[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

both the constraints and the possibilities of boys relationships with
in-school learning of languages. For this reason we have chosen to present
the data in two sections, relating to two broad differentiating features.
This chapter presents commentaries gathered in state school contexts 
what are known as public or state schools in Australia and government
schools in the United Kingdom (the term  public school in Britain, con-
fusingly for outsiders, representing the private or independent sector),
while the following chapter presents data collected in the independent or
private school sector. This is clearly a questionable organising principle,
there being variables and distinctions to be found in terms of general
demographics and individual players in both sites; but we are using it as a
first-level strategic organising principle; a blunt analytical tool, but one
which illustrates how intersecting social and cultural variables impact on
each other. As in the studies referred to above, which focus on the rela-
tionship between masculinities and schooling, the voices of the boys in
this study drive the analysis in powerful ways. Their narratives often
sound self-consciously performative; but their performances  like all
cultural performances  carry traces of the tensions and contradictions
identified by Coates (2003) and Mahony (1998) and referred to in the
previous chapter. Much of the time they conform to dominant main-
stream discourses of young masculinities; but there are moments when
these regulating, normative discourses are contested, subverted or stra-
tegically rearranged.
Our interest as educators, academics and parents is to try to under-
stand what it is that boys are saying about themselves and about lan-
guages education; and also what they are not saying; to discover the
story that lies behind the statistics presented in Chapter 2. As in all dis-
cursive accounts, the silences and gaps are at times as informative as the
statements. What is  sayable by boys in the school context is not always
the full account. Sometimes what is narrated in negative terms  for
example, descriptions of boys who are perceived as deviant from the
56 Boys and Foreign Language Learning
sanctioned norms of hegemonic young masculinity  suggest possibil-
ities of unsanctioned versions of themselves which are not narrated.
The data come from a large bank of commentaries collected from boys
over a two-year period in Australia. They represent a fraction of the com-
plete data set,  excerpts of performances. Ultimately, we will interpret
and comment upon these performances, but for now, we will listen to
the boys.
Background to the project and methodology
Poor relationship between boys and foreign language study is a feature
of school experience in all the major Anglophone countries. Most of the
boys presented here happen to be Australian, but they could equally
well have been British, or New Zealanders, as is clear from the data pre-
sented in Chapter 2. They could almost certainly have equally been
North American. As will emerge from comparative data along the way,
their comments align uncannily closely with the commentaries col-
lected from British boys by Jones and Jones (2001) and from anecdotal
evidence from both New Zealand and North America. The voices which
follow, then, speak with Australian accents.
As indicated in the introductory chapter, they were collected over a
two-year period in the course of a research project which had small
beginnings a couple of years earlier in Far North Queensland  a geo-
graphically isolated and culturally conservative region. The region is
culturally diverse, with significant numbers of Italians (Bettoni, 1981;
Douglass, 1995), Aboriginal peoples and descendants from the so-called
 Kanakas (Pacific Islanders), who were originally transported to the
region to work in the cane fields (Mercer, 1995); but it is not a region
known for progressive engagement with cultural diversity. This pilot
stage of the study unsurprisingly produced discouraging data from a lan-
guage teacher s perspective, but it fuelled the interest to explore further.
The subsequent stage of research, carried out from 2001 3, involved
much wider sampling of opinion and commentary, including this time
some interviews with teachers and with girls working alongside boys in
language classrooms.
Unlike countries where English is not the mother tongue, the major-
ity of English-dominant countries present the foreign languages option
as exactly that: an option. In these countries there is usually a short
compulsory period, after which language study becomes an elective sub-
ject, offered along with, or in competition with, many others. As noted,
Australia s support and commitment to school-based languages learning
Boys Talking 57
is currently not in a strong phase. While important progress was made
in terms of policy formulation and enactment in curriculum develop-
ment and regional language policies in the late 1980s and early 1990s
(Lo Bianco, 2001), the past eight years of Liberal and National Party
Coalition governments have seen a substantial reorientation of lan-
guages education in the school sector which amounts to a significant
weakening of commitment to languages education. This move at lead-
ership level, involving legislative and funding moves as well as discur-
sive renegotiations around national identity, has reconfirmed the
Australian community s historically monolingual mindset. The agenda
of internationalisation and globalisation, and targeted educational
objectives of multiliteracies and intercultural competence, inexplicably
continue to sidestep the core issue of the relationship between culture
and language. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]