing an alternative discourse, that of linguistic diversity, which recognizes the complex intertwining of various language forms, which are put to different socially-situated uses. This approach takes into account both the equality underlying diverse linguistic forms and the diverse ways of communicating in society. Diversity entails, not just the languages people speak, but also the people speaking the languages. Of course, the discourse of linguistic diversity is not altogether new. As far back as the 19th century, research on multiple languages and language varieties was plentiful. Apart from dialectology, which emerged with the development of dictionaries and grammars inWestern Europe, historical linguistics was concerned with how languages change over time. Historical linguists developed comparative methods that uncovered systematic structural correspondences across a wide range of languages. Their work led to the discovery that many of these languages were members of a 'family', the Indo-European family of languages with a common ancestor.

This insight gave rise to comparative work in 20th century linguistics to account for this language family's diversification and geographic spread. It Discourses of Linguistic Exceptionalism and Linguistic Diversity 5 also gave rise to the question of how one might theoretically reconcile the notion of language as a unifying system with the diversity of languages changing geographically and over time. Enter Ferdinand de Saussure, the father of 20th century linguistics. His lectures delivered at the University of Geneva addressed complex historical, structural and social questions about language. Saussure is best known for his Cours de Linguistique Générale (1916/1966), which calls for a shift from diachronic (historical) to synchronic linguistics (the language system at a given point in time), and for a focus on the formal system of grammar rather than its realization in actual verbal performance. Yet this treatise, taken alone, limits our understanding of Saussure's thinking. Recent scholarship shows that Saussure thought of language as a 'two-fold essence' such that, despite the interpretations of his students, whose notes became the structure-centric Cours, Saussure's intellectual life was devoted to coming to terms with the relationship between langue and parole – between language as a unifying system and diversity in language use (cf. Gasparov, 2006a, 2006b; Sanders, 2006). According to notes written in his own hand, Saussure was also concerned with the social nature of language because:

while there may be psychological facts, and while there may be phonological facts, neither of the two series alone would ever be capable of giving rise to any linguistic fact whatsoever. For there to be a linguistic fact, the two series must exist in union ... (Saussure, 2006: 68)

Meanwhile in early 20th century USSR, ideas on linguistic diversity began to emerge from the Bakhtin Circle. Vološinov (1929/1973) also faced the linguist's universality–diversity quandary. In Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, he asked, 'What, then is the true center of linguistic reality: the individual speech act – the utterance – or the system of language?' (Vološinov, 1929/1973: 63). In answering this question, Vološinov contrasted the privileging of language-as-system in the Cours (without the benefit of Saussure's own recently discovered notes) with his own approach, which gives primacy to linguistic performance. Importantly, he insisted that 'the utterance is a social phenomenon' (Vološinov, 1929/1973: 82, emphasis in the original), where words are signs that take on meaning only through dialogue and in specific contexts. Thus, signs are, in his words, multiaccentual; diversity of meaning is worked out in social interaction.

Rooted in the work of Boas, Sapir and Whorf, thinking on diversity in languages and cultures in the US developed in the second half of the century, when Hymes (1972), in a response to Chomsky's notion of linguistic competence, used the term communicative competence to encompass not only the tacit knowledge of grammatical structure but also knowledge of how to use language appropriately, thus emphasizing the importance of the diversity of language practices in society. Gumperz (1964) introduced the concept of verbal repertoire to capture the full range of languages, varieties and styles that an individual or social group may deploy in social interaction. For Gumperz, the verbal repertoire bridges the gap between grammatical systems and human groups (1964: 54). His work on linguistic and cultural diversity includes studies of language varieties and bilingualism (e.g. Gumperz, 1971, 1982). This research focuses largely on a kind of multilingualism in which speakers have full control of all the languages and varieties that they use.

(Continues…)

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Table of Contents

1. Introduction: Discourses of Linguistic Exceptionalism and Linguistic Diversity in Education - Jo Anne Kleifgen

Part 1: Language and Education in Africa

Introduction to Part 1 - George C. Bond

2. African Perspectives on Linguistic Diversity: Implications for Language Policy and Education - Sinfree Makoni and Barbara Trudell

3. Language in Education in Africa: Can Monolingual Policies Work in Multilingual Societies? - Casmir Rubagumya

4. Perspectives, Challenges and Prospects of African Languages in Education: A Case Study of Kiswahili in Tanzania - Peter Mtesigwa

5. Languages, Literacies, and Libraries: A View From Africa - Kate Parry

6. Street Setswana vs. School Setswana: Language Policies and the Forging of Identities in South African Classrooms - Susan E. Cook

Part 2: Language and Education in the Diaspora

Introduction to Part 2 - Jo Anne Kleifgen

7. Creole Exceptionalism and the (Mis-)Education of the Creole Speaker - Michel DeGraff

8. Political and Cultural Dimensions of Creole as a Regional Language in the French Antilles - Ellen M. Schnepel

9. Success or Failure? Language, Tracking, and Social Stratification of Anglophone Caribbean Students - Shondel Nero

10. Sierra Leonean and Liberian Students in ESL Programs in the US: The Role of Creole English - Christa de Kleine

11. Continued Marginalization: The Social Costs of Exceptionalism for African Refugee Learners of English - Doris S. Warriner

12. Linguistic Profiling, Education, and the Law Within and Beyond the African Diaspora - John Baugh

13. On Shallow Grammar: African American English and the Critique of Exceptionalism - Arthur K. Spears

14. African American English and the Public Interest - Walt Wolfram

15. Rockin' the Classroom: Using Hip Hop as an Educational Tool - Jon A. Yasin

Index

Editorial Reviews

This is a rich collection of generally convergent, stimulating takes on the “Creole Exceptionalism” thesis. Extending it to African languages and African American English, most of the authors show the disastrous consequences of underrating and marginalizing these vernaculars in school. Other contributors apply the thesis to the profiling of African Americans, making it obvious that attitudes to these varieties reflect social prejudice toward their speakers. Still others show how a better understanding of structural and stylistic peculiarities of these vernaculars can be used profitably in education and the promotion of their speakers. Sadly, both contemporary Black Africa and its Diaspora still suffer from the European colonization’s legacy of devaluating the languages and manners of the subjugated populations, thereby disenfranchising them!

Salikoko S. Mufwene

This is a remarkable collection of articles that make a unique and important contribution to scholarship on language, learning, and linguistic diversity in Africa and the diaspora. Key researchers in the field address an exciting range of topics, from language policy and community libraries, to African American English and Creole as a regional language. It will be of great interest to applied linguists, language educators, and language planners.

Bonny Norton

This deeply informed and solidly grounded inquiry provides an illuminating perspective into the nature, variety, and social and cultural setting of languages of Africa and the diaspora, and implications for instruction and language policy. A very valuable contribution.

Noam Chomsky