England: policy developments impacting on ESOL basic literacy

1. England: policy developments impacting on ESOL basic literacy Pauline Moon Helen Sunderland LLU+ @ London South Bank University

3. Government departmentsconcerned with ESOL • Innovation, Universities and Skills • Children, Families and Schools • Home Office • Communities and local government • Work and Pensions

4. The invisible student

5. Policy re LESLLA learners • Provision • Very little specific to learners with little ed. • Funding • Prioritises higher levels (targets) • Teacher education • No requirement to train to teach this level • Curriculum • Previously hidden, will be explicit • Quality assurance • Ofsted report doesn’t mention this work

6. Revised ESOL Adult Core Curriculum

7. Current policy drivers Leitch review of skills (2006) and government response By 2020 95% adults functionally literate Social cohesion agenda & consultation on ESOL Local areas decide priority groups Immigration fears and new regulations Difficult for unskilled migrants to enter UK

8. High status literacy Classics, Greats some learners: fewerlanguagesthan English language learners prospectuses: “knowledge” ancient Greek courses @ Oxford & Cambridge Universities – some for learners who don’t read and write Greek

9. Low status literacy basic literacy some learners: morelanguagesthan ancient Greek learners prospectuses: “skills” English language courses in post-16 – some courses are for learners who don’t read and write English

10. Conceptualising courses • ancient Greek: an achievement • English language: to become ordinary • issues: status, prestige, ideology, discourses, hegemony, identity • theory: Gramsci, Foucault, Labov, Trudgill ...

11. Naming practices pre-beginners ? illiterate ? pre-entry ? Identity: did anyone ask us? basic skills ? Can’t read, can’t write (recent British TV programme)

12. Conceptualising the learners: not beginner thinkers “…two little four year old girls, one Arabic and the other American doing ‘scribble’ writing. When asked what it said, the Arabic child replied “you can’t read it – it’s in Arabic”. Hall (1987) quoted in Spiegel and Sunderland (2006)

13. Route to resolution: what is literacy? • social & cultural practices: involvement – not solitary (New Literacy Studies: Brice-Heath, Street, Barton, Hamilton ...) • involvement in literacy practices – not necessarily doing the reading and writing (Brice-Heath, Barton ...)

14. ESOL Curriculum • curriculum takes a position: • negotiate relevant learning contexts (not prescribed – example contexts) • integrate text, sentence & word level (curriculum divides – guidance for integration) • teachers take positions: • may or may not contextualise learning • may or may not integrate text, sentence & word

15. A policy for LESLLA learners? What are the pros and con? What could go in such a policy? Should LESLLA be lobbying for policy development? Should LESLLA be collecting information on policies in different countries?

16. References Barton, D. Hamilton, M. and Ivanic, R. (2000) (eds) Situated Literacies. Routledge. Barton, D. (2007). Literacy: an introduction to the ecology of written language. Blackwell. Brice Heath, S. (1983). Ways with words. Cambridge University Press. Coffield, F (2007) Running ever faster down the wrong road Labov, W. (2006). The social stratification of English in New York City. 2nd edition. Cambridge University Press. Street, B. (1985). Literacy in Theory and Practice. Cambridge University Press. Trudgill, P. (1975). Accent, dialect and the school. Hodder Arnold. Foucault on discourse, power and knowledge. Gramsci on hegemony.

17. Contact us Pauline Moon p.moon@lsbu.ac.uk Helen Sunderland h.sunderland@lsbu.ac.uk