By: Tianyi Long
Van Hertz (2018) discussed language mismatch of students in educational systems, stating that in communities, bilingual communities as an example, students may use different languages at homes and at school. Such phenomena were assumed to be negative, preventing students (especially working class students) from achieving academic success and endangering the trust of parents in the educational system. However, my engagement with my local communities provides examples of an alternative possible attitude toward the language mismatch: students or their families are eager to abandon their own language features to cope with that of educational system. Moreover, this attitude is most likely to happen among working class or immigrant families.
It may be important to note firstly, that today’s society still tends to regard some languages, registers, or speaking varieties as “more valued” than others. The word “valued” here means speakers of those languages are usually seen as belonging to a higher social status and/or have easier access to social resources. Languages used in educational systems are either an approximation of such valued languages, or at least a necessity to access higher education, which usually brings decent career and higher social status. Bearing these in mind, you may find my observations below are actually understandable:
There are occasions when families, usually from working class or lower social status backgrounds, feel the need to shape their children’s language competence (or repertoire) to approximate those valued languages. Further, they are willing to abandon their home languages or language features in order to achieve this.
For example, the Ningbo dialect spoken in my hometown is quite different from Mandarin, the Standard Chinese. Although the Ningbo dialect is their L1, many people of the older generation deliberately expose their children to, and communicate with them only in Mandarin, which is also the language of schooling. In some families (mine included), parents use dialects for communication with each other, but talk to the children in Mandarin, resulting to an imbalanced distribution of language competence with the children, usually being able to listen and comprehend, but not to speak the parents’ dialect.
The top concerns of those families are firstly to integrate children into the schooling system as smoothly as possible, and to erase possible dialect influences on children’s Mandarin accents so that they may sound more “educated”, or more “local” in the cases of immigrant families.
Whilst this attitude facilitates students’ language learning at school in general, thus my reference to “positive” above, and is usually positively described as “a strong learning motivation” by teachers and researchers, we can see there are hidden dangers. First, the epistemology behind such an attitude tends to be purely pragmatic, where the values of schooling and language learning are reduced to a pure tool for obtaining social resources. Individual development, therefore, is more or less neglected (for example, it does happen that the only expectation for some students is to obtain a diploma or university degree.). Second, abandoning the home languages often accompanies the abandoning of student’s ethnic or regional identity, and can be seen as a micro-scoped “colonisation” – conquering occurs when the major, dominant identity replaces and erases the minor, marginalised one.
Do you have similar observations in your learning/teaching/living community? Leave a comment and let me know!
References:
Van Herk, G.(2018). What is sociolinguistics? (2nd ed.). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell.
