Macau Language Planning in Post-colonial era: Schools as Meso-level Agentic Actors

• In Event: Multilingual approaches to language planning, pedagogy, and assessment

Proposal

Introduction
Since the handover of Macao in 1999, Chinese and Portuguese are specified as official languages, while English also enjoys official status in daily life (Moody, 2008). On a macro level, the diverse language culture in postcolonial Macao serves as a catalyst for global communication (Mark & Koo 2004). At the micro level, individuals' language choices not only reflect their cultural identity but also indicate their recognition of the economic potential associated with each language. Language planning has long been considered as the actions taken by governments and governmental institutions to address language-related issues. Individuals only play the role of accepting or rejecting the language planning, reflecting the implementation of the language planning policy (Liddicoat & Taylor, 2021). However, every policy is subject to reinterpretation by individuals' beliefs and practices, leading to the bending and mediation of the original policy and the emergence of unexpected practices. The language used by individuals and institutions are crucial elements for analysis, as they not only highlight alternative forms and models of practice, but also illustrate the interaction between ideology, structures, and individual and collective actions (Goodson & Rudd, 2012).
To discover these individuals’ agency within school context, this research aims to address the following questions:
1. How does the agencies of principals and teachers in Macao schools work to meet the requirements of language policy?
2. How are the agencies of principals and teachers interplay in their language education practice?
Theoretical framework
This research intent to discuss school agency in different levels and types of practice. Baldauf (2006) and Kaplan and Baldauf (1997) categorized agency into three levels: macro (national), meso (organizational), and micro (individual). The agency constitutes three different types of action: iteration, projectivity, and practical evaluation, which represent the reproduction of past patterns, the expectation of future trajectories, and the capacity to make judgements between alternative actions respectively (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998). From this perspective, individual's agency typically comprises these three elements, with one element potentially being more dominant in specific conditions. Agencies of different individuals may conflict with each other due to variations in identity, perspective, and beliefs. It is through the collaboration, conflict, and comprise that the constraints of individual’s agency and the mechanism of organizational agency are revealed.
Methods, data collection, and analysis
This research involves interviewing principals from four 15-year continuous education schools (schools providing education from kindergarten to high school) in Macao. The four schools include church schools, private schools, and public schools. As for the instructional language, there are Chinese schools as well as schools with both Chinese and English campuses. Interview questions include the history of school language tradition, the changing process and current situation of the school language policy, and the development of current language curriculum. Audio recordings (taken in informed consent) of the four interviews are transcribed into text for analysis.
The analysis of the data follows 3 steps:
1. Identify principals’ and teachers’ language believes, actions, and important events.
2. Categorize principals’ and teachers’ believes and actions into three types (i.e. iteration, projectivity, and practical evaluation).
3. Analyze the interactions between principals and teachers in important language events.
Findings
As indicated by Table 2 and 3, the agencies of principals and teachers are demonstrated through specific educational practices. The agency of principals are equally balanced in iteration, projectivity, and practical evaluation while teachers’ agency mainly focuses on practical evaluation. There are two noteworthy findings. Firstly, both principals and teachers share the task of maintaining the existing language education order through agentic activities directed by practical evaluation. This collaborative effort reflects the collaboration of principals and teachers in building the language characteristics of the schools, resulting in a stable language tradition. Secondly, the focuses of principals' and teachers' agentic activities are mildly mismatched. Principals' agency is primarily concentrated on projectivity, where they focus on the reconciliation of macro language policy and the school language traditions. The teachers' agency focuses on practical evaluation, as they conduct small-scale curriculum experiments based on the foundations and principals’ curriculum request.
Contributions of the study
This study discovers that school agency are co-constructed collective agency. The schools’ language traditions and policies are based on the professional work of teachers and the organization of principals. The language practice of people with power and people with expertise (Shouhui & Baldauf, 2012) can neither be analyzed independently nor be explained by the general concept of agency of institutions. As Liddicoat and Taylor(2021) argued: actors are not simply institutions but are also individuals within institutions whose actions create and construct the decisions around language use in the contexts in which they act. LPP agency can thus be exercised communally or individually. This study supports this idea by discovers that the language characteristic is based on not only the teachers’ micro-level work but also principals’ intended guidance in school institution.

The principals (individual with power) and the teachers (individual with expertise) interact in the process of co-construction, conflict and reconciliation in their daily practice. They form the collective agency of the schools in the intersection of their respective responsibilities within restricted condition. They transform and implement the language policy from top-down and react to the overall language environment of Macao society. The diversity of language traditions and principals' leadership styles contributes to the diversified pattern of language education in Macao today. Therefore, it can be learned that the people with power of the meso-level institution plays a bidirectional intermediary role between the micro-level professional practice and the macro-level policy environment.

The revival of the Chinese language and the decline of the Portuguese language are resistance to the colonial legacy. The limited retention of Portuguese and the rise of English are the balance in the interaction between official policy and folk language choice. The agency of schools not only translate and implement official policies, but also echoes the micro language appeal. In the contradiction between the two forces, the agency of the individuals in the institution has explored a path of language education with Macao characteristics beyond the policy intention.

Author

• Yuting Shi