English in the Global Classroom

February 24, 2009 - In a Delhi classroom, the teacher corrects a student's arithmetic error: "Jitne ki table hai utne ko hi aage plus karma hai," she begins.

English is the language of instruction in this Indian classroom, but Amarjeet, the teacher, draws simultaneously on Hindi and English to explain the intricacies of multiplication.

As English emerges as the world's lingua franca, such scenes are playing out in more and more schools across the globe. And for educational linguists like Nancy Hornberger, they are evidence of the ways that multilingualism can thrive even when English is the official language of instruction.

Recently, Hornberger joined with Viniti Vaish, an assistant professor at Singapore's Centre for Research in Pedagogy and Practice, to explore the tensions between multilingualism and English-language instruction in three very different countries.

For none of the three — India, Singapore, and South Africa — is English the most frequently spoken language at home. Still, in all of them, the demand for English-medium instruction is rising.

They share other similarities as well: all are ethnically diverse and, for all, English instruction carries with it a fair amount of colonial baggage. What is more, each has chosen a policy that diverges from the one-language model favored by the U.S. and, rather, embraces multiple languages as equally representative of the nation.

In Singapore, Mandarin, Malay, English, and Tamil are co-official languages, with Malay the national language. India recognizes 22 languages, all of which can be included in the educational curriculum, while South Africa recognizes 11. In all three countries, multilingualism is viewed as a resource — both in the halls of government and on the street.

Despite that very real commitment to multilingualism, official policy can be difficult to translate into the give-and-take of the classroom. As Hornberger and Vaish put it, "The central tension we see between the process of globalization and school linguistic practice is the rising demand for the linguistic capital of English, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the challenge to bilingual programs to meet this demand bymobilizing the child's mother tongue as a resource."

To see just how teachers and students are managing these challenges, the researchers went into the classroom. And what they found there points to a possible resolution to the dilemma.

From India to Singapore to South Africa, teachers drew on the entire range of linguistic "capital" in their classrooms. According to Hornberger and Vaish, teachers and students alike adopt "hybrid multilingual classroom practices." That is, they exploit all the linguistic resources at their disposal — mother tongue, dialects, English — to do the work of teaching and learning.

So Singaporean students in an English-language classroom ask their questions in the colloquial dialect of Singlish while teachers in South Africa provide simultaneous exposure to English and Xhosa through interactive writing techniques.

And in Delhi, Amerjeet switches between English and Hindi to unlock the mysteries of the multiplication tables.

To read the paper Hornberger and Vaish wrote, click here.