From the policy analysis and the learner interviews discussed above, it can be seen that each of the languages carries value for the state as well as the learners.
The negotiation of values can be conceptualized as language choice at several levels of decision making, involving a number of agents of choice interacting with each other.
The term ‘language choice’ can conjure up a host of phenomena ranging from language planning made by the state to individual language choices made by language learners or users. There has been relatively little discussion in the research literature to directly connect these two phenomena or other related phenomena, which is unfortunate as this makes it difficult for some stakehold-ers in language education to see how the choices they make can have educa-tional consequences for language learning. To synthesize the several dimensions of language choice in the research literature, Lam (2007b) proposed the Multi-agent Model (Table 9.3) involving agents such as: policy makers in the government, educators, parents (and other family members), learners and other language users.
In making policy decisions, policy makers are not only influenced by the patterns of language use in the society at the time of policy making but also by their hopes for the national future, taking into account language use around the world. Likewise, all agents in the model take account of the status quo at their level and make choices, overtly or covertly, to ‘engineer’ (Spolsky 1998: 66) some desirable linguistic future in view of the value(s) of the lan-guages involved in daily interaction, in education, in career advancement, regionally, nationally and globally. All choices involve conscious and active investment of resources such as time, energy and money to optimize learning
or language-use conditions such as learning materials, teaching input and language-use opportunities. Any investment of resources is inevitably linked to value assignment, conscious or sub-conscious, explicit or implicit. The more valuable a language is to a government, a team of educators, parents or learners, the more investment will be made into the teaching or learning of that language. Investments made by agents at one level inevitably affect the investments made by other agents. The learner is but one agent in this interac-tive language investment or trading process. The very interacinterac-tive nature of such a process gives rise to a certain indeterminancy in the assignment and re-assignment of language value; and it is this very indefiniteness that allows a state, such as the Chinese government, to officially argue for bilingualism while, in reality, to expect or at least encourage learners to be trilingual. (This section is adapted from Lam 2007b.)
Table 9.3 The Multi-agent Model
Agents Language choices Phenomena
Policy makers in the government
What language(s) or dialect(s) to promote in government, education and the public media.
Language planning.
Linguistic imperialism (if enforced by a foreign power).
Educators (principals, teachers)
What language(s) or dialect(s) to use as the medium/media of interaction or instruction in and outside the classroom, in what proportion and under what circumstances.
Models of bilingual or multilingual education.
Parents (and other family members)
What language(s) or dialect(s) to speak to each other and the child in and what medium/media of school instruction to choose for the child.
Language use in mixed marriages and international families.
Interface between the home and the school.
Learners What language(s) or dialect(s) to use with others or invest learning energy/time in while growing up and also in study plans in adulthood.
Language acquisition and learning.
Adult language learning.
Competent language users
What language(s) or dialect(s) to use in everyday interaction (for example, the workplace) and cultural or literary expression.
Conclusion
This chapter has shown that while the Chinese government seems to empha-size bilingualism in its policy statements, learners are often at least trilingual in day-to-day language use. It is argued that this apparent paradox is actually not an unrealistic solution to an otherwise politically difficult set of language circumstances to negotiate. The Chinese government will find it difficult to enforce an officially trilingual model as that will seem to lay too heavy a learn-ing burden on native speakers of Southern Chinese dialects and especially on the learners from minority ethnic groups. It is more politically expedient to therefore promote bilingualism officially and leave the emergence of trilin-gualism to the interaction of choices among different stakeholders in the language education process. What the state lacks in legal provision, the language investments made by intermediary agents at various levels of the lan-guage education process such as educators, parents and other competent language users in the society, will provide the impetus for learners to choose to become trilingual if they wish to participate in the mainstream life of the nation. This state of language trading can occur in China, and perhaps even in other countries, because the values attached to languages in any community are often in an unending state of flux and negotiation. One can even go so far as to state that it is the very indefiniteness surrounding the value of each lan-guage involved that permits governments and the lanlan-guage users in the realms they govern to trade languages from time to time and assign and re-assign value as they adjust to the changing market values of the languages involved both nationally and globally.
Note
1 This chapter draws upon the findings in the Language Education in China project which was fully supported by a grant from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (Project No. HKU7175/98H). The permission from Hong Kong University Press to adapt some case reports from Lam (2005) for this chapter is gratefully acknowledged.
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