The Impact of Post Colonial Language Policies on India & Taiwan: Experiences of K-12 Educators

• In Event: Linguistic Hierachies and Multilingual Education

Proposal

Abstract: The objective of this study is to understand the current practices of English education policies through middle school teachers’ perspectives in India and Taiwan after 2020, and further analyze the prioritization of English-only schooling and curriculum through Postcolonial Theory. Using qualitative interviews, we seek to understand how middle school teachers in India and Taiwan interpret and implement the current English education policies in classroom practices, particularly as both governments prioritize English over heritage/native languages, unveiling these teachers’ challenges and critiques.

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to understand the current practices of English education policies through middle school teachers’ perspectives in India and Taiwan after 2020, and further analyze the prioritization of English-only schooling and curriculum through Postcolonial theory. India and Taiwan have both been colonized by different countries; however, the time of postcolonialism is very close in both countries. India was colonized by the British from 1858 through 1947, and there are still lasting effects of the British colonization, although India received its independence afterwards. These effects are evident through various educational policies, such as India’s Official Languages Act of 1963 and the multiple revisions of the National Policy on Education of 1968, 1986, 1992, and 2020, which prioritize using English in various sectors. Taiwan also has remnant effects of colonization through China; however, recently, there’s also been a shift in aligning its educational policies toward English only. After 1945, as Japan returned Taiwan to the Republic of China government, the officials implemented Mandarin promotion to the entire country until 2003. Two major education reforms in Taiwan, such as the “ 9-Year Integrated Curriculum Guidelines (2001 - 2014)” and the “12-Year Basic Education Curriculum Guidelines (2014 -2019)”, promote multicultural/multilingual education at public schools to develop students’ local awareness and Taiwanese identity. Moreover, to develop global competitiveness, the Taiwanese government has developed the “2030 Bilingual Nation” policy, which prioritizes the English language over the local language of Mandarin. This begs the research question: What are the experiences and challenges that middle school educators in India and Taiwan face when implementing recent English language policies?

Theoretical Framework: The theoretical framework that informs our study is Postcolonial Theory, which focuses on the long-term effects of colonialism in formally colonized countries. This theory focuses on the impacts of colonial histories that influence modern-day policies, and further advocates addressing inequities and historical injustices caused by colonizers. Furthermore, this theory is particularly useful for our study because in both countries, educational policies have begun to prioritize the English language over their heritage and native languages. Specifically, our study utilizes key concepts of power and identity, cultural hybridity, and critique of universalism to code our data.

Methods & Data Sources: To critically examine the application of the educational policies in India and Taiwan after 2020, this study employs 10 in-depth semi-structured interviews of middle-school educators. This study will delve deeper into how various forms of colonization may have a modern-day impact on the classroom curriculum, pedagogy, and coursework in these countries. Particularly, our interview protocol will seek to understand whether instructors in India and Taiwan are prioritizing the colonizers’ languages, including English and Mandarin, over local heritage languages, such as Hindi or Taiwanese.

Our qualitative study analyzes the implementation of educational policies in Taiwan and India through the lens of K-12 educators. Our sample will include a total of 10 interviews of middle school educators (5 Indian and 5 Taiwanese) who are implementing these policies in their courses. We will use an in-depth semi-structured interview protocol, which will focus on topics such as their training with multilingual pedagogy, challenges in utilizing English and/or local languages, and their interpretations, perspectives, and critiques of these language policies. Both researchers will conduct virtual interviews and post-interview memos, which will be recorded and transcribed. The data will be developed into clean audio-visual recordings and transcripts for analysis, which will go through three rounds of review.

The first review and coding will be done individually by both researchers. The second review and coding will be done collaboratively. These two rounds of coding will be used to develop preliminary themes, which will focus on commonalities across Indian and Taiwanese educators. The third round of collaborative review will focus on coding with the lens of the Post Colonial theory, which will be applied to the analyses to understand how the educators are impacted by the education policies from both India and Taiwan. The thematic analyses will then reveal how educational policy discourse shapes instructors' pedagogy, curriculum, and coursework, which also reflects social-political power structures and hidden ideologies embedded in India and Taiwan.

Results: There are many parallels between India’s and Taiwan’s educational policies. Both countries emphasize the importance of English over their heritage/native languages, and rationalize English language educational policies with the potential for social mobility through employment opportunities for their citizens. Through the Postcolonial theory framework, in India, we can see how the colonialism of post-British rule has not disappeared but only been enhanced with the prospects of aligning Indian education with Western English-speaking standards. Furthermore, in Taiwan, several educational reforms have been implemented to promote multicultural & multilingual education. However, we can also see English as a new hegemonic language center in the education system in Taiwan after 2020. Through further analyses, we expect to find that the education systems in each country's policies are perpetuating the internationalization of colonial practices, standards, and expectations.

Scholarly Significance: The significance of this work is that there are few scholarly works that compare and contrast the educational policies of India and Taiwan through a postcolonial theoretical lens. There's a gap in the field of education, and this study contributes to revealing how the long-lasting effects of colonization in both countries are leading them to prioritize English language education and align themselves with Western standards of language learning. This work plans to use qualitative interviews to reveal teachers’ voices, offering critiques of current policy implementation, and emphasizing the importance of maintaining diverse heritage/native languages to maintain each country’s cultures and histories.

Authors

• Harmeet Kalsi, UCLA

• Kathy Li, UCLA