Ideologies and Interactions in Multilingual Education: What Can an Ecological Approach Tell Us about Bilingual Pedagogy?

A. CREESE and A. BLACKLEDGE

Introduction

This chapter uses the metaphor of language ecology to consider language practices and ideologies in complementary schools. Complementary schools are also known as supplementary, community language, mother tongue language and heritage language schools. They are voluntary, outside the state system, established and run by community members. There is great diversity in provision. Our particular focus is on schools that explicitly aim to teach a community language. The schools in our study are held either at the weekend on Saturdays and Sundays or after school during the week. They tend to meet for around 2-3 hours weekly and more or less keep to the same term dates of mainstream schools. Since 2002, we have researched complementary schools to look at identity, learning and linguistic repertoires of young people and teachers. The complementary schools we researched were Bengali, Chinese, Gujarati and Turkish in Birmingham, Manchester, Leicester and London, respectively. The project aimed to explore the social, cultural and linguistic significance of complementary schools both within their communities and in wider society, and to investigate how linguistic practices of students and teachers in complementary schools are used to negotiate their multilingual and multicultural identities.

Language Ecology: An Interactional Perspective

The study of language ecology is the study of diversity within specific sociopolitical settings where the processes of language use create, reflect and challenge particular hierarchies and hegemonies, however transient these might be. An ecological perspective on multilingualism is 'essentially about opening up ideological and implementational space in the environment for as many languages as possible' (Hornberger, 2002: 30). At its heart is the dialectic between the local interactional and the social ideological. An ecological perspective warns us against too easily reaching comprehensive tidy findings. Kramsch suggests that we use an ecological framework to voice the 'contradictions, the unpredictabilities, and paradoxes that underlie even the most respectable research in language development' (Kramsch, 2002: 8; Kramsch & Steffensen, 2008).

The language ecology metaphor offers a way of studying the interaction in order to explore how social ideologies, particularly around multilingualism get created and implemented. Creese and Martin (2003, 2008) describe classrooms as ecological micro systems. They argue for the importance of exploring ecological minutiae of interactional practices in classrooms, linking these to the ideologies that pervade language choice and language policy. A similar point is made by Jaffe (2008) who describes a need for 'microecologies' of linguistic, social, political and pedagogical practice (Jaffe, 2008: 225). It is in the detail of the interactional that ideologies are formed. As Silverstein argues,

the macro-sociological is really a projective order from within a complex, and ever changing, configuration of interdiscursivities in micro-contextual orders, some of which, it turns out, at any given moment of macro-order diachrony asymmetrically determine others. (Silverstein, 2003: 202)

Silverstein shows that the dominant macro social order is a manifestation of smaller, local and iterative micro orders some of which dominate the macro ideological order more than others. In taking a classroom ecological perspective, with a specific focus on multilingualism, we can explore how cultural reproduction is framed locally (Erickson, 1990). The purpose of this chapter is to consider how the multilingual orientation of compl ementary schools frame bilingual pedagogy as an ideology and how teachers and students practise it locally and interactionally. In the larger macro ideological order, which is increasingly hostile to multilingualism and multiculturalism through its enforcement of monolingualism in society (Blackledge, 2005; Rassool, 2008) complementary schools provide an alternative (Mirza & Reay, 2000), safe (Martin, 2005) and multilingual (Hornberger, 2005) space for institutional bilingualism. We consider the possibilities they present to challenge the monolingual macro order.

Participants in complementary schools have various views and practices about what constitutes bilingualism and how languages should be taught, learnt and maintained (see Creese et al., 2008). One view is that language boundaries are clear and sacrosanct; in other words, in complementary schools a 'language' should be preserved and kept free from contamination by other sets of linguistic resources. A second view is that in practice, bilinguals do not make a distinction between the various signs which they use to convey meaning; that is they do not experience their language use as 'bilingual' or consisting of different languages, rather they draw on whatever semiotic signs are available to them to make meanings. Both views and practices run alongside one another in complementary schools (see Creese & Blackledge, 2010).

Complementary schools are different from other language teaching and learning contexts, such as English as an additional language (EAL) and modern foreign language (MFL) in mainstream schools because of their focus on the community context. Complementary schools are institutions which endorse multilingualism as a usual and normative resource for identity performance (Creese et al., 2006; Martin et al., 2006) and which strive to...