by Hilary Janks, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa

Because English is a dominant world language, access to English provides students with ‘linguistic capital'. Bourdieu's theory of the linguistic market (1991) has important consequences for the teaching of a powerful language such as English. English teachers, who take issues of language, power and identity seriously, confront the following irresolvable contradiction. If you provide more people with access to the dominant variety of the dominant language, you contribute to perpetuating and increasing its dominance. If, on the other hand, you deny students access, you perpetuate their marginalisation in a society that continues to recognise this language as a mark of distinction. You also deny them access to the extensive resources available in that language; resources which have developed as a consequence of the language's dominance. This contradiction is what Lodge (1997) calls the ‘access paradox'. This paper explores ways of working inside the contradiction by examining language in education policy in South Africa as well as classroom materials and classroom practices. It shows the importance of counterbalancing access with an understanding of linguistic hegemony, diversity as a productive resource, and the way in which ‘design' can be enriched by linguistic and cultural hybridity.

This paper will focus on access to English, an issue that is inextricably bound up with questions of history, power, identity and desire. Theory will be used to suggest that there is a price to pay for acquiring English and to explain the unequal distribution of, what Bourdieu calls, ‘chances of access' (1991, p. 56). Put simply, it is important for us as English teachers to understand that access to English is not a simple matter. We have to consider both its effects and its conditions of possibility in order to consider our practices in multilingual classrooms. While most urban classrooms in South Africa are multilingual, only some classes include both students who speak English as their home language^[1] and students who speak it as an additional language. In some schools, usually in rural contexts, one can still find speech communities that are predominantly homogeneous, where all the students share a single home language and where learning English is more like learning a foreign language. In all these classrooms, it is important to get access to English right, because what is at stake is nothing less than students' identities and students' futures. In addition, we all have a responsibility to understand the consequences of the global spread of English and the ways in which it inhibits people from learning other languages.

In my research at Phepo primary school, a primary school in a black township outside of Tshwane^[2] where the children speak African languages at home, I am conscious of how using English as the language of teaching and learning inhibits student participation. In this school, students learn through the medium of Setswana from Grade 1 to Grade 4, while learning English as a subject. In Grade 5 they switch to the English medium of instruction, although in practice, the teachers regularly code-switch between English and African languages in order to facilitate understanding. When the students in a Grade 7 class are expected to respond in English, only about five children out of forty three are confident enough to do so. The rest are mute, robbed of language. In small groups, where these same children are allowed to use an African language, not necessarily their home language, the children come alive. The group dynamics change: different children emerge as leaders and there is a flood of ideas as the children are rescued from the silence imposed by English.

Figure 1: Grade 3 child's visual representation of the playground which shows children skipping, fighting, playing hopscotch, playing a chasing-catching game.

Using a multiliteracies approach with Grade 3 and 4 children, it became clear that the children could convey more meaning with their drawings than they could with spoken or written English. Figure 1 is a Grade 3 child's visual representation of the playground which shows children skipping, fighting, playing hopscotch, playing a chasing-catching game. Much is happening at once. The child's representations of the space with a tree, walls, tyres used to edge flower beds, and steps between the beds, make it easy to recognise exactly which section of the yard the child has drawn. In addition, the representations of the children's bodies show emotions and movement. Even the tree appears to be running. The same child's written text is sparse by comparison (Figure 2) and appears to bear little relation to the drawing.

Figure 2: Same child's written text is sparse by comparison.

The child's linguistic ability – one-word and two-word sentences, unconnected to one another – limits what can be said. The writing shows uncertainty as to the basic word order of English. ‘Us clean' and ‘us like' uses subject-verb word order, while ‘clean us' and ‘like us' uses verb-subject order. The child's use of both forms for each meaning suggests an awareness that word order is an issue. In addition, the distinction between the subject and object forms of the pronoun, ‘we' and ‘us', has not yet been acquired. Here all the child is able to tell us is that children like the playground, they clean it and see it as big. ‘Gyound' is a representation of the sound of the word ‘ground' as heard by the child. The drawing shows that the child understands the genre of ‘telling all about' but as yet is unable to produce it in English. Within eighteen months, this child will be expected to cope with English as the medium of instruction.

Language in education policy in South Africa since independence entitles learners to education in any of South Africa's eleven official languages: IsiZulu, IsiXhosa, SiSwati, IsiNdebele, Sesotho, Setswana, Sepedi, Tshivenda, Xitsonga, Afrikaans and English.^[3] The majority of parents want their children to learn English. Because most African parents believe that learning English as a subject is not adequate to ensure full access to English, they believe that it is also necessary for their children to learn through the medium of English. Bantu education imposed mother-tongue medium of instruction in primary schools and dual medium instruction in secondary schools, where half the subjects were taught through the medium of English and half through the medium of Afrikaans. Parents' ‘recognition' (Bourdieu 1991) of English as a means to an improved socio-economic status continues to increase the dominance of English in schools, despite the Government's multilingual language policies and a Constitution that enshrines language rights. That English has extremely high symbolic value (Bourdieu 1991) in South Africa is not an accident. Rather as Pennycook (1998) argues, with respect to other colonial contexts, it is an effect of powerful colonial discourses which continue into the present.

In my synthesis model for critical literacy education (Janks 2000), which is concerned with teaching learners to understand and manage the relationship between language and power, I argue that different realisations of critical literacy operate with different conceptualisations of this relationship by foregrounding one or other of domination, access, diversity or design.^[4] Although in this paper my focus is on access, my main contention in the synthesis model is that these different orientations to critical literacy are crucially interdependent and should not be separated from one another.

Critical literacy has to take seriously the ways in which meaning systems are implicated in reproducing domination and it has to provide access to dominant languages, literacies and genres while simultaneously using diversity as a productive resource for redesigning social futures and for changing the horizon of possibility (Simon 1992). This includes both changing dominant discourses as well as changing which discourses are dominant. Any one of domination, diversity, access or design without the others, creates a problematic imbalance. Genre theory without creativity runs the risk of reifying existing genres; deconstruction without reconstruction or design reduces human agency; diversity without access ghettoises students. Domination without difference and diversity loses the ruptures that produce contestation and change. (Janks 2000, 178–9)

The way I theorised this interdependence was to take each of these dimensions of critical literacy education: domination, diversity, access and design and to consider what each orientation looks like, if the other orientations are not considered. For the purposes of this discussion I will focus on access only – looking at what happens to access if the other dimensions are ignored, and also looking at each of these other dimensions to see what happens when access is ignored. Table 1 is a summary of the discussion that will follow.

Table 1. A critical approach to access to English language education

Access without domination	Access without a theory of domina-understanding of how these power-ful forms came to be powerful.
Domination without access	This maintains the exclusionaryforce of dominant discourses.
Access without diversity	This fails to recognise that differencefundamentally affects pathways to access involving issues of both history, identity and value. It also limits the resources available for redesign.
Diversity without access	Diversity without access to powerful forms of language ghettoises students and limits their futures.
Access without design	This maintains and reifies dominant forms without considering how they can be transformed.
Design without access	Runs the risk of whatever is designed remaining on the margins.

Putting access together with domination, asks us to think about the relationship between questions of access and the relative power of different languages. The languages we speak and the ways in which we speak them are not equally valued in the communities and countries in which we live, or in the global arena, nor do they provide equal access to resources: material, educational, economic. What counts as acceptable discourse in different social contexts is tied to the construction of what Bourdieu (1991) describes as a ‘linguistic market'.

Linguistic exchange – a relation of communication between a sender and a receiver … is also an economic exchange. … Words, utterances are not only … signs to be understood and deciphered; they are also signs of wealth, intended to be evaluated and appreciated, and signs of authority, intended to be believed and obeyed. (p. 66, original italics)

The constitution of a linguistic market creates the conditions for the objective competition in and through which the legitimate competence can function as linguistic capital producing a profit of distinction on the occasion of each social exchange. (p. 54)

This means that different languages and different varieties of the same language are differently valued. This produces a system of social distinction, providing linguistic capital to those who have access to the distinctive^[5] language. For Bourdieu, the different power attributed to different varieties is a form of ‘symbolic power'. It is ‘symbolic' because it depends on people's belief in the social distinctions; a language's legitimacy depends on people ‘recognising' its legitimacy (1991, p. 170).

Bourdieu calls this ‘misrecognition' because he sees it as an example of institutionally manufactured compliance or consent. The education system is a central institutional apparatus for the privileging of a particular language (or variety) and for legitimating its dominance. Bourdieu draws attention to the fact that while the education system fails to provide students from subordinated classes with knowledge of and access to the legitimate language, it succeeds in teaching them recognition of (misrecognition of) its legitimacy (1991, p. 62, my emphasis). What is needed is classroom pedagogy that reverses this – that gives mastery of English, together with a critical view of its status as a global language. Education needs to produce students who understand why linguistic diversity is a resource for creativity and cognition, who value all the languages that they speak and who recognise the paucity of English only.

While Bourdieu refuses to recognise the legitimacy of a dominant language, he nevertheless argues that it is a form of ‘capital', with real socio-economic force. By its very dominance, access to such a language materially affects people's futures. Arthur's (1988, 1989, 1990) economic theory of increasing returns is helpful for understanding the increasing power of English. According to Arthur,

If one product or nation in a competitive marketplace gets ahead by ‘chance' it tends to stay ahead and even increase its lead. (1990, p. 80)

Arthur uses VHS and Beta video tape technologies as an example.^[6] Although Beta is the superior product, the one chosen for use in the industry, the public at first bought more VHS video players than Beta players. The demand for movies on VHS in video shops therefore outstripped the demand for Beta tapes so the video shops stocked more VHS videos. People thinking of buying video machines learnt that VHS videos were more available so they chose VHS over Beta, and so on. The more this happened, the more VHS increased its dominant position in the market. This snowball effect leads to ‘lock in' – one product taking over the market, even if it is inferior. This process is not easy to reverse or halt, but it can be affected by a dramatic shift in technology, such that video tapes are no longer needed. And this is precisely what has is happening with the introduction of DVDs and DVD players.

Although Arthur is working with economic markets not Bourdieu's metaphorical linguistic market, it is possible to substitute ‘language' or ‘language variety' or ‘genre', or ‘discourse' where he refers to ‘product'. In considering the idea of increasing returns in relation to the status of languages, one can argue that English has already pulled ahead in the marketplace. Pennycook (1998, p. 133–139) provides litanies attesting to the ‘wondrous spread' of English, our ‘marvellous tongue', that date back to the nineteenth century. Images which describe the inevitable growth of English, capture what Arthur means by increasing returns. They include images of English as ‘spreading like primordial ooze' (138)^[7] , and ‘eating up, like Aaron's rod, all other languages' (134).^[8] These litanies are instanciations of the discourse of the superiority of English and those who speak it. It is this discourse in combination with colonial discourses which set up the inferior other as its binary opposite, that produce the symbolic power of English. It is this ‘overvaluing' of the colonial language that induces people ‘to collaborate in the destruction of their [own] instruments of expression' (Bourdieu 1991, p. 49). In South Africa, Sachs (1994), a constitutional court judge, maintains that in South Africa ‘all language rights are rights against English'.

The access paradox

Arthur's theory of lock-in, together with Bourdieu's theory of the linguistic market produces an irresolvable contradiction (Janks 1995, Granville et al. 1998). If you provide more people with access to the dominant variety of the dominant language, you perpetuate a situation of increasing returns and you maintain its dominance. If, on the other hand, you deny students access, you perpetuate their marginalisation in a society that continues to recognise this language as a mark of distinction. You also deny them access to the extensive resources available in that language; resources which have developed as a consequence of the language's dominance. This is Lodge's (1997) ‘access paradox'.

The access paradox recognises that domination without access excludes students from the language or the language variety that would afford them the most linguistic capital, thereby limiting their life chances. It restricts students to the communities in which their marginalised languages are spoken. As the establishment of ghettoes based on language and ethnicity was one of the main aims of the apartheid state, English is seen as a way out of the ghetto. On the other hand, access without a theory of domination, naturalises the power of the dominant language, English, and devalues students' own languages.

The way forward

As English teachers what do we do? We need to remind ourselves that the power of English is neither natural nor unassailable. A dramatic shift in the balance of power in the world, or changes in the flow of people, can, like a change in technology in relation to a material product in the economic market, effect a change in the languages favoured in the linguistic market. The fate of Latin is a reminder that powerful, imperial languages can die; the advance of Spanish in the United States is proof that patterns of migration can affect the dominance of English; and South Africa's 1996 Constitution shows how politics and the law can empower indigenous languages. As teachers of English it is our job to give students full access to English and to its powerful forms – the standard variety for written communication, dominant genres, prestigious registers. But access, without an understanding of how the language and these forms came to be dominant reifies them, and access without any possibility of re-design leaves no possibility for transforming the language or its dominant forms. It is here, in bending language to their own purposes and meanings that post-colonial writers have been so successful and colonial subjects, in making English their own, have produced many Englishes as attested to by twenty one volumes of the journal World Englishes.

As teachers, we need to find ways of rejecting a unitary view of English and a normative view of communicative competence. We need to show that just because a language or a variety or a genre is dominant, it is not ‘superior' to other linguistic options that by a different set of historical chances might have been dominant (Arthur 1990, p. 85). We need to reduce the power of education to deliver the recognition required for the maintenance of the language's symbolic power, particularly where this recognition is to the detriment of the languages that the students speak. In addition, we have to understand that difference fundamentally affects pathways to access because language is not simply about mastering a defined technical competence but involves the acquisition of a whole other habitus, which Gee (1990, p. 142) explains as ‘saying-(writing)-doing-being-believing-valuing' combinations. According to Bourdieu (1991, p. 237), this produces a system of fine distinctions where outsiders are easily marked by small deviations from these norms – deviations of posture, proximity, accent, gaze, politeness, grammar, attitude and the like. This is particularly difficult when one is learning a non-cognate language, that is a language that originates from a different family of languages and that provides a different way of construing the world.

Different language communities also have ‘different cultural discourse norms' (Corson 2001, p. 36), different norms for interaction. Whole class teaching, which asks children to respond publicly to questions and which may differ from the ways children are expected to behave in their communities (Cazden 1988), could as easily account for the reluctance of Grade 7 children at Phepo primary school to volunteer answers, as their uncertainty with English. In acquiring the new habitus that comes with learning, and interacting in, a new language, it is important that students do not lose their own ‘ways with words' (Heath 1983) – their community's ways of being in the world. If South Africa is to achieve its language in education policy which calls for additive multilingualism, learning additional languages has to mean that a new habitus and identity is acquired in addition to that of one's primary discourse. We need to ensure that students' abilities in their home languages, their primary discourses, are maintained and developed.

It is important to mount an argument against mono-lingualism. Key to this argument is an understanding of habitus and the relationship between language and identity. For Bourdieu, the languages we speak are written on to our bodies. He gives the example of the way in which the tiniest movements of the tongue in our mouths create the sounds of our home language, and the national and local varieties of this language (p. 86). For those of us who have learnt additional languages, we know how difficult it is to get our mouths around what to us are strange vowels and different consonants. Our tongue has to learn new movements and often the ingrained movements of our native tongue, leave their mark on our accent in the new language. Old habits die hard. But the micro-movements of the tongue are just one example of how language is embodied. It is also encoded with other uses of the body – hands, eyes, stance, voice – that we have acquired unconsciously as members of the language communities in which we live. These well-established patterns form part of who we are, part of our identity. One of the ways in which we come to ‘see' these unconscious behaviours is by learning another language, acquiring an additional habitus, an additional identity. In this way, our taken-for-granted ways of being in the world are denaturalised and disrupted and we come to imagine and own other possibilities.

If one takes seriously the idea that diversity is a productive resource, that hybridity is a ‘key issue in the cultural making of new practices, meanings and discourses' (Kostogriz 2002, p. 5), and that ‘semiotic border crossing' (Kostogriz 2002, p. 155) enables creativity, then as teachers we need to recognise the limitations of monolingualism and the danger of the ever-increasing dominance of English. de Saussure (1972) taught us that we can often see what something is, by seeing what it is not. We can help students to understand what English is and what it is not by making use of the wealth of linguistic resources that our multilingual students bring to our English classes. In this way, we might convince all our students that English is not intrinsically superior to other languages, while at the same time teaching them to value linguistic diversity and to respect people who have extensive multilingual repertoires. In my own work with English-speaking student teachers in South Africa, teaching them to hear and reproduce the sounds of the aspirated consonants and the fine tonal distinctions of African languages, has helped them to understand why speakers of African languages struggle to hear and make the vowel distinctions of English that do not exist in their own languages.

Practice and policy

I now turn to how some of this might be achieved by examining Janet Orlek's workbook Languages in South Africa, published in 1993 as part of the Critical Language Awareness Series, edited by Janks (1993).^[9] Languages in South Africa can be divided into five sections. According to my analysis these sections are

1. Multilingualism as the norm (pages 1 to 5)
2. Language and identity (pages 6 to 9)
3. English in the world (pages 10 to 15)
4. English in relation to the other languages in South Africa (pages 16 to 19)
5. Language policy and language in education policy in South Africa (pages 20 to 23).

The workbook begins by treating multilingualism as the norm. The first activity asks student to talk to one another about their own names. Immediately, this surfaces cross-cultural naming practices and shows students how their names relate to their family's history and values. This is particularly apparent if students know how their surname has changed over time and the socio-political reasons for these changes. In addition, having names in more than one language speaks of communities that have been dispossessed or displaced and of parents who have therefore given their children names to remind them of who they are and where they come from as well as a name in whatever happens to be the language of power at that time. This multilingual naming literally en-titles these children to hybrid identities. Immediately, students who have names in only one language, often from dominant groups in the society, feel that their names are ‘less interesting' and that their lives are therefore ‘boring'. This de-centring of students who are usually privileged by their society's linguistic norms, continues through the first and second sections of the workbook.

The next three pages ask students to work out the linguistic repertoire of the class – how many languages are spoken, as well as the different varieties. Students are also asked to use their own experience to work out the advantages and disadvantages for them of monolingualism, bilingualism and multilingualism and to think about how this relates to which languages in particular they speak. Students are asked to keep a language diary and to become conscious of which language they speak, with whom, when and why. They are encouraged to think about whether their different languages are reserved for different domains of use or for use with different people. Students are invited to see code-switching as a natural practice and they are asked to do some research on the use of code-switching in the different contexts in which they find themselves. They have to think about which language people switch to as well as how and why this happens. Students who predominantly use only one language are asked to consider changes in variety or register. Again this activity privileges multilingual students. In South Africa, English speakers are not used to being marginalised and they do not like it. In using this book in my own classes, I try to get students to understand how shifting the symbolic power to multilingualism and away from English enables English speakers to experience and to understand how it feels to have one's language devalued, the common experience of their fellow students for whom English is an additional language. The final activity in this section looks at an English text that includes words and phrases from IsiZulu. Here those students who speak IsiZulu become the experts, whose linguistic resources are in demand. While the text itself does not translate to other contexts, the idea does. A great deal of literature includes words and expressions from other languages and post-colonial literature includes different varieties of English. Such literature should be included in the English curriculum and students need to think about how these additional resources are used to make meaning. What would be lost if the entire text were in standard English?

The second section of this workbook focuses on language and identity. Students are asked to think about the notion of mother-tongue. The naturalised assumption that everyone has a single mother tongue does not square with the experience of people who grow up in multilingual communities, where more than one language may be acquired simultaneously in the home and in the community. Students also have to think about which of their languages they prefer to use for private and public activities. Finally, they are given questions to answer on a literary text in which Ngugi (1981) writes about how he was punished and humiliated at school if he was caught using Gikuyu, his home language, instead of English. His experience is that of countless colonial subjects across the globe.

The third section of the workbook provides students with information on the history of English. Influences on the language, its spread to many parts of the world, and borrowings from other languages are all shown to be produced by particular historical events and political forces. The aim is for students to understand that there is nothing natural or inevitable about the dominance of this language, but rather that this is an effect of power. The material chosen also contests the notion of a pure language and argues that the spread of English has led to growth of many Englishes which compete for power with standard British or American English in different contexts. Although this section concludes with South African English, the questions could easily be used to talk about Australian, Canadian, Indian, Singaporean or African-American English.^[10]

The last two sections of the workbook are likewise adaptable to other contexts. The final eight pages examine English in relation to the other languages in South Africa (Section 4) and to language policy and language in education policy in South Africa (Section 5). While these pages refer specifically to South Africa, they are illuminating for other contexts in that they ask students to consider the history of their country's language policy, language policy options and the consequences of policy choices for speakers of different languages and for the students' own education.

The Soweto uprising in 1976 was sparked by the proposed introduction of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction in primary schools. When this workbook was written in 1992, there was a heated national language debate which had been produced by struggles over language. Guaranteeing language rights was fundamental to the multi-party negotiations that resulted in the first democratic elections in 1994 and these rights were subsequently enshrined in the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa (1996). Afrikaners, who previously had had to fight for their language against the imposition of English by the British, were again determined not to succumb to the now global force of English. This combined with the need to protect the African languages from the dominance of isiZulu, led to South Africa's recognising all nine of its African languages together with Afrikaans and English as official languages. The contestation around language enabled Orlek to realise the potential of language policy debates for education. Activities in the workbook ask students to discuss the effects of language policy on the educational rights and opportunities, as well as the futures, of students who speak different languages. These final sections of the workbook show students that policy is not an irrevocable given and they provide teachers with a model of how to use language policy in the classroom. While the specifics need to change for different contexts, the ideas are widely adaptable. Written before 1994, this section would have to be used differently even within South Africa.

Now, despite a constitution which enshrines language rights along with other basic human rights, the increasing hegemony of English has proved to be an obstacle to the formal establishment of multilingualism in high status domains. Education policy documents published in 2002, the Revised National Curriculum Statements Grades R–9 (Department of Education) and the National Curriculum Statement Grades 10–12 for primary and secondary schooling and the Language Policy for Higher Education are designed to ‘compel transformation' (Ministry of Education 2002) in terms of the language clauses of the Constitution. The school curriculum requires all students to study at least two South African languages. While it is recommended that one of these should be an African language, this is not a requirement. Given the availability of resources for teaching English and Afrikaans, the official languages prior to independence, there is an urgent need to develop modern materials for the teaching of African languages as well as to educate teachers in modern methods for teaching these language. In addition, until such time as African languages are used for teaching and learning in higher education, African parents will continue to choose English as the medium of instruction for their children's education. The new Language Policy for Higher Education addresses this issue by requiring Universities and Technikons to develop multilingual language policies.

As a result, the University of the Witwatersrand, for example, adopted a new language policy^[11] 14 March 2003 in which it commits itself to

• promote multilingualism by supporting the use of all eleven official languages for interaction on the University campus and in ceremonial gatherings, by translating documents and providing interpreting services where necessary and by offering a major in at least one foreign language.
• develop Sesotho by developing language teaching resources and courses in Sesotho for staff and students, and by assisting the government to develop such resources for primary and secondary education. It also proposes to contribute, alongside government, to the development of the language itself, so that it can be used as a medium of instruction in Higher Education.
• develop the linguistic abilities of staff and students in English, Sesotho and IsiZulu by providing courses in these languages and by requiring communicative competence in English and an African language.

This policy sets the University on a path to introducing a bilingual Sesotho-English medium of instruction in the long term.^[12]

The policy recognises African students' desire for access to English^[13] while at the same time requiring students and staff who cannot speak an African language to take courses in either Sesotho or IsiZulu. It is the combination of access to English and the requirement that everyone speak an African language that might realise the policy's claim that ‘learning the languages of South Africa is a means of enhancing understanding of one another and of overcoming our differences' (University of the Witwatersrand 2003). The combination also provides a space for holding access in tension with domination, diversity and design/redesign. The dominance of English is reduced by the insistence on competence in an African language and the possibility of introducing a bilingual medium in the long term; diversity is addressed by requiring communicative competence in two languages that are not cognate; regular code-switching between English and Sesotho constitutes a transformation or redesign of exisiting patterns of interaction at the University. The increased contact between these languages is also likely to produce changes in both languages as well as the development of more hybrid identities, by requiring all South Africans to learn at last how ‘to speak with the voices of the land' (Cronin 1985).

Orlek's workbook, in privileging multilingual students over English monolinguals, in showing that policy is not a given, in historicising English's rise to power, and in using the diversity of language resources in the class, shows teachers how to create a context for the teaching of English that does not undermine the languages and the identity investments that students bring with them to the English class. It provides access to English, without necessarily increasing its symbolic power, and without diminishing the worth of other languages or the students who speak them. These achievements are summarised in Table 2

Table 2: Achievements

Access with a theory domination	Here access to English, a powerful language, is taught within a critical framework that historicises its rise to power and considers the effects of its continuing domination on other languages and on the identi-ties and futures of speakers of these other languages. These effects are made explicit in the English classroom and strategies for countering the privileging of this language are considered and implemented.
Access with diversity	Here access to English is accompanied by recognition of the importance of linguistic hybridity for cognition, cultural understanding and creativity. Multilingual resources are used in teaching the language of power and language in education policies provide courses in English for non-English speaking students and require English-speaking students to be at least bilingual.
Access with design/redesign	Design and redesign are made possible by tempering access with diversity. Increasing multilingualism of students and teachers enables the redesign of classroom interaction and produces the changes in perspective and understanding that provide the creative resources needed for redesign.

Only when desire runs in both directions – when those of us who have English desire other languages alongside those who desire ours – only when all of our identities are informed by linguistic diversity and cultural hybridity, only when power is not reserved for one global language, only then can we reverse the history of linguistic and cultural imperialism produced by colonial conquest and maintained by super power domination – a history that has led thus far to the triumph of English. Those of us who teach this language have an awesome responsibility.

---

Notes

1. This terminology is in flux. In the 1960–1994 curriculum documents ‘first language' is used to refer to one's home language or mother tongue and ‘second language' and ‘third language' to additional languages studied. Because multilingual speakers contest the notions of both ‘first language' and ‘mother tongue' (many acquire languages simultaneously as they grow up in homes and communities where more than one language is used), the 2005 curriculum refers to one's primary language as the ‘main language' and to other languages that one studies as ‘additional languages'. The Revised National Curriculum Statement (2002) use ‘home language', ‘first additional language' and ‘second additional language. (Prinsloo & Janks 2002). For simplicity, ‘home language' and additional language' are used in this paper.
2. Phepo is a pseudonym for the school and Tshwane is the new name for Pretoria, the administrative capital of South Africa.
3. The naming of the languages and the spellings are not stable. This nomenclature and spelling is taken from the latest government document, the Language Policy for Higher Education (2002). Elsewhere in the paper, when quoting from the 1996 Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, the nomenclature and spelling used in that document is used in this paper.
4. A full explanation of each of these terms appears in Janks 2000. In addition, see Critical Language Awareness (Fairclough, 1989, 1992, 1995; Janks 1993, Clarke and Ivanic (1997, 1999) in relation to domination Genre Theory (Martin, Christie & Rothery 1987, Cope & Kalantzis 1993, Kress 1999), work on explicit pedagogy (Bernstein 1990, Delpit 1988) and work in academic development (Starfield 1994, Dison & Rule 1996, de Groot & Dison 1996, Lodge 1997) in relation to access The New Literacy Studies (Heath 1983, Street 1994, Gee 1994) work on multilingual education in South Africa (Heugh et al. 1995, Welch et al. 1996) and critical multicultural education, (for example, Kostogriz 2002, hooks 1990, Gutierrez 1993) in relation to diversity and Multiliteracies (New London Group 1996, Kress & van Leeuwen 1990, 2001) on design.
5. Bourdieu plays with the ambiguity. `Distinctive' means both different and distinguished.
6. Arthur also uses the example of the QWERTYUIOP keyboard as an example. This example is discussed in Granville et al. 1998.
7. James Alatis 1977, quoted in Pennycook 1998.
8. de Quincy 1862, quoted in Pennycook 1998.
9. I have chosen to focus on this workbook to pay tribute to the writer, Janet Orlek, who died last year in her forties, and whose work continues as an enduring reminder of what she gave to education both in South Africa and subsequently in England.
10. The history of African-American English, Ebonics, differs in important respects from the imposition of English as a colonial language, speaking instead of the history of slavery, linguistic oppression and creative resistance. While slaves who spoke the same language were separated so that they could not talk to one another, ‘throughout the New World, slaves were busy creating (languages) that allowed them to communicate' (Rickford 1997). Rickford goes on to say that Ebonics survives today because it continues to serve a function – ‘marking out Black identity, creating bonds of solidarity and friendship, allowing people to relax and let themselves go'. Ebonics, like all languages, is powerfully bound up with people's identity investments (Perry & Delpit 1998).
11. The policy submitted to the University Senate and Council was written by Dr N. Thwala, Dr D. Swemmer and Prof H. Janks. It was based on language research conducted at the University (van Zyl & Makoe 2002) and on the advice given by the Senate Language Policy Committee.
12. The literature in the field and the Language Policy for Higher Education only talks about dual medium of instruction (where some subjects are taught through the medium of one language and some through the medium of another language), and parallel medium of instruction (where all courses are repeated in each language). Instead, the University policy conceptualises a bilingual medium of instruction which uses oral code-switching. This is the common practice in most South African schools.
13. Research conducted at the University (van Zyl & Makoe 2002) ‘indicates that there is overwhelming support by all students for improving their English language skills so that they can attain mastery of oral and written competence' and for qualifications to ‘include credit-bearing courses in English for students who need them.' (University of the Witwatersrand 2003)

---

References

Anderson, P.W., Arrow, K.J., and Pines, D. (eds) (1998) The Economy as an Evolving and Complex System, Addison-Wesley.

Arthur, W.B. (1988) ‘Self-reinforcing mechanisms in economics', in P.W. Anderson, K.J. Arrow, and D. Pines, (eds) The Economy as an Evolving and Complex System, Addison-Wesley.

Arthur, W.B. (1989) ‘Competing technologies, increasing returns and lock-in by historical events', The Economic Journal. No. 99, March: 116–131.

Arthur, W.B. (1990) ‘Positive feedbacks in the economy', Scientific American. February.

Bernstein, B. (1990) The Structuring of Pedagogic Discourse Volume IV: Class Codes and Control, London: Routledge.

Bourdieu, P. (1991) Thompson, J. (ed.) Language and Symbolic Power, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Breir, M. and Prinsloo, M. (eds) (1996) The Social Uses of Literacy, Cape Town: Sached Books and John Benjamins Publishing Co.

Cazden, C. (1988) Classroom Discourse: The Language of Teaching and Learning, Portsmouth: England: Heinemann.

Clarke, R and Ivanic, I. (1997) The Politics of Writing, London: Routledge.

Clarke, R and Ivanic, I. (eds) (1999) Language Awareness Special Issue Critical Language Awareness, Vol. 8(2).

Corson, D. (2001) Language Diversity and Education, Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum and Associates.

Cope, B. and Kalantzis, M. (eds) (1993) The Powers of Literacy. A Genre Approach to Teaching Writing, London: Falmer Press.

Cronin, J. (1985) ‘Voices of the Land', in M. Leveson and J. Paton (eds) Voices of the Land: An Anthology of South African Poetry. Johannesburg: A.D. Donker.
Department of Education (2002) Policy Revised National Curriculum Statement Grades R–9 (Schools) Overview, Pretoria.

Department of Education (2002) Policy National Curriculum Statement Grades 10–12 (Schools) Overview. Pretoria.

Delpit, L. (1988) ‘The silenced dialogue: Power and pedagogy in educating other people's children', Harvard Educational Review, Vol. 58: 280–298.

de Groot, M. and Dison, L. (1996) ‘Responding to diversity in university teaching: a case study', Academic Development Journal, Vol. 2(1).

de Saussure, F. (1972) Harris, R. (1990) (ed.) Course in General Linguistics, London: Duckworth.

Dison, L. and Rule , P. (1996). ‘Bridging the subject-student divide: An integrated approach to developing foundational curricula', Academic Development Journal, Vol. 2(2).

Fairclough, N. (1989) Language and Power, London: Longman.

Fairclough, N. (ed.) (1992) Critical Language Awareness, London: Longman.

Fairclough, N. (1995) Critical Discourse Analysis, London: Longman.

Gee, J.P. (1990) Sociolinguistics and Literacies. Ideology in Discourse. London: Falmer Press.

Gee, J.P. (1994) ‘Orality and literacy: from The Savage Mind to Ways with Words', in J. Maybin (ed.) Language and Literacy in Social Context, Milton Keynes: Open University Press.

Granville, S., Janks, H., Mphahlele, M., Reed, Y. Waatson, P., Joseph, M. and Ramani, E. (1998) ‘English with or without g(u)ilt: A position paper on language in education policy in South Africa', Language and Education, Vol. 12(4): 254–272.

Gutierrez, K. (1993) ‘How talk, context and script shape contexts for learning. A cross case comparison of journal sharing', Linguistics and Education, Vol. 5: 335–365.

Heath, S. (1983) Ways with Words, New York: Cambridge University Press.

Heugh, K., Siegruhn, A. and Pluddemann, P. (1995) Multilingual Education for South Africa, Johannesburg: Heinemann.

Hooks, B. (1990) Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics, Boston: South End Press.

Janks, H. (ed.) (1993) Critical Language Awareness Series, Johannesburg: Hodder and Stoughton and Wits University Press.

Janks, H. (1995) The Research and Development of Critical Language Awareness Materials for use in South African schools. Unpublished doctoral thesis, Lancaster University.

Janks, H. (2000) ‘Domination, access, diversity and design: a synthesis model for for critical litearcy education', Educational Review, Vol. 52(2), June: 175–186.

Kostogriz, A. (2002) Rethinking ESL Literacy Education in Multicultural Conditions. Unpublished doctoral thesis, University of New England, New South Wales, Australia.

Kress, G. (1999) ‘Genre and the changing contexts for English'. Unpublished paper presented to a National Council for the Teaching of English conference.

Kress, G. and van Leeuwen, T. (1990) Reading Images, Geelong: Deakin University.

Kress, G. and van Leeuwen, T. (2001) Multimodal Discourse, London: Arnold.
LANGTAG (1996) Towards a National Language Plan for South Africa. Final report of the Language Plan Task Group.

Lodge, H. (1997) Providing access to academic literacy in the Arts Foundation Programme at the University of the Witwatersrand in 1996 – the theory behind the practice. Unpublished Masters Research Report, University of the Witwatersrand.

Martin, J., Christie, F. and Rothery, J. (1987) ‘Social processes in education: A reply to Sawyer and Watson (and others)', in I. Reid (ed.) The Place of Genre in Learning: Current Debates, Geelong: Deakin University.

Ministry of Education. (2002) Language Policy for Higher Education.

Ngugi wa Thiong'o. (1981) Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, Nairobi: Heinemann.

New London Group. (1996) ‘A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures', Harvard Educational Review, Vol. 66(1), Spring.

Orlek, J (1993) Languages in South Africa, Johannesburg: Hodder and Stoughton and Wits University Press.

Pennycook, A. (1994) The Cultural Politics of English as an International Language, London: Longman.

Pennycook, A. (1998) English and the Discourses and Colonialism, London: Routledge.

Perry, T. and Delpit, L. (1998) The Real Ebonics Debate, Boston: Beacon Press published in collaboration with Rethinking Schools.

Prinsloo, J. and Janks, H. (2002) ‘Critical literacy in South Africa'. English Teaching: Practice and Critique, November, Vol. 1(1): 20–38. Published online at http://www.tmc.waikato.ac.nz/english/ETPC/article'pdf/2002v1n1art3.pdf

Rickford, J. (1997) ‘Holding on to a language of our own: An interview with John Rickford', in T. Perry and L. Delpit. (1998) The Real Ebonics Debate, Boston: Beacon Press published in collaboration with Rethinking Schools.

Rosen, M. (1992) ‘The school visit', in Mind the Gap, London: Scholastic Children's Books.

Sachs, A. (1994) ‘Language rights in the new Constitution', South African Constitutional Studies Centre, University of the Western Cape.
Starfield, S. (1994) ‘Multicultural classes in higher education', English Quarterly, Vol. 26(3): 16–21.

Street, B. (1994) Literacy in Theory and Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

The Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996.

University of the Witwatersrand. (2003). Language Policy, Johannesburg.

van Zyl, S and P. Makoe. (2002). Language Policy Research Report, University of the Witwatersrand.

Welch, T., et al. (1996) Activities for Multilingual Classrooms Ditema Tsa Thuto: Activities Book. ELTIC documents. Teachers Manual 3, Johannesburg: Eltic.