Mother-tongue Education in the Process of Sustainable Social Structuration

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Monday II)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: The challenges of approaching a sustainable minority education

Proposal

This paper aims to examine the challenges of Tibetan mother-tongue education in the process of sustainable social structuration in China. The purpose of this paper is to contribute a new sociological analysis to the field of language, education and cultural identity in international premodern societies. This paper employs the structuration theory and sociology of language as conceptual frameworks to conduct a critical analysis of how the structuring effect of language, education and cultural identity within diverse settings of premodern society. The structuration theory has much potential for the analysis of education that is related to policies on curriculum, language-in-education policy, and policies on the equal distribution of educational resources and cultural identity. As the unique characteristic of social totality, language not only plays communicative role but also functions as the irreplaceable constituent of society.
Nation state language and minority language are the basic categories of language status in today’s global community. However, these language status shift by different social context and power relation, for example, state language becomes minority language such as French in Canada and Spanish in United States, and minority (in China) language becomes state language such as Mongolian in Mongolia. According to Giddens’s analysis of language in process of social structuration, changing language status affects both level of micro and macro social structure and its social sustainability. Significance of this study is that language in nation state is safe, and minority language often in a dangerous situation by various internal external factors including language policy. As a result, promoting mother-tongue autonomous policy can stabilize multicultural and multiethnic state in long term concern.
This paper also articulates a sociological interreflection of multilingual practices in Tibetan society within China based on the structuration theory. Such a society has been practicing multilingualism for decades, but it remains as an under-researched area from a sociological perspective. To examine the macro social reality of multilingual practices and education in Tibetan social context, this paper extends the book: “Social Structuration in Tibetan Society: Education, Society, and Spirituality,” particularly, linking the relationship of multilingual practices to both micro and macro social structuration of Tibetan society, and to the dilemma of maintaining social-cultural identity or shift to other identities. The book built a theoretical foundation of applying structuration theory to Tibetan society that enable us to conduct a further investigation of how multilingualism resulting Tibetan social structural change in China.
This paper designed to justify the theoretical indication of language issues causing conglomerative social problem such as social structural issues by gathering new data from field work. The research data will be collected from two sources of traditional rule-implementers, interviewees (equal number of M/F), and questionnaires.
As a result, multilingual education and practice increases individual opportunity, but at the same time, it is producing and reproducing divisive primary social groups and linguistically divided social members in Tibetan oral society. The tendency of oral multilingualism and multilingual oral literacy practice is becoming an inevitable social phenomenon within Tibetan oral society. On the other hand, multilingual abilities are empowering purely mother-tongue based institutions by receiving new knowledge through various language channels. In short, this paper will fully employ the structuration theory to theoretically map-out the examination of multilingualism and its practice in both Tibetan oral and literate societies within the greater context of China.

Key Words: Language role; mother-tongue; Social Structuration; Sustainable education; language Practice
Reference
Berger, P. L. and Luckmann, T. (1966). The social construction of reality: A treatise in the sociology of knowledge. New York: Doubleday.
Fishman, J. A. (1969). The sociology of language. In P. P. Giglioli (Ed.), Language and social Context (pp.45-58). Harmondsworth, England: Penguin
Giddens, A. (1984). The constitution of society: outline of the theory of structuration. Berkeley, California: University of California Press.
Giddens, A. (1991). Structuration theory: past, present and future. In C. Bryant & D. Jary (Eds.), Giddens’ theory of structuration: A critical appreciation (pp. 201-221). London, England: Routledge.
Author. (2016). Social Structuration in Tibetan Society: Education, Society, and Spirituality. Lexington Books.
Miller, A. P. (2003). Language and power. Multicultural Perspectives, 5(3), 33–38.

Author

• Jia Luo, Yunnan Normal University