Signalling L2 centrality, maintaining L1 dominance: teacher language choice in an ethnic minority primary classroom in the Lao PDR

Abstract

Although the Lao People's Democratic Republic has speakers of up to 230 different languages belonging to four ethnolinguistic families, the Lao Government's policy as stated in its Education Law is that Lao is the official language of education at all levels. This creates a challenging situation for teachers in ethnic minority villages throughout the country, where students often begin school with no knowledge of the Lao language. This paper explores the language practices of one teacher in a combined Grade 3 and 4 ethnic minority classroom. It describes how this teacher balances the constraints on him to use Lao as the central language of teaching with his belief in using the students’ mother tongue to allow effective teaching and learning to occur. The teacher uses the students’ L1 not only in the ways expected of him by national-level policy-makers and planners, or in those often described in the literature on similar contexts, but also in unexpected and creative ways. This has important implications for education policy and planning, particularly in areas such as teacher recruitment, training and deployment, as well as for our understanding of bi- and multilingual classroom behaviour.

Keywords:

• bilingual education
• classroom discourse
• codeswitching
• language-in-education
• minority education

Notes

1. These are as follows, in order of numerical dominance: Tai-Kadai, Austroasiatic, Hmong-Mien and Sino-Tibetan.

2. This paper is drawn from a doctoral dissertation examining language practices in three ethnic Kmhmu classrooms in the Nalae District and their relationship to official policies and discourses on language, education and ethnicity in Laos. The project involved discourse analysis of policy documents in Lao, interviews with key policy-makers and planners, ethnographic observation, classroom observation and interviews with teachers.

3. Reliable population figures are unavailable, but at the time of the research, over 70% of the villages in the district were ethnic Kmhmu.

4. As Kmhmu and Lao are unrelated, knowledge of one does not generally facilitate knowledge of the other. However, Kmhmu and the Nalae dialect of Lao do share some lexis, because of borrowing of lexical items in both directions. They also share a subject–verb–object (SVO) word order and some other syntactical/morphological features, including lack of inflection for person, number and tense.

5. Khamsuk was observed to be unfamiliar with some botanical terms in Kmhmu when teaching a unit on plants. He also reported that he was unfamiliar with some specialised ritual language commonly used by Kmhmu people when participating in ceremonies.

6. The research was carried out exclusively in Lao and Kmhmu. The researcher is fluent in spoken and written Lao to a professional level and competent enough in conversational Kmhmu to understand the majority of classroom interaction.

7. Documents included the following: the Lao Constitution (People's Supreme Assembly 1996); ‘Resolution of the Central Party Organization Concerning the Affairs of Various Minorities, Especially the Hmong Minority’ (Central Party Organization 1981); ‘Resolution of the Central Party Organization Concerning Ethnic Minority Affairs in the New Era’ (Central Party Organization 1992); the Education Law (Lao Ministry of Education 2000/2002); the Education for All National Plan of Action (Ministry of Education 2005); and ‘Papers from the Meeting on Ethnic Minority Affairs in Provincial Governance’ (Lao Front for National Construction 1996).

8. Interviews were conducted with: the Head of the Gender and Ethnic Minority Unit, Ministry of Education; the Deputy Head of General Education, Ministry of Education; the Head of Teacher Training, Ministry of Education; the Director of the National Research Institute for Educational Sciences; and the Head of the Ethnic Minority Education Unit, Ministry of Education.

9. Lao is written using a Roman orthography here for the sake of non-Lao speakers. The Lao language is rendered in normal script and Kmhmu in bold. Words or phrases which could be either Lao or Lao words borrowed into Kmhmu (and thus Kmhmu) are underlined.