CRO05560

The author wishes to acknowledge the helpful comments of Dr Margaret Gearon and Dr Alex Kostogriz on an earlier draft of this paper.

LOTE Teachers’ Work: A cultural-historic analysis of foreign language teacher practice

Russell Cross

Faculty of Education, Monash University

russell.cross@education.monash.edu.au

Paper presented at the Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE) Annual Conference, 27 November – 1 December, 2005, Sydney

Abstract For some time now, there has been a call to situate the study of foreign language teachers and their work in the sociocultural context that it occurs (Crookes, 1997). This paper draws on Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory, with a particular focus on the cultural-historic domain of genetic analysis, to examine the role of foreign language teachers in Australia. Beginning with an overview of Vygotsky’s genetic domains to establish a framework, the paper examines how the activity of Japanese language teaching in Victoria has been shaped at the cultural-historic level through policy. In addition to addressing the ‘traditional’ policy areas of language and language education, this paper also addresses reforms to the middle school that have had equally significant implications in defining the work of language teachers in Victoria. Keywords sociocultural theory, foreign language teaching, foreign language education policy, middle school reform, Japanese as a foreign language, Victoria

Introduction

The field of educational linguistics has recognised for some time that research into LOTE1 teacher practice is often divorced from the wider sociocultural-political reality in which it occurs. Crookes (1997), for example, has criticised the lack of consideration such research typically gives to the educational and political systems that influence language teaching. Markee (1997) has similarly argued that second language acquisition research does little to affect the professional culture of foreign language teachers because it does “not address the real-life concerns of teachers and policy-makers” (p. 81).

This paper draws upon Vygotsky’s (1978, 1987) domains of genetic analysis to examine the teaching of Japanese as a foreign language in Victorian middle schools2 from a cultural-historic perspective. The larger study from which this study emerges uses both sociocultural theory (as part of the overall framework which I demonstrate here) and activity theory (for the microgenetic level of analysis in relation to classroom practice (see, for example, Cross, in press)) to provide an overall account of LOTE teacher activity across the cultural-historic, ontogenetic and microgenetic3 domains of analysis.

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Vygotsky’s domains of genetic analysis

By emphasising the significance of history in the development of mind and behaviour, Vygotsky (1978) rejects a descriptive-analytic framework for psychology, arguing instead that “mere description does not reveal the actual causal-dynamic relations that underlie phenomena” (p. 62). In his discussion on “The problem of method” in Mind and Society, Vygotsky (1978) refers to Kurt Lewin’s analysis of phenotypic (descriptive) and genotypic (explanatory) perspectives in biology. Lewin finds that, historically, biology has based the study of objects according to a classification of external phenomenal features. In other words, descriptive accounts of the object that led scientists to believe, for example, that whales were fish (van der Veer, 2001). Following Darwin’s theory on the origin of the species, however, Lewin notes a change that sees the identification of an object’s genetic development as now crucial for establishing its nature in relation to its origin. It is this meaning of “genetic” that Vygotsky uses with respect to his own psychological theory for understanding mind and behaviour. His own quote from his mentor Pavel Blonsky – “behaviour can only be understood as the history of behaviour” (cited in Vygotsky, 1994, p. 70) – encapsulates the essence of what we now understand as “sociocultural theory”. He, himself, claims that “this idea is the cardinal principle of the whole method” (p. 70).

Vygotsky proposed four genetic domains of development at the phylogenetic, cultural-historic, ontogenetic and microgenetic levels of analysis. Cole and Engeström (1993) depict the relationship between each of these levels diagrammatically, with the ellipse representing a specific event in time to highlight the nested, interrelated nature between each of the levels as a whole:

(p. 20)

The phylogenetic domain in Vygotsky’s work accounts for human development over the course of evolution as a natural species. However, Vygotsky saw the transition from ape to human at this “natural” level, to the point at which activities emerge that constitute the beginnings of “human culture”, as so distinct he proposed a separate domain of development concerned specifically with the development of human culture and history itself: the “cultural-historic domain” (Vygotsky & Luria, 1994). Vygotsky’s conceptualisation of “culture” is complex and Wertsch and Tulviste

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(1992) devote a considerable discussion to Vygotsky’s use of the term but, at the most fundamental level, he means social values, attitudes, and understandings, as well as the tools, artefacts and technologies through which they are conveyed.

“Tools” or “cultural artefacts” are key concepts in sociocultural theory since the whole theory is premised on the notion of mediated social interaction, meaning that we rely on tools and artefacts in order to engage in social activity. Such activity, in turn, defines the nature of our development in relation to everyday actions, ourselves as individuals, a generation and, ultimately, a race. For Vygotsky, tools and artefacts refer to not only obvious items such as hammers, automobiles, and computers, but to also what he considered the most powerful of all: language and its associated semiotic system of signs and symbols, “language [includes …] various systems for counting; mnemonic techniques; algebraic symbol systems; works of art; writing; schemes, diagrams, maps, and mechanical drawings; all sorts of conventional signs; etc.” (Vygotsky, 1981, p. 137).

As tools and other mediatory artefacts are passed from one generation to the next, they come laden with their own sets of histories (Bruner, 1987; Kuutti, 1991). We only know what an object does because of its use to mediate an activity. While a set of shelves may appear to one person as a place for books, to someone else they might seem the natural place to leave shoes. Heavily influenced by Hegelian dialectics (Tolman, 2001), Vygotsky’s conception of tools – from literature and art through to machines and technology – is one where the tool both shapes, while being shaped by, activity.

This level of genetic analysis, the cultural-historic domain, is the focus of this paper. It is concerned with key historical “tools” that have developed over time to create the sociocultural milieu (macrocontext) in which the activity of foreign language teaching takes place.

Policy as tool which shapes the cultural-historic domain of teaching

My proposition in this paper is that policy be conceived of as “tool”, since policies are key cultural-historic artefacts that have developed over time to provide the macrocontext within which activity (in this case, “LOTE teaching in the Victorian middle school”) unfolds in the microcontexts of the ontogenetic and microgenetic domains of development. That is not to say that policy dictates activity but, reflecting Vygotsky’s dialectic thesis on the nature of tools and social activity, they “carry with them both possibilities and constraints, contradictions and spaces. The reality of policy in practice depends upon the compromises and accommodations to these in particular settings” (Bowe, Ball, & Gold, 1992, p. 15).

If I adopt this position, two points in the policy literature become useful starting points from which to develop “policy as tool” further. First, Ball (1994) sees policy as “text” and “discourse” – the encoded manifestation of decisions into language, and the way we then make sense of it in practice. The second is Bridgman and Davis’s (2004) assertion that policy is an “instrument of governance” (p. 3). Understood in these terms, policy is essentially a method through which governments manage issues of significance to society (Beresford, 2000), making for what Ball (1994) describes as “textual interventions into practice” (p. 18).

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Such a conceptualisation of policy is consistent with the sociocultural notion of “tools” on two counts. First, with respect to the idea of policy as a tool of significance in a discussion of the cultural-historic domain of development, Haynes (2002) has observed that policies in education play a significant role in shaping the activity of teaching and teachers’ work since it “influences their conditions of work” (p. 7). Polices are, after all,

statements about practice – the way things could or should be – which rest upon, derive from, statements about the world – about the way things are. They are intended to bring about idealised solutions to diagnosed problems. Policies embody claims to speak with authority, they legitimate and initiate practices in the world, and they privilege certain visions and interests. (Ball, 1990, p. 22)

Second, Ball’s (1994) “policy as text” goes beyond mere static encoding of decisions. Rather, polices are “cannibalised products of multiple (but circumscribed) influences and agendas” (p. 16) that represent the final outcome of the decision making process. Moreover, while he indeed agrees that “policy texts […] represent policy” (Bowe et al., 1992, p. 20, emphasis in original), he further argues that the decoding of text is as equally important: “for any text a plurality of readers must necessarily produce a plurality of readings” (Ball, 1994, p. 16), subjecting the reading of policy texts to “interpretations of interpretations” (p. 17). Policy as text, in this sense, undergoes a process of “secondary adjustment” (Riseborough, 1993, p. 172) through its realisation in practice. In other words, the “reading” of policy relies on the ways we make sense of text in practice – discourse (Gee, 1996). This suggestion that “policies [as text] do not normally tell you what to do, they create circumstances in which the range of options available in deciding what to do are narrowed or changed, or particular goals or outcomes a set” (Ball, 1994, p. 19) echoes Lewis and Simon’s (1986) discussion of “discourse as a mode of governance” (p. 457), by

delimit[ing] the range of possible practices under its authority and organises the articulation of these practices within time and space although differently and often unequally for different people. Such governance delimits fields of relevance and definitions of legitimate perspectives and fixes norms for concept elaboration and the expression of experience. (pp. 457-458)

Gale’s (1999) discussion of “policy as ideology” (Gale, 1999, p. 395, himself elaborating on Ball’s (1994) ideas of policy as text and discourse) further clarifies the idea of policy as a cultural artefact of wider social and cultural practices. While acknowledging that policies are represented in certain ways as text (i.e., the “what”), and interpreted in certain ways as practice (policy as discourse, the “how”), Gale’s point is that “policies are ‘ideological and political artefacts which have been constructed within a particular historical and political context’ (Burton & Weiner, 1990, p.25)” (p. 399) – text and discourse both ultimately depend upon a particular world view which informs them: policy as ideology, the “why”. I stated earlier that Vygotsky’s understanding of culture involved the social values, attitudes, and understandings, and the tools, artefacts and technologies through which they are conveyed and passed on (Wertsch & Tulviste, 1992). Tools in sociocultural theory are “messengers” of ideology; manifestations of society’s values, attitudes and understandings. Recyclable green carry bags in many Australian supermarkets, for example, represent the social values, attitudes and understandings of the wider population with respect to the environment. They also represent the values, attitudes

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and understandings of retail managers in terms of branding, image and marketing. The point is that no decision about the production of the cultural artefacts is value-free – tools come to us laden with their own sets of histories and those histories are reflected in the values and beliefs of those who use them as well as the way in which they are used.

In relation to an analysis of the cultural-historic development of teacher activity, then, policy provides an important description of how is has come “to be” over time, as it presents an account of how governments have decided to construe the role and purpose of schooling (and therefore, teachers) for society – “the bureaucratic instrument with which to administer the expectations that the public has of education” (Taylor, Rizvi, Lingard, & Henry, 1997, p. 3). Bridgman and Davis (2004) argue that “we shape our world through […] policy” (p. 1) and Kemmis (1990) even suggests that policy has become a more authoritative source of teacher knowledge for practice than education theory, echoing Ball’s (1990) assertion that “education policies project definitions of what counts as education” (p. 3).

With this as the basis for my theoretical framework, the remainder of this paper will illustrate an example of cultural-historic genetic analysis through policy with specific attention to Japanese language teachers in Victorian middle schools. I appreciate King’s (1979) definition of education policies as those “whose implementation can reasonably affect the promotion of learning” (p. 60). In this paper, two salient aspects of my central focus which relate to education are “teaching Japanese as a foreign language” and “teaching in a Victorian middle school”. These constitute the areas of policy to be addressed in the remainder of this paper.

Policy on languages: “Teaching Japanese as a foreign language”

Using the three orientations to multilingualism offered by Ruiz (1988) – languages as problem, right, or resource – Lo Bianco (1999) suggests the origins of Australia’s official position on languages was a reaction to the influx of non-English speaking immigrants in the 1950s following World War II. While no “official” policy had been tabled by Parliament before this, such inaction only served to reinforce the status quo and unquestioned acceptance of English as the language for all aspects of civil life, government, education, law, religion and the press. This was further reinforced by the pervasiveness of English customs and practices as a consequence of Australia being a colony of the former British Empire. The sudden incursion of foreign elements into mainstream “Anglo” society therefore met initial resistance which led to a positioning of languages (other than English) as “problem” (Lo Bianco, 1999).

With migrant communities gradually establishing themselves over time, however, the social and cultural makeup of Australian society slowly began to change. That, together with Britain’s own repositioning in Europe at the end of the British Empire, saw an appreciation of Australia’s own “unique” national identity emerge in the mid-1970s as a counter-movement to the earlier, deep-rooted historical identification that the mainstream held with Britain. Other significant political changes of the time which further affected these perceptions included suffrage for Aboriginals, the repeal of the “White Australia Policy”, and an influx in Asian immigrants fleeing unrest in their own countries, such as Vietnam. Acknowledging this shift in pubic disposition and the emergence of a small but growing multicultural society within the mainstream,

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the political orientation towards languages during the 1970s shifted to one that saw multilingualism as “a right” of the minorities. Cultural retention programs were established by the government along with language programs that had an additive bilingual focus (i.e., to teach English as a second language rather than as the immigrant’s “new” first language) (Ozolins, 1993).

By the early 1980s, publicly funded institutions realised they were not in a position to properly support the diversity of languages and cultures among all minority groups in a way that was adequate, equal and fair for all (Lo Bianco, 1999). In response, language policy finally took on a guise consistent with Ruiz’s (1988) description of “language as resource”, premised on the belief that diversity has value in itself and that benefits can be gained from a multilingual community and workforce. While the assumptions which orientate the former two views (language as problem and language as right) are, by nature, in opposition with each other, Ruiz suggests that repositioning language as “resource” offers a comprise between the two:

It can have a direct impact on enhancing the language status of subordinate languages; it can help to ease tensions between majority and minority communities; it can serve as a more consistent way of viewing the role of non-English languages […] and it highlights the importance of cooperative language planning. (p. 15)

This orientation is evident in Towards a National Language Policy (1982), the first official document to be released by the Commonwealth Department of Education on languages, when it argues that: “The existence of […] diverse languages within Australia gives rise to a range of issues concerning the roles which each should play and the step which should be taken to enable the best management in our linguistic resources” (p. 1). The National Policy on Languages [NPL] (1987) was finally tabled by Parliament to become Australia’s first “official and definitive statement on language policy” (Herriman, 1996, p. 49). While the policy encapsulated the spirit of multicultural diversity, the shift to “language as resource” also brought with it a significant change in the direction of policy by explicitly identifying certain languages for special funding, one of which was Japanese.

Emphasising language as “economic” resource: “Australia’s Language” (1991)

Having entered a severe economic recession by the beginning of the 1990s, the Commonwealth government released the Discussion Paper on an Australian Literacy and Language Policy for the 1990s that proposed foreign languages be prioritised on the basis of economic benefit. The Asian Studies Council established by the Commonwealth government during the 1980s had come to accentuate the relationship between Asian languages and the Australian economy, culminating in the release of the Ingleson Report (1989) which stressed the significance of Asia for Australia’s economic prosperity and the importance of an “Asian literate” workforce.

Australia’s Language (Commonwealth Department of Employment, 1991) was tabled by Parliament a year later, effectively replacing the NPL as the new Commonwealth policy for languages. Although it gave considerable support for foreign language education, Herriman (1996) has criticised it as “stark” (p. 55) in its goals and “an age removed from the academic, social justice and multicultural concerns that drove the

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NPL” (p. 54): rather than teaching languages for the good of multiculturalism, language teaching and learning was now tied to Asia and the economy.

Most important for Japanese was that Australia’s Language secured ongoing and dedicated support from both state and federal governments. This saw the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) endorse the 1994 Rudd Report, Asian Languages and Australia’s Economic Future, which crystallised the Labor government’s economic imperatives for Asian languages. Setting a target of 25% for all Year 12 students and 60% for all Year 10 students to be studying a foreign language by 2006, and foreign languages to begin at primary school from at Year 3, the Rudd Report mandated a trajectory for all state based policies on language education that saw Japanese and the other Asian languages rise to what Lo Bianco (1999) dubs the “tsunami” of LOTE education in Australia.

Tsunami or paper dragon?

Ironically, it seems that that the very catalyst for the meteoric rise of Asian languages in the “tsunami” of the 1990s may have also led to its demise. Labor’s 1991 reformulation of Lo Bianco’s National Policy on Languages was censured for being so “narrow” in terms of reference that, in contrast to the former, it became void of a balanced social and cultural argument that could frame “language learning as a symbol of the way in which we understand our society” (Liddicoat, 1996, p. 7). Instead, it became little more than a “funding document” to underwrite later developments such as the Rudd Report and the ensuing National Asian Languages and Studies in Australian Schools (NALSAS) project to realise COAG’s goals and recommendations. The utilitarian relationship between LOTE and partisan economic policy would leave languages in hands of a different political persuasion uncertain.

LOTE education, especially with respect to Asian languages and studies, is seen as a legacy of Labor’s social, economic and geo-political interests in the Asia-Pacific region throughout its term in office during the 1980s and early 1990s (Ozolins, 1993; Wyatt, Manefield, Carbines, & Robb, 2002). The orientation of the Howard Coalition government which replaced Labor in 1996 has seen a return to “the primacy of English” (Lo Bianco, 2003, p. 25). Despite an overwhelmingly positive review of LOTE developments in Australia commissioned by the Commonwealth Department of Education, Science and Training in 2003, for example, the Howard government ceased funding for the Labor initiated NALSAS project mid-term in a move judged by some as “premature and short-sighted” (Mackerras, 2002).

However, perhaps such moves are telling of the Howard government’s astute reading of the Australian public in relation to the country’s relationship with Asia and attitudes towards multiculturalism more generally. Rizvi (1997) finds that the breakdown in the COAG policy lies in “the serious ways in which the strategy underestimates the deep ambivalence that exists in the Australian society about its engagement in Asia” (p. 117). While he states that the rationalist approach to policy development presented in the Rudd Report by specifying clear and specific objectives for foreign language education on the basis of securing an economic future for Australia is “sensible and proper” (p. 117), he argues that effective reform relies on more than government resourcing and exhortation alone:

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While teachers can see merit in teaching languages that are spoken by many of their students at home, they are less clear about the Australian government’s agenda of engagement with Asia. There is no reason to assume that teachers’ attitudes towards Asia are any less ambivalent than the of the rest of the Australian community (Rizvi, 1996). Publicity surrounding the Independent Member, Pauline Hanson’s maiden speech to the Commonwealth Parliament in 1996 has highlighted this ambivalence. While much has been said by governments about the importance of Australia negotiating a new role for itself in the Asia-Pacific region, this publicity indicates that most Australians remain suspicious of this rhetoric. (p. 119)

The reference to Pauline Hanson is of interest since she claims to represent, in contrast to the “political elite” (McAllister, 1992), “everything […] which is typical of mainstream Australia” (cited in Australian House of Representatives, 1996, p. 3863). In Jackman’s (1998) analysis of public opinion on points of difference between Hanson’s ideology and those of the major political parties with respect to race and links with Asia, he finds that “the electorate holds quite conservative [i.e., Hanson-like] opinions on these issues relative to the candidates, and is quite distant from Labor [ALP] candidates in particular” (p. 167). Notable is the data presented contrasting Labor candidates’ opinion on the need to build closer links with Asia with that of the general electorate: on a scale from 1 (“Not nearly enough”) to 5 (“Gone much too far”), the ALP average was 2.3 whereas the electorate was 3.1 (Jones, McAllister & Gow, 1996a and Jones, McAllister & Gow, 1996b in Jackman, 1998). In short, it would appear that the overall public consensus is that Asia and the need to learn Asian languages for Australians is, despite Labor’s rhetoric, negligible.

A further influence has been the restructuring of international world order as a result of globalisation (Olssen, O’Neill, & Codd, 2004). While economic globalisation was the impetus for Australia to reconsider its relationship with Europe and Asia in the late 1980s and 1990s, the idea of English as the language for international communication has continue to grow during a period of rapid globalisation – economic, political and cultural – that has been dominated by the English-speaking West. This has caused politicians and economists from both English speaking and non-English speaking countries alike to focus their attention on the development of the “‘basics’ in English literacy” (Lo Bianco, 2003, p. 26). While “literacy” was identified as a “generic core” skill in Skills for the Future commissioned by the Commonwealth Department of Education, Science and Training (Australian Chamber of Commerce & Industry and Business Council of Australia, 2002), it barely addressed the issue of languages other than English at all, except for its inclusion in one (and, even then, qualified) final bullet point: “speaking and writing in languages other than English (in this research this element was specific to a selection of jobs in the large enterprises)” (p. 40).

Together, this rejection of Asian regionalisation by mainstream Australian society and the reorganised world order being imposed by globalisation with its emphasis on English literacy has seen the argument for developing communication skills in Japanese at school diminish. Quite opposite, the return to English literacy as the primary focus for schooling has led foreign language advocates to “sharpen their justifications for mass language learning [by] advancing the interdependent effects of literacy in second languages with literacy in English” (Lo Bianco, 2003, p. 27), and

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schools to “[re-evaluate] the extent of their present commitment to languages in the context of the higher priority now devoted to increasing performance in English literacy assessments” (p. 27).

Before addressing the effect of these changes on the teaching of Japanese in Victorian middle schools, it is also important to consider other recent and significant policy directions in Victoria that have had an impact on teaching and learning more generally.

Policy on teaching: “teaching in a Victorian middle school”

As a consequence of Commonwealth initiatives 4 that established a national framework to counter student alienation and disengagement during the middle years of schooling (Barratt, 1998; Cumming, Cormack, & Australian Curriculum Studies Association, 1996), the Victoria Department of Education and Training began its Middle Years Reform and Development (MYRAD) project in the late 1990s to develop a whole-school approach for improving pedagogy in the middle years (Centre for Applied Educational Research, 2002). Such moves have been consistent with the state government’s targets for Education announced in late 2000:

1. To reach or exceed national benchmarks levels for reading, writing and numeracy by 2005,

2. To have ninety percent of students to complete Year 12 (or its equivalent) by 2010, and

3. To increase students aged 15-19 in rural and regional Victoria by six percent by 2005 (Department of Education, 2001, p. 3)

The project from which many of these current changes emerged, MYRAD, was considered the cornerstone for Victorian school reform to teaching and learning in the middle years (Williams, 2001). The project determined that the most effective strategy for school reform lie with changes to the three key areas of curriculum, pedagogy and school organisation.

Curriculum: Integration through a thinking-oriented approach

The Victorian Department of Education and Training has advocated the use of a thinking oriented approach to curriculum as a way of integrating the eight key learning areas (KLAs) within its P-10 Curriculum and Standards Framework (CSF) (Department of Education and Training, 2002e). The thinking oriented approach focuses on the development of fundamental cognitive skills (eg, knowing, comprehending, applying, analysing, synthesising and evaluating (Bloom, 1956)) and key generic competencies (i.e., literacy, numeracy, problem solving and critical thinking) through subject-matter, rather than the traditional focus on the subject-matter itself.

Teaching and learning in the thinking-oriented school

The Department of Education, Employment and Training (2002e) outlines the impact of the thinking approach on pedagogy in relation to beliefs, targets, teaching strategies, assessment, and special assistance. Heavily reflecting the idea that thinking is learning, these include:

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Beliefs and understandings · Teachers believe that all students can enhance their learning through

the development of thinking skills. · Teachers understand the thinking demands and learning expectations

in all learning areas. · Teachers accept responsibility for teaching knowledge about thinking

and learning in all learning areas.

Standards and targets · Teachers are informed of school and system standards and targets for

literacy, numeracy, attendance and retention and are aware of the different needs and pathways of diverse groups of students.

Classroom teaching strategies · Teachers provide students with challenging tasks that stimulate,

encourage and support thinking. · Teachers model thinking and learning strategies they want their

students to develop. · Teachers explicitly teach cognitive and metacognitive strategies and

embed them in all learning areas

Monitoring and assessment · Teachers use a common framework for assessing higher order thinking

skills. · Teachers provide students with opportunity to evaluate their learning

through metacognitive strategies.

Intervention and special assistance · Teachers develop students’ thinking skills to support literacy.

(Department of Education and Training, 2002e)

Following on and consistent with the thinking-based approach adopted with respect to curriculum, the Department has similarly argued in a professional development module for pedagogy in the middle school that,

it is important to use [thinking-based] strategies that cater simultaneously for the range of learners. These include: mind-mapping (which uses both left and right brain processes), open-ended tasks or inquiry learning (which promote constructivism, and allow students to function at the level and in the manner specific to himself/herself as a learner), or strategies that provide choice. One successful approach to providing choice is the learning centre, a very successful version of which utilizes both Bloom’s Taxonomy of Cognitive Processes (Dalton & Smith 1986) and Multiple Intelligence Theory (Gardner 1983) as organizing principles, and presents a wide variety of activities, of which students complete only a selection, chosen in negotiation with the teacher. This structure caters for the highly varied interests and levels of development of young adolescents, provides room for student choice and input, and fosters independent learning. (Department of Education and Training, 2002a, ¶2)

The Victorian Department of Education has also been concerned with assessment. Advocating a philosophy based on realistic learning experiences, it argues that assessment should simultaneously serve “as both evaluation and instruction”

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(Department of Education and Training, 2002b, ¶1). In particular, assessment should reflect a collaborative process between students and teachers and make use of a range of different strategies, real-life learning experiences and contexts in which students learn (Department of Education and Training, 2002b).

Organising for a thinking-oriented approach to schooling

The organisation of schools was also identified as an important aspect of reform if the curriculum and pedagogical innovations described in the previous two sections were to have any chance of success in practice. For instance, a recurring theme of curriculum, teaching and learning in the middle school has been that it be student-centred, personalised and negotiated on the basis of students’ needs and concerns (McInerney, Hattam, Smyth, & Lawson, 1999 & Lawson, 1999). This means that classes must be organised to maximise student/teacher contact time so that productive relationships and a mutual understanding of each others’ expectations and needs have a chance to develop (Hackmann & Valentine, 1998). The Department of Education and Training also encourages schools to identify a “significant teacher” (Department of Education and Training, 2002d) for their students and encourages interdisciplinary teaching teams in order to support an understanding of both the “key learning areas and detailed personal knowledge of students” (Department of Education and Training, 2002c, ¶1, emphasis added). The integration of curriculum and team-teaching has meant that teacher/teacher relationships have also become an important aspect of the middle school reforms. Subject leaders, for example, must now rethink their KLAs in relation to others so that that thinking skills and learning strategies are integrated across the curriculum as one coherent whole. While not suggesting that team-teaching and collaboration were never evident in the past, the literature on middle schooling suggests that collaborative activity is particularly commonplace in schools affected by middle school reforms (Cumming, 1998; Earl, 1999).

The last significant aspect that the recent reform initiatives has had on the organisation of schooling has been with respect to students’ parents, homes, and their immediate social community (Department of Education and Training, 2003). Productive partnerships with families and the community allows students to see the connection and relevance between their own lives and the skills learned at school. Parental involvement has shown to have further positive effects on the middle school since it not only provides an opportunity for teachers to better understand their students and their needs, but it also creates an impression that schools see their students as “whole people” with their own lives and interests (Epstein, 1995).

The cultural-historic domain of teaching Japanese in a Victorian middle school

The curriculum rhetoric of the P-10 Curriculum and Standards Framework (CSF) for Japanese in Victorian middle schools suggests that the place of LOTE in the curriculum is one where students learn “to communicate in the target language” (Victorian Board of Studies, 2000, p. 5). This goal of communicative competence is framed in terms of economic imperatives and the perceived importance of Asia for Australian society asserting, in a rationale clearly consistent with the political rhetoric which prevailed at the time the CSF was developed in the late 1990s, that “the ability to use a language other than English and move between cultures is important for full

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participation in the modern world, especially in the context of increasing globalisation and Australia’s cultural diversity” (p. 5).

In sum, it emphasises a place for Japanese language teaching in schools on the basis of a need for communicative skills in the language – reflecting the accepted goal of language education more generally (i.e., language as a means of communication (Canale & Swain, 1980; Hymes, 1972; Richards & Rodgers, 1986)) – so that students can participate in an Australian economy that is becoming increasingly reliant on Asia. Accordingly, teachers are encouraged to concentrate on the communicative aspects of language teaching given that LOTE is conceived of a skill-based KLA that involves “reading, writing, speaking and listening”, (Victorian Board of Studies, 2000, p. 1), stressing elsewhere in the CSF that “learning outcomes and indicators are organised under [these] four strands which relate to communication in the target language” (p. 7).

All this portrays Japanese a key learning area of economic and cultural importance: a KLA for schools and teachers to focus upon to develop the communicative skills necessary for the economic and cultural good of both the nation and their students. However, the earlier discussion has clearly demonstrated that such rhetoric fails to hold ground in the current social, cultural, economic and political environment in Australia. Consequently, the place of Japanese in the general school curriculum has diminished and other more recent initiatives, such as the integrated approach to curriculum and the shift towards the “basics” (thinking skills, literacy, numeracy and engaging schooling that connects with the students’ own lives), have further eroded the once assured place Japanese had in the curriculum. With few students having regular contact with Japanese language, culture and people in their everyday lives, it is difficult for teachers in the current context of schooling, which holds such connections to be important, to purely focus on the idea of teaching Japanese (or possibly any Asian or non-community language) with true communicative intent.

Lindsay Rae (2003), writing as Manager of the Professional Support Initiatives at the Curriculum Corporation, recently asked, for example: “should we persevere with the concept of LOTE as a key learning area that demands every student’s participation over most of the compulsory years of schooling?” (¶1). He argues that LOTE appears to have done little to increase cultural diversity and that few students ever achieve more that the most rudimentary level of proficiency in the language – claims commonly leveled against the provision of LOTE in the general curriculum. In response, Mueller (2003) sets out a number of reasons why a place for LOTE should be maintained but, in contrast to the curriculum rhetoric described earlier in relation to the conventional goal of foreign language leaning (i.e., “to communicate”), she argues for a rationale based on the contribution LOTE makes to the development of higher-order skills (such as “sound study habits and a better understanding of how to learn” (2003, ¶10)) and its “benefit for student literacy in the first language” (2003, ¶10) – in short, “the compelling reasons for learning languages reside in the intellectual enrichment of the individual learner” (Australian Literacy and Languages Council, 1996 cited in Mueller, 2003, ¶ 11).

Mueller’s (2003) position reflects the general trend that has been observed by commentators on language education in Australia in recent years, that in spite of the curriculum rhetoric which argues that languages be taught with communicative intent,

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the reality is that LOTE is now justified and defended on the basis of being “a useful support for other curriculum areas, most recently, literacy in English” (Liddicoat, 2002, p. 30), echoing the earlier claims of Lo Bianco (2003) with respect to globalisation and the return of the primacy of English in schools. A clear example of this in Victoria is the Linking LOTE to the Early Years Literacy Program document issued by the Department of Education, Employment and Training (2000) that suggests a place for LOTE in schools to support the “literacy development of English” (p. 9).

This repositioning of LOTE has been reinforced by the middle school reforms I have described above, which themselves are consistent with the governments’ global focus for education announced in 2000 (i.e., engagement, literacy, numeracy and critical thinking). These include the shift from a traditional focus on subject matter itself to the integrated curriculum fused by thinking skills across all KLAs, and the need to relate each KLA to the individual and personal concerns of adolescents and their immediate community.

Teaching in the middle school: identity-wrenching, quasi-generalists, and commitment

In one of the earliest but most comprehensive studies of middle schooling, Hargreaves (1986) notes the dilemma teachers face as they negotiate an identity between “specialists” (as they were trained), and “generalists” (taking on a more holistic role) in the middle school. Beane (1992) similarly talks of the process of “identity-wrenching” (p. 47) that occurs when traditionally separate discipline boundaries are blurred to integrate curriculum, leaving teachers to question their own role and purpose in the classroom. Aspland and Crosswell (2002) offer an Australian perspective of identity-wrenching when they cite one graduate teacher in the middle school who protests: “I am trained to teach history, not manage difficult adolescents” (p. 16, emphasis in original). Hargreaves (1986) even conjectures whether this identity struggle of teachers leads to “a new kind of teacher” (p. 189), concluding that middle school teachers are best described as “quasi-generalists” since they shun the teaching of KLAs outside of their primary specialisation, yet reject the idea that their subject specialisation is the main aspect of their own teacher identity.

The idea of “generalist” is most often associated with the “primary school teacher”, whose principal commitment is to care for the needs of their students at a personal level over any commitment to specific subject matter or specialism that they teach. This philosophy of teaching comes through strongly in the literature on Victorian reforms to middle schooling and Erb (2001) argues that such changes have had profound effects on the nature of schools. Chadbourne (2001), for example, has observed changes in teacher attitudes in the middle school to be one of enablement. With students’ needs positioned as a shared, common interest for staff, the school culture fostered by middle school reforms typically results in a strong, interdisciplinary and collaborative attitude amongst teachers that otherwise have no subject matter or disciplinary interests in common.

This process of identity reconstruction shapes the nature of Japanese teachers’ work in Victorian middle schools as they change from seeing themselves as “Japanese language teacher subject specialists”, to “generalist teachers of the middle years (who

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happen to teach Japanese)”. With that change, they shift their focus from concentrating on the stated curriculum rhetoric (i.e., to acquire communicative skills for the benefit it bestows in relation to international trade and development), to instead being responsible for relating their KLA to the needs of the student and those of the school more generally. That might mean, for example, de-emphasising a focus on communication, grammar or vocabulary in the program so less time is spent dealing with “communicatively-demanding” activities, and more time is allowed for problem solving and thinking strategies related to language (eg, an activity requiring only a limited range of vocabulary such as numbers or colours, but presented as a puzzle or similar problem solving task requiring certain higher-order cognitive skills). In other contexts, where students have little opportunities to encounter different ethnicities or cultures, for example, the teacher may decide to focus less on developing Japanese communication skills so that more time is available to address multiculturalism and cross-cultural issues more generally, given that few opportunities exist for those students to explore such issues elsewhere.

Conclusion

Cognisant of Vygotsky’s idea that “behaviour can only be understood as the history of behaviour”, this paper has attempted a Vygotskian genetic analysis of Japanese teaching in Victorian middle schools by conceiving of “policy” as key a sociocultural artefact that shapes the cultural-historic domain of teacher development. While this is only one of the four layers of analysis in his overall framework, it is an area that has otherwise received little attention in studies of educational linguistics and second language teacher education to date.

This analysis has demonstrated that policy texts, like all sociocultural artefacts and tools, are subject to discursive practices and the dominant ideologies when realised in practice through activity. Although key curriculum documents for Japanese in Victoria present it as a subject to be taught with communicative intent to promote an “Asian literate” Australian society on the basis of global, cultural and economic need, this discussion has suggested that the place of Japanese in Victorian middle schools today relies more on the ability of teachers to engage with Japanese as subject matter that can support different (and less explicit) goals, such as the development of English literacy, the integration of languages into a curriculum focused on thinking skills, and identifying connections between Japanese (or at least “foreign languages and cultures”) with their students’ own lives.

Through this discussion, I have outlined one layer of analysis of Vygotsky’s overall framework from which further research can emerge. By addressing the individual (ontogenetic) and operational (microgenetic) domains of development to build a more complete picture of language teaching in future studies, we can begin to integrate macro and micro perspectives to better understand the nature of such work. Of perhaps of more immediate importance, however, this paper has highlighted a reality of language teaching that might have been otherwise ignored given educational linguistics’ seemingly perpetual neglect of such matters in relation to studies of language teachers’ work.

1 Languages Other Than English

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2 Victoria, like all Australian states and territories, does not have any physical institution that represents “the middle school”. Rather, the term (along with “middle schooling” and “the middle years”) has come to mean the period of schooling during early adolescence (i.e., late primary and early secondary).

3 The phylogenetic domain is not addressed since it is concerns the development of humans as a biological species. LOTE teachers (despite anything you might have heard otherwise) are human and is therefore not the subject of any further analysis. Given my focus on the cultural-historic domain, I wont elaborate on the two “lower” levels of analysis in any great detail here either, suffice to say that the ontogenetic domain shifts the focus from the development of humanity as an entire species or cultural-historic group, to an understanding of development as “a human” at the individual level. The microgenetic domain is also concerned with development at the individual level but, unlike the ontogenetic domain which aims to construct an understanding of the overall development of an individual, microgenetic research focuses on specific fragments of development that might be only momentary.

4 Most notably the National Collaborative Curriculum Project for K-12, the Australian Educational Council’s Common and Agreed Goals for Schooling, and a succession of reports by Finn (1991), Mayer (1992) and Carmichael (1992) that emphasised a vocationally-oriented framework for post-compulsory schooling (i.e., Years 11 and 12)).

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