Faculty of Education - Theses
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ItemVernacularising the law: Malaysia's bilingual policy as a model for postcolonial common law systems.( 2014)Malaysia is among a dozen or so common law-based jurisdictions that use a language other than English in the legal domain. Common law, which is much the largest legal system but cohabits with Syariah and customary law, functions in two languages: Malay, the national language and official legal medium, and English, the colonial medium still admissible in court in ‘the interests of justice’. This study investigated why and how bilingual law has been implemented in Malaysia using a language planning perspective, whereby linguistic reform is seen as motivated more by extralinguistic factors such as politics and socioeconomics than by linguistic factors such as communicative need. The perspective considers manipulation of language status, corpus, acquisition and discourse to be key components of planning. Evidence for these interrelated processes was found through documentary analysis of laws, judgments, and educational and news reports, as well as in interviews with lawyers, law lecturers, law students and administrators. The study also explored how lawyers and future lawyers orientate to bilingual practices. Interviews were conducted with 55 lawyers, 18 lecturers teaching law or language for law, and 9 administrators involved with legal affairs. These were supplemented with questionnaire data from nearly 500 law students and with follow-up interviews with some 100 of them. Drawing on structuration theory’s emphasis on the recursive relationship between individual behaviour and inherited rules and resources, agency was found to be highly constrained by the politicised character of language planning and authoritarian nature of legal institutions, yet immanent in tensions in the language policy itself between idealism and pragmatism, sociopolitical stability and economic growth, national unity and international engagement. Agency is also contingent on the bilingual proficiency of practitioners. The third strand of the study compared Malaysia’s experience with other common law jurisdictions that have attempted vernacularisation. Use of languages other than English is confined to a minority of jurisdictions and very few of these employ them extensively in higher courts or jurisprudence. This makes Malaysian bilingual law unusual, interesting, and a potential model for other multilingual postcolonial societies seeking to enhance access to justice while maintaining legal stability and integrity. Comprehensive bilingual legal resources and systematic bilingual training are argued to be critical for effective vernacularisation.
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ItemLanguage maintenance shift of a three generation Italian family in three migration countries : an international comparative study( 2004-03)This thesis is a comparative investigation into the use of Italian of an extended Italian family in language contact situation in three countries: the United States, Australia and France. This study is undertaken and described in the context of the different policies on migrant integration and minority languages in the three migration countries. The investigation uses the ‘Case Study’ methodology in the format of an embedded multiple case-study project. The third generation was made the focus of the study to investigate Fishman’s “intergroup social dependency” theory. According to this theory, when the immigrant experience is viewed from a perspective of three or more generation time depth, the immigrant group generally loses its language due to its dependency on the host society for its survival. Fishman contends that only an effective and strict ‘compartmentalisation of language functions’ between the minority language and the host language can help the minority group maintain its language. The findings indicate that for people of Italian background living as a minority group in language contact situation compartmentalisation is not a viable alternative. Nor do they consider the ‘maintenance’ of their community language important. When in the migration country bilingualism is valued, it is the standard variety of the heritage language that is chosen for maintenance and further learning. The study presents recommendations towards the achievability of bilingualism beyond the limitations of compartmentalisation.
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ItemThe discourse of ESL policy: the impact of the 'literacy crisis'( 2009)The silencing of English as a Second Language (ESL) has occurred concurrently with an alleged crisis in literacy standards that has concentrated funds into early years programs and foundational literacy. The ‘literacy crisis’ has focused teacher attention on standardized assessment and on meeting benchmarks, which shape classroom activities and distort learning activities. The ‘literacy crisis’ has also focused attention on literacy for mother tongue English speakers, at the expense of ESL students. Instead of bilingualism being seen as a resource that can be used to support English literacy development, it is presented as a deficit - a barrier to meeting outcomes in English literacy. This research focuses on how ESL has fared in this context. Drawing on methods from Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), the language of policy texts is examined to reveal the current status of ESL in Victorian schools where a self-managed school ‘system’ makes it difficult to as certain common practice in relation to ESL provision and programs. The thesis builds its theoretical conclusions using ideas from ‘grounded theory’ to connect the discourse of ESL policy to wider social issues as a way of understanding how policy has impacted on ESL in schools. Having examined policy texts and more positive forms of support for ESL in schools, some recommendations are made to right language wrongs and write language rights that support multilingual school students and encourage linguistic adaptability.