cohesion - European Centre for Modern Languages

Both of these, the broadly social and the broadly linguistic, are brought closer together
with contemporary views of language that stress performativity and contemporary
views of society that stress activity. These approaches to language and society focus on
what we do rather than what we are, and view language as what we accomplish in
communication in interaction with others, rather than what we know in abstract.
By focusing more on performance, i.e. the doing or activating of sociolinguistics, we
open up a new space. We see that language and society do not just reflect each other
but that they sometimes, or often, constitute each other. Here we enter a richer and
deeper realm of thought which is very relevant to the projects that the ECML should
favour, such as activities in which language learning and teaching are integrated into
social actions favouring cohesive social relations among groups. In this way language
learning and social cohesion can be more supportive of each other.
I will discuss social cohesion in relation to language learning for the most part but
social cohesion as an ideal and as a problem has implications for language policy, for
language research and for language curriculum design as well as for language learning.
Social cohesion and language learning
In May of 2001 violent rioting occurred in the town of Oldham, in the Greater
Manchester area of England. According to most reports these were the worst riots with
an apparently racial motivation in the UK for more than 15 years. That same summer
there were other major riots in several English towns and some British newspapers
came to call it the Summer of Violence, as rioting extended to confrontation along
broadly racial divides in northern England towns and cities such as Leeds, Bradford
and Burnley. Preceding the riots there was a considerable build up of attacks, abuse and
interracial tension in Oldham between white and some south-Asian communities.
The October-November 2006 upheavals across France began in the suburb of Clichysous-Bois
when two boys seeking to evade capture by the police climbed into a power
substation and were electrocuted by a transformer, their deaths believed by their
community to be the responsibility of the police. This incident too was preceded by
years of economically based tension but still characterised by ethnic and religious
tensions, with the 27 October incident serving to catapult these simmering tensions into
open conflict that lasted some six weeks. The unrest spread, as we all know, thousands
of vehicles were burned, but fortunately few if any deaths resulted. President Jacques
Chirac was forced to declare a state of emergency on 8 November.
In Australia, at the beachside suburb of Cronulla in December of 2005 thousands of
white Australian youths, the national flag painted on their half-naked bodies, attacked
Lebanese people, a Sicilian gelato seller and anyone who looked vaguely swarthy and
foreign in a struggle for the right kind of behaviour on Sydney’s beloved beaches. Over
the next few days there were attacks on mosques and retaliation from some Muslims on
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