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

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

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements

for the degree of Master of Arts

Department of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education

Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the

University of Toronto

© Copyright by Laura Cleghorn (2000)

Laura Cleghorn

Master of Arts, 2000

Department of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education

Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto

This institutional ethnography of a Canadian federal language training program for adult immigrants explores the historical and sociological discourses that inform the field of ESL for adult immigrants and the attendant ideologies of language that accompany the notion of immigrant integration through language learning. The study zeroes in on one LINC program (Language Instruction for Newcomers to Canada), housed in a Somali immigrant serving organization in Toronto. Local and extra-local discourses converge in the site, policy becomes practice, and the ideologies and practices of the program and its participants are considered to account for the ways that institutional and social practices shape the social relations of the program. Lastly, the study considers a few examples of classroom linguistic interactions to look at how the notions of linguistic and cultural difference are constructed in and by the program to reproduce elements of Anglo-Canadian linguistic and cultural dominance.

Most of all I want to acknowledge and thank the participants in this study who allowed me to talk with them and to spend time with them at the Centre.

Throughout the thesis process, I had a lot of support from and many important conversations with my fellow student, Karin Meinzerl. Thanks also to my mother, Janet, and my sister, Amanda, for their ongoing support, and to my brother, Angus, for his wise counsel. Barbara Burnaby was an enthusiastic second reader, and Monica Heller was a steady and sure supervisor. Lastly, thank you to my partner, Paul Rooney, for his everyday encouragements and constant confidence.

Abstract ii

Acknowledgements iii

Table of Contents iv

An Institutional Ethnography of a Federal Language Training Program

Introduction: Immigration and Language Training 1

Institutional Ethnography: The Institution and Social Interaction 4

Institutional Ethnography and This Project 11

Methodology 16

Conclusion 23

Endnotes 25

Chapter Two

Introduction 26

A History of Canadian Federal Language Training Programs 27

Provincial and Federal Responsibility 32

Changing Immigration 34

LINC: The Reorganization of Federal Language Training Programs 38

The ESL Profession and Standardization. 44

Issues of Access and Control 47

Ideologies of Language and Immigrant Integration 50

Managing LINC 58

Conclusion 61

Endnotes 64

Chapter Three

Introduction 65

Somali Immigrant Serving Organizations 66

LINC at the Somali Centre 70

The People and the Program 74

LINC’s Relationship with the Centre 74

The Coordinator 77

The Teachers 80

The Cultural Interpreters 91

The Students 93

A Disruption of Order 99

Conclusion: Regulating LINC 101

Endnotes 104

Chapter Four

Introduction 105

The "Incident" and Linguistic Difference 107

The Production of Cultural Difference 111

Negotiating Difference 124

Teaching LINC 128

Gender, Nation, and Education 137

Conclusion 141

Endnotes 144

Chapter Five

Introduction 146

Dominant Institutional Discourses 149

The Question of Integration 155

Looking for Change 156

The Politics of Language and ESL 159

Linguistic Interactions and Social Relations 162

Conclusion 163

References 166

Appendix A: Letter Requesting Administrative Consent 177

Appendix B: Letter of Consent 178

Appendix C: Staff Interview Questions 180

Appendix D: Student Interview Questions 182

Over the last decade, Canada’s annual immigration levels have been on the rise and will continue to rise, or at least remain constant, in the future. Canada’s immigration policy is required to sustain the population of the nation, because it is suffering from declines in the birth rate, continuous out-migration, and shortages in high-tech labour. The increased immigration levels needed to address the declining population and shortages in labour are accompanied by strict selection criteria that immigrants must now meet in order to be accepted into Canada. The criteria emphasize high education levels and linguistic proficiency in one of Canada’s two official languages (French and English). Over the last ten years, however, roughly half of the immigrants who have settled in Canada did not speak either official language when they arrived (Employment and Immigration Canada, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993; Citizenship and Immigration Canada, 1996d, 1998c). In addition, Canada’s annual immigration targets include a commitment to accepting a certain number of refugees, roughly ten percent of the total immigration level each year, many of whom will seek official language training and educational upgrading. While Canada’s immigration policy focuses on selecting and accepting immigrants who are, ideally, better educated and proficient in English or French than in the past, many of the immigrants and refugees who settle in Canada do not already meet these criteria.

The federal government has responded to the problem of adult immigrants and refugees with minimal skills in the official languages by providing, over the past 50 years, federally-funded English and French language training programs. The federal programs, organized in conjunction with the provinces, are intended to increase the opportunities for adult immigrants and refugees to find work, to continue their education, and to generally improve their access to mainstream institutions and services. Federally-funded language training programs are viewed as a valuable resource by the government and by immigrants and refugees themselves because it is through language training that immigrants and refugees might improve the access they have to symbolic and material resources.

The first of the federally-funded English language training programs, introduced in 1947, provided language training in preparation for citizenship. It was a program that was engaged in the project of nation-building, and the expectation was that the immigrant’s language(s) and culture(s) would be replaced by the language and culture of Canada. It was, then, straightforwardly assimilationist (see Ciccarelli, 1997). Over time, the process that characterizes the adaptation of immigrants and refugees to Canada has shifted from the notion of assimilation to be reconceived as "settlement and integration" (CIC, 1996c). The current manifestation of federally-funded language training for adult immigrants is the LINC (Language Instruction for Newcomers to Canada) program, introduced in 1992. The goal of LINC is to facilitate newcomer integration through language training. The original LINC policy document from 1991 states that "the basic ability to communicate in one of Canada’s official languages is often the essential first step towards successful integration" (Employment and Immigration Canada, 1991b, p.1).

Although Canada’s Official Languages Act of 1969 (amended in 1988) recognizes English and French as the country’s official languages, the LINC program is provided in English only. This is due, in part, to the fact that the province of Quebec, where the majority of Canada’s francophones live, has established provincial control over the jurisdiction of immigration. The province has full responsibility for settlement services including French language training for adult immigrants. The rest of the provinces in Canada work in conjunction with the federal government in matters of immigrant integration and settlement. The LINC program for adult immigrants is understood as a settlement language training program. The English language is taught alongside the program’s mandate to "introduc[e] newcomers to shared Canadian values, rights and responsibilities (EIC, 1991b, p. 3).

As federal programs, LINC and the previous manifestations of federal English language training programs have always had nationalist objectives. The building of the nation, immigrant integration, and the teaching of English form a historically and socially significant nexus. This project engages with the links between English language training, the notion of integration, and what this means for the nation to examine the relationship between ideologies of language and nation and the practices of immigrant language education. I have chosen to look at the ideologies and practices that inform the field of ESL for adult immigrants in one instantiation of the LINC program in Toronto, with a view to tie those ideologies and practices to the larger socio-historical context that shapes the program. Canada’s history of the institution of federal language training and the ideologies of language therein are the first considerations in this study of federal language training for adult immigrants. With that established, the policies and ideologies of LINC are explored to consider how policy figures in practice in the local implementation of a LINC program.

This project contemplates the relationship between governmental policies and local institutional practices. The challenge here is to show how these influence one another; that is, to consider how the practices of the people in the program and the program itself are linked to policies and ideologies that are shaped by dominant social processes. This form of social inquiry immediately engages with the project’s sociological dimensions when it asks about the relationship between policy and practice. The field of sociology, and sociology of education in particular, concerns itself with the nature of the relationship between "macro" and "micro" processes that explore how the relations between social structure and social interaction are understood. It is my intention to show that these are inter-related processes. By conducting an institutional ethnography of one LINC program, I will show how the socio-historical discourses that inform the current manifestation of ESL for adult immigrants are reproduced in and through local expressions of social interaction which are also mediated by the institution.

Institutional ethnography has as its focus the relationship between everyday talk and social structure to consider how this relationship is mediated by institutional practices. To clarify, the term institution is broadly construed here to refer to the "common sense" and everyday discourses, ideologies, and practices that are contained by and within the institution that shape and define what that particular institution is and does. In the case of LINC, I refer to the institution also as the actual physical location of the site of the LINC program that I am studying. The manifestation of this program is shaped by governmental policies of language training and immigration and by local practices that derive from the social relations produced inside and outside the institution.

Institutional ethnography is interested in the relationship between the social structure of the institution (broadly conceived) and the production of social interaction in that site. Social interaction is informed by specific local and extra-local ideologies that shape the discourses and practices of the people in the institution. The ideologies that govern the ways that knowledge is produced and meaning is rationalized are locatable in discourse. As Blommaert and Verschueren (1998) note, "the most tangible manifestation of ideology is discourse" (p. 26). Discourses, as I understand them, represent a whole range of "texts" available to us, from everyday talk to governmental policies and the law, that permit and also constraint what kinds of talk and action are possible. Certain discourses and ideologies achieve dominance because they are all structured by material and symbolic relations of power that legitimize certain forms of knowledge over others. Discourses are not wholly totalizing, however, because articulations of discourse contain oppositional or counter-discourses that can potentially disrupt the rationality of the discourse. One of the focal points for institutional ethnography is the ways in which the institution contends with certain ideological and practical disruptions, ambiguities, and contradictions. Institutional ethnography considers how specific social interactions are local level expressions of the discourses and ideologies that structure the larger patterns of social structure and social relations, and how the local relations are shaped and constrained by the mediations of the discursive order of the institution.

In what follows, I will outline some of the institutional ethnographic work that has influenced the theory and methodology of this study. To begin, the work of Hugh Mehan (1987, 1996) and Aaron Cicourel (1987) is particularly good in the way that it accounts for the influence of relations of power on decision-making in institutional settings, as well as the ways in which the authors structure for discussion the domains of social interaction and the institutional order. Mehan (1987) puts it simply, to explain that his work "look[s] for ways in which circumstances which originate outside the institution interact with circumstances which originate within it to influence the course of interaction and the work of the formal organization" (p. 293). Mehan’s (1987) article locates the influence of economic, practical, and legal constraints in the talk of educators who are meeting about placing and classifying "special needs" students. Cicourel’s (1987) article has a similar focus on how decisions are made about the case of a patient at a teaching hospital. The "bureaucratic context" of the hospital consists of the order of social interaction and the organizational accounting procedures that create and transmit knowledge about the patient (p. 348). Cicourel identifies the nature of the interplay between the bureaucratic organizational structure and the social interactions between the patient, resident, and supervisor, to display how the decision-making of the professionals presupposes certain kinds of local and background knowledge.

The production and reproduction of professional knowledge in decision-making is of primary concern in these studies. Mehan’s later work (1996) continues to discuss the categorization of learning disabled students, but with a greater focus on "the politics of representation" to explore how larger sociological and historical discourses are mobilized to create and reproduce categories that classify students. Mehan shows how repeated decision-making about a student increasingly "textualizes," that is, fixes and determines, the identity of the student as "regular" or "special’ (p. 253). Furthermore, in the decision-making process, Mehan shows how the esoteric knowledge of the "experts" is rendered authoritative over and above the opinions of teachers and parents in less prestigious professional and social positions. The work of Cicourel and Mehan discussed here concerns itself with how professional discourses work in interaction to classify the subjects of the institution and thereby reflect and reproduce dominant modes of representation and dominant forms of knowledge. Mehan’s work goes further than that of Cicourel to assert that the relationship between social interaction and organizational structures works in powerful ways to reproduce a stratified social structure.

The ways in which institutions work to structure social interactions to reproduce a society stratified by gender, race, and class are a primary concern in ethnographic studies that stretch across various academic disciplines and fields. Over twenty years ago, Bourdieu and Passeron (1977) asserted that the institution of education is a primary centre of cultural and social reproduction. Schooling is a process of selection determined by class interests; it is an "educational process of differential elimination according to social class (leading to a determinate distribution of competence among survivors)" (p. 73). The linguistic and cultural capital of the students is directly linked to the degree of success of the students, because, in the educational process, the institution performs the function of legitimating the linguistic and cultural authority of the dominant classes, thereby devaluing that of "other" languages and cultures. Bourdieu and Passeron make the case that the linguistic and cultural assimilation that takes place in the education system functions as symbolic domination; it is the articulation and workings of relations of power without the use of direct force or coercion. The educational system "contributes irreplaceably towards perpetuating the structure of class relations and, simultaneously, legitimating it, by concealing the fact that the scholastic hierarchies it produces reproduce social hierarchies" (p. 205).

The recognition of the field of education as a site of cultural and social reproduction and symbolic domination has engaged the attention of ethnographers because it is through ethnography that one attempts to answer the question of how social stratification is reproduced through the workings of the institution. The effects that the workings of the institution have on the subjects of the institution is also an important part of the inquiry. The work of Bourdieu and Passeron tends to paint a rather structurally deterministic picture in this regard. Their work, along with that of Mehan and Cicourel discussed above, does not consider some of the ways that symbolic and linguistic domination might be challenged or resisted. Some critical ethnographers in the field of education, however, explore "schools as sites of social and cultural reproduction mediated through human agency by various forms of resistance and accommodation" (Anderson, 1989, p. 255). Anderson asserts that the designation of "critical" ethnography arose out of the field of ethnography more generally because it strives to critically address and assess the relations of power that inform social and cultural reproduction with a view to the possibility of transforming them (see, for example, Collins, 1996).

The effort to examine not only the dominant institutional ideologies and practices of the professionals in an educational institution, but also the responses to these discourses by the students/clients and junior staff, is very important in representing how institutions work to regulate, contain, and resolve internal ideological conflicts and contradictions. Heller’s (1994) work does just that, to explore how a French language school in Ontario produces and reproduces Francophone linguistic norms, to value certain forms of French over others. The interests of the different groups in the school, represented by the parents, the teachers, and the students, vary according to their relation to the linguistic, cultural, and educational objectives of the school, and are shaped by class and ethnic membership. The different groups and individuals and their relation to the authoritative ideology of the school creates conflicts and contradictions that emerge in differing ideologies of the value and form of the French language, and manifest themselves in different forms of language choice and use in the linguistic interactions that take place at the school. More recently, Heller (1999) examines the language ideology of a Franco-Ontarian high school to explore how the ideal and ideology of the school as a monolingual zone of standard French language produces language norms that must be ideologically "managed" by the teachers. Certain contradictions arise in the maintenance of language norms and language "quality," and the teachers employ "strategies of ambiguity" to avoid such contradictions (p. 131). Heller then describes how the students, who form various groupings according to ethnicity, class, and/or gender identifications, take up the school’s language ideology to actively comply with and/or resist the social order of the school.

The examination of ideologies of language in minority language, bilingual, or multilingual institutional settings is particularly fruitful, because, as Woolard (1993) asserts, "language ideology is a mediating link between social structures and forms of talk" (p. 235). Goldstein (1997), for example, explores the relationship between social processes and language choice in a multicultural/multilingual workplace in her investigation of the language practices of production line workers at "Stone Specialties," a Toronto factory. Goldstein’s investigation is geared toward uncovering why the female employees of the factory were not participating in a workplace English language training program. The workplace viewed the program as an opportunity for the workers to gain access to a valuable linguistic resource that would improve the conditions of the women’s lives in the workplace and beyond. By examining the ideologies of language revealed in the linguistic practices of the Portuguese women in the workplace, Goldstein establishes that language choice and use are shaped by the social processes of gender and class and the history of Portuguese immigration to and settlement in Toronto. For my purposes, the salience of Goldstein’s study rests in its ability to establish the differential values attributed to Portuguese and English linguistic practices by the workers in a bilingual institutional setting. English and Portuguese are valued differently for both economic and social reasons which helps to explain how and why language boundaries are maintained or not, and for what reasons.

Many Portuguese immigrants have made a living without learning English in factories such as Stone Specialties. In this sense the minority language has not just symbolic value, but material value as well since it is associated with economic survival and gain (p. 61). Speaking Portuguese is not just a social activity associated with maintaining community networks, but it is also "a strategy for managing conditions of economic subordination" (p. 175). The study shows how the mandate of a workplace ESL program, which is to increase the access that the employees have to English-speaking networks to improve their economic conditions, is at odds with the already-established values associated with minority language use. Goldstein’s work is a close examination of the costs associated with learning English for one immigrant community in Toronto to reveal how different interests in and ideologies of learning English converge in an ESL workplace training program. Because the study shows how a minority language is used to manage conditions of subordination, it challenges basic assumptions about language training for adult immigrants by considering how learning a second language can be a serious and potentially risky venture for minority language speakers.

The institutional ethnographies reviewed here have provided me with the methodological and theoretical tools to conduct this study. The work by Mehan (1987, 1996), Cicourel (1987), Heller (1994, 1999), and Goldstein (1997) supplied me with the methodological considerations necessary to attend to how linguistic interactions are shaped by institutional and social constraints to understand the ways that power relations work in institutional settings. The work of those cited above, plus that of Bourdieu and Passeron (1977) draw attention to how ideologies of language mediate the relationship between talk and social structure, and this is both the theoretical and methodological focus of this study.

In many institutional ethnographies, there is particular attention given to the ambiguities, contradictions, and even conflicts that are contained within the ideologies and practices of the institution. In this respect, social institutions embody and enact social relations and relations of power in specific ways that are intricately linked to relations of power outside of the institution. The workings of the institution regulate and contain the ambiguities, contradictions, and conflicts that surface in interactions between individuals that are expressions of relations of power between different groups. Institutions, most importantly, work to control and monitor the distribution of valuable symbolic and material resources. Institutions mirror social structure, and therefore often represent social divisions based on majority-minority relations. Understood in this way, institutions are sites of struggle over power and resources.

The institution of the LINC program provides access to the valuable resource of linguistic competence in English, which is believed to lead to greater symbolic and material reward. The focus of this thesis is to explore the relationship between the ideologies and practices of LINC and the conditions of its implementation in one particular context, at the Somali Centre, a community-based immigrant serving organization in Toronto.¹ My proposition is that the instantiation of LINC in any local context will produce contradictions, conflicts, and struggles over power and resources because the program itself is a resource that must be regulated and distributed according to certain conditions that arise in its implementation. My interest is in exploring what the specific nature of these conflicts are as they manifest themselves in material and ideological conflicts. How, then, does the institution work to contain these various contradictions?

A second line of inquiry follows the proposition that the intention of LINC programs is to provide English language learning instruction to facilitate immigrant integration. The LINC program serves to teach immigrants and refugees the English language as an institutionally and culturally determined "relation to language" (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977, p. 116). As Bourdieu and Passeron assert, education is the promulgation of a "type of relation to language and culture" (p. 114). The LINC program is a form of education where a relation to language and culture is explicitly taught. The policies and practices of the LINC are shaped by the program’s mandate that Canadian values and beliefs be taught through the English language. Bourdieu and Passeron note that "no one acquires a language without thereby acquiring a relation to language. In cultural matters the manner of acquiring perpetuates itself in what is acquired" (p. 115). Here, the education system as a site of cultural reproduction is the issue, where the acquisition of language and culture is learned in a "manner" that reproduces the way that it is being taught.

The relation to language "is the product of the social conditions of the acquisition and use of language" (p. 117). In other words, language and culture are taught as a certain kind of relation that is shaped by the social relations inside and outside of the institution. The "relation to language" established in and by the LINC program is not created by the program alone, but, importantly, is reproduced within the program because of the larger processes of social relations that structure differential access to linguistic and material resources. One’s position within social relations is hierarchically organized by class, race, gender and ethnic membership. The "relation to language" that the LINC program asserts can be transmitted to immigrants and refugees via language training is in fact a social relation to Anglo-Canadian English language and culture that, when undertaken by the Somali immigrants and refugees at the LINC program in this study, is not so direct or easy a relation to acquire as it is assumed to be. How, then, do the LINC students negotiate the relation to the English language that the LINC program proposes?

To address these queries, in Chapter Two this thesis considers the dominant historical and sociological discourses that shape the field of English language teaching and learning for adult immigrants in Canada and Ontario. The chapter establishes how the LINC program has come to be formed, organized, and managed as it currently is, identifying along the way the histories of the institutions that merge in LINC, such as ESL for adult immigrants and immigration policy. The secondary consideration of the chapter is the ideologies that are contained in and by these institutions and how they are linked to larger sociological discourses about the management of immigrant integration, language ideology and the hegemony of the English language. Phillipson (1992), for example, traces the global spread of English Language Teaching to show how it is historically linked to British colonialism and Anglocentricity. As a form of linguistic imperialism, English Language Teaching serves to reinforce the hegemony of the English language. The dominance of English is reproduced and maintained through the "continuous reconstitution of structural and cultural inequalities between English and other languages" (p. 47). Phillipson’s work helps to link current ESL practices to the realm of global English dominance. But his work does not link ESL practices at the level of the institution to the larger policies, where both the students and the teachers are subject to the mandates of the organization where they work and learn, and to the mandates of the ESL program and the governmental policies of which they are a part. The next sections of the thesis attempt to do just that.

After the ideological domain of ESL for adult immigrants has been established in Chapter Two, Chapter Three moves into the actual research site to reflect on how the policy and mandate of the LINC program is put into practice at a community-based immigrant serving organization. The point here is to show that LINC policies become practiced in specific ways because the organization of the program is mediated and constrained by the commingling of local and extra-local institutional ideologies and practices. The chapter explores the ways that the ideologies and practices of the program are taken up by various groups that animate the LINC program in the site (the teachers, the students, the cultural interpreters, the Program Coordinator, and the staff of the community-based agency). The dominant institutional discourses are established as the rules and regulations that govern the institution to see "how they function ideologically to make specific courses of action accountable to the wider institution and . . . justify institutional decisions about the allocation of scarce resources" (Sarangi & Roberts, 1999). Once the order of the institution has been described, Chapter Three ends with an example of a conflict that disrupts the order of the institution to reveal how conflict and contradiction is institutionally managed.

The conflict is taken up again in Chapter Four as an instance of social interaction to show how the dominant discourses of the institution manifest themselves in daily interactions. The moment of conflict functions as a focal point which, when explored and discussed with the program participants, points to and opens up further contradictions, ambiguities, and negotiations that are occurring in the program between the program staff and the students. The chapter has a second area of concern, motivated by an assertion made by Mehan (1987) over a decade ago:

If, in fact, schooling is the acquisition and transmission of specific cultural practices as Bourdieu and Passeron (1977) and Collins (1977) suggest, then we must begin to examine both "what counts as knowledge" in the school system, and also how specific institutions of schooling (including the workings of curriculum) are organized to transmit this "cultural capital" across generations. (p. 299)

A morning of classroom interaction in the LINC program is considered to see what gets produced as knowledge. The forms of knowledge that are authorized in the classroom are, not surprisingly, shaped by dominant ideologies of gender, nation, and education. The knowledge that is produced in the classroom serves to reinforce the order and authority of the institution, but not without the production, also, of a certain amount of contestation.

This project attempts to account for the workings of the institution by considering the dominant discourses of the local and extra-local ideologies and practices that inform the site. It is, however, constrained by this focus on the dominant discourses. What is produced and reproduced in LINC is a "relation to language" that is culturally constructed and socially stratified. It means that there is little accommodation for other ways that the relation could be taken up. What is interesting, though, is the negotiations that take place in the spaces created by the relations between the institution and the participants, and between the discourses and the practices. This is somewhat shaky ground that has to be fixed for a moment in order to talk about it. In the last section of this chapter I will discuss how I went about it--the methodology of the study.

In seeking a site in which to conduct an institutional ethnography of a LINC program, I began to gather information about a variety of immigrant serving organizations that offer the program in Toronto to assess which one I might approach. I then heard about the LINC program at the Somali Centre from an acquaintance of mine who worked in the field of ESL in Toronto. I met to talk with the Coordinator and the staff of the program about my project and sought administrative consent (see Appendix A). I asked permission to observe and note the goings-on of the institution for two to three days a week for two months, and I asked to interview one-third of the 30 students in attendance, as well as conduct two group interviews with the students. I also requested permission to interview the LINC program staff consisting of the Coordinator, the three teachers, the two cultural interpreters, one of the three child minders, and the Executive Director of the Somali Centre. For all of the interviews I supplied a letter of consent that explained the research project (see Appendix B).

I visited the Centre two or three times a week for two and a half months, from January to March, 1999. During that time, there were approximately 25-30 students in attendance, roughly divided between the three levels of the LINC program that were offered there. The program capacity was a little bit below average, thus the Coordinator was actively recruiting new students throughout the time that I was there. There were three LINC classes at the Centre: a Level One literacy class taught by Lucy, a split Level One/Two class taught by Gail, and a split Level Two/Three class taught by Sarah. All of the classes used the help of a cultural interpreter, who worked full time for the LINC program. Hajia was the cultural interpreter when I began my research the Centre, and an month or so later Dunia returned from a maternity leave and replaced Hajia. Rebecca, the Coordinator, organized and administered the program.

The Somali Centre is a community-based immigrant serving organization located in Toronto, and most of the students that I met there were female Somali refugees, some of whom had managed to obtain landed immigrant status. Somali refugees have been emigrating to Canada in large numbers over the last decade because of the outbreak of civil war in that country. To clarify my use of the terms "Somalia" and "Somali," it is necessary to provide a summary of the historical situation that has brought Somalis to Canada. In 1960, Somalia became independent from the dual colonizing powers of Italy and Britain which occupied the country for decades. At that time, the country functioned as a parliamentary democracy for ten years. During the 1969 election, however, there was a military coup and General Said Barre assumed control of the country. The coup initiated an era of Marxist Socialism in Somalia. In 1988, the Barre regime was challenged by the Somali National Movement, and civil war ensued. The northern region of Somalia, which was the region colonized by Britain, broke away from the post-colonial Socialist Republic soon after the civil war to form the Somaliland Republic. In the southern region formerly colonized by Italy, Barre’s regime collapsed, but civil war continued and still continues (see Abdi, 1998; Kahin, 1997).

The war in Somalia is a struggle over access to the country’s resources located in the south, consisting of rich farmlands and export centres along the coast. The southern region was populated mostly by minority groups, and these people were apparently the targets of Barre’s regime (Kahin, p. 8). The northern region of the country has established a government and is rebuilding some infrastructure. The southern region, however, is divided into "minifiefdoms" where war civil continues (Kahin, p. 26). This brief rendering of the political and historical situation in Somalia was provided here to indicate that the terms "Somali" (the people and nationhood) and "Somalia" (the country) used throughout this thesis are categories that gloss over the details of Somali history and the minority-majority relations between Somali people. The term "Somali" is even more complex than this, because it also refers to Somali people who have lived outside of Somalia for decades, in Kenya, Djibouti, and Ethiopia. The tendency to elide the complexities of the socio-historical situation that brings Somali people to Canada and the specificity of the personal histories of the women students prior to their arrival in Canada become salient issues in this study. This section is an attempt to acknowledge how categories of nationhood and belongingness are homogenized and simplified to be made intelligible and known. In the process, the intricate histories and knowledges of cultures and nations are reified and essentialized. This process characterizes the ways that cultural, social, and linguistic differences are understood, and I will return to examine it further in Chapter Four.

The majority of the students in the LINC program at the Somali Centre are immigrants and refugees from the southern region of Somalia where the war continues. All but three of the students were women ranging in age from early 20s to early 60s. There were, however, two elderly Somali men in attendance, as well as a young man in his 20s from Ghana. There were only three students in the LINC program who were not Somali: a middle-aged woman from Colombia, the young man from Ghana, and a woman from Albania in her mid 30s. In February, four more students joined the program: a young woman from Afghanistan, and three Somali women in the late 20s. I must note here that I took the opportunity presented by the apparent near-homogeneity of the student body to focus this research on the relationship between the Somali women students and the LINC staff and program. The LINC staff also represented an apparently homogeneous group, since they were all White English-speaking middle-class women. In the process of shaping the research in this way, the non-Somali students and the male Somali students were marginalized by my research interests, which reflects, also, their position of marginalization within the institution. In many instances, including my research, there was a tendency to see the students as a group of Somali women, and to gear the talk and the practices of the institution to this group alone.

There were a number of constraints on my data collection, the first of which I note above, where the research "groupings" were consciously made homogeneous. Secondly, and most obviously, I cannot speak Somali. Somali takes up a fair amount of discursive space at the Centre. Indeed, the teachers made repeated efforts in class to ask that Somali not be spoken between the students. Outside of the classroom, however, Somali was the language of communication for the students. For the bilingual Somali staff, Somali was the primary language of communication, but there was frequent codeswitching between Somali and English as well. Much communication took place in English and Somali, or in Somali alone, so the access that I had to what was going on before me was limited by what I could see but not understand.

My understanding of the linguistic interactions that took place in the institution is shaped by the social relations that position me as a member of the dominant majority - a middle-class White English-speaking Canadian woman. The way I am positioned outside of the institution worked in concert with the social relations within the institution because I "fit in" with the middle-class White female staff of the LINC program. While I frequently defined what I was doing at the Somali Centre as "doing research," I was often referred to by the students as "teacher," and I did help out in the classrooms. The alignment between myself and the teachers is not so far off, however, since I have taught English language and English literature for a number of years. My interest in language ideology stems from this, particularly in the way that we teachers tend to ignore the politics of language in the classroom in the effort to get across the lesson of the day. Finally, in the same way that my position as a monolingual English speaker prohibits me from understanding what is happening in Somali, my class, gender, and ethnic membership influences what it is possible for me to know in the whole research process. This study, as a result, is really an examination of the dominant discourses of LINC. These are the conditions of constraint and possibility that shape the study.

Interviewing the students presented more constraints for a number of reasons. Under the advisement of Kajia, one of the cultural interpreters, I did not tape-record the interviews with the women students because she asserted that being tape-recorded might reproduce a semblance of the conditions of interrogation that some of the women experienced in Somalia under its military dictatorship. In these interviews, then, I recorded their comments on paper. The English language skills of the women students varied enormously, so that for seven of the interviews we did not need a linguistic interpreter, but three of the interviews were conducted with the assistance of Dunia.

The assistance of cultural interpreters was integral to my research not just because of Dunia’s asisstance in the three interviews, but because both Dunia and Kajia gave constant input to my research throughout my interviews and observations at the Centre. Prior to interviewing the students, I asked Dunia and Kajia to look at the student interview transcript to ensure that the questions were appropriate and clear (see Appendix C). Goldstein (1995) recommends this practice when one is interviewing people with whom one does not share cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Furthermore, when working with cultural and linguistic interpreters, Edwards (1998) suggests that the researcher should not attempt to "make invisible" the participation of the interpreter in the interview, but to recognize how the interview works as a complex three-way process (p. 202). The effect of making the interpreter "visible" makes for very interesting data about linguistic interactions. Edwards also recommends that the interpreters be interviewed, because in that way they become a "form of key informant" in the research process (p. 203). Certainly, Dunia and Kajia were, in this way, key informants in my work, and invaluable to me as linguistic and cultural interpreters.

The interview data is highly mediated by all of these practices. Three of the student interviews were translated, and all of the student interviews were recorded with only pen and paper. Interestingly, the three teachers refused to be tape-recorded for their interviews. I spoke with the teachers as a group about interviewing them, and it was at that time that Sarah, the senior teacher in age, experience, and authority, refused to be tape-recorded. Gail and Lucy, the two other teachers, followed suit. All of the other staff interviews were tape recorded and later transcribed (see Appendix D). All of the interviews were semi-structured; they ranged in duration from half an hour to over two hours.

For the interviews that were not tape recorded, those of the students and the teachers, the speaker’s talk may appear more fragmented and staid than it would be if captured on tape. The important pauses, emphases, and interruptions that are part of speech are virtually lost in note-taking. In transcribing all of the interviews, I had to make certain choices about how to represent the talk (see Roberts, 1997). The transcription of my jotted notes of the student interviews may contribute to the appearance of their talk as uniformly disjointed and fragmentary; the transcriptions don’t reflect the various levels of proficiency that the students certainly had in speaking English. For the interviews that were transcribed from tape, I attempted to reproduce the talk as strictly as possible. For the interviews where I took notes, I chose to stick to my notes, and not "fill in" parts of speech or sentence structure. I wanted to acknowledge the integrity of the students’ talk in its nonstandard forms. In representing transcript excerpts in the thesis, I chose to include lengthy excerpts of talk instead of shorter fragments of talk, so that the meaning I am making of the talk is open to the interpretation of the reader as well . The transcripts are, nevertheless, my representation of the interviewing event, and a transcript must be recognized as a "partial representation" at best (Green, Franquiz & Dixon, 1997, p. 173).

Every part of data collection is a partial representation, and what counts is being able to make links between the various methods of data collection and the different types of data. Thus the interview data, and the questions I asked in the interviews, were shaped by my observation of and participation in the goings-on at the LINC program, which I recorded at length in field notes. I gathered data from interviews, from the field notes and from researching secondary sources. The process of the research is best understood by me as constant movement. One moves recursively over and back across the different forms of data, checking for consistencies and inconsistencies, because both are fruitful to explore. The scope of the research necessarily narrowed as time went on, and other areas of import were left behind and ignored. In this way, my research is entirely partial, and it is important to acknowledge it as such. What I discuss here is a short and particular story that is, as I see it, one strand in a large and complicated web of social and institutional relations, practices, and ideologies.

In what follows, I will explore the manifestation of one LINC program. Taking into consideration the historical and sociological discourses that inform the field of English language training for adult immigrants, I consider how the organization of the LINC program at the Centre mediates these discourses. Furthermore, I look to identify how the larger discourses and the institution’s mediations of them surface in interaction. These lines of inquiry reveal certain conflicts and contradictions in the social relations in this setting, and I want to see what they reveal about how the institution of LINC is taken up by the participants in the program. Finally, what can we know about English language training and education as a result?

The name of the immigrant serving organization that delivers the LINC program has been changed to preserve anonymity, as have the names of all of the participants in this study.

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

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