Valuing English: An Ethnography of a Federal Language Training Program for Adult Immigrants

by Laura Cleghorn

| Table of Contents/Chapter 1 |  Chapter 2  |  Chapter 3  |  Chapter 4  |  Conclusion  |

This chapter of the thesis engages with the relationship between the local discourses and practices of the institution and extra-local discourses that shape the LINC program as discussed in the previous chapter. While the main focus is on the ways that institutional ideologies determine what kinds of talk and action are possible, the title of the chapter acknowledges that these constraints are also conditions of possibility. The institution is the active site of the negotiation of the discourses that shape it. Amidst the negotiation of these discourses, the conditions of the program produce dominant institutional discourses that influence the form of social interactions in the institution. My interest here is based on institutional ethnographic methodologies that look at how ambiguities are rationalized, how decisions are made, and how problems are solved in institutions that, in their operations, produce contradictions and conflicts.

This chapter will establish the site of this research project by first, a brief foray into the development of community-based immigrant serving organizations in Toronto that serve the Somali community, to arrive at a description of the Immigrant Serving Organization (ISO) that I am studying here. Next, I will talk about the organizational structure of the agency and compare it to other LINC programs in Ontario to establish it as a "typical" LINC program. Lastly, the groups and individuals that animate these structures will be introduced to discuss their relationships to the institutional order of the organization, their interests in the LINC program, and the constraints that they face as participants in a federally-funded ESL program that is housed in a community-based ISO.

In my attempt to represent the groups and individuals involved in this program, I am aware of being required to create groupings of people that share beliefs and practices, yet there are contradictions within these groupings that are elided to show the larger structures of social relations. At the level of the group, and within the individual, allegiances shift and change frequently, depending on the situation, and depending on the desired goal. In the next chapter, where I take a closer look at how the order of the institution is borne out in social and linguistic interaction, I will be able to account more fully for this element, for the shifting nature of power relations. First, however, the parts that make up the structure of the organization as a whole must be considered to get a sense of the everyday workings of LINC at the Centre.

Holder’s (1997) study of the role of immigrant serving organizations (ISOs) in the Canadian welfare state explains that in the late 1960s immigrant services developed into a separate sector for social welfare provision. Since the 1970s, the provision of these services has been supplied by both "mainstream" and community-based immigrant serving organizations. Mainstream organizations supply services based on need, such as food, shelter, and health, not on client characteristics. Community-based immigrant serving organizations, on the other hand, provide services geared to a specific community that defines itself according to cultural, racial, and/or linguistic factors (Holder, 1997, p. 13). Holder argues that mainstream services have done little to address the issue of accessibility to services by minority groups, and it is community-based immigrant serving agencies, or "ethnoracial" organizations, that meet the needs of specific communities and work to promote immigrant and refugee interests (p. 2).

In keeping with Holder’s analysis, the development of settlement services for African communities, and the Somali community specifically, began in response to the increasing numbers of African immigrants and refugees who settled in Canada since the 1980s, and who needed to create their own institutions to meet their interests. The increase in migration from Africa is related, of course, to changes in the nation’s immigration and refugee policies, as discussed in Chapter Two. From the 1950s to the 1970s, Canada’s system for accepting immigrants was highly selective, and favoured people from European countries. In the 1940s, immigrants from Africa accounted for only 3% of all immigrants to Canada; the numbers increased slowly in the subsequent two decades, but African migration to Canada remained slow compared to that of other countries (George & Mwarigha, 1999, p. 78). The African immigrants who were permitted entry to Canada during these decades tended to be well-educated professionals. In the 1980s there was a sudden increase of African immigration, and by the early 1990s this group comprised 7.5% of all of the immigrants to Canada; the majority of these people are members of ethnic minority groups from Sub-Sahara and Arab Africa (George & Mwarigha, 1999, p.78). Such is the story of the people who established the Somali Centre. Somali refugees began to arrive in Canada in the late 1980s when civil disturbances began in that country. Increasing numbers of Somali refugees arrived in Canada throughout the 1990s, so that Somalia ranks in the top 10 of the countries from which Canada accepted refugees from 1990-1998 (EIC, 1990, 1991a, 1992, 1993; CIC, 1996d; CIC, 1998c).

The city of Toronto receives about half of all of the refugees who arrive in Canada; that is, 7 000 - 10 000 per year over the last 5 years (CIC, 1996d; CIC, 1998c). The number of Somali immigrants and refugees in Toronto is difficult to determine and estimates vary significantly. The 1998 annual report from the Somali Centre cites 60 000 Somalis in Toronto (Somali Centre, p. 2). Opoku-Dapaah’s (1995) study says there are 25 000 Somalis in Canada, and the majority of them are in Toronto (p. 1).

When the first refugees from Somalia began to settle in Toronto, a small association of Somalis began to meet together in the mid-1980s in Parkdale. The group gathered to promote awareness about the issues facing Somali refugees, and to begin to look at the specific laws and practices that affected the community’s resettlement in Toronto. The association was incorporated in 1988 as a non-profit organization, and soon after opened its first office to establish itself as the first Somali immigrant serving organization in Toronto. A decade later, the Centre offers a range of settlement services: immigration counseling and advocacy, translation/interpretation services, employment related assistance, housing, welfare, and legal aid referrals, health and nutrition programs, support groups, frequent workshops, and, of course, the LINC program. The Somali Centre functions as a community centre: it supports sporting and cultural events, youth programs, and, save for the LINC program, the staff organizes and administers all of the programs and services listed above. The organization operates by means of a Board of Directors and an Executive Director, a handful of paid staff, and a host of volunteers, most of whom are members of the organization. The Centre is now one of 9 ethno-specific immigrant serving organizations that serve the Somali community in Toronto, and one of 24 African ISOs in the city (George & Mwarigha, 1999, p.3).

Opoku-Dapaah (1995) conducted a survey to profile the settlement experiences of almost 400 Somalis in Toronto. He found that 78% of this population was involved in Somali community organizations (1995, p. 63). He states that Somali community-based agencies were developed to provide the essential service of helping refugees with encounters with government institutions while in the process of settling in the city of Toronto (p. 75). Opoku-Daapah explains that Somali community organizations serve the "neediest and largest refugee community in Toronto" (p. 80).

The ethno-specific Somali immigrant serving organizations in Toronto, along with those that are designated "African" ISOs, all must compete with one another for funding at the local (private donations and membership dues), municipal, provincial, and federal levels. Provincial and federal funding for settlement services, for example, is allocated according to the number of landed arrivals from source countries, which places community-based ISOs from the same community in direct competition with one another (George & Mwarigha, 1999, p.37).

The Somali Centre receives its funding from a host of municipal, provincial, and federal sources, as well as partnerships with and support from mainstream voluntary organizations, such as the United Way. The Centre began to offer the LINC program in 1993, shortly after the program was introduced. The financial administration of LINC is organized in conjunction with a large private ESL school in Toronto. The school represents the other side of ESL--ESL as a private profit-making venture. It is a school for mostly young, university-age adults from Europe, Asia, and South America who obtain temporary visas to come to Toronto for English language training and certification. The private ESL school has nothing to do with the delivery of the LINC program at the Centre, and operates from a location on the other side of town, but it controls the distribution of LINC finances. Most likely, this partnership was devised to legitimize the funding administration of the program by having a large reputable business "front" the Centre for the purposes of winning and securing the government contract for the LINC program. The Centre has successfully obtained federal funding for the LINC program for 6 years in a row.

The Centre is located in Toronto, housed on the second floor of a strip mall. From the street, large yellow letters plastered on the Centre’s second story windows announce the available services; they are worded both in English and Somali. Up two flights of metal stairs, the Centre shares a hallway (scuffed walls and worn carpet) with a few other businesses. At one end of the hallway is the Somali Centre lobby where a reception desk, a computer, a phone, and a photocopier are located. The lobby has a shiny tile floor, and it is the hub that connects the LINC Coordinator’s office (very small and full of files and paper), two classrooms, and a very narrow room that holds a fax machine and teaching supplies. Down the hallway is the comfy childminding room, the nicest looking room in the Centre; it has a soft carpet and is filled with children’s tables, chairs, and toys. Further down the hall is a third large classroom, and the "Office." The "Office" consists of a meeting room that has a large wooden table and two desks separated by dividers, and a Social Services office, a tiny room which opens with a flimsy door with no handle, has no windows but a humming fluorescent light above, and can barely contain the desk and two chairs in it. Next to the Social Services room is the Executive Director’s office, a well furnished place with a computer and a large window with a view to the street.

The Centre’s current LINC program offers three classes: a literacy class, a split Level One and Two class and a split Level Two and Three class. LINC supplies the wages for a program administrator, three full time teachers, a cultural interpreter, and three child minders. It covers program expenses, teaching materials, transportation costs, and some capital and overhead costs. On a typical day, there are 25 - 30 students attending the classes, which take place from 9:00 - 3:30, with a break in the morning and a 45 minute break at lunch. During the two and a half months that I visited the Centre, from January to March, 1999, the students in attendance were mostly Somali women, ranging in age from early 20s to early 60s. The cultural interpreters were Somali women as were the child minders, while the teachers and the Coordinator were all White English-speaking women who had lived in Canada all of their lives.

In comparison to other LINC programs, this program appears to be fairly "typical" of what is offered elsewhere in Toronto and throughout the province. A recent study of ESL/FSL services in Ontario commissioned by CIC confirms that the LINC program at the Centre is similarly organized and operated compared to others in the province. There are a few small differences between the program at the Centre and others in Ontario. The class sizes at the Centre tend to be smaller than average (8 - 12 students per class, as opposed to an average of 17 students in other classes) (Power Analysis, Inc, 1998, p. 34). Also, few LINC programs have split level classes as the LINC program at the Centre does (only 16% of all LINC classes in Ontario offer split level classes) (p. 39). These are minor differences. The similarities between programs are more interesting.

The study reveals, for example, how extremely gendered ESL is in Ontario; these statistics concur with the gendered make up of the program at the Centre. Eighty-six percent of the teachers of LINC and ESL programs are women, as are 69% of the students (p. v). As for the ethnic and racial identities of the participants and staff of ESL and LINC in Ontario, the report does not explicitly venture into determinations of race and ethnicity, but instead relies on language as a marker of ethnicity by tabulating the "Native Language" spoken by students and teachers. This calculation is a bit spurious because it leaves no room for multilingual linguistic identities, and forces what might be multiple identifications into a deterministic rendering of a singularity. Thus the "Native Language" category can be interpreted to reflect ethnic and racial affiliations that are probably more complex and multiple than the statistics take into account.

I do rely, however, on these statistics as a representation of what is happening in ESL in Ontario. Forty-seven percent of LINC teachers said they spoke a first language other than English, such as French, Chinese, or Spanish (p. 56). Of the students, twenty-three percent speak Chinese as their first language. Somali figured as 2.5% of the tabulation of "languages other than English," appearing as number eleven in a list of 20 identifiable languages spoken by LINC/ESL students. The top nine languages listed after Chinese (number one) prior to Somali (number eleven) were Spanish, Arabic, Serbian, Tamil, Russian, Polish, Persian, Korean and Farsi (p. 82). The linguistic repertoires of the students are much greater than the representation of 20 different languages, however, since 15% of the students surveyed speak "Other" languages.

A third point of interest and comparison in the survey is that according to teachers and administrators in both provincial ESL and federal LINC programs, the dearth of funding for ESL creates unstable working conditions for the staff and impoverishes the effectiveness of the programs for the students. Funding is found to be "the top issue" for ESL in Ontario (p.71). The last relevant point that surfaces in the study is the claim that the "prevailing opinion among experts in the field who were interviewed for this study is that the typical reason for taking English training is to find a job," but "the [students’] number one reason for taking the course [LINC or ESL] was to understand and speak with Canadians in everyday life" (p. 94). This last point unearths an ideological conflict between ESL students and ESL "experts" about the intended goal and purpose of ESL training. The economic goals of ESL are, for the students, secondary to its social and participatory function.

Establishing the "typicalness" of the LINC program at the Centre by means of comparison with a provincial study helps to highlight the everyday and ordinary issues and concerns in the field of ESL. Statistical data provides answers to simple questions about who the students of ESL are, who the teachers are, what the conditions of the programs are, and what these people’s interests are in English teaching and learning. Generalized data, however, elides and erases the complexities of these issues, and the ways in which they are figured differently in and through specific social and institutional relations. By taking a closer look at the operations of one LINC program in a particular institutional context, it is possible to find out more about why funding is deemed the most important issue to ESL, what some of the effects might be of a field that is so highly gendered, what the particular interests are in teaching and learning ESL, and given those interests, how the constraints and possibilities offered by institutional and social relations shape them. These are some interesting questions that I will explore in relation to one another, and in relation to a particular and local institutional context. The next step is to consider how these constraints surface in and shape institutional practices and social interactions, and what, from them, is produced. But before this next step can be broached, the order of the institution needs to be established.

To get a glimpse of the way LINC operates at this particular organization, the Somali Centre, it is imperative to have a sense of the various interests of the people that are contained in and by the LINC program, and also of the ways that this particular institution mediates how the program takes shape. The different players involved in the scene make up a constellation of individuals and groups who move in and out of the physicality of the institution itself (its physical and organizational structure, as described above), as well as in and through the discourses that make up the "invisible" structure of the institution’s ideologies and practices. Next, I intend to map out who these groups and individuals are and what the conditions are of their involvement in the LINC program.

The presence of LINC at the community-based immigrant serving organization brings in members of the community to join in on the activities of the organization and utilize its other services. LINC is also, however, the only program at the Centre that is wholly managed and run by people external to the membership of the organization. LINC programs at community-based ISOs are an example of one of the ways that the majority regulates the "self-organizations" of migrants, as Blommaert and Verschueren note in their study of the migrant debate in Belgium (1998, p. 192). This makes for an institutional arrangement that necessitates compromises. When I asked about the relationship between the Centre and LINC, Mohammed, the Executive Director, responded with this explanation:

LINC was only specifically one program that we felt was, ah, important to the community, was important to the agency at that time, because we wanted to recruit the community to take advantage of this because we - if you don’t know the language, your chances are very slim to live here. You know, you sign documents that you don’t know, don’t know who you are talking to, all that stuff. And now, ah, - I feel it’s still important program, and if you have got people coming into the country and so on, not saying that it isn’t [?], it’s like any other program, with its own challenges, its to - and market, make sure that people [?] . . . [phone bleeping] . . . like any other program, any other school, you want people to go to U of T not Ryerson, Ryerson not U of T, you know, competition like. -- Same as any other program that you have, there are different schools running it . -- That’s how I studied and became successful because I went into a LINC program when I came into the country. I don’t know, without LINC I wouldn’t have made it to college or university. Because if you just took English for granted, ’cause you were born here, would wonder why this, you know? ’Cause they took it for granted that everyone knows, should know. And same as, we took for granted like ah, life, we took it for granted because if you’re healthy, have you ever thought about health and all that stuff? No. When you get old and sick you feel that health is an issue. Same thing with the program, you, I know, because I know how difficult it is - and see how they do studies of Canada, only because they have to become ah, they are the expectations of hired teachers, they have to be good teachers, we don’t have that skills for that, so we have to go with partnership of one [?], so we partner with . . . [?] Like any other program it has its challenges, its ups and downs.

Mohammed’s words reveal some ambivalence about the program. He acknowledges, in the beginning, that the program was regarded as an opportunity for the Centre to recruit members to the organization, and because he speaks of this in the past, there is a sense that this function of the program might not be important any longer. The LINC market has expanded since the Centre began to offer the program in 1992, and instead of the program acting as a draw to the community, it now has to actively recruit students to keep the program running. But Mohammed interrupts his history of the program with a pragmatic rationale of the program that justifies its relevance now: it is hard to live here if you don’t speak the language, and he could not have been successful without it. Mohammed expresses some ambivalence around the content of the LINC program, where the "studies of Canada" are the "expectations of hired teachers." The community does not yet "have the skills" for "good teachers" of their own. His comments imply that he would prefer to have teachers of his "own" with more control over course content. The arrangement, as it stands, is a compromise; it has its "ups and downs."

The contact between the Centre’s Board of Directors and the LINC program is minimal. The LINC staff do not attend any meetings of the Board, nor are there formal meetings between the LINC staff and the staff of the Centre. In this respect, the Centre and the LINC program live side by side but operate quite independently from one another. Mohammed’s take on the relationship between LINC and the Centre reflects, I think, an ambivalence about it because of the tensions it produces as a compromised and compromising institutional arrangement. The nature of these tensions, and the ways that the institutional arrangement necessitates compromises, will become clearer in the following sections where I discuss the relationship between the Centre and LINC with the teachers and the staff.

The Coordinator’s impression of the relationship between the LINC program and the Centre takes shape in more personal terms. In the past year, the Centre moved locations. The move altered the physical organization of shared space, and the Coordinator, Rebecca, says that she feels the relationship between the Centre and LINC changed as well. In the previous building, the LINC program and the Coordinator’s office were located on a separate floor from the activities of the Somali Centre. In the new building, the LINC classrooms and offices share the lobby and other spaces of the building directly with the Somali Centre. Rebecca attributes the change in the layout of the shared space, and her six years of employment with the organization, as two factors that contribute to her commitment to and involvement in the community initiatives headed by the Centre. In the interview excerpt below, she describes her increased involvement in the Centre:

. . . . When we moved here, before in the other place, I was downstairs, working, in the building, and the Somali Office, all this, all the main activity was on another floor, so I was really, it was just the teachers and myself isolated. But now I have become sort of immersed in the last year and a half, immersed in the culture, in the - and I wish it had happened a lot sooner. . . . I’ve been able to get involved in some of the workshops that they’ve been offering to [the Centre] staff , so, what I’m not gaining in money I’m gaining in um, just, in opportunities to learn, to acquire new skills. . . . we’re all working together, I’ve gotten to know them more and we’ve become extremely close. Now they’re like second family for me, you know.

Rebecca often mentions that the people at the Centre were like a "second family" to her. What is notable here is the ease with which she feels a part of the Centre both as the LINC Coordinator and as a member of the Centre. There isn’t much ambivalence about it. I suspect that this is because of the difference in power relations that positions her as authoritative in her role as LINC Coordinator and as entitled to join in on the Centre’s initiatives. Her social positioning allows her to move easily between both "worlds." Furthermore, her position in the institution necessitates that she mediate the conflicts and contradictions that arise as a result of the presence of LINC at the Centre. In this way, Rebecca is able (and indeed required) to cross a variety of institutional, cultural, and linguistic boundaries in her role as Coordinator.

Although Rebecca might feel highly valued (like family) by her involvement with the Centre, the line that separates LINC and the Centre is drawn quite clearly by the Executive Director. This separation was negatively valued by the Coordinator and the teachers, to imply that they believed the staff and members of the organization should be "more involved" with the LINC program. The sense that the LINC program is not of great value as a resource to the organization creates a source of tension, but the reason for the tension might not be explicitly recognized: the LINC program exists in a contradictory relation to the autonomous nature of the community-based immigrant serving organization. The participants of LINC feel the sense of compromise through the Centre’s "lack of involvement" with LINC staff and students. This way, they are made aware of the uncertain status of the program within the organization.

Rebecca’s involvement with the Centre goes beyond the dictates of her role as LINC Coordinator. She comments in the above excerpt that she does not get paid for the extra work she does. The work that she does get paid for as the LINC Coordinator includes organizing workshops on settlement issues, purchasing, bookkeeping, monitoring the progress of the classes, monitoring the child minding program, and preparing mid-year and year-end reports. In her own words, here is her description of one aspect of her role as Coordinator:

I act as liaison between the teachers and the students when things get a little rough, like if the teachers need to vent, I’m the person they vent to, if the students need to vent I’m the person they vent to. I have to kind of monitor the attendance and if there are problems with students coming in late so I’ve got to give them these little talks every once in a while. Just to get them back on track again.

Indeed, attendance is one of the most intense and contentious issues of the program: it produces frequent conflicts that Rebecca has to mediate, and she is bound to the "rules" about attendance since strict record-keeping is demanded by LINC. The above excerpt clearly articulates Rebecca’s complex role as negotiator and mediator of the program and the conflicts that it produces.

In her role as Coordinator, Rebecca occupies a position of authority that requires her to monitor and track the attendance and progress of the program in order to ensure its continued viability. She also, however, enjoys being "involved" and closely connected to the people that she works with. After observing the goings-on of the organization for a few weeks, I noticed that Rebecca, the teachers, and the cultural interpreters were often very involved in helping the students sort out conflicts with landlords or creditors. They were doing the work of settlement counselors. The Centre has one part-time settlement counselor on staff, and the LINC program does not provide funding for settlement counselors. Speaking with Rebecca, I asked her about the role of settlement counselors within the organization and in relation to the LINC program:

There are supposed to be people in the organization on a regular basis that will provide counseling. When we have real problems Ahmed is a big help. Unfortunately, he’s not paid full time. He’s only paid to be here 15 hours a week. And hopefully, the government is being very generous with funding, right now, because election time is coming, so hopefully [the Centre] will get some money to have full-time counselors on staff ’cause really quite frankly we need somebody to be here. . . . Otherwise I end up doing it and I’m not supposed to be doing it.

The lack of settlement counselors is certainly due to a scarcity of funds, but it also contributes to the sense that the Centre is not providing the necessary support for the LINC program to function smoothly. As mentioned earlier, this is one of the compromises felt keenly by the LINC staff and students that create tensions in their relationship with the Centre.

The involvement of the LINC staff in settlement service work is so wedded to their work at the Centre that all of them identified themselves, at times jokingly, as "social workers" as well as ESL teachers/instructors. Here, the ideology that aligns the provision of language training for adult immigrants with social welfare provision is made visible. If programs like LINC are part of social welfare provision, indeed, designated as a settlement language training program, then the resources to provide the settlement aspect of the program should be adequately provided. One morning, for example, Rebecca organized a workshop on the Landlord and Tenant Act, presented by a lawyer, to let the students know about their rights as tenants. As a result of the information provided by the lawyer, many of the students realized they were being gouged by their landlords in a number of ways. The lessons planned for that afternoon were put aside to work out strategies for the students to deal with their landlords. The teachers’ goals as ESL instructors are regularly interrupted because of the discovery of certain problems and crises that the students are experiencing, and the teachers want to help. There are other structural constraints, similar to this one, that impinge upon the conditions of the teachers’ work.

The LINC program operates in policy on a continuous intake basis, and very often the classes are multi-level. Two of the three classes offered at the Centre are split-level classes. The classes, as a result, are very heterogeneous in terms of the students’ proficiencies, and the teachers cannot maintain much continuity between classes. The students in the classes range in age and in their personal motivations and goals for the program. In all of these ways, the teachers’ attempts to reach certain objectives can be extraordinarily difficult. Gail, an Anglo-Canadian woman in her late 20s, has been teaching at the Centre for less than three months, and she has been teaching ESL for two and a half years. She teaches the split Level Two/Three class. I asked Gail how she achieves her goals as a teacher given the conditions in which she works. Here is her answer:

In an ideal situation in this culture, eventually I would achieve what I want to do as an ESL instructor. I’m constantly in an uncertain stage - I don’t know how many students I’ll have, or who. How do students catch up? There is no catch up. It’s hit and miss. It’s so frustrating. Other teachers deal with that, but their students do homework and attend. There are certain aspects of your goals that you won’t achieve. You have to take it on a day to day basis, rather than get upset. Each LINC program is different.

Gail says that in the "culture" in which she works, she could only achieve her goals in an ideal world. Instead, she never knows how many students she will have or who they will be, which is partly due to the structure of the program. But the problem of continuous intake and multi-level classes is linked to attendance and homework, and these she attributes to the lack of motivation and goals of the particular "group" of students that she teaches at the Centre. All of the teachers have taught ESL or LINC in other institutional contexts, and they often compared this group of students to other ESL classes to assert that these students are more of a challenge, as Gail does above.

The constraints that affect the ease with which the teachers achieve their goals depend on a combination of both the structure of the program and whether the goals and objectives of the teachers resemble in any way those of the students. Structural constraints are not considered to contribute to the construction of social relations in a particular context; instead, individuals are held responsible for actions that produce difficulties or conflict. The conditions that are produced by the structure of the LINC program at the Centre, however, are not unusual. In 1997, Ellen Cray interviewed six LINC teachers employed by Ottawa area school boards as one part of a larger study on how teachers deal with difficult teaching situations (Cray, 1997). In her study, Cray found that continuous intake, multi-level classes, and inconsistent attendance were the most prevalent constraints on the program and the most compromising conditions of the teachers’ work. The LINC programs in this study were small, managed by a single teacher in an "off-site" location such as a community centre, the basement of a primary school, and even the bedroom of an apartment in a subsidized housing complex (p. 30).¹ The teachers had to track attendance, and four of them worried that their programs would be cancelled. Because the teachers were directly responsible for the viability of their own jobs by keeping the numbers up, they felt that the records required by LINC did not take into account the complexities of the students’ lives that interfere with regular attendance. Cray writes,

Learners missed classes for a variety of legitimate reasons such as illness, problems with children’s school and with housing, and lack of familiarity with Canadian weather. Attendance records did not allow teachers to evaluate the legitimacy of student absences. So although the teachers felt they should maintain accurate records, they felt threatened when attendance figures were low. (p. 27)

At the Centre, the teachers do not believe that the attendance requirements are too strict. Instead, the attendance requirements for LINC are viewed as acceptable. The teachers at the Centre found the students’ frequent lateness and absences unacceptable. The teachers repeatedly expressed frustration at the prospect of trying to move a class forward to learn new things when there was little consistency in the students’ participation. Their goals as ESL teachers always felt interrupted. The issue of attendance affected the teachers’ sense of professional identity; they perceived the students’ absences as a challenge to their authority as teachers, and hence it was often phrased as a "matter of respect," an issue that I will return to shortly. Finally, problems in attendance threatened the security of their positions as workers. In the second month of my research at the Centre, a representative from Citizenship and Immigration Canada came to visit to inform the staff that LINC would now require 80% attendance rates from the students. The teachers turned to the Coordinator to enforce the rules on attendance, thus positioning Rebecca as the gatekeeper of the program. Rebecca required that the students only miss class if they had a legitimate appointment, and she requested that they show her appointment cards from doctors, dentists, and immigration officers. Classes were to start promptly, and if students were late they would not be permitted to join the class.

The multi-level, continuous intake structure of the LINC classes and the issue of attendance are the best examples of how the practices of the staff and students of the LINC program are shaped by LINC policy. Furthermore, the self-identification of the teachers and the Coordinator as "social workers" points to a specific institutional constraint on their attempts to get their work done as LINC employees. The implications of this set of constraints, and what they might produce, will be explored further in the next chapter by looking at specific linguistic interactions that take place during the process of teaching and learning ESL. There is one other element in the mix, however, that acts as an institutional constraint--another area of contradiction between the LINC program and the Centre that deserves mention.

Because most of students in the program are Somali, the teachers are constantly imploring the students to "speak English!" The ethno-specificity of the community-based immigrant serving organization proves to be a challenge to the teachers because "speaking Somali" in class becomes another activity that must be monitored and controlled. The teachers know that the LINC classes offer one of the few opportunities for the students to speak English. They lament the fact that the students rarely do homework, and have few chances to practice English outside of the LINC program. In interviews with the students, I found that Somali is the dominant language in the women’s homes. The women live in Somali communities where many shops are Somali-owned, and when they do need to access mainstream services, they often ask a bilingual relative or child to accompany them. The teachers value their efforts to teach English to the students because it will allow the students to be more independent, and the students will no longer rely on others for translation. In this way, the ideology of language behind the teachers’ insistence to "speak English" is structured by this desire to "empower" the women to independence. In practice, it means that the teachers frequently quell discussions in Somali in the constant struggle to maintain English in the classroom. In Chapter Four, I will investigate the implications of this ideology in more detail. For now, however, the teachers work to create a monolingual zone of English, because there is "too much Somali" being spoken in the classroom. Ideally, Somali is only sanctioned when a translation is needed from a cultural interpreter, but in actuality the regulation of Somali and English linguistic productions is a constant activity.

The teachers’ struggle to regulate and enforce English is a product of the institutional arrangement that places LINC in a community-based ISO. The Somali Centre is, in effect, a place where Somali is highly valued and used; it is the language of communication at the community centre. I asked the teachers and the Coordinator about the advantages and disadvantages of offering LINC at a community-based ISO. While the LINC staff are aware of the benefits of the community-based structure of the organization, the linguistic struggle that it produces was frequently noted. Gail says this about the Centre: "They are with people who can speak the language for them. This is extremely important; it is a home base." Lucy has a more complicated view. She has been at the Centre for a year and a half, and has been teaching ESL for three or four years. She is under 30, a second generation Italian-Canadian woman, and she was hired because she speaks Italian. Lucy teaches the literacy class, and many of the women in the class are elderly Somali women who have minimal literacy skills, but speak Italian as well as Somali.² She says that offering LINC at a community-based ISO means that the students

. . . are in touch with their community, but they are not integrated with people who speak other languages, or with people from other backgrounds. What we can do, though, is specify workshops geared toward them, for example, we had one recently on diabetes. We are able to have a translator for them – it’s easier for them here. But we have to ask them to speak English all of the time.

Sarah teaches the split Level Two/Three class, and has thoughts similar to Lucy’s about the relationship between LINC and the Centre. Sarah was born in Montreal, and is in her 60s; she is the senior teacher in age, experience, and authority. Although she is not a certified ESL instructor, she was trained as an elementary school teacher, took time off to raise three children, and then began to volunteer as an ESL teacher until she was hired at the Centre six years ago. Sarah says that the advantages of offering language training at the Centre are that

The students are more comfortable here, they are not alone, and they have cultural interpreters to help them. But they learn slower and they revert to Somali a lot . . . In mixed classes they have to find the words to speak to one another. It is easier not to when they speak the same language. -- They have fun here - they laugh a lot.

The Coordinator concurs with the teachers: "we wish we had more people from other groups because - and I’m going to try to do something about it - because then the students are forced to speak English in order to interact."

Rebecca’s imperative to "do something about it" reveals that "too much Somali" is an ongoing concern to the LINC program. Indeed, in the everyday goings-on at the Centre, Somali occupies most of the linguistic space, with frequent crossings into English: the Somali Centre staff speak Somali to one another, the child minders speak Somali to the children, all of the brochures and signs printed by the Centre are in both English and Somali, as is the message on the answering machine. The linguistic allegiances of the Somali Centre and the LINC program are at cross-purposes, which produces contradictions that need to be managed. The solution that the LINC staff seeks to "too much Somali" is to recruit more non-Somali students. But this solution will alter the membership of the "community" that the community centre claims to represent. This issue is another example of how, in subtle ways, the autonomy of a community-based centre might find itself in conflict with the goals of a supposedly universal and uniformly applicable federal program. It is, in fact, a very complicated relationship, just as Mohammed, the Executive Director, described it above.

Finally, there is one other aspect of the teachers’ work that must be mentioned, although it operates as less of a constraint than what has been outlined in the previous section. One aspect of the LINC program and policy that does not seem to impinge on the teachers’ actions is the LINC curriculum. The Revised LINC Curriculum Guidelines (1997), based on the Canadian Language Benchmarks, state that "the basic goal of LINC programmes is to help learners develop communicative competence in English in order to be able to participate more fully in Canadian society." Ontario’s LINC Curriculum Guidelines are organized according to "themes" which are meant to provide the context within which the learners are expected to develop linguistic proficiency. The Curriculum Guidelines suggest twelve "themes of everyday life," such as Canadian Law, Canadian Society, Commercial Services, Employment, Family Life, Housing, Leisure, Media, and Transportation. Each theme has a set of corresponding competencies that must be achieved. The competencies are based on three areas of proficiency: reading, writing, and listening and speaking, and these areas are ranked by level of difficulty to match up with the Canadian Language Benchmarks which were developed as the guidelines by which competency is based. The LINC program also developed a literacy component for students whose reading, writing, and numeracy skills need to be improved before entering LINC Level One.

The teachers at the Centre did not follow the curriculum guidelines devoutly, but devised the curriculum of the day and the week based on similar themes as outlined above, and according to what they felt were the needs of the students. At the Centre, the teachers’ perusal of LINC Curriculum Guidelines resembled that of the teachers in Ellen Cray’s (1997) study of LINC teachers in Ottawa, who consulted the guidelines for "ideas of themes and topics," although they did not feel that "they were being forced or even strongly advised to use it" (p. 33). Cray notes that the LINC Curriculum Guidelines and the Canadian Language Benchmarks are quite an achievement in the development of language policy in Ontario, but, interestingly, "the curriculum, for all its weight and authority, was of little importance to the teachers" (p. 33). This is a sure comment on the government’s efforts to standardize ESL curricula, the effectiveness of which, regardless of the development of extensive documents and materials, rests on the teachers to implement it, or not. Fleming’s (1997) thesis study of five instructors of an adult ESL settlement program came to similar conclusions. The instructors whom he interviewed did not relish the development of the Canadian Language Benchmarks, and wanted, instead, "autonomy over the choice of materials and activities" that they used in their classrooms (p. 95). The trade-off here, however, is that there is a high degree of responsibility for curriculum placed on ESL teachers (Fleming, 1997, p. 95).

The 1998 Study of ESL/FSL Services in Ontario cites much higher probabilities that ESL/LINC teachers are using standardized curricula than the above studies suggest. The LINC Curriculum Guidelines are used by 87% of the teachers surveyed, and 70% of the classes in the study used the Canadian Language Benchmarks (Power Analysis, Inc., p. ii). At the same time, however, the study says that 74% of the ESL/LINC classes "required their instructors to develop curriculum appropriate to the needs of their class" (p. ii). The curriculum guidelines are available to ESL and LINC teachers as resources, and are used as such. ESL and LINC teachers are not explicitly mandated to follow the standard curriculum nor do they feel obliged to do so, as evidenced by the studies above, and my own. The Revised LINC Literacy Component (1997c), for example, acknowledges in its introduction that "like the guidelines for LINC 1, 2, and 3, the literacy component offers a ‘way in’ for LINC teaching that instructors can refine, adapt, and personalize" (p. 5). What gets taught, and how it is taught, is up to the teachers. The teachers’ autonomy to devise the curriculum is one area where they are not so greatly constrained by LINC policy, as they are in many other aspects of their work. The teachers have a certain amount of "choice" in what they teach. There is also, in LINC, a strong "client needs" discourse that surfaces in the early policy documents, in the curriculum guidelines, and in the talk of the teachers and administrators of LINC that acknowledges the autonomy of teachers to make decisions about curriculum based on what the students want to learn.

According to the teachers and the Coordinator, the objective of the LINC program is to teach English to assist immigrants and refugees with language skills so that they can integrate into Canadian society. As Gail describes it, "with LINC, you walk with [the students] as they experience Canadian life." Rebecca spoke frequently about the program providing "basic skills," or "life skills," and Gail characterizes what she does as teaching "survival English." The teachers and the Coordinator at the Centre consider LINC to be the first opportunity that immigrants and refugees have to begin to learn English, and to learn about Canada. Indeed, language and a particular form of cultural knowledge, knowledge "about" Canada are combined, to reflect that LINC is both a settlement/integration and an ESL program. The teachers and the coordinator talked frequently about what the students "need to know," and one of the teachers said that her job is to "help people who do not know." The teachers have a fair amount of autonomy in decision-making about curriculum, and this aspect of their work will be explored in more detail in the next chapter. Now, I turn to the role of the cultural interpreters in their negotiations of the LINC program at the Somali Centre.

The cultural interpreters

Dunia and Hajia are the Centre’s "cultural interpreters;" they are the negotiators and translators of the relationship between the LINC staff and the Somali students. LINC provides funding for only one interpreter: Hajia was the cultural interpreter when I began to visit the Centre, and a month or so later Dunia replaced Hajia. As the job title suggests, Dunia and Hajia negotiate the boundary between English and Somali cultures and languages; they act as bilingual brokers between the two language groups (see Heller, 1994). Hajia and Dunia were both Board Members prior to resigning to become employed as interpreters. Hajia is in her late 20s and has been in Canada since 1991. She was educated in Somalia as a pharmacist. When she came to Canada she went to night school to learn English, and is now enrolled in a college community worker program, because, as she says, "the sad one is when you come to Canada you have to start again and again." Dunia is in her 30s and completed the community worker program two years ago. When she arrived in Canada in 1990 from Somalia, Dunia already possessed English language skills. She was educated in Pakistan and Italy as a child and learned English during those years. In the early 1990s, she worked a few odd jobs in the service sector at first, and then went to college. Hajia and Dunia each speak four languages.

The cultural interpreter has a very busy job. She spends the mornings in Lucy’s literacy class, where communication occurs in a constant mix of English, Somali, and Italian. The interpreter spends the afternoon with one of the other classes, helping out with small group work. She is often called upon to accompany Rebecca from class to class to make announcements, or to translate for workshops. While I was conducting my research, her time was even more in demand because she often helped me out by translating in my interviews with the students. The job often goes beyond the bounds of its description, as Hajia explains: "I am the cultural interpreter, I am also the escort worker, the social services, I am the women’s support group here - (laughter) - I’m lots of things."

Hajia and Dunia occupy a position in the organization that requires them to mediate the lines drawn between English and Somali languages and cultures. Because language and culture are not fixed entities, but are (re)produced in and through interactions, the cultural interpreters in a sense "make" and define those languages and cultures as they translate them. Symbolically, then, the women have a very powerful function in the organization that is in great demand, and is often a matter of contestation. For the teachers and Rebecca, for example, the interpreters are the line of communication between the students and the LINC staff. When the students break out into intense conversations in class in Somali, or when there is a special event that the students celebrate with Somali songs or readings, the teachers are constantly asking the interpreters, "What are they saying? What are they saying?" When, in class or at workshops, the students can answer questions in Somali, they argue with the interpreter over the answer that she chooses to give, as Dunia explains:

I have to give the answer but they don’t agree with the answer I give! So I have to listen this, listen to that - yeah, I deal with it, but it’s very, very - and sometimes I go home with a headache.

Because the interpreters can understand both linguistic groups, and a few others as well, they have access to a resource (different kinds of linguistic knowledge) that is in constant demand by the different groups at the Centre. It requires the interpreters to move across linguistic boundaries and cultural allegiances, to be "on side" with one group or another: to represent the interests, or "make meaning," of one group or individual to another. As a result, the positions that Dunia and Hajia occupy as Somali immigrant women and as LINC employees are, at times, in tension with one another. The tensions are not so contradictory that they produce great uncertainty and ambivalence, but they require careful maneuvering. Dunia and Hajia occupy positions that resemble that of Rebecca, who is the regulator of access to the LINC program, and part of the "family" at the Centre. For these three, their jobs demand that they negotiate the conflicts and contradictions of the program, and these positions inevitably produce tensions and contradictions that require deft work to reconcile, or perhaps remain unreconciled. The point here is that the interpreters have a resource that many of the people at LINC (maybe) want for themselves and certainly want access to--that is, bilingualism.

The Somali students at the Centre are very familiar with the fact that bilingualism is a valued resource. All of the ten female Somali students whom I interviewed speak two, if not three languages. Arabic is the language of the Qur’an, and as children all of the women learned how to read in Arabic as part of their religious schooling. Many of the students speak Italian because it was the language of instruction during the colonial era when the southern region of Somalia was an Italian colony, and a few of the students lived in Italy as students during their youth, or later, as refugees escaping the civil war in Somalia. While the women might be highly skilled in spoken language skills, the effects of a colonial education system, the ensuing civil war, and patriarchal gender ideologies that value boys’ education much more than that of girls, means that many women had their education interrupted or they never went to school in the first place.

In a group interview with Lucy’s class, and with Dunia’s help as translator, I asked the students why they were at the LINC program. The students in Lucy’s literacy class are all in their 50s and 60s. They intend to learn enough English not to get a job or to continue their education, but to "get by." The women want to speak English to go to the doctor, to go shopping, and as one woman put it, to access "resources and information." The other students’ motivations to be in the LINC program varied according to age; indeed, age figured as the factor by which everyone in the program explained differences among the students. Age split the group of students into two: young and old. It served to explain the differences in the women’s ideologies of education, gender, and religion, and differences in their experiences and practices as well. Age differences figured as a factor that positioned the students in Canada, but age also functioned as something that delineated the young and old along historical lines, in that they brought with them to Canada different experiences of pre- and post-independence Somalia, and therefore they had different expectations about their lives in Canada.

For the younger women, the interest in learning English is very much about accessing resources and information, as it is for the older students, but there are other motivations as well, such as helping with their children’s education, getting further education for themselves, or finding a job:

I would like to finish school. I help my children go to school full time. If I can find work; if I have trouble, I continue school. (Asha)

***

LINC helps language, help in translation of school meeting of teachers. Teachers speak too fast. To help, write, for my son. (Lambar)

***

Have to learn language. Help myself, my children. To write. To know how to read letter from the government, letters from school. Have to understand what they say. Bank, have to know to talk, to ask. I drive a car. If I have accident, I have to know to contact insurance. I can’t do nothing without English. And at office, I have to fill out form; sometimes they don’t say last name, first name, they don’t all say it the same way. (Aisha)

***

My speaking English is a little bit broken. I need good education. I help myself. I can’t read and write English very good. I have to go to bank, write letter, cheque; they helping me all that stuff. I plan to work, learn computer. And I have to learn English good, read good, know meaning when I write. (Damac)

The students expect that learning English will facilitate access to mainstream services and other resources. There are, however, other interests in the program because it is, in itself, a resource with symbolic and material benefits. LINC provides subsidies for child care and transportation; it is a meeting place for the women outside of their homes; there are parties, field trips, and workshops. Rebecca provides a nice analysis of the many different interests that bring the students to the program:

I think that some of them just want to learn English, some of them just want to keep welfare off their backs. But some of them really want to learn English. Some of them come here because it makes them feel less isolated, but some of the students really want to learn and get an education, and get jobs. There are different - like for the older people, they want something to do, they want to feel, they don’t want to feel helpless. And they’re, I think, the bravest people. The young women that come in, they’re really looking for a future. The women that are sort of older, I think some of them are kind of hoping, like even the women that are in their 30s, 40s, they’re still hoping that at least they can get something, or at the very least become literate enough so that they can help their children in school. Some don’t have future goals at first but after a while see that there are possibilities. So, it really depends on the individual. They all have different goals. Some of them it’s just to acquire a knowledge of the language so that they can get by, you know.

There are ways, however, that the everyday business of learning the language is interrupted by the complexities of the women’s lives, as in the example cited earlier where the day’s lessons had to be put on hold because of the discovery of problems with housing. The majority of the women are on welfare; if they have children they are most likely single mothers. Of the ten women that I interviewed, five of them are raising children and nine of the women do not have husbands: three of the women are divorced, and many of the women’s husbands had died in the war, or are still in Somalia or surrounding refugee camps. Most of the women in the LINC program are single heads of households, or, in the case of the older women, are living with other women and their families and helping to raise children. Affi (1997) notes that "single Somali women endure extreme obstacles in Canada including gender discrimination, language difficulties, and sole responsibilities for child rearing with a lack of any support system" (p. 442).

Most of the students at the Centre are Convention Refugees, and some are landed immigrants. Many are involved in the long process of obtaining landed immigrant status. In 1995, Opoku-Dapaah found that the average wait for refugee determination for Somali refugees was two years (p. 24). In 1997, however, the Canadian government created a new category of refugees called the Undocumented Convention Refugees In Canada Class, applicable only to Somali and Afghani refugees, in an attempt to discourage migration to Canada from Somalia and Afghanistan. If refugees cannot produce legitimate identity documents, they must wait five years before applying to become permanent residents (CIC, 1997a). There is no government in Somalia, now or in the last decade, from which identity documents can be obtained. This heavy-handed regulation imposed by the federal government makes settling in Canada immensely challenging for Somali refugee women. As a refugee, it is very difficult to get a job, and impossible to get a loan; tuition fees for university or college education are that of foreign students, thus out of reach for oneself or one’s children. The UCRCC regulation serves to maintain the marginalized position of refugees in the economy. As a refugee, it is impossible to sponsor family members from Somalia, or to travel outside of Canada, which means that the regulation maintains the fragmentation of family support networks that began with the civil war (see Israelite et al., 1999).

Canada’s conditional acceptance of Somali refugees in Canada places many of the women in the LINC program, and their children, in a state of limbo. Their uncertain, second-rate status in Canada is an improvement on the conditions of their lives in refugee camps in Ethiopia and Kenya that many of the women came from, but it is a sharp contrast to their status positions in Somalia prior to the war. Dunia, who, along with Hajia, often acted as "cultural interpreter" for me as well, explains the harsh contrast between the women’s status in Somalia and how they are seen as refugees in Canada:

Ah yeah, some people think they [the women] don’t have any education, they don’t have houses, they don’t have - some people think that we don’t have water running, we don’t have electricity, you know, they don’t think we had life at home, that we had a better life than most Canadians have. Especially, these women you are seeing here, some of them were very rich, very famous - very bad - some of them they don’t want to talk about it. But the thing that most of us - they always say, it’s destiny, you know.

The women’s faith in Islam helps them to account, somewhat, for their current lot in life. Dunia uses, at first, a detached "they" to talk about the representation of Somali women in Canada, and then moves to a collective "we" to explain how Somali women, as refugees, are regarded as disenfranchised not just in their present positions in Canada, but in a way that belies the richness and worth of their pasts as well. In speaking with the ten women I interviewed, half of them described themselves as shop owners or business women in Somalia, the others worked at home and brought up their children. A few mentioned the comfort and beauty of their lives there: large houses, cars and chauffeurs, and supportive networks of extended female family members who shared the responsibilities of looking after the home and the children.

The shift has been drastic for Somalis who, due to the effects of war and migration, have moved from the patterns of extended family that shaped social relations in Somalia to the ideology of the nuclear family of the Western world (see Kahin, 1997). This is just one of the factors that is an immense change, just one factor of "difference" that surfaces between the students and the institution of the LINC program. In many ways, the ideologies and values of the Somali women students come into conflict with those of the program over issues such as the women’s relationships to their families and to education, and their commitment to the LINC program. I will briefly outline below how one such conflict occurred, to establish how conflict is contained and how the students respond to it. But the salience of the event will be explored in greater detail in the next chapter, where I will look at the social and linguistic interactions that shape, negotiate, and produce the differing ideologies of gender, education, and nation.

As I have already mentioned, from the first of my visits to the Centre, it appeared that attendance was a contentious issue. Attendance in classes during the month of January was hampered by holidays for Ramadan, and there were a few snow storms in January and February. Lateness was always an issue and a source of complaint by the teachers. At the beginning of February, the LINC Project Officer from Citizenship and Immigration came to visit. She spent some time talking with Rebecca, the Coordinator, and Sarah, the senior teacher, and she sat in on a class for an hour. Her visit to the Centre confirmed that strict attendance must be monitored because the LINC program now required 80% attendance from the students. The visit created some panic from the teachers and Rebecca, because many students were not attending 80% of the time.

One week later, an "incident" occurred. The reconstruction of the event is sketchy because I was not there. The students were apparently gathered in one classroom making candles (the teachers often planned activities like this for the students). One of the older students, Kunab, was not following Sarah’s directions, and was taking more supplies than she was permitted. Sarah lost her temper and yelled at Kunab. The teachers separated themselves from the students, and the Coordinator went to talk with the students. Rebecca told me that she spoke at length about the efforts that the teachers make for the students, and that elements such as repeated lateness, absences, and not doing homework all add up to the teachers feeling frustrated and unable to accomplish their goals as teachers, thereby causing conflicts. She asked the students to make more of an effort in these areas.

The problem of the disruption of order was solved in the service of the problem that was presently at issue for the Coordinator--attendance. The incident was actually a conflict over resources; Kunab wanted more materials for candles than she was allowed, and Sarah obviously felt she wanted too much. The teacher must regulate the student’s access to something of value in order to accomplish her goals: there had to be enough supplies for everyone for the task to be completed as planned. But a conflict over resources and the loss of order in the classroom became an opportunity to address a pressing issue at the level of the institution and to refigure the stakes of the program. Rebecca’s disciplinary measures resulted in a new set of "rules" for lateness and absences that, a week later, were presented by her and the Executive Director to each class. If students were repeatedly absent, arriving late or leaving early, then Rebecca would ask them to leave the program. Rebecca asked to see proof of appointments that required the students to miss classes. These rules would be strictly followed for all students, and were also in effect for those who required letters as proof of attendance for their Social Services workers and for day care subsidies.

The way that order is lost and regained in this event highlights the workings of power relations in the organization. There is no formal voicing of the students’ point of view on all of this. With Rebecca’s help, Sarah’s actions are legitimized, and the authority of the program is secured and reinforced. The student’s apparent transgression is utilized to reinforce the institutional order. When the "face" of the organization is potentially threatened, broad powerful strokes are made to enforce the order of the institution. But it is at the level of everyday interactions that the nature of power is revealed as shifting, inconstant, and difficult to maintain. New rules require strict policing by the administrators of the program, and this, I found, was not performed with nearly as much conviction as was the claim that there were new rules. Immediately following the incident, there were signs of a boycott of Sarah’s class: for three days after, half of the students in her class did not show up. Over the next few weeks, one student, one of the non-Somali students, was asked to leave because she had a part-time job in the afternoon and could not attend the whole day. Damac, a Somali woman with two children, was warned that she was not attending enough. She did not appear in class for a few days, and then returned. Her status in the program was under negotiation when I finished my research there.

The students’ attendance at school is the contingency upon which all else rests. The survival of the LINC program and the jobs of its employees depend upon maintaining a record of 80% attendance from the students. The Coordinator must see that this requirement is met, or the future of the program is in jeopardy. In my research, access to the program is the most important concern and the most regulated activity of the organization, the dominant discourse, and the main component of the institutional order.

The groups and individuals at the Centre have different understandings and expectations about what learning English will provide access to, in terms of jobs, further training, and even the resources of the LINC program itself. What everybody knows, however, is that learning English depends upon the students’ attendance in classes on a regular basis, because then the students can move from one level of LINC to the next to eventually graduate from the program.

Notably, there is very little formal testing of the students’ abilities, save for the initial assessment that each student had to undergo to be placed in the appropriate class. The students’ succession through the program depends instead on the teachers’ personal evaluation of the student, and the teachers determine when the students move from one class to the next. Perhaps because of the informal nature of the tests and measures of the students’ progress, attendance itself is a measure of "success." It is connected to many positive and negative valuations of the students, and its presence is felt in many instances of decision-making and problem-solving, hence it is an issue of constant concern and negotiation. The rules of the institution enforce particular forms of student behaviour to meet its own interests as a body that must regulate access through a process of selection and exclusion, but the enforcement of "the rules" is shifting and uneven. The conflicts about student attendance and access to the program are about larger discourses of gender, nation, and education; different ideas come into conflict over what the responsibilities of an adult woman student are to her school, and to her family, and by extension, to the new nation that is her home.

These are the issues that will be examined in the next chapter in a closer analysis of how the ideologies and practices of language learning that are shaped by various institutional constraints (such as the regulation of student attendance) surface in linguistic interactions. I will look at how the "problem" of attendance surfaces in other instances and acts as a catalyst for unearthing the presence of other "problems" that are under negotiation in the LINC program. The ways that these problems are understood and dealt with reveal how the institution engages with larger social processes and ideologies about language training for adult immigrants. In this complex process, I am interested in what is being produced as knowledge, to consider the particular "relation to language" that is formed in the teaching and learning of English in the LINC program at the Centre (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977).

Cray’s (1997) piece reveals some of the truly awful conditions in which LINC teachers work, conditions that do not surface as an area of concern in the CIC commissioned study of ESL/FSL Services in Ontario (Power Analysis, Inc., 1998). On the other end of the continuum, however, are LINC programs such as the one I visited in Scarborough. The LINC program there ran out of a multi-service, multi-ethnic immigrant serving organization that offered settlement services in 29 languages. In conversation with the Director, I got a sense of her vision of how it is possible to structure an organization to lessen the impact of the LINC program’s structural constraints. For example, whenever a LINC teacher becomes aware that a student is having a problem, the teacher refers the student to a settlement counselor who can speak the student’s language. The differences in the provision of LINC at the SPO in Scarborough has everything to do with the management of the institution itself. With 15 years of experience in settlement services, the Director has established a financially secure, smooth-operating organization.