University of Roskilde, Denmark, and Åbo Akademi University, Vasa, Finland
Diyarbakir/Amed, 20-25 March
2005
What
do two Prime Ministers think about the desirability of cultural diversity?
The Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan writes in his foreword to the
almost 500-page catalogue for the magnificent exhibition Turks. A journey
of a thousand years, 600-1600[1]
that he is confident that the exhibition “will further enhance mutual
understanding, tolerance and peace”. “Cultural diversity is a source of
richness for all nations”, he proclaims (2005: 9). The British Prime
Minister Tony Blair joins him in this, claiming that the journey
“demonstrates that the interaction of different cultures in our world is
crucial if we are to survive” (2005: 9). My first question to Erdogan and
the Turkish state is: Is
”cultural diversity”(which includes linguistic diversity) seen as ”a
source of richness” which enhances ”mutual understanding, tolerance and
peace” in today’s Turkey? Is the existing linguistic and cultural
diversity in Turkey being supported, maintained and developed?
In
this paper[2]
I show that subtractive
submersion (sink-or-swim) education where the dominant language is learned
at the cost of the child’s mother tongue (instead of in addition to the
mother tongue, additively) can and in most cases does cause serious mental
harm to the children, cognitively, educationally, linguistically,
psychologically, socially, and, in the end, in terms of labour market and
political participation. This kind of education fits two of the five
definitions of genocide (IIb and IIe) in the United Nations Genocide
Convention The paper will elaborate on these issues, with examples from many
parts of the world, relate the issues to the situation of Kurds in Turkey,
and suggest research-based solutions, anchored in human rights.
Most
of the world’s languages are very small. The median number of users of a
spoken language in the world has been estimated by Darrell Posey to be
5.000-6.000 (Posey 1997). Some 5.000 of the world’s almost 7.000 spoken
languages[3]
and at least 99% of the Sign languages[4]
have fewer than 100.000 users.
What
is happening today to the world’s languages? Are they being maintained?
The answer is NO.
Optimistic
estimates of what is happening suggest that at least 50% of today’s spoken
languages may be extinct or very seriously endangered ("dead" or
"moribund", meaning
they have only elderly speakers and no children are learning the language)
around the year 2100.
This estimate,
originating with Michael Krauss (1992) is also the one used in some of
UNESCO’s publications (see, for instance http://www.unesco.org/endangeredlanguages,
the guidelines Education in a Multilingual World (UNESCO 2003c) http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0012/001297/129728e.pdf).
Pessimistic but still completely realistic estimates claim that as many as
90-95% of them may be extinct or very seriously endangered in less than a
hundred years' time - this is Krauss' estimate today[5]
(e.g.
Krauss 1992, 1995, 1996, 1997).
UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage Unit’s Ad Hoc Expert Group on
Endangered Languages (see UNESCO 2003a; see also UNESCO 2003b, c) uses this
more pessimistic figure in their report, Language
Vitality and Endangerment
(
http://portal.unesco.org/culture/en/file_download.php/1a41d53cf46e10710298d314450b97dfLanguage+Vitality.doc).
We may have only 3-600 oral languages left as unthreatened languages,
transmitted by the parent generation to children; these would probably
be those languages that today have more than one million speakers, and a few
others. Still more pessimistic estimates suspect that only those 40-50
languages will remain in which you can, within the next few years, talk to
your stove, fridge and coffee pot, i.e. those languages into which Microsoft
software, Nokia mobile phone menus, etc., are being translated (Rannut
2003).
Nobody
has made predictions about the future of Sign languages, but the World
Federation of the Deaf is worried about more powerful Sign languages in
every country (and, especially the American Sign language also
internationally) wiping out smaller Sign languages[6].
Table 1 gives the web addresses for some of the lists of endangered
languages.
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When
we try to understand why languages are disappearing today faster than ever
before in human history, we find two explanatory paradigms, two ways of
attempting to explain it:
the
language death paradigm,
and the
language murder or the linguistic genocide paradigm (see Table 2).
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Does
it matter theoretically which paradigm we use?
If
we believe that languages just disappear naturally, just die, like
plants (they are born, they flourish; they have a certain life-span, and now
it is over for most small languages),
there is no agent. The only ones to blame are the speakers themselves. It is
THEIR individual and collective responsibility and they (seem to) have
profited by language shift (see Skutnabb-Kangas
2003 for an analysis of this kind of arguments).
If
we, on the other hand, believe that languages have been murdered/killed, we
can analyse the structural and ideological agents responsible: the world’s
economic, techno-military, social and political systems. Even when language
shift has happened with what seems like speakers’ “consent”,
ideological factors behind this “manufactured consent” (Herman &
Chomsky 1988) can be analysed.
I claim that the disappearance of most languages today and at least during
the last two hundred years or even longer can best be understood by using
the genocide paradigm. I shall come back to linguistic genocide in a moment.
First we are going to define killer languages and subtractive teaching.
What
is a killer language? When
”big” languages are learned subtractively (at the cost of the
mother tongues) rather than additively (in addition to mother
tongues), they become
killer languages. ”Being”
a killer language is thus NOT a characteristic of a language. It is a
relationship. It is a question of how a language functions in relation to
other languages. Any language can become a killer language in
relation to some other language.
Besides,
”languages”
do not kill each other. It is the power relations between the speakers of
the languages that are the decisive factors behind the unequal relations
between the languages, which then cause people from dominated groups to
learn other languages subtractively, at the cost of their own.
English
is today the world’s most important killer language, but
most dominant languages may function as killer languages vis-à-vis smaller
languages. There is a nested hierarchy of languages. Bigger languages
”eat” smaller languages, and are in turn ”eaten” by the even bigger
languages. When
speakers shift to another language (and their own language disappears), the
incoming new language can function as a killer language.
What
about Turkish in relation to Kurdish? Has Turkish functioned earlier as a
killer language vis-à-vis Kurdish? Have (some/many) Kurdish speakers
assimilated into becoming more or less monolingual in Turkish? Does Turkish
still function as a killer language in relation to Kurdish? My answer to all
three questions is yes.
English
may be functioning as a killer language even in relation to Danish, Finnish,
Swedish, and other ”big” EU languages in some domains (e.g. in research,
higher education etc.). There are several studies about this in the Nordic
countries, and the governments are actively planning to maintain the large
national languages as “complete” languages that can be used for all
purposes. Of course this goes together with language rights for ALL
minorities, even immigrated minorities[7].
What about English in relation to Turkish?
Are there areas, for instance in research, where Turkish researchers know
their area better in English than in Turkish? In that case even Turkish, a
very “big” language, may be losing domains because of English. This
could possibly give Turkish speakers some understanding for the plight of
Kurdish speakers.
Most
indigenous and minority children in the world are taught subtractively,
instead of additively. What is subtractive teaching (Table 3) and what does
it do to indigenous or minority children?
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All
Kurdish children in Turkey are being taught subtractively, in submersion
(sink or swim) programmes. Turkish is the teaching language. They do not get
any teaching using Kurdish as the teaching language. Kurdish is not even
taught as a subject.
Does
this teaching make Kurdish children literate? In most cases the answer is
no. Based on many studies, including work by UNESCO, we can claim the
following about the number of years of formal education that it takes to
become literate to various degrees, provided
the teaching language is your own language.
A.
The technical skill to decode text takes minimally 1-2 years to
learn, depending on the language, script, and level of teacher training and
schools in general.
B.
Lasting ”technical” literacy seems to take at least 4-6 years of
formal education - with less, the technical skill is forgotten as soon as
the child leaves school. This is often the situation in many African
countries.
C.
Using basic literacy for further education and as a member of civil
society seems to take at least 8-9 years, i.e. the time that obligatory
education lasts in many countries.
D.
Using literacy (including computer literacy) for full participation
on labour market and society at large often seems to be a matter of some 12
years of formal schooling, i.e. up to A-levels or graduation. This is what
beginning university students are supposed to have.
But
all of this is true only of the
education is in the student's mother tongue. If the student is taught
through the medium of a foreign (often dominant/majority/high status)
language, and if we want the student to learn not only literacy but the same
content as s/he would have learned in a mother tongue medium school, we have
to add another 2 years to A and 4-5 years to B, C and D. This has to do with
the fact that even if a minority student may become orally fluent in the
foreign teaching language so that s/he can talk about everyday things in a
face-to-face situation (BICS, in Cummins’ terms, Basic Interpersonal
Communicative Skills), in as short a time as 1-2 years, it takes minimally
5-7, often up to 9 years before she has developed cognitive-academic
language proficiency (CALP) in the foreign language. And this is what is
needed for complex content (see references to Cummins and Thomas &
Collier in the bibliography). At the point that the minority student has
this academic competence, enabling her to handle complex content in
intellectually and linguistically demanding de-contextualised situations,
s/he has to not only learn what those students who were taught through the
medium of their own language, learn, but s/he has to compensate for all the
knowledge that s/he lost while she did not yet know the teaching language
well enough. Table 4 summarizes the time estimates.
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Since
most of the world’s indigenous and many minority children are taught
subtractively, through the medium of a dominant language, not their mother
tongue, most of them do not stay in school long enough to become fully
literate.
What
about Kurdish children in Turkey?
What
does subtractive teaching through the medium of a foreign language do to
minority children? Subtractive teaching prevents profound literacy. It
prevents students from gaining the knowledge and skills that would
correspond to their innate capacities and would be needed for socio-economic
mobility and democratic participation. It replaces mother tongues and kills
languages. It wastes not only the child’s and her communitiy’s resources
but also the country’s resources in a major way. It prevents (sustainable)
development. And it is genocidal, according to UN Genocide Convention’s
definitions of genocide.
Subtractive
teaching leads to forced assimilation. It is genocidal, according to the
United Nation’s Genocide Convention’s definitions of genocide.
When one mentions the concept of linguistic genocide, many people are
shocked. They ask: Genocide?
Is the term not
too strong? Is it not watering down the concept - after all, genocide is
about killing people physically, is it not?
In
order to show that what happens in minority education really can be
genocide, we have to look at the United Nations Genocide Convention. UN
International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of
Genocide (E793, 1948)
has five definitions of genocide. Two
of them fit today’s indigenous and minority education.
Article
II(e): 'forcibly transferring children of the group to another group';
and
Article
II(b): 'causing serious bodily or mental harm to members
of the group'; (emphasis added).
In
order to make what the definitions might means more concrete, I give several
examples from various parts of the world. I ask the readers to think, for
each example, whether it also applies to Kurdish children in Turkey.
Pirjo
Janulf (1998) conducted a
longitudinal large-scale (almost 1200 youngsters in grade 9) study with
Finnish immigrant minority children in grade 9 in Sweden as the main
informants (with several types
of control groups in Sweden and Finland). All their education was through
the medium of Swedish. Janulf went back to as many as she could find, after
15 years.
Not
one of them spoke any
Finnish to their own children. Even
if her informants themselves might not have forgotten their Finnish
completely, their children were certainly forcibly transferred to the
majority group, at least linguistically.
What
about Kurdish children in Turkey? Assimilationist
education
is genocidal. It transfers
children forcibly from their own group to another group, linguistically and
culturally.
Edward
Williams (1995) conducted a large-scale study in Zambia and in Malawi, with
some 1,500 students, in grades 1-7. The Zambian students had all their education through the medium of
English only. Large numbers
of Zambian
pupils have, according to Williams, “very weak or zero reading competence
in two languages”. The Malawi
children were taught in local languages (which in most cases were their
mother tongues) during the first 4 years, with English as a subject; from
grade 5 onwards their education was through the medium of English. These
Malawi students had slightly better test results even in the English
language than the Zambian students. In addition, they learned to read and
write their own languages. Williams’
s conclusion is: “There is
a clear risk that the policy of using English as a vehicular language may
contribute to stunting,
rather than promoting, academic and cognitive growth”.
Surely
stunting a child’s academic and cognitive growth is “causing serious
mental harm” to the child, i.e. it fits the UN Genocide Convention’s
definition of genocide.
What
about Kurdish children in Turkey?
Katherine
Zozula’s and Simon Ford’s 1985 report
Keewatin Perspective on Bilingual Education tells about Canadian Inuit
‘students (taught through the medium of English, not their mother tongue)
who are neither fluent nor literate in either language’ and presents
statistics showing that the students ‘end up at only Grade 4 level of
achievement after 9 years of schooling’[8].
What about Kurdish children in Turkey?
Mick
Mallon and Alexina Kublu (1998) tell about “a
significant number of young people [who] are not fully fluent in their
languages”, and many students who “remain apathetic, often with minimal
skills in both languages”. These children also had all their education
with English as the teaching language. What
about Kurdish children in Turkey?
The
Nunavut Language Policy Conference in March 1998 claimed that “in
some individuals, neither language is firmly anchored.”
What about Kurdish
children in Turkey?
Another
report, Kitikmeot struggles to
prevent death of Inuktitut (1998) says that “teenagers
cannot converse fluently with their grandparents”.
What about Kurdish children
in Turkey
The
subtractive dominant-language-only-medium submersion education has clearly
caused serious mental harm to the indigenous, minority and/or dominated
group students, and has attempted to forcibly transfer them to another group
linguistically (see Skutnabb-Kangas 2000, 2003, and Magga et al. 2005 for
many more examples).
This
is linguistic genocide.
To
qualify as genocide, an act has to be intentional. Have states had an
intention to
'forcibly
transfer children of the group to another group';
and
'cause
serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group’?
My
answer is: yes, unfortunately they have.
Of course few states have themselves put it in those terms (even if
some have, especially earlier – see e.g. Milloy 1999 devastating book
looking at Canadian indigenous education; see also Churchill 1997).
Instead, we have to reformulate the question: have states knowingly
organised their indigenous or minority education so that it would eventually
lead to an annihilation of the languages? Have the states known?
The
negative results of subtractive teaching have been known already at the end
of the 1800s. States and educational authorities (including churches) have
had the knowledge. There
are many examples from the Nordic countries (see descriptions and references
in, e.g., Skutnabb-Kangas & Phillipson 1989). The USA Board of Indian
Commissioners (quoted from Francis & Reyhner 2002: 45-46) wrote in 1880:
…first
teaching the children to read and write in their own language enables them
to master English with more ease when they take up that study…a child
beginning a four years’ course with the study of Dakota would be further
advanced in English at the end of the term than one who had not been
instructed in Dakota (p. 77). …it
is true that by beginning in the Indian tongue and then putting the students
into English studies our missionaries say that after three or four years
their English is better than it would have been if they had begun entirely
with English (p. 98).
”Modern”
research results about how indigenous and minority education should be
organised have been available for at least 50 years, since the UNESCO expert
group summed them up in the seminal book The
use of the vernacular languages in education (1953), on the basis of research, that the mother tongue was
axiomatically the best medium of teaching. In
today’s schools, most indigenous and minority children and children from
dominated groups are taught subtractively.
If
states, despite this, and despite very positive results from properly
conducted additive teaching, have continued and continue to offer
subtractive education, with no alternatives, knowing that the results are
likely to be negative and thus to 'forcibly transfer children of the
group to another group'; and 'cause serious bodily or mental
harm to members of the group', this
must be seen as intentional.
If
we want to counteract the linguistic and cultural genocide, can linguistic
human rights play a role? First we have to ask: Do we have such rights? I
shall sum up what kind of LHRs exist in international law. I am here too
most interested in LHRs in education (see Skutnabb-Kangas 2000, Chapter 7,
for an extensive summary).
The
right to mother tongue medium (MTM) education is weak in international law
today. Having one's
education through the medium of one's own language in state schools, paid
for through tax moneys, is not a binding legally guaranteed right today,
except for some linguistic majority children - and not even for all of them.
Language
is one of the most important ones of those human characteristics on the
basis of which people are not allowed to be discriminated against. Others
are gender, ”race” and religion. Still language often disappears in the
educational paragraphs of binding HRs instruments. The
Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948): the paragraph on
education (26) does not refer to language at all. Similarly,
the International Covenant on
Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (adopted in 1966 and in force since
1976), having mentioned language on a par with race, colour, sex, religion,
etc. in its general Article (2.2), does explicitly refer to 'racial, ethnic
or religious groups' in its educational Article (13.1). However, here it
omits reference to language or linguistic groups:
...
education shall enable all persons to participate effectively in a free
society, promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations
and all racial, ethnic or religious
groups ... (emphasis added).
Secondly,
binding educational clauses of human rights instruments have more opt-outs,
modifications, alternatives, etc than other Articles. One example is the UN
Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic,
Religious and Linguistic Minorities,
1992. I have added the
emphases, 'obligating' and positive measures in italics, 'opt-outs'
in bold). The twp paragraphs about identity (which in itself is a
vague concept) make states fairly firm duty-holders whereas the paragraph
about language in education is full of opt-outs.
1.1.
States shall protect the existence and the national or ethnic,
cultural, religious and linguistic identity of minorities within their
respective territories, and shall encourage conditions for the promotion
of that identity.
1.2.
States shall adopt appropriate legislative and other
measures to achieve those ends.
4.3.
States should take appropriate measures so that, wherever
possible, persons belonging to minorities have adequate
opportunities to learn their mother tongue or to have instruction in
their mother tongue.
Council
of Europe’s Framework Convention for the Protection of National
Minorities[9] and The European Charter for Regional or
Minority Languages[10],
both in force since 1998, also have many of these modifications,
alternatives and opt-outs:. An example is the Framework Convention's
education article 11(3):
In
areas inhabited by persons belonging to national minorities traditionally or
in substantial numbers, if there is sufficient demand, the parties shall
endeavour to ensure, as far as possible and within the framework of their
education systems, that persons belonging to those minorities have adequate
opportunities for being taught in the minority language or for receiving
instruction in this language (emphases added).
The
following list shows some of these expressions from Council of Europe’s Framework
Convention for the Protection of National Minorities[11]
and The European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages:
■
‘as
far as possible’
■
‘within
the framework of [the State's] education systems’,
■
‘appropriate
measures’
■
‘adequate
opportunities’
■
‘if
there is sufficient demand’
■
‘substantial
numbers’
■
‘pupils
who so wish in a number considered sufficient’
■
‘if
the number of users of a regional or minority language justifies it’.
Without
binding educational linguistic human rights most minorities have to accept subtractive
education through the medium of a dominant/majority language. As I wrote
earlier, this mostly leads to assimilation and prevents integration. There
are, though, some new positive but so far non-binding recommendations; some
will be mentioned below.
If
the right to MTM education is still relatively weak in binding international
law, we have to ask: Why is it not stronger?
Does it mean that it should not be a right? Does it mean that
research results say that it is better for minorities and indigenous peoples
to be educated through the medium of a dominant language than to have MTM
education? Are the states which deny the right to MTM education (like
Turkey) in fact acting in a rational way? After all, minorities need to
learn the dominant language if they are to get anywhere in life.
My next questions are, therefore: Do states act in a rational way? Are research results being implemented?
7.
What are the recommendations about the medium of education for indigenous
peoples and linguistic minorities on the basis of research results?
Indigenous
and minority children have to become minimally bilingual through their
formal education. They need to know their mother tongues for reasons of
continuity, identity, security, self-esteem, emotional well-being, cognitive
development. They need to know the main majority/dominant language of the
country where they live for reasons of the labour market, often further
education, democratic participation and integration in the larger society.
Bilingual
education of all kinds is a very specialized and sensitive area of both
research and policy-making. However, detailed knowledge of it is a
prerequisite for being able to make sound recommendations for how minority
children should be educated in order to become high-level bilingual or
multilingual. One cannot expect that ordinary parents or politicians or even
teachers know these principles.
One
of the difficulties is that some of the scientifically sound and practically
proven principles of how to enable children to become high-level
multilingual with the support of the educational system are
counter-intuitive and go against common sense.
If
indigenous or minority children who speak their mother tongue at home, are
to become bilingual, and learn the dominant/majority language well,
a
common
sense approach would suggest that (1)
early start in and through the
medium of the dominant language, and (2) maximum
exposure to the dominant language
would be good ideas, like
they are for learning many other things - practice makes perfect.
In
fact, both are false. What we have is an early start fallacy, and a maximum
exposure fallacy. In
fact,
the longer indigenous and minority
children in a low-status position have their own language as the main medium
of teaching, the better they also become in the dominant language,
provided, of course, that they have good teaching in it, preferably given by
bilingual teachers.
This
is also acknowledged in UNESCO’s new Position Paper on education:
Education
in a multilingual world. UNESCO Education Position Paper,
2003
http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0012/001297/129728e.pdf.
This book may
replace UNESCO’s classical book, The use of
vernacular languages in education (Paris,
1953), which has for 50 years been a guiding book for educators. And the
1953 book also recommends mother tongue medium education.
The
Big Contradiction is that many
politicians and school authorities say that they want minority children to
learn their mother tongues and, especially, the dominant language(s)…
while in practice preventing it, today as much as earlier ("Despite the
reported success of bilingual methods, the federal government reacted
negatively and suppressed programs that included the use of an indigenous
language in the 1880s", Francis & Reyhner 2002: 46, about USA).
What
exactly do research results say, then? In the following I shall sum
up two really large-scale well-controlled studies, Ramirez
et al. study, 1991, and Thomas & Collier’s studies. Both are about
Spanish-speaking students in the USA.
The
Ramirez et al.’s 1991 study, with 2352 students, compared three groups of
Spanish-speaking minority students (see Table 5). The first group were
taught through the medium of English only (but even these students
had bilingual teachers and many were taught Spanish as a subject, something
that is very unusual in submersion programmes); the second one, early-exit
students, had one or two years of Spanish-medium education and were then
transferred to English-medium, and the third group, late-exit
students, had 4-6 years of Spanish-medium education before being transferred
to English-medium.
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Now
the common sense approach would suggest that the ones who started early and
had most exposure to English, the English-only students, would have the best
results in English, and in mathematics and in educational achievement in
general, and that the late-exit students who started late with
English-medium education and consequently had least exposure to English,
would do worst in English etc.
In
fact the results were exactly the opposite. The late-exit students got
the best results, and they were the only ones who had a chance to
achieve native levels of English later on, whereas the other two groups
were, after an initial boost, falling more and more behind, and were judged
as probably never being able to catch up to native English-speaking peers in
English or general school achievement.
The
Thomas & Collier study (see bibliography under both names), the largest
longitudinal study in the world on the education of minority students, with
altogether over 210,000 students. It included in-depth studies in both urban
and rural settings in the USA. It had full MTM programmes in a minority
language, dual-medium or two-way bilingual programmes, where both a minority
and majority language (mainly Spanish and English) were used as medium of
instruction, transitional bilingual education programmes, ESL (English as a
second language) programmes, and so-called mainstream (i.e. English-only
submersion) programmes (see Skutnabb-Kangas & García 1995 and
Skutnabb-Kangas 2000 for characteristics of various programmes).
Across
all the models, those students who reached the highest
levels of both bilingualism and school achievement were the ones where the
children's mother tongue was the main medium of education for the most
extended period of time. This length of education in the L1 (language 1,
first language), was the strongest predictor of both the children's
competence and gains in L2, English, and of their school achievement.
Thomas
& Collier state this as follows themselves (2002: 7):
“the strongest predictor
of L2 student achievement is the amount of formal L1 schooling. The more L1
grade-level schooling, the higher L2 achievement.”
The
length of mother tongue medium education was in both Ramirez' and
Thomas & Collier's studies more
important than any other factor in predicting the educational success of
bilingual students. It was
also much more important than socio-economic status, something extremely
vital in relation to poor and/or oppressed indigenous and minority students.
The
worst results (including
high percentages of push-outs[12])
were with students in regular
submersion programmes where the students' mother tongues (L1s) were
either not supported at all or where they only had some
mother-tongue-as-a-subject instruction. This is the subtractive learning
situation.
There
are hundreds of smaller studies showing similar conclusions, with many
different types of groups, and many languages, and from many countries[13].
A
typical example would be my own small-scale study among Finnish working
class immigrant minorities in metropolitan Stockholm in Sweden
(Skutnabb-Kangas 1987). The students in my study were in Finnish-medium
classes, and I had Swedish control groups in the parallel classes in the
same schools. For their Swedish competence, I used a difficult Swedish
language test, of the type where normally middle-class children do better
than working class children (see Table 6). After 9 years of mainly
Finnish-medium education, and good teaching of Swedish as a second language,
these working-class Finnish students got somewhat better results in the
Swedish language than the Swedish mainly middle-class control groups. In
addition, their Finnish was almost as good as the Finnish of Finnish control
groups in Finland.
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M
= mean; sd = standard deviation
Finnish
working class immigrant minority youngsters in Sweden, after 9 years of
mainly Finnish-medium education; Swedish control group: mainly middle class
youngsters in parallel classes in the same schools; Swedish test:
decontextualised, CALP-type test where middle-class subjects can be expected
to perform better. (Skutnabb-Kangas 1987)
Another
extremely well controlled study is Saikia & Mohanty's (2004) study of
indigenous/tribal Bodo children in Assam, India. After strong campaigning
they have just managed to get mother tongue medium education going. Saikia
and Mohanty compared three Grade 4 groups, with 45 children in each group,
on a number of measures of language and mathematics achievement. "The
three groups were matched in respect of their socio-economic status, the
quality of schooling and the ecological conditions of their villages."
Group BB, Bodo children, taught through the medium of the Bodo language,
performed significantly better on ALL tests than group BA, the indigenous
Bodo children taught through the medium of Assamese. Group BA did worst on
all the tests. Group AA, Assamese mother tongue children taught through the
medium of Assamese, performed best on two of the three mathematics measures.
There was no difference between groups BB and AA in the language measures.
"The findings are interpreted as showing the positive role of MT medium
schooling for the Bodo children."
All
these studies show both the positive results of additive mother
tongue medium maintenance education, and the mostly negative
results of subtractive dominant-language medium education.
Dominant-language-only
submersion programmes “are widely attested as
the least effective
educationally for minority language students”. This is the conclusion arrived at in a very large-scale and thorough
research summary by
Stephen May and Richard Hill (May
& Hill 2003: 14, see also May et al. 2003), commissioned by the Maori
Section of the Aotearoa/New Zealand Ministry of Education).
I
repeat: Dominant-language-only
submersion programmes “are widely attested as the least effective
educationally for minority language students”. This
is the model Turkey is using for Kurdish children.
If
the Turkish state wants Kurdish children to learn Turkish well, the best
method would be to use
Kurdish as the
main teaching language, and to teach Turkish as a subject, using bilingual
teachers who know both Turkish and Kurdish.
This
kind of teaching would obviously also make the children bilingual. They
would learn BOTH Turkish AND Kurdish well, and have a chance of achieving
academically.
Turkey
needs well-educated bilingual people with a strong bilingual bicultural
identity. Being able to enjoy all fundamental linguistic and cultural human
rights also promotes stability and loyalty.
This
kind of teaching would also live up to the recommendations in OSCE’s High
Commissioner on National Minorities’ Hague
Recommendations Regarding the Educational Rights of National Minorities
(1996); see http://www.osce.org/hcnm/)
and
UNESCO’s Education Position Paper
Education in a multilingual world (2003). In The
Hague Recommendations,
mother tongue
medium education is recommended for minorities at all levels of school, also
in secondary education. This includes bilingual teachers in the dominant
language as a second language (Art. 11-13).
The Explanatory Note, explaining and clarifying the Recommendations,
state clearly:
'[S]ubmersion-type
approaches whereby the curriculum is taught exclusively through the medium
of the State language and minority children are entirely integrated into
classes with children of the majority are not in line with international
standards' (The Explanatory Note, p. 5).
Teaching
Kurdish as a subject only in school (while the rest of the teaching is in
Turkish) might be a good start for the children’s identity and
self-esteem, but it does not help the children to learn Turkish well, and it
does not help them much in learning Kurdish
well either.
Today
research results are NOT
being implemented. Is Turkey implementing research results? NO. States,
including Turkey, do NOT
act in a
rational way. There are very large gaps between
theory and
practice, research and implementation, and rhetoric and realities.
Educational
linguistic human rights, especially the right to mother tongue medium
education, are among the most important rights for all indigenous peoples
and minorities. Without them, a minority/people whose children attend school
usually cannot reproduce itself as a minority/people. It cannot integrate
but is forced to assimilate.
Even
if many other countries participate in linguistic and cultural genocide in
relation to minorities, Turkey is unfortunately one of the worst offenders
in the world,
in several ways THE worst.
My
question is, then: When
are states going to see that their policies are irrational and work against
their own interests?
8. Is Turkey approaching international human rights standards? Could it?
Even if many
legal changes have been accepted (at least on paper), Turkey is not even
approaching the international human rights standards yet, neither in
education nor in other aspects of linguistic rights.
ALL
basic linguistic and cultural human rights are necessary. We can ask: do
they exist in Turkey for (Muslim) minorities?
In order to show that it would be perfectly possible for Turkey to
grant these rights, I want to make a few comparisons. We start with Finland.
In
Finland, with a population of some 5,2 million, there are fewer than 300,000
native Swedish-speakers (5.8% of the population), a total of some 7,000
speakers of 3 different Saami languages, some 5-7,000 Deaf people and
speakers of many other languages (Romany, Russian, Tatar, etc). In
comparison, how large is the percentage of Kurdish-speakers in Turkey?
Certainly more than 5,8% of the population!
Finnish
and Swedish are national languages, both with the same rights in ALL
official areas (education, media, army, church, courts, communication with
authorities, etc).[14]
This is what Kurdish could and should have in Turkey.
Even
the 3 Saami languages have regional official status[15].
The other languages (including Finnish Sign language) are mentioned in the
Constitution and have many more rights than Kurdish in Turkey.
We
can now ask: Has the existence of basic linguistic and cultural human rights
led to the disintegration of the Finnish state? A threat to unity? These are
the ghosts that Turkey always marshals to the fore, even in the latest
reform package of laws (for Amendments
to the Law on Foreign Language Education and Teaching
(2002), see www.abgs.gov.tr/abportal/uploads/files/Analytical%20Note%20on%20Constitutional%20Amendments%20.doc
and www.deltur.cec.eu.int/english/e-g-regular2002.html.
See also Skutnabb-Kangas 2002a,b).
Of course not! Ethnic Swedish-speakers in Finland identify politically as Finns/Finnish citizens. They have their own language and culture, but feel much closer to th