Language Planning and Policy: Issues in Language Planning and Literacy
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Language Planning and Policy: Issues in Language Planning and Literacy
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781853599774 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Multilingual Matters Ltd. |
| Publication date: | 07/05/2007 |
| Series: | Language Planning and Policy , #5 |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.60(w) x 9.75(h) x 0.85(d) |
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CHAPTER 1
Language Planning for Literacy: Issues and Implications
Anthony J. LiddicoatResearch Centre for Languages and Cultures Education, School of International Studies, University of South Australia, Magill, Australia
Language planning for literacy has typically focused on models of provision of print-based literacy programmes in order to develop widespread literate capabilities in reading and writing. This paper argues that contemporary literacy planning needs to consider more than models of delivery and engage with issues related to defining the nature of literate capability and the selection of languages in which literate capabilities will be developed. It argues that these questions are fundamental to the literate futures of people in a globalised world.
Keywords: language planning, literacy, autonomous literacy, ideological literacy, functional literacy, multiliteracies
Introduction
Literacy development is one of the central objectives of languages-in-education planning and has developed increasing significance in recent decades. In particular, there has been a strong focus on planning for developing the literacy abilities of large sectors of the population as part of mass education both by governments and by NGOs such as UNESCO, the IMF and the World Bank. In part, the emphasis on literacy has grown out of a perception that literacy is fundamental to contemporary economic systems and that economic development depends on the provision of adequate levels of literacy to a wide segment of the population. In response to such goals for literacy, language planning has traditionally taken the form of determining how to inculcate literate capabilities in as wide a segment of the population as possible (Hornberger, 1994a; Watters, 1990). The key planning dimension of literacy, then, has been to determine how best to provide as much literacy training as possible within the resources available to the polity. Literacy itself in such perceptions may, however, be reified as the device which will transform society in significant ways by achieving extra-linguistic goals of economic development, social improvement or democratisation, although the ability of literacy to achieve such goals is, as Kaplan and Baldauf (1997) have noted, debatable.
Recently, and especially in the context of social and economic globalisation, the questions surrounding planning for literacy have become more complex than those relating to programme delivery. In particular, the nature of literate capabilities has itself changed as the result of changes in communicative practices, and there are now emerging new literacies prompted by communication change, which are both contrasted with and additional to, the old literacies associated with more traditional communicative practices. This means that language planning for literacy is no longer simply a matter of planning for improvements in a pedagogic method for teaching a stable version of print literacy but instead, needs to engage with emerging and evolving understandings, conceptualisations and definitions of what it means to be literate, how, where and in what contexts and in which modalities. As a consequence, language planning needs to articulate the nature of the valued literate practices in a polity as a definitional activity as much as it needs to engage with issues of implementation. This paper will examine two aspects of this emerging context for language planning for literacy – definitions of literacy and language selection – and some of the consequences of language planning choices around these.
The Nature of Literacy
A core issue in language planning and literacy lies in the way in which the activity being planned is defined and these definitions are potentially quite problematic. Auerbach et al. (1997: 6) state that, 'What counts as literacy changes depending on the historical time, the place, the purpose and the people'. The definition given to literacy in a particular polity shapes the kinds of policies that are developed and the teaching and learning practices that are adopted.
One dimension of the definitional problem involves determining which language skills are to be considered as literate capabilities and which will be the focus of education. The ways in which literacy is defined in language-planning contexts is influenced by and may be in tension with academic understandings of literacy, which increasingly focus on the complexity and multiplicity of literate capabilities. Definitions of literacy can privilege some literate capabilities – notably print-based reading and writing – over others and in so doing can limit the scope of literacy programmes and the outcomes of literacy learning.
For example, the OECD defines literacy as 'using printed and written information to function in society in order to achieve one's goals, and to develop one's knowledge and potential' (OECD & Statistics Canada, 2000: x) and further identifies three 'domains' of literacy skills:
• prose literacy – the knowledge and skills needed to understand and use information from texts including editorials, news stories, brochures and instructional manuals;
• document literacy – knowledge and skills needed to locate and use information contained in various formats, including job applications, payroll forms, transportation schedules, maps, tables and charts;
• quantitative literacy – the knowledge and skills required to apply arithmetic operations, either alone or sequentially, to numbers embedded in printed materials, such as balancing a cheque book, figuring out a tip, completing an order form or determining the amount of interest on a loan from an advertisement. (OECD & Statistics Canada, 2000: x)
The definition of literacy given here is very much based on a view of print literacy with the reading of written information being privileged as the central literacy skill. While the OECD definitions include a dimension of use for information, it is not clear from the discussion of the domains that this use involves much writing, beyond filling in forms. Kaplan and Baldauf (2003) argue that literacy has historically been defined in terms of reading more than writing because of an inherent assumption that extensive reading will ensure an ability to write. Moreover, writing instruction has focused on surface correctness and orthography rather than on communication through the written language.
Literacy, especially in the context of mass literacy campaigns, has also been conceptualised in terms of functional literacy, which has as its aim to equip the illiterate with the skills and knowledge which ensure competence to function as workers and citizens in a print-dominated society. The functionality of functional literacy is, therefore, related directly to the economic functioning of the literate subject (Bhola, 1994). Initial definitions of functional literacy were, however, not framed simply as issues of economic functionality. For example, UNESCO's original definition of functional literacy is highly contexted within the person's existing cultural framework:
A person is functionally literate when he [sic] has acquired the knowledge and skills in reading and writing which enable him to engage effectively in all those activities in which literacy is normally assumed in his culture or group. (Grey, 1956: 19)
Levine argues that the development of economically focused functional literacy was the result of an increasingly utilitarian turn in mass literacy campaigns in the framing of the advantages of literacy:
After the disappointment and failures of previous literacy schemes, the new literacy thinking – adult, selective, developmental, participative – required a label that suggested the economic benefits that could be expected from investment in literacy, and 'functional' carried appropriate overtones. Nevertheless, history clearly shows how functional literacy was at an early stage adopted in a series of political, military, educational, and diplomatic arenas by parties who needed a label for their convictions regarding the economic potential of, and justification for, mass training for adults in basic literacy skills. (Levine, l982: 35)
Functional literacy is, therefore, a view of literacy which creates a dichotomy between the literate and the illiterate and sees those who are illiterate as being limited in their value in terms of human capital. It aims to overcome this defect by enabling people to fit more fully into existing social and economic circumstances, practices and roles from which they are barred by their illiteracy. This view equates, as Kaplan and Baldauf (1997, 2002) have noted, with a simplistic medical metaphor of the literate state in which being illiterate is equated with a disease for which remedy must be found, and literacy programmes are associated with metaphors of eradication (e.g. the common slogan 'stamp out illiteracy'). This metaphor stigmatises the literate state and not only oversimplifies the nature of literacy and illiteracy, but also ignores the fact that for some people and in some language circumstances, literacy may not be either necessary or desirable and may impact negatively on the linguistic ecology in which inappropriate literacy practices are introduced (Messineo & Wright, 1989; Mühlhäusler, 1992, 1996, 2000).
Functional approaches to literacy have been criticised because they aim to equip literacy learners only with sufficient competence to operate at the lowest levels of mechanical performance required to meet the demands of a print-dominated culture (Kozol, 1985). In his critique of functional literacy programme in India, Agnihoti (1994) notes that: '... the best we have been able to do so far is to move slightly away from "writing your name" and "counting to ten" to a highly minimalised functionalist concept of literacy' (Agnihoti, 1994: 55). Similarly, Lankshear (1993: 94) further argues that, 'Functional literacy equips the person to respond to outside demands, to understand and to follow. There is no suggestion here of leading, commanding, mastering or controlling'. That is, it does not function to expand the possibilities of the newly literate beyond their existing social and economic context, but rather to develop their potential as human capital. This means that to be functionally literate can be seen as a negative state in which the literate person avoids failure to cope in the society in which he or she lives (Lankshear, 1993).
The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) literacy programmes from the mid-1960s used goals and strategies that were closely linked to developing literacy skills for economic growth. The programme aimed to promote functional literacy for specific groups of adults in key growth sectors of the economy so that literacy instruction would make them better workers. The net result of the programme in the participating countries was generally disappointing (UNESCO/UNDP, 1976) because the issue of learner motivation had been neglected and the workers in the sectors selected for the programme could see no direct advantage to themselves in becoming more productive human capital (Limage, 1999). The lack of direct benefit to participants, rather than to economies, is a common problem for functional literacy programmes. The result was that the term functional literacy took on a specific ideological connotation of creating amore efficient workforce without consideration of the needs and aspirations of individuals. This connotation further affected the extent to which literacy programmes could achieve even limited functional objectives. For example, UNESCO (1974) reported that a functional literacy programme for a mining community in Brazil failed because it was perceived as irrelevant to the needs and aspirations of the workers themselves and was at best thought to be an attempt on the part of mining companies to appear more humane, especially at a time when the military government had repressed earlier experimentation with literacy for political and social liberation based on the work of Freire (Limage, 1999).
In spite of the problems which came to be associated with the term functional literacy and which were recognised by UNESCO, the term continued to be used including in documents relating to the International Year of Literacy in 1990, although with fluctuating definitions (e.g. UNESCO, 1990). The term was used both to indicate functionality in reference to work rather than to the individual's autonomy and development and also implying a broader utilitarian mastery of the written word (Limage, 1999). In addition, functionality has been used to classify people into the dichotomy of 'functional' literate and 'functional' illiterate to refer to individuals in industrialised countries who have gone through part or all of the formal system of education but failed to acquire basic skills to 'function in society' (Giere, 1987). The result has been an emerging dichotomy between the functionally illiterate, who are those in industrialised societies without the skills to participate fully in economic life and the illiterate, who are those in developing countries without literacy skills (Limage, 1999).
An example of a recent literacy programme which reflects the limited scope of functional literacy programmes can be seen in recent literacy planning work from Indonesia (Department of National Education Indonesia, 1999). The planning for the literacy programme involves the standard activities for programme delivery: developing training manuals and handbooks; training personnel; setting up delivery; establishing targets; evaluating outcomes; and measuring learner achievements. There is little attempt to describe the nature of the literacy needs of the learners themselves, nor of the literate goals beyond a statement that 'there are many citizens with minimal education who do not have the functional literacy competencies they need for solving problems in daily life'.
This formulation locates the literate needs of individuals within the context of dealing with the literacy demands of their current social position. The economically focused construction of literacy, however, becomes much more clearly articulated in the assessment checklist used to measure the new literates' achievements. These include:
• Reading and writing ability to fill out a biodata form.
• Ability to organise the steps and write instructions for a process.
• Mechanical ability to fill in each segment of a table accurately.
• Mechanical ability to line up numbers by the decimal point.
• Ability to add a column of numbers.
• Understanding of production units.
• Understanding of unit cost.
• Ability to multiply unit cost and production units.
• Ability to calculate profit/loss.
• Quantitative amount of writing.
• Spelling ability.
• Mechanical ability to write clearly and form neat letters.
• Ability to organise words into aparagraph with sentences and punctuation.
• Ability to combine phrases into complete and complex sentences.
• Ability to explain an idea clearly.
• Ability to understand the questions. (Department of National Education Indonesia, 1999: 24–5)
The focus here, especially in the items listed in the middle of the checklist, is clearly on economic tasks, along with lower-level literacy skills. There is no critical dimension to the construction of literacy, nor is there a central concern with developing the ability to locate and access information even within the print-based focus of the practices involved. The literacy programme focuses on making illiterates into better functioning components of the state economy rather than developing emancipatory literacy practices.
These criticisms of functional literacy have been made most strongly in the context of adult literacy programmes for educational development, where literacy has a historical role in the maintenance or suppression of marginal groups (Welch & Freebody, 1993). Literacy programmes which fail to do more than maintain people in situations of dependency can be regarded as an exercise in what Freire (1970) has called falsa generosidade 'false generosity' in that the literate capabilities the programme develops make the people more useful as productive elements for the economy without significantly altering their social and/or economic status.
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