(PDF) Language In Development Constrained: Three Contexts

VOLUMES MENU QUARTERLY Founded 1966 CONTENTS SPECIAL-TOPIC ISSUE: LANGUAGE IN DEVELOPMENT ARTICLES Language in Development: Questions of Theory, Questions of Practice 265 Numa Markee Hold Your Courses: Language Education, Language Choice, and Economic Development 275 Paul Bruthiaux Pathways and Labyrinths: Language and Education in Development 297 Eddie Williams and James Cooke Language in Development Constrained: Three Contexts 323 Roslyn Appleby, Kath Copley, Sisamone Sithirajvongsa, and Alastair Pennycook The Role of English in Individual and Societal Development: A View From African Classrooms 347 Ailie Cleghorn and Marissa Rollnick cclviii TESOL QUARTERLY Volume 36, Number 3 䊐 Autumn 2002 Postcoloniality and English: Exploring Language Policy and the Politics of Development in Tanzania 373 Frances Vavrus Determining the Cost Benefit, the Return on Investment, and the Intangible Impacts of Language Programs for Development 399 William M. Martin and Anne E. Lomperis Language in Development in the United States: Supervising Adult ESOL Preservice Teachers in an Immigrant Community 431 Betsy Rymes A Developmental Perspective on Technology in Language Education 453 Mark Warschauer Information for Contributors 477 Editorial Policy General Information for Authors TESOL Order Form TESOL Membership Application REVIEWS cclix QUARTERLY Volume 36, Number 3 䊐 Autumn 2002 A Journal for Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages Founded 1966 and of Standard English as a Second Dialect Editor CAROL A. CHAPELLE, Iowa State University Guest Editor NUMA MARKEE, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Reviews Editor ROBERTA J. VANN, Iowa State University Assistant Editor ELLEN GARSHICK, TESOL Central Office Assistant to the Editor SHANNON SAURO, Iowa State University Editorial Advisory Board Dwight Atkinson, John Levis, Temple University Japan Iowa State University J. D. Brown, Lourdes Ortega, University of Hawaii at Manoa Northern Arizona University Suresh Canagarajah, James E. Purpura, Baruch College, City University Teachers College, Columbia University of New York Steven Ross, Micheline Chalhoub-Deville, Kwansei Gakuin University University of Iowa Miyuki Sasaki, John Flowerdew, Nagoya Gakuin University City University of Hong Kong Kelleen Toohey, Carol Fraser, Simon Fraser University Glendon College, York University Jessica Williams, Linda Harklau, University of Illinois at Chicago University of Georgia Devon Woods, Ryuko Kubota, Carleton University The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Additional Readers Steve Andrews, Katherine Bailey, Robert Bayley, Cathrine Berg, Joan Carson, Hywel Coleman, Graham Crookes, Fred Davidson, Kathryn Davis, Chris Davison, Dan Douglas, Zoltán Dörnyei, Patricia Duff, Andrea Golato, Susan Gonzo, Greta Gorsuch, Liz Hamp-Lyons, Adrian Holliday, Awad Ibrahim, Karen E. Johnson, Chris Kennedy, Diane Larsen-Freeman, Defeng Li, Kim McDonough, Peter Master, Carla Meskill, Gayle Nelson, Robert Phillipson, Bill Savage, Jon Shaw, Ann Snow, James Tollefson, Alan Waters, Jim Witte, Vivian Zamel Credits Advertising arranged by Suzanne Levine, TESOL Central Office, Alexandria, Virginia U.S.A. Typesetting by Capitol Communication Systems, Inc., Crofton, Maryland U.S.A. Printing and binding by Pantagraph Printing, Bloomington, Illinois U.S.A. Copies of articles that appear in the TESOL Quarterly are available through ISI Document Solution, 3501 Market Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104 U.S.A. Copyright © 2002 Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages, Inc. US ISSN 0039-8322 REVIEWS cclvii is an international professional organization for those concerned with the teaching of English as a second or foreign language and of standard English as a second dialect. 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. OFFICERS AND BOARD OF DIRECTORS 2002–2003 President Mark Algren Jun Liu MARY LOU McCLOSKEY University of Kansas University of Arizona Atlanta, GA USA Lawrence, KS USA Tucson, AZ USA Nancy Cloud Lucilla LoPriore President-elect Rhode Island College Italian Ministry of Education AMY SCHLESSMAN Warwick, RI USA Rome, Italy Evaluation, Instruction, Design Tucson, AZ USA Aysegul Daloglu Anne V. Martin Northern Arizona University Middle East Technical Syracuse University Flagstaff, AZ USA University Syracuse, NY USA Ankara, Turkey Barbara Schwarte Past President Eric Dwyer Iowa State University NEIL J. ANDERSON Florida International Ames, IA USA Brigham Young University University Betty Ansin Smallwood Provo, UT USA Miami, FL USA Center for Applied Linguistics Aileen Gum Washington, DC USA Secretary City College CHARLES S. Beth Witt San Diego, CA USA AMOROSINO, JR. Chinle Elementary School Alexandria, VA USA Constantine Ioannou Chinle, AZ USA Ottawa-Carleton District Jean Zukowski/Faust Treasurer School Board Northern Arizona University MARTHA EDMONDSON Ottawa, ON Canada Flagstaff, AZ USA Washington, DC USA cclx TESOL QUARTERLY QUARTERLY Founded 1966 Editor’s Note ■ As guest editor, Numa Markee has collected a fascinating sample of TESOL-related development work in this issue, which helps define the domain of language in development as it pertains to TESOL. Taking readers from the detailed perspectives of learners and development workers to those of theorists and business people, the articles attest to the complexity of language-related development issues, which transcend the traditional bound- aries of academic areas and geographical regions. On behalf of the TESOL Quarterly readership, I thank Numa for his insight in defining language in development as a topic for a special-topic issue of TESOL Quarterly and for shaping it in a way that speaks directly to the concerns of the TESOL profession. Carol A. Chapelle In This Issue ■ The eight articles in this issue lay out some of the major theoretical and practical issues that face L2 specialists working in the area of language in development. • Arguing that the most important goal of development work is poverty reduction, Paul Bruthiaux examines the microlending literature in economics to make the case that the poorest of the poor—usually women—need direct access to relatively modest lines of credit to improve their own lives. The linguistic dimensions of this position are that the most important educational priority for borrowers is to become literate in their own native languages. Conversely, Bruthiaux argues that English-medium education is an expensive luxury that is largely irrelevant for the majority of the population in poor countries. IN THIS TESOL ISSUE Vol. 36, No. 3, Autumn 2002 QUARTERLY 261 • Eddie Williams and James Cooke provide an extensive review of the literature on the links that exist among language, literacy, education and economic development. The authors compare and contrast how the trajectories of economic development and literacy differ in rich and poor countries, and raise the important question of whether literacy is a cause or by-product of development. They, too, argue that the use of an L2 (typically English or French) as a medium of instruction by poor countries is likely to have a negative impact on the quality of the education students receive. • Roslyn Appleby, Kath Copley, Sisamone Sithirajvongsa, and Alastair Pennycook explore the political, ethical, and professional dilemmas faced by ESL professionals working in the context of Australian language aid projects in Laos, East Timor, and Cambodia. The authors use each of these environments to illuminate how language aid practitioners have to deal with issues of language choice, ownership, and political context. Based on these practical experiences, they develop the beginnings of a theoretical framework for understanding the sociopolitical context of language in development work. • Ailie Cleghorn and Marissa Rollnick examine how teachers and learners in eastern and southern Africa code switch between English and their L1s in science and mathematics lessons. The authors use empirical classroom data to show that code switching is a valuable linguistic resource for education. More specifically, this behavior enables teachers and learners to discuss abstract concepts that would be difficult to communicate about if they restricted themselves to using English only in the classroom. • Frances Vavrus provides a critical analysis of the language-in-education situation in Tanzania, documenting how teachers and learners per- ceive English as a resource for personal development. She argues that “knowing English” (however imperfectly) is viewed by Tanzanians as an essential symbolic attribute of being an educated person. Thus, a critical issue for ESL researchers and teachers working in language-in- development contexts is to negotiate a delicate balance between the actual and symbolic properties of English as a medium of instruction in Tanzania. • William M. Martin and Anne E. Lomperis develop a framework for specifying and evaluating clients’ needs in English for occupational purposes programs in terms of cost-benefit analyses. The authors show how government agencies and nongovernmental organizations in- volved in language in development work can develop language pro- grams in terms of likely returns on investment and evaluate program- matic impacts on learners, organizations, and the larger community. • Betsy Rymes reports on a community-based teacher education project, in which preservice ESL teachers developed language curricula for a Latino community in the United States. Rymes shows how many of the 262 TESOL QUARTERLY issues that characterize language in development work in poor EFL countries also affect ESL instruction in the United States and other rich countries. This suggests that all ESL teacher educators, whether they are geographically based in rich or poor countries, are potentially engaged in language-in-development work. • Mark Warschauer reports on a U.S.-funded language aid project in Egypt that trained Egyptian ESL instructors to integrate information technologies with language instruction. Warschauer argues that lan- guage and technology are both tools for individual and societal development. Accordingly, he frames his study within a diffusion-of- innovations perspective and analyzes the developmental processes and products of the project. Numa Markee, Guest Editor IN THIS ISSUE 263 Language in Development: Questions of Theory, Questions of Practice NUMA MARKEE University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Urbana, Illinois, United States This article reviews three main themes that come into focus in this special-topic issue on the emerging subfield of language-in-development studies: (a) basic definitional issues, (b) issues of the locus and scope of language in development, and (c) the role of English and other languages in language in development. The article proposes a working definition of language in development as the resolution of practical language-related problems in the context of individual and societal development, where language is defined in terms of communicative competence, and development, as a reduction in participants’ vulnerabil- ity to things they do not control. It then recounts the genesis of this definition in terms of the author’s research and professional field experience in language aid and curricular innovation work in rich and poor countries. A critical summary of the second and third issues identified above then shows how each contributor’s paper extends or critiques these preliminary insights. W hat is language in development ? This special-topic issue of TESOL Quarterly provides a preliminary account of the kinds of theoretical and practical questions that constitute language-in-development work. More specifically, the authors who have contributed to this issue address the following concerns: 1. What are the important definitional and terminological issues in language in development? 2. What are the locus and scope of language in development? 3. What is the role of English and other languages in language in development? In order to situate the articles that make up this special-topic issue, I offer a working definition of language in development and outline its genesis. I then show how this issue extends and critiques the definition. TESOL QUARTERLY Vol. 36, No. 3, Autumn 2002 265 A DEFINITION OF LANGUAGE IN DEVELOPMENT Language in development focuses on the resolution of practical language-related problems in the context of individual and societal development, where language is defined in terms of communicative competence (Halliday, 1971/1979; Hymes, 1972/1979), and development, as a reduction in participants’ vulnerability to things they do not control (Goulet, 1971). This definition may seem intimidatingly abstract, so let me describe its genesis in terms of my own and others’ research and experience in this area (see, e.g., Crooks & Crewes, 1995; Holliday, 1994a, 1994b; Kennedy, 1988, 1999; Kennedy, Doyle, & Goh, 1999; Kenny & Savage, 1997). Genesis of the Definition I first became interested in the role language plays in individual and societal development in 1981, when I saw an English for specific purposes (ESP) job advertised in the newspaper by the British Council. The job description was standard enough—ESP materials design and teacher training designed to provide language support for a larger project in engineering education—except for the intriguing information that this particular project was part of Britain’s program of aid to developing countries. This description raised the obvious question in my mind: What is language aid? I applied for the job to find out, and a few months later, I duly arrived in Sudan, officially designated as a language aid expert. Upon arrival, I set about surveying the needs of the institution where I worked, developing communicatively oriented ESP materials for the College of Engineering, piloting preliminary versions of these materials in my own classes, and training my Sudanese and junior British colleagues in their use. The materials that I produced pleased both the Sudanese institution’s administration and the British Council, and were included in annual reports to the British government funding agency as evidence of the ESP project’s success. Nonetheless, I came to realize over time that the language situation at this institution (indeed, in all Sudanese higher education) was very complex. Based on the results of a prototype version of the International English Language Testing System’s (IELTS) test, the proficiency levels in English of first- and second-year students varied from 0 (did not attempt the test) to 9 (expert user). Most students achieved scores of 4 (limited user). This proficiency band is glossed as follows: “Basic competence is limited to familiar situations. Has frequent problems in understanding and expression. Is not able to use complex language” (IELTS, n.d., n.p.). 266 TESOL QUARTERLY From an educational language policy perspective, English was a sacred cow. Sudanese faculty and students (even those who had little, if any, proficiency in the language) viewed being educated through the me- dium of English as an indicator of individual and societal development, even if the actual level of ESL proficiency attained by learners was in reality quite low. English was the official medium of instruction, meaning that all textbooks were in English, as were all examinations. But given the linguistic realities of the situation, the use of English as a medium of instruction necessarily varied tremendously. Even in the College of Engineering, which probably had one of the highest levels of English use in the institution, Arabic was widely used to varying degrees as the unofficial medium of instruction (Markee, 1986). To complicate matters further, although students’ oral proficiency in English improved somewhat during their studies, this improvement was not necessarily attributable to the formal ESL instruction provided by the British expatriate staff and our Sudanese ESL colleagues. Students received 2–4 hours of ESL instruction and 20–25 hours of content instruction a week. To the extent that this content instruction was at least partly mediated through English, learners may have learned most of their English from their Sudanese content lecturers, not from the ESL staff. Students therefore learned a Sudanese variety of English, through a traditional lecture, question-and-answer format. More specifically, the methodology of content classes frequently involved instructors’ writing excerpts from course textbooks (which students did not possess) on the blackboard. Students copied this information into their notebooks. Instructors provided commentary on these texts in either English or Arabic, and students asked questions, almost always in Arabic. Instructors answered these questions in either English or Arabic. These complex pedagogical and linguistic practices obviously had serious implications for the language component of this aid project. Even if the reading-oriented ESP courses that I had developed repre- sented a viable interpretation of learners’ needs, we expatriate, so-called aid experts were not only linguistically but also professionally and culturally marginalized within the institution (Markee, 1993). The Sudanese language instructors for whom these ESP materials had been written generally found the communicative methodology implied by the materials culturally unfamiliar and often too difficult to use, as did the learners. Thus, even as I introduced these materials into the curriculum, instructors either avoided using them altogether or reinterpreted their methodological intent so as to be able to continue using more familiar methodologies. By the time I left Sudan in 1983, I realized that I had gone through a defining, though enormously confusing, intellectual and professional experience—at considerable expense to my Sudanese hosts. Clearly, LANGUAGE IN DEVELOPMENT 267 whatever expertise in aid or development work I had acquired came from the job itself, not from my experience and education before going to Sudan. Equally clearly, I had found out that aid and development were not synonymous. The aid project’s explicit aims of modernizing the institution’s educational capacity to deliver Western-style ESL instruction had probably failed. On the other hand, this did not mean that graduates of the institution could not parley their officially English- medium degrees into opportunities for self-improvement. Upon graduating, most male graduates went to work in the oil-rich economies of the Persian Gulf, where their technical and multilingual skills were highly valued. After working 5 or 10 years in one of these countries, during which time they likely supported their families in Sudan, most of these graduates were able to return home with enough money to buy a house and car and to start their own families. For female graduates, the same qualifications opened more limited opportunities in the local economy, perhaps working with English-using international organizations in Khartoum. This brief example illustrates how difficult it is to formulate direct cause-and-effect relationships or define success in what I am now calling language in development. Developing such a formulation requires going beyond the important, though ultimately relatively mechanical, curricu- lar concerns of how to plan and implement ESL curricula and looking to more interdisciplinary approaches to how language and education fit in with broader societal and individual aspirations. An Interdisciplinary Approach From a language sciences perspective, Hymesian (1972/1979) and Hallidayan (1971/1979) notions of communicative competence clearly pro- vide a viable definition of language. Kachru’s (1985) seminal work on world Englishes is also highly relevant to understanding the ongoing transformation of English from a colonial language to the world’s leading language of wider communication, particularly in science, technology, medicine, business, transportation, and education. Kachru’s work problematizes fundamental linguistic categories, such as native speaker and nonnative speaker. It also raises important ethical questions about who “owns” English. This perspective has also led to fruitful discussions of the linguistic rights of non–English speakers to maintain their own languages (Kontra, Phillipson, Skutnabb-Kangas, & Varady, 1999; Skutnabb-Kangas, 2000) and to various postcolonial critiques of the ESL profession (Canagarajah, 1999; Pennycook, 1994, 1998, 2001; Phillipson, 1992; Tollefson, 1989, 1991, 2001). Insights from the field of language planning are also relevant to the 268 TESOL QUARTERLY formulation of a linguistically oriented definition of language in devel- opment (Kaplan, 1998). Historically speaking, language planning was probably the first of the language sciences to address how questions of language status and standardization might interact with social, primarily economic, development (see Fox, 1975; Rubin & Jernudd, 1971). Furthermore, the planning perspective of this early work provides a useful intellectual and methodological context that can connect ESP work with wider societal concerns (Kaplan & Baldauf, 1997; Kennedy, 1982; Markee, 1989). On the other hand, this early language-planning tradition was characterized by a now-discredited reliance on centralized planning at the national level. Furthermore, until recently, language planning has had little to say about the connection between national policy and classroom practice, what Cooper (1989) has called acquisition planning. In another sense, Cooper’s (1982, 1989) work is particularly impor- tant for a definition of language in development because he explored the relationships between language planning and other forms of social change, such as marketing, decision making, and the management of innovation. This work is the principal source for my own subsequent work in curricular innovation in the United States (Markee, 1997). One of the implications of this work is that managing innovation and development in a U.S. research university and doing so in a Sudanese teaching institution are remarkably similar (for other work on the management of innovation in a variety of educational contexts and countries, see Gorsuch, 2000; Henrichsen, 1989; Kennedy, 1988, 1994, 1999; Kennedy et al., 1999; Li, 1998; Rea-Dickins & Germaine, 1998; Salaberry, 1999; Stoller, 1994, 1995; Wall, 1996). This insight allows the explicit linking of educational and sociological notions of innovation (Fullan, 1982, 1993; Havelock, 1971; Miles, 1964; Rogers, 1995) and Goulet’s (1971) thesis that development is both a change process and an end state, which involves individuals or large social groups working to control their own destinies. These concerns go far beyond what is normally considered to be within the scope of applied linguistics. Nonetheless, the advantage of this multidisciplinary perspective is that it provides a backdrop for a broad range of questions that are highly relevant to ESL specialists. For example, is language in development a cause or an effect of poverty reduction? This question formulates the issue of vulnerability reduction in macroeconomic, product-oriented terms. On the other hand, asking how and why ESL teachers decide to adopt certain teaching methodolo- gies and techniques while they reject others is an attempt to understand developmental processes from a qualitative, ethnographic perspective. Both types of questions are valid, and both suggest important lines of research. LANGUAGE IN DEVELOPMENT 269 THEMES OF THE SPECIAL-TOPIC ISSUE Both lines of research are represented in the articles in this issue. The first two articles, by Bruthiaux and by Williams and Cooke, respectively, focus on literacy. The third article, by Appleby, Copley, Sithirajvongsa and Pennycook, explores the ethical, political, and professional dilem- mas that are illuminated by three examples of Australian language aid projects in southern Asia. The fourth and fifth articles, by Cleghorn and Rollnick and by Vavrus, respectively, analyze educational language policy issues in the multilingual contexts of eastern and southern Africa. The sixth article, by Martin and Lomperis, shows how to use cost-benefit analysis as a technique in designing English for occupational purposes programs. The seventh article, by Rymes, discusses the developmental issues involved in a community-based ESL program for a Latino commu- nity in the United States. And the final article, by Warschauer, discusses the evolution of a U.S. aid project to introduce information technology as a resource for ESL into Egyptian schools. Definitional and Terminological Issues Judging from the way these eight authors have approached the definition of language in development, achieving a consensus on this matter is a work in progress. There is substantial agreement that a definition of language in development needs to be couched in rather broad terms to capture the complexities of human resource develop- ment (see the articles by Bruthiaux and by Williams & Cooke). However, only four of the articles (those by Bruthiaux, by Rymes, by Vavrus, and by Warschauer) draw specifically on the language of the definition pro- posed at the beginning of this article. Williams and Cooke, Appleby et al., Cleghorn and Rollnick, and Martin and Lomperis are essentially neutral on the proper breadth for a definition of development. In fact, Bruthiaux provides an incisive critique of the inclusiveness of the proposed definition, arguing that language-in-development work has to prioritize the needs of the poorest of the poor. From this perspective, the articles by Cleghorn and Rollnick and by Vavrus take on particular significance, because the African continent is the poorest in the world. At the same time, Rymes demonstrates in her article that language-in- development issues are central to the work of some ESL teachers even in the richest country in the world. These articles also show clearly that terminological issues are impor- tant. Country descriptors like Third World, developing, underdeveloped, developed, rich, poor, low income, and high income are not neutral. They are 270 TESOL QUARTERLY invested with particular meanings, some of which, if used carelessly, may be viewed as demeaning (see in particular the articles by Bruthiaux, by Appleby et al., by Cleghorn & Rollnick, and by Vavrus). Similarly, as Appleby et al. point out, although language development (in the sense of language acquisition) may be an important actual or symbolic component of language in development (see Vavrus’s article), they are not synonymous. Thus, language in development (or, following Kenny & Savage, 1997, language and development) probably includes a number of subordinate terms such as language as development and language for development. Time will tell whether further subdivisions are necessary to capture the range of activities subsumed by language-in-development work. The Locus and Scope of Language in Development As this collection of articles attests, language in development is a worldwide phenomenon. Its scope includes both the informal educa- tional sector (as portrayed by Bruthiaux, by Williams & Cooke, and by Rymes in this issue), the formal educational sector (as portrayed by Appleby et al., by Cleghorn & Rollnick, by Vavrus, and by Warschauer) and the public and private business sectors (as portrayed by Bruthiaux and by Martin & Lomperis). Development work may be funded either by governments (see the articles by Appleby et al. and by Warschauer) or by nongovernmental organizations (see the articles by Bruthiaux and by Vavrus). The ideologies that may inform development work potentially span the entire political spectrum (see the articles by Bruthiaux and by Vavrus). Last but not least, questions of access to literacy, education, or technology by the most disadvantaged members of society are high- profile issues in language-in-development work, as are a variety of ethical, political, and professional problems (see the articles by Bruthiaux, by Appleby et al., by Cleghorn & Rollnick, by Vavrus, by Rymes, and by Warschauer). The Role of English and Other Languages in Language in Development Finally, probably the clearest and (from the perspective of ESL specialists) the most controversial theme to emerge from this issue is that, despite its widespread diffusion as a language of wider communica- tion, the role of English as a resource for development remains highly ambiguous and controversial (see the articles by Bruthiaux, by Williams LANGUAGE IN DEVELOPMENT 271 & Cooke, by Cleghorn & Rollnick, and by Vavrus). English has never completely shed its colonial and elitist baggage (see Appleby et al.’s article). The costs and benefits of using English as a medium of instruction must always be assessed in terms of the broader linguistic resources that characterize a given situation. The younger or the more disadvantaged the participants are, the more likely it is that the L1 will provide the most viable means of access to development. The world remains a highly multilingual place, and as ESL professionals, we must remain mindful that we do not blindly assume that English necessarily provides a one-size-fits-all solution to fundamental issues of individual and societal development. THE AUTHOR Numa Markee has taught ESL or applied linguistics in Britain, the United States, Switzerland, Spain, Algeria, Mexico, and the Sudan. In addition, he has lectured widely on how curricular innovations diffuse in Hong Kong, Thailand, Taiwan, Indonesia, and Vietnam. He teaches applied linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. REFERENCES Canagarajah, A. S. (1999). 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(2001). Language policies in education: Critical issues. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Wall, D. (1996). Introducing new tests into traditional systems: Insights from general education and from innovation theory. Language Testing, 13, 334–354. 274 TESOL QUARTERLY Hold Your Courses: Language Education, Language Choice, and Economic Development PAUL BRUTHIAUX National University of Singapore This article argues that discussion of the role of English in development fails to recognize the success of narrowly focused community-based projects, in which basic L1 literacy rather than English education is the goal. The argument centers on analysis of economic realities of the informal economy, in which absence of clear title to tangible assets in low-income countries prevents the entrepreneurial poor from using these assets as collateral and acts as a brake on economic development. I show how microlending offers an effective route around this problem and argue that literacy is essential in transforming the poor’s percep- tion of their own economic potential. I also argue that, because literacy should encourage a sense of greater empowerment on the part of recipients, its acquisition should occur in a local vernacular as opposed to a potentially unfamiliar language of wider communication. Finally, I suggest that unsubstantiated faith in the supposed benefits of English language education for all may divert precious resources from urgent language education for development tasks and ultimately benefit mostly the relatively well-off at the expense of the poorest. T he role of English language teaching in economic development is a confusing issue for many TESOL professionals. Critical theorists articulate the need for professionals to recognize the hegemony of English in the process of development and globalization, and therefore to reflect on their role in perpetuating the inequities associated with English as the language for development. Other applied linguists see English in development in more neutral terms, suggesting the inevitabil- ity of the spread of English and noting the value English holds for individuals and societies in need of development. In this article I argue that both of these perspectives are based on a narrow view of develop- ment that is all but irrelevant to the development needs of the many people who live in poverty. The analysis of development I present suggests that for the large majority of the poor, L1 literacy is the essential TESOL QUARTERLY Vol. 36, No. 3, Autumn 2002 275 factor because they need the basic literacy skills to participate in their local economies, not the English that some argue is needed for participa- tion in the global economy. I articulate this analysis through discussion of development in general and then of how economic development can be implemented through either a top-down or bottom-up approach, the latter relying on poverty reduction in the informal economy. I describe the dearth of clearly recorded assets in many low-income countries and argue that this acts as a major brake on economic development. I show how the concept of microlending offers an effective route around this problem. I stress that the acquisition of basic L1 literacy is essential to encouraging a transfor- mation in the poor’s perception of their own potential. I argue that the acquisition of basic literacy must take place in a local vernacular as opposed to a potentially unfamiliar language of wider communication, whether an imported language such as English or a language of wider communication used nationally, including areas where it is not indig- enous (e.g., Hindi in non-Hindi-speaking parts of India, such as Tamil Nadu). Finally, I suggest that undue faith in the supposed benefits of English language education may divert precious resources away from more urgent development tasks and ultimately benefit only the relatively well-off at the expense of the poorest. LANGUAGE IN DEVELOPMENT DEFINED An understanding of the role of language education in economic development should begin with a definition of the concept of develop- ment that all parties concerned can agree on. Unhelpfully, two of the principal protagonists in this process, namely, economists and language educators, tend to operate independently of each other (Abbott, 1992; Bruthiaux, 2000). In studies of language and economics, references to economic models tend to be limited to rich countries, as in discussions of the benefits of bilingual education in North America or the promotion of minority languages in Europe (Grin & Vaillancourt, 1997). A review of the literature on the role of language education in economic develop- ment reveals that mainstream economists and language educators tend to operate on the basis of different conceptions of what economic develop- ment entails (Bruthiaux, 2000). Mainstream, classically trained econo- mists often charge social scientists (and, by implication, language educa- tors) with advocating worthy but unrealistic development goals and methods. Language educators, meanwhile, often reject what they see as the corporate-friendly stance of mainstream economists and the dehu- manizing mathematical models they use to gauge economic development. Yunus (1998) stresses that the process of development should be seen 276 TESOL QUARTERLY in human, not just economic, terms. In essence, economic development is above all a search for means to reduce poverty, which should be viewed as an insult to human dignity and a violation of basic human rights (Huq & Sultan, 1991). Just as important, it entails an attempt to increase participants’ control over the very process of economic development. Although this broad view of development covers both quantifiable and qualitative aspects of the process, it has the disadvantage of covering all potential recipients of development policies regardless of their current economic standing (i.e., the moderately well-off as well as the severely poor). Thus, economic development of the most urgent kind should be viewed more narrowly as a process of societal change leading to tangible improvements in and greater control for the most disadvantaged mem- bers of a society over their living conditions. These societies are conven- tionally labeled low-income in sources such as World Bank studies, and I adopt this descriptor throughout this article in preference to alternatives such as developing (which masks the regrettable fact that some low- income nations are actually regressing) or underdeveloped (which suggests a fixed standard and can be seen as demeaning). To be sure, measures of income such as comparisons of gross domestic product (GDP) (even when adjusted for purchasing power parity) are hardly fine-grained. Yet they are objective enough for the purpose of this discussion in that no one disputes the proposition that by any measure Myanmar is poorer than Malaysia, for example. ROUTES TO ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT Beyond terminology, the devil is in choosing among the different routes to development on offer and in implementing the policies that flow from these choices. At least since scores of new nations gained independence after World War II and especially since the 1960s, the poor world has seen the implementation of many large-scale develop- ment projects. Many have been conceived largely by technocrats and development experts whose own models of economic development are often colored by experience gained in geographically and culturally very different contexts (Mihevc, 1995; Rich, 1994). Over the decades, na- tional governments, financial institutions such as the World Bank, and myriad nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have tended to pro- mote heavily theory-dependent projects and, implicitly or explicitly, left it to potential beneficiaries to adapt to these models. Yet, despite being welcomed by national elites in recipient countries, these donor-driven development policies have often brought about only marginal rates of economic growth (Huq & Sultan, 1991). I do not suggest that the earlier experience of economically developed HOLD YOUR COURSES 277 countries is of no relevance to low-income nations or that development should, as many social scientists and demonstrators at gatherings of international bodies such as the World Trade Organization often argue, be insulated from what is seen as the pernicious influence of Western models and of globalized trade in particular. As Coulmas (1992) sug- gests, there is no serious alternative to the proposition that economic development implies some combination of key factors such as the accumulation of capital, an educated workforce, legally enforceable contracts, institutionalized relations between capital and labor, and a largely free (though not unregulated) market. Key concepts for eco- nomic development and individual participation in the process must be imported from the West, Coulmas argues, not because the process serves the exclusive interests of the Western exporters of these concepts (though this will inevitably occur) but because no low-income society can hope to emulate the West’s earlier successes without adopting—with local adaptations, of course—some of the fundamental principles that led to that development. Moreover, the societal features most in need of change if economic development is to take place are often the tradi- tional structures that local vested interests are most keen to preserve, because the hallmarks of economic deprivation, from hunger to illit- eracy and low productivity, are inextricably bound up with the traditional societal structures that gave rise to them and ensured their perpetuation (Bruthiaux, 2000). Top-Down or Bottom-Up? The objective of pulling the severely poor out of absolute poverty has met with obvious success in places as varied as Malaysia, Botswana, and Mauritius. In some cases, these tangible improvements in the living conditions of the poor have been achieved through—among other factors—the systematic implementation of policies conceived by experts and imposed top-down with little consultation of potential recipients at the grassroots level. In many parts of the poor world, however, economic development policies—no matter how sensible—have often been hon- ored mainly in the breach. Language education policies, for example, have often been characterized, in the words of Bamgbose (1991), by “avoidance, vagueness, arbitrariness, fluctuation, and declaration with- out implementation” (p. 111). A built-in difficulty with a top-down approach to development policy is that, because it tends to be the preserve of a relatively small number of technocrats and civil servants seeking maximum effectiveness for their efforts and expenditure, it often leads to large-scale projects designed to influence the lives of vast populations. In many cases, the policy in 278 TESOL QUARTERLY question (land reform, say) may turn out to have mainly beneficial consequences. However, if the policy proves to have been wrongheaded and calls for modification, or if confusion or corruption sets in within the command system, a hugely inefficient allocation of resources is likely to result, with corrective measures correspondingly difficult and slow to implement. Moreover, even in the happy event of top-down policies having beneficial effects, it is not generally in the nature of policy makers to overly involve potential recipients in the design, implementation, or evaluation of these policies (local power brokers, because they will not; foreign experts, because all too often they cannot). As a result, the chances of a top-down approach to development empowering potential recipients and reducing their vulnerability to processes they do not control (see Markee, this issue) are severely limited. Yet bottom-up, community-based paths to development exist, with appropriate language education playing a major role in this process, as I explain below. The key process consists of identifying a narrow set of socioeconomic factors that has led to the perpetuation of poverty, proposing a specific remedy involving self-determination on the part of the poor themselves, specifying the part language education may play in this process, and finally making appropriate policy choices over which language is most likely to bring about a successful educational and economic outcome. Poverty Reduction and the Informal Economy As Chickering and Salahdine (1991) argue, poverty is not primarily an issue of lack of skills, to be remedied by the application of appropriate doses of education. Nor should poverty be seen through metaphors borrowed from medical practice representing it as a symptom of dysfunc- tional or pathological societal conditions, with the poor viewed as passive victims of a disease. In fact, the poor are proactive participants in a dynamic process, with multiple skills and vast potential, and their survival skills born of dire necessity make them some of the most entrepreneurial individuals in low-income societies. In the view of Chickering and Salahdine, the misapplication of the mechanistic assumptions of a Newtonian world view has encouraged Western-trained technocrats to see development as a machine, to be analyzed for signs of what needs fixing, typically top-down, through some form of central planning and control of entrepreneurial forces within the system. In one sense, the poor in low-income countries are not always poor in that they often have claims to substantial assets, such as land or a house, a situation less often seen among the wage earners of wealthier coun- tries. The difficulty is that because the poor rarely have formal title to HOLD YOUR COURSES 279 these assets, they cannot use them as collateral to raise capital, which consigns the poor to small-scale activities with limited potential for growth. Typically, these small-scale informal operations employ no more than 10 people who have little or no schooling and who are drawn mostly from the immediate household; they generally avoid social and other government regulations; they do not operate at fixed hours; they are itinerant or occupy provisional (typically unrecorded) premises; they do not use electricity or other forms of mechanical energy; and they are characterized by relative ease of entry (Butler, 1998; Salahdine, 1991). By all accounts, the size of the informal economy in low-income countries is huge, possibly involving 50% of the labor force and accounting for 40% of total GDP (Montiel, Agenor, & Haque, 1993). In Morocco, typical informal sector activities include transport and con- struction, and involve perhaps as many as 75% of the active urban population (Salahdine, 1991). In Bangladesh, 70% of the urban workforce is engaged in some form of informal income-generating activity whereas large-scale industry accounts for only 5% of GDP and 2% of the total workforce, and in the Philippines the informal sector accounts for 73% of nonagricultural employment, 78% of construction, 86% of transporta- tion, and 93% of trade (Chickering & Salahdine, 1991). Even more important, these figures appear to be on the increase with no end to the trend in sight, especially as numbers of employment seekers continue to grow. Meanwhile, because informal operators of this type do not have access to bank credit, informal loans account for 45% of all lending in urban settings in the Philippines and 57% in India, and in rural areas of the Philippines the figure exceeds 66% (Ghate, 1992). In Zambia, the activities of as many as 80–90% of working adults are supported by informal loans, and informal lending accounts for 87% of farm loans in Zimbabwe and 95% in Nigeria (Murinde, 1996). Yet, despite overwhelming evidence that the informal economy plays a large and dynamic role in the process of economic development, mainstream economists and formal education providers tend to regard it as a marginal phenomenon, of interest mainly to aid workers and the police (de Soto, 2000). According to Yunus (1998), this marginalization of the informal economy stems in large part from the misguided notion that economic activity is primarily driven by a small group of uniquely gifted individuals, namely, the entrepreneurs. The corollary is that everyone else must make a living from wage labor in the service of this select group. In fact, in most low-income countries, the informal economy is far larger than its formal counterpart. According to de Soto, the collective value of the fixed assets owned without title by the poor in low-income countries is a staggering 93 times the amount of develop- ment aid poured into these nations by rich countries in the past three 280 TESOL QUARTERLY decades, or 46 times as much as all the World Bank loans of the past three decades. In many ways, the dominance of the informal sector in low-income countries is not the symptom of development failure it is often taken to be. Instead, this vitality, self-reliance, and endless capacity for adaptation contrasts favorably with the vast subsidies from governments and donor agencies needed to sustain large-scale enterprises that provide formal employment for the relatively few (Chickering & Salahdine, 1991). Even if larger scale industrialization were an unmitigated blessing, there is no realistic hope of the formal sector absorbing the current number of job seekers, let alone the increase in the labor force projected for the coming decades. Moreover, wage employment by itself does not necessar- ily alleviate poverty. Instead, it can create a mechanism that perpetuates poverty by depriving workers of adaptability in changing circumstances, such as periodic financial crises (Huq & Sultan, 1991), and often forces many wage earners to labor under even more inhumane conditions than in the informal economy. As Bearak (2001) tells it, the 1.5 million jobs created in Bangladesh by the U.S.$4.3 billion garment industry that accounts for 76% of the country’s exports have come at the cost of 3,300 inadequately regulated factories, many operating under sweatshop con- ditions on a Dickensian scale. By contrast, the informal sector is a ready-made context for creativity and initiative as well as a key basis for increased earning power and empowerment through self-employment. As Chickering and Salahdine (1991) argue, it thrives on the naturally self-governing capacities of societies to flourish while minimizing the bureaucratic structures that most governments in low-income countries cannot yet sustain. It pro- vides enterprising individuals with the freedom to set up income-raising commercial activities with minimal interference from ineffective and often corrupt governmental agencies or from transformation-averse traditional hierarchies. Because in such adverse circumstances collective endeavor is more likely to succeed than individual effort, it finds in the extended family unit a ready-made, homegrown structure in which to flourish. As such, the informal sector constitutes an essential bridge between traditional collective values and entrepreneurship anchored in the best available unit of analysis and implementation, namely, the family, with its culture of work sharing and collective decision making. This culture contrasts with typically anonymous and often ill-fitting top- down schemes (domestic or imported) and with irrelevant notions of relationships between management and wage workers, in which often only men are ever considered as breadwinners (Butler, 1998; Yunus, 1998). Naturally, entrepreneurship in the informal sector tends to alarm HOLD YOUR COURSES 281 vested interests on both left and right. On the conservative right, an entrenched oligarchy fears the competition posed by informal entrepre- neurs as well as the destabilizing effect and greater social mobility that entrepreneurship implies, especially once the education of women is added to the mix. On the idealistic left, critics make no distinction between informal entrepreneurs and industrial wage earners and insist on seeing them all as the passive victims of a class struggle. In fact, far from being a sign of a dysfunctional economy, a lively informal sector is an indicator of a healthy society in transition from feudalism and endemic poverty to empowerment and more humane living conditions. As such, the sector deserves all possible assistance in areas such as provision of basic management training and credit (Salahdine, 1991). To these areas should be added that of language education and more specifically the provision of basic literacy, an issue that I explore further below. Microlending As de Soto (2000) shows, assets without title are of little help beyond immediate survival—especially to those ambitious or desperate enough to plan an escape from the grip of economic deprivation—because absence of clear title to assets prevents them from being offered as collateral. In the informal economy of Thailand, for example, money- lenders lend only to people they know and trust, and even they must put up some form of collateral (Poapongsakorn, 1991). Often, the only tangible alternative to land or property consists of household appliances, which are seized by the lender until the debt is repaid, thereby reducing the borrower’s standard of living from the start (Ghate, 1992). Grameen Bank’s Approach One well-documented response to this conundrum is the concept of microlending, an approach to making capital available for small-scale, community-based projects such as operating a neighborhood bakery, manufacturing basic furniture, buying and operating a rickshaw, trading rice, or raising cattle for milk production. Pioneered in Bangladesh in the 1970s through the work of the Grameen Bank, this approach to financing economic activity for the very poor is characterized by the typically tiny size of the loans it makes, the fact that it lends mostly to women because of their demonstrably better record at achieving both effective use of capital and timely repayment, and reliance on peer pressure rather than the provision of collateral. Today, Grameen oper- ates in more than half of all rural communities in Bangladesh, where it 282 TESOL QUARTERLY lends to 2.3 million borrowers and boasts a repayment rate of 95% (Yunus, 1998). It also requires borrowers to undertake to keep their families small, educate their children, and renounce traditional practices such as the provision of dowry and child marriage (Auwal, 1996). In addition, the bank offers literacy classes that feature not only reading, writing, numeracy, and accounting but also functional education focused on awareness raising in areas such as family planning services, health care, and nutrition (Khan & Ahmed, 2001). The emphasis placed by Grameen on lending to women without collateral is especially important given that inheritance by women is rare under customary tenure systems in many cultures. In southern Africa, for example, women are often driven away at the death of a husband from land they have been occupying (Joekes, 1999). In Bangladesh, main- stream banks actively discriminate against women, and any woman wanting to borrow money from a formal lender has to have a male relative provide collateral for the loan (Huq & Sultan, 1991), a practice resulting in the high degree of correlation between divorce rate and extreme poverty (Wahid, 1994). Given that the competition between mobility and reproduction—among other factors—has traditionally barred women from wage employment, the microlending concept allows women to bypass traditional obstacles to realizing their income-generating potential and begins the process of confidence building and empower- ment (Butler, 1998; Kelly, 1996). Although feminist commentators such as Stromquist (1995) and von Massow (1999) deplore the recasting of women into roles supposedly constructed for them by men, it would be churlish not to welcome the greater involvement of women in income-raising economic processes at which they obviously excel. A study of Grameen operations in Bangladesh (Pitt & Khandker, 1998) reveals that capital tends to be spent by male borrowers on leisure and by female borrowers on household goods. In addition, daughters of Grameen borrowers were more likely than others to be enrolled in school. As a work of fiction with more than a ring of truth puts it, The women, they’re the only hope of Africa, man. . . . We give food only to the women. The men, we don’t trust those idiots across a road. No sir. They sell our porridge in the markets. They have their women make strong drink with it. They buy cigarettes, guns, girls. The men are bums. The women make the homes, the men make the wars. The whole of Africa, that’s one big gender fight, man. Only the women do God’s work around here. (Le Carré, 2001, p. 456) While a woman becomes accustomed to transacting independently of her male relatives and managing an income visibly her own, part of the microlending vision is that membership in a self-help group will deliver HOLD YOUR COURSES 283 continued learning about investment and organizational skills shared among women with similar needs and aspirations. Thus, the expectation is that this practice will lead to a greater sense of solidarity, self- awareness, and decision-making capacity (Fairley, 1998; Huq & Sultan, 1991). Over time, the Grameen venture has generated numerous studies. Wahid (1994) finds a link between dedicated bank loans and a measur- able improvement in housing conditions as well as a higher proportion of land devoted to high-yielding crop varieties. Auwal (1996) claims that the bank is less prone to corruption than traditional financial institu- tions—especially governmental ones. Hassan and Renteria-Guerrero (1997) conclude that unsecured lending is a viable aid in the fight against poverty and an appropriate tool for bottom-up community development. Criticism of Microlending Naturally, microlending is not without its critics. Papa, Auwal, and Singhal (1995) charge that bank prophecies can become self-fulfilling as bank workers coerce potential borrowers into meeting lending targets. Rahman (1999) points out that pressure to repay or to meet savings targets can put borrowers at the mercy of loan sharks, a step backward that bank balance sheets do not capture because they show only that funds were somehow secured and loans serviced or repaid, not how and at what cost funds were secured. Auwal (1996) suggests that Grameen’s success may be difficult to replicate in sparsely populated countries, where personal contact and peer pressure are less easily applied, a view echoed by Nienhaus and Brauksiepe (1997). Wahid (1994) notes that the bank continues to be dependent on foreign funding agencies (does this matter if disbursements are generally more efficient and less corrupt?) and male participation to be far lower than female and declining (a blessing in disguise, perhaps, given male borrowers’ undis- tinguished record of financial management). Morduch (1999) claims that high repayment rates have not necessarily translated into profits for the bank. Fairley (1998) notes the difficulty inherent in making the concept of interest acceptable in Islamic societies. Rahman (1996), Fairley (1998), and Navajas, Schreiner, Meyer, Gonzalez-Vega, and Rodriguez-Meza (2000) argue that, though successful among the less poor, the concept cannot address the needs of the truly destitute because they will never be viable borrowers for banks and that attending to these needs will continue to be the responsibility of governments and NGOs. Despite these reservations, the Grameen concept has spawned many imitators, including—with major adaptations—projects in the United States and Canada (Conlin, 1999), though comparable experiments 284 TESOL QUARTERLY have typically taken place in countries such as Malaysia (Auwal, 1996), Mali (Cerven & Ghazanfar, 1999), Guatemala (Kelly, 1996), and espe- cially Bolivia (Navajas et al., 2000). In the process, as Salahdine (1991) notes, microlending has led to a degree of income redistribution, not through taxation or the top-down application of a centrally conceived master plan, but by tapping the energy and creativity of individuals. Overall, microlending has a track record of focused resource manage- ment. At the very least, it offers participants a chance to escape the poverty trap to which birth and traditional social structures had seemed to confine them. Though no panacea, it represents a willingness to apply a fresh approach to an age-old problem that entrenched interests and sluggish bureaucracies have been all too happy to ignore. What part language education and in particular the acquisition of basic literacy can play in the process is an issue to which I now turn. ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT AND LITERACY The informal economy in low-income countries and the concept of microlending should be of interest to language educators on two counts. First, the logistics of effective microlending suggest that the model calls for an approach to language education that emphasizes the acquisition of basic literacy by borrowers. Although literacy can by itself constitute a powerful symbol of a yearning for change, without a practical function in everyday life, it can often appear mysterious and inaccessible (Carrington, 1997; Kell, 1996). Only when it is linked to specific development activities—such as borrowing in order to expand a business and gaining a degree of practical control over one’s affairs—can the acquisition of literacy begin to socialize participants into new and potentially life- transforming roles. In practice, the successful management of all but the tiniest of businesses requires record keeping of a kind not possible through memorization alone. Although many recipients of microloans in fact start out illiterate, microlending projects typically offer—and in many cases require—literacy training, including basic numeracy and record-keeping skills (Auwal, 1996; Fairley, 1998; Hossain, 1998; Rahman, 1996), the medium-term aim being to prepare recipients for the man- agement of larger loans once they have successfully negotiated the first steps. Even more important, however, the model and the type of basic literacy training that typically accompanies microlending has built-in consciousness-raising implications. In many ways, what counts is less what gets written than the act of writing itself. As Norman (1993) notes, the act of writing itself focuses the mind and forces the writer to reflect on the event being recorded so intensely that, at the conclusion of the HOLD YOUR COURSES 285 event, the record itself can sometimes be discarded. If this is true for the graduate student taking notes or the rocket scientist at work, there is no reason to suppose that it will not be true for the operator of a tiny poultry business in Dhaka or Cairo. Thus, the practice of literacy by the poor cannot take place for long without alerting participants to a range of interrelated economic, social, and intellectual issues related to poverty. Key among these are the practical causes of vulnerability and lack of control, rationales and methods for medium- and long-term planning and management to deal with them, accountability, and, crucially, the direct involvement of women in a type of decision making traditionally denied to them. As Auwal (1996) notes, the collective nature of microlending projects and the literacy effort that typically parallels them ensure that, by interacting among themselves, participants learn from one another and become aware of their social, economic, and political status as well as their rights, responsibilities, and opportunities. To be sure, the acquisition of literacy gives neoliterates access to practical and previously privileged information on topics such as basic financial control as well as hygiene, diet, and sex education (Carrington, 1997; Trudell, 1995). Yet literacy is not a neutral practice that merely allows the creation and interpretation of written records. As Street (1995) writes, “change brought about by literacy involves profound changes in people’s sense of identity and in what they take to be the basis of knowledge” (p. 31). Elaborating on this notion, de Soto (2000) argues that literacy is at the heart of economic development in that it enables users to conceptualize what they know exists but cannot see, especially assets. Property is of limited use as long as it remains in immovable, unrecorded form, in the form of an untitled house or a plot of land, for example. To grow to the point at which its operation begins to make a noticeable difference to standards of living, capital needs to become virtual; that is, it needs to be handled via an abstract representational system, a process in which literacy plays a key role. In practice, for the poor to progress beyond the most basic economic level, their assets need to be represented in writing—whether in the form of a title, a security, a contract, or some other record—while the object of the record is typically not present. In effect, representing ownership in writing— especially that of increasingly large amounts—allows the user to step from the material into the conceptual realm where capital lives and economic development begins. The written representation of ownership is standard practice in the rich world, where assets can be traded in various combinations, and every piece of land, building, piece of equipment, or inventory is recorded in a document that is the only visible evidence of a vast hidden process connecting these assets to myriad others in the rest of the economy. In the virtual world of capital, people can buy from strangers goods they 286 TESOL QUARTERLY cannot see, property can be divided so that risk can be shared, co-owners can be bought out so that land does not have to be divided into ever- smaller plots, and information can be centrally recorded and made widely available. By contrast, the poor remain trapped in the physical world of rigid, nontradable forms, a world from which they are unlikely to escape because there is a practical limit to what can be accumulated and traded physically and, most importantly, because they are in effect barred from making the conceptual leap from an object-based to an asset-based economy. Because writing is in essence a representational system that reduces the need for physical enumeration, literacy consti- tutes an essential component of the process of facilitating that concep- tual leap and of promoting change in perceptions and practices. In this sense, literacy can help narrow the poverty gap, not between the haves and the have-nots, as folk economics has it, but between the fortunate conceptual haves and the disadvantaged physical haves. Perversely, there is a risk that increased levels of literacy could retard economic development in that it might encourage the proliferation of bureaucratic hurdles such as multiple requirements for paperwork, as in the notorious case of the 289 days and U.S.$1,231 in fees (or 31 times the monthly minimum wage) needed to formally set up a small business in Lima, Peru (de Soto, 2000). Similarly, it is mistaken to assume that more education automatically leads to more economic development and that the educational effort must increasingly concentrate on technical train- ing (McGrath & King, 1999; United Nations Development Program [UNDP], 2001). Clearly, economic development is not a single-factor process, and making it come about requires much besides literacy, including development-friendly macroeconomic policies, the encour- agement of a business ethic, the provision of transparent governance and of a judicial system capable of enforcing contracts predictably and reliably, and investment in infrastructure (Fairley, 1998; Gustafsson, 1991). Moreover, the jury is still out on the issue of whether literacy is in general a precondition for development, a by-product of a development process already under way, or (as seems most likely) a key component in a bidirectional process, whether at the grassroots level (La Belle, 2000) or as part of a top-down language-planning effort (Djité, 1993). VERNACULAR VERSUS ENGLISH LANGUAGE EDUCATION What is uncontroversial is that literacy will sooner or later become a feature of any society that is serious about economic development. Thus, the question becomes one of choosing an appropriate linguistic vehicle for that literacy, and the discussion must now turn to language education HOLD YOUR COURSES 287 and in particular to potential competition for scarce resources between basic vernacular language education and English language education. I have argued that for the enterprising poor, literacy constitutes both a practical tool for handling the increasing complexities of economic transactions and a conceptual tool for visualizing hitherto inaccessible opportunities. Given that a key objective of economic development policy is poverty reduction in societies with severely limited resources, the overall objective must be to deliver basic literacy as efficiently as possible. In practice, this objective points to language education in a local vernacular rather than in one of the languages of wider communi- cation on offer, including former colonial languages such as English or French (Djité, 1993; Gfeller & Robinson, 1998), and national or official languages such as Hindi, Filipino, or Bahasa Indonesia in areas of the country where these languages are not spoken indigenously. I do not mean to suggest that these languages have no useful role to play in the overall process of economic development. However, I stress that their promotion should not come at the expense of language education for localized development needs. The Language Policy–Language Use Mismatch In many cases, economic development projects have been tied to educational efforts delivered via a language with national or interna- tional reach rather than in a local vernacular, reflecting a mismatch between language education policy and language use in the communi- ties. With rare exceptions such as Singapore, dependence on a non- indigenous language correlates strongly with continued poverty (Abbott, 1992). As many have argued—and I concur—development is essentially about individually and collectively initiating and controlling beneficial change and increasing personal and societal involvement in that process. As Robinson’s (1996) ethnography of a rural community in Cameroon demonstrates, such changes require language education policies that permit the recipients themselves to negotiate a compromise between current local attitudes and practices and development-enhancing alter- natives. What comes across most strongly from Robinson’s research is the fact that in a setting where a local language (here, Nugunu) competes with a language of wider communication with a colonial history (here, French), each code carves out for itself a role linked to specific socioeconomic factors. Whenever development issues are being dis- cussed at the level of the parish council and higher, especially when officials and outsiders are present, men tend to play dominant roles and the language of business tends to be French. By contrast, when issues are 288 TESOL QUARTERLY discussed at the village level and the driving force consists of women, the dominant language tends to be Nugunu. As Robinson notes, most development-related interaction thus occurs among the more educated (as evidenced by their command of French), whose access to resources and power is already greater because of gender or status. In effect, then, the discourse practices of large-scale, top-down development do not match those of community-based development projects of the type I have discussed. Given the need to encourage community-based development projects and the evidence from the Grameen experience that men have a less-than-scintillating record of responsible management of such projects, it is all the more essential for language education for economic develop- ment to favor the code of those who are most involved at the community level and who have the better record of bringing small-scale, community- based projects to fruition, namely, women. Moreover, communication among these key participants in community-based development activities must be as free and open as possible. Clearly, this is not likely to occur as long as basic education is delivered in someone else’s language. If, as Abbott (1992) puts it, “teachers have to minimize strangeness and encourage ownership of the process of change, . . . what words could be less strange that those of one’s own spoken language?” (p. 175). For the vast majority of the severely poor, that language is not English. Nor are those in most need of poverty reduction policies likely to become part—except in the most indirect of ways—of globalized ex- changes with the potential to contribute to rising living standards. Globalization essentially involves international trade and the communi- cation networks that make trade possible. This fact increases the chance that—because economic growth is not a zero-sum game, with one participant destined to lose out if another gains—the wealth born of increased exchanges will accrue to the community of participants in these exchanges. Clearly, English plays a key role in this process, and its position as the tool of choice for worldwide communication is probably unassailable (de Swaan, 1998). Thus, it is proper for English language educators to concern themselves not only with designing appropriate pedagogies for each setting but also with guarding against the negative side effects of bringing languages and cultures of unequal power into contact. However, language education for economic development need not be synonymous with English language education. Throughout the 1990s and increasingly today, development efforts have become inextricably linked in governmental and academic circles as well as in the media with English language education (see, e.g., the range of topics in Kenny & Savage, 1997). To quote Savage (1997), language education for eco- nomic development should be HOLD YOUR COURSES 289 a critical pedagogy because of the operation of five notable characteristics: change-oriented, experiential, proautonomy, collaborative, and communica- tive. It is impossible to engage in these without also engaging an open, critical, and dynamic approach to the wider educational experience and to life itself. (p. 323) However, for language policy makers and language educators alike, and of course for the intended beneficiaries of language education policy for economic development, the danger is that this approach may—acciden- tally, perhaps—be restricted to English language education. Is English Really Dominant? To be sure, the recent expansion in the role of English in interna- tional communication has been little short of spectacular. Around the world, boardrooms echo with the sounds of English even though the setting may be Belgium or Brazil and none of the participants may be native speakers of the language. As witnessed by the abrupt displacement of Russian by English as the dominant L2 in Central and Eastern Europe, this demand for English language education is widely seen as motivated by a desire to break with past deprivations and to share in the fruits of globalization (Laitin, 1996; Petzold & Berns, 2000). Meanwhile, the more reflective element among providers of English language educa- tion, such as Clayton (1999), and critical theorists such as Fairclough (1999), Phillipson (1997), and Pennycook (1999) struggle to reconcile their desire to contribute to development efforts with their reluctance to serve as vehicles for what they see as hegemonic forces they cannot hope to resist or even influence. Yet this debate is largely irrelevant to basic economic development because it applies to an altogether different audience. In most markets, the consumers of English language education are the relatively well-off, already far beyond the stage of mere survival. To the extent that the severely poor are aware of it at all, the global spread of English is a sideshow compared with the issue of basic economic development and poverty reduction. Indeed, perceptions of the impact of the worldwide spread of English may well reflect the relatively fortunate circumstances of its beneficiaries, including the English language teaching profession itself. Warschauer (2000), for example, predicts that “the shift toward a global informational economy will intensify . . . , integrating more countries and regimes into the global market and further spurring the need for workers worldwide in diverse occupations, from Webmaster to food server, to learn English” (p. 529). In practice, far less English is used in most cultures than many observers in the rich English-speaking world 290 TESOL QUARTERLY imagine. Although estimates of the number of English speakers world- wide vary hugely, the number of those who use English as an L1 or to a high level of proficiency for a substantial part of their daily activities as an L2—as opposed to the vast numbers who merely know some English— probably does not exceed 10% of the current population of the planet (600 million of 6 billion). Even among such clearly successful partici- pants in the global economy as France, Spain, and Italy, fewer than 3% of those recently polled by European television companies were reported to have an excellent command of English, and only in small markets such as Scandinavia and the Netherlands did that number exceed even 10% (Parker, 1995). Moreover, the ratio of users to nonusers of English is likely to be affected in the foreseeable future in one direction by undeniable growth in international communication and in the other by lower birth rates in the wealthier countries that have English as their primary language (e.g., the United Kingdom) or a strong second (e.g., Scandinavia) and among the urbanized middle class in countries that have English as a major L2 (e.g., India). As a result, the trends may cancel each other out, keeping the number of English users as a proportion of world population steady, at least for the foreseeable future. A third likely counterweight to the current spread of English is the fact that, as more speakers acquire a workable command of the language, reduced scarcity may drive down the current premium afforded by possession of that skill and increase demand for alternative languages as markers of economic potential and social achievement (Grin, 2001). For Americans, this assumption that the world speaks English—or soon will—has led to a reluctance to address issues relevant to each local setting and in particular the inability to gather reliable intelligence on which to base foreign policy. It should after all be self-evident that governments and—post–September 11, 2001—underground organiza- tions alike prefer to work in their own language. Yet falling language teaching budgets and tepid interest in foreign language courses among U.S. college students—with, as Brecht and Rivers (2000) noted some- what prophetically, just nine students graduating in Arabic in 2000— cannot be unrelated to major security failures such as the inability of U.S. intelligence to spot forthcoming nuclear tests in India and Pakistan and, of course, the September 11 attacks on U.S. cities. Meanwhile, in less turbulent times and places, the daily existence of a large, prosperous middle class in vibrant cultures such as Brazil, Italy, or Japan takes place in the dominant local language, and, for most, the need to use English on a regular basis remains very low. Even for the most wired and globally aware in these cultures, recourse to English remains a last resort. Among their children, Harry Potter—that archetypal globalized cultural phe- nomenon—is experienced in translation, not in English. The severely poor, of course, are feeling little or no effect of the global HOLD YOUR COURSES 291 spread of English because they are barely touched by the globalization that underpins it. Defined as a rise in the ratio of trade to national income, globalization has since the 1980s spread from rich countries to a relatively small number of nations with large populations, such as China and Mexico, and has correlated with relatively high rates of economic growth in those countries (World Bank, 2001), an observation that—incidentally—argues for more, not less, globalization. Yet even those countries that have benefited overall from increased internal and external trade have clearly not succeeded in eliminating the most extreme kinds of poverty. It follows that those nations—many of them in Africa—that have stayed out of the process of greater economic integra- tion and whose ratio of trade to national income has fallen have even further to go in tackling extreme poverty. Thus, these nations are at the greatest risk of falling victim to inappropriate development policies, and appropriate language education policies that favor viable development projects should be designed and implemented with precisely these populations in mind. Fund Basic Literacy First In practice, the cause of the exclusion of the poor from greater participation in wider trade possibly involving a language of wider communication such as English is largely that their current daily activities are geared primarily toward survival and that any surpluses they may take to market are unlikely to find their way into the wider process of economic exchanges. In principle, English language education has the potential to facilitate communication between commercial operators large and small, thereby contributing to wealth creation and poverty reduction for many. However, this process must be framed within a broader language education policy that does not divert scarce resources away from the severely poor, who are not yet part of this process, but instead channels public funds first and foremost toward primary educa- tion, and in particular the provision of basic literacy. The stated aim of such a policy should be to facilitate the growth of community-based projects likely to lead to tangible poverty reduction along with a process of reflection and consciousness-raising leading to greater self-reliance and empowerment. Meanwhile, tertiary education should be encour- aged to place correspondingly greater reliance on private funding (UNDP, 2001). For deeply poor populations in many countries, educa- tion of the most basic type remains a pipe dream, and English language education an outlandish irrelevance. In a world where, it is said, half the population has never made a telephone call, talk of a role for English language education in facilitating the process of poverty reduction and a 292 TESOL QUARTERLY major allocation of public resources to that end is likely to prove misguided and wasteful. In brief, what the more reflective element among providers of English language education should agonize about is less the notion of linguistic imperialism propagated through English language education than the likely diversion of scarce resources in the direction of English at the expense of vernacular language education in those poor countries that succumb to hyperbole and take dreams of soon plugging into the global village for reality. To be sure, carefully targeted English language education is appropriate for specific populations that have a realistic chance of participating in international exchanges soon. However, given that, as Markee (1993) shows in the context of English-medium college education in Sudan, success is far from guaranteed even for student populations headed for roles of leadership, a trade-oriented English language education policy for everyone is all the more likely to run the risk of draining scarce resources from primary education and basic literacy, especially for women, who, as Haq (1995) shows, are so often the losers in many low-income societies. As Abbott (1992) comments, “in many countries, the teaching and use of English at primary school level is less a cultural invasion than an unnecessary invitation” (p. 175). For the severely poor, the village is local, not global. In these societies, it is members of the relatively affluent urban middle class who stand to benefit most from English language education because they are already closer to the opportunities offered by increased trade and communica- tion. Meanwhile, the poor have no lobbying power with which to redress the blatant subsidy of the better-off by the worse-off such a misallocation of resources constitutes. For the poor, the appropriate educational approach lies in facilitating the acquisition of basic literacy in a local vernacular with specific, practical, user-driven needs in mind, such as recording assets to make them available as collateral or carrying out small business transactions, thereby contributing to a greater sense of empowerment among its recipients. For these populations at least, the rhetoric of English language education as a path to economic develop- ment through participation in a globalized economy will remain irrel- evant for the foreseeable future. THE AUTHOR Paul Bruthiaux, who earned a PhD in linguistics at the University of Southern California, has written on language education and development in Journal of Multilingual & Multicultural Development, Language Problems & Language Planning, and Journal of Asian-Pacific Communication. His other work in applied linguistics has appeared in Language & Communication, Applied Linguistics, and English Today. HOLD YOUR COURSES 293 REFERENCES Abbott, G. (1992). Development, education and English language teaching. ELT Journal, 46, 172–179. Auwal, M. A. (1996). Promoting microcapitalism in the service of the poor: The Grameen model and its cross-cultural adaptation. Journal of Business Communica- tion, 33, 27–49. Bamgbose, A. (1991). Language and the nation: The language question in sub-Saharan Africa. Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press. Bearak, B. (2001, April 15). Lives held cheap in Bangladesh sweatshops. New York Times, p. 1. Brecht, R., & Rivers, W. (2000). 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Journal of International Affairs, 52, 47–65. 296 TESOL QUARTERLY Pathways and Labyrinths: Language and Education in Development EDDIE WILLIAMS University of Reading Reading, United Kingdom JAMES COOKE University of Science and Technology Cholburi, Thailand Because much education through ESL takes place in broader contexts of development, this article explores the links between areas often dealt with separately, namely, language, literacy, education, and develop- ment, particularly national economic development. We characterise the contrasting histories of rich and poor countries and discuss definitions of development, poverty, literacy, and L1. We review evidence showing that education and literacy are more effectively achieved in a known language, and that effective education contributes to both economic and human development. Education in poor countries, however, is ineffective, one reason being that students have an insufficient under- standing of the instructional medium (typically English or French). Unfortunately, the status quo is maintained because of political priori- ties of unification and modernisation, and parental pressure. Develop- ment depends on an interdependent complex of economic, social, and educational factors that combine to produce vicious or virtuous circles: Effective education at the primary level, implying the use of a language understood by the students, is therefore crucial. I n the opening years of the 21st century, an estimated 150 million school-age children are not in school, more than 900 million adults are not literate, and 1.3 billion people live in extreme poverty on under U.S.$1 a day (Department for International Development [DFID], 1997). Those who are not literate are in the main the same people as those living in poverty, and they are also the parents of the children who are not in school. On the surface, therefore, language, education, and development appear to be related. However, the nature of the relation- ship is rarely examined critically. The academic literature in language, education, and development typically does not draw links among these TESOL QUARTERLY Vol. 36, No. 3, Autumn 2002 297 areas because research tends to focus on one area rather than looking at interrelationships. Through their work, many TESOL professionals participate in development projects within larger educational initiatives and therefore need to attempt to understand the interplay between their work and issues of development. SEPARATE FIELDS, SEPARATE RESEARCH The literature dealing with development has paid remarkably little attention to the issue of language in education (Institute of Develop- ment Studies, 1998, p. 1). Arcand (1995) notes that there is nothing on language in the two-volume Handbook of Economic Development (Chenery & Srinivasan, 1988), and the same is true of An Introduction to Development Economics (Elkan, 1995). Robinson (1996a), speculating on this lack of attention, surmises that for the developed world “development problems are not experienced first-hand, but rather seen from a macro perspec- tive, for instance as a matter of international trade, of large climatic regions, of disaster or famine” (p. 6) and suggests that governments in poor countries with limited resources may choose priorities other than communication. Development economists’ lack of interest in language is reciprocated by an almost complete neglect of development economics on the part of language educationists. Although the titles of some volumes suggest a link between language and development, notably Language and Develop- ment, edited by Kenny and Savage (1997), and an identically entitled collection edited by Crooks and Crewes (1995), the volumes are largely concerned with language education in developing countries rather than with the exploration of the linkage between language, literacy, and development. A number of publications also attest interest in macro- sociolinguistic and ideological issues (e.g., Hall & Eggington, 2000; Pennycook, 1994; Tollefson, 1991) but eschew engagement with eco- nomics. However, interest in the links is now growing: Coulmas’s (1992) Language and Economy looks at these human phenomena from a capitalist perspective, and Rassool (1999) looks at literacy for sustainable develop- ment in poor countries. Review papers oriented toward setting agendas for language and development have also appeared, some of a general nature (e.g., Arcand, 1995; Grin, 1996; Robinson, 1992) and some with a local orientation (e.g. Bunyi, 1999; Heugh, 1999; Webb, 1999), and Wagner (1995), though focusing primarily on adult literacy and develop- ment, raises a number of language education issues. Given the plethora of papers in other areas of ESOL, however, the number of papers by language educationists that engage with develop- ment economics is still relatively small. Bruthiaux (2000), in a vigorous 298 TESOL QUARTERLY exploration of the intellectual causes for this neglect, sees it as a function of the historical antipathy of educationists toward market capitalism from the 1930s depression onward. To this one might add hostility toward the statistical approaches of economic modeling on the part of many language educationists, whose background is generally in the humanities, and their suspicion that an interest in economics betokens a right-wing perspective. More unexpected than language educationists’ neglect of economics is the large amount of work in development education that evinces little concern for language (e.g., Pennycuick, 1993; Postlethwaite & Ross, 1992; Thomas, 1992). Education reports from developing countries also say little about language: Education Now (Oxfam International, 1999) devotes fewer than 2 of 240 pages to language questions, and Machingaidze, Pfukani, and Shumba (1998), less than 1 page in a 95- page report on education in Zimbabwe. Although there are exceptions (e.g., Treffgarne, 1986), the general impression is one of neglect, due, according to Watson (1999, p. 5), to the field’s domination by education- ists with a background in policy and planning rather than in language. Despite the lack of interdisciplinarity on the part of those working in language, literacy, education, and development, in this article we suggest that there are sufficient data from past experiences to attempt a critical descriptive account of links between them. In the remainder of this section, we briefly review the role of language in the development of rich and poor countries and define some basic terms. A Historical Perspective Languages are identified and standardised as a result of human actions in the past. As Blommaert (1999) points out, “one cannot define a speech community in purely synchronic terms” (p. 7). A current understanding of language in development requires a look at the contrasting histories typical of rich and poor countries. In the history of rich countries (especially, but not only, of Western Europe), three simultaneous, interdependent processes have typically operated: (a) the consolidation of the political unit; (b) the consolida- tion of the economic network; and (c) the development and dissemina- tion of the standard language, accompanied by literacy in that language. Literacy in this context does not necessarily mean mass literacy, for, as Graff (1995) says, “More important than high rates or ‘threshold levels’ of literacy . . . have been the educational levels and power relations of key persons” (p. 15). Likewise, the great majority of the population may not be proficient in the standard language, although it is normally a symbolic reference point for those who claim it. The legitimisation of the state and PATHWAYS AND LABYRINTHS 299 its institutions inevitably involves the legitimisation of the language of the state. This so-called standard language variety is that of the dominant group or one to which that group has ready access.1 There is a concomitant tendency to marginalize other language varieties (Skutnabb- Kangas, 2000). In many colonised parts of the world, on the other hand, the internal development of states in terms of these political, economic, and linguis- tic dimensions was largely curtailed. Africa provides extreme examples. Following the General Act of Berlin in 1845, European powers estab- lished boundaries for the colonies. The preeminent colonial powers, France and the United Kingdom, installed their own economic and political institutions in their colonies, operating in their own languages. The use of colonial languages meant the short-circuiting of functional development, standardisation, and the spread of literacy for almost all African languages (see Coulmas, 1992, p. 50; Mazrui, 1996). Although many African languages developed orthographies and were used for religious texts (thus qualifying as standard varieties in terms of pre- scribed orthography, lexis, and grammar), their functions as vehicles of public written communication were largely limited to the religious domain. Issues of language identification and standardisation are therefore most problematic precisely in many of the ex-colonial areas of the world. In Zambia, for example, Grimes (1992, p. 433) identifies 35 indigenous languages, whereas Kashoki (1990) identifies 80 “dialects” with approxi- mately “20 mutually unintelligible clusters or ‘languages’” (p. 109), and the 1990 Zambian population census (Central Statistical Office, 1995) states that “the country has 72 tribes, each with its own unique language or dialect” (p. 34). Although the immediate reasons for such discrepan- cies stem from differing criteria (i.e., local political vs. linguistic) for defining a language, this indeterminacy is bound up with colonial history and the consequent marginalisation from power of indigenous popula- tions and their languages. The extreme power differentials in colonial regimes generally inhibited any integration of indigenous institutions (economic, political, or linguistic) into those of the colonisers. Decolon- isation, if and when it came, did not allow for reruns of history, and at the moment of independence the new nations often had no realistic alternative to the use of ex-colonial languages in the institutions of the state, thereby effectively disadvantaging citizens with little or no proficiency in the language. (Globalisation, dominated by the United States, fol- 1 To expect otherwise is to mistake the nature of power. Dominant groups by definition do not put themselves at disadvantage, although they may extend a degree of tolerance provided the minority group does not threaten their interests. 300 TESOL QUARTERLY lowed close on decolonisation; for anglophone ex-colonies, this but- tressed the status of English.) In rich European countries such as France and the United Kingdom, on the other hand, the emergence of a standard language and the consolidation of the state in economic and political terms had been in a symbiotic relationship for several centuries of preindustrial as well as industrial development. The key word, however, is symbiotic —literacy alone did not cause development. Graff (1995, pp. 19–22) claims that industrialisation in parts of 18th-century Europe was accompanied by a temporary decline in literacy rates, whereas in Sweden and Scotland, Protestantism generated high levels of literacy that were not an immedi- ate cause of industrialisation, although they may have facilitated the eventual transition. Nearer the present, the experience of the Experimental World Literacy programme, organised by the United Nations Education, Scien- tific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 11 countries (Algeria, Ecuador, Ethiopia, Guinea, India, Iran, Madagascar, Mali, Sudan, Syria, and Tanzania) from 1967 to 1972, provides further evidence that attempts to establish large-scale literacy with no immediate socioeco- nomic functions are likely to fail (see Lind & Johnston, 1990, p. 71). Reflecting on the failure, the programme assessors observed that, if development is to occur, “literacy must often be linked to changes in other fields, such as economic and social reforms” (United Nations Development Programme [UNDP]/UNESCO, 1976, cited in Lind & Johnston, 1990, p. 75). In short, history suggests that the role of language varies according to socioeconomic conditions. Definitions The lack of agreement on the definition of central terms in the fields of education and development can be an obstacle in discussion. Development and Poverty Almost a decade ago George and Sabelli (1994, p. 230) claimed that the word development no longer conveyed an agreed concept. King (1998) put forward the view that categorising countries as developed and develop- ing is of doubtful validity because all countries in the world face development problems and are in some sense developing. Nevertheless, the literature includes two differing conceptions of development: 1. development conceived of as increased prosperity, measured in terms of economic growth (e.g., Arndt, 1987). There are two views on the PATHWAYS AND LABYRINTHS 301 preferred means of achieving this conception of development. In the neoliberal view, the forces of supply and demand in free markets are the most efficient way to set prices for maximum absolute gain. While recognising that much of this gain accumulates with a minor- ity, neoliberals claim that wealth also “trickles down” to benefit the poor. The second view, namely, the structuralist, recognises the efficiency for growth of industrial capitalism but values state inter- vention in markets in the interest of equity, or to reduce the dependency of poor countries on rich countries, for example, by protecting infant industries through price-fixing or import quotas. 2. development conceived of as the meeting of human needs, which enables the potential of human personality to be realised (Thomas & Potter, 1992). In this conception, development is equated not only with reduction in material poverty and in inequitable distribution but also with in- creases in such factors as democratic participation, levels of educa- tion, levels of health, mortality rates, the status of women, and environmental sustainability. The human needs conception is also compatible with the view that vulnerability, powerlessness, and isolation are important aspects of deprivation. It is, however, the development-as-economic-growth view that has risen to global dominance today, and free-market economics forms the backbone of the new world order, with the promotion of the view that human development ultimately depends on national economic develop- ment. Like development, the term poverty is notoriously relativistic. The term itself is a point of contention, with de Haan (1999) pointing out that in France the phrase social exclusion is preferred, the term poverty being discredited as a result of its association with charity and liberal individualism while French Republicanism favours solidarity and social integration. However, because this concept has not to date featured prominently in analyses of international development, we avoid it here. By contrast, a considerable literature is devoted to defining the term poverty, the following being two of the more common approaches: 1. poverty line: In the simplest definition, poverty is income below a certain level. In the Poverty Reduction Handbook, the World Bank (1993a, p. 11) used a poverty line of the equivalent of U.S.$370 per person per year. Obtaining cross-society comparability is, of course, difficult. 2. poverty profile: This notion highlights dimensions of welfare such as health, female fertility (i.e., birth rate), life expectancy, child mortal- ity, nutrition, access to clean water, and school enrolment rates to provide a profile for a given population (Crow, 1992, p. 28). 302 TESOL QUARTERLY Either of these definitions will capture a common core of poor people, but the total numbers may vary depending on the definition adopted. Tabatabai (1995), using the income-centred approach of setting a dollar-a-day poverty line, estimates that about one third of the population of developing countries live in poverty. The incidence of poverty is now highest in South Asia and in sub-Saharan Africa (50–60 percent of the population), and lowest in East Asia (about 15 percent). (p. 30) He adds that although most of the poor currently live in Asia, particu- larly in South Asia, “there is an unmistakable trend towards the Africani- sation of poverty” (p. 31). Of the 36 countries estimated by UNDP (2001) to have “low human development” (p. 1), 29 are in Africa, 6 are in Asia, and 1 is in the Caribbean. National economic growth and poverty reduction are obviously linked, but no consistent relationship exists between them. Intranationally, although a state’s average per capita income may rise through economic development, the benefits may be disproportionally allocated (cf. DFID, 1997, paragraph 1.3), so the population of poor people remains unaf- fected. Economic development may therefore coincide with an increase in the number of people in absolute poverty (Tabatabai, 1995, p. 28). Internationally in the past 50 years, formerly poor countries, such as Thailand and Malaysia, have become relatively rich while those that remain poor face further decline (Ilon, 1997, p. 413). Additionally, many poor countries are burdened by debt incurred because of the oil crises of the 1970s and 1980s, rising interest rates, and declining terms of trade. Corrupt or inefficient officials have in some cases aggravated debt and poverty, as was the case in the former Zaire, and chronic civil conflict has hampered countries such as Angola, Burundi, Sierra Leone, and Somalia. Disagreement is widespread on how the effects of the globalisation of the world economy, stimulated by trade deregulation and facilitated by the communication revolution, relate to development and poverty. Although international business executives (e.g., Sutherland, 1998) claim that the effects “have been overwhelmingly good” (p. 62), globalisation has left some 1.3 billion people, of whom about 70% are women, in extreme poverty, with less than U.S.$1 a day to live on (DFID, 1997, paragraph 1.9). In short, economic growth approaches to develop- ment, though successful in the so-called Asian tiger economies, have to date failed to alleviate poverty (DFID, 1997). Aspirations are now under review, and there is an increasing emphasis on human needs. The World Bank is currently “defining a new role for itself as a global welfare agency and placing education firmly at the centre of its strategy” (Ilon, 1997, p. 414), and it claims that “poverty alleviation and environment [have] moved center-stage” (World Bank, 1994, cited in Ilon, 1997, p. 416). PATHWAYS AND LABYRINTHS 303 Literacy A simple definition of literacy, provided by Carrington (1997), is the following: That person is literate who, in a language he speaks, can read with under- standing anything that he would have understood had it been spoken to him; and can write so that it can be read, anything that he can say. (p. 82, citing Gudschinsky, 1968, p. 147) As Carrington notes, this definition is applicable to any cultural setting; it is nonetheless essentially a psycholinguistic view of literacy, focusing on the creation of meaning through writing or reading. However, literacy may also be seen in a more relativist social perspective as “a set of individual skills, but these skills may be thought to be sufficient or insufficient, depending on the social, cultural and political context of any given society” (Wagner, 1995, p. 350). Although the two views are not incompatible, in this review we adopt the narrow psycholinguistic interpretation of literacy, not the broad social one, and we focus on reading acquired through formal education. More radical conceptualisations of literacy, as embodied in new literacies work (e.g., McKay, 1996; Street, 1993), focus on literacy practices (i.e., forms of social behaviour) rather than on literacy competence (i.e., pro- cesses of individual understanding). Although such studies offer insight- ful analyses of the social value of literacy (Street, 1995, p. 29), the conceptualisation of ideological literacy is too abstract and the ethno- graphic instantiation too local and contingent to be readily applicable to general reviews such as this one (e.g., choral reading or reciting aloud without understanding is a literacy practice that is ubiquitous in schools in poor countries but one that we wish to distinguish from reading with understanding). In compilations of literacy statistics, operational definitions of literacy vary from country to country. In some it is calculated on the basis of years of school attendance; in others, on the basis of self-reports or the ability to write one’s name. Such reports use the term illiterate to refer to those who do not meet the criteria. According to one set of criteria, estimates of literacy in adults aged 15 or over in developed, developing, and least developed countries over 20 years show generally increasing rates worldwide (UNESCO, 1995; see Table 1). However, because of increases in population, the absolute numbers of illiterate people have not fallen commensurately, particularly in the least developed countries. Currently women account for approximately two thirds of adult illiterates, al- though the rate of difference between men and women is closing. Wagner (1995, p. 349) points out that even in families in which some 304 TESOL QUARTERLY TABLE 1 Estimated Frequency of Illiteracy and Estimated Literacy Rates by Area (UNESCO, 1995) Illiterate adults (millions) Adult literacy rate (%) Area 1980 1995 2000 a 1980 1995 2000 a World 877.4 884.7 880.8 69.5 77.4 79.4 Developed countries 29.0 12.9 10.7 96.6 98.7 98.9 Developing countries 848.4 871.8 870.0 58.0 70.4 73.4 Least developed countries 135.4 166.0 178.0 36.5 48.8 52.7 a Projected. members are illiterate, one or two may have some degree of literacy, so the family as a unit has access to literacy. In passing, we note that, from a development perspective, numeracy (which may be best regarded as a type of literacy) is probably as important as, if not more important than, literacy (cf. Wagner, 1995, p. 352). LINKING LANGUAGE AND DEVELOPMENT Despite the unidimensionality of both development and language perspectives, some important connections emerge from analysis of work in each area under the broader umbrella of education in developing countries. From an instrumental perspective, education is intended to turn students into citizens and workers, and to promote the spread of knowledge, with the classroom typically seen as a teacher-dominated site for transmission of information. The personal-growth perspective, on the other hand, sees education as a student-centred process in which learners not only acquire information but actively manipulate, integrate, and create knowledge. Although in reality the education that takes place in many classrooms falls somewhere between these perspectives, in both cases language is clearly crucial. Education and Language Labels The oft-cited view of UNESCO (1953) that “we take it as axiomatic that the best medium for teaching is the mother tongue of the pupil” (p. 6) is at face value entirely reasonable, but in practice it poses a number of difficulties. First, the term mother tongue is problematic for a host of reasons. One is the context in which the student has acquired language. PATHWAYS AND LABYRINTHS 305 Some children are exposed to two—or more—languages from infancy and have “bilingualism as a first language” (cf. Swain, 1972; see also Zentella, 1997), particularly in situations of language contact in urban areas of developing countries. Second, a student’s chronological L1 may have atrophied, and the chronological L2 may have become dominant— a not uncommon eventuality for children from minority communities. (Mother tongue here, of course, refers to the chronological L1.)2 Moreover, to assume that mother tongue education is taking place simply because the same language label is applied to the students’ language and the medium of instruction may be mistaken if the two are different varieties of what is considered the same language. This issue is critical in poor countries where highly divergent rural varieties and urban contact varieties may share the same linguistic label as the standard language (e.g., in Zambia, urban Nyanja is very different from the standard Nyanja of schoolbooks; see Williams, 1998). Literacy studies need to be especially alert to language variety because most texts are written in a standard language, whether Arabic, English, Spanish, or another language. Researchers must always bear in mind the possibility of variety mismatch in reading lest they attribute difficulties with literacy skills to individuals who simply lack proficiency in the standard variety of their language. Primary-school children in Zambia, for example, are well aware that their own Town Nyanja differs from the standard Nyanja of their course book, as the words of one child attest: “I don’t know Nyanja so well. The way we read is different from the way we speak” (Williams, 1998, pp. 59–60). Education, Language, and Reading We take the position that literacy, especially reading, is an important factor in formal education.3 A wealth of research supports the view that education in a language already known to the learners, typically their mother tongue, is more likely to succeed than education in a language children meet for the first time as they enter the classroom. Greaney (1996), in his review of developing countries, concludes that “research findings suggest that initial instruction should be offered in a child’s first 2 Mother tongue in sub-Saharan Africa may refer to the unacquired language of the group to which a person belongs, yielding anomalous claims such as “I have never learned my mother tongue.” 3 Scribner and Cole (1981), however, were able to separate literacy and education in research with the Vai people of Liberia and showed that it was not literacy itself but schooling that produced cognitive changes. In this review, however, we focus on literacy in schooling, and “to have schooling without literacy is not possible” (Cook-Gumperz, 1986, p. 41). 306 TESOL QUARTERLY language” (p. 24). Elley (1994), reporting on a survey of 32 countries, found that pupils whose home language differed from the school language performed less well on reading tests than those who were tested in their home language. The situation in sub-Saharan Africa, where exoglossic languages (i.e., English, French, and Portuguese) dominate primary education, gives particular cause for concern (see Bamgbose, 1991, p. 81; Rubagumya, 1990, p. 2; Schmied, 1991, pp. 102–104). Studies of individual African countries likewise present a gloomy picture. In Zambia ample evidence shows that the vast majority of primary school pupils cannot read adequately in English, the sole official language of instruction (Nkamba & Kanyika, 1998; Williams, 1996), and Machingaidze et al. (1998) conclude that in Zimbabwe between 60% and 66% of pupils at Grade 6 do not reach “the desirable levels” (p. 71) of reading in English. Similar findings for Zanzibar (Nassor & Mohammed, 1998), Mauritius (Kulpoo, 1998), and Namibia (Voigts, 1998) are reported on the basis of large- scale research (carried out on behalf of UNESCO by the Southern Africa Consortium for Monitoring Educational Quality). Conversely, beneficial effects flow from use of the mother tongue, or a known language, in reading. Research from Nigeria, Mali, Kenya, and Tanzania, summarised by the Association for the Development of African Education (1996), supports this view, and in Burundi, Eisemon et al. (1993) found that Year 6 students scored significantly higher on Kirundi versions of tests of comprehension than on French versions. Williams (1996) found from a variety of quantitative reading tests and qualitative reading investigations that Year 5 pupils in Malawi primary schools had largely achieved reading proficiency in their local language, Chichewa (the language of instruction for Years 1–4). One reason for the positive findings for reading in an L1 (or a familiar language) is almost certainly that the initial stages of beginning reading are much easier because students can bring into play psycholinguistic guessing strategies based on knowledge of that language. Other evidence, however, runs counter to the view that children will succeed in reading only if they are taught in their mother tongue. Wagner, Spratt, and Ezzaki (1989) traced Berber L1 and Arab L1 children in Morocco from Years 1 to 5, administering annual tests of Arabic reading. Although there were differences in favour of the Arab L1 children in Year 1, these differences had almost disappeared by Year 5, and Wagner et al. dispute the view that learning to read in an L1 “enhances a child’s achievement relative to that of children obliged to learn to read in a second language” (p. 32). However, the Berber L1 children were clearly using Arabic informally outside the school, and it had probably become their dominant language by Year 5. Such a shift in PATHWAYS AND LABYRINTHS 307 language dominance is not uncommon for numerically submerged marginalised peoples, and the term L1 is misleading in such situations. Further counterevidence to the view that successful reading instruc- tion must take place in the L1 is provided by the well-known French- medium immersion programmes in Canada. Longitudinal evaluation from kindergarten to Grade 8 suggests that, for the first three grades, the French immersion groups (i.e., English groups taught through French) lag behind the control groups (i.e., English groups taught in English) in English reading but that the immersion groups catch up to and overtake their English control groups thereafter (Cummins & Swain, 1986, pp. 60–61). It would, however, be misleading to generalise from Canadian immersion to situations in less developed countries, given the differing background factors that operated in Canada. Parents there deliberately opted for the immersion schools for their children and could withdraw their children if the latter experienced problems; the schools were also relatively well provided for, and all the teachers were trained (see Serpell, 1989, p. 102, on the inapplicability of the Canadian immersion model to Zambia). Education and Economic Development The consensus is that, at national levels, education and development as economic growth tend to correlate. A number of studies, many of which inevitably confound formal education and literacy, have demon- strated this relationship. Lewin (1993) cites one such study by Harbison and Myers (1964), who found that indicators of human resource, including literacy, correlated closely with levels of economic develop- ment. Causal interpretations of these correlations were investigated by Hicks (1980, cited in Lewin, 1993), who compared historic economic growth rates with literacy levels (not education) in 83 countries. The 12 developing countries with the fastest rates of growth were found to have literacy levels 12% above the average for the 83, leading Hicks to suggest that literacy indeed contributes to growth. This finding is supported in a study by Wheeler (1980, cited in Lewin, 1993), who examined longitudi- nal data from 88 countries and concluded that 20–30% increases in average literacy rates led to rises in gross national product of 8–16%. The conclusions of the above studies are compatible with the histori- cal evidence that education contributes to but is not a causal factor in development. This view of education as contributory is supported by the work of Azariadis and Drazen (1990), who looked at the development history of 32 countries from 1940 to 1970 and from 1960 to 1980. They concluded that a threshold level of economic state variables, including 308 TESOL QUARTERLY the educational quality of the labour force, was a necessary but not sufficient condition for rapid economic growth. At the start of the study, the fastest growing countries ( Japan, Greece, Mexico, Finland, Guate- mala, and Nicaragua in the first period, and Korea, Japan, Greece, Portugal, Spain, and Thailand in the second) all had a highly qualified labour force relative to initial per capita income. Other countries in Azariadis and Drazen’s survey, where the necessary conditions pertained, experienced less dramatic growth, and still more (many in Latin America) had up to that point failed to capitalise on their well-qualified labour force, experiencing slow or even negative growth. Azariadis and Drazen speculate that the failures were due to “wasteful economic policies, wars and other political upheavals” (p. 519), together with flaws in the working of credit markets and differences in birth rates. However, what they saw as significant is that not one of the countries in which the labour force lacked the threshold level of educational quality managed to achieve rapid growth. Azariadis and Drazen’s (1990) conclusion leads them to speculate whether a threshold level of literacy in an adequate proportion of the population is necessary for economic takeoff. Anderson (1966) earlier estimated that “about 40% of adult literacy . . . is a threshold for economic development” (p. 347), although the claim begs many ques- tions and attracts criticism from Rogers (1990, p. 3), Street (1984, p. 2), and Rassool (1999, p. 81). However, in fairness to Anderson, we note that most critics (Graff, 1995, p. 52, being an exception) fail to mention his statement that “that level of education would not be a sufficient condition in societies lacking other support systems” (Anderson, 1966, p. 347). Support for the importance of a threshold level of education comes from Moock and Addou’s (1994) analysis of a number of studies from 12 countries in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. They concluded that, overall, formal schooling was positively related to agricultural productivity over- all, although there were variations in the relationship between the two. They also found evidence for a threshold number of years of education (3–6 depending on the country) and propose that this threshold represents a level of education at which the literacy and numeracy skills attained are sufficient to be retained and rewarded later in life.4 4 In alternative explanations, Graff (1995, p. 54) claims that the purpose of schooled literacy is to train the masses for factory work, and screening theory says education has no productivity- related impact, school credentials simply acting as signals for employers. However, Colclough (1993, p. 29) adduces evidence from the nonformal employment sector in support of the view that the increased cognitive abilities brought about by formal schooling raise productivity. PATHWAYS AND LABYRINTHS 309 Education and Human Needs Development From the development-as-meeting-human-needs perspective, a num- ber of benefits are associated with education, the most important probably being the improvements in health status and birth rates associated with female education (Subbarao & Raney, 1993). The evi- dence comes from a wide variety of sources. Caldwell (1979, cited in Hobcraft, 1993) found that in Nigeria the impact of maternal education on child survival was significant even with controls for the husband’s educational level and occupation. After analysing data from 88 coun- tries, Wheeler (1980, cited in Lewin 1993, p. 21) concluded that literacy contributed to reduced birth rates, and Puchner (1995) found maternal education to be closely related to child nutritional status and mortality. Lomperis (1991), using data from Colombia, found that maternal education significantly affected preschool children’s nutritional health, and she claims that investment in maternal literacy would have a more effective, longer term impact on child nutritional health than do food transfer programmes, the effects of which are only short term. Hobcraft (1993) reviews evidence on the effects of the education of women from a number of major studies in the United Nations World Fertility Survey programme. He confirms the findings that educating women significantly improves health and lowers fertility, and found that these effects survive controls for a range of other potentially significant variables. As well as the immediate disadvantages of poor child health, evidence shows, predictably, that good health is a positive factor in school achievement, as healthy children are more likely to be able to pay attention in class whereas unhealthy children are more likely to be absent (Puchner, 1995, p. 307). Hobcraft notes, however, that the effects of maternal education on increased chances of child survival appear much weaker for countries in sub-Saharan Africa than in other poor regions of the world, a finding for which he has no convincing explana- tion. Cochrane and Farid (1989) also observe that in sub-Saharan Africa the birth rates of the rural uneducated and the urban educated show smaller differentials than in other regions (particularly Latin America), a point we return to below. Attitudinal as well as health-related changes are claimed to result from women’s achieving literacy. The changes appear to derive from greater self-confidence and a new identity (e.g., Bown, 1990), and they may also have the potential to alleviate poverty by, for example, increasing readiness to participate in small businesses or contribute to making family decisions (Archer & Cottingham, 1996). Summers (1994) maintains that education also yields environmental benefits. The most significant effect of female education on the environ- ment is likely to flow from a reduction of birth rates and the consequent 310 TESOL QUARTERLY slowing of population growth, resulting in less pressure on the land. Large numbers of rural poor live on marginal land that is particularly vulnerable to degradation. For all its educational excellence, however, the developed world has hardly set an example of efficient environmen- tal management, and the thesis that environmental degradation has marched with the growth of formal Western-style education is, sadly, quite plausible. One of the biggest obstacles to development in sub-Saharan Africa is HIV infection and AIDS. Of the total estimate of 16.3 million deaths attributed to AIDS globally by the end of 1999, 13.7 million had occurred in sub-Saharan Africa (Bartholet, 2000, p. 19). Apart from the human tragedy, the epidemic has devastating consequences for national eco- nomic development, the loss of skilled members of the workforce being of particular concern (e.g., Malawi’s minister of education claimed that the country was losing 50 teachers a month, mainly to AIDS-related deaths; “50 Teachers Die Every Month,” 2001). According to Subbarao and Raney (1993, p. 4), research has been unable to quantify the importance of literacy and education in combating HIV infection and AIDS. Although Uganda, where the rate of HIV infection has fallen from 15.0% to 9.7% of the population (Bartholet, 2000, p. 17), provides limited grounds for optimism, the drop occurred in the context of a prolonged government campaign. World Development Report 1993 (World Bank, 1993b) notes that “when the AIDS epidemic began, infection was initially concentrated among well-educated élites” and goes on to point out that “these same groups were the first to change their lifestyles as information became available about the disease and its prevention” (p. 44). The power of formal education to combat the significant problems of environmental degradation and HIV/AIDS may be in doubt. Overall, however, the research evidence indicates that, whether one interprets development from the perspective of national economic growth or of human needs, education is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for development to take place. LANGUAGE IN SUPPORT OF EDUCATIONAL QUALITY? Given the evidence reviewed above for the potentially positive impact of education on development, one might conclude that efforts to extend primary school access to all children in developing countries should be pursued without further ado. However, research on the quality and effectiveness of formal education reveals that, in developing countries, much of the potential is not being realised, even for those children who attend school. Oxfam International (1999), for example, claims that “it is PATHWAYS AND LABYRINTHS 311 clear that much of what passes for education in the developing world is of abysmal quality” (p. 12). Much of the educational provision in developing countries is ineffective for a variety of reasons, including language access and language teaching. Lockheed (1993) draws attention to the contrast between primary school provision in developed and in developing countries as well as between what is officially provided in developing countries and what takes place in reality. A primary school student in a developed country is likely to be healthy and well nourished and to receive instruction in a class of 30 or fewer children in a well-equipped school with a curriculum that is well thought out in terms of scope and sequence. On average they have 900 hours a year of learning time, $52 a year of non-capital material inputs, and a teacher with sixteen years of formal education. (Lockheed, 1993, p. 20) In low-income countries, many children attend a shelterless school or have class in a poorly constructed and equipped building, and their curriculum is likely to be poorly designed. On average they have only 500 hours a year of learning time, $1.70 a year of non-capital material inputs, and a teacher with ten years of formal education. Typically, the student will share a resource-poor learning environment with more than fifty other children, many of whom are chronically undernourished, parasite- ridden and hungry. (p. 20) Even such bleak descriptions as these fail to reveal the full extent of the current ineffectiveness of many schools in developing countries. The difference between levels of subject-matter knowledge for teachers in developed and developing countries is likely to be far greater than suggested by the ratio of 16:10 years spent in formal education, as each year of education in a poor country, with all its inefficiencies, may result in very little learning—and teachers’ subject-matter knowledge has been shown to be a key determinant of student achievement in developing countries (Lockheed, 1993, p. 28). As for quality in the context of literacy, Postlethwaite and Ross (1992), in a survey of 9- and 14-year-olds in more than 4,000 schools in 26 (mainly developed) countries, concluded with respect to reading meth- ods, “The more effective school is one where the teachers emphasise, above all the understanding of what is read” (p. 46). However, most sub- Saharan primary schools teach reading through rote repetition in a little- known language, as shown in the following extract from a third-year reading class in Zambia: 312 TESOL QUARTERLY Teacher: We are going to read the story that is Chuma and the Rhino. That is paragraph three and four, which has been written on the board. Who can read the first sentence in paragraph three? Yes? Pupil: Look at that hippo’s mouth father Teacher: Read aloud. Pupil: Look at that hippo’s mouth father. Teacher: Once more. Pupil: Look at that hippo’s mouth father. Teacher: Yes. The sentence is “Look at that hippo’s mouth father.” Class: Look at that hippo’s mouth father. Teacher: Look at that hippo’s mouth father. Class: Look at that hippo’s mouth father. (Williams, 1996, p. 199) The lesson continues in this vein, with no attention to the presentation or checking of meaning. Such rote repetition of written text without comprehension is a readinglike activity, but it is not reading according to our definition (although it qualifies as a literacy practice). Likewise, copying from the blackboard without comprehension is writinglike but is not true writing, and has a similar implication for effective education. If children in developing countries have little exposure to the lan- guage of instruction (whether English, French, Portuguese, or another language) outside the school, and if teaching the language of instruction is ineffective inside the school, then low-quality education is inevitable. Reading cannot fulfill its intended major role in formal teaching and learning, primarily because, for the vast majority of children, lack of language competence short-circuits the reading process. In such cases, the school experience runs the risk of being stultifying rather than enlightening.5 Indeed, the above-mentioned findings that education had weaker effects on child survival in sub-Saharan Africa relative to develop- ing countries in Latin America (Cochrane & Farid, 1989; Hobcraft, 1993) are likely to be the result of the lower effectiveness of education in Africa. It was less effective there partly, we suggest, because the students lacked proficiency in the language of instruction; the Latin American students, by contrast, had acquired proficiency in Spanish. The cognitive gains from investment in inadequate education are negligible, as one would expect (Knight & Sabot, 1990). Simply provid- ing access to schools therefore may not encourage the poorest parents to enrol their children. To sacrifice the valuable productive labour of their children to education (the opportunity cost), such parents must perceive 5 Another risk is the negative impact of English on national self-esteem. Kapepwe, at the time vice president of Zambia, said in 1969, “We should stop teaching children through English right from the start because it is the surest way of imparting inferiority complex in the children and the society. It is poisonous. It is the surest way of killing African personality and African culture” (as cited in Serpell, 1978, p. 432). PATHWAYS AND LABYRINTHS 313 education as a valuable investment. Crucially, then, it is effective educa- tion that enables individuals to acquire knowledge and skills that in turn can contribute to development. The glaringly obvious point is that education is unlikely to be effective for the majority when schools employ an unfamiliar language such as English as a medium of instruc- tion without effective means for increasing learners’ language proficiency. POLITICAL PRIORITIES Educationists who advocate a central role for African languages in primary education (from the United Missionary Conference in Kenya in 1909 to the Intergovernmental Conference on African Language Poli- cies in Africa in 1997) have repeatedly stated the overwhelming case for educating children in a familiar language. Governments have largely ignored these calls, invariably citing the need for national unification and development. In Zambia, the Ministry of Education (1976) clearly laid out the postindependence role of schooling in promoting this unity through English: For the sake of communication between Zambians whose mother tongues differ and in order to promote the unity of the nation, it is necessary for all Zambian children to learn the national language [i.e., English] as early as possible, and to use it confidently. (paragraph 47) Although opting for English may have prevented conflict in the educational arena between competing language groups in countries such as Zambia, the language has divided, on the one hand, those who have access to it, typically members of reasonably well-off urban groups and, on the other hand, those who do not, typically the members of poor urban and especially rural groups. Far from being a source of unity, the use of English in education in many poor countries has become a source of national disunity. Likewise, far from being a bridge to development, the dominant role of English in primary schools (the only form of education for the vast majority of people in poor countries) has proved to be a barrier, because most students fail to acquire adequate competence in the language. Not surprisingly, then, whether one looks at development in terms of the national economy or in terms of human needs, poor countries that use English as a means of accessing development have not hitherto made great strides. For example, Zambia’s gross domestic product had a real growth rate of minus 2% in 1998, and 86% of the population was estimated to be living under the poverty line in 1993 (World Factbook, 1999). Life expectancy at birth was just under 37 years, and 19% of the 314 TESOL QUARTERLY 15- to 49-year-old population was affected by HIV/AIDS (Bartholet, 2000, p. 17). This bleak picture is repeated in many other African countries; Zambia is ranked 153 of 174 countries in the Human Development Index (UNDP, 2001, p. 1). Djité (1993) concludes that reliance and dependency on superimposed international languages to achieve development in Africa over the last three decades has proven to be a failure. Instead of leading to national unity, this attitude has significantly contributed to the socioeconomic and political instability of most African countries. (p. 149) Although such views are widespread, governments, especially in Africa, have shown little will to change their policies, and their favouring of exoglossic languages such as English is generally supported by local communities, for whom English equals education. Families see English as a “strong” language and primary-school English as the first step toward a coveted white-collar job. Hornberger (1987) notes similar community resistance to the use of Quechua in rural Peru; Davies (1996) notes the insistence of parents in Nepal that children be taught through English. What governments and families appear not to appreciate is the consider- able amount of time, effort, and resources necessary to learn a language to a point, for example, at which independent reading of more than the simplest texts is possible. Although it would be unrealistic and unhelpful to expect governments to abolish the use of English, its dominance in the primary system in Africa should certainly be reduced if children are to engage affectively and cognitively with their schooling. However, political will in the matter of local languages is crucial, and as Heugh (1999, p. 309) points out, in the absence of demand from the communi- ties themselves, change is unlikely. CONCLUSION There is no clear pathway whereby literacy leads to an acceptable standard of life; there is a labyrinth in which the best intentioned can lose their way. Literacy, education, and economics are not linked by simple one-way, causal connections but interact in complex ways in contexts of conditionality. The above-mentioned failure of UNESCO’s 1967–1971 World Literacy programmes, which were not connected to economic or social change, contrasts with four successful, nationally inspired mass literacy campaigns (in Cuba, Nicaragua, Vietnam, and Somalia) in the 1960s and 1970s (Lind & Johnston, 1990, p. 89). All four, however, were associated with social change, and there was accordingly a PATHWAYS AND LABYRINTHS 315 use for literacy; furthermore and, in our view, crucially, these successful campaigns took place in countries with one principal majority language (see Archer & Cottingham, 1996, on projects that successfully integrated local language literacy and local development on a smaller scale). Such episodes support current development thinking, which holds that three general conditions, involving economic, social, and human capital, are necessary if poor countries are to develop in the modern world. Global economic conditions should not be a barrier to poor countries’ acquiring economic capital. Declining terms of trade and debt burdens interact to hinder the efforts of poor countries to establish the sound economic base they need to build up necessary infrastructures. A particularly contentious issue is trade liberalisation: One view is that it will increase the globalisation of poverty; the opposing view, championed by a small number of rich countries in the World Trade Organisation, is that strengthening the global economy is the only way to help the poor. Stewart (1996, p. 332) concludes from a study of 16 countries that education is implicated in both virtuous and vicious circles in economic globalisation: Stewart’s successful countries (China, Hong Kong, Indone- sia, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand) start with a well-educated population, which helps them succeed in the global economy, thereby generating further income to resource more educa- tion and enabling them to keep competing in the global economy. Stewart’s unsuccessful countries (Bolivia, Ethiopia, Madagascar, Mauri- tania, Niger, Peru, Sierra Leone, and Zambia) start with a poorly educated population, which contributes to economic failure and reduces these countries’ capacity to sustain educational resources, leading to a downward spiral. To compound their problems, their key skilled people are attracted to the successful countries. To ensure social capital, a critical mass of a country’s citizens must be committed to the polity. Many working in development (e.g., Edwards, 1999, p. 66; Robinson, 1996b, p. 170) claim that development requires not certain economic factors but the transformation of countries from within into states that have generated social capital, that is, a critical level of trust and reciprocity between citizens, with institutions and individuals who are committed to the welfare of their fellows, so that the state coheres as a polity. Sachs (1996, cited in Edwards, 1999, p. 68) maintains that it is the level of social capital that marks out the Asian tiger economies from most of Africa, and over two decades ago President Kaunda of Zambia was wont to complain of the need for civic responsibil- ity in his country. 316 TESOL QUARTERLY Provision of effective education is crucial in contributing to human capital. The crucial phrase here is effective education: It is a grotesque paradox that poor countries, who can least afford to, often operate expensive educa- tion language policies that involve home-school language switching and are generally ineffective. Rich countries, on the other hand, usually operate relatively cheap, largely monolingual language policies that are reasonably effective. Although no simple causal connection exists be- tween the language of education and the well-being of the state, the weight of evidence suggests that learners acquire literacy skills more easily in a familiar language, leading to more effective education; in turn, effective education can contribute to poverty alleviation and develop- ment. The crucial point here is that education should be effective. It is abundantly clear that education in a language that few learners, and not all teachers, have mastered detracts from quality and compounds the other problems of economically impoverished contexts. These three capitals—economic, social, and human—are, we suggest, multiplicative in the sense that if the value of one is close to zero, then the other two do not operate. Thus a weak economic base has a debilitating effect on education (human capital) and ultimately on the cohesion of the state (social capital); a weak social base means that economic life (economic capital) suffers through corruption and fraud and state education is neglected; a weak base in education means that neither economic or human development is sustainable, and again the cohesion of the state will suffer. The interrelatedness of the economic, the social, and the human requires simultaneous action on all three fronts from people who are both sympathetic and knowledgeable. Although many citizens of the global village are aware of the limitations of the power of education to transform lives in countries where trade deregulation is stifling econo- mies or where corruption and conflict are stifling civic society, language educators are better placed than most to understand the connections between language and the provision of effective education, which is a crucial factor in economic and human development. It is up to TESOL professionals to share this knowledge with politicians and economists in both rich and poor countries who are in a position to influence matters. The intricacies of economics, society, and education create a labyrinth, but surely a world whose rich nations periodically summon up huge military forces with apparent ease can find a pathway. Are we, as language educators, playing our part in the search for that pathway? 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Blackwell: Oxford. 322 TESOL QUARTERLY Language in Development Constrained: Three Contexts ROSLYN APPLEBY, KATH COPLEY, SISAMONE SITHIRAJVONGSA, and ALASTAIR PENNYCOOK University of Technology Sydney Sydney, Australia This article highlights several issues of concern for language-in- development programs through an examination of different aspects of such programs in three contexts: (a) the needs of Lao People’s Democratic Republic (PDR) as it seeks greater integration with South- east Asia and the global economy; (b) the struggles over language policy and education in East Timor, with its new mixture of economic and political dependence and independence; and (c) the relationship between local and external participants in a development project in Cambodia. We argue that whereas countries such as Lao PDR seem to have little choice in engaging in widespread English education, several concerns emerge from East Timor and Cambodia: The discursive context of development disallows participation both in the classroom and in program development. By viewing their central concern as language development rather than language in development, such programs have frequently failed to confront the contexts in which they operate. Together, these three contexts suggest that language development can become language in development only when it faces up to these broad political and discursive concerns. W e begin this article with three brief vignettes for two reasons. First, our experience suggests that they may resonate with anyone who has worked in the area of language in development in similar contexts. And for those who are less familiar with such contexts, we hope these moments provide both a small window on the varying contexts of work in this field, and suggest encounters and contexts that are not so different from others in language education. In addition, these three vignettes, though small, raise a host of larger questions about work in language in development. TESOL QUARTERLY Vol. 36, No. 3, Autumn 2002 323 THREE CONTEXTS1 English for Lao Government Officials Sitting next to a well-dressed woman at the closing ceremony of the third 9-month English language teaching (ELT) program for senior Lao government officials at the National University of Laos in July 1998, I (Sithirajvongsa) was curious about what had brought this obviously important government official to the program. She was president of the Lao Women’s Union of Champasack, one of the southern provinces of Laos, she explained, and had joined the program with a very limited English background together with 50 other senior Lao government officials, most of them holders of important positions in different sectors, such as heads of provincial and district education departments, high-ranking officials at the provincial level, directors of state enter- prises, and representatives of mass organizations. How important, I asked, was English in relation to her present and future work? As she explained, English played a very important role in the Lao civil service and had become one of the criteria for promoting all government officials, especially those who held high positions. As far as the Lao Women’s Union was concerned, she went on, English had also become very important for participation in regional and international conferences, seminars, and workshops on women’s issues. So far, she had not been able to attend any of these conferences because of her level of English. Learning English was hard and frustrating for her at 45, she explained. If only they had known earlier that English would become such a dominant language, they could have learnt it at school. But now, in a new era of globalization and internationalization, and with Lao economic and political policy orienting more toward integration into the region, learning English was an inevitable burden.2 1 The three stories are all based on real events, though we have changed certain elements for reasons of clarity, consistency, or confidentiality. Drawn from three much larger, ethnographic research projects on (a) the role of English in the development of Lao PDR, (b) an English language teaching development project in East Timor, and (c) local participation in develop- ment projects in Southeast Asia, they are a way into the contexts that we want to discuss and a representation of the common place from which many of our discussions about language in development start. 2 Interestingly, when I met her again a year later, she had been elected a member of the National Assembly, representing one of the southern provinces of Laos. She expressed her gratitude for our work at the National University of Laos in organising ELT courses for senior government officials, which had given her the chance to upgrade her English language proficiency and receive promotion. 324 TESOL QUARTERLY The Donor’s Visit: East Timor In a disused university campus in East Timor, I (Appleby) was teaching a group of Timorese students in an English program supported by overseas aid funds. The campus was surrounded by barbed wire and had been used as a military headquarters during recent turbulent events surrounding Timor’s vote for independence. The classroom was hot, dusty, and noisy: Smells and smoke wafted in through the wall of broken windows, and the noise of military aircraft and armoured personnel carriers jangled amid the ever-present crowing of roosters. My aim, according to the project contract, was to raise the students’ proficiency in English by one level on an internationally recognised scale. During the course, the students and I received two classroom visits from representatives of the donor government funding the project. On the first visit, a government official, accompanied by press secretaries and bureaucrats, surveyed with satisfaction the students quietly attending to lessons from the donor-supplied textbooks and to grammar points explained on donor-supplied white boards. For the duration of the visit, the students sat in silence at their desks, and the tension was not relieved until the last members of the large entourage had left. At this early stage, the students’ shyness and uncertainty masked their underlying vitality. On the second visit, after the students and I had spent several weeks together in the classroom, the government official, accompanied by two politicians, made a return visit to show his continuing interest in the students’ progress. But this time the students were thinking about their future after the completion of the English program and my return to the comfort of home. Rather than grammar, we had been discussing the students’ difficulties in studying—difficulties that related to the recent war, the many languages the students would need to continue their studies or gain employment, the sufficiency of assistance being offered by foreign governments and the United Nations administration, and the students’ own enormous financial hardships. The students asked the official whether the donor government would greatly increase the number of scholarships for the students to study in overseas universities, considering the part Western countries had played in accepting the oppression of East Timor over the past decades. The government official was rather taken aback, expressed concern that such political matters were being openly discussed with the students, and hastily retreated from the classroom. Outside the classroom, the official suggested to project coordinators that continued political discussions could cause the project to be closed, as project contracts proscribed involvement in Timorese political affairs. LANGUAGE IN DEVELOPMENT CONSTRAINED 325 “Do We Talk?”: Cambodia At a conference I (Copley) met up with Visna, an ex-colleague on an educational development project in Southeast Asia. I was one of the foreign specialists; he was one of the local Ministry of Education staff selected to work with us on this project. We had not seen each other for a couple of years, and in the course of our catching up, he asked me what I had been doing since we had worked together. I explained about my research on discourse in the development workplace: “It’s about interac- tion between partners in development projects like the one we worked on together,” I told him. “It’s about how we talk to each other in development projects.” There was a short, incredulous silence, and then, with the split-second timing that a seasoned comedian might muster, he asked, “Do we talk?” On the second evening of the conference, I ended up talking to Visna again. As he started telling me about difficulties he was facing in his workplace, working with team members of various nationalities, many issues that we had faced when we worked together arose: inequity of remuneration, the expectation that local staff would work long hours on the project but earn their second incomes on other (i.e., their own) income-generating projects, a lack of communication and negotiation, and unexplored assumptions on the part of many participants. As he narrated his stories, I could see that he was feeling angry and frustrated. He was speaking emphatically, lending weight to particular words, gesturing and punctuating what he was saying with judgments about the incidents he was recounting, such as “It’s disgusting, it’s really disgust- ing!” I had never heard him sound so irate. One story he told particularly caught my interest. It centred on a work meeting in which an end-of-course exam had been under discussion. Visna and his colleagues had experience of the course (they had all trained on it), the trainees (who came from the same educational context that they had done), and exam writing (they had written exams within that Ministry of Education system). Nevertheless, the expatriate team members decided that they would write the exam. The completed exam was given to Visna and his colleagues for feedback. They consid- ered the exam inappropriate for the context for three main reasons. First, the time allotted for the exam was too short for the trainees to manage the tasks. Second, the tasks were too difficult: The trainees were being asked to produce a lot of work that was beyond their levels of English and beyond the kinds of skills that they had covered in the training course. Third, the instructions were confusing, and the task was unclear. The original exam writers rejected the feedback, and when the students took the exam, the majority failed. 326 TESOL QUARTERLY LANGUAGE IN, AS, FOR, AND OF DEVELOPMENT The three vignettes in the previous section raise questions that point to a set of problematic and largely unaddressed constraints on language in development: Why is English so widely promoted in so many contexts? What are the many possible consequences of such promotion? Why do aid donors put such restrictions on what can and cannot be said and done? What constitutes relevant and meaningful language use in local contexts? What are the mechanisms by which project partners establish their view of reality and their understandings of development as the most valued? How do project partners become legitimate speakers in the development process? These questions interconnect at several levels. Asking what makes the Lao government promote ELT and English language learning so widely and what the effects of this ELT requirement may be means looking at the relationship between the global spread of English and local (or regional, national, or provincial) needs. According to the perspective of the Lao government and public, English has already played and will continue to play a significant role in Lao PDR’s socioeconomic develop- ment (i.e., language in development). Yet the requirements for large- scale ELT provision put considerable strain on the country’s economic and educational resources, creating not only forms of economic depen- dency but also educational dependency as Lao PDR turns to outside assistance for ELT provision. As English is taught in more and more contexts throughout the country, other questions arise about implica- tions for other languages within the Lao education system and about the possible social and cultural effects of such education. As a new nation, East Timor has had to confront similar difficulties in establishing a language policy and a balance between dependence on the large political and economic forces competing for influence over its people and resources and its determination to forge a degree of independence for virtually the first time in more than 400 years. Here, too, despite a decision to opt for Portuguese as the official language, many, especially students and community members keen to access the expected economic benefits of engagement with international agencies and businesses, perceive English as playing an important role in the country’s development. And plenty of aid money is available to support ELT both as an end in itself (i.e., language as development) and as a tool for other domains of development (i.e., language for development). But as shown in the second vignette above, such ELT development comes with a number of restrictions, one of which involves the possible domains of talk in the classroom. Although the preferred model of ELT may be one of transferring technical skills using the latest methodologies and LANGUAGE IN DEVELOPMENT CONSTRAINED 327 materials, the context of countries under development3 can involve cultural and political forces that significantly affect the institutions and classrooms where language education programs are implemented. An English language program limited to specific discourses and uncontro- versial themes might be acceptable to donors in a development project; however, a language program relevant to students’ cultures and needs involves engagement with the social, historical, political, and economic concerns that constitute their daily reality. Thus, the second vignette raises questions about the relationship between the broad agendas of development projects and the local concerns of those for whom the projects are intended; the third vignette raises related questions of local participation in the development project. One way to resolve the problem of competing agendas in external agencies and local bodies might be to increase local participation in project design and implementation. Yet, as the third vignette suggests, although projects often pay lip service to such participation, an indi- vidual needs far more than language competence and the right to speak at meetings to become a legitimate speaker in project management. In part, this vignette raises the question of the language of development, or the discourses that construct the ways in which development happens. Indeed, the discourses of development cut across all three contexts, constructing the need for ELT, silencing discussion of the context of ELT, and delegitimizing speakers. We return to these concerns below. English in Development in Lao PDR Much has been made, particularly in work such as Phillipson’s (1992), of the global imposition of English. At the very least there are certainly good reasons, as Tollefson (2000) points out, to question whether English will bring the benefits that are so often promised. But when yet another country buys into the global English market, one should understand it in terms of the local and regional forces that drive such initiatives. The main concern here, then, is to look at the forces that construct the need for ELT. 3 We are aware of the many problems with the terminology of development. We avoid the patronizing overtones of underdeveloped, but the notion of development more generally remains useful if also problematic. To avoid some of the problems with the terms so-called developing, underdeveloped (in the active sense of something done to other countries; see, e.g., Phillipson, 1992), third world, and other such labels while disrupting the supposed transparency of the label developing countries, we use countries in development and countries under development to signal both the continuing use of the notion of development (as in this special-topic issue; see Markee, this issue) and the continuing problematic of the relations different countries enter into as they undergo change. 328 TESOL QUARTERLY Since the establishment of Lao PDR, English, which was previously regarded as a language of colonialism and imperialism, has gradually grown in importance there. Other languages are still taught and are used in the Lao civil service: French (formerly more widely taught as the colonial language and still important as the language that links Lao PDR to the francophone nations), Russian (more widely taught when links with the Soviet Union were stronger), Vietnamese and Chinese (the languages of two significant neighbours), Spanish, German, and Japa- nese (the language of a major power in the region and a large investor in Lao PDR). But English quickly took the dominant position. The need for English began to grow in 1986, when the government of Lao PDR, regarding the old economic system as ineffective for the long- term needs of the country’s socioeconomic development, determined to proclaim its new economic management (NEM). The introduction of NEM has switched the Lao economic system from a centrally planned and nature-based economy to a more market-oriented economy. This policy has been implemented in line with the effort for economic cooperation among the countries of the Asian Pacific Economic Coop- eration forum and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which signaled the desire of the Lao government to open up trade with the international community and establish a broader base of interna- tional relations. For this reason, Lao PDR, which has been ranked 136 of 205 countries in the world in gross domestic product (Ministry of Education, 2000), decided to join, or become a signatory to agreements with, various regional and global economic organizations, such as ASEAN, the Asian Free Trade Area, the European Union, and the World Trade Organisation. Because of Lao PDR’s need for increased involvement in international economic organizations and in international relations and cooperation, the nation needs to speed up its human resource development, which includes upgrading the technical and technological knowledge of key personnel as well as their foreign language skills, especially in English. As a result of involvement in ASEAN alone, representatives of Lao PDR must attend more than 300 meetings annually. As a result of the lack of personnel with adequate English language proficiency, over the past few years Lao PDR has missed out on a number of international meetings and conferences, with negative repercussions for the country as a whole (Zasloff, 1999). The need for English is inextricably bound up with Lao PDR’s socioeconomic development, which is reflected in the case of the president of the Lao Women’s Union of Champasack Province, who, like many other government officials, needs English to participate in meet- ings, negotiate with her counterparts, and voice the interests of the country. In particular, she needs English to help explain Lao concerns to LANGUAGE IN DEVELOPMENT CONSTRAINED 329 the outside world; encourage participation in the country’s socioeco- nomic development; and participate in conferences and meetings about women in countries under development, agricultural and land reform, and rural development. The government’s decision to become involved in various interna- tional communities led to the issuing of Decree of Order 94, on the establishment of ELT facilities within the Lao civil service. Besides emphasizing the importance of English for the nation’s socioeconomic development, the decree stresses the need for English in the educational system: For “the needs for future generations, English will be formally introduced into the curricula of the lower and upper secondary schools as well as the curricula of all faculties of the National University of Laos (NUOL) and vocational schools” (Sithirajvongsa & Goh, 2000, p. 205). The decision to promote English as the most important foreign language in the Lao civil service, apparently the only option for the government, was well received by many aid agencies and development organizations. Since the launching of the ELT policy in the Lao civil service, English has played a significant role in all areas, especially in international relations and economic cooperation, trade, international aid projects, education, investment, and tourism. As a result, demand for ELT is growing in all sectors, which unfortunately does not match the supply of teachers and facilities. To address short- and medium-term needs, the government has urged all ministries, organizations, and provinces to be more self-sufficient in establishing English language facilities for their own staff, which led to the submission of more than 40 requests for assistance in and approval for the establishment of ELT facilities by various ministries, organizations, and provincial authorities, including ELT courses for senior Lao government officials at the National University of Laos. The Lao government at present has a limited capacity to deliver ELT courses, so “Laos will have to develop immense resources with massive foreign aid” (Sithirajvongsa & Goh, 2000, p. 206). Australia, Canada, Germany, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, Sweden, and the United Kingdom (through the British Council) have all contributed significant amounts of aid for ELT initiatives, but the amount falls far short of what Lao PDR actually requires for its socioeconomic development (Sithiraj- vongsa & MacLeod, 1997). The situation in Lao PDR exemplifies the big picture of language in development: As countries such as Lao PDR move from colonial forms of limited elite French-Lao bilingualism, and from a centrally planned economy and limited Russian-Lao bilingualism under the former rela- tionship with the Soviet Union, to integration in new regional and global formations, English looms large as the language to teach throughout the school system. In becoming part of this new system of political and 330 TESOL QUARTERLY economic relations, Lao PDR increases its dependency on the ELT donors, who are only too willing to provide English programs. This dependency carries with it some constraints, as the situation in East Timor shows. Texts in Conflict in East Timor In 2000, a major education project in East Timor funded by interna- tional development agencies provided an English language course in response to a request from 1,000 university students who had been out of the education system for up to 7 years as a result of intense political turmoil. The program was conducted in a university that had been closed by occupying forces 2 years prior and was subsequently controlled by a student organisation. The English language program was intended to provide students with practice in using the language in meaningful situations, as communicative language teaching contexts are commonly called, and with the content and vocabulary for their area of study. However, the program operated in a volatile, complex social and cultural context, shaped by historical struggle, a precarious political setting, and the intertwined language issues of East Timor. These broader social issues, together with the discourses of ELT and development, affected and were reflected in the microculture of the classroom. An engagement with these discourses in the classroom led to language work that often had a focus different from the one originally intended by the funding bodies. The political setting in East Timor evolves from a history consisting of layers of colonial intervention. After centuries as part of the Portuguese trading network and empire, followed by decades of oppression under the Indonesian regime, resistance to foreign rule embedded in the island’s social, cultural, and economic structures (Taylor, 1999) finally culminated in the vote for independence in 1999. The departing Indonesian forces left a trail of destruction across the country, killing tens of thousands and leaving hundreds of thousands homeless. The country was left in a state of collapse: The infrastructure was destroyed, and all civil, government, and administrative functions ceased. Although the majority of Western governments and the United Nations had de facto recognized Indonesia’s occupation and military control of East Timor (Taudevin, 1999), those same foreign agencies now had the task of supporting a fragile independence with military, humanitarian, and development assistance. At the turn of the 21st century, the country was facing the task of rebuilding itself from ground zero: It struggled to establish basic living conditions amidst the chaos, and despite the overwhelming presence of military forces and the United Nations, the LANGUAGE IN DEVELOPMENT CONSTRAINED 331 continuation of militia activities presented a security problem. The country would be independent, as promised, but would be dependent on international agencies to survive. At the same time, the intervention of international agencies had brought with it a large group of privileged individuals who spoke English, earned high salaries, and enjoyed lifestyles far different from those of the local community. The Timorese National Resistance Council, a coalition of resistance parties, had recently reiterated the language policy of the country, where at least 15 indigenous languages are spoken: The official language and the medium of education was to be Portuguese (spoken by only 5–20% of the population), the language of the small, educated elite that had played a pivotal role in the fight for independence from the Portuguese and Indonesians (Taylor, 1999); Tetum (an indigenous language spoken by 60–80% of the population) was to be the national language (Hajek, 2000). English and Indonesian were to be taught as foreign languages in secondary schools, and the languages of the new National University of East Timor were to be Portuguese and English (Hull, 2000). The university students, raised and educated with Indonesian as the medium of instruction in schools and universities, had expressed some resentment toward the imposition of Portuguese and requested that the United Nations provide English language training in the months leading up to the reopening of the university. The value of and demand for English language education were linked to the obvious presence of English-speaking military forces, aid agencies, and business ventures in East Timor and the use of English as a medium of communication for the United Nations’ transitional administration. The students saw En- glish as a means to access employment opportunities and overseas study scholarships and to connect East Timor to the perceived benefits of the international community of modern technological development. Al- though the precise role of English in the country was, and continues to be, unclear, the configuration of present-day socioeconomic and politi- cal influences may result in the de facto establishment of English as the majority foreign language regardless of official language policies. The influence of the university students in the inception of the English language program was crucial. Following their key role in the fight for national liberation, their struggle to find a voice in the emerging nation manifested itself in a desire to control aspects of the program that necessitated delicate negotiation with other project partici- pants: so-called foreign language experts and representatives of a foreign donor government. In a position of relative power in the nation’s profile and as the intellectual elite, the university students were at a relative disadvantage with respect to language issues. Although they had facility in several languages, they viewed their lack of Portuguese and English, 332 TESOL QUARTERLY which had been imposed by the continuing effects of colonial intrusion, as a barrier to employment and to participation in decision making. When the English classes were finally established, they consisted of students of mixed ability in English language and in general academic skills, with many students suffering the effects of poor education in Indonesian, their second or third language. Some students had com- pleted only an elementary education in Timor and came from impover- ished backgrounds. Others had completed a tertiary education in offshore Indonesian universities and, while still suffering serious eco- nomic hardship, displayed signs of higher socioeconomic status. Many students were affected by illness, loss, and significant memories of trauma. English language professionals and project coordinators, who brought with them expectations and set practices, had to confront the complex context at the university. One challenge was to adapt the standard positivist tenets pertaining to international ELT (Phillipson, 1992), which embody accepted notions of universally appropriate, modern materials and methodology, and to contextualise the program according to the multifarious factors affecting it. As books and libraries had been destroyed, very few local resources were available to use as teaching materials. The textbooks supplied for the course or brought by teachers, in common with most globally marketed textbooks, presented a materi- alistic, middle-class lifestyle belonging to the English-speaking world (Brown, 1990), which contrasted markedly with the cultural and eco- nomic reality of East Timor. The situations in the textbooks clearly did not fit the intense political concerns and basic economic needs of the students. Similarly, in terms of conventional ELT methodologies, common practices such as the demand to use only English in the classroom, the priority given to oral interaction over written communication, and the presentation of certain culturally dependent games and activities, par- ticularly prestructured, textbook-based information-gap activities, ap- peared inappropriate, both culturally and educationally (cf. Pennycook, 1994, pp. 166–175). Students’ responses to these practices and expecta- tions varied. Some students accommodated the different patterns of thinking and acting required, becoming actively involved in tasks and activities. Others responded with silence and confusion, interpreted variously as opposition and resistance to alien discourses (Canagarajah, 1993), as a means of indicating the irrelevance of the teaching texts (Auerbach, 1995), or as an indication that they lacked the legitimacy to speak in this situation (Peirce, 1995). Initially, much of the teaching involved relating the language-focused activities to the less controversial aspects of community life, such as LANGUAGE IN DEVELOPMENT CONSTRAINED 333 students’ daily activities, procedures for finding a job, and local foods. In return, the students presented a parallel syllabus in the form of unstruc- tured journal entries that often relayed their concern with more contro- versial and challenging political and emotional topics. This meaningful communication contrasted powerfully with the comparatively dry written texts that resulted from an emphasis on generic structure and specific grammatical patterns. Similarly, for most students, interest in political and social issues lent a vitality to their spoken language in debates and spontaneous discussions that was missing when the activities required only practice of functional patterns or the completion of (locally) inauthentic tasks. Interviews and debates on government policies gener- ated interest and a will to speak; videos showing recent resistance struggles provoked questions and discussion. Over time, students and teachers shared ideas, knowledge, and culture, negotiating and constructing texts that not only related to the educational concerns of the students but also inevitably involved the social, economic, and political issues shaping and being shaped by their lives and activities. These texts and tasks drew on experiences of both personal and national concern, such as the language debate, the militia, the new government, the role of the United Nations, priorities for development, the destruction and rebuilding of physical facilities, and the students’ visions of the future. The difficulty remained, however, that many of these topics not only were often confrontational but were also viewed by agencies outside the classroom as inappropriately political and outside the language learning agenda. The development of appropriate, reflective methodologies for periph- ery contexts has been extensively explored (see, e.g., Holliday, 1994; Kramsch & Sullivan, 1996), and Kenny and Savage (1997) have de- scribed experiential, proautonomy, collaborative approaches suitable for development contexts “as a step forward towards listening to voices from the periphery” (p. 317). However, this focus on relating classroom life to the local world outside the classroom often avoids addressing the larger ideological and political problems (Canagarajah, 1999) that can have a significant impact on students’ lives and teachers’ roles. In a volatile situation that has been shaped by the relationship between East Timor, its closest neighbour, and the foreign interests that now cooperate in the country’s reconstruction, these problems are evident everywhere, and they permeate and interact in the classroom. The problems are, then, inherent in the discourses of development: They influence relationships between donor and recipient at all levels from the global to the classroom and create expectations and tensions around questions of ownership, control, and expertise within language and development programs. 334 TESOL QUARTERLY Moments of Change: Talk and Text in the Development Workplace One way to address some of problems in the university English classes in East Timor would be to ensure more consistent input from local participants in the development and implementation of projects. Yet the third vignette illuminates the problematic nature of discursive practice and competing discourses in the development workplace. Visna’s ques- tion, “Do we talk?,” raises a number of issues. But what does the question mean? The project that Visna worked on, in theory at least, employed a participatory approach to project management. It openly encouraged the contributions and the active participation of local project partners, but Visna’s question suggests that, at least in his perception, his contribu- tion in fact carried no weight. His question indicates his frustration with the way that his work was going. I (Copley) understood it to mean, “We talk about talking, but I don’t think we do talk.” or “When we talk, nobody listens or hears.” The fundamental issue is that Visna felt that his words were not being considered and that, despite the rhetoric about participation and the centrality of local partners’ voices in the decision- making process, the project made no space for the input, expertise, and experience of the local participants. Visna’s subsequent story about the exam explains his initial reaction to my assumption that participants in development projects indeed talk, listen, hear, and are open to being influenced by one another. Visna’s story is only his version of the events and thus is only one piece of a complex whole. Nevertheless, his story is illuminating because it foregrounds the frustration of many local participants on development projects with the lack of regard for the opinions of host-country partners. Even though Visna made several seemingly valid points in his feedback to the exam writers, they did not incorporate that feedback, which was based in his experience and expertise as a trainer, in the final draft of the exam. In addition, the story reveals that local participants are limited in the degree to which they can decide on the direction of a project. Interestingly, others (e.g., Arnst, 1997; Porter, Allen, & Thompson, 1991) have documented at length this failure to consider local understandings of what is needed or how projects should proceed. Of particular interest here, however, is the importance of language in this process, that is, how language is used to promote certain world views and to gain and consolidate positions of advantage within the development process. This story raises issues of both language and discourses. Visna’s question reflects a feeling that his voice is not heard. He thus echoes Porter et al.’s (1991) questions about the “lack of inquiry into the historical circumstances of the people [development practitioners’] LANGUAGE IN DEVELOPMENT CONSTRAINED 335 interventions seek to assist” and affirms the concept of language as a “site of struggle” (p. xv). From this point of view, language is more than just a reflection of social reality. Rather, following Richardson (1994; cf. Weedon, 1987), language is seen as central to the construction of the social world: Language is how social organisation and power are defined and contested and the place where our sense of selves, our subjectivity, is constructed. Understanding language as competing discourses, competing ways of giving meaning and organising the world makes language a site of exploration, a site of struggle. (Weedon, 1987, cited in Richardson, 1994, p. 518) A number of assumptions are typically made about the possible impact of learning English on people’s lives and about the expectations of language learning held by both local and expatriate partners in develop- ment. Local participants aspire to knowledge of English for a number of reasons: to increase their chances of gaining well-paid employment; work effectively in development projects with expatriate project partners; attend and participate actively in international conferences where issues around economic, political, and social development are on the table; and benefit from exogenous sources of information. In the Lao context described in the first vignette, many of these concerns drew the govern- ment official to take English courses (although by that time learning English had become a structural necessity). Thus, both local and expatriate partners working with development agencies perceive a knowledge of English as essential. Holders of professional positions such as the one held by Visna are often required to be competent English speakers (thus reproducing the cycle of development by regarding English as the language needed for development). Visna is highly skilled in his profession. He is articulate in English, and presents himself as confident and authoritative. Yet his feedback on the exam is discounted, and he fails to make the changes that he wishes to make. Thus, even though English is seen as a skill that enables the active participation of local participants and, indeed, possi- bly as a gatekeeper for the development workplace, competency in English (in addition to professional skills) may not guarantee that local partners’ contributions are considered authoritative. The discourses that construct the development workplace had already discounted Visna’s contributions to the project. Invited to the table, he was still not accorded the position of legitimate speaker. Visna’s story is typical of accounts of other individuals working in the same field. The work of Bourdieu (1991) on the dynamics of participant relations is useful for further exploration of Visna’s story. Particularly interesting is Bourdieu’s argument that authority does not stem from words alone but 336 TESOL QUARTERLY that “the authority that utterances have is an authority bestowed upon language by factors external to it” (Thompson, 1991, p. 9). Despite the possible legitimacy of Butler’s (1997) critique that Bourdieu problemati- cally posits all power as external to language, the power relations that infuse the development workplace make Bourdieu’s explanation look all too feasible. Bourdieu uses the example of the skeptron that, in Homer, is passed to the orator who is about to speak, thus nominating that person as a legitimate or authoritative speaker whose words and opinions count. Visna was passed the turn but not the skeptron. In other words, he could speak, but his words carried no authority. Bourdieu (1991) likens the authority invested in the speaker by the passing of the skeptron to the outward markers of authority created by the social institutions within which an individual operates. The most obvious examples might include the justice’s wig, the professor’s gown, and the priest’s robes, all of which lend authority to the individuals who wear them. When these obvious markers are absent, more covert markers often exist. In the development context, the obvious markers might be race, ethnicity, nationality, managerial status within a project, or status within a host government. In a situation that is supposedly participatory, these outward markers may appear to be absent, but they are deeply embedded in the hierarchies of discourses within which participants operate and which are realised through language. Visna was already marked by his ethnicity and the global stigma of being a nonnative speaker of English. The fact that he was given his turn to participate but was not passed the skeptron may have significant implications for language learners and language programs in countries in development. Learning English does not guarantee that local partici- pants in interactions in the development workplace will be legitimate or authoritative speakers. Visna’s story supports Bourdieu’s (1991) (and others’) claims that it is not language per se and the way one expresses oneself in it that guarantees authority in a given discursive event. More important is the chance to grab the skeptron, and the very discourses of development that bring these speakers to the table often deny them that chance to graduate to the status of legitimate speaker. LANGUAGE, DISCOURSE, TEXT, DEVELOPMENT The three contexts discussed here raise a range of important ques- tions for understanding language in development, questions that, we would argue, have all too often been overlooked. A common shortcom- ing of work in this area has been the tendency to conflate language in development with language development (see Pennycook, 2000a). There is a danger that language programs in the development context become LANGUAGE IN DEVELOPMENT CONSTRAINED 337 ends in themselves rather than the means by which to significantly improve education for the disadvantaged. Many English language pro- grams designed specifically for recipient government personnel focus solely on the more mechanical aspects of language. In part this emphasis may reflect the fact that common conceptions of language education focus too narrowly on the technical aspects of teaching, such as discus- sions of objectives and goals (often unchallenged), materials, equipment and methodology, assessment procedures, and instruction for teachers and teacher educators (Pennycook, 1994). The assumption is that, if a context is defined as one of national or regional development (by dint of various lower social or economic indicators relative to other contexts), and if language programs are seen as part of the development process, then language development (i.e., improvement in language skills) must contribute to broader social and economic development. Thus, once the context is defined as a country under development, language programs within that context are assumed to relate to development according to the success or failure of those programs. We have been suggesting, by contrast, that the situation is far more complex than this and that at the very least language-in-development programs need to address two key domains: the relationship between language programs and other forms of development, and the ways in which the discourses of development construct and limit the possibilities for change. Language Programs and Development Language-in-development programs must first ask in what ways lan- guage learning is contributing to the process of development. On the front page of the EL Gazette of October 1999, a picture of laughing children is accompanied by the subtitle “English is key to a better life for the poor.” Inside, an article (Hurst, 1999) argues that the widespread introduction of English into primary sectors around the world should lead to the amelioration of poverty. But the key question here is how English—or other languages—might be related to development. On the one hand is the idea that language education, and particularly English language education, may cause development. Such a notion is problematic both because it overlooks the many possible negative effects of the wholesale presence of English in the curriculum (e.g., pushing other languages aside, contributing to a diminished education through the L1) and because it fails to draw any real connections between language and social, cultural, and economic change. If, on the other hand, this notion is merely a suggestion that English may be correla- 338 TESOL QUARTERLY tional with development (contrary to evidence; see Tollefson, 2000), then the questions of how learning English may help people “escape from grinding poverty” (Hurst, 1999, p. 3) and how such an escape might be beneficial in broader social and economic terms still remain. Instead of framing the issue in terms of individual escape, any discussion of a relationship between language and development needs to address ways in which language education may be related to other forms of positive change. Indeed, one might well argue that escape from poverty through English (which still remains to be demonstrated) perpetuates inequality and holds back development because it only provides access (for some) to inequitably distributed resources instead of changing the distribution of those resources. At the very least, these issues need to be understood as related in complex, contextual ways. Looking at the broad context of development and development aid, one must also ask what different agendas are served by different types of language program. In Lao PDR, even though the Lao government appears to have little choice at this juncture in providing ELT to a large proportion of its population, doing so clearly produces various depen- dent relationships with other countries. And because English has be- come the most important foreign language within the Lao civil service and has contributed considerably to Lao PDR’s socioeconomic develop- ment, one must take into account the possible effects of English on the people’s social, cultural, economic, and political life: English may come encumbered with Westernisation, modernisation, culture, technology, and consumerism, which may have ideological as well as behavioural and econotechnical consequences (Phillipson, 1992). English is not a cultur- ally and politically free element. It brings with it a wide range of social, historical, cultural, and political relationships (Pennycook, 1995, p. 35) that may have long-term effects on the country’s social and cultural identities, such as attitudes toward the learning of English as opposed to the learning of local languages, toward Western culture and lifestyle, and toward particular forms of economic and political organization. In other parts of ASEAN, some critics have expressed considerable concern about the role of English in relationship to global forces. As Ordoñez (1999) put it in a discussion of the role of English for global competitiveness at a 1995 conference in the Philippines, English continues to occupy the place of privilege—it being the language of the ruling system, government, education, business and trade, and diplomacy . . . English for global competitiveness fits into the type of education that would conform to the requirements of an export-oriented economy pushed by the IMF–World Bank for the Philippines. (p. 19) He goes on to suggest that LANGUAGE IN DEVELOPMENT CONSTRAINED 339 the role of Philippine education . . . seems to be that of supplying the world market economy with a docile and cheap labor force who are trained in English and the vocational and technical skills required by that economy. As it is we do have a decided advantage in the export market of domestic helpers and laborers. Cite their knowledge of English as that advantage. (p. 20) Santos (1999) suggests that to push our global competitiveness as a people and as a nation with and through English Studies, we must be sensitive to the cultural violence that the pursuit of such a goal had wrought on our people in this ending century, and must yet impose on majority of our people at the present time. (p. 25) In the Philippines, where English is embedded in a deeply inequitable social system and externally dependent economy, the role of English in development is a highly contested area. Lao PDR is a very different case—it has a different colonial history, a different economy, and different social and political structures—but as it enters a new economic and political world, it will need to examine carefully the unplanned implications of using English to become globally competitive. Discourses of Development Language-in-development programs also need to understand how the discursive construction of development positions its participants and limits its possibilities. Although there is no space here to engage in an extended discussion of development discourse (see Escobar, 1995a), we note that not only does the Eurocentrism of development models frequently lead to a vision of a singular path of upward development, but it also simultaneously produces images of the Other—images of nonde- velopment that position participants in particular ways. As Escobar (1995a) argues, development discourse “has been the central and most ubiquitous operator of the politics of representation and identity in much of Asia, Africa, and Latin America in the post–World War II period” (p. 214). According to Escobar, these areas of the world have suffered “a succession of regimes of representation” (p. 214) that originate in colonialism and continue into the discourses of modernity. “From the will to civilization in the nineteenth century to today, violence has been engendered through representation” (p. 214). Thus, as Escobar points out, “in many places there are worlds that development, even today and at this moment, is bent on destroying” (p. 226): Until recently, it seemed impossible to get away from this imaginary of development. Everywhere one looked one found the busy, repetitive reality of 340 TESOL QUARTERLY development: governments designing ambitious development plans, institu- tions carrying out development programmes in cities and countryside alike, experts studying development problems and producing theories ad nauseam, foreign experts everywhere and multinational corporations brought into the country in the name of development. In sum, development colonized reality, it became reality. . . . Development proceeded by creating abnormalities (“the poor,” “the malnourished,” “the illiterate,” “pregnant women,” “the landless”) which it would then treat or reform. Seeking to eradicate all problems, it actually ended up multiplying them indefinitely. Embodied in a multiplicity of practices, institutions and structures, it has had a profound effect on the Third World: social relations, ways of thinking, visions of the future are all indelibly marked and shaped by this ubiquitous operator. (Escobar, 1995b, p. 214) The introduction of a notion of sustainable development has done little to alleviate these problems. Indeed, in the same way that language development is often conflated with language in development, so the sustainability of language programs is conflated with sustainable develop- ment, thus ignoring once again both the need to show a connection between language and development and the need to understand the discursive construction of development. As Adams (1995) suggests, sustainable development may be seen “as simply one more transient label on the trickle of capital flows of aid donors from the industrialized North, and something that allowed ‘business as usual’ by international capital” (p. 99). And equally importantly, as Escobar (1995b) argues, sustainable development continues to produce the same discursive relationship between donor and recipient. These relationships impinge massively on the East Timor and Cambodian contexts described above. The discourses of language in development create the abnormality of the person who does not speak English. By failing to understand themselves in terms of the discourses of development, and viewing themselves instead only in terms of language development, language-in- education programs have all too often failed to engage with the context in which they operate. The discourses that disallow the political to enter the classroom (as if one can keep it out) constrain language-in- development programs, thus denying the significance of the local context and the knowledge that students bring to class. And local participation is also discounted by those discourses that construct it as less developed. Visna is allowed to speak but is not passed the skeptron, and the East Timorese program is threatened with closure if teachers do not control discussion of economic and political relations between donor and recipient countries. LANGUAGE IN DEVELOPMENT CONSTRAINED 341 CONTRADICTIONS AND CONCLUSIONS We have tried in this article to get at some of the deep tensions and contradictions that underlie much work in language in development. By drawing on three different but related contexts, we have endeavoured to show both how language in development is contextually embedded (i.e., Lao PDR, East Timor, and Cambodia are very different places) yet how the three are interlinked particularly by the discourses of the develop- ment industry. Given the current ways in which globalization—and discourses of globalization—operate, many countries have little choice but to opt for large-scale investment in English education. One might want the situation to be different, and one might want support for other languages, but that is another battle (though one that is ignored at both the peril of other languages and the peril of the possibilities of what it means to be human; see, e.g., Skutnabb-Kangas, 2000). It is evident from these and many other contexts that individuals and governments cur- rently see access to English as a necessity. For government officials of Lao PDR—as the country switches from a centrally planned economy and relative political isolation to an economic and political member of regional and international organizations—or for students in East Timor— who see English as a potentially more useful language than the new official language (Portuguese), the national language (Tetum), or the dominant regional language and most recent language of colonization (Indonesian)—English is viewed as a key tool for personal and national development. Thus, ironically, even though until recently the view in many of these contexts was that English was the unacceptable face of U.S. imperialism and global capitalism, it is also seen as crucial for change and development. But with such an acceptance come other ironies and contradictions. At the same time that both personal and national goals are aiming at increased economic and political autonomy in the world, the demand for English re-creates other forms of dependency on the wealthy anglophone (and other) donor nations. Along with the implementation of ELT programs come a number of other factors: The limited financial resources of many countries are tied to a new set of so-called educational deficiencies as countries become deficient in their ability to provide adequate English language education. This situation produces a range of dependencies, both economic and pedagogical, leading to a series of potential changes to the social, economic, cultural, and political fabric of the country. Meanwhile, the discourses of development and of ELT bring about numerous exclusions in the process of curriculum change and teaching. Although development programs sometimes give lip service to encouraging local participation in the development process and promot- ing contextually appropriate curricula, all too often in the language-in- 342 TESOL QUARTERLY development context, local participants—teacher educators, teachers, curriculum designers, and students—are not viewed as, or are not able to claim the space as, legitimate or authoritative speakers. A similar issue emerges from the East Timor context. To bridge the gap between the students’ experiences and the discourses represented in conventional ELT texts and practices, we as TESOL professionals need an approach to teaching and learning that engages with questions of importance to the students, bringing the social and cultural politics of the community into the classroom as a focus of meaningful language work and discussion (Auerbach, 2000; Pennycook, 2000b). In develop- ment contexts, bringing about this focus may include facing some of the power relationships inherent in aid projects and confronting issues of difference and inequality, politics and history. In this way, involvement in language education, particularly in teaching a language that has eco- nomic and political power, means that language teachers and students inevitably become part of a political process (McKay, 2001). Clearly, the conventional texts and practices used in ELT are also positioned within particular political discourses, yet questioning the existing power struc- tures embedded in language and development projects makes the educational practices appear unacceptably political. Although expression of political opinions may be manageable and even unavoidable in the relative privacy of the classroom culture, where only teacher and students interact, wider political realities, including the nexus between political control and financial control in development, which determine the right to speak and be heard, constrain the voicing of these concerns in a more public arena. Language professionals therefore need to problematise the way that many language programs in the development context are designed and delivered: They draw heavily on certain discourses while eschewing others, with the potential result that they fail to equip learners with the skills and knowledge that they need in order to become active and authoritative participants in the development process. If the aim of such language programs is to engender and facilitate participation in the development process, then they need to take into account these wider sociopolitical and discoursal aspects of interaction. Although any reasonable appraisal of the context in which language- in-development programs (particularly English programs) take place would suggest that the walls of the classroom are indeed permeable (Pennycook, 2000b)—the broader social, cultural, political, and eco- nomic contexts in which they occur have major implications for what occurs in the classroom, and what occurs in the classroom has great significance for the outside world—such permeability is more often denied than acknowledged. ELT is a controversial activity, and its implementation in any context is shaped by, and shapes, cultural politics LANGUAGE IN DEVELOPMENT CONSTRAINED 343 at multiple levels. Contextual complexity arising from the political setting, language policy, development project agendas, and student and teacher practices and expectations inevitably permeates classroom cul- ture so that the classroom becomes a site for political expression. As a result, not only must any of us involved in language in development ask serious questions about the appropriateness of many language-in- development programs, but we must also question whether programs based on such delegitimizing of local participants’ interests, concerns, beliefs, and politics can ever really be seen as engaged in a process of developing language for the process of development. Language programs have yet to fully explore certain discourses that are central to the structure and functioning of development, including such issues as the relationship between donor and recipient and their participant representatives, the political motivations of development, and the role of the English language in relation to other languages at global and local levels in development contexts. For people to be able to pursue an active role in the process of development and to achieve levels of autonomy or independence, particularly when that development depends on languages such as English, language-in-development pro- grams need to think beyond the narrow confines of language as commonly defined and take far more seriously the question of discourse. Until such issues are addressed and accommodated throughout the hierarchy of language-in-development projects, ELT risks remaining a “sealed box” in situations where it is practised. Rather than deny such issues, the planning and implementation of projects, and also the education of teachers, need to account for them in order to make the most of all participants’ efforts in and contributions to development work. THE AUTHORS Roslyn Appleby, Kath Copley, Sisamone Sithirajvongsa, and Alastair Pennycook do research at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) in the area of language and development. Roslyn Appleby is a lecturer in academic language and literacy at UTS. Her research interests include the negotiation of teacher and learner identities in L2 education, and perceptions of internationalization in Australian universities. Kath Copley lectures in adult education at UTS. She has worked in the field of TESOL in a range of teaching and learning contexts. Her research interests include critical practice in language teaching, the discourse of educational aid and develop- ment, and agency in the management of educational development. Sisamone Sithirajvongsa has worked at the National University of Laos for over 20 years as an English teacher, head of the English department, and vice-dean of the 344 TESOL QUARTERLY Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. He is the governing board member of the Regional Language Centre in Singapore for Lao PDR, and he conducts research on the impact of ELT at the National University of Laos. Alastair Pennycook is professor of language in education at UTS. His publications include The Cultural Politics of English as an International Language (Longman, 1994), English and the Discourses of Colonialism (Routledge, 1998), and Critical Applied Linguistics: A Critical Introduction (Erlbaum, 2001). REFERENCES Adams, W. (1995). Green development theory? Environmentalism and sustainable development. In J. S. Crush (Ed.), The power of development (pp. 87–99). London: Routledge. Arnst, R. (1997). International development versus the participation of indigenous peoples. In D. McCaskill & K. Kampe (Eds.), Development or domestication? Indigenous peoples of Southeast Asia (pp. 441–454). Chiang Mai, Thailand: Silkworm Books. Auerbach, E. R. (1995). The politics of the ESL classroom: Issues of power in pedagogical choices. In J. W. Tollefson (Ed.), Power and inequality in language education (pp. 9–33). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Auerbach, E. (2000). 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Wong (Eds.), Language policies and language education: The impact in East Asian countries in the next decade (pp. 197–207). Singapore: Times Academic Press. Sithirajvongsa, S., & MacLeod, D. (1997). English language requirements for Lao PDR’s membership in ASEAN: Needs assessment and English language training strategy (UNDP Project LAO/96/002). Vientiane, Lao PDR: United Nations Development Programme. Skutnabb-Kangas, T. (2000). Linguistic genocide in education—or worldwide diversity and human rights? Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Taudevin, L. (1999). East Timor: Too little too late. Sydney, Australia: Duffy & Snellgove. Taylor, J. G. (1999). East Timor: The price of freedom. London: Zed Books. Thompson, J. B. (1991). Editor’s introduction. In P. Bourdieu, Language and symbolic power (pp. 12–23). Oxford: Polity Press. Tollefson, J. (2000). Policy and ideology in the spread of English. In J. K. Hall & W. G. Eggington (Eds.), The sociopolitics of English language teaching (pp. 7–21). Clevedon, England: Multilingual Matters. Weedon, C. (1987). Feminist practice and poststructuralist theory. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Zasloff, J. (1999). The foreign policy of Laos in the 1990s. In J. Butler-Diaz (Ed.), New Laos, new challenges (pp. 127–146). Tempe: Arizona State University Press. 346 TESOL QUARTERLY The Role of English in Individual and Societal Development: A View From African Classrooms AILIE CLEGHORN Concordia University Montreal, Quebec, Canada MARISSA ROLLNICK University of Witwatersrand Johannesburg, South Africa This article discusses sociocultural and other theoretical aspects of the language-in-education debate in the light of their practical implications for language policy and teacher education in linguistically diverse school settings. We draw on studies carried out in African classrooms where subjects such as science were being taught via English, an L2 for most learners. Studies indicate that code switching offers an economi- cal resource for constructing meaning in classrooms where teachers and learners can use the same home or local language. Language use within the classroom is thus seen in terms of the need to communicate meaning with the goal of ensuring access to knowledge and thereby fostering individual development. We suggest that meaningful learning contexts are likely to increase the motivation to learn English, ulti- mately fostering societal development within the larger global context. The article concludes with a call for the TESOL field to identify the full potential of code switching and categorize its functions so that teachers may be helped to use it purposefully. A ccording to estimates (Crystal, 1997), more than 700 million chil- dren throughout the world are taught in English, a language that may not be used at all in the home or in the school community. Despite this widespread use of English as an L2 for content instruction in classrooms of the still-developing countries1 as well as in the increasingly 1 We use the term still-developing to refer to countries whose economies are struggling and where a large percentage of the population is both rural and impoverished. The term more developed refers to countries whose economies are strong and, like the United States, the United Kingdom, and several European countries, wield considerable power internationally. Recently, TESOL QUARTERLY Vol. 36, No. 3, Autumn 2002 347 diverse classrooms of the more developed regions of the world, educa- tors remain uncertain about the issues of learning through an L2. At a recent science and mathematics education conference in a southern African country, for example, one paper after another revealed problems stemming from the use of English as the instructional language and from a lack of understanding of the importance of culture in African L2 classrooms. Despite over 15 years of work in this field, each new generation of educators appears to stumble over the same language- related problems, with insights from research on L1 and L2 development or bilingual education failing to be incorporated into language-in- education policies or included in teacher education programs. The role of language and culture in education and in individual and societal development is not getting through to those who establish language policies or decide what preservice teachers should know. Rather than applying current knowledge about language in educa- tion, teachers and policy makers seem to be confused by the language-in- education debate, which encompasses a variety of issues concerning which language to use for content instruction in the schools. Despite the fact that policy-practice connections are never direct, if professional knowledge about language in education is to inform teacher education and educational policy, TESOL professionals need to understand the issues. The purpose of this article, therefore, is to discuss some central theoretical and practical aspects of the language-in-education debate with a view to their implications for language-in-education policy and for teacher education in diverse school settings, where the students’ home language and culture may differ from the language and culture of the school (i.e., the multicultural/multilingual school settings that characterise many cities in developed and still-developing countries in which English, a former colonial language, remains the dominant language of instruc- tion). We draw on the research in African ESL education settings, much of which has been carried out in science classrooms at the primary, secondary, and postsecondary levels in several southern African coun- tries as well as in the east African country of Kenya. Science lessons are an excellent window for observing the interplay between two functions of language in the L2 classroom: (a) the development of knowledge, facts, and skills and (b) the provision of linguistic input for students to acquire the language of instruction—the target L2 (Wong-Fillmore, 1991). Science lessons thus also provide a magnified snapshot of the complex ways in which the home language and culture of the students encounter these terms have begun to be replaced by the more numerically accurate terms majority world and minority world to indicate that the majority of the world’s population lives in relative poverty. 348 TESOL QUARTERLY the culture of science along with its Western world view as carried via the English language (Cobern, 1998). Following a brief description of language in education in Africa, we discuss two related macrotheoretical issues useful for understanding culturally complex L2 situations, namely, sociocultural theories of learn- ing and the complementary concept of border crossing. We then discuss practical matters of classroom language use with particular attention to the functions of code switching, giving examples from science lessons and mathematics classes. Finally, we touch on the little-discussed matter of the language and use of text materials (especially in science) before concluding with a discussion of language-in-education and teacher education policy matters. LANGUAGE IN EDUCATION: THE AFRICAN CONTEXT The language-in-education debate tends to centre on the choice of language for initial instruction in countries such as Kenya and South Africa, where many ethnolinguistic communities and therefore many different home languages are represented. Kenya, for example, which has English as the official language and Kiswahili as the national language, is home to at least 40 different ethnolinguistic groups. Depending on the region, speakers of different mother tongues may use English, Kiswahili, or both for communication. South Africa now has 11 official languages and over 100 different languages and dialects. Due to the sometimes total absence of text materials in local languages, in such settings the former colonial language is often selected as the language of instruction. English is the choice in most of the eastern and southern African countries whereas French is the language of choice in the former French colonies of West Africa. Although such choices are seemingly logical because the selection of one local language over another might result in rivalry between the different ethnic groups, the choice of a language such as English raises difficult issues for individual and societal development as well as for teacher education, depending on the culture, economics, and other particulars of each education setting. To briefly characterise a complex situation, we note that the sociocul- tural contexts of schooling in African countries vary along a number of dimensions according to, for example, a school’s location in a rural, urban, or semiurban area. The language infrastructure of the school in each type of locale varies accordingly. In addition, a sharp economic and lifestyle gradient exists between urban and rural life in most parts of southern and eastern Africa, the regions of concern in this article. Thus, in urban school settings English may be considered an L2 because of its ROLE OF ENGLISH IN INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIETAL DEVELOPMENT 349 use in the immediate environment for business and commerce as well as for communication between the speakers of different African languages who populate the cities. Under these circumstances learners have relatively frequent opportunities to use English for natural communica- tion and increasingly through the media and the Internet, providing evident reasons to acquire English. In contrast, English may be consid- ered a foreign language in the rural areas because it is not often used in the immediate environment of the learner and opportunities for the practice of receptive skills through the mass media may be few, due to persistent extreme poverty and the absence of electricity, for example. Under these circumstances the teacher is frequently the learners’ only source of English (Ringbom, 1987; Setati, Adler, Reid, & Bapoo, in press). Though the second language/foreign language distinction may seem too dichotomous for the situation we describe, it is important in understanding the range of learners’ language experiences and in thinking about language-in-education policies as they relate in particular to the education of ESL and other teachers (Genesee, 1993; Johnson & Swain, 1997). Although the situation is changing in countries where the economy is growing, numerous studies of instruction in African schools give evi- dence of patterns of instruction that can be attributed to persistent poverty as well as to culture (Cleghorn, 1992; Cleghorn, Merritt, & Abagi, 1989; Dube & Cleghorn, 1999; Fuller & Snyder, 1991; Prophet & Rowell, 1990; Shumba, 1999a). In Kenya, Zimbabwe, and Botswana, for example, the demand for schooling in the past 20 years has far outstripped the ability of governments to educate adequate numbers of teachers and to provide enough spaces at the secondary level to allow education for all children (United Nations Education, Scientific, and Cultural Organization [UNESCO], 1999). Thus primary-level classes may contain as many as 90 pupils, and teachers must sometimes be deployed before they are trained at all, with 10–12 years of schooling being considered enough to enable them to teach, at least until they can avail themselves of in-service or distance teacher certification courses. In addition, end-of-primary national examinations act as the sole or main selection device for the approximately 30–45% of primary school gradu- ates who can access the scarce secondary school seats (World Bank, 1997). The examination failure mark is thus set at about 60% (to provide an exclusion device from secondary schooling), with an incalculable impact on the many so-called failing learners’ self-esteem (Hewlett, 1995). There is fierce competition within and between schools due to the publication of examination results by region and by school. Teaching is therefore often oriented in the extreme to examinations, with old examinations taking the place of lesson plans, teacher creativity, and curriculum innovation. Because the examinations are often multiple 350 TESOL QUARTERLY choice in format or require short, fixed answers, instruction tends to emphasise rote question-and-answer routines requiring single-word an- swers so that students are prepared to recognize the key (English) words on the examination. At times these routines are also a function of teachers’ limited knowledge of English and limited understanding of the content they are expected to teach.2 These practices contrast sharply with our view of language use within the classroom, which holds that language should communicate meaning in order to ensure the learner’s access to knowledge and foster individual development. SOCIOCULTURAL LEARNING THEORY AND BORDER CROSSING From a sociocultural Vygotskian (1978, 1986) perspective, teaching and learning are seen in terms of linking social action with cognition. Therefore, the principal goal of education is to provide an environment in which students, however diverse their background, engage collaboratively in productive, purposeful activities which enable them to take over the culture’s toolkit of skills, knowledge and values so that they are able to participate effectively in the practices of the larger society. (Wells, 1999, p. 335) While highlighting the intimate connection among language, meaning making, and practice, this perspective also points to the complex role that the language educator/teacher must play in guiding students through the many different cultural, linguistic, and cognitive borders that they encounter in the school setting, underlining the complexity of the seemingly simple notion of the zone of proximal development (ZPD). In non-Western school settings in which a former colonial language is the language of instruction and the content of the curriculum is largely imported from the West, the question is, which culture’s toolkit of skills, knowledge, and values is being taken over? And what is the nature of the borders that need to be crossed by an African student who has one name at school and another at home, one type of dress for school and another for home, one language for school and another for home, and for whom one type of behaviour is acceptable at school and another is acceptable at home? Such a student becomes two people. Although schooling 2 Our intention is not to disparage teachers but to point to the harsh conditions under which they must work. Although such question-answer routines are found in classrooms everywhere (cf. Corson, 1993; Wells, 1999), the extreme restriction to examination require- ments strikes us as particular to the African settings we know. ROLE OF ENGLISH IN INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIETAL DEVELOPMENT 351 everywhere requires a kind of border crossing (from not knowing to knowing, at least), the borders are more easily observed in non-Western school settings and especially in the teaching of a subject such as science, which, as we explain below, contains many unfamiliar elements. Sociocultural Facets of Science Learning Recent investigations of language in science education have worked within sociocultural perspectives of learning that, as noted above, consider learning as an integral part of social practice. This perspective contrasts with views that consider cognitive processes to be primary in learning. For example, Lave (1997) contrasts what she calls the culture of acquisition to understanding in practice. Lave and Wenger (1991) based many of their ideas on studies of the apprenticeship of tailors in West Africa. They refer to this apprenticeship as legitimate peripheral participa- tion, which describes the relationship between newcomers and old- timers. In moving from legitimate peripheral participation to full partici- pation, the newcomers become part of the community of practice. This process subsumes the learning of knowledge and skills. Lave (1997) sums these ideas up as follows: The idea of apprenticeship, or learning in practice reverses this relation (between the learner and the problem) by making central the encompassing significance and meaning—understanding that children have the opportu- nity to develop about things they are learning. (p. 33) Elsewhere in the literature are signs of a growing following of the situated cognition paradigm, as evidenced in work by Scott (1998), Duran, Dugan, and Weffer (1998), Kelly and Chen (1999), and Kirshner and Whitson (1997). Their idea of culture is encompassed in a sociocul- tural view of learning. Both Lemke (1997) and Gee (1997), for example, have used the related idea of situated cognition in the context of learning through language—Lemke coming from a science education perspective and Gee from a language perspective. Even for L1 speakers, Lemke (1990) has argued that reading, writing, and talking about science are often difficult for middle school learners because the science discourses and practices are new to them. Lee and Fradd (1998) maintain that because science is a part of social practice, science learning is mediated by social action and cultural practice and hence embedded in particular discourses. The consequence of this, according to Moje, Collazo, Carrillo, and Marx (2001), is that learners need to be engaged in authentic science-learning experiences in which they answer ques- tions that have meaning in their lives, allowing more informal discourse 352 TESOL QUARTERLY within the discipline in the learner’s main language3 to be linked to formal science concepts in the language of learning and teaching. Setati and Adler (2000) carried out a 3-year study of South African teachers who were taking an upgrading course. The contexts of the classrooms in which the teachers were observed ranged from rural areas to townships (rurally based, high-density communities formed during Apartheid for Blacks). The results suggest that in learning to cope with the discourse of a particular subject (in this case mathematics), learners have to move from their own informal, spoken language (L1 or main language) to the precise, formal language of the discipline (English, the target language). The goal of instruction, formal written mathematical competence, thus needs to be reached from a position of informal spoken mathematics rather than English, indicating an interplay be- tween access to meaning versus access to English. Setati and Adler propose a model, shown in Figure 1, that illustrates the possible routes by which the informal-formal language shift could take place in the manner suggested by the following teacher quotation: During the maths period, students are expected to work in English, this has been my policy in class since I started teaching them; I always thought that they practised it, or at least I should say they gave me the impression that they do. The video, however, revealed to me during that particular period, ten groups out of twelve had their discussions in Tswana, Zulu or street language (Tsotsitaal).4 (Setati, 1994, as cited in Adler, 1998, p. 28) The dotted lines in the figure represent possible routes to follow in teaching, and the solid lines, the routes observed as more likely to be followed. The category formal written discourse, main language does not appear either theoretically (dotted lines) or empirically (solid lines), as written discourse would have to appear in English to conform to the expected policy of English-medium instruction. Teachers would expect all written work to be in English, both because of its susceptibility to outside scrutiny and the idea that written work is in some sense a preparation for formal examinations, which must be conducted in English. Setati and Adler add another dimension by distinguishing between conceptual and calculational discourse. In the lessons they observed, switches from informal mathematical discourse to formal calculational discourse were usually accompanied by a switch from the 3 We use the term main language rather than home language because South African students are often adept in the use of several African languages. 4 So-called street languages, a mix of English as learned at school and elements of various dialects and languages that are mutually intelligible, develop in urban areas of Africa where children from many different language backgrounds come together. In Shona-speaking parts of Zimbabwe this is referred to as Sheng. ROLE OF ENGLISH IN INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIETAL DEVELOPMENT 353 FIGURE 1 Routes for Shift From Informal to Formal Language Note. Dotted lines = possible routes; solid lines = routes observed as more likely to be followed; LOLT = language of learning and teaching. From “Between Languages and Discourses: Language Practices in Primary Multilingual Classrooms in South Africa,” by M. Setati & J. Adler, 2000, Educational Studies in Mathematics, 43, p. 250, Figure 1. Copyright 2000 by Kluwer Academic Publishers. Reprinted with kind permission of Kluwer Academic Publishers. main language to English, whereas moves from informal mathematical discourse to formal conceptual discourse took place first entirely in the learners’ main language before switching to English. Apparently, for these learners the formal and spontaneous concepts meet to form true concepts (Vygotsky, 1986) at the interface of the two languages. Border Crossing in the Science Classroom The early work of Heath (1983) shows that learning through two languages fosters the ability to operate in two different forms of social practice and facilitates, especially in subjects like science—what Jegede and Aikenhead (1999) and Cobern (1996, 1998) refer to as border crossing, the ability to shift cognitively as well as culturally from one world view to another. World view refers to culturally embedded presuppositions about the natural world—a fundamental organization of the mind, a way of looking and of understanding (Cobern, 1998). Together these con- cepts further the understanding of the link between the cognitive and 354 TESOL QUARTERLY the social. They are thus also useful for understanding the adaptation of students to school in light of the home culture and other individual variables as mentioned above. In some urban settings the distance between worlds may be small, smoothed over by children’s exposure through the media or through preschool to what to expect in school. In rural areas the disjunction may be great, creating a hazardous if not impossible journey. In relation to learning situations in which essentially foreign curricula are being conveyed via a colonial second/foreign language, the concepts of border crossing and world view suggest that teaching can be seen as cultural transmission and learning as cultural acquisition, culture here being defined as a system of meaning and symbols, including ways of thinking and views of the nature of phenom- ena (Aikenhead, 1996; Geertz, 1973; Ogawa, 1998). Such a view of teaching brings to mind Vygotsky’s (1978, 1986) thoughts on the main purposes of schooling, again begging the question of whose toolkit of skills, knowledge, and values—or simply whose culture and whose science—is to be acquired (Clay, 1996; Shumba, 1999a). Although there is controversy over the question of culture, language, and science learning, a recent special issue of the Journal of Research in Science Teaching (Kyle, 1999) contains three articles (Aikenhead & Jegede, 1999; Shumba, 1999b; Waldrip & Taylor, 1999) that subscribe to the world view theory. The findings of these studies, based on extensive ethnographic data, mostly relate to conditions under which learners of different cultures can cross borders into the scientific world. In this work the concept of culture appears to encompass language, as it is not dealt with separately. However, in the same issue others (Akatugba & Wallace, 1999; Dzama & Osborne, 1999; Rollnick, 2000) draw on Vygotsky’s (1978) ideas to critique the world view hypothesis on the grounds that in all cultures a gap exists between the culture of science and society. Perhaps what is missing here is a distinction between science education for young people and the conceptual world of the adult scientist. Shumba (1999a, 1999b) warns against oversimplifying this discussion. He notes the ways in which Zimbabwean cultural norms intersect with what is taught in school and how it is taught. For example, traditional rationality and Western scientific rationality are different but not neces- sarily incompatible, but notions of cause and effect and the irrelevance of hypotheses for explaining phenomena are deeply rooted in tradi- tional culture and the norms governing interaction between young people and adults. With reference to both the Shona and Ndebele cultures in Zimbabwe, Shumba (1999a) writes, Normal behaviour requires observing and respecting the linear hierarchy in which younger members . . . have lesser privilege to query, criticise, and contribute to decision making . . . . children who are inquisitive are often ROLE OF ENGLISH IN INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIETAL DEVELOPMENT 355 chided for being too clever. . . . although natural physical causes are accepted to explain some experiences, there is always a belief in underlying causes of a mystical nature. (p. 336) Not only are young children and even college students in some African cultures not inclined to ask why things happen the way they do, but societal norms such as these are also likely to affect teachers’ instruc- tional styles as well as teacher-student relations in the classroom (Serpell, 1993). The following exchange, quoted by Rollnick, Manyatsi, Lubben, and Bradley (1998), illustrates the point: T: I want us to look at how we can extract metals from their ores. I’m sure you can remember that in Swaziland there was a mine at Ngwenya, do you remember that? P: Yes (chorus answer) T: What was mined there? P: Iron ore (chorus answer) T: Recently you’re behaving more like people who’ve never been to school. You don’t know that you’re supposed to raise your hands up? (p. 461) Clark and Ramahlape (1999) show how cultural border crossing intersects with classroom language use, also providing an example of identity in practice—of Lave’s (1997) idea of moving from legitimate peripheral participation to full participation in a community of practice. Their study drew on South African students’ traditional beliefs about the causes of lightning to entertain alternative explanations as rooted in Western science. When students were permitted to use the home language in class to discuss their beliefs about lightning and to speculate about its causes, the discussion became lively and the students actively engaged, an unlikely occurrence had the students been required to use English, a language they had not mastered well enough for purposes other than those relating to the particular question–single-word-answer– response ritual seen in so many African classrooms. Clark and Ramahlape note, They were given the chance to talk about something that genuinely interested them. . . . many of them were going “minds on” during the lesson. . . . being able to express themselves in the mother tongue . . . students felt freer to venture an opinion about something which is located in their everyday experiences. . . . holding such a discussion in science served to value students’ traditional beliefs. (p. 17) This account is important because it shows that social constructivist teaching approaches can be used in school settings where students are accustomed to rote learning within a hierarchical, authoritarian system (Shumba, 1999a). It also suggests that if students’ prior knowledge is 356 TESOL QUARTERLY rooted in traditional knowledge that is not brought into the classroom, only a form of collateral learning ( Jegede, 1995) can be expected to take place. Collateral learning refers to the extent to which learners compart- mentalize new knowledge alongside prior knowledge rather than inte- grating the two, in what Cobern (1998) refers to as cognitive apartheid. We point out, however, that some students become adept compartmentalizers and perform well, especially on multiple-choice examinations that test for recall of isolated facts. These students may be the ones who gain access to scarce spaces in university but cannot cope once there (Hewlett, 1995; Moyo, 1993; Rollnick & Manyatsi, 1997). As one student said when asked about her feelings of inferiority upon entry to university, When you hear somebody speaking English you feel I’m nothing since I can’t speak like that and I have to keep alone. Our schools are poor. My English is poor. Most of the time if they feel you do not speak English well they isolate you. You come from a poor school and they come from a (formerly white) school. (Rollnick & Manyatsi, 1997, p. 178) To the extent that (a) what is taught in school reflects a Western form of culture often associated with English speakers and (b) the content of the curriculum violates indigenous norms, values, and beliefs, one can say that English, the language of instruction, supports acculturation, if not assimilation, into another way of looking and another set of societal norms. Stated differently, a disjunction between the culture and lan- guage of the home and the culture and language of the school occurs, requiring the learner literally to cross borders in going from one to the other. The school bag in such a situation can be seen as a kind of metaphorical transitional object, rarely opened once inside a rural African home because there may be many chores to be completed before nightfall and no electric light under which to study. CODE SWITCHING: A RESOURCE FOR CONSTRUCTING MEANING IN THE CLASSROOM Code switching acquired a bad reputation in the field of L2 learning from assimilationists who sought to eradicate the use in school of so- called socially inferior home languages. In addition, there has been misinterpretation of the purposes of using the target language exclu- sively in early immersion programs where the home languages are well supported both in the environment of the learner and later on in school, when instruction shifts to an L1 maintenance, bilingual model (Genesee, 1987; Johnson & Swain, 1997). In the latter case home languages were (and are) sure to be well supported both in the environment of the ROLE OF ENGLISH IN INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIETAL DEVELOPMENT 357 learner and later on in school, when instruction shifted to an L1 maintenance, bilingual model. Although teachers often seem to hold negative attitudes toward code switching, there is considerable evidence that code switching can offer a natural, economical, and effective resource for establishing meaning in classrooms where the teacher and the students can communicate in the same home or main language (Adendorff, 1996; Eastman, 1992). Teachers and researchers working in African classrooms have ob- served many instances of linguistically based confusion, giving evidence of the need at all levels of schooling for a ready device to clarify meaning. This need may be especially acute when teachers’ English vocabulary is limited, making it difficult for them to reformulate ideas. For example, in a Grade 3 science lesson on air in Kenya (Abagi & Cleghorn, 1990), the English word gas was confused with the similarly sounding Luo word ngas, which means ladder. The teacher simply met the confusion with an admonishment, missing a chance to raise the learners’ metalinguistic awareness. In another study, in this case of ways to improve the prelaboratory preparation of first-year university chemistry students in South Africa (Rollnick, Zwane, Staskun, Lotz, & Green, 2001), a teacher reported that only during the discussion after the first part of the practical did she realise many students had no idea as to the meaning of the word brittle; no one had asked. Because meaning can be said to belong to culture rather than simply to language (Caldas-Coulthard & Coulthard, 1996), code switching can facilitate the establishment of meaning by providing a linguistic and cultural bridge to understanding in what Merritt (Merritt, Cleghorn, & Abagi, 1988) has termed a process of dual translation. Sometimes only a word or two in the local language are necessary to provide a familiar image for a word that has no exact English translation, as in this example. T: You get the sweet potatoes from the shamba [local word for family garden plot], . . . you cover this pot with a sufuria, or a plate.5 Often, switches occur with words that seem irrelevant to the discourse, for example, phrases like, isn’t that so? or you know. Characterised first by Gumperz (1982) as contextualisation cues, small switches such as these capture the attention of learners and refocus their attention on specific content. In the light of the high concentration needed to follow instructions in an L2, the utterance of a few words in a familiar language seems guaranteed to recapture attention. A clue to this function comes 5 Italics in excerpts indicate English translations of African languages. 358 TESOL QUARTERLY from the unsubstantiated impression that the shift tends to move from the instructional second/foreign language to the home language, as in this brief example from Rollnick and Rutherford’s (1996) study, carried out in Swaziland: T: They are made of air. Isn’t that so? [spoken in SiSwati] A lesson in rural western Kenya on transmission of disease illustrates how use of Luo, the learners’ home language, can help convey under- standing of unfamiliar abstract ideas, such as the microscopic, invisible quality of germs (Cleghorn, 1992). T: Since these germs are not seen to our eyes, and since we cannot take a microscope to help us see the germs all the time. . . . the safest way to protect ourselves from this disease is by washing our hands . . . so we wash away the germs. Analysis of discourse in Zimbabwe primary mathematics lessons (Dube & Cleghorn, 1999) pointed to both cognitive and affective purposes of code switching. In this case the teacher fostered understanding by using Shona, the learners’ home language, for direct translation, for repeti- tion, or to give instructions while retaining the English for the formal terms and vocabulary for equipment that students had never seen but would need to recognize on the examination. T: So pens down. What numbers did I ask you to do? And later, T: OK, we want to multiply this eight hundred again by ten . . . . In the next example, Shona was used for affective purposes, to reinforce the rules relating to honesty. T: OK, you mark yourself. We don’t want liars or those who cheat themselves. In another lesson on division, Shona was used to draw attention to a child’s incorrect use of English, again pointing to the ease with which confusion could arise. S: You are divided . . . , T: Do you say you are divided?! Mind your English! In a study of South African Grade 12 learners in an urban context, Mumba, Rollnick, and White (2001) observed teachers switching for the purpose of recalling prior knowledge. ROLE OF ENGLISH IN INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIETAL DEVELOPMENT 359 T: How can you test for an acid? S1: By using indicators T: Of course, when the indicators are added to acids the colour changes T: Next property . . . . S2: They react with metals to give a salt and hydrogen gas T: You must remember a metal and acid give you a salt and hydrogen gas. The foregoing examples suggest the many forms and functions of code switching as well as its potential. Code switching serves to clarify linguistically based confusion, render the culturally unfamiliar familiar, make the implicit explicit, provide English vocabulary needed for examination purposes, provide contextualisation cues, and raise learn- ers’ metalinguistic awareness. Clearly, single instances of code switching often have more than one purpose. The full potential of code switching, however, has yet to be fully identified and its functions categorised so that teachers can use it systematically and with greater consciousness than is usually the case. THE QUALITY AND USE OF TEXT MATERIALS Recent work by Peacock, Cleghorn, and Mikkila (in press) points out that the role of text materials in the teacher-learner-text relationship is often left out of discussions of language use between teachers and learners. For example, the fact that the vast majority of the world’s children are learning via a language they do not use at home seems to be lost on the developers of text materials, who frequently write as if the readers are L1 speakers of the language the text is written in. The way teachers mediate between such text materials and the learners is critical for understanding how to move the learners beyond what they can learn on their own. The problem is not simply the paucity of reading and other text materials in many African classrooms. Where materials do exist in plentiful supply, as in diversely populated classrooms of North America and Europe, they tend to be used in ways that may not be beneficial for L2 learners; yet these ways tend to be exported, in the form of teachers’ guides, as the developing countries acquire more materials. The way teachers mediate a text depends on their content knowledge, their assumptions about the learners’ abilities and prior knowledge, and their own predetermined understanding of how interaction in the classroom should occur. When there is a marked discrepancy between the learners’ level of English and the level of language used in the text, serious problems may arise, not the least of which is the tendency of teachers to use the textbook to create oversimplified if not misleading worksheets. 360 TESOL QUARTERLY Further, a rote use of text, as described earlier, implies that the content of the text lies outside the learners’—and in some cases, the teacher’s— ZPD. As Kress (1996, p. 15) points out, texts are potent cultural objects. Peacock (1995) confirms the need to guard against unquestioningly exporting not only the format of text materials but also the ways they tend to be used. He found that the expository nature of science text made it inaccessible to young L2 learners and that illustrations did not always help because their conventions were rooted in an assumed understanding of Western symbols. This tendency may be increasing with the globalization of the textbook industry, which has meant an increase in Internetlike visual formats and an assumed culturally free subjectivity of the reader (Kress, 1996; McEneaney, 2000). Teachers thus need to be attuned to the cultural aspects of visual literacy, both global and local, in order to mediate effectively between the learners and whatever texts might be available. The inappropriateness of many available text materials adds an extraordinary burden to teachers, who need to know how to interpret such materials to the learners. This interpretation requires a process of triple translation—linguistic, visual, and cultural. The level of difficulty of the language in the text and the unfamiliarity of certain visual symbols are only part of the problem. Clark (1997) not only found that technical terms posed difficulty for students but, like Peacock (1995), found that everyday words such as describe and observe caused confusion, and Cleghorn and Shumba (2001) note that the same word in Shona is used for something that is white and something that is transparent. These seemingly simple findings point to the need for attention to language matters per se and again to the potential of code switching to clarify meaning. Furthermore, text materials for L2 and multicultural school settings need to be developed with particular attention to the way language and culture connect, so that teachers may more easily guide students across the many different kinds of borders they are likely to encounter in the classroom. Culture also seems to play an important role in students’ ability to produce written text. Although there is little research on the topic, the traditional African valuation of speech over writing may impede stu- dents’ ability to write in ways that go beyond the expected L2-related problems of vocabulary and grammar (Caldas-Coulthard & Coulthard, 1996). For example, in a study of bridging students from disadvantaged school systems in South Africa, where both science and language background may be called into question, Inglis (1993) showed that the written assignments in science produced by one student within a week revealed vastly different degrees of language proficiency in English. Inglis suggests that the quality of the writing may be closely related to the ROLE OF ENGLISH IN INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIETAL DEVELOPMENT 361 student’s declarative understanding of the content of the assignment. Thus poorly written science assignments may be evidence either of poor language proficiency or of poor declarative knowledge. Rollnick, White, and Dison (1992), working with similar bridging students, also found that extracts from the beginning of an essay showed that the concepts were well understood, but extracts from the end of the same essay showed problems in understanding concepts. Poor language proficiency cannot thus be hastily judged as a weakness in knowledge of the language but may be a symptom of problems stemming from compre- hension of content. Further to this point, Chen and Donin (1997) found in their work with Chinese university students studying in English that domain-specific knowledge was a far more important factor in their comprehension of text than language proficiency was. However, these students may be assumed to have considerable knowledge of the situated meanings of the text; that is, by that point in their education they would have been familiar with the patterns and subpatterns of the texts. THOUGHTS ON LANGUAGE-IN-EDUCATION POLICY AND TEACHER EDUCATION In this section we consider implications for language-in-education policy as well as ways that teacher education might facilitate teaching and learning in complex L2 school settings. Establish Basic Literacy Skills in the Mother Tongue An important part of the language-in-education debate concerns when to introduce English as an instructional language for second and foreign language learners. Depending on the sociocultural setting, the choices include English-only from the start (i.e., submersion); mother tongue first with transition to English only after the first few years (i.e., transition); English first followed by a balanced, mother tongue/English bilingual programme (i.e., immersion); mother tongue throughout with English as a second or additional language; and a dual-language ap- proach that ensures the development of literacy in the L2 and in the mother tongue (i.e., L1 maintenance). Based on the research in African and North American classrooms, the ideal time to introduce learning via English appears to be after, or at the same time as, the establishment of basic literacy skills in the mother tongue (except in those places where the learners’ mother tongue is so well supported at home and in the community that there is no risk of it being lost, e.g., English in French- 362 TESOL QUARTERLY speaking Quebec or Spanish in some parts of the southwestern United States); henceforth, a balanced bilingual/biliteracy programme for the duration of the school years seems to be most effective for individuals and for society as a whole. This scenario was first described as additive as contrasted with subtractive by Peal and Lambert (1962) at the start of the Canadian French immersion studies. Later Swain and Cummins (1979), among others, confirmed that bilingualism can be cognitively as well as socially additive because it can help the learner see different representa- tions of the same idea. Because the sociocultural conditions of schooling in rural Africa may make a bilingual approach impossible or inappropriate for many learn- ers, other models need to be considered. In light of the value placed in many parts of Africa on oral language skills, and if oral skills are indeed part and parcel of literacy (Gee, 1986; Street, 2001a), then an emphasis during the initial years of schooling on oral skills in the home (first) language may be an excellent precursor to later reading and writing in the L2, if not also in the home language. Although there has been little follow-up, a longitudinal study carried out in Nigeria (Bamgbose, 1984) found that children taught in the home language performed signifi- cantly better than a control group in all subjects, including English. A smaller study carried out in Ghana (Collison, 1975) found that children made statements at a far higher cognitive level in the home language than in English. The results of the shift in some regions of Ethiopia to Amharic as the main instructional language will not be known for some time (Pillai, 2002). Bunyi’s (1999) study in Kenya reinforces the position that, whenever possible, home languages need to be developed in school. She found that when the use of English dominated in science instruction, students could not apply what they had learned to practical situations at home, documenting the subtractive nature of English-only instruction both for individuals and for society as a whole. Another study found that when code switching into the home language was used to foster understanding of key concepts, Grade 5 Kenyan students could use the home language (in this case Kikuyu) to write about the contents of a science lesson on water (Cleghorn, 1992). Although very tentative, this finding suggests that the students were developing literacy skills in the home language despite the official cessation of instruction via that language by Grade 3. These preliminary observations further reinforce the rationale for in- school support of the home language in order to foster a two-way transfer of literacy skills between the home language and the target L2, reinforce personal identity, and establish more equitable conditions with regard to education (Carey, 1991; Phillipson, 1992; Roller, 1988; Street, 2001b; Swain, Lapkin, Rowen, & Hart, 1990; UNESCO, 1999). ROLE OF ENGLISH IN INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIETAL DEVELOPMENT 363 Although numerous studies (Cummins, 1996; Genesee, 1987, 1993; Johnson & Swain, 1997; Lightbown & Spada, 1999; Rollnick, 2000) support a bilingual approach, the so-called language debate quickly becomes political. What is deemed best for societal development is often at odds with what educators consider to be best for individual develop- ment, suggesting the need for decentralized language-in-education policies that allow for rural-urban differences in school populations and the varied language infrastructures of schools. For example, because of the widespread status of English, there is a popular perception that maintenance of L1s will impede the learning of English. In Kenya’s rural schools and in Zimbabwe, there was thus pressure from parents, school heads, and teachers themselves to use English even as early as preschool (Cleghorn et al., 1989; Prochner, in press). In Kenya’s urban schools the constant presence of school inspectors guarantees that teachers use English even when they might just as easily use Kiswahili as a lingua franca. Different complexities exist in South Africa, Tanzania, Botswana, Malawi, and Zimbabwe (Dube & Cleghorn, 1999; Fuller & Snyder, 1991; Mateche, 1994; Rubagumya, 1994), but in each case the policy in place cannot easily meet both individual and societal needs. And the situation is no less political in the developed parts of the world. Cummins (1999) found that the current push for all-English programmes in the United States is politically motivated by a resurgence of concern about assimilat- ing non-English-speaking immigrants as well as Spanish-speaking resi- dents, who now constitute a numerical majority in a number of commu- nities. Evidence that an all-English approach is not pedagogically justified comes also from Cummins and Corson’s (1997) finding that students in the United States acquired nativelike proficiency in English despite considerable amounts of use of the home language during instructional time. Develop Materials in the Local Language The problems associated with implementing a pedagogically sound bilingual program in rural and urban African school settings cannot be underestimated. Several studies carried out in Botswana, South Africa, Kenya, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, and elsewhere (Fuller & Snyder, 1991; Hewlett, 1995; Swilla, 1992) have shown that when English is used for instruction in a rote fashion simply to deliver disconnected facts, without meaningful contextualisation, the development of English remains so superficial that by the end of secondary school students are not prepared for the language demands of university—such as taking notes, writing term papers, and participating in class discussions of abstract ideas. Under these circumstances the results serve neither the student nor the 364 TESOL QUARTERLY society because little knowledge is acquired and the input for L2 learning is too thin. The resulting high dropout rates (UNESCO, 1999) of students who have come through such impoverished school systems document how both global and local inequality is constructed and perpetuated through schooling (Tollefson, 1991). Thus, in addition to suggesting a nearly exclusive emphasis in the early years of schooling on the development of L1 oral skills, we also suggest that resources be put into the provision of local language text materials. The argument that this would be too costly falls away when one considers the extreme lack of text materials in any language in many African classrooms: What goes on the blackboard and then is copied into notebooks is often the only text. That this text inevitably appears in English needs to be examined critically because most local languages have written forms, as witnessed by the prevalence of local language Bibles in most communities and households (in which it is sometimes the only book). In school, home language stories, parables, and the like could be transferred to the blackboard. That teachers can take a hand in this process was successfully shown during the establishment of a bachelor degree programme in early childhood education in Zimbabwe. With an eye to addressing the shortage of children’s books, student teachers were encouraged to record the traditional fables, myths, and other stories that they had been told as young children. As one teacher said with amazement, “I did not know these stories could be good for children in our schools today” (field notes, 1995). Educate Teachers About Code Switching The main concern, as Adler (1998) points out, is the dilemma of simultaneously providing access to content and to a prestigious instruc- tional language, thereby providing access to the outside world. Again, the answer would seem to lie in helping teachers develop systematic strategies for code switching while not losing sight of the equal need for effective means to develop English, the target language. If included as a systematic part of teacher education, code switching might acquire more legitimacy. For example, Setati et al. (in press) report that South African teachers’ participation in a further diploma in education course gave them more confidence in using code switching. In fact, the level of code switching increased over the years of their participation in the programme, much of it attributed to the increased use of group work in the lessons. However, many of the teachers believed that code switching was not the right thing to do, even though they were aware of its benefit in the classroom. The dilemma remains how to use code switching without reducing the ROLE OF ENGLISH IN INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIETAL DEVELOPMENT 365 necessary exposure to English, so that access to higher education and participation in the wider world community is possible. Here the implications for teacher education are evident: In the absence of ESL specialists, all teachers are L2 teachers (Genesee, 1993). They need extensive knowledge about how to integrate the learning of English with the teaching of subject matter. Educate Teachers About Border Crossing Drawing again on Vygotskian (1978, 1986) thought, we believe that the notion of border crossing also needs to be made explicit for teachers so that they can expand their mediating roles to include that of cultural broker. The concept of border crossing joins the cognitive with the social, illuminating the importance of understanding the possible conflict between world views that learners, as well as teachers, may experience as they move from home to school and back again. Although teachers may quite readily come to understand their role in the classroom as one of guiding learners to an understanding that they could not achieve on their own, learners need a similar intervention to guide them to a cultural awareness that they could not achieve on their own. This kind of intervention would help learners move comfortably among their various worlds, acquiring an understanding of the culture of the school while maintaining the integrity of the home culture (Bruner, 1996), allowing them to understand which aspects of the toolkit belong to their own culture and which aspects come from afar. As in the additive situation discussed above with reference to in-school use of both the home language and the L2, schools and teachers have a critical role to play in the development of biculturalism. We would go further to suggest that students are not likely to master what they learn in school without explicit attention to home-school cultural differences. Thus, as Aikenhead (1996) also points out, wherever different cultures and languages come together in the classroom, teacher education needs to incorporate a cross-cultural perspective to enable teachers to add cultural brokering skills to their roles as teachers. Without this knowledge, it is hard to imagine that Vygotskian principles can have any kind of universal salience. However, even taking all these points into consideration, we note that, to succeed academically, learners have to master formal language, be it the main local language, English, or another interna- tional language. 366 TESOL QUARTERLY CONCLUSION Language-in-education issues touch both individual and societal de- velopment in complex ways, especially because of the mixing of peda- gogical, economic, and political concerns. Despite the research that has contributed to a better understanding of these issues, practices in science classrooms in Africa suggest that the language-in-education debate remains relatively uninformed by results and insights. Perhaps as researchers we fail to communicate with those who establish language-in- education policies and those who decide what needs to be taught in teacher education programmes. The research findings repeatedly em- phasize the need to ensure that L2 speakers have equitable access to what is being taught; research has demonstrated clearly the cognitive (individual) and the social (societal) value of developing literacy in the instructional language as well as in the mother tongue whenever possible. In all this, however, we may simply be looking for research- based solutions to political problems. Language policy is not a single entity but, like all policy, is part of a system of knowledge and belief. We may also be forgetting that the research-policy-practice connection is a loose one and may always remain so (Myers, 1975). However, the steps that a few developing countries are now taking to develop systematic cooperation between various government sectors such as education, health, and social services may provide new contexts for research, policy, and practice to come together. In conclusion, we ask what researchers can do better or differently to assist teachers in helping students cross the linguistic and cultural borders to access the knowledge and the language or languages they will need in order to function in their home communities and in their relations with the world beyond. Most educational research is applied; as such, it becomes a form of discourse about social reality. The participants in that discourse are many: The conversation must flow not simply from the researchers to the policy makers but both ways. Perhaps more effective education of preservice teachers about these matters will result in change when some of these teachers take up policy positions. This article has drawn on research in African school settings, but some common principles should extend beyond African schools to the many classrooms where children learn science and other subjects through an L2. In these settings the strategic use of code switching appears to be a feasible way to help establish meaningful learning contexts. Further, meaningful learning contexts seem to underpin the motivation to learn the L2, ultimately fostering societal development within the larger global community. ROLE OF ENGLISH IN INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIETAL DEVELOPMENT 367 THE AUTHORS Ailie Cleghorn is an associate professor in the Education Department at Concordia University. Her doctoral degree from McGill University is in comparative sociology of education. Her teaching includes comparative and international education and cross-cultural perspectives on literacy. Her research has focused on language issues in education in Kenya, in Zimbabwe, and in Quebec, Canada. Marissa Rollnick is director of the College of Science, an access course for underprepared students at Witwatersrand University. 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Drawing on qualitative and quantitative data collected between 1996 and 2001 on Mount Kilimanjaro, this longitudi- nal study of secondary school students’ lives after graduation sheds light on the relationship between language and development. The profound sense of economic hardship among these graduates was tempered by their optimism that their knowledge of English would eventually help them find employment or opportunities for further education. Current economic conditions in the country appear to play an important role in shaping secondary school graduates’ identity as educated persons who know English and who can find ways to cope under these challenging circumstances. The use of the term postcoloniality throughout the article emphasizes the economic domain of everyday life in present-day Tanzania, but an examination of the cultural dimensions of students’ support for English reveals the interconnection between the materialist and nonmaterialist aspects of language policy. The study has implica- tions for ESL practitioners and for applied linguistics research in the areas of bilingualism, world Englishes, and language policy in postcolonial countries. T he presence of English language teaching in development contexts prompts TESOL professionals to probe the relationship between language and development. Research on bilingualism investigates the interdependence of language, cognition, and individual development as well as studying societal development through bilingual education in communities where the language used in the schools is distinct from that in other social settings (Cummins, 2000; Cummins & Swain, 1986; Dicker, 2000; Skutnabb-Kangas, 1981). Research on world Englishes looks at the link between language and individual development among nonnative English speakers, especially in the former British colonies, TESOL QUARTERLY Vol. 36, No. 3, Autumn 2002 373 where English has undergone a complex process of linguistic nativization leading to the creation of new Englishes (Kachru, 1983, 1990; Lowenberg, 2000; Pakir, 1991). Additionally, the study of world Englishes highlights the potential for English to promote societal development through enhanced communication in an increasingly transnational world (Kachru, 1986) and simultaneously signals the fact that English remains one of the most enduring vestiges of colonialism (Canagarajah, 1999; Pennycook, 1998, 2000; Phillipson, 1992; Tollefson, 2000). This article addresses the issues of bilingualism and the spread of English in sub-Saharan Africa, but its focus is on a third dimension of applied linguistics research—educational language policy—in the former British colony of Tanzania. With 90% of the population identifying themselves as bilingual in a vernacular language and in the national language, Swahili, Tanzania serves as an ideal site to explore issues of societal bilingualism (Rubagumya, 1990). Because Swahili and English are official languages and are the only ones used in the education system, the literature on world Englishes in “Outer Circle” countries (Kachru, 1988, p. 221) helps explain the desire among Tanzanian youth to learn English for intranational and transnational communication. However, the research on language policy in postcolonial societies is the most central to this study because of its emphasis on the sociopolitical dimensions of language in development that concern both critical applied linguists and critical development scholars.1 From a critical perspective, the political dimensions of language policy are as important as its linguistic aspects because language can either impede or promote development by changing people’s vulnerability to forces they do not control (Markee, 1997). The notion of reducing vulnerability is central to my definition of development and to my analysis of the support for English among Tanzanian youth during a period of economic uncertainty. My interest in the socioeconomic conditions that influence language policy is revealed by my choice of the term postcoloniality for the title of 1 The term critical has been popularized by the work of scholars in the field of education whose research and teaching advocate for social change (Apple, 1990, 1993; Giroux, 1988; McLaren, 1989). TESOL Quarterly devoted a special-topic issue (Pennycook, 1999a) to the development of a critical theory approach to language teaching in the hope that it will “help us understand in much more complex ways the contexts in which TESOL occurs and offer the prospect of change” (Pennycook, 1999b, p. 346). The work of two groups of scholars in development studies shares with critical applied linguistics the goal of effecting social change by analyzing relations of power: (a) Marxist and neo-Marxist researchers who examine the economic dependency of Third World countries in the world capitalist system (Cardoso & Faletto, 1979; Frank, 1967; Wallerstein, 1982) and (b) researchers working within a post- structuralist paradigm that interrogates power/knowledge relations in development programs designed to alleviate inequalities based on gender, race, or socioeconomic status (Escobar, 1995; Ferguson, 1994; Sachs, 1992). 374 TESOL QUARTERLY this article. I ascribe my use of the term to Pennycook (1998), who defines it as the “material state after the end of colonialism” (p. 39). According to Pennycook, postcoloniality differs from postcolonialism in that the former examines the lasting impact of the “economic depriva- tions of colonialism” (p. 39) whereas the latter explores the cultural and ideological aspects of colonialism that continue to influence the present. Pennycook does not propose a rigid distinction between the material and nonmaterial dimensions of colonialism; instead, he suggests that culture, ideology, and economics are interconnected without one domain being prior to or constituted by the others. My analysis of educational language policy in this article emphasizes the material aspects of everyday life in present-day Tanzania, focusing on the use of English and Swahili in school life, teachers’ perspectives on education, and students’ lives after graduation. These material conditions are intertwined with the national economic conditions as well as with beliefs about language in development in postcolonial Tanzania. BACKGROUND Language, Education, and Economic History in Tanzania The United Republic of Tanzania, formed in 1964 with the union of Tanganyika and the island of Zanzibar, is made up of 20 regions on the mainland and 5 regions on the islands (Bureau of Statistics, 1997). Although these regions consist of many different ethnic groups with distinct mother tongues, Swahili serves as the language of intranational communication because it is spoken by the vast majority of the popula- tion (Rubagumya, 1990). Efforts to standardize Swahili began during the British colonial period, which lasted from 1920 until independence in 1961. The Inter-Territorial Language Committee, formed in 1930, stan- dardized Swahili orthography throughout British East Africa (which included Kenya and Uganda) by publishing textbooks and dictionaries (Whiteley, 1969). The greatest boost to the promotion of Swahili as the national language occurred in 1954 with the formation of Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), the party that would eventually govern the country after independence. TANU and its successor, the Chama Cha Mapinduzi (Party of the Revolution), have been in power since 1961 and have consistently supported the use of Swahili as the language of national unity by making it the language for official government business and for instruction in primary school (Abdulaziz, 1980; Mwansoko, 1990). The use of Swahili in the education system was closely tied to the 1967 policy of Education for Self-Reliance (ESR), which was part of the POSTCOLONIALITY AND ENGLISH 375 country’s socialist development program known as ujamaa and pro- moted by Tanzania’s first president, Julius Nyerere. Ujamaa was explicitly opposed to the Western neoliberal model of development that privileges urban development, free markets, and production for export (Gillette, 1977; cf. Apple, 2000; Mundy, 1998). The primary goal of ujamaa was rural development because the vast majority of the population lived outside the urban centers and made their living through agricultural production. The policy of ESR was intended to complement this comprehensive rural development strategy by emphasizing primary schooling for the masses rather than secondary and tertiary education for the elite. During the period of ujamaa, Swahili was seen as a symbol of nonalignment with the West, adult literacy rates reached the highest levels in Africa, and the achievement of universal primary education was regarded as a sign of success for the new government’s policy of self- reliance (Brock-Utne, 2000). Although Nyerere’s socialist views were radically different from the current neoliberal ideology of development discussed below, he, too, placed great faith in the power of formal education to transform the country from an underdeveloped nation to a developed socialist state. His belief that primary schooling could instill unity and cooperation at the village level has been described by some as “modernization by traditionalization” (Mushi, cited in Hyden, 1980, p. 98). Yet “tradition- alization” did not supersede pragmatism in all aspects of education, as the strong nationalist ideals of ujamaa did not lead to a change in the use of English as the medium of instruction at the secondary and tertiary levels. Throughout the late 1960s and 1970s, the government made declarations about its intention to use Swahili at all grade levels, but by the early 1980s the plan to change the policy was all but abandoned (Rugemalira, Rubagumya, Kapinga, Lwaitama, & Tetlow, 1990). The 1982 Presidential Commission on Education, for example, stated clearly that “English will be the medium of education at post primary levels where the teaching of Kiswahili as a subject will also be strengthened” (Ministry of Education, 1984, p. 21). The most recent comprehensive education policy, published in 1995, reconfirmed the use of English at the secondary level and increased the number of years in which primary students would study English, mandat- ing that students start in the first year instead of the third. This policy document did not explain the rationale for the increase in the number of English periods, but it made clear that English would be a school subject at the primary level and the medium of instruction in secondary schools. The document also stated that the economic restructuring underway in Tanzania since the mid-1980s, known as structural adjust- ment, necessitated the privatization of schooling by allowing more nongovernmental organizations to manage schools (Ministry of Educa- 376 TESOL QUARTERLY tion and Culture [MOEC], 1995). Another consequence of structural adjustment was that students’ families began to pay fees and other school-related costs that were once paid by the government (Brock-Utne, 2000; Maarifa ni Ufunguo, 2001). Because of the negative effect on school enrollment (Brock-Utne, 2000; World Bank, 1999), the govern- ment reconsidered this policy, abolishing school fees in 2002 at the primary level but not at the secondary and tertiary levels (Kabale, 2001). Theoretical Dimensions of Postcoloniality Language and the Production of Human Capital The privatization of schooling in Tanzania has led to the proliferation of private secondary and tertiary institutions and to the intensification of the national English-only language policy for postprimary schooling. Many private schools now advertise themselves as English-medium or international schools to attract fee-paying students, and some of these schools have opted out of the national secondary school examination process by offering the Cambridge International General Certificate of Secondary Education instead. On a recent visit to two private schools on Mount Kilimanjaro, I was surprised to see several students wearing signs suggesting they had misbehaved in some way. These placards were reminiscent of the moving description of colonial schooling by Kenyan writer Ngu]g ı] wa Thiong’o (1986), who wrote about the common practice of children being forced to wear signs with “I am stupid” on them if they spoke Gı]ku]yu] in school (p. 11). At one prestigious private school, a girl was wearing a burlap vest with the words “Shame Upon Me” written on it, and at another private institution a student had a wooden sign on her chest announcing that she would not speak Swahili. When I asked a teacher at the secondary school about the student’s offense, she told me that the girl had spoken in Swahili during class and was being punished for violating the school’s policy of using English only on school grounds. Although tempted to point out that we were conversing in Swahili, I inquired instead about the reason for such a strict language code on campus. The response was a familiar one: “Educated girls know English.” The teacher believed that the school’s strict adherence to the government’s educational language policy would improve her students’ proficiency in English and provide them with advantages when they began searching for jobs in an era of high unemployment. This teacher’s views about language and individual development were troubling to me as a former secondary school teacher in Kilimanjaro who had watched her students struggle in their classes because of their limited communicative competence in the medium of instruction, POSTCOLONIALITY AND ENGLISH 377 English. Moreover, the teacher’s remark highlighted the contradiction in my roles as an English teacher and as a critic of the imposition of English through international aid programs that is described so forcefully in Phillipson’s (1992) Linguistic Imperialism. Perhaps most disturbing to me about this teacher’s equating a knowledge of English with being edu- cated was its apparent endorsement of the neoliberal economic theory of human capital, which challenges critical theories of development. Ac- cording to its advocates, human capital theory has “no genuine rival” (World Bank, 1995, p. 21) in the field of development. Formulated several decades ago by Schultz (1971), the theory contends that eco- nomic growth depends on the health and education of the labor force— human capital—in addition to improvements in a country’s physical capital, such as roads, dams, and factories. From this perspective, education not only increases productivity by teaching young people new skills but also promotes development through the inculcation of so- called modern attitudes about work, education, fertility, and health. The World Bank, one of the most important institutions shaping educational policy in the Third World, uses human capital theory to explain the rationale for promoting education within its overall program of eco- nomic development there.2 A recent World Bank publication explains the relationship between human capital development and neoliberal economic policies: The emerging consensus favors encouraging private sector initiatives, reduc- ing the presence of government, and allowing market forces to operate; in short, a market-oriented approach to development . . . . Hence, investment in the health, nutrition, and education of the people has high returns for society. It raises their productivity, decreases the number of days they are ill and prolongs their potential working lives. (Psacharopoulos & Nguyen, 1997, p. 4) It is certainly difficult to imagine individual and societal development taking place in the absence of a healthy, well-educated populace, but critical scholars are quick to point out that the presence of skilled human capital does not guarantee economic prosperity for Third World coun- tries. Furthermore, they contend that a country like Tanzania may invest heavily in human capital development, but the international capitalist system operates to maintain the country’s peripheral status and perpetu- ate its state of underdevelopment (Frank, 1967; Rodney, 1982). Other 2 Although the term Third World is often used today as a synonym for underdeveloped, it was first used by representatives at the 1955 Bandung Conference in Indonesia to express their countries’ nonalignment with either capitalist or socialist world powers. I use it in Young’s (1990) suggested dual sense of “a positive term of radical critique even if it also necessarily signals its negative sense of economic dependency and exploitation” (p. 12). 378 TESOL QUARTERLY critical researchers argue that education reproduces intranational social inequalities rather than alleviating them because certain forms of knowledge acquired in school, such as English, function as symbolic capital to which only a minority has access (Bourdieu, 1991; Bowles & Gintis, 1976; Fuller, 1991). Language and the Formation of Identity Despite their popularity, human capital and critical development theories have been criticized for their common assumption that “people’s lives are determined by economic relations” (Pennycook, 1994, p. 55). Critical applied linguistics research on identity formation can help remedy this problem by showing how one can explore the influence of social, economic, and political relations on the lives of people in a nondeterministic fashion. Norton’s (1997) definition of identity pro- vides a useful point of departure: “I use the term identity to refer to how people understand their relationship to the world, how that relationship is constructed across time and space, and how people understand their possibilities for the future” (p. 410). Central to Norton’s work is the view that identity is dynamic, that it is affected but not determined by changes in social and economic conditions, and that it derives largely from an imagined view of one’s future place in the social world. This perspective on identity construction as a fundamentally social process is shared by Morgan (1997) and Toohey (2000), whose research also explores the sociopolitical dimensions of language learning without reducing class- room participation to examples of structural relations. Canagarajah’s (1993) study of English and identity among Tamil students at the University of Jaffna is particularly relevant to this research on secondary school students’ identity in Tanzania. He contends that the students’ loss of interest in the ESOL course he studied came from multiple sources, including opposition to the textbook and pedagogical practices, and also from their adherence to “the promise of social and economic advancement English holds” (pp. 621–622). On the one hand, the students felt that their English lessons posed a threat to Tamil culture because they drew on Western culture and communicative pedagogy rather than use the grammar-based approach some students preferred; on the other hand, there was a recognition in the class that English might prevent the spread of Sinhala nationalism and might assist the students in seeking refugee status in the West. This tension surrounding language and identity in Sri Lanka resembles the current situation faced today by Tanzanian secondary school graduates, who are also aware of the cultural costs that may result from using English in school and the potential benefits that English may bring in creating job opportunities at POSTCOLONIALITY AND ENGLISH 379 home and possibilities for study abroad. These imagined future sce- narios for Tanzanian youth represent the complex and at times contra- dictory relationship among language, identity, and the current material conditions of life in the country. THE RESEARCH PROCESS I conducted the research for this study during three different periods of fieldwork between 1996 and 2001. The project began when I engaged in a year of participant-observation research at Njema Secondary School3 on Mount Kilimanjaro in northern Tanzania. The school had approxi- mately 300 male students, both boarding and day pupils, but all 45 girls were day students in 1996 because a girls’ dormitory did not open until 2 years later. Njema has a history dating back to 1926, and for the past 15 years it has been managed by the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Tanzania, which supervises many secondary schools for Lutheran and non-Lutheran students in northern Tanzania and elsewhere in the country. During the 1996 school year, I taught Form 2 English (the second year of high school) and communication skills (English writing, speaking, and listening skills) for Forms 5 and 6, a 2-year program of advanced secondary schooling that is roughly equivalent to the first year of college in the United States. In my role as teacher, I prepared the year-long syllabus based on the national curriculum, attended staff meetings and school assemblies, supervised examinations, helped organize graduation ceremonies, and served as faculty coordinator for the Girls’ Club. In my role as researcher, I made formal and informal observations of classes at Njema in all subjects and at all grade levels, and I observed classes and held focus groups with students at four other secondary schools in the Kilimanjaro region. Although participant observation was the primary method of data collection, I also interviewed students, teachers, princi- pals, and parents about their views on schooling. Some students and teachers met with me again during focus groups toward the end of the fieldwork year to discuss the themes that had emerged from earlier observations and interviews. I also developed a questionnaire and essay task that involved students at Njema and at a neighboring coeducational school. Two hundred and eighty-two students completed the questionnaire about their family’s educational history and socioeconomic status, and they wrote essays in response to five questions addressing themes that were central to the 3 The names of the school and all participants are pseudonyms. 380 TESOL QUARTERLY fieldwork. The students who completed the questionnaire in 1996 were asked to write down their home address if they wanted to participate in the research project in the future. In the summer of 2000, I returned to Tanzania and sent a second questionnaire and essay task to 225 of the original 282 students in the study. Fewer students participated in the 2000 study because some had not provided explicit written consent for me to contact them in the future, and others had given the address of their former secondary school rather than a home address. This second questionnaire included questions about level of completed schooling, current employment, marriage, and children, and the essay asked these former students to write about the important events that had occurred in their lives since 1996. They were also asked to indicate whether they wanted to continue with the research project by participating in a focus- group discussion the following year—2001—when I would be in Tanza- nia again. All of the 125 people who returned the questionnaire agreed to continue with the longitudinal study, so the 82 young women and men who currently lived in the Kilimanjaro Region were invited to attend one of four focus groups during June 2–10, 2001. A total of 20 people attended these four sessions, each of which lasted 11/2 –21/2 hours. The topics for discussion came from the essays written the previous year, which included the reasons for limited employment opportunities for secondary school graduates, the impact of HIV/AIDS on education, and English as the medium of instruction in the Tanzanian educational system. The questions discussed during the focus groups varied, but the following five were covered at all the session: (a) What benefits, if any, have you gotten from completing secondary school? (b) Which language would you have preferred for your secondary school studies, English or Swahili? (c) What is the meaning of the phrase “I am at home and have to work,” which appeared in many of the essays written last year? (c) What are young people doing about their sexual relationships given the current problem of AIDS? and (e) In what ways is life better today when compared to 1996 and in what ways is life worse? These multiple methods—participant observation, interviews, focus- group discussions, and survey research—help capture the multifaceted processes and relationships that affect language and development in contemporary Tanzania. EDUCATION IN THE KILIMANJARO REGION Statistical Portrait The Kilimanjaro Region is considered by many to be in the vanguard of development in Tanzania. It has very high primary school enrollment POSTCOLONIALITY AND ENGLISH 381 rates compared with the rest of the country, and it has the largest number of public and private secondary schools of any region in Tanzania (MOEC, 1996). The strong support for schooling in Kilimanjaro began over 100 years ago, when Chagga chiefs on the mountain vied with each other for missionaries who would set up schools, churches, and dispensaries in their communities (Bennett, 1964; Rogers, 1972). With the introduction of coffee as a cash crop in the late 19th century, many Chagga communities had money to invest in the building of roads and clinics. Education, however, received the bulk of these new funds: By far the most important cash investment the Chagga made in the new ways was in paying school fees for their children. The demands for education on Kilimanjaro grew from early mission times and a generation later became unremitting. (Moore, 1986, p. 129) The current education statistics for Kilimanjaro look good relative to the other regions in the country, but schooling has been greatly affected by the precipitous drop in the export price of Kilimanjaro coffee in global commodity markets. From the time this study began in 1996 to the time of writing, the price that farmers receive for their crop fell by 50% (Maarifa Ni Ufunguo, 2001; Oxfam International, 2001), and fees at private secondary schools more than doubled (Vavrus, 2001). As one farmer in Kilimanjaro put it, What has happened to the price of coffee is a disaster. Years back, when coffee prices were good, we could afford to send our children to school. Now we are taking our children out of school because we cannot afford the fees. (Oxfam International, 2001, n.p.) Similar sentiments were expressed to me by parents living near Njema Secondary School who participated in eight focus groups held in June 2001. Not only had the drop in coffee prices affected their ability to pay for schooling, but the costs of fertilizer and pesticides to care for their coffee trees had also risen dramatically in recent years (Maarifa Ni Ufunguo, 2001). In short, many families are finding it more difficult to send their children to school, yet this has only heightened their desire for their children to learn English because of the promise of advance- ment the language holds. Njema Secondary School: English and Swahili in School Life The sign on the door of the English Department at Njema Secondary School read “Speak English Only,” and Mr. Mwenge, the most senior teacher at the school in 1996, used only English with students who came 382 TESOL QUARTERLY to speak with him. He was a member of the small cadre of young men who had attended postprimary school (Standards 5–10) during the British colonial period in Tanzania. He went on to study in the United Kingdom in the late 1950s and eventually received a bachelor’s degree in English. Although Mr. Mwenge had many complaints about the harsh colonial school system, he had greater disdain for the current educa- tional system, in which teachers and students do not take schooling seriously. Mr. Mwenge, like most of the teachers I interviewed, laid the blame for this situation on the poor economic conditions in Tanzania since the mid-1980s: The economy of the country plays a very big role in helping the administra- tion of the school and the other developments, you know, of the academic institutions of the country. And if the teaching materials are not there, if there are no books and the buildings begin to decay, all of these things contribute to the indiscipline of the students. The economy began to run badly in this country. In those days, the economy wasn’t bad. Now we feel economically that we are very poor, and we cannot afford to make our institutions look attractive in such a way as to attract students. We cannot make the students believe that whatever they are learning is good for their lives. (interview, November 7, 1996) Mr. Mwenge’s Form 4 English classes were the only ones at the lower- secondary level (Forms 1–4) in which I never heard Swahili in use, except in classes taught by visiting British or U.S. teachers who did not know Swahili. In many classrooms, especially in bookkeeping and science classes for Forms 1 and 2, teachers used Swahili to clarify terminology and explain concepts, and students used it when asking questions of their teachers and classmates. In several classes at Njema and at other secondary schools I visited, Swahili, rather than English, was the necessary medium of instruction because the students or teacher— or both—did not have the requisite proficiency in English. The heavy reliance on Swahili during the first 2 years of secondary school suggests that teachers are well aware of the benefits of gradually introducing English as the medium of instruction, which is a position consistent with the recent research on bilingualism by Skutnabb-Kangas (2000a, 2000b). Mr. Mwenge, however, was completely fluent in English and felt duty- bound to uphold the official English-only language policy for the benefit of his students, who would soon be taking the national Form 4 examina- tion in English. If Mr. Mwenge heard students whispering to each other in Swahili, he would shout at them, “Use English only!” He was also one of the minority of teachers at the school who had his students work in small groups, and he insisted that they discuss the reading passages in English to give them a chance to improve their oral language skills. Miss Mosha, a young English teacher at Njema Secondary School, POSTCOLONIALITY AND ENGLISH 383 provides a far more typical picture of teachers’ use of English and Swahili in school. Although Miss Mosha greeted Mr. Mwenge and me in English whenever we were in the English department office, she and I always exchanged greetings in Swahili when we met off the school grounds and when we discussed course content in the office. Miss Mosha expected her Form 3 students to speak with her in English on campus, but they would frequently be conversing in Swahili when I would walk past her class- room. Miss Mosha did not seem comfortable talking with me in English, and she used a lecture format in the classroom that left little time for students to speak in English among themselves or with her. Instead, English lessons consisted primarily of question-and-answer sessions about the class readers or presentations of grammar topics from the national curriculum, as exemplified in the following vignette: Miss Mosha and I arrive for her third-period class. She asks one of the boys to erase the board even though one of the girls is still writing down notes from the previous class. Two other girls bring in a desk for themselves from the classroom next door, while a boy goes to get a chair for me because there are no extra ones in this class of 36 students. Miss Mosha begins writing ENGLISH/Continuous Aspect (Progressive Aspect) on the board as a few more boys walk in. She then writes He, She, It Examples and asks for sentences from the students. A girl gives an example and then a boy gives one. “More examples?” asks Miss Mosha. Another boy says, “He is playing football,” but Miss Mosha doesn’t hear him properly so he repeats the sentence. “Speak English,” she says to him and then asks the students to come up with examples using we, you, and they. After a few examples with plural subjects, Miss Mosha asks, “Any problems so far?” The students respond in unison, “No.” Twenty minutes into the lesson, Miss Mosha erases part of the board and writes on it Past Continuous Tense. She then says to the class, “Yes, let’s go on with another tense. It is past continuous tense. I can see you writing. You must be sharp.” Miss Mosha provides a few example sentences: “She was eating food. He was playing football . . . . Can you add more examples as far as second person plural, singular? James?” James, one of the best students in Form 3, responds to her question about the second person with “They were going to church.” Miss Mosha indicates that this is correct and then calls on several other students. After a few more examples from students, Miss Mosha reads a definition of the past continuous tense from her notes and gives an example of something that was happening during the night. She then explains in Swahili the use of the past continuous and asks the girls in class whether they have any problems. The girls remain silent, but Miss Mosha replies with “no problems” and tells the students they have 6 minutes to complete the seven fill-in-the-blank exercises she is going to write on the board. After writing the exercises, Miss Mosha walks up and down the rows of students and looks at their answers. She slaps the back of one male student who has made a mistake and tries to pull the ear of another, but he puts his 384 TESOL QUARTERLY hand over his ear to guard it. Miss Mosha finally dislodges his hand and pulls his ear, and then she takes another boy’s notebook, asks, “You can say ‘They was’?”, and then pulls his ear, too, because of his mistake. She asks another boy in Swahili who taught him English because he wrote “They will be eating” to complete a sentence that required the past continuous. The pattern of checking notebooks and pulling boys’ ears continues until the bell rings. Miss Mosha spends a few minutes at the end of class looking at the girls’ notebooks and talking to them in Swahili about their mistakes rather than using corporal punishment with them. (participant observation, February 29, 1996) When I returned to Njema in 2001, I learned that both Mr. Mwenge and Miss Mosha had left the school, the former retiring after many years of service and the latter getting married to someone who lived far from the school. I also learned in the focus-group discussions with former Njema students that they greatly respected Miss Mosha’s proficiency in English. To my surprise, the students said that Miss Mosha had instilled in them a love of English and served as a model of an educated Tanzanian woman. She knew English well, they told me, because she expected students to greet her in English and she was thorough in grading their exercise notebooks. They also reminded me that she had spent a lot of time in Kenya, a country that many people in Kilimanjaro look to as the model for educational language policy because English is used more extensively there. These former students also hinted at the rumors I had heard in 1996 that Miss Mosha had had a Kenyan boyfriend, which some of the female students found desirable because it opened up opportunities for international travel. These former students’ comments about English and educated women helped me understand my problem of associating the content of Miss Mosha’s lessons with the identity ascribed to her as a person who knows English. Moreover, Miss Mosha’s connection to Kenya was significant to her students in ways I had not appreciated because it indicated that she knew English and was building the kind of “relationship to the world” and “possibilities for the future” (Norton, 1997, p. 410) valued by these secondary school graduates. As Stambach (1998) writes about the teaching of home economics in Tanzania, “the influence of schooling lies in what the school signifies locally, not in its literal content. Schooling constitutes and provides an institutional forum through which persons . . . might operate to shape and define their worlds” (p. 188). In addition, Markee (1993) notes in his discussion of another former British colony, Sudan, that the adoption of English as the official language in the Christian Southern Region “provides an official counter- weight to Arabic” (p. 350) spoken by Muslims in the North, even though most southerners use a variety of Arabic rather than English for wider communication. In a similar way, the situation at Njema Secondary POSTCOLONIALITY AND ENGLISH 385 School reveals the important symbolic dimensions of language policy because knowing English did not necessarily mean speaking it like someone who had studied in the United Kingdom, such as Mr. Mwenge. Moreover, the designation of English as the official language in Tanza- nian secondary schools may be inconsistent with research on bilingual- ism and cognitive development, but it reflects the sociopolitical context, in which English signifies an orientation to the future for individuals in a transnational world. Teachers’ Perspectives on Education The contrast between Mr. Mwenge and Miss Mosha extended beyond their proficiency in English and their teaching styles; it also included their educational philosophies, which represented a shift from the child development model introduced by progressive teacher educators toward the end of the colonial period when Mr. Mwenge was in school to the human capital model emphasizing education for employment that became popular during Miss Mosha’s education. Mr. Mwenge was clear in his conviction that teacher education was a lengthy process that should only be pursued by those whose calling it is to teach because teachers’ primary responsibility should be to encourage individual development: And I believe the training of teachers today does not emphasize the need to take particular care, to become child centered. I think you understand what I mean. If a teacher, a trained teacher—teaching is an honorable profes- sion—knew that he was obliged to teach his child [student] good manners and make sure he is growing properly spiritually, physically, and mentally, all these things combined . . . I believe this would go a long way to minimize our discipline problems. I remember during our course in teaching in this country much attention was given to child development. Teaching meant to develop a child to be a man. That was the theme of education we had in those days. (interview, November 7, 1996) Several of the younger teachers at Njema explained to me that they had not chosen to become teachers but had had no other options available to them when they completed Form 6. Such was the case with Miss Mosha: She had wanted to study law but did not have a sponsor to pay her fees, so she chose the shorter and less expensive option of a diploma course in teaching. When I asked her about the qualities of a good teacher, Miss Mosha explained (in Swahili except where italicized) that it had to do with being well prepared: “She/he should have a scheme of work, a lesson plan, and especially a lesson notice [for the students]. These are the three things that make a good teacher.” We then talked about the 386 TESOL QUARTERLY reasons parents sent their children to school these days, and Miss Mosha brought up a topic that I would hear in many interviews with parents, namely, the idea that schooling kept children from becoming a burden on their parents: “They [parents] only send their children to school so that later they will have a better life. They don’t want them to bother them like a child who hasn’t been to school and who is a burden” (interview, April 15, 1996). This idea is quite different from the notion that education provides spiritual, physical, and mental development, as Mr. Mwenge described it. However, the emphasis on the instrumental benefits of schooling is understandable in the context of postcoloniality, where economic difficulties shape people’s perceptions about the benefits of education. Students’ Lives After Graduation The belief in English leading to individual and societal development was consistently expressed in my research on secondary school students’ lives after graduation, but this view was more complicated than the optimistic theory of human capital development. It was also more complex than the critical theories of language policy (e.g., Phillipson, 1992; Skutnabb-Kangas, 1981, 2000a) on which I had relied to justify my opposition to the use of English as the medium of instruction in Tanzanian schools. The focus-group discussions with my former students helped me appreciate the ambiguous role of language in development for multilingual societies and for multilingual individuals whose futures are intimately connected to English. The subtle complexity of language planning was evident during focus- group discussions about the questionable benefits of secondary school- ing that I perceived and the advantages that the students thought would accrue to them in the years to come because of their knowledge of English. Although they generally believed that knowing English created numerous possibilities the world over, the students were also well aware of the limitations for young people like themselves living in the Third World. The students’ essays from 1996 showed that most of them hoped to still be in school in 2000 or to be employed in the nonagricultural sector of the economy. However, the follow-up survey conducted 4 years later revealed that less than half of them were still students or were engaged in steady employment. This situation of completing secondary school but finding few postsecondary educational or economic opportu- nities may explain why only 13% of the respondents said they were more satisfied with their lives in 2000 than they had been 4 years earlier (Vavrus, 2001). They recognized their good fortune in completing secondary school in a country where less than 15% of the population POSTCOLONIALITY AND ENGLISH 387 receives a postprimary education (World Bank, 1999), but this educa- tional experience neither satisfied their educational goals nor created opportunities for steady employment. Given these findings from the survey, I was eager to talk with the students about the reasons for their dissatisfaction with life after secondary school. The focus groups in the summer of 2001 provided an opportunity to discuss the questionnaire and essay components of the 2000 follow-up study. One of the most striking commonalities among the students who participated in the focus-group discussions was their overwhelming preference for secondary schooling over some other form of postprimary education. In response to a question about whether they had received any benefits from secondary school or whether they now wished they had chosen to study at another kind of school, such as a computer school or a vocational training program, only one young woman said that she would have preferred a tailoring school rather than secondary schooling because she would have found employment more easily after graduation. Even though most of the young women in the focus groups were unemployed, almost all of them insisted that they had received one very important benefit from secondary schooling that they would not have otherwise: learning English. The young women and men—except for the few who were still in school—admitted that they were not using English very much then, but they saw English as essential to connecting with the world beyond Tanzania now and in the future because it is an “interna- tional language,” as they said repeatedly. The following comments (in Swahili except where italicized) illustrate these sentiments: Another advantage of knowing English is that if you get friends from another country you can communicate with them. (young woman, Focus Group 1, June 3, 2001) If you go to another country, you will discover that the language used to communicate with others is English. (young man, Focus Group 3, June 9, 2001) If you know English, you can use it for communication with people other than Tanzanians. (young man, Focus Group 3, June 9, 2001) Swahili is not an international language. It’s a language that is spoken a lot in East Africa . . . but it’s only known here in East Africa. And it’s not everyone in these countries who knows Swahili well. There are differences in the Swahili of Kenya, Uganda, Burundi, and Zaire [Democratic Republic of Congo]. If we use Swahili, we will be like an island. (young man, Focus Group 4, June 10, 2001) The focus-group discussions became quite animated at times, espe- cially when I challenged one group on the idea that English is an 388 TESOL QUARTERLY international language because many people in the Third World do not know it. Two of the participants responded strongly by saying that Tanzanians needed to learn English to communicate with other Africans and not just with Europeans and Americans. One young man admitted that it was the colonial legacy of English that made some people oppose its use, and he explained that there was growing opposition to English among some groups of students at the national university in Dar es Salaam. However, he was very concerned about the consequences for transnational communication in Africa if Tanzanians do not know English: Last year, during the Uhuru [freedom] Torch celebration, there were a lot of foreigners there along with [Tanzanian] university students. You know, many university students are poor in English because there is no one there like Mr. [one of the English teachers from Njema Secondary School] to make the students speak in English because they are free there. They are fearful to speak in English, but this is sad. There were students there from other countries like Kenya and South Africa who were surprised that our university students don’t know English well. There are Form 6 students who know English better than they [university students] do. (Focus Group 3, June 9, 2001) A young woman in the same focus group then added her pragmatic assessment of the situation: “Because Africa depends on Europe, both of these languages [English and Swahili] are important for us to know. Also, at institutes and schools, teachers should give students advice about knowing English well and Swahili well.” I then asked her, “But whose language is English?” She gave this question some thought and replied diplomatically to my query: “It is an international language.” She explained that the status associated with knowing English is not because it is the language of the United States but because it is a language that invites respect: “When Africans see someone speaking in English, they are very impressed and they respect them. Yes, even if they are not well educated but only know this language, they are respected” (Focus Group 3, June 9, 2001). The issues of respect and bilingualism were central to this young woman’s identity because of her imagined future as a respected Tanzanian woman who knows English well enough to study overseas but who still feels strongly about the importance of Swahili for intranational communication. The significance of English as a language of wider communication was apparent when participants discussed how English would provide them with the means to participate in the international community in Africa and beyond. Several people mentioned traveling to Uganda or Kenya and using English instead of Swahili, and others talked about people they knew who had found sponsors to support their studies in Europe or the United States. A few of these young people mentioned specifically POSTCOLONIALITY AND ENGLISH 389 that they, too, wanted to study abroad, but most discussed the need to know English as a way to benefit from the international development and tourist industries closer to home. Tourism is a popular topic of conversation in northern Tanzania because many English-speaking visi- tors come to climb Mount Kilimanjaro and go on a safari at the nearby Ngorongoro Crater or Serengeti National Park. The sentiments of one insightful Form 6 graduate expressed the students’ general feelings about the relationship between language and societal development through tourism: Because our economy is small and our strength as a nation is small, we can’t make Swahili be an international language . . . . In other sectors, like tourism, Tanzania is a country that has an abundance of traditional things that haven’t yet been destroyed when compared to all other countries in the world. However, because of the language problem, the tourists who come here aren’t shown these things or the proper welcome, but how can you communi- cate with them? You can’t. They don’t know Swahili and you don’t know English or German or French. If you compare this to a country like Switzerland, it’s a small country but those people are rich in terms of languages. You might find someone there who knows eight languages, so all the guests who go there can communicate with them [the Swiss] well and are made to feel welcome. Tanzanians are hospitable, but the problem is language. (Focus Group 4, June 10, 2001) The strong feelings expressed by the focus-group participants about Tanzanians learning to communicate with tourists may help explain why the students overwhelmingly believed that English should be made the medium of instruction throughout the entire education system, from preprimary school to the university level. Some talked about a recent study they had heard about showing that Tanzanian students did poorly on their national exams because of their low proficiency in English. Government sources appear to support this claim: A recent statistical report from the Ministry of Education and Culture (1999) shows a continuation of the pattern in which 70–79% of the students taking the national Form 4 examination received a Division 4 (lowest division) or failed completely. The reason for these disappointing results, according to the Executive Secretary of the National Swahili Council in Tanzania, was “students’ low level of understanding of the English language resulting from the weak foundations of the subject in primary schools” (Raphael, 2001, p. 1). These former students were well aware of the barrier to learning that English poses at the secondary level, but their solution was to intensify the use of English rather than abandon it. They felt the problem lay primarily in the poor foundation that students have in the language when they begin Form 1 because most primary school teachers do not 390 TESOL QUARTERLY know English very well. My proposal to use Swahili as the medium of instruction throughout the education system but offer English as a subject taught by qualified bilingual teachers was roundly rejected. These young people were unconvinced by my example of German students who are taught in German but know English well even though they study it only as a subject. The difference, according to one Form 6 graduate, has its roots in the economic conditions in Tanzania that make it difficult to get the books in Swahili and English necessary to do a good job of teaching English as a subject only: It’s fine [to study English only as a subject] in countries . . . like Germany and other European countries, but their foundation from the beginning of their studies is good. They write their books in their own language from the beginning, and English is taught as a subject. The books we have are in English, but the language we use for everything is Swahili. For others in Tanzania, for example, they use their mother tongue language although they also know Swahili. So if we could do this [bilingual teaching] from the beginning, there wouldn’t be a problem. The problem here is a result of our poverty. Where will we get the money to change these books, to change computers [laughter]? This is where our problem lies. Of course, it is good to be taught in a language you know. You will understand well and succeed in your studies. (Focus Group 4, June 10, 2001) These comments and the previous ones suggest that young people support an English-only approach to education because they do not feel the country has the resources to implement a Swahili-medium curricu- lum at the secondary and tertiary levels. If such resources were available through governmental and nongovernmental channels, then students would be likely to accept a bilingual approach to education rather than the oppositional framework of using English or Swahili that has marked educational language policy in Tanzania from the colonial era to the present. However, this study also indicates that secondary school gradu- ates want to capitalize on the social and economic benefits that may accrue to them by knowing English. In general, these young people appreciate the benefits of bilingualism for individual and societal devel- opment because it would help them establish a solid academic founda- tion in Swahili and transnational communication skills in English. IMPLICATIONS FOR LANGUAGE SPECIALISTS This article has explored some of the ways that sentiments about the economic situation in Tanzania are reflected in people’s views about the educational language policy in the country. I have argued that the current condition of postcoloniality is marked by a decline in income POSTCOLONIALITY AND ENGLISH 391 and a reduction in educational options for many families as a result of neoliberal development policies that increase the burden on individuals to pay for social services. Learning English has become an important form of symbolic capital that young people believe will help them improve their material conditions through employment in tourism or through higher education abroad. These optimistic possibilities for the future are tempered by young people’s recognition of the difficulty of achieving these goals when jobs are scarce, salaries are low, and language skills are often limited even after 4 years of using English as the medium of instruction. Despite these challenges, English remains inextricably linked to secondary school students’ identity as educated persons during uncertain economic times. The principal goals of this article were to illuminate the problems associated with language in development in Tanzania and to draw attention to the more general issue of English in postcoloniality. In particular, I sought to raise questions for critical applied linguists and critical development scholars about the widespread view that the use of English as the medium of instruction in postcolonial societies is synony- mous with imperialism and imposed models of development. Using my own pedagogical journey as an example, I have attempted to show how one can maintain a critical approach to the study of language in development by examining power/knowledge relations and advocating for social change without being dualistic in one’s views of educational language policy. My earlier notion of Swahili being the “good” language for education and English being the “bad” one has given way to a dialectical position that recognizes the contradictions between these two ideas and seeks a resolution without negating the continued tension in their interaction. The resolution in the case of educational language policy in Tanzania could take the form of an official dual-language program in the schools, but it would be naive to think that this solution would completely resolve linguistic tensions due to the inherent com- plexity of language in development. If language is defined in terms of communicative competence and development as a reduction in partici- pants’ levels of vulnerability over things they do not control (see Markee, this issue), then people’s support for a language will change over time as they seek competence in the language(s) that reduce their current sense of being vulnerable to material and nonmaterial forces. I contend that a critical theory approach to language in development should begin with a bottom-up analysis of the ambiguous and often contradictory linguistic strategies that individuals use to gain control over the economic and cultural dimensions of their lives, coupled with reflections by the researchers on the reasons why these strategies may be radically different from their own a priori assumptions about how to enhance the commu- nicative competence and reduce the vulnerability of others. 392 TESOL QUARTERLY The philosophical issues about language in development raised by this study lead to several practical lessons that may help ESL practitioners resolve professional dilemmas in similar teaching and research situations. Bilingual Education as a Middle Ground The first lesson is that bilingual education has the potential to create a middle ground between the exclusive use of English or another language as the medium of instruction. Despite the “belief in monolin- gual teaching” (Pennycook, 1994, p. 137) that has characterized much of the work in applied linguistics, research on bilingualism (Cummins & Swain, 1986; Skutnabb-Kangas, 1981, 2000a) suggests that teaching an L2 through interaction with the L1 yields many academic, cognitive, and cultural benefits. The extensive use of Swahili by Form 1 and 2 teachers in this study draws attention to the fact that bilingualism is the de facto educational language policy even when teachers are constrained by monolingual textbooks and teaching aids. Official support for the gradual introduction of the number of subjects taught in English at the secondary level—or a dual-language approach—would alleviate some of the conflict for teachers between engaging in pedagogical practices that foster the immediate cognitive development of the individual and following the language policy of the government, which may have long- term societal development as its goal. ESL practitioners may need to adopt a critical approach to teaching that “aims at transformation” (Pennycook, 1999b, p. 341) of language policies hindering the educa- tional success of their students in the present while still recognizing that these policies may be maintained because of the symbolic functions they perform for students, teachers, and government officials. Critical Engagement A second lesson that ESL practitioners might consider regards the different views of teachers and students about the spread of English in Outer Circle countries. My experience in the focus-group discussions illustrates the problem of embracing a critical approach that assumes agreement between teacher-researcher and participants on issues of language and power in the teaching of English. Instead of expecting my former students to share my critique of postcolonial language policies, I would have been wise to heed the advice of Pennycook (1999b) in his assessment of critical theory in TESOL: “A more plausible way forward is through a critical engagement with people’s wishes, desires, and histo- ries, that is, a way of thinking that pushes one constantly to question POSTCOLONIALITY AND ENGLISH 393 rather than to pontificate” (p. 343). One way to establish such engage- ment is through longitudinal research with a group of students or teachers that creates the possibility for the development of a meaningful relationship over time and an open exchange of ideas about the sociopolitical dimensions of language in development. Critical Practice and the Colonial Legacy of English A third lesson from this study concerns the tension for critical TESOL practitioners surrounding the colonial legacy of the language they teach. The economic and cultural deprivations of postcoloniality in many parts of the Third World can never be completely divorced from their colonial predecessors. Thomas (1994) cogently argues that as scholars and practitioners, we cannot “complacently situate ourselves in a postcolonial epoch. To do that, we would need to have transcended the cultural forms and procedures associated with colonial dominance” (p. 195). Compla- cency has seldom been a problem in the dynamic field of TESOL, but practitioners still need to struggle with the colonial dominance associ- ated with the teaching of English in some contexts and with the a priori opposition to its use in others. 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LOMPERIS Language Training Designs Germantown, Maryland, United States Businesses, government agencies, and nongovernmental organizations that sponsor language training programs normally have specific, real- world objectives for those programs, such as increased sales and improved performance in overseas training. Current methods for evaluating language training programs describe the participants and the programs, provide statistics on the number of trainees undergoing training and their pass-fail rates, and comment on the organization and effectiveness of training, but they fail to provide data on the sponsoring agencies’ objectives or on the cost-effectiveness of the program. This article adapts methods used in general workplace training to obtain the cost-benefit and return-on-investment information desired by agencies that fund language training programs, particularly in the field of English for occupational purposes. These evaluation methods attempt to describe the impacts—both tangible and intangible—of language training programs on the learners, the learners’ organizations, and the community. E nglish language programs, especially English for occupational pur- poses (EOP) programs, are often included as a component of development projects. As a consequence, when funders examine the evaluation of a particular development project, they ask to see evidence * This article is an expanded and revised version of a paper first presented at the Fifth International Conference on Language in Development, Phnom Penh, Cambodia, September 2001. Neither the data nor the format of Figures 1, 6, and 7 and Tables 2 and 3 in this article may be reproduced by any third party without written permission of the authors. TESOL QUARTERLY Vol. 36, No. 3, Autumn 2002 399 on the extent to which the language training has achieved its objectives and the extent to which meeting these objectives has improved the trainees’ job performance. Language program evaluations, however, frequently deal only with whether or not learners have acquired the language taught and sometimes with their attitudes toward the program, two aspects of success that are important but limited relative to the funders’ interests in the impact of the training on the learners, on their organizations, and even on society in general. Moreover, funders are interested in evidence that results have been achieved at the lowest price possible. Weir and Roberts (1994) speak of “cost-effectiveness as a criterion for judging merit” in order for “funding agencies . . . to determine whether their money is being well spent” (p. 13). In our experience, showing sponsors that a development program has been cost-effective requires evidence of improved on-the-job performance, not just language test scores. Program evaluation has traditionally entailed the use of multiple forms of evidence, so we begin by reviewing developments in evaluation, focusing on workplace training programs. We then demonstrate how methods of evaluation for workplace training can be adapted to EOP language training and present case studies illustrating these methods in use. The case studies, which come from both the public and private sectors and from nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), show that such evaluations attempt to describe all impacts—tangible and intan- gible—that a language training program has on the learners, the learners’ organizations, and the wider community. For example, one evaluation revealed that increased effectiveness for a company translated into higher profits, but increased effectiveness for one NGO equaled improved dissemination of human rights information. EVALUATION OF TRAINING AND EDUCATION PROGRAMS Workplace evaluation is situated within a tradition that Guba and Lincoln (1989) described as having passed through three generations and as entering a fourth in the late 1980s: (a) measurement, (b) description, (c) judgment, and (d) responsive evaluation. The first evaluations, in the last half of the 19th century, consisted largely of measurements of learners’ progress. After World War I, reporting measurements (i.e., learners’ test scores) was no longer sufficient; learners became the subject of evaluations, which described the process (e.g., the curriculum and the methodology) of learning in the hope of replicating successful programs or improving unsuccessful ones. Tyler 400 TESOL QUARTERLY (e.g., Smith & Tyler, 1942) epitomized this school. By the mid-1960s, evaluators (e.g., Scriven, 1973; Stake, 1975; Stufflebeam et al., 1971) often judged the process in the hope of guiding the funding agency’s decision to continue or cancel projects, or expand or contract them. By their nature, the measurement and descriptive phases were limited to quantitative research. With the arrival of the judgment phase, a conflict arose between evaluators who accepted qualitative evidence and those requiring quantitative evidence. Guba and Lincoln’s (1989) responsive evaluation methodology is one attempt to forge a bridge between the quantitative and qualitative schools; Mark, Henry, and Julnes’s (2000) method for evaluating projects and programs in not-for-profit organiza- tions is another such attempt. Workplace Evaluations While educational evaluators were gradually broadening the scope of evaluations and increasing the involvement of more stakeholders, work- place evaluators were moving in a different direction, focusing on the impact—especially the financial impact—of the programs they evalu- ated. Over a period of 40 years, Kirkpatrick (1996, 1998) developed a four-level system (i.e., reaction, learning, behavior, and results; see Table 1) that culminated in gathering evidence on whether training courses had had an impact on business practices. Although the four levels help systematize the process, in our view each has limitations in practice. None of the four levels includes the calculation of the program’s cost benefit (by means of a cost-benefit analysis [CBA]) or return on investment (ROI) for the company. Without CBA, it is impossible to determine whether the financial benefits of training outweigh its cost. Without knowing the ROI, evaluators cannot determine whether the benefits provided by one training program outweigh those provided by another such program or whether the benefits of training outweigh other uses of the same money (e.g., the purchase of new equipment). Some analysts have looked at quantifying employees’ contributions to the workplace (e.g., Bassi & Ahlstrand, 2000; Fitz-enz, 2000; Watson Wyatt Co., 2000), and others (Bee & Bee, 1994; Phillips, 1997b, 1999a, 1999b; Phillips, Jones, & Schmidt, 1999; Phillips & Pulliam, 1998; Phillips & Stone, 1999; Wade, 1994) have proposed formulas for calculating the CBA and ROI of training. An entire publishing industry has grown up around the practical applications of using these financial data for evaluation, including case studies using both hard economic data and estimates provided by knowledgeable corporate insiders (Hodges, 1999; Phillips, 1994, 1997a, 1998; Sugrue & Fuller, 1999). A growing number of how-to manuals have also appeared (Combs & Falletta, 2000; Fisher & DETERMINING COST BENEFIT, ROI, AND INTANGIBLE IMPACTS 401 TABLE 1 Criteria and Limitations of Kirkpatrick’s (1996, 1998) Four-Level Evaluation Model Level Criteria Limitations 1. Reaction Did learners enjoy the course? Learners may have rated the trainer and the Did they like the trainer? refreshments highly, but they may not have Were the facilities adequate? learned enough or may have learned inappropriate content. 2. Learning Did learners demonstrate Learners may have mastered the content, but mastery of the training content, (a) they may not apply what they have as indicated by test results? learned on the job, (b) the content may not have been based on course objectives, or (c) the objectives may not have been based on real needs. 3. Behavior Has job performance changed? Although this level begins to look at on-the- (E.g., do learners apply what job impact, it offers no proof, for example, they have learned in a technical that the improved technical reports make the report writing course to write company more effective or more efficient, improved reports?) leading to increased profits. 4. Results Has the organization benefited? Although this level discusses on-the-job (E.g., have sales improved since impact, it fails to provide sufficient financial a training course in which information to calculate the cost benefit or employees learned to improve return on investment. their marketing reports?) Ruffino, 1996; Ford, 1999; Lapidus, 2000; Mondschein, 1999; Novak, 2000; Parry, 1997; Rothwell, 2000; Russell, 1999; Sharpe, 1999; Watson, 1992). Van Adelsberg and Trolley (1999) promote going one step further and, in the words of their title, “running training like a business.” Evaluation of General Education, Social Science, and English Language Programs Evaluators in general education and social science, though rarely in English language teaching (ELT), have adopted similar methods for studying the impact of programs (Horn & Miron, 2000; Hough, n.d.). Culhane, Metraux, and Hadley (2002), for example, have compared the costs of providing services to the homeless in New York City to the costs of providing those services plus shelter. With few exceptions (Mitchell, 1992; Sarvi, Hamaimbo, & Kunda, 1992; Watson, Carlson, & Robinson, 1998; and see Lomperis, 1999; Lomperis & Martin, 2001; Martin, Craig, ElTatawy, Gordon, & Lomperis, 2001; Martin & ElTatawy, 1999a, 1999b, 402 TESOL QUARTERLY 2000a, 2000b), evaluations of language education and training programs have not attempted to measure their impact. Ten years ago, Alderson and Beretta (1992) noted the lack of attention to evaluation in the field of L2 learning: As a cursory glance at the publishers’ lists and the contents of the major journals reveals, the discipline of second language education evaluation has been afforded relatively little attention. By contrast, in general social and educational spheres, provision is routinely made for evaluation, and this emphasis is reflected in their respective literatures. (p. 1) Beretta (1992), in the same volume, continued in the same vein: To date, very few books have appeared on the evaluation of language teaching programs in general. This compares unfavorably with the general fields of educational evaluation, where dozens of titles appear annually in one publishing house (Sage). (p. 5) The appearance of a scattering of books dealing with the evaluation of English language programs (Brown, 1989; Lynch, 1996; Rea-Dickens & Germaine, 1992; Weir & Roberts, 1994) at or shortly after the time that Alderson and Beretta were writing filled that gap to some extent, but ELT is still underrepresented in the field of evaluation of training and education. And, with the possible exception of the discussion of insider participation in evaluations (Alderson & Scott, 1992; Weir, 1995), ELT evaluation remains rather traditional. The majority of the literature on ELT evaluation is derivative (as is the current article), applying tech- niques used in other fields. In addition, there still appears to be little awareness among ELT practitioners of the necessity—and benefits—of conducting and using evaluations: The two major works on ELT manage- ment (Impey & Underhill, 1994; White, Martin, Stimson, & Hodge, 1991), for example, scarcely mention program evaluation. Much of the discussion of program evaluation in ELT has come from work in development. In particular, eight papers in a collection from a conference on language and development discuss some part of the evaluation process (Coleman, 1995; Flew, 1995; Kafudji, North, & Finney, 1995; Martin & Balabanis, 1995; McGovern, 1995; Nangsari & Adlam, 1995; Smith, 1995; Weir, 1995). Development projects have also provided some of the more innovative studies in evaluation (Alderson & Scott, 1992; Coleman, 1992; Weir, 1995). A September 1998 conference sponsored by the British Department for International Development even purported to look at the impact of language projects (McKay & Treffgarne, n.d.). In addition, a number of papers on development projects, while not claiming to be evaluations, actually perform an DETERMINING COST BENEFIT, ROI, AND INTANGIBLE IMPACTS 403 evaluatory function, including the evaluation of the impact of at least a part of the project (cf. Williams, 1996). The businesses and development agencies that fund programs such as those for ELT are interested in intangible impact—for example, in- creased customer satisfaction, the publicity value of a good safety record, and increased exchange of information on human rights activities—as well as tangible (financial) impacts, such as higher productivity as measured by output per hour, lower defect rates as measured by decreasing amounts of returned merchandise, and decreased training costs as measured by faster learner progress through a training program. Most traditional evaluations, particularly those for ELT, stop well short of measuring financial outcomes. However, because an important aspect of ELT is its financial return, we discuss how this return can be calculated. Below, we explain how to calculate CBA and ROI, discuss the role of needs assessment, and show how to classify and analyze factors to evaluate. We then present two types of cases: minicases demonstrating the classification and analysis of factors, and in-depth cases demonstrat- ing the calculation of CBA and ROI. CALCULATING THE FINANCIAL RETURN OF ELT CBA, ROI, and Needs Assessment CBA is necessary to determine whether the financial benefits of training outweigh the costs of training. For example, has the ability of training program graduates to read instructions led to a decrease in the accident rate? Has this decrease improved profit margins by lowering insurance, legal, and health care costs? Has the decrease led to increased productivity because of decreased employee and equipment downtime and less employee absenteeism for due to illness? And do these financial benefits exceed the costs of providing training? The formula for calculating a CBA is total benefits ⫺ training costs ⫽ net benefit of program. For example, if a course for salespeople is deemed to have increased sales by $15,000 annually, and the training program cost $5,000, the net benefit to the company was $10,000 ($15,000 ⫺ $5,000 ⫽ $10,000). (See the section Methodology for Calculating CBA and ROI for ways of obtaining the data for these calculations.) Calculating ROI, the return on a company’s investment in a program, enables a comparison of the benefits of training with the benefits of other potential investments. For example, would producing a new sales brochure have been more profitable than investing in language training for salespeople? Would bringing trainers into a developing country have 404 TESOL QUARTERLY been more cost-effective than sending managers from that country to the United States for training? Had trainers been imported, would the trainees’ lack of contact with the native-speaking target population, market, and culture have had a measurable (negative) impact on results? The formula for calculating ROI is (net benefit/costs) ⫻ 100 ⫽ return on investment in program. For the training program discussed above, dividing the benefit ($10,000) by the cost ($5,000), and then multiplying by 100 to yield a percentage, equals 200, meaning that the training program brought the funders an ROI of 200%. This return can now be compared with the return on other potential uses of the same funds. For example, one might find that hiring additional salespeople brings an ROI of 150%, a less profitable use of the money, but that the ROI for a new advertising campaign is 300%, a more profitable use of the money. Evaluation, as shown in the cases we examine, must be set in the larger context of a key element of training: needs assessment. Needs assessment and evaluation are bookends of the teaching/training process. A sound EOP program begins with a needs assessment that identifies communica- tion problems related to job performance. Many of these areas for improvement represent tangible or intangible factors, which are evalu- ated at the end of a program to determine the cost benefit and ROI. The purpose is to discover whether the program has met its objectives and those of its many stakeholders, that is, whether the program has had an impact at immediate, organizational, and societal levels. The results guide decisions about renewing or expanding, canceling or downsizing, or changing the program. Thus, data on costs, benefits, and ROI are useful for measuring accountability to needs assessment (both initial, organizational needs assessment and subsequent, instructional needs assessment); these data are also key to evaluation and are even compel- ling in marketing the program to new clients. Classification and Analysis of Factors To gather appropriate data for determining cost benefit and ROI, the evaluator must first classify and analyze certain factors from the corpo- rate or organizational, not the educational, perspective, although the experienced EOP provider can glean language training information from the data. The process consists of three phases: (a) classification of industry sectors and subsectors, (b) analysis of impact factors related to language, and (c) analysis of cost factors. DETERMINING COST BENEFIT, ROI, AND INTANGIBLE IMPACTS 405 Classification of Industry Sectors and Subsectors The first step is to classify the industry sector of each case using a standard system that allows for comparisons. Of the existing classification systems, the broadest one is that of the United Nations, known as the International Standard Industrial Classification System (United Nations, International Labour Organization, 2000). It has four primary levels of subdivision. The highest level identifies 17 main industry categories. Examples of these categories follow, as correlated to the classification framework we use in this article: agriculture, hunting, and forestry (primary/extractive); manufacturing (secondary/manufacturing); hotels and restaurants (tertiary/service); education (government—civilian); public administration and defense (government—military); and health and social work (development). In North America, the North American Industry Classification System prevails. The European Union uses Nomen- clature général des activités économiques dans les communautés européennes (general industrial classification of economic activities within the Euro- pean communities), and Japan uses the Japanese Standard Industrial Classification. In this article, we use a simple classification framework that blends the three traditional major industry sectors (i.e., extractive, manufacturing, and service) with three others discovered in our fieldwork (government—civilian, government—military, and development-related endeavors undertaken by development organizations) (see Table 2). The next level of classification, the industry subsector, identifies the business activity. Examples are an oil exploration company (extractive), a paper mill (manufacturing), a restaurant (service), a county transporta- tion department (government—civilian), a peacekeeping mission (gov- ernment—military), and a literacy project (development organizations). The process continues with analysis of impact and cost factors, using a cluster of questions (see Figure 1) related to each set of factors. Question Clusters 1 and 2 address impact factors related to language; Clusters 3–6 address cost factors. Analysis of Impact Factors Related to Language Identify key impact categories, key impact factors, and language-related tasks. Key impact factors fall into four categories: administration, perform- ance, social responsibility, and human resources (see Table 3). The factors in each category represent common business concerns. By asking a client about initiatives to obtain certification of standards (administra- tion), increase productivity (performance), improve safety (social re- sponsibility), or make training more accessible (human resources), the EOP professional gathers important information about a company. 406 TESOL QUARTERLY TABLE 2 Industry Sectors Sector Subcategories and examplesa 1. Primary/extractive Low-end: agriculture, forestry, High-end: research/design of (from land or fishing, hydrology, mining, oil projects for agriculture, forestry, water) recovery fishing, hydrology, mining, oil recovery 2. Secondary/ Low-end: handicrafts, High-end: semiconductors, manufacturing garments, textiles, furniture biomedical equipment, automobiles, telecommunications 3. Tertiary/service Low-end: hotels, restaurants, High-end: banking, insurance, gas stations, retail stores medicine, law, commerce, real estate 4. Government— Low-end: basic utilities, basic High-end: military operations, civilian infrastructure, social services defense equipment 5. Government— Low-end: military support, High-end: energy research, mass military domestic and international transit planning, space exploration emergencies 6. United Nations, Domestic funding: social, International funding: social, health, private voluntary health, educational, educational, environmental organizations, environmental nongovernmental organizations, community-based organizations a Low to high end roughly follows a continuum from trades to professional functions. Subsequent questioning uncovers deeper layers of need that may lead to language training implications or to language-related tasks that may need to be addressed for any given impact factor. For example, in the administration category, an enterprise that wants International Organization for Standardization (ISO) certification must document its work processes. Employees with limitations in the target language may not be able to write well enough for this exacting task. Probing this issue may uncover the need for a course in technical writing. Similarly, in the performance category, a company facing productivity problems may discover that language-limited employees slow down processes because they take too long to accomplish routine tasks, such as writing reports, answering customer questions, or referring to a maintenance manual. In the social responsibility category, safety issues may arise because language-limited employees do not give appro- priate oral or written warnings. As for the human resources category, DETERMINING COST BENEFIT, ROI, AND INTANGIBLE IMPACTS 407 FIGURE 1 Question Clusters for Analysis of Factors Language-Related Impact Factors Cluster 1. Identify key impact categories, key impact factors, and language-related tasks. • What exactly is the problem? • What needs to be improved, increased, or reduced? Cluster 2. Distinguish language-related dimensions and nonlanguage factors. • How much of the problem is language related? What dimension can be isolated as directly language related? • What are nonlanguage factors or issues? Cost Factors Cluster 3. Determine standards for performance according to hard data and describe substandard performance relative to the established standards. • What is standard, good, expected job performance? • What is the current level of performance vis-à-vis standard performance or expectations? Cluster 4. Analyze issues and identify research needed to determine cost figures. • Are they tangible or intangible? • How is the problem being handled now? How is the need for improvement being handled? • Who and what are directly involved (by cost center and department)? At what cost? • Who and what are indirectly involved (internally and externally)? At what cost? • What data are needed? • What are sources for these data (for hard data; for estimates)? Cluster 5. Determine appropriate interventions and related costs. • What are possible, appropriate interventions? • What are the costs of these interventions, especially the costs of language training? • Which interventions are preferable, why, and for what time frames? Cluster 6. Analyze the results of language training. • What improvements (direct and indirect, tangible and intangible) occurred in key impact areas over given periods of time? • How was the change (improvement) measured? • What sources of data were used to measure change (hard data, estimates)? under personnel benefits, companies may experience problems with medical insurance claims from language-limited employees who cannot read and understand the benefits and restrictions in their policies. Or, under training, these employees may not be able to access information in training materials. Each language-related problem presents an opportunity to address the underlying impact factor through customized language training. If the language-related problems are solved, the company can, for ex- 408 TESOL QUARTERLY TABLE 3 Key Impact Factors to Assess in a Workforce of Non-Target-Language Speakers Key impact category Key impact factors Sample language-related tasks Administration • Management • Strategic planning • Financial planning, budget • Growth and development: new or expanded goods and services; number of facilities; geographic expansion or relocation • Operations • Certification of standards (e.g., ISO • Write documentation of work 9000 series) processes for ISO certification • Pursuit of excellence (e.g., Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award) Performance • Marketing • Sales • Negotiations • Productivity • Write correspondence, • Quality proposals, reports, studies, • Delivery articles, brochures • Maintenance and repair of • Repair equipment by equipment referring to a maintenance • Record keeping manual • Customer relations (internal and • Answer customers’ questions external, including coworker relations) • Cross-cultural skills • Teamwork • Internal power structures and dynamics (taken into account when communicating) • Meetings (i.e., leading and participating in) • Presentations • Conference attendance (e.g., international; speaking, asking and answering questions, networking, socializing) Social • Health, safety, and security • All factors: Recognize a responsibility • Environmental protection potentially dangerous • Regulatory practices and agency situation and give an requirements appropriate warning (verbal • Human rights practices, compliance, or written description/ and enforcement documentation) Continued on p. 410 DETERMINING COST BENEFIT, ROI, AND INTANGIBLE IMPACTS 409 TABLE 3 (continued) Key Impact Factors to Assess in a Workforce of Non-Target-Language Speakers Key impact category Key impact factors Sample language-related tasks Human • Personnel policies and benefits • Read and understand benefits resources • Employee satisfaction and restrictions of medical • Hiring insurance policy • Training, cross-training (including • Listen to and follow oral training abroad) instructions in on-the-job • Performance evaluations training; comprehend and • Leadership interact about content in • Greater responsibility, advancement, formal training presentations promotion (e.g., pay rates and raises, (e.g., in external courses salaries and increases) abroad) • Reassignments and retention • Terminations • Turnover • Right-sizing, career and outplacement support ample, obtain ISO certification, increase productivity, enhance safety, save time filing insurance claims, or make training more accessible. To identify a company’s key impact categories, key impact factors, and language-related tasks, the EOP professional would answer the questions in Question Cluster 1 (see Figure 1) and organize the answers by impact category and factor, listing language-related tasks as shown in Table 3 above. Distinguish language-related dimensions and nonlanguage factors. In CBA and ROI calculations, the effects ( i.e., benefits) of language training need to be isolated from effects (i.e., benefits) caused by other variables. For example, sales may have increased because of language that salespersons learned or because of the improved economy. The questions in Question Cluster 2 (see Figure 1) help the EOP professional analyze these language and nonlanguage factors. Analysis of Cost Factors The analysis of cost factors involves four clusters of questions related to four sets of factors. 410 TESOL QUARTERLY Determine standards for performance according to hard data or estimates, and describe substandard performance relative to the established standard. In calculating CBA and ROI, the basic question is how much cost a company is currently tolerating because of language-limited employees. For example, how much extra time does a certain task take? How many product defects are there? How much waste is involved? Question Cluster 3 (see Figure 1) deals with this area. The gap between standard performance and actual performance should be calculated according to hard data measures, such as baseline data for quantity, quality, time, and costs or information from an accepted external database or standard (Phillips, 1997b; see also Table 4 below). Sometimes using estimates from experts, trainees, supervisors, senior management, or the human resources department is more feasible (Phillips, 1997b; see also Table 4 below). Analyze issues and identify research needed to determine cost figures. Every key impact factor has associated costs. As mentioned, costs can be figured from hard data, from internal data or accepted external databases, or from expert, professional estimates (Phillips, 1997b). Cost factors can, in fact, be almost infinite, and the lists developed can rival any created by Munby (1981). Thus, for reasons of time and cost-effectiveness, the EOP professional should limit the analysis of cost factors to the most impor- tant and easily measurable impacts. The purpose of this analysis is to begin thinking about the cost dimension, not to derive the most exhaustive list possible. The fact that evaluations involving CBA and ROI have been used repeatedly in general workplace training tends to indicate that a balance between completeness of information and a manageable process is possible. Other data to collect relate to the tangible costs that result from the way a language-related problem is currently handled. Substandard performance involves human and nonhuman costs (i.e., the who and the what of the performance) that may be direct or indirect, and internal or external. Thus, the human factor—that is, a language-limited em- ployee—may contribute directly to a cost factor in loss of sales. An associated nonhuman cost may be the resulting waste of inventory. Furthermore, this reduction in sales may indirectly affect other employ- ees, whose hours may be cut back proportionally, or customers, who may be limited in where they can purchase the desired product (an intan- gible cost). Such indirect impacts are known as the downstream, ripple, or domino effect. Documenting all the dimensions of these costs requires gathering specific data and identifying the sources of these data, either in hard figures or in expert estimates (see Figure 1, Question Cluster 4). DETERMINING COST BENEFIT, ROI, AND INTANGIBLE IMPACTS 411 Determine appropriate interventions and related costs. After the costs of the current problem have been determined, the next step is to calculate the cost of an intervention to address that problem. Note that nonlanguage interventions may be necessary. For example, both immediately and for the long term, posting signs describing sales items may be a low-cost way to support employees who currently cannot fully answer questions about these items. The more substantive costs of language training need to be researched according to the needs and proficiency levels of the partici- pants and the features of the program, such as the number of cycles of training and, for each cycle, the number of weeks and the number of hours per week. Question Cluster 5 (see Figure 1) shows the related questions to ask. Analyze the results of language training. The final cost-related factor to analyze is the results of language training. This factor is the difference between pre- and posttraining performance in relation to impact cat- egory and impact factors, whether these changes are direct or indirect and tangible or intangible. As in analyzing performance (Question Cluster 3), the analysis should be based on hard data, such as changes in quantity, quality, time, and costs, on information from external data- bases, or on estimated data from experts, trainees, their supervisors, senior management, and the human resources department (Phillips, 1997b). Sources for these data will also have to be identified. Question Cluster 6 (see Figure 1) guides this analysis. Methodology for Calculating CBA and ROI CBA and ROI calculations draw on impact and cost factor data collected through the six question clusters. Phillips’ (1997b) 10 ways of calculating the cost benefit of training and the resulting ROI represent the most fully developed system. This section describes methods we and our colleagues (Lomperis, 1999; Lomperis & Martin, 2001; Martin & ElTatawy, 1999a, 1999b, 2000a, 2000b; Martin et al., 2001) have devel- oped to determine the direct and indirect, tangible and intangible impacts of language training in the public and private sectors and in NGOs in developing countries. To develop these methods, we have adapted and expanded corporate training evaluation models to fit the evaluation of language training programs. Here we collapse Phillips’ (1997b) 10 methods of collecting data for general workplace training into 6, giving examples for business English programs (Table 4). Methods 1–5 involve the use of hard data; Method 6 involves the use of estimates by outside workplace (not language) experts or by insiders from the funding organization. As noted above, such estimates have long 412 TESOL QUARTERLY TABLE 4 Methods for Calculating the ROI of Language Training Example from business English program Method Pretraining Posttraining 1. Change in quantity/ 10 insurance claims per day 11 insurance claims per day output processed by employee processed by employee 2. Change in quality 10 calls per day misdirected by 3 calls per day misdirected by operator operator 3. Change in time 30 hours’ writing time per 22 hours’ writing time per report needed to complete report per employee per employee task 4. Change in costs 8 accidents per month per 5 accidents per month per plant (past to present) plant 5. Change documented Average cost of replacing 5 Average cost of replacing 2 by external databases dissatisfied employees per yeara dissatisfied employees per year 6. Change estimated by Managers’ estimated time value for accident-related costs affecting experts, trainees, loss of working time, e.g., trainees’ supervisors, Employees gawking at accident senior management, Water cooler discussions human resources Equipment downtime department Completion of accident reports Employees’ time at dispensary after return to work Employees functioning at less than 100% efficiency after return to work Note. Methods 1–5 involve hard data; Method 6 involves the use of estimates. a Database: National Association of Managers; average turnover cost = $2,867. been used and accepted in general workplace training (Phillips, 1997b), and many of the case studies for workplace training cited above (Hodges, 1999; Phillips, 1994, 1997a, 1998; Sugrue & Fuller, 1999) make liberal use of estimated data. Extending the use of such estimates to workplace language training thus should not pose a significant problem. In fact, the projected cost-benefit data cited in the second full case study below were derived from estimates by the human resources manager of the head- quarter organization (the funding source) and the manager on-site at the trainees’ field location. Because the funder’s managers or employees provide the estimates, they have inherent credibility: Although this is an estimate, it is probably more accurate than data from external studies, calculations using internal records, or estimates from experts. And because it comes from supervisors who deal with the issue daily, DETERMINING COST BENEFIT, ROI, AND INTANGIBLE IMPACTS 413 it will usually have credibility with senior management. (Phillips, 1997b, p. 126) In fact, if judiciously used and acceptable to senior management, estimates can make CBA and ROI calculations less cumbersome. Esti- mates must come from the people who are most knowledgeable about workplace issues; estimates made by a language training provider would have little credibility. For the case studies in the next section, we use the following questions to identify cost figures for CBA and ROI calculations. The first set of client-related questions relates to Question Cluster 4 in Figure 1 above: 1. What are the costs • per person (or organization) for those directly involved? • for nonhuman factors directly affected? 2. What are the costs • per person for those indirectly involved? • for nonhuman factors indirectly affected? 3. What is the total cost? The questions below are used to identify training program–related costs. Question 1 comes from Question Cluster 5. The remaining questions expand on the analysis in Question Cluster 6 (see Figure 1). 1. What are the costs for a language training program in relation to the costs resulting from the problem? 2a. What are reasonable expectations for progress from the language training program, over given periods of time? 2b. What was actual progress over the given periods of time? 2c. How should the program or expectations be adjusted to address any difference between expected and actual progress? To complete the CBA and ROI calculations, the evaluator needs to subtract the direct and indirect costs of the language training program from its benefits. Direct costs include the trainer’s salary; materials development and production; stationery and supplies; training room rental and utilities; and transportation, food, and lodging for trainer and trainees. Indirect costs include lost productivity while trainees are attending the training program rather than working; the human re- sources costs of supervising trainers, trainees, and the training program; and the costs for conducting evaluation. Questions to ask are as follows: 1. Cost-benefit result: What are the savings or revenue realized from the language training program (i.e., the revenue lost due to the problem before the program minus the reduced revenue loss remaining after the program) minus the cost of the program? 414 TESOL QUARTERLY 2. ROI result: What is the net benefit expressed as a percentage (i.e., the net benefit divided by the cost of the program and multiplied by 100)? Is this value higher than the projected ROI for other possible uses of the same funds? CASES The four minicases presented here illustrate the classification and analysis of factors. We then demonstrate the calculation of CBA and ROI through two in-depth cases. Minicases in Cost/Impact Analysis The minicases, which are based on authentic data, illustrate how the system of analysis we have described would work in actual programs. The four cases have been selected to show a range of impact and cost factors. The first three represent a period when data were collected primarily for needs assessment purposes, not evaluation. No language training pro- gram took place, so no impact could be measured. However, the data are useful for identifying areas in which language training could be expected to achieve results. The fourth case involves anecdotal data, not complete financial information, collected as the first step in developing a complete impact analysis as described in this article. Though incomplete, the minicases illustrate the variety of data needed for CBA and ROI calculations. Here we present the process for pursuing such analyses, starting with needs assessment data. We correlate the data on needs with impact and cost factors and present them in terms of potential or actual results of language training, expressed as a measurement of change based on hard data or estimates, and we identify the sources for these data. Minicase 1: A Restaurant-Boutique in Turkey This restaurant-boutique is affiliated with the only English language newspaper in Turkey. It serves a high-end clientele of diplomats, journal- ists, and other expatriates who use English as a common language. The wait staff feel customer satisfaction would increase if they spoke better English. They can handle routine greetings, but they want to expand their skills to include small talk, especially with repeat customers. They have a hard time understanding the different accents of the customers’ English. They also need to be able to describe the ingredients in and the DETERMINING COST BENEFIT, ROI, AND INTANGIBLE IMPACTS 415 manner of preparation of dishes on the menu that represent local specialty cuisine. Interestingly enough, the newspaper offers descriptions of some of these dishes in its ads for the café, so creative and enterprising wait staff could refer to these while also marketing the newspaper. This establishment also includes a boutique, and the person in charge feels the same need for better English to improve customer relations and increase sales. Although she can handle routine, formulaic questions, she needs to be able to respond to more complex questions. Figure 2 shows the analysis of factors for this business. Minicase 2: A Paper and Pulp Mill in Egypt This paper and pulp mill is a public sector manufacturing company with an innovative method for using a raw material in processing pulp to paper: rice straw, which would otherwise be discarded. Training in the use of this rice straw waste is in increasing demand, particularly in Asia, where rice is widely cultivated and forest timber is becoming scarcer. Thus, this company needs English in many areas, but especially for training. When going abroad for training, mill staff need English to obtain knowledge and report back. Other staff need to discuss patents and technology in English. The company needs English language FIGURE 2 Minicase 1: Expected Results of Language Training Industry sector: Tertiary—service Business or organization: Restaurant-boutique Location: Ankara, Turkey Impact category Factor Measure of change Data source Performance Direct impact Tangible: Higher sales Increase in quantity Financial records Intangible: Better Improvement in Customer surveys, customer relations quality interviews Social responsibility Indirect impact Intangible: Improved Improvement in Observation, surveys, diplomacy and news quality news articles among satisfied customers Human resources Indirect impact Tangible: higher Increase in quantity Financial records employee income (salary, tips) 416 TESOL QUARTERLY training for internal staff, for example, so they can communicate with Swedish specialists who come to Egypt. Egyptian staff, in turn, need English to conduct transfer-of-technology training in areas such as the Philippines, where English serves as the common language of communi- cation. English is also needed locally for internal operations because it is the language of manuals, general reports, and specific reports on experiments in the mill laboratories. No Arabic materials about the technical part of paper-pulp technology and the paper-pulp industry are available. The mill buys equipment from Germany. Unlike the other manuals, the equipment repair manuals are written in German. When equipment breaks down, repair is delayed until someone who can read German is found. Productivity on either side of the broken-down machine stops (immediately, all processes following this machine and, eventually, all processes preceding this machine). A key consideration is thus training key employees in German or translating the manuals into Arabic, whichever (in the spirit of this article) proves more cost-effective. Figure 3 shows the analysis of factors for this business. Minicase 3: A Cruise Line in the Caribbean Each of this cruise ship’s 601 employees wears a name badge with a safety number referring to the set of instructions the employee is to give in the event of an emergency. The manager responsible for safety has estimated that 95% of the crew, mainly nonnative speakers of English, do not know their safety number instructions and could not deliver them in English, putting the cruise line at enormous risk of injury and loss of life as well as damage to the ship. After such disasters, the cruise line is at further risk of lawsuits that could range from $1.0 million to $1.5 million per victim and fines from regulatory agencies (e.g., the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board). Widespread negative publicity could also hurt business. Figure 4 shows the analysis of factors for this business. Minicase 4: Legal Rights NGOs in Egypt The main goals of the human rights organizations were to have staff learn English to disseminate information about the human rights situation in Egypt, to learn more about human rights by reading and by attending international conferences, and to speak to international representatives visiting Egypt. The English course concentrated on reading and writing about legal rights topics, preparing for attendance and participation at international conferences, and discussing or debat- ing human rights issues. An unplanned benefit was that representatives DETERMINING COST BENEFIT, ROI, AND INTANGIBLE IMPACTS 417 FIGURE 3 418 Minicase 2: Expected Results of Language Training Industry sector: Secondary—manufacturing; government—civilian Business or organization: Paper and pulp mill Location: Alexandria, Egypt Impact category Factor Measurement of change Data source Administration Indirect impact Intangible: greater growth and development of global Senior management estimates Annual reports business due to improved ability to collect data and knowledge and to discuss patents and technology Performance Direct impact Tangible: greater plant productivity, teamwork Increase in quantity, decrease Financial records, in task time observations Tangible: lower maintenance costs (repairs, depreciation) Decrease in costs Maintenance records due to less damage to equipment Intangible: Improved record keeping Improvement in quality All related records Indirect impact Intangible: higher customer satisfaction and retention of Improvement in quality, Customer surveys/interviews, customers due to on-time delivery of goods (no delays increase in quantity of customer lists, delivery records from not knowing how to repair equipment) customers, and decrease in late deliveries Performance/human resources Direct impact Higher job quality due to improved understanding of Improvement in quality Observations, performance internal training, of industry manuals and reports, and of evaluations maintenance manuals Human resources Direct impact Tangible: improved competence in conducting external Improvement in quality Evaluations from external training for potential new customers training Indirect impact Tangible: higher employee retention rate Increase in quantity Personnel records Tangible: increased sales from newly trained customers Increase in quantity Records for new sales TESOL QUARTERLY Intangible: higher employee satisfaction Improvement in quality Employee surveys/interviews FIGURE 4 Minicase 3: Expected Results of Language Training Industry sector: Tertiary—service Business or organization: Cruise line Location (ports of call): Bahamas, Jamaica, Mexico Measurement Impact category Factor of change Data source Performance/social responsibility Direct impact Tangible: improved Senior management Senior management safety estimate observation Tangible: savings Prevention of cost Company records resulting from increases improved safety Tangible: improved Improvement in Performance job quality leading to quality evaluations improved safety Social responsibility Indirect impact Intangible: Positive Comparison with Customer surveys and publicity value of good cruise line industry interviews safety record safety data of one NGO learned enough English to write a fund-raising brochure; the resulting donations freed the organization from its earlier depen- dence on foreign aid. Figure 5 shows the analysis of factors for this organization. Discussion Minicase 1 (the restaurant-boutique) shows a need for customer service English in a retail context. The calculation of CBA and ROI focuses on the expansion of employees’ communication ability as a way of increasing sales. In the second minicase (the paper mill), the firm needs to train employees in English so that it can participate in global business and so that employees can receive and give training. Another issue is whether to train employees in reading German or to translate equipment maintenance manuals into Arabic to minimize delays in repairs and delivery of goods. Minicase 3 (the cruise line) identifies serious safety consequences. The CBA and ROI figures show the overwhelming advantage to develop- ing the crew’s competence in safety language relative to bearing the costs DETERMINING COST BENEFIT, ROI, AND INTANGIBLE IMPACTS 419 FIGURE 5 Minicase 4: Results of Language Training Industry sector: Development organizations Business or organization: Legal rights NGOs Location: Egypt Measurement Impact category Factor of change Data source Social responsibility Direct impact Tangible: Improved Increase in quantity Financial records results from fund-raising Intangible: Improved Increase in quantity Records of rate of acceptance of participating NGOs trainees at human rights conferences Intangible: Wider Increase in quantity NGO records on data dissemination of distribution, information about calculation of the human rights in Egypt number of times representatives were quoted in the international press Indirect impact Intangible: Improved Improvement in Governmental and human rights quality NGO records situation? Intangible: Less Improvement in Governmental and political dissent quality NGO records resulting from human rights crisis? of potential lawsuits, death benefits, regulatory agency fines, and lost business due to negative publicity. Factors other than language, of course, play a large role in a disaster at sea. (Although a cruise liner does not represent a developing country context, its crew members come almost exclusively from developing countries.) Minicase 4 (a human rights group) shows significant increased donations through creation of an English language fund-raising brochure and a greatly increased Egyptian human rights presence on the world stage. As the minicases show, the type of data collected varies enormously depending on the needs analysis and the resulting course objectives. The one constant is that all data involve real- world impact, not language use per se, and are therefore expressed in terms of sponsor-desired out- 420 TESOL QUARTERLY comes, such as increased sales, higher productivity, improved safety, and better fund-raising. Improved language use helps attain the goals, but the goals themselves, not language use, are measured. Data for calculating CBA and ROI are difficult to gather and often incomplete. In fact, the more complete the data, the more expensive they are to collect, making calculation counterproductive. Even partial results, however, impress funders of language training programs by showing that their real-world objectives have been met. Full Cases With CBA and ROI Calculations As in the minicases, in the following two full cases we include classification of industry sectors, but we add the specific data needed for detailed calculation of CBA and ROI. Similar to the section on minicases, in which three cases described anticipated results based on needs assessment data and one case described final results, in this section the first full case describes benefits derived from actual results, whereas the second uses managers’ estimates of CBA and ROI for anticipated outcomes based on the original needs assessment. Full Case 1: A State Transportation Department A Chinese-speaking environmental planner took 10 hours to submit an acceptable technical report (4 hours to write the original and 6 hours to make revisions) that should have taken 2 hours over 2 weeks. His supervisor spent 5 extra hours editing the report. Thus, the total extra time spent on the task was 13 hours (8 by the environmental planner and 5 by his supervisor). Two other planners were delayed in writing their reports because they needed the information from the first planner. Furthermore, the rest of the department was held up because all reports had to be submitted at the same time to the external environmental agency for approval before construction could begin on a particular highway project. Thus, the project fell behind schedule. The calculations in Figure 6 show that, after 20 weeks of a technical writing course, the planner reduced the extra time taken by half, as did his supervisor. This saving exceeded the cost of the language program, with a cost benefit of more than $3,700 and an ROI of more than 500%. Much of the CBA and ROI is based on personnel costs. Salary or hourly wage information is hard to obtain, so for this case, salary data were estimates from Business & Legal Reports’ Employee Compensation in Maryland (Brady & Persson, 1999), which also contains national salary scales. After the positions of the planner and supervisor had been DETERMINING COST BENEFIT, ROI, AND INTANGIBLE IMPACTS 421 FIGURE 6 Full Case 1: CBA and ROI Calculation Industry sector: Government—civilian Business or organization: State transportation department, district (county) level Impact category: Performance Factor: Improved productivity in report writing Area Calculation Data source Report writing and editinga Pretraining Environmental 10 hr total writing time ⫺ 2 hr normal time ⫽ Daily time planner 8 hr excess time logs; 8 hr ⫻ $25.53 per hr = $204 per 2 weeks observation; Brady & Supervisor 5.5 hr total editing time ⫺ .5 hr normal time ⫽ Persson 5 hr excess time (1999) 5 hr ⫻ $27.09 per hr ⫽ $135 per 2 weeks Posttraining Environmental 4-hr reduction in writing time ⫻ $25.53 per hr ⫽ Daily time planner $102 savings per 2 weeks logs; observation Supervisor 2.5-hr reduction in editing/advising time ⫻ $27.09 per hr ⫽ $68 savings per 2 weeks Total savingsb $102 ⫹ $68 ⫽ $170 per 2-week period $170 ⫻ 26 2-week periods ⫽ $4,420 annually Training 2 10-week cycles ⫻ $350 per participant ⫽ $700 Contract between department and language training provider Cost benefit $4,420 ⫺ $700 ⫽ $3,720 ROI ($3,720/$700) ⫻ 100 ⫽ 531% a Time lost by other planners due to delays (not calculated here) could be estimated and calculated as the planner’s and the supervisor’s were. bBased on savings during the year following training. Some trainers calculate the savings on a 2-year basis (Phillips, 1997b), which greatly increases savings, but here we use the more conservative 12-month standard. identified on the transportation department’s organization chart (State of California, 1991), the editor at Business & Legal Reports reviewed numerous scales to determine job descriptions and correlated salary figures. These figures were then converted into hourly rates to use in calculating the CBA and ROI. 422 TESOL QUARTERLY Full Case 2: An Oil Exploration and Production Company In the second full case, estimates by the human resources manager and senior management played a key role. Both individuals provided data related to workover cost factors, and the human resources manager provided the details for the design, staffing, and anticipated costs of the language program and the expected benefits. Expatriate supervisors tried to tell their workover crews which valves to connect on the Christmas tree (an assemblage of valves, gauges, and chokes at the top of a well that control the oil flow). If the supervisors and crew members had been from the same background and had been trained on the same equipment, they would have been able to perform the task in 30 minutes. However, lack of familiarity and poor communi- cation extended this period by at least 2 hours per well per year (a very modest estimate, according to the managers) in a field of 250 wells, for a total of 500 hours per year. After a language training program, the managers estimated that, because of improved communication, 2 hours of downtime per year per well would be recovered in a field of 250 wells with 2 workovers per well per year. Calculations of the estimated savings are shown in Figure 7. Discussion The ROI for the training program in the second full case was less dramatic than in the first (147% vs. 531%), but the dollar amount of the cost benefit was larger ($71,400 vs. $3,700). In both cases, the language training provider could demonstrate that concrete, real-world objectives had been met. CONCLUSION This article has focused on demonstrating the financial impact of training to the satisfaction of funders. The methodology, however, is not limited to financial impacts: The full cases and minicases cited also uncovered evidence, for example, of improved job satisfaction. And, at a minimum, the improved work-related language skills increased the employees’ chances of retaining their jobs; a longer term study might also reveal that improved language skills had financial impacts for participants (e.g., higher pay, promotion) as well as for funders. Impact data are valuable beyond individual programs and end-of- program decisions. Program providers should compile data across indus- try sectors, across types of organizations, and by impact and cost factors. DETERMINING COST BENEFIT, ROI, AND INTANGIBLE IMPACTS 423 FIGURE 7 Full Case 2: CBA and ROI Calculation Industry Sector: Primary—extractive Business or Organization: Oil exploration and production Location: Russia (Siberia) Impact category: Performance Factor: Improved productivity in workover of oil well Area Calculation Data source Downtime due to language problems Pretraining 2 hr per well ⫻ 250 wells ⫽ 500 hr per year Field records of total downtime, estimates by acting director general of time related to language problems 12 barrels per hr ⫻ 500 hr ⫻ $10/barrel ⫽ $60,000 Corporate financial records $60,000 ⫻ 2 workover crews per year ⫽ $120,000 Time sheets Posttraining 0 Total savingsa $120,000 ⫺ 0 ⫽ $120,000 Training $23,744 (Phase 1) ⫹ $24,848 (Phase 2) ⫽ $48,592 Human resource manager’s estimates Cost benefit $120,000 ⫺ $48,592 ⫽ $71,408 ROI ($71,408/$48,592) ⫻ 100 ⫽ 147% a See Figure 6, Note b. The information is then available for use in marketing, when references to financially beneficial outcomes for similar programs can be compel- ling. Being able to explain and discuss impact factors with language training implications, and being aware of how training can solve a business problem, increases the EOP professional’s credibility and flexibility in the business world. Outcomes are based on a needs assessment that identifies critical training content, and relevant results for critical needs are, of course, what evaluation aims to show. If an evaluation is to show that a program 424 TESOL QUARTERLY has met these needs, a language training program must begin with a needs assessment that identifies impact factors—such as safety, produc- tivity, or customer relations—as areas to be improved. These factors are evaluated at the end of training. Such impact evaluations are, in effect, reverse needs assessments, determining to what extent the language training program has met the needs of the learners and their organiza- tions. Brown (1989) noted similarities between needs assessment and evaluation: Evaluation is defined in Richards et al. (1985) as “the systematic gathering of information for purposes of making decisions.” This definition is perhaps too broad for the purposes of this paper in that it could equally well be used to define needs analysis. However, it is worth considering the possibility that the difference between needs analysis and program evaluation may be more one of focus than of actual activities involved. (pp. 222–223) We would add that just as a needs assessment is a standard feature in designing a good language training program, an impact study could become a valuable tool for evaluating the success or failure of a language training program. We are not suggesting that every evaluation should include detailed CBA and ROI calculations. Indeed, because of the cost, Kirkpatrick (1998) does not advocate even Level 3 and 4 evaluations in all cases. Phillips (1997b) states that calculating ROI adds 3–5% to the cost of workplace training programs. Just as not all language training programs require the same high level of needs assessment and customization of materials, not all programs need the same degree of impact evaluation. However, evaluating the impact of language training programs by calculating CBA and ROI is a tool to use when needed, such as for large- scale, long-term projects and pilot programs. Small-scale, one-off pro- grams, in contrast, would almost certainly not call for a complete impact evaluation. Businesses that use these methods to evaluate other types of training might welcome similar evaluations for language training. Weir and Roberts (1994), quoted at the beginning of this article, note development projects’ demand for financial accountability. The methods presented in this article would enable evaluators to provide data to establish this accountability. At present, businesses and development agencies sometimes make decisions based on the perceived cost- effectiveness of a program; it would be preferable to have the tools to demonstrate the actual cost-effectiveness when needed. Although in this article we have limited our discussion to the use of CBA and ROI data for EOP training, the methods described might be used in other types of language training. Intensive English programs might, for example, compare the cost-effectiveness of their programs with that of competitors. Academic English programs might track the DETERMINING COST BENEFIT, ROI, AND INTANGIBLE IMPACTS 425 success rate of program graduates in their academic studies and com- pare the rate with that of students who studied in competing programs or who had no prior language training. The methodology used in the cases cited here could be extended to the evaluation of the teaching of languages other than English as well. THE AUTHORS William M. Martin is business English programs coordinator for the University of Pennsylvania’s English Language Programs and is a doctoral candidate in ELT evaluation at the University of Surrey Roehampton. He has been an EFL/ESP teacher, teacher trainer, and program manager in Ivory Coast, Ecuador, Somalia, Egypt, Thailand, and United Arab Emirates. Anne E. 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DETERMINING COST BENEFIT, ROI, AND INTANGIBLE IMPACTS 429 Language in Development in the United States: Supervising Adult ESOL Preservice Teachers in an Immigrant Community BETSY RYMES The University of Georgia Athens, Georgia, United States Community is more important than English to many of the families at Valley View and if I want to create English opportunities I can never do so at the expense of community members.—master’s student in a field-based ESOL methods class Literature on globalization and language teaching generally points to the potential of English to be simultaneously a colonizing threat to language and culture and a resource for economic opportunity and social change. This conflict translates into a dilemma for English language teachers and for professors who teach methods classes. This article discusses a teacher educator’s journey through these issues by documenting curricular innovation in an adult ESOL methods course for preservice teachers. In the course, preservice teachers engaged with the community by spending the majority of course time in the commu- nity of the language learners, that is, in the homes of a Spanish- speaking community of primarily Mexican immigrants in the southeast- ern United States. By taking part in the community of English language learners and by developing an appreciation for the Spanish language and for the customs and quality of life there, the preservice teachers attained the resources and knowledge to teach English from a critical perspective. The reflections of these novice teachers suggest that practice in the context within which language teaching effects develop- ment can provide preservice teachers some of the experience necessary to think through their role in this process. “ H ola. Buenas tardes. ¡Pasale, pasale!” Imagine hearing these phrases— and not understanding a word—as you cross the threshold into someone’s home to begin your first English teaching assignment. This is what preservice teachers in my Adult ESOL Methods course faced as they TESOL QUARTERLY Vol. 36, No. 3, Autumn 2002 431 embarked on teaching in Valley View, a community of predominantly Mexican immigrants, many of whom found work in the chicken-processing plants in a relatively affluent college town in the southeastern United States. Few of the preservice teachers knew what these friendly words of greeting and welcome meant, and, although they were there to practice teaching English, many of them were shocked to realize that their students spoke exclusively Spanish. They would soon find that teaching English without using the L1 of their students would be nearly impos- sible—and certainly uncomfortable and depersonalizing. They would also find that, although they were speakers of the dominant language in the United States, they felt like outsiders in this teaching situation. Besides facing the challenge of the use of Spanish in the community, many were intimidated by the overall experience of being outsiders both linguistically and socially—of bringing themselves into homes of strang- ers in a community about which they knew nothing. They were coming face-to-face with the context and contradictions of teaching ESL. As these preservice teachers would soon discover, despite the vocal population who would like to claim English as the only language of the United States, in increasing numbers of communities, like Valley View, English seems barely relevant. From California, to Wisconsin, to Georgia, these communities are growing much more quickly than those in which only English is spoken (National Center for Educational Statistics, 1998). Nevertheless, English is the language of power in the United States and a tool of development that provides access to power outside the United States (Cooke, 1999). People in the United States who do not speak English are inevitably more vulnerable and more subject to forces they cannot control. Teaching English can be a means of empowering Hispanic communities like Valley View in the United States. But as the first experiences of these preservice teachers suggest, the adult members of Valley View already had a language—Spanish—that served them well in most of their daily interactions, both in the home and the workplace, and provided families with a secure sense of community. The situation in Valley View exposes a disturbing contradiction in the role of the English language. While granting power in one realm, it has the potential to annihilate language diversity and communities that function in languages other than English (Corson, 2001). English provides both “threat and opportunity” (Cooke, 1999, p. 417), which translates into a dilemma for English language teachers. Some analysts have even suggested that English not be taught at all (Rogers, 1982). How, after all, can language teachers recognize Hispanic communities as important and powerful elements of society when the primary way these teachers seek to give the communities power is to teach them English— a potential threat to their students’ native language and speech community? I have felt this underlying contradiction acutely as a professor respon- 432 TESOL QUARTERLY sible for teaching methods courses to future ESL teachers. As one who respects linguistic diversity but is also responsible for spreading compe- tence in English, I have wrestled with how to teach future English teachers while emphasizing the human and political complexities that prevent English from seeming important to many English language students. Successful community-based language programs are typically bilingual programs, conducted by community members who are bilin- gual (cf. Auerbach, 1996; Freire, 1970; Rivera, 1999). However, most of the preservice teachers in my classes neither come from the community of their future English language students nor are bilingual in the language of those students. Yet these future teachers are sincere in their desire to become English teachers, and they are an important resource for those who would like to learn. The paradox is, then, how to profess methods of teaching English while honoring the community norms and interests that may not include the learning of English. In this narrative, I discuss my own journey (as a teacher educator) through these issues by documenting a curricular innovation in an adult ESOL methods course for preservice teachers. The innovation was to ensure that preservice teachers would engage with the community of the language learners by spending the majority of the course time there, that is, in the homes of a Spanish-speaking community of primarily Mexican immigrants in northeast Georgia. After summarizing some trends within the field that initially made such a course seem relevant and possible, I describe how, by taking part in the community of English language learners and developing an appreciation for the Spanish language and the customs and quality of life within the Valley View community, the preservice teachers in my course attained some of the resources and knowledge to teach English and help determine whether English would take the form of threat or opportunity. I also discuss some of the problems in the implementation and sustainability of the course. SECOND LANGUAGE SOCIALIZATION, GLOBALIZATION, AND LANGUAGE IN DEVELOPMENT The curricular innovation in my course—holding an adult ESL methods class in the homes of language learners—might not have been considered valid during a different swing of the theoretical pendulum. But several recent trains of thought within the language teaching profession encouraged my decision to hold a course within the relevant cultural context of language learning. First, because sociocultural factors affecting L2 education are portrayed as increasingly salient theoretically (Toohey, 1996; Willett, 1995), a practical application that takes these factors into account seemed a likely and viable next step. If teacher LANGUAGE IN DEVELOPMENT IN THE UNITED STATES 433 educators believe that language is always learned in context—as an apprenticeship into a culture (Roberts, 2001; Rymes, 1997)—then the teacher education curriculum needs to reflect this belief. The methods course in Valley View introduced preservice teachers to the idea that L2 learning, like L1 development, is a process of socialization into a new community in and through discourse, a process of give-and-take like that described in L1 socialization studies (Ochs, 1988; Schieffelin, 1990). Rather than receiving lesson plan recipes or checklists of lesson compo- nents, preservice teachers in this predominantly Hispanic and Spanish- speaking community had to take part in this give-and-take as they entered homes to teach English lessons to adults, and as they made decisions about what local cultural routines accompany and facilitate the learning of ESL. Furthermore, the research and thought on English and its global spread (Burns & Coffin, 2001) and a general interest in critical pedagogy in the ESL field (Morgan, 1998; Pennycook, 1998, 1999) have generated a call for a greater sensitivity to the larger social and political context of teaching English. The time has come for English language teachers to recognize and confront the possibility that “English is not a universal panacea for social, economic and political ills, and that teaching methods and materials, and educational policies, need to be adapted for local contexts” (Graddol, 2001, p. 36). Teaching methods are also highly politicized, and the advocacy of one method over another is often based on a political history that teachers may not be aware of (Macedo, 2000). So, in addition to introducing the preservice teachers to the local contextual contingencies involved in socializing their students into an L2, I wanted to raise their awareness of the global and political realities that created the growing community of Spanish speakers in our univer- sity town and that influence ESL teaching. Additionally, terms like linguistic imperialism (Phillipson, 1998) and linguicide (Skutnabb-Kangas, 1988) within the language teaching profes- sion have drawn attention to the damage English language teaching can do to minority languages and the communities that speak them. Rather than teach English at the expense of an L1 (i.e., commit linguicide) or with the implication that English is somehow superior to minority languages (i.e., practice linguistic imperialism), L2 teaching that incor- porates an L1 automatically communicates the value of that L1 as a cultural and social resource. Furthermore, L1 use can play an important facilitating role in learning the L2. As Corson (2001) has pointed out, ignoring language learners’ L1 “stops them from making use of the best vehicle available to them for engaging with their new culture: their first language” (p. 111). This comment is consistent with current research firmly linking L1 maintenance with successful L2 learning (Collier, 1992; see also Krashen, 1999, for a review of recent studies). By situating this 434 TESOL QUARTERLY methods class in the midst of a community of Spanish speakers, I hoped to make the importance of L1 use for L2 learning strikingly and practically evident for the preservice teachers in the course. By discussing my work as a teacher educator in one immigrant community, I hope to show, more generally, that the issues surrounding language in development are not important only to the work English teachers do abroad in developing countries. As I developed a teacher education course based on intensive field experiences in the increasingly culturally and linguistically diverse United States, I faced some of the same issues that international change agents have to address as they develop curricula and teacher education programs abroad. Markee’s (1997, 2001) work on resistance to innovation, among both preservice teachers and students of English, is particularly relevant to this case. Drawing from multidisciplinary research in the diffusion of innovation, he has conceptualized some of the key challenges for innovative change agents as not only reforming material and methods but also document- ing how practitioners change their pedagogical values. Accordingly, in the case documented here, I discuss innovations in curricula as well as preservice teachers’ changing beliefs and pedagogical values as they emerged in the context of language in development work in Georgia. THE COURSE Participants The Preservice Teachers As described above, I had practical goals that grew out of current research and the learning context I inhabit as a professor of language education. But these goals were not necessarily those of the 15 unsus- pecting preservice teachers (10 graduate and 5 undergraduate) who appeared in my course the first day. They were expecting to learn the basics. None of the undergraduates and only two of the graduate students had ever taught ESL. One graduate student was already teaching in a public elementary school, and all of the preservice teachers had plans to teach in the future. Some were finishing teaching creden- tials; others were simply testing the idea of becoming an ESL or EFL teacher. Two of the graduate students were working on their PhDs in linguistics but were also interested in teaching adults. The reasons for taking the course (as stated on the questionnaire I passed out on the first day of class) ranged from the very practical and self-interested (e.g., “required course”) to the practical and more teach- ing oriented (e.g., “when I had a little girl in my class who spoke no LANGUAGE IN DEVELOPMENT IN THE UNITED STATES 435 English and I had no one in my school who taught ESL, I had no where to turn”; “With the influx of foreign students I feel that I need to develop a deeper understanding of nonnative speakers and what teaching approaches work effectively”) to the more generally humanitarian (e.g., “There is a need for this knowledge in today’s society”). As would be expected, and as indicated by the response on this questionnaire, these preservice teachers, like those in other ESOL certification programs (cf. Major & Celedón-Pattichis, 2001), appeared to share the assumption that teaching English involved a decontextualized set of skills and that they simply needed the practical education to go about doing it. During the course, the participation of the four international preservice teachers became particularly salient. As I discuss below, their responses to the course were uncannily similar to each other and were distinct from those of the other preservice teachers. Yet the international students were on the surface a very diverse group. Two—one from Finland, married with one child, and the other from Bulgaria, married and childless—were in a linguistics PhD program and interested in second language acquisition. The other two were in the TESL master’s degree program; one, from Korea, was married with one child, and the other, from Taiwan, was single, in her 20s. The Community and Families The preservice teachers did not receive their education in the university classroom where we met the first day of the 15-week class. We spent 12 weeks in the Valley View community, a cluster of duplex buildings just 15 minutes from our university classroom. At the center of Valley View is a four-room community center, an unassuming building that closely resembles the houses in the community and would be hard to spot if one were not looking for it. It serves as a gathering place for social workers from the university and as a venue for an after-school teaching program, Girl Scout meetings, and other events. The center also maintains records on the families living in the area and is open every day to meet ad hoc needs of community members, such as translating documents and finding medical services. Working with another profes- sor and one of the center employees, I went door-to-door to recruit families to participate in the methods class. By the time my course began, 10 families had indicated an interest in having English teachers come to their homes to teach. Strolling through the neighborhood at dusk, a time when many parents, teenagers, and children gather outside to talk and play, I wondered how relevant the adults in the community would find the learning of English: In Valley View, children, not adults, knew English. The children loudly and confidently greeted me and people from the 436 TESOL QUARTERLY university in English and often spoke to each other in English. By contrast, for many of the adults the teaching provided by the preservice teachers in my course would be the first extended experience they had had with the language. As researchers have noted (Valdés, 2000; Zentella, 1997), this division between the language practices of adults and children occurs in other bilingual immigrant communities in the United States. In Valley View, the experiences of adults and children most likely reinforced these language practices. The adults for the most part either stayed at home with their children in their predominantly Spanish- speaking community or worked with other Spanish speakers at the local chicken-processing plants or elsewhere. The children, on the other hand, attended school every day with native English speakers, listened to English-speaking teachers, and rode the bus home with English-speaking peers. The Curriculum Even casual observations like those in the previous section became important parts of the curriculum for this class. Phenomena like the contrast between adults’ and children’s language practices became springboards for further discussion, reading, teaching strategies, and research. In addition, this nontraditional teaching context presented at least two significant challenges for preservice teaching practice. First, by practicing their teaching outside a traditional classroom setting, the preservice teachers were stripped of the trappings of tradi- tional teachers. Already nervous about their own novice teaching skills, preservice teachers might gain confidence and legitimacy by standing at a big chalkboard or behind an overhead projector, addressing students formally arranged at desks or tables. Such bolstering classroom trappings were nowhere to be found in Valley View. Another distinctive challenge of the setting was the fact that most of the preservice teachers were leaving their own, comfortable turf—the English-speaking university— and entering foreign territory. As I discuss in detail below, this challenge had some important ramifications. First, the setting did not present as much of a challenge to the international preservice teachers because the university was also foreign turf for them. Second, the setting made the use of English and the rejection of Spanish a more dubious endeavor. Because the preservice teachers were guests in Spanish-speaking homes, they could not, for example, make blanket demands for the exclusive use of English without great self-consciousness. Although I designed the course to take advantage of local observa- tions and contextual challenges, my syllabus was also influenced by a service-learning initiative within the university and an internal grant LANGUAGE IN DEVELOPMENT IN THE UNITED STATES 437 designed to encourage professors to engage their classes in the commu- nity through academic community-learning projects. This institutional initiative grew out of a 1999 Kellogg Commission report called Returning to Our Roots: The Engaged Institution, which was issued as a call to land- grant institutions to return to their roots and the founding land-grant values of engagement with the community. Service learning, or, as it is called at my university, academic community learning, provides a valu- able means to accomplish this goal. What, precisely, is service learning, and how did it shape my own curricular innovation? As Rosenberger (2000) defines it, “service learn- ing is action and reflection integrated with academic curriculum to enhance student learning and to meet community needs” (p. 24). Consistent with this definition of service learning, the syllabus for my course was designed to make explicit these goals of active community engagement combined with reflection and to motivate the preservice teachers not only to do community service but to consider the issues involved in it: What does it mean to be engaged with community? What is community? These questions seemed especially relevant in Valley View, where one of the defining features was the Spanish language even as one of our defining missions was to teach English. Again, the dilemma of English teaching as both a threat and an opportunity seemed to arise as I considered the university’s goal of community engagement. In addition to reflecting community and institutional needs, my course needed to offer something the preservice teachers wanted— instruction in practical teaching methods and materials. The course therefore provided preservice teachers with some basic tools to start teaching adults in English and to help them think through their role as English teachers in the community. To start designing lessons, we used themes and lesson ideas drawn largely from one of the textbooks (McKay & Tom, 1999). To facilitate our thoughts on the meaning of community, we read essays and research articles on global English; on the role of L1 in L2 learning; on the use of children’s literature for teaching adults language; on Mexican Americans; and on immigration, urban gangs, and other community issues discussed in a required anthology, Changing Community (Walker, 1993). These readings changed and expanded as we learned more about our teaching role in Valley View and as the class defined its own goals and learning projects for the course. Through our e-mail discussion list, in addition to talking through lesson plans and ideas, I constantly urged the preservice teachers to consider how their actions and observations shaped their impressions of community and how they were shaping the community within which they were working. After 3 weeks of preparation and lesson planning in the university classroom, we met as a class once a week on the playground in the center of Valley View to brief each other on how the teaching sessions had been 438 TESOL QUARTERLY going, discuss teaching plans for that week, and talk about any specific issues that had arisen. Our discussions covered such topics as the use of Spanish to teach English, ways to form a meaningful relationship with the language learners without knowing Spanish, the use of children’s books to teach English, racial tensions in the neighborhood, the feeling of being an outsider, family dynamics in the households, the vulnerability felt by females in an all-male teaching situation, and the overwhelming hospitality of the families. After this group meeting, the preservice teachers would disperse to the homes in pairs to teach. I rotated among the households (all of which were within walking distance of each other) to check on the preservice teachers’ and their students’ progress and get acquainted with each of the families. Of the 10 families who volunteered for English lessons, my students took on 6, splitting up into groups of two and three. In some households, up to eight people would arrive for the English class; one household class included only one language learner, a situa- tion I refer to nevertheless as teaching rather than tutoring. Even in this case, although ad hoc features of tutoring often were apparent, the preservice teachers also were doing formal teaching in that they pre- pared lesson plans and materials and tried to assess progress from week to week. Furthermore, the preservice teachers were preparing for teaching classes of their own in the future, so they tried out activities they might consider preparing for an entire class of adult language learners, tailoring them to the needs of the individual household. Through the readings, the discussions, and their own teaching, the preservice teachers devised projects for themselves that would display their learning during the course. I encouraged them to follow up on issues that they were curious about, leading to a great diversity of projects. One preservice teacher researched the spread of English into other languages. Another, curious about the graffiti in the neighborhood and the young people’s attraction to it, read a memoir of a Hispanic gang member. Another researched the history of Mexican immigration to the United States. A psychology student, just beginning to consider a teaching career, made a day-long visit to a public school ESL classroom to get a first glimpse of how children from neighborhoods like Valley View were faring in the schools. The class was then required to provide evidence of their own growth— as language teachers, as learners, as researchers, and as socially aware community members—in a final portfolio. During our first class session, I provided the portfolio outline, including seven sections and recom- mendations for evidence that might be included, and the preservice teachers developed a rubric consisting of criteria for evaluating each section of the portfolio. Three times during the semester, they wrote formal letters to me about their progress with the portfolio, and I LANGUAGE IN DEVELOPMENT IN THE UNITED STATES 439 typically wrote back with suggestions for follow-up research or reading. When these letters were due, students also spent time discussing and comparing portfolio plans with their peers. The resulting portfolios, while representing each student’s individual learning, were also the result of semester-long discussion and planning within the group and with me. IMPACT OF THE COURSE I have analyzed the impact of the course primarily through the experience of the preservice teachers as presented and distilled by them in their course portfolios. The portfolio provided a means for me to assess the value of the experience for the preservice teachers and, to a lesser degree, for the students they taught. In addition, our group discussions before and after teaching, face-to-face and on the e-mail discussion list, shaped some common ways of talking about our experi- ences. These common impressions crystallized in the final narratives of the preservice teachers’ experience and their portfolio summary, and, as discussed below, led to some shared themes as well as some important differences within the group. The summarizing labels below (Personal Transformation, Changing Pedagogical Values, and The Use of Spanish to Teach English) emerged out of my own reading of the portfolios as well as my observations of and participation in class throughout the semester. On the Preservice Teachers Personal Transformation The most noticeable theme in the majority of the portfolios was that of personal transformation. The titles for some portfolios alone (e.g., “An Awakening at Valley View,” “My Growth at Valley View”) revealed this sense of accomplishment. Indeed, their own learning, more than that of the students they were teaching, was usually foregrounded. As Mica put it, “My learning gauge has soared off the charts” (December 2000). Most of the preservice teachers described a transition from being petrified about entering a community as outsiders to feeling triumphant about having had a unique experience. As the comment below exemplifies, several considered dropping the class when they learned they would be working in families’ homes: “When this class began, I felt overwhelmed and frustrated. I was very apprehensive about going into homes. I was scared. On the first night, I considered dropping the course.” But this 440 TESOL QUARTERLY preservice teacher described herself as “blossoming” from the experi- ences working in this home provided: Not only did they [the family] teach me how to teach them English, but also they taught me much more about the kind of people that they are. They welcomed us each week with open arms. And though I was reluctant to go into their homes at first, in the end, I always felt welcome and safe there. (Roanne, December 2000) Sheri, in a characteristic before-and-after narrative, questioned whether she really knew the students in her traditional classroom before teaching at Valley View: I must admit that even though I grudgingly attended the class in the beginning, I’ve come away with a deep appreciation and respect for these second language learners. . . . Before the Valley View experience, I professed that I had honestly attempted to establish a classroom community, to recognize individuals, and to exclude no one. Now, I wonder if I had really established community at all. (Sheri, December 2000) The following comments reveal a similar transformation of an inner sense of dread to actual enjoyment and growth: On the first day, as I learned more and more about what this class was going to involve, the more and more I wanted to drop it. . . . I felt nervous. . . . I felt overwhelmed. . . . But as the semester progressed, I found myself talking about the class and the readings with my friends and family. . . . My eyes were being opened. (Alice, December 2000) On first reading, these narratives were gratifying to me. I felt my experiment in teaching had had an important impact on the develop- ment of the preservice teachers in my course. But I also wondered about the commonality of this testimonial story line and the narrated transfor- mation. This uniformity became even more evident when contrasted with the story lines of the four international preservice teachers in the course, from which discussion of such personal transformations was noticeably absent. Unlike their native-English-speaking classmates, not one of the four nonnative English speakers foregrounded a dread of entering a new community and the homes of the language learners. Taken together, the narratives of the international preservice teachers suggest a cosmopolitan perspective that was nearly absent from the other course participants’ narratives. The only noninternational students who did not remark on the transformation from dread to enlightenment were two who had had an extended overseas experience. Participants who had come to the United States from another country or who had experienced the role of outsider overseas did not describe entering LANGUAGE IN DEVELOPMENT IN THE UNITED STATES 441 Valley View as a threat. Instead, they focused on how they taught English there, and how they prepared their lessons and fit in with the household in which they were teaching. The absence of dread and awakening from these narratives eliminated some of my distrust of the other transformation stories. Although they may be somewhat generic, they are still evidence that the preservice teachers found the Valley View context new and alarming. And the transformation stories—especially in contrast to the narratives of the international travelers in the course—illustrate that many participants in my course had not been exposed to new situations (besides the tradi- tional public school setting of the ESOL practicum) and were able to benefit from the experience. Changing Pedagogical Values With experience within the context of language learning came changing ideas about what it means to be a good language teacher. The course was designed for people who planned to teach English to adults. As my class soon discovered, first by simply witnessing the language used predominantly by adults in the neighborhood and then by teaching English in the homes, learning the English language as an end in itself was not immediately important to adults who had spent their whole lives in Spanish. They were not concerned with grammaticality or the ABCs, nor did they display much interest in assimilating into the English- speaking part of the area. They usually watched television in Spanish, shopped at Mexican grocery stores, cooked traditional Mexican meals, and listened and danced to regional Mexican music. For some of the preservice teachers, negotiating what the language learners wanted to learn while simultaneously feeling like they were really teaching proved difficult. The preservice teachers’ comments reflected this struggle and the change in their teaching orientation. In one class discussion, a pair of teachers mentioned that one adult student had led them out to his car to have them describe the parts in English as he explained the problem to a mechanic over the telephone. Another teacher helped a student fill out an enrollment form for Head Start. Others puzzled over a credit card application with their language learners—and in a class discussion wondered aloud about the best advice to give about something so ominous and, they felt, personal. Sometimes, the English lessons turned into informal lessons in Mexican family life for the preservice teachers, as the families cooked them chicken mole for dinner, showed a videotape of a daughter’s wedding in Guadalajara, Mexico, or taught them dance steps. 442 TESOL QUARTERLY Through these sorts of unplanned experiences, the teachers were discovering what kind of English would be relevant for their students— and even wondered, at times, if any English would be relevant. And as they found out what their students needed, the preservice teachers also found out more about the community and themselves. Although some teachers never overcame their frustration at not being in a more traditional learning format, all recognized the imperative of flexibility as they struggled to find relevant teaching strategies and content. As Mica wrote, “The greatest challenge was to keep in mind the needs and circumstances of our students. . . . I feel I can now enter into a teaching environment with more flexibility and fortitude” (December 2000). She also wrote a review of our methods textbook, critiquing its usefulness and zeroing in on its bias toward literate, middle-class learners. Therefore, while the class struggled to overcome their desire for concrete and ineffable methods for teaching adults English, they learned the inevi- table complexities involved in teaching English in any context. Paradoxi- cally, learning the local particulars of this context and the needs of their students gave the preservice teachers a more global understanding of English teaching—and its questionable relevance to those who did not speak English either at home or at work and had spent their whole lives without it. Use of Spanish to Teach English Reflecting this more global understanding, many of the preservice teachers became aware of their own need to use Spanish, in part simply because most of them were entering homes where none of the adults spoke English. Because these homes were not their own turf, the preservice teachers—both the native and the nonnative English speak- ers—did not have the legitimacy that they would have had in the classroom, or even the psychological authority one gains when in a familiar context, to forbid the use of Spanish. Being a native speaker did not necessarily give any teacher an advantage. The most common response to this reality was to begin to learn Spanish. Two pairs of teachers resurrected old Spanish language textbooks and began to brush up. Another sought out bilingual editions of children’s books. Although we had multiple discussions about the value of using students’ L1 and the way that it should be done, several teachers commented on the relief and enjoyment that filled the households when the teachers would attempt to say words in Spanish. One of the international preservice teachers became an expert at locating bilingual children’s picture books. In her final narrative she wrote, “If the teacher speaks a little bit of the students’ language, it is helpful. When we teachers struggled to pronounce LANGUAGE IN DEVELOPMENT IN THE UNITED STATES 443 Spanish words, students tried to help us a lot and enjoyed it” (Yuki, December 2000). And another put it simply, “If I could speak Spanish to help my student master English, she would learn better” (Tina, Decem- ber 2000). My own sense was that, intuitively, the preservice teachers used Spanish in the homes as a way of avoiding the linguistic imperialism or linguicism described by Phillipson (1998) and Skutnabb-Kangas (1988). As we found through our experiences in the neighborhood, the commu- nity of Valley View functioned well with Spanish alone. Even though all the families had agreed to have English lessons in their homes, wanted to learn the language, and preferred home visits to more intimidating English classes, most of the preservice teachers commented on their self- consciousness when entering students’ homes and the initial sense that they were forcing English on the families. The preservice teachers’ use of Spanish in the homes not only communicated some respect for the language learners but also facilitated a humane form of English teach- ing. Theoretical discussions of English as a global language (Crystal, 2000) as well as literature on bilingualism (Cummins & Corson, 1997) discuss the need to respect language diversity and the languages that are already valuable and functional to their users. In Valley View, preservice teachers came face-to-face with this necessity. Learning about English teaching methods in this Spanish language context, then, made theories of globalization of English practically relevant. On the Families We Taught Because I conducted this study from the perspective of a teacher educator, my main source of data was class e-mail journals and final portfolios, and my focus was on my teaching practices and on the course’s impact on the preservice teachers. As a result of this focus, the impact of the course on the university students was clear from their comments during and after teaching, but the impact on the community and the families we taught was less measurable. We did not conduct follow-up interviews with families. Instead, the only empirical means available of assessing this impact was to monitor the continued presence of the neighborhood teaching after my course had officially ended. Though formally my course required only 10 weeks of teaching, we found it hard to say good-bye when that period had ended. Instead of holding our last class on campus as planned, the class unanimously decided to hold class at Valley View as a potluck dinner party for the people we had been teaching. And long after the semester had ended, one teacher created a volunteer program to continue the teaching in the homes. A year after I brought the first group of preservice teachers to 444 TESOL QUARTERLY Valley View, families were still inviting teachers into their homes and sharing their lives as well as words in English and Spanish with them. A general assessment of the project as a whole suggests that the presence of teachers in the Valley View community somehow enriched the lives of everyone there. However, as Anna wrote, our impact had less to do with language teaching than with community contact: One of the most significant and long-lasting consequences of this project, in my view, is that it has turned Valley View into a lively place of instruction and cooperation, and the community itself into a meeting place of people of all ages, interests and cultures. (December 2000) POSSIBLE PROBLEMS WITH THIS APPROACH Resistance to Innovations My rude awakening to the problems inherent in attempting a curricu- lar innovation came the first day of class, when I found that most of the preservice teachers did not share my excitement about holding class in a nontraditional context. The preservice teachers did not like my curricu- lum at first, and they were resistant to developing innovative curricula for the English language learners. They wanted traditional tasks and struc- ture, and they wanted to provide traditional tasks and structure for their students. And, even at the end of the class, the preservice teachers were still demanding more structure. Despite their acknowledgment that lessons come out of students’ needs and that much of what we did in the homes could not have been planned for ahead of time, and despite the myriad interesting strands of research the preservice teachers took up as they followed their emergent curiosities, on the final class evaluation only one person requested less structure, and most demanded more. They did not like the loss of control they experienced during the in- home teaching experiences, and they wanted to be prepared with more strategies for dealing with it. As Auerbach (2000) has written, this discomfort is to be expected: Students and teachers both need to feel safe in the classroom and often traditional roles are the most comfortable for everyone. . . . The key is not scrapping all the tried and true ways, while at the same time still taking risks. This means mixing traditional forms (grammar exercises, fill-in-the-blanks, etc.) with less familiar forms. Lessons can be set up so that the teacher provides a familiar structure, but content comes from the students. (p. 154) Many of the preservice teachers followed this advice intuitively, prepar- ing traditional lesson plans and worksheets while learning about their LANGUAGE IN DEVELOPMENT IN THE UNITED STATES 445 language learners’ lives and needs. As I continue to teach the course in coming years, I plan to do the same: provide a comfortable structure from which my methods students can branch out. However, the fact that I intend to provide structure does not mean that I, or the preservice teachers, should abandon a critical stance. Despite resistance, there is a reason for branching out and not simply maintaining comfortable curricula. Traditional curricula and methodol- ogy are attached to traditional values that may not be beneficial to the community that is being “developed.” To understand how changing curriculum is involved with a critical stance, Markee (2001) has concep- tualized resistance to innovation as resistance not only to new curricula but also to new pedagogical values. By teaching in a community in which the value of the English language was not automatic and the traditional trappings of the authoritative teacher were not automatically provided, the preservice teachers began to change their pedagogical values. This change was revealed most clearly in the way the preservice English teachers took on the use of Spanish. At the beginning of the course, nearly all the students voiced an English-only point of view, but as the semester continued, they all began to recognize the pedagogical value of modifying their English-only practice—and even learning a few words of Spanish themselves. Thus, by taking on the role of outsiders and immersing themselves in the lives of their students, the preservice teachers began to change not only their ideas about curriculum but also their pedagogical values. But the resistance on the part of the preservice teachers and the English language learners were only two layers of the resistance onion. I have since discovered a thick skin of institutionalized resistance to this sort of project. Even though a service-learning initiative at the university had funded the development of the course, other university obligations prevented me from teaching it the following year. Instead adjunct faculty taught the course, which reverted to its original, primarily on-campus format. I plan to assert my own agency more insistently, as I hope the preservice teachers I taught will in the future. I will have to take a critical stance toward curriculum and pedagogical values of the institution within which I am working and take responsibility for offering a methods course and promoting community involvement outside the traditional structure of the university. English Language Teaching as Colonial Invasion or Border Pedagogy? Although we came to Valley View with the agenda of understanding and sharing language and culture, it was easy to feel as if we were 446 TESOL QUARTERLY invading, not quietly learning and teaching, as we descended on the community each week. This paradox was never resolved and probably never will be; it is inseparable from the simultaneous threat and opportunity presented by the teaching of English. However, experience in Valley View and immersion in the life predicaments of the language learners there pointed to some issues that might be critically addressed in the future. An anecdote from one MA-TESOL student who is still teaching at Valley View exemplifies some of these issues. He recently appeared in my office, delighted about his continued teaching and community activities. He had taken family members house hunting because they had decided they might like to buy a house of their own and move out of the rental- only Valley View community. This decision seemed like tangible economic progress—and was certainly facilitated by the learning of English—but it was made with some regret over abandoning the neighborhood that helped sustain the family’s Spanish language use and roots in Mexico. These regrets became even more tangible when, a few weeks later, I visited the household during a teaching session and the issue of house hunting came up again. Now a few more details emerged. A family member who had intended to provide substantial funding for the house was beginning to balk. Buying a house meant progress, but it also meant putting roots down, virtually ensuring that the family would not return to Mexico. This family seemed to be teetering on the brink of becoming residents here and acknowledging that Mexico was a former home, not their homeland. This family’s house-hunting forays crystallized a dilemma other preservice teachers had discussed throughout their community experi- ence: Many families seemed ambivalent about life in the United States and unsure whether they would stay for long. Most sent money to family members in Mexico, and some returned to Mexico, at great risk, for holidays and other special occasions. However, these families were always toying with the possibility of living in the United States permanently. Whereas many adults wished to return to Mexico, their children, many of whom had been born in the United States and spoke English exclusively, often voiced the opposite perspective. Once the paradox of the simulta- neous pulls of the English-speaking world and the familiarity of Mexico emerged, it was apparent everywhere one looked in Valley View. This paradox of identity and economics was never more apparent than in the decision over home ownership, which exemplifies how language plays a role in development and, more specifically, how critical pedagogy in this context is necessarily a border pedagogy (Giroux, 1992). That is, this setting revealed the necessity for a critical pedagogy that emphasizes learner agency but also encourages an understanding of situated, historical, and linguistic limitations and affordances. From this LANGUAGE IN DEVELOPMENT IN THE UNITED STATES 447 perspective, this family’s choice was not simply whether or not they could afford to buy a house. It was a question of which identity the family members would take up or how any one of them could muster “diverse cultural resource to allow for the fashioning of new identities within existing configurations of power” (Giroux, 1992, p. 28). An English teacher’s role as critical pedagogue is to explore these diverse cultural resources with students, and working in a community like Valley View can make future teachers acutely aware of this role. In the future, I plan to infuse a critical–border pedagogical element more explicitly into the course, that is, to emphasize that the role of teachers in this community involves not simply the translation of documents or the provision of phrases for negotiating the basics but also the practice of critical thinking in any language and the critical consider- ation of the multiple identities that may be available to students as they take on the English language. The job of English teachers in community development, then, would not be simply to proffer English as a decontextualized tool but to model critical thinking in the new language and introduce some of the tools of critique needed to creatively construct hybrid, fluid identities as speakers of Spanish and English as participants in the economic and social life of multiple speech communities. Questionable Long-Term Impact Another concern that came up during the course was the extent to which it affected the preservice teachers and the community for a lifetime rather than just for a semester. The transformation narratives suggest that the preservice teachers grew from this experience. Although their contact with the community was short term and limited, I hope that they will carry their engagement with the issues that arose in our work into new and different contexts. I am confident that all of them, even those who spent only one semester in Valley View, expanded their perspective on immigrant communities and language learners in gen- eral. This expanded perspective is the most substantial contribution a course like this can make. After the course, most of these preservice teachers would soon be working somewhere else—as teachers with the insight gained from a semester in the Valley View community. I am less confident, however, about what the families gained from our weekly occupation of the community. Furthermore, although all partici- pants were aware from the start that the teaching sessions would continue only for a limited time, there was certainly some awkwardness when the last class session rolled around and most of the preservice teachers departed from the community for good. This problem may be, in fact, structurally unavoidable in all university courses that have 448 TESOL QUARTERLY community service as a goal. In the future, I plan to discuss more openly the problems of and possibilities for best working with this momentary community development and search for ways to develop an infrastruc- ture that could last beyond our semester of more direct involvement. IMPLICATIONS FOR LANGUAGE IN DEVELOPMENT: WHICH LANGUAGE IS FACILITATING DEVELOPMENT? WHO IS DEVELOPING? As the successes and concerns arising from my course suggest, the preservice teachers—at least as much as the community of immigrants they taught—were experiencing development. And Spanish—at least as much as English—was playing a large part in facilitating this develop- ment. Development, as considered in this special-topic issue, is defined as a reduction in participants’ levels of vulnerability to things they do not control (Markee, this issue). By this definition, all the preservice teachers were developing by acquiring a new language and by understanding a community about which they had known virtually nothing but that contributed substantially in numbers economically, socially, and cultur- ally to life in their college town. Many of them were terrified on entering this community and felt a loss of control as they entered homes knowing very little Spanish. Their narratives of the experience indicate that they gained a sense of control as they learned about the members of this community and how best to communicate with them as well as how to teach English. The English teaching of the preservice teachers also facilitated a form of development in the Valley View community, but it is one that English language teachers need to examine carefully. In the worst sense, learning English potentially contributes to the worst form of globalization— McDonaldization (Phillipson, 1998)—as residents abandon their cultural traditions and take on habits (e.g., the consumption of fast food) encouraged by the English-dominant economy. Nevertheless, the En- glish the residents learn also serves as a resource for taking control of their new lives in the United States: establishing a financial credit record, buying a house, getting parts for their car, finding a preschool for their children, resisting marketing campaigns, and forming meaningful friend- ships with native English speakers. Whether language facilitates McDonaldization or more positive forms of development is partially the responsibility of language teachers. By learning about teaching English through action and reflection within the Valley View community, the preservice teachers in my course were at least exposed to some of the forms of participation that English language learning could afford. LANGUAGE IN DEVELOPMENT IN THE UNITED STATES 449 The role of language in development also took a third, subtler, shape in this course, revealed by the international students studying to become English teachers. The way these preservice teachers participated in the course and the community demonstrated that English is not a cultural privilege of U.S. citizens but “belongs to all those who use it” (Kachru, 1988, p. 1). As mentioned, none of the four international students had problems or concerns about teaching a course in Valley View. Their narratives, which contrasted dramatically with those of the other preservice teachers in the course, suggest that they were accustomed to the role of outsider and were not overly worried or fearful about entering someone else’s community to teach English. They had already entered someone else’s community by coming to Georgia to attend school. In addition, they expanded the idea of how learning English could be useful. They saw themselves not as representatives of some generic English-speaking culture or as invaders in someone else’s territory but as people who had a command of English and were capable of passing it on. Their presence in the course, and their nonchalance in the face of the Valley View context, gave the other preservice teachers in my course and the households in which they were teaching a new understanding of the language learning process and the potential for English to be a useful tool for crossing community boundaries. Language and its role in development will never be without complica- tions and dubious ends. But as suggested by the experience of the participants in my community-based adult ESOL methods course, expo- sure to the context within which language teaching brings about development can provide preservice teachers, at the very least, with experience and knowledge with which to think through their role in this process. The comment that begins this article exemplifies the new perspective gained in this course: “Community is more important than English to many of the families at Valley View” (Rita, December 2000). As this preservice teacher suggests, learners may perceive English as some- thing external, as unrelated to established communities, and certainly as not playing a role in their development. However, this perspective did not mean that we scrapped our English teaching plans. Instead, we combined our teaching of English with learning more about the commu- nity. The experience of teaching English—and learning Spanish—in Valley View helped us all to conceive of community development as a bidirectional process. Although the preservice teachers in my course entered the community with the goal of teaching English, perhaps the greatest benefit for community was the interaction between communi- ties that resulted. During that semester, language played an important role in community development—but only because it played a role in the language teachers’ development as well. 450 TESOL QUARTERLY ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The course discussed here would not have been possible without the courageous participation of the preservice teachers and the language learners who opened their homes to us. I also thank three anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of an earlier version of this article, and Rachel Pinnow, Kevin Smith, and Masa Yamaguchi for their ongoing words of encouragement and critique. 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This article suggests that both language and technology are tools for individual and societal development. The article introduces a developmental approach to integrating technology in language education, based on consideration of both product and process. It then illustrates these concepts through analysis of a large, U.S.-funded English language developmental pro- gram in Egypt. Two projects are examined: a teacher education program on computers in English language teaching and a basic English methodology course taught via videoconferencing. The analysis indicates that a developmental approach is critical to successful integra- tion and use of technology in language education programs. I n the eyes of many educational technology specialists, the role of the computer in education has gradually been transformed from that of tutor to that of tool (see discussion in Warschauer, 1996). This is certainly the case in the field of L2 teaching, in which the most dynamic applications of computer-assisted language learning (CALL) involve simulations, electronic communication, and multimedia production rather than simple drill-and-practice tutorials (see examples in Egbert & Hanson-Smith, 1999). But the question remains: A tool for what? Technology in TESOL is best understood not only as a tool for language learning but also more broadly as a tool for individual and societal development, which is broadly conceived as a reduction in participants’ levels of vulnerability over things they do not control (Markee, this issue). This article illustrates the important tool functions of technology in development through a description of 3 years of research in Egypt, where I partici- pated in a large donor-funded program for integrating a range of technology in English language teaching and teacher education at the K–12 and university levels. I first briefly expand on the theoretical TESOL QUARTERLY Vol. 36, No. 3, Autumn 2002 453 implications of the definition of development used above by examining the role of information and communication technology (ICT) in lan- guage learning from both a product- and a process-oriented perspective. I then describe research from the program suggesting that a develop- mental perspective should guide the products and processes of the integration of technology in TESOL. PRODUCT AND PROCESS OF TECHNOLOGY IN LANGUAGE LEARNING Product and process are critical to both language education and development theory (Markee, 1997a). In general theories of socioeco- nomic development, perspectives on the end product of what constitutes development have gradually changed from a vision that focuses narrowly on wealth to one that also includes broader issues of social inclusion and protection from vulnerability, encompassing literacy, health care, social equality, and democratic rights. This broadening definition of product is accompanied by an increased focus on process: “how development is gained” is viewed as “no less important than what benefits are obtained at the end of the development road” (Goulet, 1971, p. x), because only participatory and democratic involvement of people in their own devel- opmental process can ensure that any change is sustainable. Develop- ment is therefore both a terminal state and a change process (Goulet, 1971, cited in Markee, 1997a.) Language learning theory has also been marked by a broadened vision of the desired product and a renewed emphasis on learning process. A singular focus on the end product of grammatical compe- tence has widened to encompass other forms of communicative compe- tence, with the goal being not just formal knowledge but also the power to use language for meaningful interaction and agency (Warschauer, 2000). With this widening has come an increased emphasis on classroom processes or, actually, on the combination of product and process, from both a teaching (e.g., Breen, 1984; Candlin, 1984) and a research (e.g., Spada, 1987) perspective. Processes involving autonomous learning, collaborative learning, and the development and practice of language learning strategies are all designed to empower students to continue their own learning and communicative innovation outside the classroom (see the discussion in Markee, 1997a). 454 TESOL QUARTERLY An Expanded Product: Electronic Literacies A developmental approach to technology in language learning re- flects these same two issues: an expanded product and particular attention to process. Starting with product, the rapid diffusion of ICT is shifting the goalposts of what it means to be a competent language user. For example, with the number of e-mail messages sent and received annually exceeding 3 trillion, according to an estimate 3 years ago (Pastore, 1999), e-mail has joined other media as an essential means of communication. Indeed, according to one study, a plurality of U.S. managers believe that e-mail is the principal means of communication in their business, surpassing the telephone, the fax, and even face-to-face conversation (American Management Association International, cited in Warschauer, 2000). Therefore, language teachers must not only use e-mail to promote English teaching (Warschauer, 1995) but also teach English to help people learn to communicate effectively by e-mail. Similarly, with the World Wide Web becoming an essential medium of information exchange in economic, academic, and civic affairs, the literacies of accessing and publishing Web-based information must also become part of English language teaching curricula. New electronic literacies (Shetzer & Warschauer, 2000; Warschauer, 1999a, in press) include computer literacy (i.e., comfort and fluency in keyboarding and using computers), information literacy (i.e., the ability to find and critically evaluate online information), multimedia literacy (i.e., the ability to produce and interpret complex documents comprising texts, images, and sounds), and computer-mediated communication literacy (i.e., knowledge of the pragmatics of individual and group online interaction). These literacies are important in many languages, but they are especially critical in English because even several years ago more than 50% of the world’s online content was estimated to take place in English (“Cyberspeech,” 1997). The extensive amount of online infor- mation and communication in English provides the possibilities and, in many contexts, the imperative to reconstruct the English language curriculum to incorporate technology-enhanced communication and project work (Warschauer, 2000). The importance of these new literacies calls into question a basic tenet of CALL: that the computer is an optional tool to assist the language learning process but that technology does not transform the goal of what is to be learned (see, e.g., Kenning & Kenning, 1990). My ethnographic research with language learners in Hawai‘i—including immigrants, foreign students, and native Hawaiians—indicated that they viewed technology not as a secondary, optional tool but as a critical added value to language education (Warschauer, 1999a). In other words, students in TECHNOLOGY IN LANGUAGE EDUCATION 455 technology-intensive language classrooms learned both language skills and valuable information/communication literacies simultaneously. This point was similarly brought home to me many times in Egypt, but never more so than when a high school English teacher expressed his view that “English is not an end in itself, but just a tool for being able to make use of information technology” (personal communication, August 24, 2000), thus standing on its head what I see as the perspective of CALL proponents. Although I understand the teacher’s sentiment, I would suggest instead that both English and information technology are tools—to allow individuals to participate fully in society. And English and information technology are also tools for societies— to participate fully in the world community and advance politically, economically, and socially. With the successful institutional integration of information technology being one of the key factors in socioeconomic development (Castells, 2000), societies, schools, and teachers will not sacrifice the time, effort, and money required to implement technology- based instruction only for the goal of teaching the same English skills better than before. Rather, they will make these sacrifices because they believe that the mastery of technology, as part of the English curriculum and other curricula, is essential if their students and society are to fully develop. An examination of new curricular standards in Egypt, Israel, Singapore, the United States, and many other countries indicates the value that national governments and ministries of education place on the goal of developing students’ expertise in information and communication tech- nologies. As the Egyptian minister of education wrote, Achieving the goals of development will necessitate preparation of a new cadre of professionals who are able to interact with the language of this age, and with the technology of the Information and Communications Revolu- tion . . . . Therefore technological training should start at an early age and should include all aspects of education. (Bahaa El Din, 1997, pp. 120–121) International language-training development projects, which often focus on development of language education management skills in addition to teaching skills, need to recognize the expanded role of ICT within the language teaching and broader educational enterprise. This entails developing institutional expertise and learning processes so that collectives and institutions can take leadership in adapting new technolo- gies in ways appropriate to their circumstances. Language departments, schools, ministries of education, and professional organizations all need to enhance their leadership in effectively integrating information and communication technologies as a developmental tool. In summary, at all levels of language education, from the individual to the institutional, 456 TESOL QUARTERLY active mastery of ICT, rather than just passive use, is essential for confronting the imperatives of an information society and economy. A Process of Autonomy and Innovation To achieve these expanded goals, whether at the individual or societal level, requires a reconsideration of the process of adopting technology. Because ICTs are changing and developing so rapidly, mastery of new technologies—whether by a student, a teacher, or an institution— necessitates a capacity for constant innovation and adaptation. The critical element here is autonomy, a concept that was valued in earlier stages of communicative language teaching but now takes on even greater significance. As Shetzer and Warschauer (2000) explain, Flexible, autonomous lifelong learning is essential to success in the age of information (Reich, 1991; Rifkin, 1995). Autonomous learners know how to formulate research questions and devise plans to answer them. They answer their own questions through accessing learning tools and resources online and offline. Moreover, autonomous learners are able to take charge of their own learning through working on individual and collaborative projects that result in communication opportunities in the form of presentations, Web sites, and traditional publications accessible to local and global audiences. Language professionals who have access to an Internet computer classroom are in a position to teach students valuable lifelong learning skills and strategies for becoming autonomous learners. (p. 176) The concept of autonomy must be extended beyond self-directed use of language and today’s technology to the ability to develop, explore, evaluate, and adapt new technology as it evolves. This ability requires the development of metaskills of critique and innovation beyond the skills of deploying any particular technology. Students not only should be able to use today’s search engines but should also have the right analytic framework to select and make use of new search engines as they emerge. Teachers not only should be able to use today’s CALL software but should also have successful strategies for evaluating and adapting the new waves of software that will surely come. And institutions should have the capacity not just to make use of technologies but also to participate in the generation and improvement of technologies (Corea, 2000). Extending the concept of autonomy in this way suggests a highly interactive and organic process, in which the development of a capacity for sustainability is of greater interest than are short-term results. It involves the application of general developmental principles of educa- tional reform, such as showing respect for local circumstances and working within the parameters of local institutions (Holliday, 1992, TECHNOLOGY IN LANGUAGE EDUCATION 457 1994). The concept of local appropriateness is of critical importance, because access to and attitudes about information and communication technologies differ greatly in different parts of the world. Developing this autonomy also necessitates an understanding of principles of social informatics, that is, the perspective of technology as a complex social system reflecting relations of culture and power rather than as the machines per se (Feenberg, 1991; Kling, 1999; Warschauer, in press). From a social informatics perspective, the implementation of ICT is not a one-shot deal involving the purchasing and installation of computers but rather a complex social process involving a lengthy restructuring of incentives, the development of different social relation- ships, and reconfigurations of power (Kling, 2000). Finally, developing learner and teacher autonomy involves under- standing and taking into account the principles of innovation diffusion. According to these principles, new ideas or innovations are not simulta- neously adopted by all but are gradually spread through different categories of people along an S -shaped curve (see Figure 1; Rogers, 1967). The first people to grasp a new idea, labeled Innovators, are a small group of highly venturesome and risk-taking people. Members of the next group, the Early Adopters, are noted for the degree of opinion leadership they exert within their social networks; they are more cautious than the Innovators and are respected by their peers. After the Early Adopters take up an innovation, the rate of diffusion increases, as first the Early Majority and then the Late Majority come on board. These two groups together make up fully two thirds of society. Finally, the last FIGURE 1 The S -Shaped Curve of Adoption Innovation Laggards Late majority Early majority Early adopters Innovators Time of adoption Source: Adapted from Rogers (1967, p. 177). 458 TESOL QUARTERLY group, termed Laggards by Rogers, consists of those people who are highly resistant to an innovation and may wait a long time before adopting it. Because of this process, long-term, in-depth training of a cadre of change agents who can provide ongoing leadership within a particular social system is a critical component of development. It is especially important to mobilize Early Adopters in such training because this group, due to its opinion leadership, is critical for the success of an innovation. To explain further the developmental perspective on technology and language education, I now discuss examples from a large-scale English language development project in Egypt. Data on this project were collected over a 3-year period (1998–2001) from sources including participant observation, interviews, focus groups, Web sites, transcripts of e-mail messages, and Ministry of Education and university documents. INTEGRATED ENGLISH LANGUAGE PROGRAM-II The Integrated English Language Program-II (IELP-II) is funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to improve English language teaching in Egypt. It is the latest incarnation of a quarter-century of U.S.-funded language aid projects in Egypt. These projects began in the mid-1970s (see Bowers, 1983), when the U.S. government was actively trying to court Egypt into the U.S. political and economic camp. Aid to Cairo, including aid for language projects, greatly expanded in the 1980s after Egyptian President Anwar Sadat signed a peace accord with Israel. Washington’s aid to Cairo was seen as a reward for the accord, an incentive to keep Egypt in the Western camp, and a developmental tool to integrate Egypt into the U.S.-led globalized economy (Weinbaum, 1986). IELP-II was launched in 1997 on the heels of IELP-I, a teacher education project that took place from 1984 to1996. IELP-II was de- signed to be as much an economic development program as an educa- tional one; it originated in the section of USAID that supports economic reform programs in Egypt, and it sees its long-term impact as “improved English language proficiency for the current and future work force of Egypt” (IELP-II—About, 2000, n.p.). IELP-II focuses not only on language pedagogy, curriculum, and materials development but also on issues related to the management of English language education and training programs. IELP-II places a great premium on institutional change and sustainability. The program does not bring U.S. instructors to Egypt to teach directly but instead emphasizes training and assistance programs TECHNOLOGY IN LANGUAGE EDUCATION 459 to increase the capacity of Egyptian educational institutions. As in many international aid projects (see also Kenny & Savage, 1997; Markee, 1997a), though, the supposed emphasis on sustainability in IELP-II is complicated by a range of international and local factors that shape the design, funding, and implementation of the project. From the U.S. side, these include a USAID-mandated emphasis on numerical milestones (such as a certain number of teachers trained per year in a certain activity). Because funding to the USAID subcontractors depends on reaching these milestones, they are given great priority, but the pursuit of numerical goals does not always cultivate the patient, behind-the- scenes work required for enhancing sustainability. From the Egyptian side, the tremendous largesse of the IELP-II program—with $52 million to spend over a 6-year period—had a distortional affect, influencing many collaborating institutions to seek a piece of the pie to address urgent short-term problems rather than long-term development needs (see discussion in Smith, 1997). More explicit political issues also affected the nature of the IELP-II program and its ability to bring about sustainable change. For example, at one point during the Camp David negotiations led by U.S. President Bill Clinton, USAID made plans to divert millions of dollars of aid money from Egypt to the Palestinian Authority, thereby forcing IELP-II to suddenly cut back on some of its training programs. These emergency reductions notwithstanding, IELP-II is believed to be the largest donor-funded program in the world for assisting English language teaching in a developing country. At its height IELP-II em- ployed approximately 60 full-time staff (including 11 Americans and about 50 Egyptians), working under two USAID subcontractors, the Academy for Educational Development and America-Mideast Educa- tional and Training Services. This full-time staff is assisted in its efforts by scores of U.S. and Egyptian part-time consultants from the fields of TESOL, applied linguistics, assessment, evaluation, educational manage- ment, and educational technology. The work of IELP-II is focused in three main sectors: (a) with the Egyptian Ministry of Education (to improve, e.g., in-service teacher education, management of English language programs, use of technol- ogy); (b) with Egyptian university colleges of education (to improve in- service education of future English teachers); and (c) with English for specific purposes (ESP) and English for occupational purposes pro- grams. Technology is considered a crosscutting area that has projects in all three of these sectors. Work on educational technology projects has been managed by a nine-person team within IELP-II supplemented by the assistance of U.S. and Egyptian consultants and working in partner- ship with Egyptian educational and nongovernmental bodies. 460 TESOL QUARTERLY I now briefly describe two technology-based projects coordinated by IELP-II to illustrate the developmental approach discussed above. Professional Development in Computer and Internet Use One of the objectives of IELP-II is to help Egyptian educators make use of new technologies in ways that are appropriate to their own circumstances. Toward this end, IELP-II has carried out a professional development program in computer and Internet use for English lan- guage teaching. The program was developed following a national needs analysis (reported in Warschauer, 1999b) demonstrating that there was a fair amount of computer equipment in Egyptian schools and universities but little knowledge of how to use it for language instruction and professional purposes. There were no CALL organizations in the coun- try, no Web sites or public e-mail lists for English teachers, and no other form of organized leadership on the issue of technology for English teaching. Based on this situation, IELP-II placed priority on developing a leadership core for the future of technology in English teaching in Egypt. Rather than conducting undifferentiated short-term education for large numbers of teachers, IELP-II chose a strategy that was based on an understanding of the aforementioned S curve of innovation. As a first step, main emphasis was put on developing and consolidating a relatively small group of change agents who could exercise leadership in this area. As a second step, these leaders were helped in reaching out to others around them both to deepen their own knowledge and to build a larger group of early adopters. The intended product of IELP-II’s program was thus an informed, organized leadership core with knowledge of and expertise in the use of technology in language teaching as it applied to the Egyptian context. The process involved working to develop a leadership cadre and then providing scaffolding to assist this leadership cadre to reach out to a broader group of early adopters. Step 1: Developing a Leadership Cadre To develop a group of leaders with expertise in technology for English teaching, IELP-II established a 2-year education program. Approximately 100 people participated in this program in three groups of 30–35. Groups were made up of English teachers, English language supervisors, and English methodology specialists from schools, universities, and ESP centers. TECHNOLOGY IN LANGUAGE EDUCATION 461 The program was entitled Computers in English Language Teaching (CELT). The name was chosen to emphasize the broader role that computers can play in English language teaching rather than the narrower role suggested to me by the better known term of CALL. The content of the CELT program was tied as closely as possible to the actual needs of Egyptian teachers and learners as identified through the needs analysis. Technology instruction included simple tasks such as the creation and use of e-mail lists for professional discussion, the use of office software to develop materials or prepare presentations, and the use of the Internet for finding information or creating professional Web sites. The program selected free or advertiser-supported software over commercial software so that teachers could readily replicate what they had learned in their own situations. Modules on classroom use of technology focused in large part on the one-computer classroom, which reflected the current conditions of Egyptian schools. Participants who completed the CELT program were thus prepared to provide leadership in the areas most needed by Egyptian teachers. All participants in the CELT program had to go through a rigorous application process that evaluated their expertise in English language teaching methods, their experience with technology, and their leader- ship potential. Applicants had to propose, and present in a personal interview, a specific technology-based project that they would implement in their own schools, universities, and regions. People were chosen to participate either because they were Innovators who were already experimenting with technology in the classroom and had some valuable lessons to share, or because they were potential Early Adopters with an interest in technology and with good ties to the broader educational establishment (see Markee, 1997b, for discussion of the complementary roles of Innovators and Early Adopters). The CELT program consisted of three main parts: 1. pretraining: For 1 year, CELT members participated in short com- puter-training workshops in Egypt and formed teams to further plan their projects. The CELT members met in Cairo and continued discussions online to prepare for their main training and their project work. 2. main training: After the first year, CELT members participated in an intensive 1-month program in the United States, where they learned about CALL and carried out work on their projects. 3. follow-up implementation: Following the main program, CELT mem- bers continued their efforts by completing their projects, implement- ing their projects in their schools, continuing discussion over e-mail, participating in advanced workshops in Cairo, and sharing what they had learned with their colleagues by leading their own local work- 462 TESOL QUARTERLY shops and participating in a national Electronic Oasis (see discussion below). Finally, in 2001, a national CELT conference was held so that members from the three CELT groups could share ideas together and view each other’s projects. Some of the CELT members’ projects were in areas that I might not think of as CALL. One professor, for example, helped launch an English language Web site for his university. Although such a project might not be directly related to English language teaching in the classroom, the project served to highlight to Egyptian educational institutions the value of integrating technology and English and inspired other universities and departments to later launch or improve their own English language Web sites, thus facilitating professional networking. Some CELT mem- bers launched electronic discussion lists to network English teachers in particular regions or programs. Other CELT projects focused on topics such as developing multimedia presentation content for the one-computer classroom and creating video-based listening exercises for university English courses. One special success of the CELT program was the work of an English teacher, Ahmed, who was blind. During his study in the United States, Ahmed gained experience with English language assistive technology for the visually impaired. Upon his return to Egypt, he organized a number of follow-up sessions on the topic for other teachers who were blind and for the broader educational community. His leadership in this area was recognized by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, which invited his cooperation in launching an electronic library for people who are visually impaired, at the recently opened (or reopened, after 18 centuries) Bibliotecha Alexandrina (Library of Alex- andria), with 10 specially designed computer stations providing materi- als in English, Arabic, and other languages. In addition to the CELT program, a number of other efforts were carried out to help consolidate a group of innovators made up of the CELT members and other highly interested teachers. Most important, a national Educational Technology Special Interest Group (Ed Tech SIG) was launched within EgypTesol. Though the Ed Tech SIG was founded by an American working for IELP-II, it is now under the leadership of Egyptians and chaired by an Egyptian applied linguist. The Ed Tech SIG carries out a number of its own training and education programs to further effective use of technology in TESOL. Step 2: Reaching Out to More Early Adopters Research indicates that the work of change agents is important in fostering innovation only if they have good ties to a broader community TECHNOLOGY IN LANGUAGE EDUCATION 463 (Markee, 1997a; Rogers, 1967). A critical next step in promoting effective technology use in Egypt was thus to promote ties between the initial leadership cadre and the broader English-teaching community in Egypt and, in particular, with those who had the potential to become early adopters. Toward this end, IELP-II coordinated closely with the Ministry of Education and Egyptian universities to assist the CELT members in organizing 1-week follow-up workshops in their own locales. This coordi- nation was challenging, as the Ministry of Education was not used to facilitating this kind of grassroots initiative. Although thousands of Egyptian classroom teachers had traveled abroad for education pro- grams over the past two decades, no systematic initiative had previously involved them in providing substantial, ongoing follow-up to their colleagues. Though arrangements were eventually made to carry out this follow-up, it was accomplished only after a great deal of delays, obstacles, and resistance, with some CELT members facing problems even getting Ministry of Education approval for leave to attend follow-up meetings. Each workshop was led by 1–4 CELT members and included 5–15 local teachers, depending on the size of the laboratory available. The content of these workshops was similar to that of the initial workshops taken by the CELT participants and focused on the mastery of basic tools, such as word processing and presentation software, the Internet, and the applications of these tools to professional communication and English teaching. Approximately 1,000 teachers participated in these follow-up workshops, and, as indicated by this statement by one CELT member, some of them continued the cascade or snowball effect by teaching colleagues at their school sites: I am very happy these days really because my dear trainees have started applying what they have already learnt in the workshop in their own schools. One of them called me yesterday and informed me he has taught the computer technician and another teacher of English in the same school how to use Microsoft PowerPoint and they were interested and the three started preparing a PowerPoint Presentation for their pupils. This is only a start and I am expecting more and more feedback from other trainees who were all under zero in the fields of technology. (personal communication, March 27, 2001) In addition to these local workshops, an Electronic Oasis is organized each year at the annual EgypTesol conference. At the Electronic Oasis, CELT members and others involved in the Ed Tech SIG give hands-on demonstrations to the many hundreds of English teachers in attendance. A total of 120 such demonstrations were given at the November 2000 Electronic Oasis, reaching an estimated 500 teachers. Topics at the 464 TESOL QUARTERLY electronic oasis range from the basic, such as getting a free e-mail address, to the sophisticated, such as the authoring of multimedia. Finally, CELT and Ed Tech SIG members also manage several Web sites for Egyptian English teachers as well as a national e-mail discussion list, ELTEGYPT, which includes some 400 educators. The list has been used for everything from announcement of local education programs, to commiseration over obstacles to using of technology in schools, to discussion of how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should be presented in the English language classroom. (The latter topic generated intense debate when the Mideast conflict flared in 2001, as some teachers wanted to use the list for free-flowing discussion of political issues whereas others felt that a list for English language teachers should only include political discussion to the extent that connections were made to education or language issues.) These achievements of the CELT program, though important, are still relatively minor compared with the broader challenge of integrating new technologies in English language classrooms in Egypt. The 1,000 teach- ers reached so far represent only a tiny proportion of the more than 60,000 English teachers in Egypt. And even these 1,000—and indeed, even the leadership core of 100—face serious obstacles in actually using computers and the Internet in their teaching. Some of these obstacles involve lack of access to equipment: There are too few computers in Egyptian schools to allow daily classroom use by English students. In addition, many administrators are reluctant even to use the computers that they have for fear that they will be broken. As one CELT participant complained on the group e-mail list, the school technology staff “know only how to unplug and cover it to protect the computer from dust so as not to be damaged” (personal communication, February 25, 2001). And even with access to computers, Egyptian teachers face additional ob- stacles to using them creatively with their students, including huge class sizes, a centralized test-driven curriculum, and a school culture that discourages innovation (see discussion of these issues in Jarrar & Massialas, 1992; Sarhaddi Nelson, 2001; Tawila, Lloyd, Bensch, & Wassef, 2000). A frequent complaint of CELT participants is that they do not have sufficient support or opportunity to put their new knowledge and skills into practice. However, the high motivation of CELT participants has led many of them to seek ways to introduce technology in their teaching, even in difficult circumstances. An excellent example is the classroom activity of Mounira, a CELT participant who teaches English literature at an urban university and whose success illustrates well the principles of electronic literacy and autonomous learning discussed earlier. Lacking access to any departmental or university computers for her teaching, Mounira TECHNOLOGY IN LANGUAGE EDUCATION 465 began to involve some individual students in tracking down online information on English poems from their home computers. These students made wall posters about what they found online and gave oral presentations to the other students in the class. These posters and presentations generated so much curiosity about the Internet that the class organized voluntary after-class field trips to the public-access computers at a nearby library. Groups of students, most of whom had never sat in front of a computer, worked in pairs at the library computers to sign up for free e-mail accounts and learn how to use the World Wide Web. These newly connected students then started to do their own online research on English poets, leading to more classroom presenta- tions and eventually to an online collaboration with students in another English class taught by a CELT participant at a different university. Mounira explained to me by e-mail how all this activity reshaped class dynamics: Two other students gave a presentation on the inauguration poems delivered by Robert Frost and Maya Angelou (another poet they’re studying this term) in the inauguration ceremonies of Kennedy and Clinton. One of the two students had come over to me a few days earlier and accusingly said: “I haven’t done a presentation yet”. I could barely keep myself from laughing out loud. I have never had a student before ask to give a presentation! In fact, this same girl had come over to me at the beginning of the semester in tears because she had flunked her previous English course. The final assignment is happening right now. It’s a collaboration between three of my students and Laila’s students [a class of a CELT participant at another university]. I thought my students would simply rewrite online what they had come up with in class but they’re doing more than that. They seem to have formulated insights about the poem which I have no idea where they got from! I can only think of one word: motivation. I haven’t had such a fulfilling experience in a long time. I keep receiving emails like “please reply now!” or “I sent you an email, you didn’t get it?” Or students submitting entries for a poetry competition, on the deadline, through attachments, and requiring immedi- ate confirmation. I’m not complaining, because to me it’s nothing short of a miracle and I’m just so happy to be a witness to it. (personal communication, April 2001) Though Mounira started by just wanting to get her students access to the content on the Internet, she came to strongly value the autonomous processes involved. When told that she could simply give out handouts rather than have students find information themselves online, she replied, “It’s not the handout I’m interested in as much as the process of the students retrieving that handout themselves and using the Internet to do that” (personal communication, January 2002). The excitement generated in Mounira’s class reflects the positive attitude of many educators and students in Egypt toward the CELT 466 TESOL QUARTERLY program. Though it has not yet reached a large percentage of Egyptian teachers nor received sufficient institutional support from the Ministry of Education, the program’s strong grassroots orientation has earned it the reputation as one of IELP-II’s best projects. Key to the success have been a strategic focus on the development and consolidation of change agents, a cascade training approach that works through change agents to reach other early adopters, a focus on content and tools appropriate to the current developmental conditions of Egypt, and a fostering of ongoing sustainable leadership networks and structures. Whether and how this group breaks through its still relatively small circles to help effect lasting change within the broader system of schooling remains to be seen, though substantial underlying problems with Egyptian educa- tional institutions as well as a broader political, economic, and cultural climate that discourages innovation make the possibility of any rapid breakthroughs unlikely (Warschauer, in press). Teacher Education via Videoconferencing A second IELP-II program worth examining is a teacher methodology workshop conducted via videoconferencing. The workshop has in- structed some 3,000 teachers in 3 years in areas of basic English language teaching methodology. Lessons learned in conducting and improving the workshop over a 3-year period support many of the points discussed above. The intended product of the videoconference workshop, as initially conceived, was trained teachers. Specifically, the workshop sought to reach large numbers of teachers who could not ordinarily attend workshops in the few major cities where they are usually held and help these teachers acquire the knowledge, skills, and attitudes required to carry out effective communicative language instruction in their classrooms. The process chosen to achieve this goal was a 1-week videoconference workshop. During the first year of the program, two 1-week workshops were held (each with a different set of teachers), covering the principal aspects of basic English language teaching methodology. The workshops were held in the Egyptian Ministry of Education’s videoconference halls, a set of 27 centers scattered throughout the country. These halls enjoy multipoint communications capacity; a speaker from any one of the 27 sites can communicate by video and audio to all the other 27 sites simultaneously. The workshops were taught by university teacher educators, who delivered the workshops from Cairo over the videoconference network. Discussion at the 27 sites and across sites was managed with the assistance of two or three facilitators at each site, most of whom were working for TECHNOLOGY IN LANGUAGE EDUCATION 467 the Ministry of Education as English language supervisors in the schools and who had come to Cairo for a few days of training in videoconference facilitation prior to the workshops. Approximately 600 public middle school English teachers participated in each of the 1-week workshops, for a total of 1,200. Unfortunately, the communicative medium of videoconferencing did not prove rich enough for an effective workshop. The sound quality was not as good as in face-to-face communication, and the Cairo-based teacher educators could not adequately assess the conditions at each site (because they could only view 1 of the 27 sites at a time). In addition, teachers complained that they found the presentations too theoretical and that they failed to adequately address classroom conditions in Egypt. Lack of direct follow-up between the teacher educators and the teachers also proved to be a serious problem, because it was unclear what elements of the workshop, if any, teachers were able to implement in their classrooms. A formal evaluation team found that the program had little lasting impact on the participating teachers. During the next 2 years, both the intended product and the process used in the program were redesigned to better reflect a developmental perspective. The product, or goal, was reconceived to place greater emphasis on sustainable change at both the teacher and the institutional level. Individual teachers were expected not only to master knowledge and skills of communicative language teaching, but also to be able to reflect on teaching techniques and approaches in light of their class- room circumstances and continually adjust and adapt as necessary. At the institutional level, a goal was to develop the capacity of the Ministry of Education and its personnel to develop and carry out its own effective teacher education programs via videoconferencing in the future. Adjustments were made in the process to support these expanded goals. The two separate 1-week workshops were replaced by a single, year- long workshop with different parts. Specifically, 600 teachers partici- pated in a 1-week workshop early in the academic year, in a series of 1-day follow-up videoconference workshops throughout the year, and in fol- low-up assignments between the workshops. These assignments includ- ing trying out in their classrooms what they had learned in the videoconferences, keeping reflection logs and portfolios, and carrying out peer observation. The 1-day follow-up videoconference sessions then focused directly on challenges and problems that teachers faced as they tried to implement what they had learned in the classroom. This reorganization of the videoconference workshops meant that only 600 teachers instead of 1,200 were reached per year, but they were in effect participating in a year-long program with a good deal of on-site follow-up rather than in a 5-day program with no follow-up at all. The role of the local facilitators changed as well. Although they 468 TESOL QUARTERLY previously had just helped guide discussion during the videoconferences, they now also helped manage the school-based follow-up by visiting and observing teachers at their schools, reading over their journals and portfolios, and conducting meetings with teachers in their area. This school-based follow-up added a note of seriousness to the workshop, as the participants knew that they were expected to reflect on and try out what they had been introduced to in the videoconferences and that they would be offered support and guidance to ensure that this occurred. The facilitators were also invited to contribute their own considerable expertise, based on years of local teacher supervision, by making presentations as part of the videoconference workshop. All the facilita- tors were invited to submit formal proposals for presentations they would like to give in the workshop. Those with the best proposals made presentations over the videoconferencing network during the 1-day follow-up videoconference sessions. Topics of these proposals included techniques for teaching reading, the effective use of visual displays, and the use of pair and group work in class. The facilitators usually collabo- rated with colleagues in their locations—in some cases participants in the CELT network—to develop multimedia material to support their videoconference presentations. These presentations were an important step forward, because there is a huge social and educational gap in Egypt between Ministry of Educa- tion employees (whether teachers or supervisors) and university profes- sors. Having the local facilitators, who are Ministry of Education super- visors, join the university professors in giving presentations over the national videoconference network was a small step in bridging this gap. The facilitators’ presentations were not as polished as those of the university professors, but their knowledge of teachers’ working condi- tions was much greater, as they worked daily supervising teachers in the classroom. They could thus fashion presentations that directly addressed teachers’ needs, which added credibility to the entire workshop. The preworkshop program for the facilitators was redesigned to reflect the expanded role they played in the program. Beyond topics of workshop facilitation, it also included topics such as how to organize peer observation, keep and evaluate teaching portfolios, make effective proposals, and make effective presentations. Technology was used to support the new school-based emphasis. A video team from Cairo traveled to different parts of the country to film teachers who were implementing in the classroom what they had learned in the workshop. This video gave the leaders of the workshop a better understanding of how teachers were acting on what had been previously covered and thus allowed the leaders to refine the content of the course. More importantly, the videos were then shown in the follow-up work- shops and served as a powerful stimulus for discussion among the TECHNOLOGY IN LANGUAGE EDUCATION 469 workshop participants. Ordinary classroom teachers showed great cour- age in having their own unrehearsed classroom teaching observed and critiqued by hundreds of their peers from throughout the country. With presentation and discussion of this classroom video, the work- shops became less a lecture from Cairo and more a reflective interaction based on teachers’ discussion of actual examples of their peers’ practice. Workshop participants who were perhaps shy about attempting new techniques in the classroom could see with their own eyes that the material covered in the course not only was theoretical but could actually be interpreted into classroom instruction in an Egyptian context. Lively discussions ensued as teachers observed and discussed videotapes of their colleagues trying out new techniques, with the very teachers featured in the videotapes available to explain their pedagogical strate- gies and respond to follow-up questions. For example, one video clip showed Hanaa, a teacher from a small town in a rural area, using small- group role playing to reinforce a grammatical point. The hundreds of teachers at the 27 sites then actively debated over the videoconferencing system whether Hanaa’s teaching strategies were practical in their own classroom and how they might have managed things differently. At many times, these debate and discussion became quite animated, as teachers from several sites competed to gain the floor and explain their views. Over 2 years, the videoconference-based training was thus trans- formed from an activity that was somewhat removed from teachers’ actual needs and experiences to one that many of the teachers viewed as highly relevant and valuable. As one teacher from a small town in the Sinai said, “I’ve been in many training workshops, but none of them were so closely related to what I actually needed in the classroom. This workshop allowed me to learn about things that were directly related to my own teaching needs” (personal communication, May 11, 2000). In summary, the infusion of videoconferencing did not bring many positive changes, but when videoconferencing was carried out in a way that better reflected the developmental needs and conditions of the local actors, important gains were achieved. Changes included focusing on the overall system of instructional support—in this case, a longitudi- nal school-based program—that could be integrated with a technology- based distance education. These changes also involved the education and development of a leadership cadre, the facilitators, who gained expertise in all aspects of videoconference-based education, including learning to conduct effective presentations themselves over the videoconferencing system. Through this effort, and especially through the close work of the facilitators, a leadership cadre was formed that could help lead technology-mediated education programs in the future. As in the CELT project above, the long-term impact of the videoconference workshops is difficult to foresee. Unfortunately, the 470 TESOL QUARTERLY Ministry of Education unit that organizes other videoconference work- shops is made up exclusively of experts in the technical matters of video, computers, and telecommunications, with no specialists in pedagogy. Those in charge of the unit appeared to recognize the value of the IELP- II videoconference program and spoke positively of the interactive features that they witnessed, but it is unclear the extent to which such features will be incorporated into their own education programs, which are more similar to the first round of IELP-II videoconferencing (short programs with limited interaction) rather than the improved later version. In the long run, the Ministry of Education’s Technology Devel- opment Center, which manages the videoconferencing unit and other Ministry technology programs, needs to develop more expertise and emphasis in pedagogy and curriculum rather than solely in technical matters, but IELP-II has not been able to bring about that change. Other Projects The length limitation of a journal article does not allow a full discussion of all the challenges, successes, and failures of IELP-II’s work with technology in education. The two relatively successful projects described here were chosen for discussion because of their common link to issues of technology, training, and capacity development, but some other technology-based projects were not so successful. For example, an effort to install two model CALL laboratories stalled for years, caught between the differing priorities of the donor (USAID) and the recipients (the Egyptian Ministry of Education and a university college of education; see discussion in Warschauer, in press). And even the projects described above were limited in their impact, reaching a small percentage of Egyptian teachers and failing to achieve full integra- tion in Egyptian educational institutions. This failure reflected a more general shortcoming of IELP-II’s work: an inability to help further institutional reform within the Ministry of Education so that the ministry itself could provide better ongoing leadership in improving teacher education and language education. This failure in turn was due to broader donor-recipient contradictions in the aid dynamic (as discussed, in general, in Hall, 1997; Smith, 1997) and reflect the fact that Egypt and its educational system were targeted for U.S. aid projects for geopolitical reasons rather than because of a good match between the development perspectives of the donor and recipient (Weinbaum, 1986). Overcoming these larger contradictions was beyond the capacity of either IELP-II or the Egyptian teachers it worked with. However, the shortcomings of IELP-II’s work were balanced by some important successes, particularly in areas related to technology in TECHNOLOGY IN LANGUAGE EDUCATION 471 language teaching. A leadership core, made up of innovators and early adopters, has emerged within the educational system to discuss and promote effective uses of technology in language learning. This technology- (and pedagogy-) savvy network can now play a leadership role similar to that of comparable networks in other countries (e.g., the Japan Association for Language Teaching’s Computer-Assisted Language Learning Special Interest Group). And a number of Egyptian language educators have also begun to share their expertise on these issues internationally by presenting on educational technology topics at inter- national conferences and participating in the international leadership of CALL organizations. This participation allows Egyptian educators to help define the future of CALL rather than only implementing technolo- gies and approaches that are designed abroad. CONCLUSION “Technologies like computer systems belong to the realm of expres- sive tools of human nature,” writes Corea (2000, p. 9). Rather than “foisting such technologies haphazardly on people,” he continues, we should instead foster “the long-term nurturing of behaviors intrinsically motivated to engage with such technologies.” It is thus crucial to “engender a systemic tendency to toward innovation in social units,” and this requires “an ‘innovating’ rather than a ‘borrowing’ strategy” (p. 9). Quoting Perez and Soete (1988), he adds that “a real catching up process can only be achieved through acquiring the capacity for partici- pating in the generation and improvement of technologies, rather than in the simple use of them” (Corea, p. 9). In the area of language education, this translates into the essential role of a body of teachers with the knowledge, skills, and attitude for innovatively designing, adapting, and applying technology in the class- room, appropriate to local context. This crucial role of human capacity and motivation for technological innovation was recognized by an Egyptian university lecturer, who told me several years ago that “we have the hardware, we have the software, but we lack the humanware” (personal communication, May 2, 1998). Even then, the statement was exaggerated, but the speaker’s emphasis on human development and leadership provides an excellent framework for ESOL educators who seek to make effective use of ICT. The goal in TESOL, and especially in considerations of how to make use of technology, should be not only development of the language but also development of the person. At the classroom level, that implies helping students not only use technology as an instructional aid but also master technology as a medium of commu- nication, research, and knowledge production. At the professional level, 472 TESOL QUARTERLY that implies developing networks of innovators with expertise in technology- enhanced teaching, teacher development, and educational reform. As the experience in Egypt demonstrates, these “products” also require a rethinking of the process of teaching and educating teachers with technology. Whether one is working with students or teachers, a developmental approach for technology and language learning requires a long-term process emphasizing initiative, autonomy, reflection, and the self-generated capacity for innovation. Through such an approach, TESOL professionals can enable people to make use of all the tools available to them—and especially the two powerful and intertwined tools of English language and information technology—to achieve their developmental goals. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This article benefited from the comments and suggestions of Mounira Soliman of Cairo University, a leader in the CELT program and videoconference workshops. I also thank all the educators that I worked with on educational technology programs in Egypt; their dedication and commitment made these programs possible. THE AUTHOR Mark Warschauer is associate chair of the Department of Education at the University of California, Irvine, an assistant professor of education and of information and computer science, and editor of the journal Language Learning & Technology. His latest book is Technology and Social Inclusion: Rethinking the Digital Divide (MIT Press). REFERENCES Bahaa El Din, H. K. (1997). Education and the future. Kayoub, Egypt: Al Ahram Commercial Press. Bowers, R. (1983). Project planning and performance. In C. J. Brumfit (Ed.), Language teaching projects for the third world (ELT Documents No. 116, pp. 99–160). Oxford: Pergamon Press. Breen, M. (1984). Process syllabuses for the language classroom. In C. J. Brumfit (Ed.), General English syllabus design (ELT Documents No. 118, pp. 47–60). London: Pergamon Press. Candlin, C. N. 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Major and for Ferenc Bunta should have read “Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, United States.” TESOL Quarterly regrets the error. TECHNOLOGY IN LANGUAGE EDUCATION 475 INFORMATION FOR CONTRIBUTORS EDITORIAL POLICY TESOL Quarterly, a professional, refereed journal, encourages submission of previously unpublished articles on topics of significance to individuals concerned with the teaching of English as a second or foreign language and of standard English as a second dialect. As a publication that represents a variety of cross-disciplinary interests, both theoretical and practical, the Quarterly invites manuscripts on a wide range of topics, especially in the following areas: 1. psychology and sociology of language 3. testing and evaluation learning and teaching; issues in research 4. professional and research methodology preparation 2. curriculum design and development; 5. language planning instructional methods, materials, and 6. professional standards techniques Because the Quarterly is committed to publishing manuscripts that contrib- ute to bridging theory and practice in our profession, it particularly welcomes submissions drawing on relevant research (e.g., in anthropology, applied and theoretical linguistics, communication, education, English education [including reading and writing theory], psycholinguistics, psy- chology, first and second language acquisition, sociolinguistics, and sociol- ogy) and addressing implications and applications of this research to issues in our profession. The Quarterly prefers that all submissions be written so that their content is accessible to a broad readership, including those individuals who may not have familiarity with the subject matter addressed. TESOL Quarterly is an international journal. It welcomes submissions from English language contexts around the world. GENERAL INFORMATION FOR AUTHORS Submission Categories TESOL Quarterly invites submissions in five categories: Full-length articles. Contributors are strongly encouraged to submit manu- scripts of no more than 20–25 double-spaced pages or 8,500 words (includ- ing references, notes, and tables). Submit three copies plus three copies of an informative abstract of not more than 200 words. If possible, indicate the number of words at the end of the article. To facilitate the blind review process, authors’ names should appear only on a cover sheet, not on the title page; do not use running heads. Submit manuscripts to the Editor of TESOL Quarterly: INFORMATION FOR TESOL QUARTERLY Vol. CONTRIBUTORS 36, No. 3, Autumn 2002 477 Carol A. Chapelle Department of English 203 Ross Hall Iowa State University Ames, IA 50011-1201 USA The following factors are considered when evaluating the suitability of a manuscript for publication in TESOL Quarterly: • The manuscript appeals to the general interests of TESOL Quarterly’s readership. • The manuscript strengthens the relationship between theory and prac- tice: Practical articles must be anchored in theory, and theoretical articles and reports of research must contain a discussion of implications or applications for practice. • The content of the manuscript is accessible to the broad readership of the Quarterly, not only to specialists in the area addressed. • The manuscript offers a new, original insight or interpretation and not just a restatement of others’ ideas and views. • The manuscript makes a significant (practical, useful, plausible) contri- bution to the field. • The manuscript is likely to arouse readers’ interest. • The manuscript reflects sound scholarship and research design with appropriate, correctly interpreted references to other authors and works. • The manuscript is well written and organized and conforms to the specifications of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Associ- ation (4th ed.). Reviews. TESOL Quarterly invites succinct, evaluative reviews of professional books. Reviews should provide a descriptive and evaluative summary and a brief discussion of the significance of the work in the context of current theory and practice. Submissions should generally be no longer than 500 words. Send one copy by e-mail to the Review Editor: Roberta Vann

Review Articles. TESOL Quarterly also welcomes occasional review articles, that is, comparative discussions of several publications that fall into a topical category (e.g., pronunciation, literacy training, teaching methodology). Review articles should provide a description and evaluative comparison of the materials and discuss the relative significance of the works in the context of current theory and practice. Submissions should generally be no longer than 1,500 words. Submit two copies of the review article to the Review Editor at the address given above. 478 TESOL QUARTERLY Brief Reports and Summaries. TESOL Quarterly also invites short reports on any aspect of theory and practice in our profession. We encourage manu- scripts that either present preliminary findings or focus on some aspect of a larger study. In all cases, the discussion of issues should be supported by empirical evidence, collected through qualitative or quantitative investiga- tions. Reports or summaries should present key concepts and results in a manner that will make the research accessible to our diverse readership. Submissions to this section should be 7–10 double-spaced pages, or 3,400 words (including references, notes, and tables). If possible, indicate the number of words at the end of the report. Longer articles do not appear in this section and should be submitted to the Editor of TESOL Quarterly for review. Send one copy of the manuscript each to: Cathie Elder Paula Golombek Department of Applied Language 305 Sparks Building Studies and Linguistics Pennsylvania State University University of Auckland University Park, PA 16802 USA Private Bag 92019 Auckland, New Zealand The Forum. TESOL Quarterly welcomes comments and reactions from readers regarding specific aspects or practices of our profession. Responses to published articles and reviews are also welcome; unfortunately, we are not able to publish responses to previous exchanges. Contributions to The Forum should generally be no longer than 7–10 double-spaced pages or 3,400 words. If possible, indicate the number of words at the end of the contribution. Submit three copies to the Editor of TESOL Quarterly at the address given above. Brief discussions of qualitative and quantitative Research Issues and of Teaching Issues are also published in The Forum. Although these contri- butions are typically solicited, readers may send topic suggestions or make known their availability as contributors by writing directly to the Editors of these subsections. Research Issues: Teaching Issues: Patricia A. Duff Bonny Norton Department of Language Department of Language and Literacy Education and Literacy Education University of British Columbia University of British Columbia 2125 Main Mall 2125 Main Mall Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z4 Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z4 Canada Canada Special-Topic Issues. Typically, one issue per volume will be devoted to a special topic. Topics are approved by the Editorial Advisory Board of the Quarterly. Those wishing to suggest topics or make known their availability as guest editors should contact the Editor of TESOL Quarterly. Issues will generally contain both invited articles designed to survey and illuminate central themes as well as articles solicited through a call for papers. INFORMATION FOR CONTRIBUTORS 479 General Submission Guidelines 1. All submissions to the Quarterly should conform to the requirements of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (4th ed.), which can be obtained from the American Psychological Association, Book Order Department, Dept. KK, P.O. Box 92984, Washington, DC 20090-2984 USA. Orders from the United Kingdom, Europe, Africa, or the Middle East should be sent to American Psychological Association, Dept. KK, 3 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, London, WC2E 8LU, England. For more information, e-mail

or consult http:// www.apa.org/books/ordering.html. 2. All submissions to TESOL Quarterly should be accompanied by a cover letter that includes a full mailing address and both a daytime and an evening telephone number. Where available, authors should include an electronic mail address and fax number. 3. Authors of full-length articles, Brief Reports and Summaries, and Forum contributions should include two copies of a very brief biographical statement (in sentence form, maximum 50 words), plus any special notations or acknowledgments that they would like to have included. Double spacing should be used throughout. 4. TESOL Quarterly provides 25 free reprints of published full-length articles and 10 reprints of material published in the Reviews, Brief Reports and Summaries, and The Forum sections. 5. Manuscripts submitted to TESOL Quarterly cannot be returned to authors. Authors should be sure to keep a copy for themselves. 6. It is understood that manuscripts submitted to TESOL Quarterly have not been previously published and are not under consideration for publica- tion elsewhere. 7. It is the responsibility of the author(s) of a manuscript submitted to TESOL Quarterly to indicate to the Editor the existence of any work already published (or under consideration for publication elsewhere) by the author(s) that is similar in content to that of the manuscript. 8. The Editor of TESOL Quarterly reserves the right to make editorial changes in any manuscript accepted for publication to enhance clarity or style. The author will be consulted only if the editing has been substantial. 9. The views expressed by contributors to TESOL Quarterly do not necessar- ily reflect those of the Editor, the Editorial Advisory Board, or TESOL. Material published in the Quarterly should not be construed to have the endorsement of TESOL. Informed Consent Guidelines TESOL Quarterly expects authors to adhere to ethical and legal standards for work with human subjects. Although we are aware that such standards vary among institutions and countries, we require authors and contributors to 480 TESOL QUARTERLY meet, as a minimum, the conditions detailed below before submitting a manuscript for review. TESOL recognizes that some institutions may require research proposals to satisfy additional requirements. If you wish to discuss whether or how your study met these guidelines, you may e-mail the managing editor of TESOL publications at

or call 703-535-7852. As an author, you will be asked to sign a statement indicating that you have complied with Option A or Option B before TESOL will publish your work. A. You have followed the human subjects review procedure established by your institution. B. If you are not bound by an institutional review process, or if it does not meet the requirements outlined below, you have complied with the following conditions. Participation in the Research 1. You have informed participants in your study, sample, class, group, or program that you will be conducting research in which they will be the participants or that you would like to write about them for publication. 2. You have given each participant a clear statement of the purpose of your research or the basic outline of what you would like to explore in writing, making it clear that research and writing are dynamic activities that may shift in focus as they occur. 3. You have explained the procedure you will follow in the research project or the types of information you will be collecting for your writing. 4. You have explained that participation is voluntary, that there is no penalty for refusing to participate, and that the participants may withdraw at any time without penalty. 5. You have explained to participants if and how their confidentiality will be protected. 6. You have given participants sufficient contact information that they can reach you for answers to questions regarding the research. 7. You have explained to participants any foreseeable risks and discomforts involved in agreeing to cooperate (e.g., seeing work with errors in print). 8. You have explained to participants any possible direct benefits of participating (e.g., receiving a copy of the article or chapter). 9. You have obtained from each participant (or from the participant’s parent or guardian) a signed consent form that sets out the terms of your agreement with the participants and have kept these forms on file (TESOL will not ask to see them). Consent to Publish Student Work 10. If you will be collecting samples of student work with the intention of publishing them, either anonymously or with attribution, you have made that clear to the participants in writing. INFORMATION FOR CONTRIBUTORS 481 11. If the sample of student work (e.g., a signed drawing or signed piece of writing) will be published with the student’s real name visible, you have obtained a signed consent form and will include that form when you submit your manuscript for review and editing (see http://www.tesol.org /pubs/author/consent.html for samples). 12. If your research or writing involves minors (persons under age 18), you have supplied and obtained signed separate informed consent forms from the parent or guardian and from the minor, if he or she is old enough to read, understand, and sign the form. 13. If you are working with participants who do not speak English well or are intellectually disabled, you have written the consent forms in a language that the participant or the participant’s guardian can understand. Statistical Guidelines Because of the educational role the Quarterly plays modeling research in the field, it is of particular concern that published research articles meet high statistical standards. In order to support this goal, the following guidelines are provided. Reporting the study. Studies submitted to the Quarterly should be explained clearly and in enough detail that it would be possible to replicate the design of the study on the basis of the information provided in the article. Likewise, the study should include sufficient information to allow readers to evaluate the claims made by the author. In order to accommodate both of these requirements, authors of statistical studies should present the following. 1. a clear statement of the research questions and the hypotheses that are being examined; 2. descriptive statistics, including the means, standard deviations, and sample sizes, necessary for the reader to correctly interpret and evaluate any inferential statistics; 3. appropriate types of reliability and validity of any tests, ratings, ques- tionnaires, and so on; 4. graphs and charts that help explain the results; 5. clear and careful descriptions of the instruments used and the types of intervention employed in the study; 6. explicit identifications of dependent, independent, moderator, inter- vening, and control variables; 7. complete source tables for statistical tests; 8. discussions of how the assumptions underlying the research design were met, assumptions such as random selection and assignment of subjects and sufficiently large sample sizes so that the results are stable; 9. tests of the assumptions of any statistical tests, when appropriate; and 482 TESOL QUARTERLY 10. realistic interpretations of the statistical significance of the results keeping in mind that the meaningfulness of the results is a separate and important issue, especially for correlation. Conducting the analyses. Quantitative studies submitted to TESOL Quarterly should reflect a concern for controlling Type I and Type II error. Thus, studies should avoid multiple t tests, multiple ANOVAs, and so on. However, in the very few instances in which multiple tests might be employed, the author should explain the effects of such use on the probability values in the results. In reporting the statistical analyses, authors should choose one significance level (usually .05) and report all results in terms of that level. Likewise, studies should report effect size through such strength of associa- tion measures as omega-squared or eta-squared along with beta (the possibility of Type II error) whenever this may be important to interpreting the significance of the results. Interpreting the results. The results should be explained clearly and the implications discussed such that readers without extensive training in the use of statistics can understand them. Care should be taken in making causal inferences from statistical results, and these should be avoided with correla- tional studies. Results of the study should not be overinterpreted or overgeneralized. Finally, alternative explanations of the results should be discussed. Qualitative Research Guidelines To ensure that Quarterly articles model rigorous qualitative research, the following guidelines are provided. Conducting the study. Studies submitted to the Quarterly should exhibit an in-depth understanding of the philosophical perspectives and research methodologies inherent in conducting qualitative research. Utilizing these perspectives and methods in the course of conducting research helps to ensure that studies are credible, valid, and dependable rather than impres- sionistic and superficial. Reports of qualitative research should meet the following criteria. 1. Data collection (as well as analyses and reporting) is aimed at uncovering an emic perspective. In other words, the study focuses on research participants’ perspectives and interpretations of behavior, events, and situations rather than etic (outsider-imposed) categories, models, and viewpoints. 2. Data collection strategies include prolonged engagement, persistent observation, and triangulation. Researchers should conduct ongoing observations over a sufficient period of time so as to build trust with respondents, learn the culture (e.g., classroom, school, or community), and check for misinformation introduced by both the researcher and the researched. Triangulation involves the use of multiple methods and sources such as participant-observation, informal and formal interviewing, and collection of relevant or available documents. INFORMATION FOR CONTRIBUTORS 483 Analyzing the data. Data analysis is also guided by the philosophy and methods underlying qualitative research studies. The researcher should engage in comprehensive data treatment in which data from all relevant sources are analyzed. In addition, many qualitative studies demand an analytic inductive approach involving a cyclical process of data collection, analysis (taking an emic perspective and utilizing the descriptive language the respondents themselves use), creation of hypotheses, and testing of hypotheses in further data collection. Reporting the data. The researcher should generally provide “thick descrip- tion” with sufficient detail to allow the reader to determine whether transfer to other situations can be considered. Reports also should include the following. 1. a description of the theoretical or conceptual framework that guides research questions and interpretations; 2. a clear statement of the research questions; 3. a description of the research site, participants, procedures for ensuring participant anonymity, and data collection strategies, and a description of the roles of the researcher(s); 4. a description of a clear and salient organization of patterns found through data analysis—reports of patterns should include representative examples, not anecdotal information; 5. interpretations that exhibit a holistic perspective in which the author traces the meaning of patterns across all the theoretically salient or descriptively relevant micro- and macrocontexts in which they are embedded; 6. interpretations and conclusions that provide evidence of grounded theory and discussion of how this theory relates to current research/ theory in the field, including relevant citations—in other words, the article should focus on the issues or behaviors that are salient to participants and that not only reveal an in-depth understanding of the situation studied but also suggest how it connects to current related theories. 484 TESOL QUARTERLY