 Okay, good. Well, thanks very much for coming. I know it's a very busy time and probably there are a lot of problem in London is always about five or six competing linguistic events at the same time. So what I'm going to do is, you've seen the abstract. I'm going to give Andy and Patrick, who is a professor of linguistics at Griffith University, but he's actually also an honorary professorial fellow here at SOAS. I'm going to give him as much time as possible and therefore I'm going to say, usually I say, the person doesn't need an introduction, but he deserves one. Now you certainly deserve one, but if these people have an abstract, I'm going to give you more time rather than read your work. What I should point out is that really Andy is one of the top scholars on language policy and especially Asian Englishes and we're very, very pleased that he's chosen to be an honorary fellow with us and that he contributes to especially courses on language policy but also English and the global world. Over to you, Andy. Thank you, Anne. Thank you very much. That's the title and although it's just me standing here, I have to acknowledge the work of Tony Liddicate in this presentation because we have just, the proofs are currently with the publishers and I'm just reading some of them. This book here called the Rutledge International Handbook of Language Policy, Education Policy in Asia. It's coming out, we hope, in a few months and Tony and I have been editing it. So a lot of what I'm going to say now, I really have to acknowledge Tony's contribution to this. And I think Anne knows Tony very well from many, many years back from another Australian. Okay. First of all, Asia. It's one of those things you don't want people to ask you these questions about, could you define Asia? And I'm sure so I spend a lot, a lot of time talking about this particular topic. I'm, we decided just so, and so we've decided so that's it. We decided that we're going to be East and Southeast, South and Central Asia but not Asia and Russia or West Asia and the Middle East. So we're basically, we are talking about the stands though, Kazakhstan, Kazakhstan come into this, but not the Middle East itself. So we're basically India, all that part of the world, yes, and of course East Asia and Southeast Asia. And, you know, Asia, it's interesting to me that I don't know whether you have it here, it's so as, but when people refer to Asia, they tend not to refer to Asia, they tend to refer to individual countries. But when people refer to Africa, they still tend to refer to Africa as though it was some kind of unified block despite being 55, whatever it is, countries of completely different types. And so that strikes me as very unusual. The other difference I think between Asia and Africa in this context is that Africa very often has adapted colonial languages as their languages. And there's been a huge debate about this for many, many years. But by and large in Asia, the opposite was the case. They have identified a national language which they then promoted to become the language of that particular country. So that's quite a significant difference really. And when we talk about language policy and education here, we're going to talk about four different types, four different sort of frameworks. One is national languages. How did they come about? And what are they? One is English. What role is English playing in the language education policies of these countries? What about the indigenous languages? Asia, how we've defined it anyway, is the most linguistically diverse place on the planet. India with 800 something languages. Indonesia with 700 or so languages. These are really, really diverse linguistically. What's happening to those languages? And what's happening to other foreign languages like the old post-colonial languages like French or whatever? Are they still being taught or not? So that's the kind of area that we're looking at. And there's a small group. So if you have any questions, of course, you can just ask at any time because there's not very many of us that we can talk about. As you'll know that most countries were colonized in the area we're talking about. Some were not. I mean Thailand wasn't, Nepal wasn't, but by and large most of the countries we're talking about were colonies. Japan itself operated as a colonial power for some time over Taiwan, for example, parts of China. China was never colonized although had chunks of its land owned if you like by various European powers in Japan. But basically they are new countries who have received independence since the Second World War of one sort or another. I grew up in what was called Malaya, which is now Malaysia. And I was there when they celebrated independence in 1957, as they call it, and I stood loyally with a Union Jack because I was English in those days. Still by the side of the road and whole my Union Jacker waved it as the Duke of Edinburgh went past in the car to hand over as it were the country to the Malaysian population. So this kind of activity was going on quite often over the world. And the kind of regimes that replace the colonial powers are interesting and complex in many ways. So as I said before, at independence, much of Asia rejected the use of colonial languages and chose local languages. And I'll just talk very briefly here about Indonesia because it's a fascinating example. Indonesia, as I mentioned earlier, has something like 700 languages spoken in it. And when the sort of the youth and the rebellion movement were coming up against the Dutch and so forth, coming up during the Second World War and before, they were looking for a language that they could use to express the independence of Indonesia. And they chose eventually Bahasa Malaysia, which was a language not spoken by many Indonesians at all. In fact, Bahasa Malaysia was spoken by only 3% of the population as a first language when it was adopted as the language of liberation, the language of revolution, and then became a constitutionally enshrined as the national language after the Second World War. Now, something like 70% of the population of Indonesia will claim to have a pretty good knowledge of Indonesia. Bahasa Indonesia, they call it Bahasa Indonesia, which is an Indonesian language. It's basically Malay with differences. I mean, there's a different sort of vocabulary set and so forth, but basically it's the same language. So here you have a newly independent nation choosing a language spoken by only 3% of the population to be the national language, which is very interesting and a very interesting insight, actually, into the often misunderstood but highly multicultural tolerant Indonesian view of life compared with some other places. And I think it's very... China, on the other hand, of course, had a top-down policy. Everyone will speak Pudonghua Mandarin, and that's it. And that's the language of the capital, and you're going to speak this way. The same thing happened in the Philippines, as we'll see. Okay, sometimes there are multiple local languages. Singapore will talk about these in more detail later. Russian and Kazakhstan and so forth, but the role of Russian in the stands is gradually declining and being replaced very often by English in many of these contexts. Not all of them, but in some of them. Portuguese in Timor-Leste, that's an interesting one. I mean, it's spoken by very, very few people, but it's still being held up as an official language there, and there's all sorts of feeling among the youth of Timor-Leste, East Timor, that English would be a much better language to be investing in than Portuguese. But the money coming from this comes from Brazil, and the same with Macau. That's where the sort of promotion of Portuguese is not from Portugal anymore. They've got no money at all. It's coming from Brazil. So Brazil is the player in this part of the world in terms of the maintenance of Portuguese. It's quite interesting, I think. And we'll talk about Hong Kong later as one of the places I know quite well. Okay, so far, okay, with it. Now, these are very often newly independent countries. And if you have a newly independent country, what the government always wants is we have to have a national language, because we need a language that will, they will say, glue us together, bind us, be our identity. We are Albanians because we speak Albanian, for example. Okay, so you have a sort of planning, a kind of corpus planning here of promotion of a particular language, and therefore you need to start to standardize it and start to do all those kind of the hard work of making sure everyone's learning the same language, despite the kind of possible variations that may be in it. And we'll see lots of interesting things about that. One of the, I mean, the Chinese Communist Party, one of its greatest achievements probably, apart from the raising the status of women through the marriage law in the 1950s, is the development of literacy across China. I studied in China in the 1970s for a couple of years when Mao was still knocking around some time ago. And we had to go and go on to study the workers, because that's what we had to do, we had to go and study the workers in the peasantry. And I was in a political study group because all these working, these factories had political study groups that met twice a week, and you were given a text by Mao and you studied it. And there were about eight people in my study group, and I was in a machine tool lathe. I was master worker ker, machine tool lathe operator, which I'm very proud of that. And anyway, sat around in this study circle and the sort of political content that guy would say, right, who would like to start? And we were reading Mao's Ten Great Relationships on Shaddao Ganshi, the famous Ten Great Relationships of Mao. And I was the only person in the group, I was the only non-Chinese in the group, who could read it? No one else could read Chinese. So that was very embarrassing for me, because how would you think you'd feel being the only person who could read the text? But it also showed that very, very few Chinese were literate, that even in that time in the 1970s, you compare that now, it's a fantastic achievement, the illiteracy rates that they've achieved, being brilliant. Okay, so literacy development has been very, very important, and crucially important, of course, for education, because you need the written word for education, basically. So that's what's been going on. Now Singapore, let's have a look at some examples. Singapore has four national languages, Malay is, sorry, four official languages, and one national language, Malay is the national language of Singapore, which is odd because only about 8, 10% of the people speak it, or have any knowledge of it, are English, Tamil and Mandarin Chinese. Tamil is interesting because it's the language of the original migrants from India, and Tamil is usually associated, has a negative association in places like Singapore, because the Tamils tended to be the labourers. So they worked in rubber plantations, or tin mines, or whatever, so they were seen to be sort of the lower class, and Tamil then got this association with the lower classes. Yet in Singapore now, most of the Indians, they are in high-tech IT, and they speak other languages, Hindi, obviously, and others. So for Tamil to remain the official language is odd in the context of Singapore, however, a PhD student just finished a PhD on Tamil maintenance in Singapore, and is actually doing quite well, much to everyone's surprise, which is, I think, quite encouraging. But Indians are allowed to learn other Indian languages as long as they pay for it themselves, community schools. This is not the case with Chinese. If you are Chinese, the government tells you your mother tongue is Putonghua Mandarin. It doesn't matter if your mother speaks Cantonese or Shanghainese, or any of the other languages, as far as the government goes, if you're Chinese, your mother tongue is Mandarin, and you will learn Mandarin. And that's caused a huge, huge problem, because it's not the case. And they've, as we'll see a bit later, many, many Singaporean Chinese are very fluent in speaking Putonghua, but they're not very strong in literacy in Chinese. And one of the problems about Chinese literacy has been that they kind of taught Chinese to these Singaporean Chinese as though they were mainland Chinese, as though they had Mandarin all around them, but they didn't. So there's been a problem with the literacy elements. And Malay, very few people. The point is that English in Singapore schools is the medium of instruction. The other languages are taught only as subjects. So despite having all these four languages, actually the language in Singapore these days is English. And if you go there now, you'll find pretty well everybody speaks pretty good English, different varieties of it. We'll talk about Hong Kong later. Anybody got any question about any of these places? Because we'll talk about them a bit more later. Now, most of the countries, what's happening is most of these countries in their language education policy are promoting or privileging the national language as the language of education. So if you live in Indonesia, you go to school, you'll be taught through Bahasa Indonesia. In Vietnam, it'll be Vietnamese, right? All these, that'll be the national language will be taught in the school. The second language in almost all these countries is not now another Asian language or indigenous language but English. So, and this is being introduced earlier and earlier into the curriculum. Places like in China, it's here primary three, although in many places it's earlier than that. But in Cambodia, even it's primary four. Despite the fact there's no one to teach it and no one learns it in primary four because they're only teachers, the official policy says English will be introduced in primary four in Cambodian schools but outside non-PEN it's not because there's no one to teach it. In Vietnam, they're just introducing it at primary three in the last couple of years. So English is being introduced in the school curricula in all these countries as compulsory language after the national language with the sole exception of Indonesia. Indonesia is the only country of most of this part of the world and most of Asia that doesn't have in English is a compulsory subject in the primary curriculum. Having said that, if you want to set up a primary school in Indonesia and you don't have English, the parents may not send their kids to it because they'll think English is hugely important for little Jimmy or little Julie to become hugely international successful entrepreneurs or global players. What the Japanese call human global resources which they're trying also to introduce. And you want to say to people who say if you learn English you'll become a human global resource think of all the people you know who speak English and wonder whether they are indeed a human global resource. You begin to think perhaps the logic isn't perfect there. Okay, any questions so far? How are we doing? Okay, everybody thinks that if they learn English well the governments think the more English that our people have the more successful our country will be in the international development globalization modernization ideological thing. And it's often implemented without really much thought or preparation. So we mentioned before in Cambodia it's now primary four compulsory but there are no teachers to teach it. In Burma it's introduced from primary one Myanmar from primary one. It's also the promoted language of higher education in Burma in Myanmar in all higher education institutions. This despite the fact that very few people in those higher education institutions speak English. The official policy nevertheless is. Myself and Jolo Bianco well Jolo Bianco was the overseer of the project funded by the UNESCO to develop a language policy for Cambodia and I was involved in developing the school language policy which we presented in Mandalay in February 2016 and we argued very strongly for the introduction of languages like Mon and Kechin and Karen in the primary school and so forth to let mother tongue education develop that. And then director of education thought it was a jolly good idea and he kind of said yes thank you very much. And then Aung San Suu Kyi the following week basically decided that she would take on the portfolio of the education ministry and decided no we're not going to do that we're going to go back to what we had before. It's going to be only two languages Burmese and English. So that's they've gone back to Burmese and English and all sorts of problems associated with that not least for trying to unify Burma with all the different ethnic groups within Burma and the different languages. Now as the association of Southeast Asian nations these are the ten nations starting of the sort of Philippines and the Far East going all the way down to Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, all that lot. Thailand, I said Malaysia, Brunei those ten countries. That association has made English the sole working language of the group. This is really interesting. I mean you can imagine what would have happened in the European Union had said English will be the sole working language of the group. Brexit might have happened a bit earlier. But anyway, ASEAN has agreed to have this. I was talking to the director general of ASEAN Filipino guy about ten years ago in Bangkok and he said you know I said what about other languages? Why not Malay for example? Because the initial group of ASEAN was the Philippines, Brunei, Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand and Malay has a very strong hold in all those five countries. So why Malay was an obvious language for the he said no, no, no, no, no. Pandora's box not going to open that one. We give them Malay, they all want something. And that was a view. And when Vietnam joined they asked for another language to be you know this was before English was made the official sole working it was just the de facto working language. And guess what the language the Vietnamese wanted? They wanted French. And the other said ah no you're not having French you can shove off. So it just remained English and then two years ago or three years ago it was officially legislated in article 34 of the ASEAN charter that English will be the sole working language of ASEAN. It is also being co-opted to develop socio-cultural ties, political ties and security. English is being held up as the language in which to do all these things in ASEAN. And we can talk about the possible contradictions in that of how one can respect unity and diversity as one of the standard slogans by using English in order to do it. Okay but this is another motivation then for the school's curricula to have English because ASEAN is now the sole working language. I've also sat in very interesting this I mean I'm a bit of a tangent but I've sat in on center director meetings in ASEAN from time to time recording them with permission for various things. And you find that the Laotians tend to be silent because they don't have very much English. And if they do have a Laotian there he or she will be there because he or she knows English, not the subject matter that they're dealing with. So pelagic fishing for example, deep sea fishing, there'll be a meeting about that. The Laotian candidate may have very good knowledge about different types and they'll be able to speak about fish in English but won't know anything about fishing. So can't really make much of a contribution. So there is some way to go before ASEAN comes. But the deputy, sorry the director general himself a couple of years ago said apart from high level prime ministerial meetings everything is in English below that. So only the prime ministers are allowed translators. No one else is. And the director general again ten years ago he said you know why we do this? You asked me this question. I said what's the question? He said how much does the European Union pay on translation interpreting? I said I don't know. He said two billion US dollars. I don't know whether it's true or not but it's not. And he then said now how much do we pay ASEAN? How much do we pay? I said I don't know. He said none, nothing. If you want it translated you do it yourself. So it was a pretty strong financial argument. Okay, what about what's happening to the indigenous languages then? Are they being taught in the school system? Well to summarize very quickly no they're not. What's happening is that the governments are promoting the national languages, their respective national languages whether that's Vietnamese or Khmer or whatever it might be, plus English. And these are dominating the school system, these two languages. And as I said earlier English is being introduced earlier and earlier into the curriculum. Now there are some examples of where this is not happening. But basically it is. And in almost all cases the adoption of languages of education depend upon NGOs or religious institutions. I thought I'd give you some if I can find it. Yes, in, excuse me, yeah, Bangladesh is interesting because there's a very significant tension in Bangladesh between private and public education. And both at the school level and at the university level. And basically all private education is the English medium. And the government has introduced a rule a couple of years ago saying if you're a private institution you've got to have Bangla taught at least as a subject. The language taught at least as a subject in the schools. The private institutions though are basically English medium. And they're more prestigious. So mum and dad want their kids to go to private universities by and large. And of course that means mum and dad want their kids to learn English so they can get to private universities. So this is a really, and the government is not putting in much support because it doesn't have very much money on to promote Bangla in the schools. This is hugely ironic because Bangladesh itself owes its existence if you like to language. I mean it's because they spoke a different language from the other countries in Pakistan, in East Pakistan, West Pakistan that they split away and became their own country. And the name of the country has its language there. Bangla-desh, the country of Bangla. But it's under some sort of threat from English and certainly in the higher institutions. And indigenous languages, this is what I wanted to read out to you because it struck me as quite extraordinary when I read it. Bangla-desh provides an example of a place where the teaching of indigenous languages is dependent upon NGOs and external funding. The NGO Building Resources Across Communities, BRAC, is the largest NGO in the world. And in Bangla-desh, BRAC owns 13,800 pre-primary schools, 13,800 pre-primary schools with 400,000 students and 22,971 primary schools with nearly 700,000 students. So this is an NGO really taking care of a lot of education. In fact, don't forget that Bangla-desh is a very populated country, of course. So this seems like lots and lots of people to us, but it's not that many. And they also operate 1600 ethnic minority schools in the south-eastern region of Bangla-desh, which is where most of the minority languages are spoken. NGO work going on, something quite significant in the promotion and maintenance of indigenous languages. But it's not really throughout this part of the world, it's not coming from the government, it's coming from NGOs and religious institutions in some cases. Obviously, in terms of Islam, a lot of the madrasas teach Arabic, classical Arabic and so there are other languages taught, but it tends to be either religious institutions or NGOs, not governments. Example a very good counter-example of this is the Philippines. Now the Philippines in 1974 introduced the bilingual education policy whereby every kid who went to school from primary one learned maths and science through English and all other subjects through Filipino. Now that has been a pretty disastrous policy because the Philippines is also highly linguistically diverse with something like 170 languages spoken and Filipino is a little bit of leisure demand. Filipino is not really Filipino at all. Filipino is Tagalog which is the language spoken by Ram Manila by about 5 million people that the language commission of the Philippines was told to take Tagalog and fiddle around with it and then sell it back to the people as Filipino. Well, they made a mistake at the beginning because they sold it back to the Filipinos as Pilipino. Well, that was a bit of a giveaway because only Tagalog speakers can't say fuzz. So if you call it Pilipino, then the only people who can say Pilipino are the Tagalogs. So he said, well, I have to call it Pilipino. So they went back and said we've got a good idea. We'll call it Pilipino now. So Tagalog speakers still call it Pilipino but they only want. So the Cebuanos and Elacanos all that can speak Filipino. So it's now become more accepted as a national language to be fair. But in 1974, you would get kids going to primary school, primary one, and being taught in languages that they didn't know much. And they'd have to do math and science with that. And very few would necessarily know Pilipino, Filipino, Tagalog. So you can imagine the kind of debates that would be going around for 30 years, more than 30 years. In 2013 the then Aquino, President Aquino announced that there will be from next semester mother tongue based multilingual education, MTB MLE. Now 12 languages were initially gazetted as being to be used. And they were to be used for the first 3 years of primary school as medium instruction and then Filipino and English taught as subjects and then the Filipino English would slowly take over as medium instruction. There's a bit of an outcry because they saw with 170 languages in the Philippines you only got 12. What about the others? So after some humming and harring they came out with 19. So there are now 19 gazetted languages to be taught in the first 3 years. It's not going really well because I mean from someone like me who you know having sort of kind of liking the languages you want to see them maintain. I mean you like to have the language. But if people don't want them it's not much anyone can do about it. And most of the parents still are not convinced that if their children are taught through a language that they know the home language it will necessarily be very good for them in the longer term. They would much rather by and large have the kids taught through the national language and later English because they believe that this will actually be beneficial for their children. And it's very difficult to persuade parents that if you actually let the kids learn in their first language first they will actually do much better in everything later on. They will learn Filipino better they will learn English better and blah blah blah. It's a very difficult cell and no politician that I know of has been able to sell it except for here the Philippines. They've actually been very brave. The other place that's been pretty brave about it is Malaysia because Malaysia had a policy of teaching maths and science through English from primary one in 2002 they introduced that and then after nine years of it they chucked it out because they found that kids from the poor parts the rural areas and so forth were simply not coping and they did not have teachers who had enough English to teach maths and science through English anyway. Although they could teach it perfectly well in Malay. So you've got the situation where kids in some sort of urban schools are mocking teachers because they're English and when they were teaching maths and science were very good and on the other hand you've got kids whose English wasn't very good failing in maths and science so they changed it. So now it went back to Malay and now it's gone back again to a dual language policy where the schools can choose whether to teach in Malay or English in primary school in maths and science. So it's complicated. Tristan terms. There is a multilingual education national plan in Cambodia. Cambodia is a country which is linguistically pretty well it may seem quite diverse to us because there are 25 or 26 languages spoken. But in terms of Asia it's not. It's one of the most homogeneous societies. 90% of the Cambodians speak Khmer so the national language was an easy pick. Everybody speaks Khmer. Up in the north west of Cambodia is where many of the minority languages are spoken and because there was a minister of education who was really interested in minority languages it got funding. So but we don't know how much longer that funding is going to go on for because the ministers as you all know change. Even if the prime minister of Cambodia doesn't the ministers do. Yes, Hoon Sen has been there for a while. Very little chance of him moving on I don't think of them. So basically though the other thing of course and this is very important some governments feel that people who don't learn the national language or learn languages other than the national language are potentially dangerous splitists. They will break away. This has been much the fear of China in some places. It's also in Thailand initially. In the south of Thailand Patani Malay is the mother tongue of many of the people. Yet Thai remains the medium of instruction for all those schools in the south and has caused a lot of ethnic unrest as you're probably aware that there's a lot of unrest in southern Thailand. It's a religious thing but it's also a linguistic thing because of Malay that Thailand has Thai as the prescribed language of education. How are we doing for time? Now this is crucially important the UNESCO figures are pretty shocking about this. The number of children who drop out in many of these school systems around about primary five is really very high. I can't give you the exact figures now but they are shocking. A lot of the kids dropping out of primary five are dropping out usually because of linguistic reasons because they were never taught in their mother tongue so they get behind in school and then they never progress and they finally drop out. This is a really huge issue and why I think UNESCO and others have been so adamant that mother tongue education is crucial for children especially in the early years of primary school and if you don't give them education in their L1s then they may well drop out of school so it's a huge, huge issue. And coupled with that of course the fact that languages removed from the school curriculum means it's very likely to become endangered. As Hyal Coleman said years ago the best way of killing a language is to remove it from the education system because as soon as you take it out of the school system mum and dad will say don't bother with that language it's not important you must speak the languages that they speak in school. So we get this. Foreign languages well not many I mean the language that is being learnt most probably is Chinese English is the second language learnt by a huge margin. A lot of the other languages if these are languages from outside, this is sort of not Asian language, language from outside tend to be taught from starting at university level. So tend to be tertiary education. There are very well I don't think there's a single ASEAN country that has in its primary and secondary school syllabus another ASEAN language other than its own national language. So if you're in Vietnam you will not learn Thai or Lao or Khmer you just won't learn these languages. You will learn English. And ASEAN has said that's good because we're going to use English to become ASEAN. And ASEAN English will do it. In places where French was the colonial language like Cambodia Vietnam it has lost a huge amount of ground to English and French NGOs in Cambodia now advertise for people who speak English not French. So even French NGOs that are operating in Cambodia are requiring their staff to learn English as well as Khmer. In Islamic countries Arabic has maintained a position in schools especially in religious schools but interestingly in places like Indonesia the Madrasas or the Pasantran these are the schools attached to mosques not all of them but a significant number of them now teach English for Islamic purposes. And you would think that if the last thing that you would expect Pasantran mosques to be teaching their kids will be English because you know English is all that dangerous stuff horrible people with short skirts eating all sorts of horrible food you know but no they have English for Islamic purposes and one curriculum is making plans if you're making plans in the English lesson you have to say when you're speaking English tomorrow I will see my mother you have to have inshallah as the part of the text I mean it's you have to use it you can't not so Islamic purposes now Russian has basically disappeared I mean I mean Russian of course was the first foreign language learnt in China from until they split in the 1950s and a great friend of mine Professor Lee who's now eighty-odd was trained first as a Russian teacher in Beijing University and then as was the case you know almost overnight said okay tomorrow you are an English teacher they said oh okay so I got a struggle now the best I ever saw there for cross training from teachers who suddenly become you know unviable in the new system when I was working in Singapore and the government decided as these governments tend to do right we're going to have get rid of all the Chinese media we're going to close down the Chinese medium university get rid of the Chinese medium schools they're too troublesome these Chinese and talk about rebellion and revolution we're going to get rid of them and we're going to just go to English and teach a training and we had a bunch of people who had been teaching Chinese these were Chinese teachers no this is Singapore this is Singapore and they were sort of scholarly Confucian types you know who would sort of whack you on the knuckles you got a tone wrong and we had to retrain them and they came what are we going to anyway some genius came up with the idea of retrain them as PE teachers so you don't have the image of these Confucian gentlemen playing basketball it's funny isn't it yeah anyway so it's a nice story where they go so basically foreign languages are not really being taught in schools certainly not in schools in universities yes but not so much in schools what I haven't spoken too much about and we can talk about it the increasing use of English in higher education in the universities in this region which is causing also a tremendous amount of confusion and controversy but there are there's some evidence that the decline may be holding in other words there is some feeling that maybe we've gone too far with English perhaps we should rethink this but I don't think it's really very serious it's certainly not in the school systems and certainly not with the local languages either I want to talk a little bit now about Hong Kong because I spent quite a long time there and how the system there works because Hong Kong as you know is not a country it's a special administrative region of China now but has its own education policy doesn't follow the Chinese one the Chinese national language law proscribes all Chinese languages other than Pudenghua from education languages of China in other words the languages of minority groups can be taught so if you're in Zhuang or Miao you can learn Zhuang or Miao in school whether you do or not so different matter but it's allowed but you do not learn Cantonese or Shanghainese or any of the other languages of Chinese languages other than Pudenghua Hong Kong still retains Cantonese as the medium of instruction in primary schools as does Macau they're the only two places left where Cantonese is used as a medium of instruction now the Hong Kong government's policy is laudable it wants its people to be trilingual in Cantonese, Mandarin and English and for those of you who are not familiar with Chinese languages Cantonese and Mandarin are mutually unintelligible languages they're different I mean you can't just knowing one doesn't help you know the other I mean it's I mean I know Mandarin and I lived in Hong Kong for eight years and my Cantonese is lousy despite the attempts to make it so it's tough but there are eight government funded universities in Hong Kong six of which have EMI only so the Chinese University of Hong Kong was set up in 1963 specifically to be a Chinese medium university for the Chinese speaking community which of course is 95% of the population but even when it was set up to get into the Chinese University in 1963 you had to do well in your English exams at school to get into it kind of missed the point but there you go now because the Vice Chancellor of the Chinese University of Hong Kong is very keen to his university to guard the rankings, international rankings in the last five or six years has been allowing more and more English medium programs to be taught in the view that this will increase the internationalization of the university and therefore the rankings the students took the university to court saying that it was breaking its its own charter by allowing English to be used as a medium of instruction and Chinese should be the sole medium of instruction the students lost in the Supreme Court they lost that fight and the Supreme Court ruled that the university could choose whichever medium instruction it wanted so the students lost that fight so even the Chinese University of Hong Kong is moving is increasing its number of EMI programs the only university now university in Hong Kong is the Hong Kong Education University used to be the Institute of Education which is where I used to work yes and we are the only one that is who has as its something to produce functionally all biliterate graduates so if you come to the University of Education Hong Kong you will learn Cantonese you will learn Puthewa you will learn English surely good and yeah I was very proud about that you also the only place in Hong Kong I think you can learn Cantonese as an academic language Chinese because most even Cantonese speakers will say Cantonese is just a vernacular language there is no written form number which is nonsense there is a written form of Cantonese and it is used in all sorts of professional circumstances like the law, teaching I mean it is huge very important but because these universities are English medium therefore the parents want their children to learn through English because they want their children to go to English medium schools now in 1997 at the time of the handover the government said right we are going to change the policy now in the past secondary schools had the freedom to choose which medium instruction they chose and almost all of them chose English and when I was working in Singapore in the 1970s late 70s I would go into a history class and watch some person teaching history and it was supposed to be an English medium class and the kids were all there the teacher was there and the textbook was English and the teacher would stand up and he would translate the textbook into Cantonese and the kids would write in the margins what the English basically and this was called by Luke and Richard in a famous article in 1982 called the textual translation method of language teaching and that is what it was like so the government said in 1997 unless your schools secondary schools meet certain criteria like teachers who can teach it students who can use it you are going to be Chinese medium at secondary level and something like 75% of the secondary schools were then classified as Chinese mediums CMI schools and only about 25% were classified as English medium schools well that sounds great except for the fact of course CMI schools become more prestigious and sought after because parents think that kids are going to get an easier run into the university so for the next 10 years and so those parents constantly saying we want more English in the secondary school system and eventually about 5, 6 years ago maybe a bit longer the government gave in and said ok we will fine tune they called this term fine tuning which allowed CMI schools to teach classes in English if they met certain criteria so what that has meant is that in the last 5 or 6 years Chinese medium schools are teaching more and more classes in English especially science classes and fewer and fewer classes in Chinese again because the kids want to go now we know that if you got a very very bright Hong Kong Chinese kid CMI school give him an exam in physics or whatever it was and he can answer in Chinese he or she will do better than if you ask that person to do the exam in English yet a lot of these schools are moving to English so I think it's a really serious issue and my own view is that the universities in Hong Kong I cannot understand why they don't do should be officially bilingual I mean why not everyone who goes to a university in Hong Kong should feel that they can come out bilingual and biliterate in Chinese and English but 6 of them are EMI so it gives you an idea of how the policies and the politics and the parents and another interesting thing people have a different view depending on which role you ask them which role they're in when you ask them if you ask a parent do you want your child to learn English from kindergarten if you ask the same person as a teacher should this child learn English from kindergarten that's not good academic practice it's much better for them to so the same person will have a different view depending whether they're a teacher or a mom or a father it's one of the very interesting things about this kind of work is that it's so human right I mean there's somebody writing a document somewhere but down here there are all sorts of people struggling with it one way or another this is becoming very serious Wang Gong Wu in 2007 said it's becoming increasingly common for people who can afford it to send their children to private schools which teach in English rather than to the local schools that teach in the national language and that is true and we're getting to see now Malaysian children, Singaporean children Filipino children who are coming out of schools really L1 speakers of English are not being so efficient or proficient in their their national language many children in the region are taught in the language that they do not understand and are thus failing at school there's a rhetorical promotion of indigenous languages but actually it's being left mainly to NGOs and religious institutions with the exception of countries like the Philippines and some exceptions in India north of India there's a government sponsored multi mother tongue scheme one shouldn't underestimate the difficulties in teaching though through an indigenous language there's a language up in the northern Philippines called Lubuguan and they developed a scheme for the teaching of through that for the kids in that area which ended up being very successful and the children who were taught through their L1 ended up doing better not only in their first language but also in the other subjects including Filipino in the exams which show that if you learn through your L1 you actually get better results in the longer term but that project took something like six years to set up and required working very closely with the community so you have community buy in the parents have got to buy the parents have got to think yes we want our children to learn this language in the school if the parents don't want to then it's going to be really difficult so it's very tough it sounds easy to be critical but the actual issues involved in doing it are very difficult so the Philippines Government even though they've met lots and lots of difficulties at least having a go and I think it's pretty noble and that's where all this if you want to read about it be all in there and I have to thank he likes to call himself AJ and is Tony otherwise known as Tony Liddicate there's a great friend of mine and we've been collaborating on this handbook so if I stop talking there now I'll give you time to answer lots of questions because there's tons of stuff here and I've also got these glasses somehow tangled around I think it opens up not a can of worms but certainly a massive trader so first of all I'd like to ask if any of you have any questions whether you have any ideas or lack thereof or whatever so you've touched briefly in Central Asia but I thought by the years ago I spent a short period of time and you still very much get the impression that the Russians still have a very strong right did you say Kyrgyzstan yeah, Turkistan yeah you still have your respective ways and you say no no we need Russian we need Russian we need Russian we need Russian we need Russian what do you think people take from this place especially on the country because you can all be well what do you think your opinion would take from English to the tone of violence well the person you should ask that question to is Tony but in some of these places English already has moved in the places that it hasn't I guess had still maintained pretty close relations with Russia and where there is trade where there is significant trade I think then the language will stay strong but people will learn these languages for economic benefit not necessarily for cultural exchange or so much for economic benefit one of the in China for example the languages other than Chinese that are being learned successfully are Korean and Mongolian and that's because their border languages on the Korean border Mongolian border and people make money they can make a very good living out of it so there is an economic imperative for learning those languages Korean and Mongolian so I suspect that's what's happening and that if the economic imperative is there then people will learn it and the policy makers can't really do much about that yeah yeah chapters on each so yes I'm doing the final proofs at the moment yeah so it should be come give them what you've said about oh well you should ask Tony so you've both taken particular parts of Asia and take responsibility for looking after that why am I asking that is one area and I'm just looking at Barbara here is clearly a very interesting area because it is so it's actually Japan now I assume that Tony is in all the Japan situation not just with English but also with other languages I wonder if you could say a few things about that well what we Japan well within English at the university well you probably know about with English with conversation in English and then the global super 30 all that stuff and trying to get 300,000 international students in the university systems and so forth to develop global human resources very soon so that's the sort of English part of it other languages we think are not really doing very well Portuguese is because of the lot of migrant population from Brazil and so forth so there are pockets of Portuguese but as far as well again Tony is the guide to what but as far as I understand these tend to be sponsored by community groups that are necessary than the government Korean yeah but no not I mean Japan's I don't know what I say here but Japan's view of internationalization is that people should understand Japan I think that's why I think it's a very interesting opportunity I understand it because you know Tony looks after Japan so I'm sort of yeah yeah yeah no no yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah my question is I assume it's impossible to draw any generalization from such a complex set of different contexts and of course each context will have needs that are different from all others but as a researcher and as a specialist of this field and I presume as a consultant for many institutions what's your take on on how to reconcile the needs of community and diversity is there a and of course I mean we talk about different purposes but then in second language so I understand that it's impossible to draw generalizations but how do you normally advise well if it well the place I work in most is within and I find that very interesting because they promoted English as a soul working language and now as the language to develop the unity and diversity in and I think that's a really problematic issue because as you and school kids do not learn about other asian countries in the school curriculum because they don't learn the languages of the other countries very much so it's almost that the English curriculum in the schools has to kind of take on what my advice suggestions will be the English curriculum therefore has to become a curriculum that introduces the kids to the cultures of their neighbors including the religions because you've got the four great major religions in the region you've got Thai Buddhists talking to Indonesian Muslims I mean they need to know what makes each other tick and the English curriculum is one his rather maybe paradoxically the curriculum that might be able to be most effective at doing that but of course that requires getting a huge sea change in ministry minds that English is an asian language not a native speaker language spoken by Brits and Americans and Australians and that's quite a difficult that's a difficult one because they then say well you're selling us a second class product you know we're not giving you native speaker English you're selling us something that isn't quite well it's not that English is an asian language it's used all the and we have asian corpus of English which we collected from the Pino's talking to Vietnamese talking to Thais and so forth in English and saying you could use this as a kind of source material for how to develop in the country because if you look at the kind of things they talk about when they're speaking in English this is all done naturally occurring data which we collected of multilingual Asians speaking to each other in English as a lingua franca basically they talk about things not surprisingly that are central to their lives the Thai-Burma border conflicts like how does one do business with Islamic banks in Malaysia if you're a Korean trader that kind of thing but I have never seen any of these topics in an English language textbook in the region so we're saying why don't you try and they've started a thing called the asian source curriculum which is starting to do that so in a very small way it may be that English can introduce people of asian to the cultures of their neighbors Islamic purposes it's allowing the language to be reshaped by its new users and that's what we're saying this language doesn't come with cultural baggage you can take it and put your own cultural baggage shape it with your own cultural baggage and that's what is happening of course in Asia but some people get it but ministries are still like the textbook to have OUP or something on it rather do you know what I mean but surprisingly well maybe that's unfair because the British council has actually been in many ways at the forefront now promoting multilingual education and I've heard senior members of the council arguing for mother tongue education in primary schools not pushing you must have English which is encouraging now the other thing is that there is a belief out there that the earlier you start learning a language the better and it's almost impossible to dislodge this to say that adults are actually quite good at learning languages and delaying language learning doesn't mean you're never going to learn trying to get across to people at someone at the age of 12 who comes into a language for the first time can learn it perfectly adequately and doesn't have to start at four or five and leave the primary schools for local and national languages delay English because you're not going to you can't not have English because if you're a politician so we're not going to teach English you'd last two seconds you know your career would be over before you start so how can you have your cake and eat it well I think you can have your cake and eat it if you allow local languages and national language at more of the primary level and only introduce English later once the children have literacy and fluency in their L1 and maybe the national language that I think works but then you come back to Indonesia and you say well okay that sounds very good but there are 700 languages here which ones of these are we going to have for languages of education of course that's you know the first answer to that is does it have an orthography you know if not you have to develop the orthography as well as did with Tagalog the national language commission basically created the national language from Filipino from Tagalog and that's what happened in Indonesia the sort of language commissions are developing standardized forms of the language but it's a very very hard so it's a very hard so and I if you ask me what I think the likelihood of the three or four thousand languages that are in Asia spoken being around in 50 years time so I would be pretty pessimistic about a lot of them actually I think so I'm sure it includes Eri and Jai but not Papua but Irian it ends where Indonesia ends I guess once you get to Australia it's all over you're out the point about Indonesia though is fascinating because it is such a diverse country it's just you know what the Chinese say when the emperor is far away so the emperor is in Beijing we can do what we want so what happens in Aceh compared to what happens in Irian Jai compared to what happens in Malacca well that's tough I was in Malacca a couple of years ago and they're still teaching Batak in some schools there but not in a kind of systematic way there's a book coming out in a few months written by myself and a guy called Wang Lixian on trilingual education in Hong Kong there's a big debate in Hong Kong at the moment whether Pudonghua should be taught to teach people how to write Cantonese which should be the medium of instruction for the Chinese subject the pressure from the mainland of course is obvious that it wants Pudonghua and the pressure from Hong Kong is the opposite of course because Cantonese is the language of identity and I'm a Hong Konger so there's a huge it's a huge issue in Hong Kong but it's a political one and an identity one and umbrella movement one and all sorts of things like that they're all linked into that but I hope Hong Kong will stay firm and retain Cantonese as the MOI because it's about the only place left where Cantonese is taught as a language of education in that way there are, as you know there are lots of people now in Guangzhou itself asking for more Cantonese and saying why do we have to listen to broadcasts in Pudonghua, why can't we have Cantonese on the radio and stuff there's an upswell of discontent I think about the language policy and wanting similarly with Minanhua in Fujian and places like this also money if you speak Taiwanese it's very small I mean the numbers of people learning Portuguese is one of the things that a cynical view is that if the government insists on Portuguese for civil servants of course it guarantees jobs for people to speak Portuguese okay so one way of looking at it but the number of people actually learning Portuguese I mean again there's a Brazilian influence and if you go to the University of Macau the Portuguese department there is I mean most of the students in the Portuguese department at the University of Macau are from Lucifone Africa Cape Verde or places like this they're going there and some from Brazil so it's not Portugal again it tends to be Lucifone countries so and also I don't know what happened here but there was some talk about Macau working with Timor Leste to try and work with Portuguese there because of the links and Macau having more money than Timor Leste at the time I'm not sure what happened whether they set up a special arrangement with the universities or not I'm not sure but they were talking about okay thank you what I think is very good is that we have in fact received a sort of preview of the sorts of different elements about language and education obviously you've certainly explained a lot but you've also raised a whole range of questions issues around for example what is the spread of English happening the way it is and in some ways I think what some of you have pointed out is that many other nations or governments see it purely as a tool so it becomes a tool rather than actually an element of identity I don't think it's true but that gives them this neutrality secondly you've certainly pointed out the issues for let's say many many languages in many countries how do they enter a model of education I wrote on my piece of paper about resources the issue is really even if you want to do it if you've got certain hundred languages you have to make it resources and commitment I think commitment is very important resources because what you have is and you need to have a textbook these have people who can teach it and even in let's say so-called westernized countries you find that schools I remember we both shared that in Australia when Japanese became very very popular you know private schools in Australia would say we're not teaching French anymore we're going to do bilingual Japanese English education fantastic but they didn't have any teachers yes they did have materials so I think you've also raised up very nicely and thank you to the audience too I asked some quite challenging questions obviously some areas are covered better than others but we're looking forward to using since we have a course on language playing and language policy I think that's certainly a talk that we should include in the future okay thanks very much