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  |

Conclusion

The continued viability of LINC is uncertain as the federal government works with each province to negotiate the transfer of responsibility for settlement and integration services. In Ontario, the process of settlement renewal is at a standstill, caught in mid-download since 1996 while the province and the federal government continue to work out the transfer of responsibility. The settlement and integration services now administered by Citizenship and Immigration Canada would be phased out once the transfer of responsibilities is complete. A CIC document on settlement renewal states that while federal programs such as LINC would be discontinued, "the activities they represent, however, could continue" (1996c, p. 17). Service providers can apply for funding for language training, settlement services counselors, and other settlement and integration services. There are no further details on how federal funding of settlement services might be organized. For now, then, the LINC program remains, but its future is uncertain. The organization of language training programs are likely to alter when they are administered by the provinces alone, and it will be interesting to see the kinds of changes that will occur. Certain aspects of the programs shall remain the same, though, as settlement services providers take on the challenge of implementing the policies of language training programs for adult immigrants in a local setting.

This study of the federal language training program for adult immigrants looks at the material and ideological conditions that shape the instantiation of one LINC program in a local setting. The historical and sociological discourses of ESL teaching and learning, immigrant integration, and ideologies of language all shape the current federal language training program for adult immigrants. Taking into account the larger discourses surrounding the formation of the program outlined in Chapter Two, in Chapter Three I looked at the social organization of one LINC program to consider how LINC policy is put into practice. The mandates of the LINC program are borne out in everyday interactions and practices that inform the social relations in the setting, which have to be negotiated and managed by all of the participants involved. By examining, in Chapter Four, the production of linguistic interactions in the classroom, I explored how the discourses of LINC are mediated by the institution and work in concert with larger sociological discourses about immigration. The teachers’ efforts to empower the students through English language teaching and learning paradoxically serve to reinforce the marginalization of the students in relation to Anglo-Canadian linguistic and cultural practices.

The dominant discourses of Anglo-Canadian cultural superiority that surface in the practices of ESL teaching and learning actively position adult immigrant learners of ESL as inferior. The norms and values of the students’ culture are construed as a problem, thus these attempts to educate the Somali immigrants and refugees about Canadian linguistic and cultural practices unwittingly devalue their own cultural and linguistic practices. As a result, the social relations in the educational setting serve to reproduce conditions of Anglo-Canadian cultural and linguistic dominance and the subservience of racialized "others" to it. My interest in exploring and accounting for these social practices is to show how social interactions are linked to larger social processes, both of which are mediated in and by institutional discourses. This approach is one way of understanding how the relationship between structure and agency works, how majority/minority social relations are produced, and how dominant ideologies are reproduced. It is also a way to make sense of the social practices and interactions in the LINC program at the Centre to consider, as a result, the knowledge that is produced in this educational setting.

The LINC program provides access to symbolic and material resources for all of its participants. For the staff, the program gives them full-time employment. All of the teachers (and the Coordinator) mentioned the symbolic value of teaching English as well: the importance of "helping" the students learn the linguistic resources they need to "get by" in their lives in Canada. For the students, LINC increases their linguistic capital. The students learn some linguistic strategies they need to access mainstream English institutions and services. The LINC program at the Centre has a symbolic function for the students too; it is a place where the students meet as a community. At times, it seemed that the function of the program as a social meeting place was, for the students, the greatest value of the program. The pedagogic purpose of the program appeared to be secondary to its social value, hence the staff’s and students’ interests were, in this respect, at cross-purposes. In all of the diverse ways the program is valued, it functions as a resource in itself. The program has to be managed as an institution that distributes a variety of symbolic and material resources. The students and staff in the program have various interests in the symbolic and material resources that the institution provides, and the institution must negotiate these interests. It is, as a result, a site where struggles over power and resources take place.

Negotiations about power and resources are structured by social relations that are produced in social interactions. By looking at how social relations are linguistically produced and practiced, and also how they are understood by the participants in the program, it is possible to better understand how social relations are structured by relations of power and by the values that are attributed to the resources of the institution. The production of social identities, social relations, and ideologies of language in the LINC program show how the institution and its participants work to manage the many layers of social and institutional relations that meet in one site. LINC policy and its practice at the Centre create ideological conflicts about culture and language that emerge in social relations. The various groups in the program work to negotiate conflict and contradiction as they engage in the interest that overwhelms all others, that is, to maintain the program and the relations within it to access the resources that each participant values. In what follows I will trace the trajectory of this study of the LINC program at the Centre to make some suggestions about what can be learned from it, and to make some recommendations for change. I will first review the particular constraints of the LINC program that shape its implementation at the Centre. I will link these constraints to the discursive practices of the teachers and students to arrive at the pedagogical and ideological implications of my thesis.

The economic structure of LINC, as it was introduced in 1992, altered the organization of federal language training programs so that the programs became contract-based and market-driven. As a result, service providers are under great pressure to market their programs and maintain their viability by tracking student participation rates for Citizenship and Immigration Canada. The emphasis that LINC places on recording student attendance means that attendance is the measure of each LINC program’s "success," and thus attendance figures as a measure of student "success" in the program as well.

When I began my research at the Centre, the matter of attendance was already of concern to the LINC staff. A few weeks into my research, when the CIC representative visited the Centre to insist upon 80% attendance rates, student attendance and the viability of the program became even more pressing issues. These particular constraints have an enormous impact on the structure of the LINC program; they are the reasons that the issue of attendance occupied such a prominent place in the everyday occurrences at the Centre. It is not surprising, then, that the dominant institutional discourse is about student attendance.

In Chapter Three and Chapter Four I showed how decisions are made and problems are solved to serve the interests of the dominant institutional discourse. The regulation of attendance is the primary measure of gatekeeping in the program. Students are deemed to be "good" or "bad" students depending on their attendance records, thus it also serves as the primary evaluative measure of student performance. In response, the students vacillate from complicity with or contestation of the program in the ways that they take up and understand the "rules" about attendance, which positions many of them in an ambivalent relationship to the LINC program. The students’ ambivalence signals the presence of larger ideological conflicts about the production of linguistic and cultural difference and dominance that is taking place in the program. In this respect, the students’ ambivalence is a way of reckoning with these forms of symbolic domination and the simultaneous need to access the resources that the program offers. The students’ ambivalence filters through other forms of participation in the program, such as homework and lateness, which encourages the staff to question the students’ commitment to the program and exacerbates the tensions around attendance and the social relations of the program in general.

The valuation of attendance as the only measure of success creates problems in the relations between the students and the staff because the only solution is improved attendance with no recognition of the reasons that the students might miss class. To recall Ellen Cray’s (1997) work on LINC teachers, she shows that under different conditions teachers take up the issue of attendance in different ways. The teachers in her study were running small independently-organized classes, and felt that LINC did not allow for the recognition of legitimate absences (p. 27). At the Centre, however, the students were held accountable for their inability to conform to the program’s mandate on attendance. This reveals how each LINC program can be instituted differently to create different sources of conflict and complicity. In Cray’s study the teachers’ alignment with the students on the issue of attendance creates a sense of solidarity between the students and staff, while at the Centre it produced conflicts and the development of authoritative disciplinary measures.

As a dominant institutional discourse, the issue of attendance revealed that greater conflicts and difficulties were occurring between the staff and students in the LINC program at the Centre. The nature of these difficulties focussed on the production of the notion of "cultural difference" as a means of explaining and describing why conflict was occurring, and why misunderstandings were taking place between the students and staff. Cultural differences accounted for why attendance was at times difficult for the students. Cultural difference was the source of many "problems" that were attributed by the LINC staff to the immigrant and refugee students by virtue of their otherness. Blommaert and Verschueren note that "the cultural differences to which most benevolent versions of rhetoric reduce the ‘problems’ are utterly dangerous constructs because they feed all the (mostly negative) stereotypes they are supposed to combat" (1998, p. 192, emphasis in original).

It is important to stress here, however, that the rhetoric of cultural difference was not just a product of the discourse of the staff and teachers in the program, but was a co-constructed discourse among the students and staff. Sarangi (1994) notes that "both dominant and dominated groups often resort to the culture card in managing their power-maintaining and power-acquiring purposes" (p. 416). The discourse was utilized in powerful ways by the staff to proffer a view of English language learning as empowering. Constructing ESL in this way idealizes Anglo-Canadian culture and disguises the fact that the access to the resources that ESL instruction provides always depend upon how the speaker is socially and economically positioned in relation to the dominant language and culture. An idealized view of Anglo-Canadian language and culture consequently devalues the knowledge and experience of the students, as explored in Chapter Four. The students and Somali staff employed the discourse in a number of ways, too, primarily to offer definitions of themselves and their culture, and to define their culture against that of Canada to emphasize the serious cultural and linguistic differences that they face in settling in Canada. For the students, playing the "culture card" in this way becomes a form of resistance. It is an articulation of the need to preserve aspects of "Somaliness" as the forces around them, such as the LINC program, encourage integration/assimilation. When the discourse of cultural difference is articulated by the dominant group, however, as in the examples provided of classroom interactions, the students resist the homogenizing and essentializing moves that accompany it to claim greater complexity and heterogeneity in the face of the teachers’ universalistic categorizations of Somali social identities.

The problem of attendance unearthed a number of sources of "cultural difference" that were ideological differences about the students’ relation to attending school because of the weather, their responsibilities as mothers, etc. Unfortunately, the institution’s response to these issues was to reinforce the authority and the rules of the school. The institution was unable to accommodate these differences in any other way. Similarly, in linguistic interactions, the students’ linguistic and cultural differences are marginalized instead of being adequately valued and recognized without being inferiorized. The conflicts in the management of the LINC program at the Somali Centre were primarily about the ways that linguistic and cultural identities and knowledges are produced, maintained, and negotiated in ways that conform, or do not conform, to the mandate of LINC.

One particularly interesting feature of this study is the near homogeneity of each of the two groups involved in the LINC program: the students and the staff. The presence of the LINC program at a Somali community-based organization structures social relations in a specific way. The raced and classed identities of the two groups in the program reflect and reproduce majority/minority social and power relations. Social alliances and solidarities are constructed and maintained according to racial/ethnic and linguistic group membership. The structure of social relations as such allowed me to explore the rather stark realities of how cultural and linguistic difference is managed in everyday interactions. The extreme positioning of the two groups in relation to global hierarchies of first world/third world racial, cultural, and linguistic identities and relationships permits me to comment more generally on the nature of social relations between third world migrants and first world citizens. I will address this issue in the closing of this chapter when I consider the wider implications of this study.

The cultural and linguistic boundaries that form the groupings at the Centre are not completely static, but are somewhat negotiable depending on who wants to cross the boundaries and for what reasons. Dunia and Hajia, as cultural interpreters and bilingual brokers, deftly negotiated linguistic and cultural boundaries. Rebecca worked to manage them for herself as well. She was the gatekeeper of the program, but she also considered herself part of the "family" at the Somali Centre. On a personal level, Dunia, Hajia, and Rebecca managed the contradictions that broke into conflict at the level of the institution. They negotiated the relations of power that placed them in both positions of authority and under conditions of constraint to manage the contradictions and conflicts that are inevitably produced in and by the program. This is, however, the mandate of their jobs. As cultural interpreters and the Coordinator, their jobs provide them with solid rationales and positions of authority and legitimacy to negotiate linguistic and cultural boundaries. Indeed, their positions in the institution necessitate and demand that they mediate these conflicts and contradictions.

For the teachers, many institutional constraints made the goals of their jobs very difficult to achieve, and prevented them from being able to negotiate the boundaries more freely, to produce conflict instead. The students’ position of ambivalence has been discussed at length, but I want to acknowledge another element that might offer further explanation of what I have described in this study. Ogbu (1991; Ogbu & Gibson, 1991) theorizes that the educational experiences of minority groups vary because these groups have different relationships to the dominant language and culture. Ogbu accounts for these differences by asserting that the migration histories of minority groups shape their relation to the dominant culture in different ways (1991, p. 8). The situation of the Somali refugees in this study resembles that of involuntary migrants who, Ogbu describes, develop "secondary cultural differences" in response to conditions of subordination enacted by the dominant White culture (1991, p. 9). In this way, cultural and linguistic boundaries are shored up and maintained as a means of coping with subordination. The boundaries may not be as easy to cross as they are for other groups, as for voluntary or autonomous migrants. The main point here is that different groups of migrants are received by the dominant culture in different ways according to their migrant status, economic status, race, etc. Some groups, like the Somalis in this study, are received as refugees and racialized others, and the elements that define them as "different" become the focus for an ambivalent and/or oppositional discourse that acts as a means of coping with conditions of cultural and linguistic dominance. The majority culture’s conditions for acceptance of migrants is hierarchically structured; it is classed, gendered, and raced. These structures are also present in the LINC program. LINC is intended to facilitate immigrant integration. Next I want to consider the implications of this mandate of the LINC program.

The negotiation of the relationship between a federal language training program and a community-based ISO reveals that linguistic and cultural immigrant integration cannot be wholly defined as "a two way street," as a CIC (1996) document on settlement services describes it. The document states that "integration is a two way process, which involves commitment on the part of newcomers to adapt to life in Canada and on the part of Canadians to adapt to new people and cultures" (p. 10). If the policies and practices of integration were really an acknowledgement of a process that works both ways, then the negotiation of difference might be better accommodated by programs like LINC. Instead, the terms of integration remain defined by the majority as simply adopting the linguistic, cultural and social practices of the majority, just as Blommaert and Verschueren contend (1998, p. 112).

The discourse of cultural differences actually increases the gap between "us" and "them," thereby contradicting the notion of integration and turning it into an impossible feat. The rhetoric of cultural difference positions the majority language and culture as an ideal, and combines well with the rhetoric of tolerance that places immigrants in the position of needing to be educated about and toward that ideal. The popular notion that advocates "tolerance" of cultural diversity (as found in the discourse of multiculturalism) implicitly contains seeds of cultural superiority, hierarchy, and inequity. Tolerance does not create conditions of respect; instead, it disguises relations of power that structure who has the authority to determine who is deserving of respect and who is not. The tenor of the social relations in the LINC program at the Centre revealed that the conditions to create a shared sense of respect were lacking. I want to explore now what might be required to create conditions of co-investment in a program like LINC.

Various economic and programmatic elements of the LINC program create constraints and difficulties that emerge in its implementation. The economic constraints of the LINC program produce the problem of attendance, as discussed above. The program’s policies of continuous intake and multi-level classes contribute to difficult working conditions for the teachers. The effects of the provincial and federal reorganization of ESL have also contributed to the devaluation of the ESL profession, which again imposes conditions of constraint on ESL teachers. These structural factors originate from outside of the institution to impose constraints on its interior workings. There are many obvious ways that the LINC program could be reorganized to improve on the conditions that produce constraints in its implementation. If language training for adult immigrants is a settlement and integration service (and now the only settlement program provided by the federal government), then the accompanying settlement services should be provided as part of the program, such as increased funding for full-time LINC settlement counselors. These are just a few examples in a long list of economic constraints that produce difficulties in the program’s operations that would, ideally, be lifted, if the money were there.

The organization of federally-funded language training programs will always impose certain conditions and constraints on the service provider organizations, which the agencies must negotiate and manage. In the process, too, the participants necessarily work through difficult internal conflicts and contradictions. This is the nature of the "messy implementation" of government programs, and the struggles that take place in their instantiation provide the grounds for future changes (O’Malley, Weir, & Shearing, 1997., p. 512). I do not believe, however, that increased funding or programmatic redesign is the only solution to the difficulties presented by the "messy actualities" of social relations found in this study of a government program (p. 512). Instead, it is more productive to focus on the ways that institutions and the people that animate them manage internal conflicts and contradictions to improve on the social relations within.

There are a number of ways that LINC could be modified in practice to minimize the effects of its constraints. In the case of LINC at the Centre, various measures could be established to improve on the conditions that shape the social relations there. Ideally, the students and the staff would take some time to refigure the current emphasis on attendance to arrive at ways that some accommodations could be made. The example of Damac’s dismissal and subsequent return to the program reveals that Rebecca does want to accommodate the students around the issue of attendance. Sarah was perturbed by Rebecca’s decision to allow Damac to return, and commented that there is no "system" in place to enforce and recognize the "rules." I agree with her, although the "system" has to be devised by the staff and students together to agree upon the terms and conditions of the program and to establish a basis for co-investment in the program.

The issue of attendance as an indicator of student/program performance has cropped up as a problematic element in other educational settings. At a community college in Toronto, the instructors of for-credit and non-credit courses (which would include ESL) are no long permitted to evaluate the students on the basis of attendance; this practice was found to contravene basic human rights (A. Cleghorn, personal communication, December 17, 1999). The instructors at the college cannot credit the students for attendance; therefore, they have to find other ways to make class time and student participation "count." This is what I mean by devising alternatives in managing the institutional arrangement of LINC to create a basis for co-investment that would foster a climate of respect.

As for the LINC program’s pedagogical focus at the Centre, the students should be granted more agency in deciding what and how they learn about what they "need to know." For now, the curriculum comes straight from the teachers and the students have no input in this. The larger problem in all of this is the overarching nature of the relations between the students and the teachers, where the experiences and knowledge of the students is devalued in classroom discourse. This requires a much greater ideological shift on the part of ESL teachers and programmers, which I will address below. In the effort to open up the lines of communication between the staff and students in the LINC program at the Centre, more attention needs to be focussed on improving these relations. A rotating student position could be created, a student secretary, who act as a linguistic and cultural "broker" (in addition to that of the cultural interpreter, who is employed by LINC). The student secretary could be a spokesperson for the students and report daily on feedback about the program in an effort to increase the students chances of being "heard" by the program staff.

In the field of ESL education for adult immigrants, many studies have focussed on the negative effects of teaching English that does not take into consideration the political implications of linguistic interactions (Schenke, 1991; Peirce, 1993; Auerbach, 1995; Goldstein, 1997). Proponents of a critical pedagogy of ESL urge ESL instructors to address how social power relations inform linguistic interactions so that the ESL learners can challenge the practices of marginalization that occur in communicative processes both in and outside of the ESL classroom (Peirce, 1993, p. 226). When critical pedagogical methods are not employed in the classroom, the linguistic practices that occur there reproduce conditions of marginalization, and the opportunities to learn under these conditions can be strained: ESL becomes anything but empowering.

The proffering of English as a means of "empowerment" for ESL learners disregards the values that the students attribute to their own language and culture. Goldstein’s (1997) work, for example, shows that for Portuguese factory employees, speaking Portuguese actually served to manage conditions of subordination. Speaking Portuguese was an important coping strategy for the factory employees that was used to find and keep jobs through Portuguese social ties. The proffering of ESL classes actually placed the workers in a double-bind, where they risked losing the support of their co-workers (p. 245). The provision of a workplace ESL program presented English as empowering, and it demanded that the learners cross language boundaries that were important to maintain; the presentation of English as such provoked a resistance to the use of English (p. 229). Goldstein’s work accounts for the heavy costs associated with learning English for this group of immigrants to acknowledge some reasons why resistance might be a valid response to ESL for adult immigrants. Furthermore, Goldstein finds that the provision of ESL instruction "does not change inequitable working and social conditions in a radical way," because it is part of the ideologies and practices that maintain English hegemony (p. 238). Goldstein asserts that "ESL should acknowledge and respect the language boundaries of people’s working and social lives" (p. 237). In this way, critical pedagogical methods can be carefully employed in the ESL classroom to provide some means and ways for ESL learners to challenge and resist the hegemony of English (p. 240).

Critical pedagogy of ESL offers ways to construct a relation to the dominant language that acknowledges how the second language speaker is positioned within relations of power, and how these relations work to undermine the authority of his or her talk. Critical pedagogy is one way of working against the reproduction of cultural, linguistic, and social inequality that can take place in ESL teaching and learning, and in the students’ interactions outside of the classroom. Supplying the second language speaker with some strategies to negotiate and learn about the production of their own talk is one way that ESL could contribute to truly "empowering" speakers of English as a second language. Judging from the pedagogical practices and policies of the LINC program, however, critical pedagogy of ESL has not been taken up by the institution, but this does not mean that it is not being practiced in some sites. The work of ESL theorists and practitioners, such as that cited above, needs to be integrated into mainstream ESL pedagogical practices to take into account the social and political implications of teaching and learning English as a second language. One hopes that the result would be a corresponding shift in the ideology behind language training for adult immigrants that would supplant the assimilationist demands of learning English with a new understanding of cultural and linguistic integration through language learning.

The social relations of the students and teachers in this study mirrored that of majority/minority power relations. The curriculum of LINC posits a dominant, Anglo-Canadian relation to language that is apparently unproblematically teachable to immigrant populations. The teachers in this LINC program shared the dominant ideology of language and the relation to language that the LINC program proposes. If, however, the current statistics on LINC teachers is correct, 47% of the instructors in Ontario speak a first language other than English (Power Analysis Inc., 1998, p.54). If the teachers of ESL have learned English as a second language, perhaps as immigrants themselves, I imagine that the social relations in the classroom could be figured quite differently. The relation to the dominant language and culture that bilingual teachers know and teach about might make for more productive interpretations and understandings of the process of language learning and immigrant integration. Furthermore, if the ESL profession becomes less dominated by Anglo-Canadians, this might improve upon the current situation where the majority is "regulating the ‘self-organizations’ of migrants" (Blommaert & Verschueren, 1998, p.192). These are a few other ways that the local level relations that are produced in and through the institution of LINC might be shaped differently in other instantiations.

I have suggested above a few ways that different knowledges about second language education might serve to challenge the reproduction of linguistic, cultural, and social dominance in a language training program for adult immigrants. The practice of critical pedagogy of ESL and the presence of teachers who speak English as a second language might refigure the relation to language taught through LINC to adequately value the first languages and cultures of the students and resist a corresponding overvaluation of Anglo-Canadian norms and values. This would bring the notion of integration through language learning into the pedagogical forefront to hold it up for questioning. Questions could be raised that ask about the costs that attend learning English as a second language, or how that language gets refigured with new values and meanings by the minority language speakers. Teaching and learning about the implications of ESL in this way means that the values attributed to the students’ first language will alter as well, since it will be acknowledged as a strategy for coping with linguistic, cultural, and economic subordination. Investing the first language with the potential for resistance has further implications that are beyond the scope of this conclusion. The value of a federal language training program, however, would be as it is now, as a program that teaches English to access mainstream resources and services, but it would work to acknowledge the symbolic and material values attached to minority language use as well.

At the root of these suggestions for pedagogical change is the reformulation of the social and linguistic relations that shape ESL programs for adult immigrants, and ultimately the ideologies of language that inform them. There are limitations to the solutions proposed above because in order to interrupt the reproduction of practices that marginalize second language speakers, both participants in a communicative event must be willing to negotiate around the relations of power that asymmetrically position them. The knowledge and experience of the second language speaker must be recognized and valued as a linguistic production to be granted authority by the listener. There is, as a result, more responsibility on ESL teachers (who are situationally and linguistically positioned in an authoritative relation to the student) to help make linguistic interaction, and learning English, a success.

The proposals I offer here apply to the field of ESL for adult immigrants, but also serve to comment on social relations and linguistic interactions more generally. In the broadest sense this thesis is about social and linguistic relations between majority and minority language groups, and between migrant and non-migrant populations. It is also about the ideologies of language that govern social interactions; that is, how linguistic (and cultural) differences are understood to influence how we speak with and listen to one another. The linguistic productions of the staff and students in the LINC program centred around the discourse of cultural difference, and got mired in that discourse. As a means of accounting for linguistic and cultural differences between groups, the discourse itself becomes the problem.

In the field of intercultural communication, a number of theorists suggest that it is necessary to go beyond the notion of cultural difference as the only way to explain and account for difficulties in intercultural interactions (Meeuwis & Sarangi, 1994; Sarangi, 1994; Shea, 1994). Instead, the focus should be on how cultural differences are taken up by the speakers to inhibit or permit successful interactions. Shea (1994) states that

How utterances are interpreted is mediated by how speakers are positioned and their discourse structured: whether interactional authority is granted and referential perspective is recognized, or whether participation is reduced and neglected. It is not cultural differences in and of themselves, but the way they are taken up and negotiated, which critically determines the shape and success of intercultural interaction. (p. 379)

At the Centre, the discourse of cultural difference is institutionalized to reduce the chances of communicative success. It functions as a "power-maintaining" discourse for the program staff (Sarangi, 1994, p. 416). The dominance of the discourse in the institution is governed in part by the tenor of public and political discourses about the "problem" of cultural difference presented by immigrants and refugees. Furthermore, Canada’s public institutions manage linguistic and ethnic diversity to promote linguistic and cultural homogeneity over any real acknowledgement of social difference that engenders an appreciation of linguistic and cultural heterogeneity.

Outside of these institutions, and even within them, the findings of Shea and other theorists of intercultural communication can be heartening. Shea insists that successful communication is a collaborative construction, and the "interpretation and outcomes of the talk are integrally shaped by the kind of speakers that are interactively constructed" (p. 377). The intelligibility of intercultural communication is ultimately negotiable in practice. Successful communication is "a function of a jointly-proposed and ratified orientation between speakers" (Shea, p. 363). This is not to deny that talk is shaped by social and institutional forces as well, but it means that linguistic interactions between majority English speakers and second language English speakers are not wholly petrified by the institutional and social processes that structure unequal social relations between the linguistic majority and linguistic minorities. Talk can be jointly produced to go one of two ways: to extend the chances of successful communication or to impede it. Linguistic interactions are highly differentiated events with multiple contingencies that affect their success. Each linguistic encounter holds the possibility of reproducing dominant social inequities or the possibility of reformulating them.

In this study of the LINC program, linguistic interactions are mediated by social and institutional ideologies and practices that place limits on the possibilities for social interactions that work to resist the ideologies that dominate them. On the other hand, however, the relationship between social and institutional constraints and linguistic interaction is mutually constitutive, which means that changes in social relations in the institution can also work to transform the shape of larger social processes.

I requested that the Coordinator of the LINC program at the Centre write up a letter similar to this to secure administrative consent.

This letter is to confirm the administrative consent of (agency name)/ LINC Program. Laura Cleghorn has requested the participation of the staff and students at -----/LINC Program to conduct a thesis study about the teaching and learning of English language at an immigrant serving organization. Laura wants to gather data about the ideas that the program participants have about the values attributed to learning English in the settlement process. The thesis is entitled "Valuing English: An Ethnography of a Federal Language training Program for Adult Immigrants."

Laura has requested permission to sit in on LINC classes and to interview 3 teachers, 4-6 staff members, and 12 students. Laura will be talking to the staff, teachers, and students about the role that learning English and taking LINC classes play in the settlement process. The study is not an evaluation of the program, but rather an inquiry into the specific ways that people at this organization understand language acquisition and learning in the context of immigrant and refugee settlement services.

For those who agree to be interviewed, they will be given a consent letter to sign (or have one read to them) that explains the details of the study and the provisions for anonymity. Individuals will be able to request that any statement be kept "off the record" or that the tape recorder be turned off .They may withdraw from the study at any time. All interview transcripts and notes from Laura’s visits to the organization will be kept in locked files in her private home office. Only herself and her thesis supervisor, Monica Heller, will see them. In the thesis or any other reports that arise from the study, no individual or organization will be identified by name or any other identifying details.

This letter confirms that you have obtained the willingness of the staff and students at

------/LINC program to have Laura Cleghorn conduct the proposed research. Administrative consent is required by the University of Toronto ethical review guidelines and the study is currently undergoing approval by the Ethical Review Committee of her department at OISE.

Sincerely,

________________________________________________________

Administrator of -----/LINC Program

____________________________

Date

Dear Participant:

My name is Laura Cleghorn and I am conducting research for my M.A. thesis at the Ontario

Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. My thesis is called "Valuing English:

An Ethnography of a Federal Language Training Program." The purpose of this letter is to introduce my research to you, and to ask your permission for an interview.

There are two aspects to my research. This first is to study how the government understands the acquisition of language skills and the process of settlement through the administration of the LINC program. The second aspect of the study is to compare the policy goals and objectives with actual data from interviews and observations that I gather here at the -----/LINC program. The purpose of the study is not to evaluate it, but to explore the experiences of the teachers and learners of LINC. I would like to ask you questions about teaching or learning English, and I want to hear your ideas and opinions about your experiences of teaching or learning English.

With your permission, I would like to tape our discussion. You can, of course, request that any

statement be kept "off the record" and/or the tape recorder be turned off. You can also refuse to

answer any and all questions. The interview tapes will be kept in my private home office, and only

I will listen to them. I will type up our interview, but only myself and my thesis supervisor,

Monica Heller, will read it. In any and all reports that come from the study, no organization or individual will be identified by name.

The University of Toronto requires that the participants of my study sign this form (see over) to show that they are willing to be interviewed by me.

Many thanks for your help.

Yours sincerely,

Laura Cleghorn

588-9873

Graduate Student

Department of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education

Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto

Thesis Supervisor: Dr. Monica Heller

Professor Department of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education

Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto

252 Bloor St. W. Toronto, On M5S IV5

923-6641

Consent Form - Individual Consent

I have read the letter describing the study to be conducted by Laura Cleghorn about the role of

language in the process of settlement, understand the procedures and safeguards outlined,

and agree to participate.

Name and signature: ________________________________________________________

Position:__________________________________________________________________

Date:_________________________________________

Current Information

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• how long have you been here?

• what do you do?

• have you worked with immigrant serving organizations and/or LINC before?

• what are the challenges to your job? The rewards?

• who are the "clients" that you work with?

Background Information

2. Could you tell me about your personal history (background, training, previous work experience)

that brought you to this job?

• previous jobs/education

• other interests, concerns, experiences that led to current position

LINC

In the time that you have been working here, what are the changes that you have seen in the conditions of your work and in the clientele that you work with?

4. What are the goals of LINC, do you think? What are the goals of the students?

5. When and how is LINC a successful or unsuccessful program?

• strengths/weaknesses

• who benefits, who doesn't?

6. How possible is it for the students to learn, given the challenges they face here and given what they have been through in Somalia, or in refugee camps?

7. There have been some conflicts between students and teachers lately around redefining of the rules (attendance, time). What do you see as the main issues here?

8. What is the relationship like between (agency name) and LINC?

• advantages/disadvantages of LINC at community-based organization

Language and Settlement

9. How do you see the integration or settlement of Somalis at this point, and how do you see it taking shape in the future?

10. What does language have to do with it?

Appendix D

Current Information

1.When did you first come to the agency/the LINC program?

• have you taken ESL before? Where/how long?

• why are you taking these classes?

• what do you want to be able to do when you are done?

Background Information

Before I find out more about learning English, could you tell me a bit about yourself? How long have you been in Canada?

• where were you before?

• what did you do there? school/job?

• did you go to school? For how long?

• what languages did you speak before you came here?

• what are your family and community connections in Canada?

LINC

3. How is LINC different or similar to previous experiences in school?

4. What have you liked and disliked about taking LINC classes?

5. I’ve noticed that there are some new rules and difficulties about attendance going on. What do you think this is about?

6. I’ve enjoyed sitting in on your classes, and I notice that a lot of talk is going on in Somali and I can’t understand it. Can you tell me what you and the other students are talking about?

Language and Settlement

7. Why do you need to learn English?

8. When do you use English now? When and how much do you use other languages?

9. How do you think the Somali community is integrating in Canada?

10. How much does language have to do with it?

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

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