Monday

Plenary Address
Professor Alastair Pennycook
University of Technology Sydney
'Language, Liberty, Freedom and TESOL'

"Words may have a very great liberating force, but they are also very confining. ... Language may enhance our freedoms but it may also inhibit our freedoms."

"Let us not assume that English itself brings freedom. Let us not assume that the English we teach brings freedom. Let us not assume that the way we teach brings freedom."

"As TESOL teachers –
                What words do we let people speak?
                Whose words do we allow them to speak?"

Tuesday

Plenary Address
Professor Michael Clyne
University of Melbourne
'Language and Freedom or Imprisonment?'

"Through language we transmit information, ideas, prejudices and stereotypes. It is a medium for cognitive development, for grouping people and things in the world according to particular schemas. Because language is also a means of identification by which group boundaries are marked and identity is expressed and imposed, it may be a key factor in many social and political issues. It can thus contribute to both liberation and deprivation. It is the medium through which we socialise, learn and work, and the main vehicle through which people are encouraged to fear, suspect and hate. Language can be used to make us sick and to make us healthy, to misrepresent us, to mystify and to clarify. It is used to declare war and to make peace .…"

"Language has been used for well over a year to justify excluding and imprisoning asylum seekers and to project them as enemies of the Australian people. The use and abuse of language [viz., labels and slogans such as 'queue-jumper', 'border protection', 'illegal immigrants'] has imprisoned much of the Australian population in attitudes encouraging the imprisonment of the asylum seekers. We all have a responsibility to make others aware of and critical of any such abuse of language."

"Bilingualism, whether simultaneous, as in children from culturally-diverse backgrounds in Australia, or sequential, as in migrants and those acquiring a second language through education, has been credited with a range of advantages of a social, cultural, economic and cognitive nature. All these can have a liberating effect on an individual, but the freedom associated with this which could be developed out of the shared capital of multicultural Australia, is all too often limited by those with narrow horizons exerting power."

"Bilingualism empowers and facilitates the achievement of people’s fullest potential."

"In spite of Australia’s multilingualism it is still dominated by a monolingual frame of mind."

"The international literature has found that there is an underlying literacy skill which can be acquired in any language and transferred to any other. It involves strategies needed to make meaning from a text, and recognising the internal structure of a word. Literacy can be acquired in more than one language and it can be enhanced by the acquisition of additional languages."

"From the findings on literacy transfer and in keeping with international practice on bilingual education, it would also be appropriate, were it at all possible, if more literacy classes for adult migrants offered the initial stages in the first language so that the learners are not receiving intial instruction in a language in which they have very little competence."

"Unless governments provide special targeted funding for language programs more and more languages will not be represented at all at university in this country. Students will not be able to develop their competence in a language beyond Year 12, and there will be no way of training future generations of teachers in a language. Funding is also needed for primary and secondary curriculum material for different groups of students in a range of languages, so that their backgrounds and needs can be taken into account. Bilingual education in the Northern Territory needs to be reintroduced as a top priority. Ethnic communities and ethnic schools can provide an authentic environment, a cultural base, and a haven for the use of their language."

Wednesday

Plenary Address
Professor Ian G. Malcolm
Edith Cowan University
'English Language and Literacy Development and Home Language Support: Connections and Directions in Working with Indigenous Students'

"The reading and numeracy skills of Indigenous students become relatively weaker in comparison to non-Indigenous students as they progress through the primary years of schooling."

"Of an initial 250 or so Indigenous languages spoken in Australia before 1788, considerably fewer than half are still regularly used, and these in many cases by older people."

"The idea that people would be helped in learning 'standard' English by having attention given to another language or dialect seems counter-intuitive. Yet, the supporters of bilingual education, vernacular education and bi-dialectal education as means of supporting 'standard' English argue that, paradoxical as it may seem, the best way to help non-native speakers of 'standard' English to acquire it may be indirect."

(from the ATESOL NSW Newsletter, March 2003 issue)