BOOK REVIEW

Vally Lytra and Peter Martin (eds): Sitesof Multilingualism: Complementary Schools in BritainToday

Trentham Books, Stoke on Trent, UK, 2010, xx + 175 pp,Pb $36.95, ISBN 978-1858564548

Siwon Lee

Received: 17 October 2012 / Accepted: 20 December 2012

� Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2012

This edited volume addresses recurring themes in the field of heritage language

education through twelve contributing chapters situated in complementary schools

in the United Kingdom. From the outset, Lytra and Martin emphasize the role of

complementary schools as positively ‘complementing’ the educational functions of

mainstream schools by allowing a safe space where young people can learn and

socialize through the fluid use of their community languages and cultures. The

twelve chapters are organized under three overarching themes: language and

literacy practices, processes of identity formation, and policy and practice.

Built upon the common ground that language and literacy practices are socially

situated, the first five chapters discuss how languages are used, valued, and

contested in complementary schools. In Chapter 1, Blackledge and Creese portray

two contradictory ideologies existing in Bengali complementary schools. While

these schools offer spaces where students are encouraged to use their diverse

language resources, teachers and parents tend to put more emphasis on the use of the

standard heritage language variety over other varieties, which may suppress

students’ dynamic language use and identities. In Chapter 2, Lytra, Martin, Barac

and Bhatt explore the aforementioned tensions by observing how students and

teachers integrate multilingual resources in both congruent and incongruent ways in

Turkish and Gujarati literacy classes. In the same vein, in Chapter 3, Wei and Wu

explicate how teachers in Mandarin and Cantonese complementary schools often

impose traditional Chinese culture on diasporic youth through socializationalteaching of literacy, a language teaching practice aimed at imbuing students with a

certain set of cultural values.

While the first three chapters capture the ongoing conflicts within complementary

schools, Chapters 4 and 5 present promising cases where mainstream schools,

complementary schools, communities and families work together to relieve the

S. Lee (&)

University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA

e-mail: siwlee@gse.upenn.edu

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Lang Policy

DOI 10.1007/s10993-012-9271-6

tension. In Chapter 4, Sneddone discusses the partnership between a mainstream

school and an Albanian community organization, Shpresa, which offered after-

school Albanian language and dancing classes in a primary school. Sneddone

suggests that this partnership facilitated the positive development of students’

academic identity as well as cultural identity by bringing their family and

community into the mainstream school. In Chapter 5, Ruvy, Gregory, Kenner and

Al-Azami introduce a case of a grandmother in a Bangladeshi British family who

teaches Bengali to her own grandchildren and other children in the neighborhood.

According to the authors, this is a common practice in the homes of migrant

families, where the functions of complementary schools are brought into the home

environment. The grandmother strategically manipulates her roles as intimate blood

grandmother and disciplinary teacher while being attuned to the individual needs of

each child like an orchestra conductor, which enables what the authors call

orchestrated learning of literacy.

The following three chapters, which comprise part two of the book, discuss how

multilingual children’s identities are shaped by their experience in complementary

schools. In Chapter 6, Prokopiou and Cline show how Greek and Pakistani youth

differ in ways of forming their academic and cultural identities depending on their

social, historical, and political discourse with the mainstream society. In Chapter 7,

Francis, Archer and Mau explicate how Chinese youth develop their identities

interplaying with multiple factors such as their ethnic ties to the heritage country,

youth culture, socioeconomic status, and so forth. The authors also attend to how

these students accept and challenge the school’s goal of preserving traditional

heritage culture. In Chapter 8, Souza displays how three mixed heritage children in

a Brazilian Portuguese complementary school choose different sets of linguistic

resources to form good learner identities and how the school experience helps the

students connect their community language with their social identities.

While previous chapters show some collaborative efforts among families,

communities, complementary schools and mainstream schools, what may be easily

overlooked is that minority students are still segregated, in the sense that comple-

mentary schooling is only implemented as ‘after-school’ programming or within the

community and home environments, separate from the regular school curriculum. The

last four chapters address this issue of power and access through the discussion of

policy and practice. In Chapter 9, Pantazi shows how a group of Greek community

school teachers developed their own teaching theories and practices attending to the

diverse needs of their students. Pantazi calls for teaching approaches tailored to

different learning contexts, a close link between community and mainstream schools,

and an official space where such discussions can freely unfold. In Chapter 10,

Robertson discusses how teacher trainees’ visits to complementary schools shifted

their deficit views of minority students and made them realize the role of

complementary schools in bringing the community together. Robertson thus calls

for collaboration among different stakeholders in teacher training programs to address

negative stereotypes against minority students. In Chapter 11, Barradas also highlights

the need for communication between community language teachers and mainstream

teachers, more funding support for complementary schools, and the development of

content and teaching methodologies. In Chapter 12, Conteh pulls together all the

S. Lee

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themes discussed throughout the book, and discusses how students attending

complementary schools make strategic use of translanguaging both in community

and mainstream schools and how such research is beginning to influence policy on the

same level.

Starting from the language practices in complementary schools, Sites ofMultilingualism goes beyond mere language use to shed light upon social dynamics

and emergent hybrid identities, and addresses the policy-driven concerns in

community language education. The scope of this book could be further broadened

by attending to the structural inequality between complementary and mainstream

schools and tackling the entailing questions as to why many complementary schools

are struggling with the decreasing number of students and their demotivation. This

may lead to the discussion of opening implementational and ideological spaces in

mainstream education policies and classroom practices (Hornberger and Johnson

2007), so that multilingual education can be implemented not just for minority

students but for all students. To this end, this book is not only recommended for

teachers or researchers involved in complementary schooling, but also for any

individuals interested in bilingual/multilingual education, such as students, teacher

educators, and policy makers.

Reference

Hornberger, N. H., & Johnson, D. C. (2007). Slicing the onion ethnographically: Layers and spaces in

multilingual language education policy and practice. TESOL Quarterly, 41(3), 509–532.

Author Biography

Siwon Lee is a doctoral student studying Educational Linguistics at the Graduate School of Education,

University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests include bilingual education, literacy curriculum

development, and language policies and ideologies, with a particular focus on Asian Americans and

migrants in East Asia.

Book Review

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