Burdensome Silence
المؤلف:
Tara Goldstein
المصدر:
Teaching and Learning in a Multilingual School
الجزء والصفحة:
P63-C4
2025-09-26
284
Burdensome Silence
The reluctance to speak English on the part of the Chinese-Canadian students in a classroom where students were asked to work extensively in linguistically mixed groups gave rise to particular racial tensions between Hong Kong-born Chinese, Canadian-born Chinese, and non-Chinese students. As Mina asserted in her interview, in many sessions of small-group work that we observed, the Hong Kong-born Chinese students spoke little, whereas the Canadian-born Chinese and non-Chinese students assumed a leadership role in an attempt to elicit verbal participation from the quieter members. For Mina, this reticence was burdensome ("I am left to do the work for them") and threatened the quality of her education ("In my other classes, I have other people [who] will say things, will disagree with me ... in this class I have nothing"). These feelings were echoed by Marilyn, a White, Canadian-born young woman in Mrs. Yee's class, who had this to say about assuming the responsibility for doing most, if not all, of the talking in her small, linguistically, and racially mixed group:
I feel like I'm just there to teach them and then—And I'm not really learning anything, I'm not getting anything out of it. Whereas if I was working with someone at the same level, then we could put in our ideas and it's not going to be just my ideas. And then the outcome will be like—we'd probably get better marks, I think because when we're doing presentations and stuff its not just one person or two people's ideas out of a group of five.
[Interview, April 30,1998]
Mina and Marilyn's interview comments equate silence with a lack of understanding and passivity. They also link silence with students' inability to work at a grade 12 level. Such comments reflect the findings of other North American educational researchers, such as Sandra McKay and Cynthia Wong, who have argued that in multiethnic and multilingual schools such as Northside, colonialist and racialized views find daily expression .1 One such common expression is the belief that English-speaking ability is not only associated with academic success, but is also an indication of cognitive maturity and sophistication, and degree of "Americanization" (or, in this case, "Canadianization"). Likewise, Mackay and Wong note the common belief that immigrant status and limited English proficiency are considered states of deficiency and backwardness. Mina's comments about the inability of her Chinese-Canadian classmates to speak "proper English" invoke such colonialist and racialist discourses. Mina's understanding of her classmates' silence as being part of their Asian nature and her use of the word "Orientals" ("Orientals I find to be quieter people") also demonstrates the legacy of colonialist worldviews that North-American teachers and students have inherited (see "A Word About Language" for further discussion on the use of the term Oriental).
In analyzing what is at stake in the linguistic and racial tensions in Mrs. Yee's classroom, we see a conflation of at least two things: First, the invocation of colonialist and racialized discourses that pathologized the quiet "Oriental" students in Mrs. Yee's class; second, the very real or material pressure for high grades and academic success (cultural capital) that weighed heavy on the minds of Marilyn and Mina. Thus, the silence of some Chinese-Canadian students functioned to affirm, in the minds of some non-Chinese students, dominant negative stereotypes of Asians. These negative reactions became more strident when Asian reticence pulled down the collective marks of a group.
The comments offered by Mina and Marilyn show us that Mrs. Yee's purposeful pedagogical maneuver of establishing linguistically mixed groups was interrupted by silence and the forces of stereotyping and the pressure for high marks and academic success. Thus, student silences can be disenabling for positive race relations in multilingual classrooms. Yet, what Mina, Marilyn, and other students did not understand was the complex social and political forces that shaped the speech and silence dynamics of their Chinese-Canadian classmates. As discussed in the Introduction, these dynamics were often the result of linguistic dilemmas or double binds that trapped students into silences. Moreover, these dilemmas had little to do with being Asian, as suggested by Mina. As explained in the Introduction, they were peculiar to the immigration process that had created Cantonese-speaking communities in schools like Northside.
1 See McKay and Wong (1996)
الاكثر قراءة في Teaching Strategies
اخر الاخبار
اخبار العتبة العباسية المقدسة
