Cultural Diversity as a Fundamental Aspect of Education in the UK - Essay Example

Introduction Cultural diversity is a fundamental aspect of education in the UK. There is a changing trend in the cultural, racial and ethnic composition in the U.K, leading to an increase in the population of ‘linguistically and culturally diverse students’ to over a million (Naldic, 2015). This paper will focus on and analyse Cummins’ 1986 empowerment theory and linked to related literature and observation and policy of present bilingual education in the UK. This paper will demonstrate an understanding of the policy and practice in the education of bilingual children through formulation of teaching strategies that are effective in the improvement of academic competency of bilingual students’ as well as analysis of the policies that support bilingual education. The observed school is located in Tower Hamlets in East London. The learning environment in the school is very approachable and welcoming. The observed year one classroom has 30 pupils aged five years with 10 bilingual learners from Mexico, Somalia, Poland, Bangladesh, Brazil and France, making for a widely diverse language and cultural environment. According to Ofsted, the performance of the school is good in terms of pupil achievement, behaviour, quality of teaching, quality of the curriculum pupil’s welfare, health and safety as well as leadership and management. The performance of bilingual pupils’ has improved steadily as they have achieved comprehension that is near that of mainstream children. To improve the performance, it is recommended that pupils be given work that challenges them and matches their level of ability (Ofsted, 2013). Cummins’ 1986 empowerment theory analysis the learning trends of bilingual students’ exploring how status relations and power difference, minority language instruction, interdependence hypothesis, community and school liaison and power and status relationships impacts the school performance of minority groups. Cummins (1986) influence on teaching strategies and policy of bilingual education is arguably very effective in focusing on the education of the bilingual students in a holistic view as opposed to Conteh’s (2009) framework, that extensively focuses on integration of parents and the community. Cummins’ framework enhances the design of intervention to ensure the potential of revising the underachievement of most bilingual pupils’ by encouraging community and parent’s participation as well as collaboration of teachers in pedagogy (Delgado-Gaitan, 1991). According to Cummins, the aim of empowerment is to promote a sense of belonging through education. Cummins (1986) theoretical framework serves to enhance effective teaching and assessment practices of bilingual pupils’ for effective learning outcomes. Faltis’s (1996) model and Cummin’s theory converge where both promote bilingual education as well as intercultural understanding advocating cooperation, communication and integration Incorporation of Minority students’ language and culture into the school programme Linguistic and cultural incorporation refers to the inclusion of the language and culture of the minority learners in the school programme (Cummins, 1989). Cummins proposes that the native language of bilingual students should be used a language of instructions (singularly or dually with the mainstream language). Linguistic and cultural incorporation is supported by the ‘interdependence hypothesis’ which posits that all language have surface features with manifestations cutting across all languages. In this case, cognitive skills are transferable across languages making it possible to transfer social and cognitive competencies from L1 to L2 (Cummins, 1986). The Hypothesis concludes that where the school incorporates, encourages and gives status to the minority language, the chances of empowerment are increased. There are both potential positive cognitive effects and positive effects on personality, attitudes and social and emotional well-being. The role of the teacher in this case can be examined along an additive-subtractive dimension. Additive teachers are more preferred in this case as they promote incorporation of minority pupils’ language and culture into the school programme. Using the minority language as the language of instruction when teaching bilingual students facilitates strong comprehension of English enhancing the transfer of cognitive and linguistics skills from L1 TO L2. It also enhances their local and social interactions, cultural identity and awareness, socio-economic benefits, metalinguistic awareness as well as cognitive and social development (Cummins, 1986; Holmen, 2006; Gravelle, 1996). According to Gravelle (1996, p.8) ‘learners need both the curriculum that motivates and has relevance for them’. Gravelle advocates for a curriculum that cuts across the curriculum in order to enable the pupils’ to feel appreciated, thus leading to acknowledgement of the norms and customs of the bilingual society. Bruner (1986) views bilingual learning as a communal activity where values, customs, culture and norms should be shared. This promotes a sense of identity and belonging in a community. The observation in the target classroom indicates that the pupils’ are learning in a mainstream type of classroom. Once a week, a community person came in to assist and provide support to the bilingual students who are empowered and given an opportunity to learn using the language that caters for their needs. The school has tried to incorporate the cultures of the student through art such as drawing their flags in class. However, their native languages and culture do not have a fixed status in the school. The observation of the bilingual classroom seemed to be consistent with Cummins’ Common Underlying Proficiency (CUP) hypothesis by concurring that achievement of cognitive competence in the native language was effective in enhancing the achievement of English competence and in improving the effectiveness in learning other subjects (Cummins, 1986). According to CUP theory, learning one language gives students skills that are necessary for learning the second language (Yamauchi, 2005). The observation provides examples of cognitive, literary, phonetic and linguistic transfer of knowledge and skills from L1 to L2 which promotes the hypothesis that bilingual students achieve higher academic performance through bilingual education. The school exhibited addictive bilingualism since bilingual pupils’ were allowed a native teacher to cater for their needs irregularly. The absence of dual language programmes inhibits pupils’ ability to develop concepts in their more developed language and does not create balanced bilingual pupils’ (Collier & Thomas, 2014). The DfE policy on EAL teaching and learning provides for bilingual students to be taught in a bilingual classroom. However, newly arrived bilingual pupils’ are allowed to receive additional help from specialist teachers or by bilingual classroom assistants (DfE, 2015). The policy does not provide for the specific time under which the bilingual pupils’ should continue to receive bilingual tuition until they achieve full competency. This leaves the policy application flexible and for the school. The observed school has been very effective in implementing this policy given the rising rate of its academic efficiency. It is therefore imperative to conclude that academic competency of bilingual pupil increases in a bilingual classroom than in a monolingual one. This is because of transfer of social and cognitive competencies from L1 to L2 as well as their increased sense of security, confidence and self-esteem (DfE, 2015). Encouragement of minority community participation as an integral component of children’s education Community participation refers to the tendency of the bilingual schools to incorporate the parents of the bilingual pupils’ in the education of their children. Power and status relations between the parents and the school play a major role in improving school performance (Cummins, 1986). According to Cummins (1989), when parents are incorporated in bilingual education, this results in the empowerment of the minority community as they gain power and status in the partial determination of their children’s schooling. He also notes that there is lack of school progress (and ‘disablement’) in schools where parents are kept relatively powerless. Furthermore, the power of a parent-teacher relationship enhances the growth of paired reading schemes. Parents are encouraged to collaborate with the schools and the teachers by getting involved in activities such as listening to their children read, perform their assignment and perform other school activities on a systematic basis. According to Cummins, the role of the teacher is examined on the collaborative-exclusionary dimension where academic performance pupils’ is dependent on the relationship between the school and the community. Collaborative teachers are preferred as they encourage minority community participation as an integral component of children’s education as opposed to exclusionary teachers (Cummins, 1989). Faltis (1996) is also concerned about community integration, which he views a means of reducing prejudice and promoting racial integration, important to cognitive and academic development. Home-school mismatch is one of the greatest contributors of low academic performance in bilingual students since it deprives their cultural and social capital which makes up the cultural and linguistic competencies required for academic excellence (Richards et al, 2006). Encouragement of minority community’s participation in children’s education allows bilingual pupils’ to collaborate the two linguistic and cultural backgrounds making it easy for them to comprehend L2. Parents are encouraged to contribute to children’s learning process by helping them read extensively in their first language (Thomas & Collier, 2002). The observed EAL pupil was helped to learn English easily by building the adjectives from French to English, letting the pupil note the connection. The school observation indicates that community participation with regards to the role played by parents in the educational needs of their children forms part of a collaborative part of the continuum of parent-teacher power relationship. The school has been rated ‘good’ by Ofsted report due to its improved overall performance of the students as the school actively involves parents’ of bilingual and other mainstream students to participate in both classroom and home support activities. The pupils’ used scaffolding and paired reading schemes in class with the help of the teacher while parents helped in scaffolding in home-based learning in order to collaboratively improve their English comprehension. The school employed collaborative bilingualism because community integration was evident in the collaboration efforts on the teachers and the parents. The DfE policy on bilingual education seeks to enhance the academic performance of bilingual pupils’ by promoting community cohesion and integration are in a better position to learn each other’s culture thereby enhancing better understanding of the broader community (DfE, 2012). Public cohesion has been improved through publicly-funded schools which have remained the obligation of the state by the Education and Inspections Act 2006. The schools were required to enhance community cohesion and report their contribution towards the same to the Ofsted report (DfE, 2012). Evidence suggests community participation has positive effects on academic performance of bilingual pupils’ as reflected in the classroom observation. Through the implementation of community cohesion and integration in the DfE policy, the observed school was noted to be cohesive as teachers and the parents were liaising between home and school. The policy could be amended to ensure that an implementation strategy is formulated to ensure uniformal enforcement in all schools. Promotion of intrinsic motivation in students to use language actively in order to generate their own knowledge Teachers need to apply learning styles as part of bilingual education; student-centred approach should be used in order to allow pupils’ to generate their own knowledge through active involvement in the learning process. The teacher should only play the role of a facilitator (Cummins, 2000). This preferred approach increases the interaction of the pupils’ by allowing them to share knowledge and get more motivated to improve their language exercise and academic performance. For Cummins (2000), the classroom pedagogy adopted should be based on positive reciprocal interaction as it promotes bilingual education through collaboration, guidance, facilitation, flexibility and interaction of teachers and learners which opposed to transmission - oriented dimension where the learning process in teacher-centred (Cummins, 1989). Faltis (1996) also advocated giving cooperative learning much attention as an effective tool for enhancing multicultural education. Gay (2000b) proposes a learning style where pupils’ are grouped to assist in the learning process along gender, racial, linguistic, ethnic and ability lines. This goes contrary to traditional grouping along cultural lines based on those who shared a common linguistic background (Söhn, 2005). Poor performance in some bilingual schools can be attributed to the teaching styles of some teachers’ who may have very low expectations of pupils’ performing poorly (Schmidt, 2005). Naldic (2015) recommends promotion of bilingual education through the application of several learning strategies allowing learners to draw on their met cognition that assists in the generation of self- knowledge. For Cummins’, the promotion of intrinsic motivation can be enhanced by varying the level of complexity depending on competency level of pupils’. Academic performance of bilingual pupils’ can be improved by conceptualising bilingual proficiency through diversification of learning tasks in terms of Basic Interpersonal Communicative Skills (BICS) and Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency (CALP). According to Cummins (2005), BICS is ‘context embedded’ and entails the improvement of conversational fluency in English as the second language, while CALP is ‘context-reduced’ and is concerned with application of language in decontextualised academic situations (Baker, 2006). Source: Cummins, J. (2000): p. 68 The movement from BICS to CALP illustrates a wide range of learning situations where bilingual learners’ are required to apply different levels of cognitive involvement, from simple cognitive involvement preferably for beginners in the upper left corner to higher level cognitive involvement in the lower right corner preferably for advanced learners. The BICS/CALP distinction has been criticised for having undesirable consequences in confusing language ability and academic achievement; failing to factor in crucial differences between first and second language development and importantly gives ‘special status’ to the instructional/mainstream language of the educated classes considered as inherently “more correct” and superior to other languages (Macswan & Rolstad, 2003). In the observation, the teacher implemented a learning strategy of pairing students so that weaker pupils’ can learn from a student who is stronger in subjects such as mathematics. The use of visuals such as pictures and names of body parts, birds and animals were used to enable pupils’ to apply their native thinking abilities into the interpretation of new concepts. Learning styles such as cooperative learning was applied in order to promote the use of strong students as a tool for alleviating the academic performance of slow performers. The school applied a positive reciprocal teaching model as there was interaction between the teachers and pupils’. The DfE policy proposes that teachers should adopt learning styles integrating the bilingual and the mainstream learners since they learn better when they are educated alongside each other. The grouping of the students during learning should not be based on a common language share between students as this will weaken their integration within a whole-school context. Nevertheless, the implementation of this policy is not provided for in the policy leaveing the power of enforcement to individual schools. As such, there is variation in the implementation levels among schools’ limiting its effectiveness (DfE, 2015). The observation points clearly to the fact that the EAL student could benefit more on slow progression from BICS to CALP while the EL1 can comfortably apply CALP at this level. Cummins (1986) suggests that different levels of support should be given to different students depending on their stages of development. The policy should be amended to reflect the different comprehension levels that should students should reach in order to qualify for some challenges. Active involvement of professionals involved in assessment as advocates for minority students According to Cummins, the assessment bilingual pupils’ should be conducted taking into account their educational and societal background (Cummins, 1089). The relatively poorer educational performance of bilingual children results from factors relating to the individual pupil (low IQ, low motivation etc) – based on psychological testing/educational testing, or factors wider such as the transmission model used in the curriculum, the exclusionary orientation of the teacher towards parents/community and the relative economic deprivation of some minority children. The assessment process is examined along the dimensions of advocator-oriented and legitimisation-oriented. The legitimization-oriented dimension is most preferred, allowing for the assessment process to account for mother languages of the bilingual pupils’ by using physiological test to determine the problems a leaner is facing. Cummins encourages schools to actively challenge historical patterns of disempowerment and become potentially subversive towards existing language majority/minority relationships (Cummins, 2000). He further promotes the power relationships are at the core of schooling. Other theorists’ have also argued that L1 and L2 should be included in the assessment process: formal and informal. To ensure effective assessment, teachers should take into account the literacy factors, educational history and compare pupils’ with the same attributes (Mehan, 2007). Furthermore, Flanagan et al (2007) advocates cognitive assessment, considering the language in which the leaner is strongest, and then combine the assessment with that conducted on the native and second language. In the observation, it is clear that the methods of instructions are tailor-made to reflect the needs of the pupils’. There were several flags representing the country of origin of its pupils’ which to help them feel comfortable and establish a sense of belonging. The practice was consistent with Cummins’ (1986) model that planning instructions and assessment for bilingual pupils’ should be conducted at different levels of development in order to ensure inclusion (Tharp et al., 2005). The assessment process used in this school was advocator-oriented model since the teacher used a standardised test to rank pupils’. However, there were collaborative power relations as the pupils’ were actively involved by the teacher in the learning process. The DfE policy on bilingual education seeks to promote effective bilingual assessment by making a provision that asserts that the assessment process should be meaningful by taking into perspective the prior knowledge of the student and experience as well as language skills. This policy has failed to achieve the expected yields in the educational sector due to the poor enforcement practices (Naldic, 2015). For example, most schools in the UK still use standardised tests (DfE, 2015). The observation of the French EAL learner indicates proper application of the assessment policy as illustrated by her activity in class while drawing the shell, she cannot describe the shells in English. In establishing a foundation for an inclusive curriculum, the teacher in this class strives to learn the student’s cultural and linguistic origin in order to establish a healthy relationship and make the learning process highly educational, relevant, fun and exciting though careful designing of lesson plans (Villegas & Lucas, 2002). This would prove impossible to apply to all minority language pupils’ due to the wide language diversity and limited knowledge and ability of the teacher’s of most of the minority languages in the school. Conclusion Cummins’ theory has made a significant contribution to the understanding and development of the theoretical basis of bilingual education. The strategies proposed in this paper followed Cummins’ empowerment framework. Cummins’ theory and Faltis’s (1996) framework engage in advocating for participation of parents from minority communities in the education activities of their children. Both authors assert that empowerment of bilingual students is the best strategy to improve their education. Significantly, Faltis does not question the advantage of primary language teaching as opposed to Cummins’ idea of dual or even minority language instruction. The DfE policy on bilingual education formulates strategies to improve the academic effectiveness. Nevertheless, Naldic (2015) questions the effectiveness of the government in enforcing their policies which have weakened education. Since there is big gap between policy and the practice in most UK schools, the government should focus on stipulating the implementation procedure of the policies to ensure that stakeholders are compliant. The formulated policies have done much in recognise or acknowledge the importance of power relations in the school but implementation remains a weakness. The school observation shows both progress and weaknesses in bilingual education with an emphasis on customised constructive creative approaches. Crucially, Cummins’ theory identifies important factors for an effective bilingual education policy stressing among other things community and school liaison and power and status relationships. However, the socio-cultural, economic and political dimensions should not be overlooked (Delgado-Gaitan & Trueba, 1991) and should be a driver for a more holistic approach to bilingual education by the government. References Buac, M, Gross, M, & Kaushanskaya, M., 2014, The Role of Primary Caregiver Vocabulary Knowledge in the Development of Bilingual Children’s Vocabulary Skills, Journal Of Speech, Language & Hearing Research, 57(5), pp. 1804-1816 Baker, C. 2006. Foundations of bilingual education and bilingualism (4th Edition). Clevedon, England, Buffalo, N.Y.: Multilingual Matters. Baker, C. 2011. 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