Biliteracy and Globalization
- PDF / 280,376 Bytes
- 12 Pages / 439.37 x 663.307 pts Page_size
- 101 Downloads / 155 Views
BILITERACY AND GLOBALIZATION
INTRODUCTION
The confluence of biliteracy and globalization is somewhat uncharted water. What text types and practices does one find at the lifeworlds of this confluence and what implications do they have for the bilingual classroom? Who are the main players at this meeting place of texts (as in biliteracy) and processes (as in globalization): markets, policymakers, teacher practitioners or finally the consumers and producers of languages? What does a biliterate text in our globalizing world look like both inside and outside the classroom? This chapter explores some of the answers to these questions. The fields of biliteracy and globalization are highly specialized within their broader disciplines. Hornberger (Continua of Biliteracy, Volume 9) has provided an updated review on the field of biliteracy, which goes back to the 1970s. Thus, this chapter will not repeat what Hornberger has already provided for us, instead it will concentrate more on the nexus of biliteracy and globalization. The data herein come from the two countries where I conduct research—India and Singapore. Research in the former, which is ongoing since 1999, is an ethnographic analysis of a Hindi–English dual medium government school (Rajkiya Sarvodaya Kanya Vidyalaya), which follows the three language formula (TLF), India’s language in education policy. In the case of Singapore, data come from the Sociolinguistic Survey of Singapore (SSS, 2006), a project undertaken by the Centre for Research in Pedagogy and Practice. E A R LY D E V E L O P M E N T S
Globalization The literature on globalization can be considered to be somewhat bounded by two massive trilogies: Wallerstein’s (1974, 1980, 1989) World Systems Analysis and Castells’ (1996/2000, 1997/2004, 1998/ 2000) The Information Age. Both sets of work are brilliant in their analyses of the ways the globe is networked into congeries of empires, corporations, communities and pan national organizations. However, Wallerstein’s Marxist perspective is now dated due to the demise of B. V. Street and N. H. Hornberger (eds), Encyclopedia of Language and Education, 2nd Edition, Volume 2: Literacy, 119–130. #2008 Springer Science+Business Media LLC.
120
V I N I T I VA I S H
communism as an enduring political alternative. Though Castells’ early writings are Marxist, his later work is more applicable to the world in which we live today. The shortcoming of his trilogy is that the work does not make India a major focus as it does China, thus excluding not only a globalizing country of 1 billion people but also one of the dominant cultures of our world. Globalization has been defined somewhat differently by economists (Bhagwati, 2004), sociologists (Castells, 1996/2000, 1997/2004, 1998/ 2000) and anthropologists (Appadurai, 1996) but they all agree on the high level of connectivity in this phenomenon between nations, corporations and individuals. Pieterse, the cultural anthropologist, gives a definition that encompasses many of these views. He writes that globalization ‘is an object
Data Loading...
