Questions and identity: Local English, global students and a tertiary entrance examination.
Farrell, Lesley
If an exam essay is well structured, grammatically coherent and
displays a sound knowledge of the topic, why then does it not receive a
high grade? Lesley Farrell argues that teachers and examiners bring to
their reading of the exam paper an implicit view of an `ideal
candidate'. While many students seem to know what these
expectations are and receive high grades, students from different
cultural backgrounds often fail in these endeavours. Farrell
demonstrates why this might be so and poses the question as to whether
we should be imposing a cultural standard on students' writing.
Debates around the effects of the globalisation of English seem
remote to many Australians. If anything, monolingual English-speaking
Australians greet the news of the spread of English around the globe
with some degree of secret relief, grateful that the arduous task of
learning another, `international', language does not fall to them.
In other parts of the world, in Africa and in India, for example, the
debates are fierce and immediate; the spread of English is recognised as
a powerful and potentially damaging colonising strategy. Where English
is accepted for historical reasons, or for pragmatic reasons associated
with participation in the global economy, the debate has turned to
issues around what counts as legitimate English, and who gets to decide.
According to Pennycook:
The main issue of debate is whether efforts should be made to
maintain a central standard of English or whether the different
varieties of English should be acknowledged as legitimate forms in their
own right.
(1994: p. 10)
The question, at least as it relates to varieties of English such
as Indian English and African English, has for Kachru already been
resolved. He argues that
native speakers of this language [English] seem to have lost the
exclusive prerogative to control its standardization.
(1986: p. 30)
While the question of the standardisation of English may have been
resolved as far as international Englishes are concerned, it is far from
resolved in countries like Australia where the dominant language is
English and the majority of the population speak English as a first
language but where a significant percentage of the population speaks
English as a second or subsequent language.
It is not simply that English is now, in Pennycook's terms,
`in the world', evolving new varieties in specific geographical
locations; it is that `the world' is now also `in English',
whether we like it or not. By this I mean that in every part of the
world where English is a first language, the practices of speaking and
writing in English are changing as the cultural and linguistic
backgrounds of English speakers become more diverse. Australian English
cannot be, and has not been, quarantined from the forces of
globalisation although it has been quarantined from scrutiny; what
counts as `English' in the powerful institutions of Australia has
generally been taken for granted.
The contestation over what counts as legitimate English in
countries like Australia, and about who gets to decide, resonates with
many of the same cultural and political debates as it does in countries
like Africa and India, where the imposition of a standard English is
more overt and obtrusive. The defining debates do not, however,
generally occur in political and policy arenas. English language and
literacy practices are contested locally, at particular moments and in
particular places. We can describe the practices associated with the
globalisation of English from a `global' perspective but it is only
in particular local sites that these practices come to matter.
Educational settings are among the most important `local
sites' in which questions about what counts as legitimate English,
and who gets to decide, are contested, and we as educators are deeply
implicated in these contests. Every day, when we respond to
students' questions, and to their silences, when we mark their
papers and read their stories, we are in positions where we deem certain
language and literacy practices to be legitimate, and others to be
illegitimate. Although these individual teaching moments hardly seem to
have the authority to standardise certain forms of English and
marginalise other forms, they gain that authority because they are
obscured in everyday teaching practices. They do not seem to be
contentious at all, just `commonsense'.
In this article I want to explore the role that educational
institutions, and individual teachers, play in the standardisation of
forms of English and the naturalisation of these forms of English as
transparently right and fitting. I find it useful to think about
standard forms of English as language practices (see Gee, 1990;
Fairclough, 1989; 1992; Hodge and Kress, 1993), practices which carry
specific social, cultural and political meanings. My particular concern
is with the way we as teachers are implicated in the processes of
standardisation at critical moments in the education of our students. My
`local site' is the writing and reading of a particular examination
essay, an idiosyncratic and ritualised form of literacy practice
associated with tertiary entrance examinations in Australia. In making
this argument I am calling on a small part of a detailed study of the
way in which examiners `make grades' when they rank examination
essays and the ways in which students write the essays that the
examiners read and rank. The written texts I analysed included ten years
of published Reports of the Examiners in Legal Studies, Australian
History and Economics (Farrell, 1997b) and forty essays written by four
students (two Vietnamese-Australian and two Chilean-Australian) over the
year that they prepared for their final examinations (Farrell, 1996;
1997a). My focus was on discourse organisation, especially linearity,
symmetry and co-ordination, and culturally situated notions of relevance
and politeness. I concluded that preferences for certain kinds of
discourse organisation were socially and culturally situated, that they
were shaped by certain social and cultural values (certain identities),
and that their preferred discourse organisation seemed, to readers and
to writers, to be both `natural' and `right'.
Here I am interested in questions of social and cultural identity.
I want to consider the way the `right' kind of `candidate'
identity is constituted in examination discourse; how certain ways of
being in the world are realised in certain English literacy practices
and read by examiners as transparent, and objective, evidence of
academic ability. As Ivanic has demonstrated,
acts of writing depend on the multiple identities which writers
bring to them, and ... acts of writing in themselves constitute an
on-going struggle over possible identities.
(1995: p. 25)
I argue that struggles over what counts as legitimate English
language practice in specific contexts (like the reading and writing of
an examination essay) are struggles over identity, although they
generally present more as pedagogical moments than as struggles, and
they rarely seem to be about identity. I argue that these struggles have
material outcomes; that the demand that students construct specific
identities in examination contexts creates structural barriers for
students, many of whom use English as a second or subsequent language.
Such students are likely to use different English literacy practices to
construct different identities which are more congruent with their
cultural backgrounds.
Australia is, like most countries around the world, a multilingual nation. Immigrant students from Language Other Than English (LOTE)
backgrounds comprise approximately 20 per cent of government and
Catholic school populations in Victoria and New South Wales and the
diversity of their backgrounds is increasing. In 1992 (the most recent
figures available), 22 per cent of immigrants were born in north-east
Asia, especially Hong Kong, 21 per cent in south-east Asia, 19 per cent
in Europe and the former USSR, 11 per cent in southern Asia, 7 per cent
in Oceania and 9.1 per cent in the Middle East and North Africa (Iredale
& Fox, 1995). In terms of language and cultural background this
diversity of the school population contributes to the diverse English
literacy practices that develop at different schools. But as this
diversity is not usually viewed as an effect of a broad social trend
like the globalisation of English, the impact of the globalisation of
English on schooling generally remains invisible. Difference in English
literacy practice is still conveniently interpreted as a matter of
individual ability or deficit, judged against an unproblematic
'standard' English. When diversity in literacy practice
figures in these discussions at all it figures as a simple problem, a
problem of falling school standards, a convenient scapegoat for economic
and political failures. This view naturalises language practices as an
unproblematic standard and obscures the ideological work that the
examination does.
The ideological work that examinations do
The introduction by the Whitlam Government of free undergraduate
tertiary education for candidates who secured a university place marked
a turning point in Australian tertiary education. Tertiary education was
no longer the exclusive province of the wealthy or those lucky few who
secured scholarships; it was open to all who qualified in the
competitive examinations that marked the final year of schooling. For a
moment it seemed that tertiary education would be available equally to
all who had the ability to benefit from it. In the process of
democratising tertiary entrance it was taken for granted that, in an
examination,
a candidate's social and cultural background is rendered
neutral when it is not explicitly identified to the Examiners, and so
the authentic academic merit' of each candidate can be discerned
and the results of candidates calibrated one against the other.
(Farrell 1997b: p. 135)
However, it has become increasingly evident that the removal of
material barriers to participation, although an important step, is only
part of the story. The very examinations which were promoted as
advancing equity unobtrusively have produced structural barriers which
privilege some categories of students while disadvantaging others
(Bourdieu & Passeron, 1972; Ozolins, 1981; Farrell, 1997a; 1997b).
This is, perhaps, inevitable in an environment where there are simply
not enough places in high status university faculties to meet the
demand. The work of the examiners is no longer primarily about ensuring
that only qualified candidates obtain a university place; it is about
creating a plausible rank order of candidates as a basis on which
scarce, and highly sought-after, places can be distributed. Some
qualified candidates must miss out. It is the examiners' task to
determine which ones they will be.
Academic reading and writing of the kind required by examiner and
candidate in tertiary entrance examinations is governed by particular
conventions and those conventions do ideological work (Gee, 1990;
Fairclough, 1992). In this context I am using the concept of
`ideologies' as Fairclough does:
to be significations/constructions of reality (the physical world,
social relations, social identities) which are built into various
dimensions of the forms/meanings of discursive practices, and which
contribute to the production, reproduction or transformation of
relations of domination.
(1992: p. 62)
I am particularly interested here in the discursive construction of
social identities of examination candidates, identities which, I argue,
may be more available to students of some social and cultural
backgrounds than to those of others. Writing for these examinations is
ruled by conventions, some of which are stated explicitly, many of which
are not. These conventions, like others associated with academic
writing, regulate `what you are allowed to say, how you are allowed to
say it and who you are allowed to be' (Clark, 1992). It has become
clear that a great deal is taken for granted in school discourse in
general and in examination discourse in particular, and educators who
see good students failing frequently demand that examiners make explicit
what is valued in competitive examinations. While these calls for
explicitness are understandable, there are good reasons why explicitness
is not, in this case, the answer.
First, it is not possible exhaustively to describe the valued
features of a high scoring examination script, and even if it were
possible, it would not be very useful because the specific features that
enable examiners to discriminate between scripts do not remain stable
when the cohort changes. Examiners routinely attempt to make explicit in
general terms what they expect and value in examinations scripts but the
precision is often spurious (Farrell, 1997b).
Second, being explicit is not enough. In her study of black
bilingual women writing academic essays in a higher education setting,
Lillis (1997) explains that:
... even though the students had been given what were considered to
be detailed descriptions of what was required in their writing they
needed to repeat the same questions time and again at specific moments
of meaning making in their writing in order to make sense of academic
writing conventions ... [The] notion of explicitness is hugely
problematic and only seems to make sense to students as they explore it
in the context of specific moments of meaning making.
(p. 187)
Writing in academic settings is not about observing explicitly
stated linguistic conventions, it is about adopting new ways of being in
the world, new writing identities. In standardising certain forms of
English we standardise certain ways of being in the world, certain
identities, and we marginalise others. In contexts like tertiary
entrance examinations, the cost of failing to assume those identities,
or refusing to do so, can be very great.
The student
Hang is a student in the final year of her secondary schooling,
preparing to sit her tertiary entry examinations. She and her family
came as refugees to Australia from Vietnam when she was twelve years of
age. Hang and her family live in a part of Melbourne that has a strong
Vietnamese community; she speaks Vietnamese to her family and Vietnamese
friends and fluent English with her English-speaking friends,
schoolmates and teachers.
Hang's school, an average-sized high school with about 900
students aged between twelve and twenty years, reflects the ethnic
diversification that attends globalisation. The students in the final
years of schooling are a little older than might be expected because
many of them are refugees and have had their schooling interrupted. At
any time, between 70 per cent and 90 per cent of the students at this
school speak a first language other than English, reflecting the many
different countries of origin represented. Almost all the teachers speak
English as a first language; in fact, nearly all the teachers are
Anglo-Australian, and nearly all are monolingual.
In terms of language background this diversification of the student
cohort is reflected in the English literacy practices with which the
students accomplish their intellectual and cognitive work (Farrell,
1997a; Farrell, 1996a). Academic literacy is, like any other literacy, a
social and cultural practice, and the school literacy practices of the
students in this school are partly shaped by the social and cultural
practices they bring to school. Another way of saying this is that the
effects of globalisation, the pressures of diversity, are written into
the literacy practices at this local site. However, while English
literacy practice is diversifying at this local site, within the formal
framework of the education system a highly idiosyncratic `Standard
English' applies. Within this framework variations in literacy
practices remain invisible; they are acknowledged only as deficit
practices, practices which fail to measure up against the standard and
therefore indicate a writer of inferior academic merit.
The examination
Hang is preparing to sit for her tertiary entrance examinations,
examinations which are externally set and assessed. Hang's teachers
will have very little say in determining her final grade. In assessing
these written examinations the examiners each year enshrine as standard
the idiosyncratic literacy practices in which the intellectual and
cognitive work is made visible (Farrell, 1997b). In the published
Reports of Examiners they state explicitly how important it is for
students like Hang to use the literacy practices the examiners recognise
as appropriate.
Markers [examiners] reported that while many answers showed
evidence of a satisfactory level of economic knowledge, far too often
this was not adequately displayed, and therefore rewarded, due to poor
writing skills and inability to structure answers appropriately.
(Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Board [VCAB]: Economics, 1990:
p. 1)
Examiners regard standardised literacy practice as important, not
because they are testing the students' control of specific English
literacy practices but because they believe that these practices are
intimately and inevitably associated with academic ability. `Academic
ability' is naturalised in these practices.
Even if their [the able students'] information is thin, they
do not relent on the task in hand. They persevere with thinking, rather
than writing tons of coherent but irrelevant stuff, all `glued
together' by a trite conclusion which fools no marker who has a
list of discriminators in front of her or him. Few of the discriminators
are attempted. They are absent from the essay.
(Victorian Institute of Secondary Education [VISE]: Australian
History, 1984: p. 2)
It is not only in the rarefied atmosphere of the examining board
that these literacy practices have been naturalised as signifying
academic ability. This view has permeated the public domain, providing
fodder for acrimonious public debates about falling academic standards.
In a bitterly fought election campaign, in which tertiary entrance
examinations were a major issue, the Victorian Labor Government argued
that the emphasis on written examinations should be reduced because they
disadvantaged certain groups of students. The Conservative Opposition
argued that:
Surely it is time for Mrs Kirner [the Premier] to clarify the
situation. Does she believe in merit and performance as the basis for
tertiary selection? Does she believe that some students should be given
a free ride into university places just because of their background, and
not solely due to their academic performance?
(Richardson, 1989, in Gill, 1994: p. 17)
In supporting examination reform, the government lost the election.
As Hang is the kind of student that Richardson (quoted above)
believed was likely to receive a `free ride' to university, it is
worth looking closely at what happens when her non-standard literacy
practice meets the demands of the standardised literacy practice of the
examination.
The essay
Hang's examination preparation consists of taking essay
questions from the examination papers from previous years and preparing
answers to them in the time allowed (about 45 minutes). Her teacher
responds to the essay as he believes an examiner would, and then Hang
tries again. For example, Hang takes the proposition, `All that remains
of our federal system is the name. In fact it is unitary,' Discuss.
and writes an essay answer that begins as follows.
A federated system is one where powers are shared by the
Commonwealth and the State Government. Since Federation, 1901, the
Commonwealth government has taken on more powers than originally
decided. This has been achieved through; the 1942 Uniform Tax agreement
Act, S96, S109, recent High Court decisions, referenda and referral
powers S 51 (37). This suggests that our system is unitary, i.e. one
where there is a central ruling government, however this in fact is not
true. State Governments still control residual powers, examples
education, health and transport.
In 1942 the Uniform Tax Agreement Act was passed the Commonwealth
government were given the country's major source of revenue. The
states thought that after World War II the power would be returned, but
it was not. In 1946 and 1957 the states challenged the Commonwealth to
the High Court, but High Court ruled in favour of the Commonwealth.
Commonwealth government further extended their financial dominance by
using s96. Under S96 of the Constitution the `special Purpose
Grants' states that the states have to spend money given by the
Commonwealth in selected areas. Examples, in 1973 -- 37% of states money
had to be used in areas which Commonwealth thought fit. In 1985 the
number increased to 51 per cent. Not only does the Commonwealth have the
power to collect major revenues but it also has the power (s96) to use
it as it wants. In this respect our system is unitary.
She continues her essay in this manner until her final paragraph.
The Commonwealth have extended powers and moved the Federal System
towards a unitary one through; the 1942 Uniform Tax Agreement Act, S96,
S109, recent High Court decisions, referenda and referral powers.
However, states have retained residual powers which are important also.
Evidently our system is not unitary, however arguments that it is
unitary are stronger. I believe that even though in actual fact our
system is not unitary, we are heading very close to being one. The
important question remains, was the constitution intentionally written
to favour the Commonwealth Government?
Standardising English
Literacy practice is not simply about ways of stringing words
together, it is about ways of being in the world, about identity. What
is being contested here, entirely through literacy practice, is the
appropriate way for a student/candidate to be `in the world'.
Hang's teacher knows that certain kinds of writing signal to the
examiner that the candidate is a certain kind of person, a person like
themselves, who is capable of analysis, who thinks logically, who will,
given the opportunity, become the right kind of university student. The
task of ranking candidates, and in doing so providing the basis for the
distribution of highly sought after places in elite university
faculties, is not taken lightly. The examiner scrutinises the
examination scripts for a `good student', and in this context that
student seems straightforward and obvious. A `good' student is one
who assumes equality and is ready to argue with the question, a student
who is prepared to put a point of view independently, even if they
aren't too sure about it or don't know a great deal about the
topic, a student who is prepared to `have a go'.
Hang is writing the wrong kind of essay to convey this message.
Despite her best efforts, her essay tells the examiners that she is not
the kind of person who should be offered one of the scarce places in the
elite universities. Her teacher is aware of the ways in which
Hang's essay will be read by the examiner. He has told Hang
repeatedly that she must take sides in her essays, she must make an
argument, she must be explicit, she must resolve contradictions. He has
explained how to do it. On this essay, for instance, he writes the
following comments.
Why introduce such a major question in the last sentence?
Previously you said the states lost power over these areas! You are
aware of all the major issues, but have not taken a clearly
distinguishable line in your essay. There are also contradictions that
need to be dealt with.
Hang's teacher has tried every way he knows to shape her
essays into a form that will signal to the examiners that Hang is smart,
analytical and independent; just the kind of person who should be
offered a university place. Hang is a good student, she knows her
teacher has her interests at heart and she tries to do what he tells
her. He tells her to make a clear argument, to write a conclusion. She
thinks that this is what she has done.
Hang's written English contains very few mistakes and she
knows her material thoroughly. When she presents herself as a good
student, however, she presents herself as a student who is subtle and
sophisticated rather than brash and obvious, one who understands that
important issues cannot be easily resolved in favour of one side or
another, one who knows that some contradictions can never be resolved.
She presents herself as a student who knows her place, she knows that
examiners are more knowledgable than she and that it is a ridiculous
pretence to assume equality. Hang is not alone in finding the subject
position she is offered in the examination unacceptable; Matalene (1985)
found that the Chinese students she taught judged the explicit spelling
out of connections between ideas and statements of opinions `rude',
`aggressive' and `illmannered' (p. 802).
Acts of writing, such as Hang's act of writing this essay in
preparation for an examination, do constitute, as Ivanic says, an
ongoing struggle over possible identities.
Conclusion
The effects of globalisation, and of the globalisation of English,
permeate the institutions, the schools, the courts, the workplaces, of
all communities although they may not be recognised as such by the
people dealing with them. It seems important for us to teach, and to
learn, what it means to say that English is a social and cultural
practice that is dynamic and deeply embedded in context and does
political work, work which has a direct bearing on people like Hang. As
English teachers we are implicated in the standardisation, and the
naturalisation, of English. At the very least we need to make explicit
that the criteria for inclusion and exclusion, in school and in
workplaces, are not neutral linguistic technologies but that they are
about being, or pretending to be, a certain kind of person.
Whose English is Hang's teacher to teach, and how is he to do
it? It is clear that a certain kind of essay signals to the examiners
that a candidate deserves a place in the university but it is not easy
to teach this kind of essay simply by teaching the rules. Hang's
teacher, if he is to be successful, must teach Hang to become someone
else. The alternative is, of course, to challenge the idiosyncratic
local standard. This is difficult because the standard has, as we have
seen, been naturalised. Certain kinds of literacy practices have come to
`go proxy' for certain kinds of intellectual and moral qualities;
to challenge the standard is understood to be synonymous with lowering
the standard. It is resisted all the more because, if the standard were
to be successfully challenged, then the whole question of which students
should be allocated which scarce and highly sought after university
places would be opened for debate.
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Lesley Farrell is a Senior Lecturer in language and literacy in the
Faculty of Education at Monash University. Her research interest lies in
the broad area of language and social change in educational settings.
Her work currently focusses on language, cultural difference and
schooling, and language and literacy practice in restructuring
workplaces.
Address: Faculty of Education, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria 3168.
Email:
[email protected]