Ideology, Policy and Practice in Bilingual Classrooms: Brunei Darussalam
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IDEOLOGY, POLICY AND PRACTICE IN BILINGUAL CLASSROOMS: BRUNEI DARUSSALAM
INTRODUCTION
English language and English medium classrooms in a non-native context are intrinsically bi/multilingual and bi/multicultural as both learners and teachers bring their multiple identities and home–community sociolinguistic practices into the classroom. In countries where policy makers and other stakeholders have realised and accepted this fact, these identities and practices are exploited (or expected to be) as ‘resources’ (in the case of Britain, for example, see Martin-Jones and Saxena, 2003); where this is not the case, they are positioned as ‘problems’. The latter is generally seen in post-colonial multilingual countries (e.g., see Arthur, 2001; Canagarajah, 2001; Hornberger and Chick, 2001; Lin, 1996) where the interaction between oppositional values of local dominant ideologies on the one hand and ‘English-only’ ideology on the other shape bilingual classroom ecologies. These ecologies are often reflected in language choices, rules for interaction and norms of interpretation. This essay focuses on how this post-colonial tension is played out in the bilingual classrooms in Brunei Darussalam, a small, oil-rich country in Southeast Asia, with a population of 379,444 and a land area of 5,270 km2. Brunei, an ethnolinguistically diverse country, is located on the north-western coast of the island of Borneo. This Muslim kingdom is a ‘state’ (Tollefson, 1991, p. 10) headed by the 39th Sultan of a Malay Muslim ruling dynasty stretching back 600 years. The Sultan belongs to the dominant Brunei Malay Muslim group that overwhelmingly dominates Brunei in numerical, administrative and political terms. There are nine other indigenous ethnolinguistic groups: Belait, Bisaya, Dusun, Kedayan, Murut, Tutong, Mukah, Iban and Penan, whose cultural and linguistic habitus (Bourdieu, 1990) hardly command any value in the cultural and linguistic markets of Brunei (see Saxena, 2006). Among the non-indigenous communities is a large population of Chinese and smaller groups of transitional expatriate groups. Bahasa Melayu (Standard Malay) is officially the language of administration and education. The local variety, Brunei Malay, however, is spoken, as first or second language, by the majority of the population. English is also used for certain official purposes. Both Malay and English are A. Creese, P. Martin and N. H. Hornberger (eds), Encyclopedia of Language and Education, 2nd Edition, Volume 9: Ecology of Language, 249–261. #2008 Springer Science+Business Media LLC.
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MUKUL SAXENA
taught and employed as media of instruction in the country’s bilingual education system. The use of Malay–English code-switching is a common practice in Bruneian communities and classrooms (Saxena, 2006, forthcoming). A complex interaction between Brunei’s broader sociolinguistic context, its bilingual education policy and classroom ecologies is shaped by a constant negotiation between ‘convergence’ and ‘divergence’ forces associated with the national ideology, Melayu
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