From right to left on the whiteboard Shazia Siddique writes in Urdu the names of the five seasons — yes there are five, including the rainy season — and explains to her attentive class of 13 to 14-year-olds that by the end of the lesson they should be able to read, write and speak about them fluently.
Her class in Lister community school in east London is very much an exception to the rule and, based on current trends, is unlikely to change. A new report published by school inspectors reveals that in 2007 just 35 individuals were training to teach Arabic, Bengali, Cantonese, Mandarin, Punjabi, Turkish and Urdu, and that no courses existed for training to teach Gujarati.
The report has turned the spotlight on the position of community languages in the United Kingdom’s education system. At its heart lies a question of status. Spanish, French and Latin are considered to be prestigious qualifications but community languages are often dismissed as irrelevant or second rate.
Siddique is challenging this hierarchy in her school. “Community language teachers often tell me they feel isolated and unequal,” she says, “but I don’t see myself as any less than any other language teacher.” Since she started teaching at Lister, Siddique has raised the status of her language and there is now a bigger uptake of Urdu than French and Spanish among language students, with 10% of the school’s 1 500 population studying it.
This achievement, Siddique explains, has largely been her own. She had to move from London to Liverpool, in north west England, for her teacher training and, once qualified, had to hunt hard for teaching resources.
“Students want to learn in a way they are used to with other languages — using ITC and tapes and games,” she says. “But there was so little available I had to translate exercises from French and Spanish books — it’s taken me eight years to build up my materials.”
The situation in the university sector is no better. A new report from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and the University of Stirling, central Scotland, found no degree courses available in Urdu, Cantonese, Punjabi and Bengali — the four most widely used community languages in England.
Joanna McPake, an expert in community languages and co-writer of the report, argues that in an era of globalisation this is a wasted opportunity. “We need a diversity of language speakers if we are to deal with the diplomatic, economic, technological and cultural situations that occur across the world,” she says. “A blanket application of French as a second language is no longer helpful.”
Although some languages, such as Mandarin and Arabic, have been encouraged because they are seen as growing in economic potential, new courses have tended to target beginners rather than community-language speakers.
Integrating community languages into mainstream institutions is a sign of their status and respect. Where this has been done, community relations have improved.
Siddique explains: “I feel merged into the British system and I like it — I don’t want to be isolated. It’s good for the students too — they think: ‘If Urdu is accepted, then I’m accepted, I’m part of this system and this culture.'”
Those who oppose increasing mainstream teaching point out that these language services are often already provided by communities.
So why the need for state-sponsored provision? Besides arguments to do with equal status and resources, there is a question of training. Jim Anderson, who works in teacher training at Goldsmiths (University of London), explains how formal training can enrich community-language teaching rather than replace it. “Almost all community language teachers are native speakers and educated overseas, where the teaching styles are often teacher-centred and didactic,” he says.
After class, Siddique tells me that targeted training also helped her deal with the range of abilities in community-language classes, as well as giving her access to mainstream support networks.
So, what’s preventing the UK from training more teachers like Siddique? Anderson thinks it’s a chicken-and-egg problem: “Schools say they can’t employ community language teachers because there is no one available, but we can’t attract people to do [teacher training] courses unless we have schools to employ them.”
In Siddique’s classroom, where the pupils switch from Urdu to English without blinking, languages seem far from mutually exclusive. For her students, as for the education system as a whole, it seems that a multilingual conversation has been started that cannot be ignored. —