Gibson Ferguson Language Planning and Education Edinburgh ...

34 Language Planning and Education
captive audience, and the curriculum affords the state unequalled opportunities to
shape the attitudes and behaviours of the next generation. Unsurprisingly, then, it
has often been a cornerstone in processes of national transformation.
To take one example, the national mass education systems introduced in England
and Wales in 1870, and in France in the 1880s under the Jules Ferry laws have, like
those in many other countries (e.g. Japan – see Coulmas 2002), been absolutely
central to the dissemination of national standard languages, which are, of course,
often quite different to the vernacular varieties spoken in the home. In such cases,
inculcation of literacy in the standard calls for mastery not only of a different
medium – writing – but also of a syntactically and lexically different variety.
Education has also more recently been a key instrument for language revitalisation
in societies emerging from, or rejecting, the old linguistic/cultural hegemony of
a dominant, centralised state – in Wales, Catalonia and the Basque country, for
example – where teaching the regional language is seen as an essential complement
to intergenerational transmission within the family and as generally uplifting to the
prestige of the language.
Evidence for the efficacy of teaching in revitalising a language is mixed, however.
The recent small rise in the number of Welsh speakers recorded in the 2001 national
census can, for instance, very plausibly be attributed to greater school exposure to
Welsh; but, as explained more fully in Chapter 4, it remains to be seen whether
Welsh language skills acquired at school will be retained over a lifetime and handed
down to the next generation.
In the very different circumstances of Ireland, however, teaching the minority
language 12 has not proved to be an effective instrument for language revitalisation
(see Ó’Riagáin 2001). The lesson many commentators draw, following Fishman
(1991), is that while minority language schooling is helpful, even necessary, for
language revitalisation, it is insufficient and likely in fact to be ineffective in the
absence of actions in other domains that reinforce the effects of teaching (see
Chapter 4).
If language education very often functions as an instrument for the attainment of
wider status planning goals (e.g. the dissemination of a national standard language),
it may also be a focus of language policy in its own right, one sufficiently distinct to
merit a separate label. One possibility, proposed by Cooper (1989: 33), is ‘acquisition
planning’, which refers to planning directed at increasing the numbers of users/
speakers of particular languages. Another, perhaps preferable for being more encompassing,
is ‘language planning in education’ within the scope of which would fall the
following policy issues, many of which are discussed in later chapters:
1. The choice of medium of instruction for various levels of the education system
– primary, secondary, tertiary (see Chapters 3 and 7)
2. The role of the home language (or ‘mother tongue’) in the educational process
(see Chapter 3)
3. The choice of second/foreign languages as curricular subjects of instruction,
along with associated decisions on: