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Abstract
The heterogeneous backgrounds, languages and proficiencies students bring to the classroom have always been a key challenge facing schools that wish to implement heritage language programmes. In this article I describe the evolution of one high school's approach to heritage language education and some of the roadblocks they encountered in attempting to boost student participation in heritage language classes during the senior-secondary years. Drawing on ethnographic observation of over two years as well as interviews with staff and students, I explore the complex ways in which top-down language-in-education policies work to favour some languages and types of speakers over others, and how course content and scheduling affect students' decisions to (not) study their heritage languages in the senior years. In doing so, my aim is not to argue the superiority of any one approach to programme design but, following Jaffe [2011. Critical perspectives on language-in-education policy: The Corsican example. In T. L. McCarty (Ed.), Ethnography and language policy (pp. 205–229). New York, NY: Routledge], to expose the implications of various choices and thereby help schools and policy-makers to better achieve their goals in running heritage language programmes.
Notes on contributor
Louisa Willoughby is a Lecturer in the Linguistics Program at Monash University. Her research focuses on language maintenance and language issues in education, health and disability service provision. She is particularly interested in how speakers use language to signal their membership of social groups and draw boundaries between in-group and out-group members.
Notes
1. A pseudonym. The school has since been amalgamated with others due to low numbers.
2. Victoria has 181 accredited Community Language schools, which in 2012 taught 43 languages to almost 37,000 students (Department of Education and Early Childhood Development, Citation2013, p. 60).
3. It should be noted that in Australia, the preferred term for heritage languages has actually been ‘community languages’, as it foregrounds the ongoing relevance of these languages to contemporary Australian life and their use by speakers from varied backgrounds (i.e. first-generation migrants, their children and grandchildren, non-heritage learners) (Clyne, Citation1991, p. 3). In cases where language are studied by significant numbers of non-heritage learners I will use the term ‘community languages’ in this article, but otherwise prefer the term ‘heritage language’ in order to foreground the familial or ancestral ties that connect heritage language learners to their particular language (Hornberger & Wang, Citation2008, p. 6).
4. It is Victorian government policy that Mandarin is the only Chinese language to be taught in government schools, and no other Chinese language is accredited for VCE exams.
5. In addition to the benefits of language maintenance, she felt it was particularly important for those students who are recent migrants to study their heritage language because it gives them one subject where they are not prevented from excelling because of difficulties with English.
6. International students were excluded from this study as, unlike local students, they do not have visa rights to remain in Australia after their education. They thus have a very different orientation to their first language than students who are long-term migrants to Australia.
7. Students may still be deterred by the inconvenience of having classes outside normal school hours and/or the additional commuting this may require, but at least the total time spent in classes per week is comparable to that of a student studying solely through a mainstream school.
8. At the time of writing a new national curriculum for languages was being developed. The proposed structure allows for three pathways for learners: traditional second-language learners, background speakers and first-language learners. However, for all languages except Chinese the only pathway being developed currently is the one that caters to the dominant cohort of students (ACARA, Citation2012).