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Language Policies, Multilingualism and Migrations:
Towards a Polycentric Approach to the Values of Portuguese in European Space
Clara Keating, Olga Solovova, Olga Barradas
I. Introductioni
This chapter represents our collaborative attempt to develop a polycentric understanding
of the values of Portuguese in Europe by framing its use in the migration processes, the resulting
multilingual contexts, and the language policies in our local contexts of action and observation.
Departing from the ethnographic insights on the lived experiences of socialization in multilingual
literacy practices of Portuguese migrant women in London by a Portuguese national in the UK
(Keating, 2005, 2009), we also draw on two other projects: a linguistic ethnography among
children of Eastern European migrants from a city in central Portugal by a Russian national in
Portugal (Solovova, 2013); and an ethnography among second generation Portuguese migrants
on the role of complementary schools in London situated within the education policies in the UK
and Portugal (Barradas, 2004, 2007).
When juxtaposed, our different insights point to coexisting distinct linguistic hegemonies,
cultural imperial narratives and opposing national projects in the same space. This prompted us
to explore spaces and speakers’ positions as eminently polycentric (Blommaert et al., 2005a;
Zentella, 2007; Keating & Solovova, 2011)ii. The focus on Portuguese illustrated the workings of
this language in the European geopolitical space, not only as a language of structure and action
(national, official, institutional vs. migrant minorities, lingua franca, community activism) but,
beyond this duality, as a language of diasporic mobility throughout non-formal niches in and
outside of Europe. These dynamics were best identified in our comparative work, deriving from
multi-sited in-depth focuses on radically local contexts. Three needs emerged from this
reflection: 1) to identify regimes of multilingualism where Portuguese acted as a resource; 2) to
recognize that the configurations of contexts of language use by overlapping spatialities and
temporalities - due to distinct traditions of migration and mobility; and, 3) to focus on the
workings of language policies and linguistic hegemonies at multiple scales (e.g., formal and
informal, micro and macro, families, schools or individual investments in language learning).
In this chapter, we focus on how the values of European Portuguese are being negotiated
across two distinct scales and geopolitical contexts within Europe. At the scale of public policies,
we follow the textual trajectories over time of two sets of official documents by a) speakers of
European Portuguese living abroad; b) speakers of other languages living in Portugal. At the
scale broadly defined here as community (migrant communities coming to terms with their
survival in host societies), we trace the timeline of two complementary schools as these align
their educational responses within the scopes of institutional action afforded by the dominant
policies. Following these trajectories allows us to identify how Portuguese is being constructed
as a prestigious world and modern language, subject to public assessment and accountability.
Nevertheless, the discursive transition towards modernization goes hand in hand with a process
of monolingualization, through institutional discourses drawing boundaries between different
domains of language use rather than constructing flexible pedagogies on the lived experiences of
multilingual socialization.
We begin by giving an overview of our ethnographic work. Drawing on the insights on
Portuguese-based mobility and migration studies, and on a sociolinguistics of scales, we
illustrate how we went about identifying policy texts and complementary school contexts as
distinct analytical scales. Transitions in public policies and complementary schools indicate how
sociolinguistic spaces are being constructed in both sites and how some possibilities are afforded
while others discarded. We end this chapter by reflecting on our methodological positioning, i.e.
the attempt to engage in a multi-sited understanding of the values of Portuguese in Europe based
on our local voices, and propose lines for future research, both from the perspective of theory,
action and practice.
II. The ethnographies
II.1. Portuguese in the UK
Keating’s study focused on the dynamic routes through informal multilingual language
and literacy practices experienced by Portuguese migrant women in their processes of relocation
from Portugal to London, and in London over a considerable period of time. These routes
through literacy were seen as dynamic semiotic processes, situated both in their intimate and
biographical experiences and in the subjectivities afforded by the hybrid, bilingual literacies
narrated or documented through observation. Insights from Vygotskian activity theory, a focus
on the life cycles of these women, as well as on actual discursive activity in situated events,
allowed Keating to develop a discursive understanding of the ‘person in the doing’, in close
dialogue with the concept of ‘person in history’(cf. Holland & Lave, 2001). This helped her
explore the historical constraints configuring the overlapping subjectivities of these women – as
traditional migrants and/or European citizens – and the corresponding language and literacy
investments sustained by public official practices, events and texts in the changing cosmopolitan
and multilingual space of the city of London at the end of the 20th century. From her work, we
draw the attempt to explore the discursive dynamics involved in the juxtaposition of multilingual
practices and identities in migrant and transnational space.
Barradas’s work was particularly relevant for our purposes in the sense that this chapter
focuses on language policies acting in local and community contexts. Barradas followed the
educational dynamics of Portuguese-speaking pupils in complementary schools in London, both
as a teacher and as a language researcher based at Goldsmiths, University of London. Much
work on educational policies for Portuguese nationals in London derives from her published
research, in particular what concerns school success, access/exclusion of Portuguese students in
the British educational system and the role of complementary schools in this process. Besides
this, Barradas traced the development of educational policies of both Portuguese and British
governments for the past decades (Barradas, 2004, 2007, 2010).
II.2. Slavic languages in Portugal
Slavic languages were practically invisible on the Portuguese linguistic landscape until
the 1990s, when patterns of migration and mobility drastically changed across the European
Union. The dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and of the USSR, as well as the Portuguese
membership in the Schengen agreement, was partly responsible for the existing migration from
Eastern Europe to Portugal. In 2002, Ukrainian migration briefly overcame the traditionally
numerous Cape Verdean in Portuguese statistics (Baganha et al. 2004: 98). In 2004, Portuguese
schools registered unprecedented linguistic diversity (54 different languages spoken by students,
cf. Mateus, 2011: 16), where Russian and Ukrainian were considered “languages of significant
minorities in education” (Feytor-Pinto, 2008: 82-83). According to official statistics in 2009, up
to 20 per cent of the foreign population in Portugal came from post-Soviet states (Ataíde&Dias,
2011). Such linguistic diversity needed language policies. Two periods are usually distinguished
in the Portuguese language policy of the recent decades (Feytor-Pinto, 2008): the “African
period” (1990-1999) indicates the growing presence of speakers of African languages and
Portuguese-based creoles in Portugal; while the “Slavic period” (2000-2004)iii
alludes to the
presence of Slavic languages in the country and coincides with both the construction of language
educational policies on “Português Língua Não Materna” [Portuguese as a Non-Native
Language] and the intensive legislation and regulation on migration and access to citizenship.
Solovova’s study of Eastern European immigrants in a city in central Portugal, over a
period of 8 years, changed its initial focus on the individual cognition of bilingual and biliterate
experiences of immigrant children to an ethnography of the complementary school setting and
the language policies that sustained it. In the process of developing an institutional identity as
complementary school within an immigrant association, and as languages spoken in the
community interacted with Portuguese at various scales (interpersonal, local, institutional etc.),
Russian reinforced its symbolic power and pushed other languages like Ukrainian and Belarusian
to the margins. The idea of one language as a central tool of integration not only validated the
linguistic hegemonies that were implicit in the Portuguese as a Non-Native Language policy.
They reinforced the asphyxiating impact of Russian on other immigrant community languages,
and helped ressurect the USSR linguistic hierarchies, where the symbolic value of Russian was
associated with scientific progress and culture (Alpatov, 1997). Now, in the diaspora, as before
in history, Russian was seen as a rational and practical solution to the multilingual
communication. Situated in immigrant parents’ individual teaching and learning trajectories,
language ideologies often associated normativity and purity with the written and oral register in
different languages. This resulted in constructing multilingualism as a sum of discrete, fixed and
separate languages, still implicit in any approach based on the duality ‘structure vs. agency’. The
data collected within the ‘Russian’ complementary school spoke in favor of a more mobile,
flexible and dynamic model that would recognize multilingual resources of speakers, similar to
the one argued in Barradas’ and Keating’s analysis of the two other spaces.
III. Migrations in Europe being spoken in Portuguese: structure, action, mobility
III.1. Migrations, Portuguese and polycentricity
The idea of Portugal’s intermediate position and it being a portal for migratory fluxes,
both importing and exporting labor force for overlapping institutional structures in the European
context (Baganha, 2001: 147; Santos, 1995), helps recognize the use of Portuguese in plural
institutional positions, sometimes operating in contradictory ways in the same sociolinguistic
spaces. Portuguese was thus our first analytic node, even though we recognize that the
intersection of histories and geopolitical networks would be of a distinct nature, had we been to
approach them with a focus on English, creoles, other lusophone varieties in London, or on a
Slavic language in Portugal.
Portuguese language has been a creative resource of contact and creolization and a
language of migration and diaspora since the early modern period. In the 21st century, it still
remains a useful resource in many niches of social life throughout the world. It has been part of
European multilingualism as an official nation-state language. It acts as an international working
language in the worldwide and regional organizations (e.g. the United Nations) in Europe, Africa
and Latin America, linked to national and transnational cultural, political and economic projects.
Simultaneously, Portuguese is considered minor, subordinate, associated to displacement and
relocation of speakers who lead lives of resistance and survival alongside more prestigious
languages (even as a “lesser used European language” alongside Hungarian, Bulgarian, Polish
and Latvian). Portuguese can be found acting in the rhizomatic lines of flight from dominant
positions, collaborating in the construction of alternative or counter-hegemonical cosmopolitisms
(Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Santos, 1994, 1995; Capinha & Galano, 1996), reproducing
alternative prestige among diasporic rationalities associated to exiles or lusophone communities.
We posit that a diasporic perspective on Portuguese cannot be dissociated from its
postcolonial condition, since Portuguese as a world language represents a result of multiple
historical processes associated with different colonial temporalities that had deep traumatic
effects on the postcolonial condition in all actors involved (Ribeiro et al, 2010)iv
. We should,
thus, be able to identify historicity, i.e., the co-habitation of developing historical projects acting
in the microscopic moment of language use. As part of multilingual repertoires configured by
plural perceptions of time, space and history, values of Portuguese are negotiated in strategic acts
of recognition of the dominant forces at play by speakers. This recognition is partial, and what is
dominant on one scale may be subaltern on another. Therefore, a notion of a diatopic
hermeneutics (cf. Santos, 2004), i.e. the idea of the impossible whole and, hence, the need for a
dialogue, comparison, co-habitation of other historical-cultural configurations of knowledge,
may speak well with the exploration of polycentricity, a term that we draw from the work on the
sociolinguistics of migration and globalization. By polycentricity we align to the discursive
exploration of situated places of production and management of speech and writing material,
permeated by constraints of various orders and instigating multiple centers (Blommaert et al.,
2005a; Keating & Solovova, 2011). It allows us to understand the use of short-term multilingual
resources yet situated in long-term configurations of power, acting locally and narrated in
distinct ways by the participants involved. Although we focus on public texts rather than
interactions, we articulate our understandings with a critical and discursive focus on language as
languaging, i.e., the performative construction, reinforcement and reinvention of semiotic
resources as if language (Garcia, 2009; Wei, 2011), as it best foregrounds the linguistic
hegemonies at play in the multiscalar process of construction of linguistic value. In the
Portuguese language, it also entails a process of revaluing, celebrating and legitimizing, in the
performative sense proposed by Judith Butler (1997), the derogatory term of ‘linguajar’, i.e.,
speech activity prone to error, distortion and malformation.
Once structure, action and mobility are acknowledged as three factors acting upon the
symbolic value of Portuguese, we can move on to identify obstacles to creativity as well as
opportunities formed by the voids that emerged from the meeting of distinct linguistic
hegemonies (Keating, 2009; Keating & Solovova, 2011). These gaps may help us to observe
possible lines of movement and creativity made explicit when adopting multi-sited and
longitudinal approaches from non-dominant or subaltern positions such as our own. As we
proceed with an informal everyday observation of multilingual contexts, identifying the
discursive processes involved in the appropriation of resources in actual encounters and
narratives, tracking down the legitimation and institutionalization processes of language
negotiation through scales of space and time, we ask the following questions: What experiences
have been discarded in the process? Are they being re-appropriated elsewhere and if so, under
what alternative conditions?
III.2. Contexts as scales: complementary school contexts and official texts
Taking into account the dynamics mentioned in the previous sections, we shall now
consider the negotiable value of Portuguese in complementary schools and public policy texts.
The trajectories and strategies of action of complementary schools:Portuguese-speaking
complementary schools in London and a Russian-speaking complementary school in Portugal
have been observed for over a decade by Barradas and Solovova, respectively.The discursive
trajectories that emerged from legal texts and official documents were gathered in the last
decades.
III.2.1. Complementary schools
Barradas and Solovova’s focus on complementary schools illustrates well the dynamics
of structure and action in the role of Portuguese in distinct multilingual repertoires.
Complementary schools are organized by communities with linguistic, cultural, or religious
affinities with the aim of maintaining cultural identities in the face of language erosion or
extinction (Lytra & Martin, 2010). They are ‘complementary’ because they complement formal
education in host societies, yet they assume an identity and heritage that resists formal education,
normally seen as insufficient or unsatisfactory, both by children and adult speakers of minority
languages (which also points at language policies acting at the home or family scale and in need
of further research). Complementary schools, if they assume the existence of multilingualism
from the start, adopt flexible pedagogies to complement formal education. As they operate on the
interface between distinct language policies, complementary schools have a potential to create
spaces that allow the development of aspects of multilingual repertoires and identities usually
lacking recognition by official schools, academic communities or educational policies of
dominant societies.
By looking at complementary schools, we can analyze the direct or indirect intervention
of nation states outside national borders, as well as the scope for legitimacy that some languages
have in certain multilingual distributions. This depends on the perceived symbolic capital as well
as on the support and investment that their ‘home’ nation-states assign to the provision of mother
tongue, both inside and outside the national territories. Public recognition of complementary
schools was connected, not only to the perceived prestige and status of their community
languages in the mainstream system (whether those languages were seen as European or not, as
modern languages recognized within the national educational system, or as heritage, second or
foreign languages), but also to the institutional policies of the countries of origin. Processes of
legitimation depended on the historically situated disciplinary and academic traditions. One can
add here the timespan of the language presence in the mainstream society and the corresponding
short-term or long-durational struggles and practices of language maintenance by minority
communities, which could not necessarily be oriented to linguistic or social integration as
envisaged by official policies.
Textual analyses of official documents that bear impact on the scope of action of
complementary schools allowed us to see how public policies deal with the multilingual
Portuguese society at times of economic and financial crisis by aligning not only to European
discourses but drawing also on postcolonial and diasporic discourses.
III.2.2. Official texts
The first set of texts, aimed at Portuguese nationals abroad, regulates the provision of
Portuguese language classes. We compared two official texts: Decree-Law 165/2006, August
11th
and Decree-Law 165-C/2009, July 28th
. The latter generates substantial changes in the
management of Portuguese language and culture education abroad by moving it from the
Ministry of Education to the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. We further
contextualize these texts in the light of the policies affecting complementary schools in London
over time and considering the actual consequences in the field.
The second set of texts regards immigrants and speakers of other languages in Portugal.
They present the perspective of linguistic integration as described by the European Union and
produced by the High Level Group of Multilingualism (European Commission, 2006). These
documents assert the kind of integration support provided to migrants (including provision of
Portuguese language classes) and the degree of recognition of ‘migrant languages’ as legitimate
resources in this process.
The first text, ‘Plan for Immigrant Integration’ (Plano de Integração de Imigrantes –PII,
Conselho de Ministros, 2007) emerged in the process of a number of inter-ministerial agreements
and is presented as measures towards social, cultural and economic migrant integration for three
year periods (2007-2009; 2010-2012). We analyze the first edition of the Plan, as the Portuguese
government considered its aims to have been practically accomplished. The second text is
produced by the Ministry of Education in Portugal and contains the guidelines that regulate the
provision of Portuguese as a non-nativelanguage (DGIDC, 2005) in the national curriculum.
III.3. Texts, contexts, discursive representations: the analysis
Our joint focus was articulated around a shared commitment to dismantle hegemonic
discourses from the local perspective of migrants. For this purpose, we consider our studies as
instances of multi-sited approaches to the same policies by acknowledging the multiplicity of
sites of observation and participation. By testing the limits of ethnography and adopting a focus
on trajectories, multi-sited approaches assume transdisciplinary and plural positions of
observation and self-identification from which contradictory subjectivities and personal
commitments may result. Researchers are construed as “ethnographer-activists, renegotiating
identities in different sites as one learns more about a slice of the world system” (Marcus, 1995:
113).
As we gathered the data in our roles of ‘circumstantial activists’ (Marcus, 1995: 114), we
also assumed the eclectic and exploratory nature of our joint project. Hence, we adopted a
rationale of bricolage, much in the tradition of cultural studies (cf. Alasuutari, 1995), which
challenged us to rearticulate our own scopes of understanding into a collaborative focus on the
movements of both discursive representations and local practices over space and time.
As far as language and literacy policies are concerned, critical approaches to discourse
were relevant in a sense that they focus on the various layers of contexts of production and
interpretation of texts. In our case,they helped understand how policies were shaping discourses
about what counted as literacy and languages in the three sites. By recognizing the power of
these linguistic hegemonies at a macro scale across time, they helped us identify how they
interacted and counteracted with other kinds of hegemonic representations of language, literacy
and multilingualism (Johnson, 2009; Keating et al., 2013). In the light of the historical
trajectories, we explored defining metaphors of language, literacy, multilingualism,
representations of social actors, presuppositions and other inferences, as well as the effects of re-
textualization in documents produced at different times (Blommaert, 2005). Our method thus
represents a linguistic ethnography informed by a critical approach to discourse analysis;
inJohnson’s words, “a methodological heuristic” that “[…] help[s] guide ethnography of
language policy data collection: one must consider the (1) agents, (2) goals, (3) processes, and
(4) discourses which engender and perpetuate the policy, and (5) the dynamic social and
historical contexts in which the policy exists, keeping in mind that these categories are neither
static nor mutually exclusive” (Johnson, 2009: 151). In the sections that follow, we start by
articulating analyses of texts with ethnographic narratives of contexts. We then focus on the
discursive and textual mechanisms involved in the representation of actors and spaces considered
legitimate for the use of Portuguese and other languages. In a final section, we identify the
common themes that emerged across both textual trajectories in official documents and
contextual trajectories manifested in the ethnographic narratives, illustrating how they helped us
identify the possibilities of action. From a methodological perspective, we aim to show how
critical comparative approaches and multi-sited ethnographic understandings of the trajectories
of language policies may help operationalize the perspective of diatopic hermeneutics.
III.3.1. Texts and contexts: provision of Portuguese language for residents abroad
The 2006 Decree-Law of the Portuguese government recognizes the provision of
Portuguese language education abroad as a constitutional right of its citizens and their
descendants, as well as an intrinsic component of the governmental mission and national project.
This document is one of many others that regulate the support provided to the so-called
‘‘Portuguese communities abroad’. In 2006, the responsibility for the provision of Portuguese
language classes abroad as well as the promotion of Portuguese language and culture (hitherto,
shared between different governmental departments and organizations) becomes the sole
responsibility of Instituto Camões (under the umbrella of the Foreign Office) with implications
for its language partners.
When a number of language policies are implemented in the 2009 legislation, the official
text does not separate between communities located in Europe and elsewhere. The support
offered to community schools, migrant associations and complementary schools is posited within
a discourse that defines Portuguese as a modern, foreign and international language. It is
grounded in discourses of public administration around auditing, i.e. quality measurements,
efficiency and responsibility by the partners.
Compared to the 2006 Decree-Law, the 2009 Law changes the aim of Portuguese
teaching abroad from an educational mission for the communities in the diaspora towards
cosmopolitan rationalities in the new global market and under a new political economy, by
which the Portuguese language becomes one of the state’s largest items of export. Language
policy now aims at the integration of Portuguese in the education systems of the host societies, at
the normative assessment of linguistic competences based on the Common European Framework
for Languages and at the quantification of teacher appraisals.
Local contexts are inevitably affected by these changes. Barradas (2010) illustrates it by
considering Portuguese classes in the United Kingdom which started in the 1960s, organized and
paid for by the local communities and migrant associations, against the historical background of
a dictatorial regime and the exodus from Portugal as a way of escaping poverty and
unemployment, political persecution and colonial war in Africa. In the 1970s, with the Greater
London Council, these classes started to take place in school premises, after school hours, while
the teachers were still paid for by the Portuguese communities. Only after the April Revolution,
in 1976, did the Portuguese government take upon itself the responsibility of recruiting and
paying the teachers. What had begun as a grassroots initiative became an enterprise subsidized
by the Portuguese government, recognizing teachers as legitimate professionals and the classes
as part of the children’s educational pathway, albeit outside the formal education system and
mainstream hours.
The number of students taking exams of Portuguese as a Modern Language within the
British education system has risen steadily. A number of schools now offer Portuguese as a
language choice and protocols have been established with Jersey’s education authorities
(Channel Islands) where a significant proportion of the children’s population is of Portuguese
migrant origin, acknowledging the need to create a link between the languages used in the
domestic and mainstream education spaces. Barradas (2010) recognizes the growing visibility of
Portuguese simultaneously as a modern and European language as well as a community
language, in tandem with the promotion of partnerships between mainstream and complementary
schools, undoubtedly the result of policies between the Portuguese and the British authorities.
The institutional configuration for the provision of Portuguese in London is, therefore,
the product of both the Portuguese and British states’ intervention which culminates in/with a
strong regulation in the financing, provision of classes, and curriculum content. Firstly, it creates
symbolic capital regarding Portuguese as an official European language. Secondly, it affects
local schools in a way that may force them to abstain from informal pedagogical practices that
take into account children’s multilingual repertoire and language pathways that largely exceed
the demands of the multinational frameworks.
The impact of these decisions on the local contexts will certainly affect school life,
Portuguese education professionals and those who promote mother tongue schools. Equally
affected will be the alternative curricula and flexible multilingual teaching pedagogies, locally
tested for those contexts. Together with the British education policies, these regulations will
serve to reinforce another layer of institutionalization upon teaching and learning, the use of
language and the acknowledgement of different ways of knowing associated with multiple
repertoires, identities and multilingual resources.
Solovova, in her most recent research (Solovova, 2013), has identified a similar change in
complementary schools organized by Russian-speaking immigrants. From the locally established
parent-run initiatives,schools are being transformed into highly regulated settings provided by
the Russian state in terms of financial and material resources. Russian language across diaspora
is promoted as a modern world language, which in Portugal means positioning it alongside
Portuguese. As we will see in the next section, this language ideology may counteract the
positioning of Portuguese as a language of the host society.
III.3.2. Texts and discourses: “Português Lingua Não Materna” (PLNM) and linguistic
integration
We focus here on a textual analysis of the representations of language issues in legal texts
for speakers of other languages in Portugal, in particular those related to linguistic integration of
adults and children of migrant origin (PII (2007-2010) and (DGIDC, 2005)). These policies
emerge from the principles produced by supra-national European agencies, such as the European
Commission.
The 2007 Plano de Integração dos Imigrantes (PII) starts by recognizing mother tongue
provision needs for migrant children, yet assigns this space of action to migrant associations
within discourses about culture. In educational discourses, other mother tongues are seen as
interferences in the learning and acquisition of Portuguese as a second or foreign language:
Establish an inter-institutional dialogue with immigrant associations and other
partners, in order to improve the specific conditions of support to the teaching/learning
of students’ different mother tongues
Identify, in collaboration with those organizations, groups/pools of experts in the
different languages, to facilitate the process of recognition of interferences in the
processes of teaching/learning in Portuguese
Promote and encourage actions that give visibility and public expression to cultural
manifestations developed by migrant communities
Promote co-productions and other forms of collaboration between creative and other
cultural agents, especially in what concerns the areas of performative arts and visual
arts (Conselho de Ministros, 2007, excerpts, our translation).
In the 2010 PII, the argument of mastering the Portuguese language as the crucial factor
for social integration is further expanded and reinforced with the implementation of policy
projects in state-funded schools, such as “Ler + em vários sotaques” [Reading more in various
accents]. These projects acknowledge the existence of distinct language varieties and highlight
diversity and cultural integration, by means of Portuguese use only: “The knowledge of
Portuguese as a factor of integration (…) the programme «To read + in various accents» to be
developed by schools (Conselho de Ministros, 2010).
Possession and acquisition of competences in Portuguese as a factor of integration is
particularly revealing in the following excerpt of the educational guidelines in Português Língua
Não Materna no Currículo Nacional, produced by the Ministry of Education in 2005:
School is the privileged space for the development of social, cultural and professional
integration of newly arrived children and youth. Their academic success is intrinsically
linked to the command of Portuguese, the essential factor of this integration. To ensure
the effective integration is a duty of the State and the school.
[…] come forward with measures that allow for the effective integration of students in
the national educational system, by ensuring the sufficient command of Portuguese as a
vehicle for all school knowledge. This is the language in which students will advance in
their studies, but it is also the language that will guide them in a new space that cannot
be conquered without its consolidation”(DGI, 2005).
In the first fragment, the epistemic modality of certainty, accomplished in the use of the
simple present, leaves no space for questioning the truth of the statements that (1) school is the
privileged space for integration; (2) integration is intrinsically linked to the full mastering of the
language. This is corroborated by the use of intrinsically, or essential (as in ‘essential factor’),
and effective (as in ‘effective integration of students’). The last paragraph contains an explicit
statement that Portuguese is the only language of instruction and curricula, and the
presupposition that it is the only language for the socialization outside the classroom. A model of
linguistic immersion is thus invoked, one that does not involve changes in the national curricula
and deals with linguistic diversity by introducing complementary support in Portuguese in after-
school hours. Throughout the documents, the language (singular, definite) is used to denote
Portuguese, as opposed to languages (plural, indefinite) to refer to languages of immigrants. This
discursive mechanism helps construct otherness, which reinforces an understanding of
multilingualism in schools as a sum of separate monolingualisms, difficult to manage and with
no place for multilingual and discursive negotiation (cf. Rampton, 2008).
In line with the perspective of “Portuguese as a Non-Native Language”, family languages
spoken by immigrant children are seen as sources of errors in Portuguese. Consequently,
“native” speakers are assigned more symbolic power as these are summoned to identify
interferences in the ‘acquisition of Portuguese’. The use of medical and orthopedic terms such as
diagnosis and correction equally stems from the PLNM discourse of deficiency. When
associated with vocabulary choices such as credit units, they echo educational discourses based
on the development of competences as academic achievement, and point at correlations between
pre-identified social and linguistic variables in the development of language profiles, both
framed by the public administration audit discourses on quality measurement, efficiency and
responsibility.
A textual analysis of official discourses helps us identify what counts as legitimate
spaces, processes and actors in linguistic integration and how they adopt an assimilationist
discourse (Blackledge, 2005). The PII circumscribes separate spaces for (1) mother tongue
support for migrants (2) a certain type of visibility that acknowledges cultural and linguistic
diversity and (3) provision of Portuguese as a foreign language. The scope of social action of
migrants is confined to teaching family languages in community spaces and collaborating, as
‘informants’ and ‘native’ speakers, in the recognition of interferences in Portuguese acquisition.
Interest in multilingualism and language diversity, as well as knowledge-building on these
matters, assumes relevance under a Portuguese-only orientation, the common denominator that
again reinforces the hegemonic authority of the ‘native’ speaker of Portuguese.
We have seen how official discourses in Portugal silence and give ambiguous treatment
to linguistic diversity. They implement linguistic integration and a Portuguese-only approach to
linguistic policies, while acknowledging the existence of societal multilingualism and the need
for intercultural dialogue. They separate policies of “language” from policies of “culture” for
immigrant communities reinforced by a deeply ingrained monolingual approach to languages as
separate systems, framed by theories of language acquisition, learning and development that give
emphasis to decontextualized grammatical knowledge and do not focus on any kind of
socialization in multilingual practice.
These views are contrasted by the research in language learning and development that
underline the mutual construction of practices in family languages and in dominant languages as
well as in reciprocal ways of knowing under a rationale of “translanguaging as flexible bilingual
pedagogy” (García, 2009; Blackledge & Creese, 2010). They situate the speaker and the
speaker’s language trajectories at the center of learning process and consider language
boundaries as flexible spaces of negotiation.
Given the global discursive construction of Portuguese as a world language, the use of
Portuguese as a linguistic resource in different multilingual contexts, as well as the increasing
number of language-related policies implemented by the Portuguese government in the
lusophone world, the traditional definitions of Portuguese as a “mother tongue”, a “second
language” etc. are in need of critical reconceptualization (cf. Block, 2003 for a thorough revision
of such approaches).
III.4. Texts, trajectories and sociolinguistic spaces: tracking down possibilities of action
Two themes emerged from our comparative work: 1) the representation of Portuguese as
a knowledge system and a ‘target language’ in translocal discourses of assessment of both
communicative and cognitive processes, defined according to global models such as CEFR and
its application for Portuguese in QuaREPE (Quadro de Referência para o Ensino Português no
Estrangeiro); 2) explicit acknowledgment of multilingual resources across social domains and
spaces of socialization for Portuguese and other languages.
The co-existence of the two themes pointed to the ambiguous position of the Portuguese
government which does not acknowledge other languages apart from the official ones within its
national borders, yet calls for the recognition of the Portuguese language outside its territory.
This position can be understood by taking into account the history of lived experiences with
languages, multilingualism and literacy, here identified by means of the multi-sited comparative
focus on the textual and contextual trajectories. Our ethnographies are thus indicative of
coexisting contradictory regimes of linguistic authority. The pressure to fill the gaps in the
previous policies by means of new modernizing discourses imply a linguistic engineering
oriented to monolingualization, which runs the risk of erasing the epistemic possibility of
tackling multilingual use in hybrid contexts as a possible object of study, research and
pedagogical practice. The focus on trajectories and mobilities is our modest attempt to counteract
this process, by foregrounding the high complexity of multilingual use of Portuguese. We do this
by tracking down the possibilities of action and recognition for multilingual speakers and their
repertoires.
Given the situation of Portugal in the world system and the growing effects of the
financial crisis, such as massive flows of qualified Portuguese emigration, as well as
juxtaposition of speakers of multiple varieties of Portuguese in Europe (also non-European
deriving from multiple migrant, refugee and other formal and informal movements), the
celebration of ‘lusophone identity’ becomes a life-saving device inside and outside European
borders, in crucial need of critical analysis.
IV. Polycentric visions, collaborative writing: exploring the dynamics of Portuguese in
the 21st
century
The collaborative exercise of writing has provided us with some insights that we would
like to pursue and incorporate in our research. We have assumed the value of the migrant
experience from the perspective of theory and practice. This has helped us to recognize the detail
involved in the discursive and language practice, and to find both actual and possible rhizomatic
lines of flight from constraints that open up a possibility of producing different versions of
language policies (Deleuze&Guattari, 1987; Garcia, 2005). Our comparative work has allowed
us to look at informal experiences and solutions by grassroot movements and trace the dynamics
of their recognition in different scales of institutional power. During this process, we also
identified which experiences were wasted, silenced or discarded. The recognition depended on
the language-related loyalties, hegemonical perceptions of normativity and investments in the
symbolic values of Portuguese.
Our work cannot be dissociated from our own pedagogical practice, so we looked for a
space of reflection that could help us a) develop ways of promoting dialogue and recognition of
both complementary schools and mainstream educational contexts; b) envisage teacher training
and life-long learning projects of teachers as critical ethnographers and activists in their own
contexts (Conteh & Brock, 2011), and c) assume the existing multiplicity of approaches and
ideologies in any educational space, when these spaces are perceived as groups of individuals
with multiple language biographies, migrant, professional and institutional trajectories and
experiences. In this light, the pedagogical encounter emerges as a complex network of
temporalities co-occurring in institutional spaces with histories of their own.
This joint work has also allowed us to track not only the global circulation of discourses
about language in Europe and other world regions, but also how they seem to be contested by
resilience and resistance, where both institutional agents and speakers adapt regulatory
discourses to their local, national, and supra-national interests.
By taking a combined perspective approach, by three authors with distinct institutional
identities – mainstream academia, action researchers and educational actors in migrant contexts –
this text represents an exploratory exercise. Using insights from a sociolinguistics of scales and
globalization (Blommaert, 2010; Collins et al, 2009; Zentella, 2007), it attempts to illustrate how
a multi-sited and longitudinal focus on one language such as Portuguese, distributed worldwide
in multilingual regimes with multiple temporalities and configurations, may open up the
possibility of understanding polycentric subjectivities, i.e., multiple and overlapping linguistic
hegemonies associated to the same ‘language’.
In so doing, our comparative work is not confined to institutional action. It acknowledges
the rhizomatic nature of language and languaging, habitually overlooked by language policies
and planning, moving from a focus on the informal uses of language in contact zones to
identifying how this experience has been appropriated by the multilingual regimes at play in our
contexts.
iWe acknowledge the financial support of FCT and POPH-Fundo Social Europeu in Portugal and Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in the research projects developed by Olga Solovova and Clara Keating. iiPolycentricity has been used by discourse analysts and sociolinguists to describe the existence, in the same space,
of “differentiated regimes of multilingualism perceived as acceptable resources instigated by different places” (cf. Blommaert et al. (2005a). Zentella (2007) also focuses on the polycentricity of the Mexican border and the co-habitation of distinct regimes of bilingualism in the same place. This is a distinct approach from that of pluricentric languages, a sociolinguistic and sociocognitive term already applied to Portuguese by Baxter (1992), and recently developed for the lusophone context of Timor-Leste by Batoreo & Casadinho (2009).
iiiThe “Slavic period” in Feytor-Pinto’s work ends in 2004 as his research spans this period. Solovova suggests that
this period should be extended to 2009 – the year in which the Eastern European migration decreases significantly. ivIn Ribeiro’s words: “When we talk today about Portuguese in its European, Brazilian, African dimensions, as well
as the existing diasporas in contexts of migration and mobility, we need to reflect upon the collection of pasts with their own specific origins and temporalities, the ones that have generated the external plurality of Portuguese colonialism and its great internal diversity” (Ribeiro et al, 2010).
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