Transcription of the Film (Investigating multilingualism in complementary
schools in four communities) AC: Angela Creese
AB: Adrian Blackledge A: Arvind Bhatt
AC: complementary schools are voluntary schools.
They are outside the state sector.
They are often hidden from view.
Many people don’t know about them including teachers in the mainstream.
AB: They are schools that young people go to mainly to learn the language associated
with their heritage group.
A: Broadly speaking there are three aims of the complementary school.
One is social: to have a place where people can meet together, educational: in a sense
that there is some sort of formal or semi-formal education and the third one is religious and
cultural aim.
AB: Something there was perhaps unique about this research is that we worked in a large
multilingual team of researchers across eight schools in the four cities.
AC: We went to two Gujarati schools in Leicester, two Bengali schools in Birmingham, two Chinese
schools; one Cantonese and one Mandarin in Manchester, and two Turkish schools in London.
We are a multilingual nation and we’ve been for a long time and we are going to continue
to be.
It’s important we feel that to study multilingualism and our multilingual young people.
We basically stayed in the schools as long as we could.
We hung around and tried to capture everything we could while we were there and that included
the detailed observation (ethnographic observation), in-depth interviewing with our key participants
as stake holders in the research, and also recording the young people.
AB: After we’ve been in the schools for several weeks we identified one student or
students from each class and asked them to wear digital audio voice recorded so that
we could really listen in on the language and languages that these young people were
using.
AC: I think that one thing that all eight schools shared was an enthusiasm for the whole
project of the complimentary schools, so for me it was real honour to go into to each school
and see the energy of the teachers and the community, and really the commitment of the
students being there on basically their day off from mainstream schools to be there for
learning.
We have a shot of an assembly where the head teacher is talking to the young people to
their parents and to the teachers and everybody is there and everybody has different levels
of proficiency , and she moves between her languages seamlessly in order to engage and
pull in the people in the audience and that was the major finding of our project that
the complementary schools were doing a very innovative things with language and in terms
of pedagogy ,I would suggest, that the mainstream has to learn from the complementary schools.
AB: This research isn’t about the present or the past.
It’s really about the future.
What we’ve been able to do is to go inside them and say here are all kinds of positive
practices which are going on in complementary schools about creating multilingual spaces,
about using language flexibly, about using the full range of young people’s linguistic
repertoires.
AC: It offers an opportunity to study aspects of history and culture and folklore that isn’t
necessarily included in the mainstream and on the mainstream curriculum.
A: From my personal point of view I think the research has been very good for myself
for taking part because its reflexive exercise, and I can see now what my work has been contributing
into which I was unaware of until I did the research.
AB: We think that in raising the profile of complementary schools, in raising the profile
of multilingualism and by saying multilingualism is not, is never a problematic issue unless
you make it so then we are able to contribute to policy makers’ understanding of the way
that people really are using language in multilingual Britain.