- 88 - final analysis, to move from a study of the narrative texts to an assessment of their youthful
creators’ narrative competence demands more than the mere listing and counting of structures—it demands understanding and intuition. We are ultimately seeking to answer
the questions: What makes a good story? and Why is one story judged to be “better”, or more pleasurable and meaningful to the hearers, than others in the set? Soundness of structure and
aesthetic worth are both important factors in any such assessment, as is evaluation which is the central topic of this thesis and the one we come back to in the next chapter.
3.8 Implications for Second Language Acquisition
In the above sections as we have considered various interrelated aspects of storytelling, we have only mentioned second-language learners indirectly, where the theoretical issues
under discussion and particular data samples seem to match up rather neatly, or where our data provide interesting contrasts to the data examples being presented by others. This
section will, therefore, focus directly on the implications of some of these notions to second-language learners in general, and our own subjects in particular.
3.8.1 Home and Community Background
In section 3.1 we discussed storytelling traditions, providing specific examples from the literature i.e. from Heath 1983 of traditional and cultural values exerting a profound
influence on the child’s concept of story. Then on page 58 we spoke of the young second- language learner’s sudden introduction to English oral and literate culture on entry into the
school environment; but we said nothing about the child’s own cultural background at that point. Unfortunately, this information is not readily available and, unlike Mike Baynham
1988 working with adult migrant workers, we were not able to collect personal biographical accounts from our subjects directly. Baynham has the following to say about
the importance of the sociolinguistic context. The report of the Linguistic Minorities Project LMP 1985 suggests that in a
multilingual setting characterized by immigrant bilingualism it is of fundamental importance to have some knowledge and understanding of the sociolinguistic history of the
different languages and their speakers. p. 65 As far as we know there is no historical record of the settlement of Panjabi speakers in
Reading. However, I do know that when I taught at Oxford Road School in the mid- 1960s, my pupils were mainly native English speakers or of West Indian origin. In 1967, a
few South Asian pupils were entering the school who were without any previous knowledge
- 89 - of English, but there was no special provision made for their integration into the school
community such as “mother tongue” classes; they acquired English naturally through interaction with teachers and monolingual peers.
In the complete report of the Linguistic Minorities Project LMP, the general migration and distribution of South Asians throughout England is described.
The distribution of the populations of South Asian origin across the country is largely a result of the employment opportunities which existed in the 1950s and 1960s, and of the
process of chain migration in which information about specific localities, and personal contacts in these localities, played an important part. Stubbs 1985:41
The South Asian Communities in Reading are largely Panjabi-speaking, and are concentrated in the east and west of the town; Oxford Road School serves the West
Reading Community. The majority seem to be of Pakistani origin and are Moslems, although there are Sikhs and Hindus from India also living in the community. This mix of
country of origin, language, and religion can be illustrated by figure 3.1:
Figure 3.1. Spoken and written languages in Punjab India
Pakistani Panjab Indian Panjab
Panjab Moslems
Sikhs Hindus
Literacy in: Urdu the NATIONAL and
RELIGIOUS LANGUAGE
Literacy in: Panjabi
Literacy in: Hindi the
OFFICIAL LANGUAGE
Perso-Arabic script
Gurmukhi script
Devanagari script
almost identical in their spoken form Urdu
Hindi Pakistan
- 90 - This figure, based on a more elaborate presentation in LMP 1985:23, attempts to set out
the interrelationships between linguistic, national and religious affiliations for Panjabi speakers. The case of Sukhbir, one of our “Other Group” interlocutors, presents a few
problems for this simple 3-way classification. In table 1.1 chapter 1, p. 8 Sukhbir is coded as being a Sikh, and in the accompanying key, this code = “Pakistani Panjabi speaker, Sikh
religion”. If he is a Sikh, then we would expect him to be an Indian, rather than a Pakistani; but his teacher clearly indicated that his family did come from Pakistan. Again, presumably,
Sukhbir’s parents must have told the school that he was a Sikh, but he did not wear the usual Sikh headdress and had his wavy hair cut short; the Moslem boys from Pakistan all
had straight hair. The rest of the subjects did fit the expected patterns. We had Moslems from Pakistan or Hindus from India—all speaking Panjabi as their mother tongue.
The LMP report discusses this whole issue of ethnicity and “the concept of ethnic boundaries” Barth 1969.
A boundary is revealed where a category of people perceive a dichotomy between “us” and “them”, and structure their behaviour accordingly. Such boundaries are not necessarily
accepted as valid by every section of society, nor need they be permanently fixed Wallman 1979. They may be “marked” symbolically by a large number of separate variables, or
by a smaller cluster of factors which are highly correlated together. Language is only one of the possible set of such “ethnic markers”. Religion,
skin colour or other physical features, nationality or dress can all be used as ethnic markers. One of the difficulties of defining linguistic minorities in England is that the
language variable, of course, is not always perfectly correlated with any of the other markers, nor is it relevant in every context in which a differentiation between “us” and
“them” is made. p. 20 The authors cite these particular South Asian populations now living in England as
examples of “this lack of fit” between various ethnic markers. They point out that nationality does not necessarily correspond with either birthplace or country of origin of
the family; that the language “taught mother tongue” of Indians could be Panjabi, Gujerati, Bengali, Urdu or Hindi, and that Pakistanis may speak one or more of the
following languages: Panjabi, Pushtu, Sindhi or Urdu. They state that in some cases there is a closer correlation between religion and nationality, in that most Pakistani nationals are
Moslems. Linking language and religious affiliation, there is a high degree of probability
- 91 - that Urdu speakers will be Moslems and Hindi speakers will be Hindus, but Panjabi
speakers may be Sikhs, Moslems, Hindus or Christians. All these members of the Panjabi-speaking population originated from a single region in
the North West of the Indian subcontinent, which until 1947 had a single government. At that time the majority of the population spoke one of the local dialects of Panjabi as a
mother tongue and, even today, “there is a high degree of mutual intelligibility between the spoken forms of Panjabi on either side of the Indo-Pakistan border, which gradually give
way to varieties closer to Hindi as one moves south” p. 45. Many linguists e.g. Khubchandani 1979 view these Hindi-Urdu-Panjabi dialects as a continuum.
Two other factors particularly mentioned by LMP are the value Moslems attach to calligraphic skills and the setting up of special Urdu classes to “pass on some of this
calligraphic tradition to the younger generation”, and the fact that Panjabi speakers who were brought up in East Africa and have now settled in this country, “have had a long
history of language maintenance and of community-run schooling in the ‘mother tongue’ for their children, alongside the mainstream English-medium schooling which many of
them experienced in those countries” LMP 1985:48. Several of the Moslem boys, e.g. Sakander, went to Urdu classes straight after school, and
they were very proud to show off their calligraphy. At the time, one of the teachers, the Head teacher and I were also going to Urdu classes to learn to read and write the script.
Our teachers were a well-educated couple who had come to Reading from East Africa in the early 1970s. They were both involved in many community-run projects of the kind
mentioned by the authors of LMP. However, the majority of families whose children attended the school came from the rural
areas of the Indian sub-continent, and “for many rural people the gap between the vernacular and standard is so wide as to make learning the standard almost like learning a
second language” 1985:44. Shamsa, the language-support teacher often complained that the children’s command of standard Panjabi or Urdu was poor and that they used a variety
of which she, herself, did not approve. According to LMP, most Pakistani migrants from Panjab speak local dialects of Panjabi as their home language, but may regard Urdu as their
mother tongue and use it as their language of literacy. Indians from the State of Panjab will, if they are Sikhs, speak Panjabi in the home and consider Panjabi both their mother tongue
and language of literacy, with Hindi as a second language or lingua franca. Hindus speak
- 92 - Panjabi but they also know spoken and written Hindi, considering it their official language
and mother tongue. In spite of these differences, the spoken varieties used will be mutually intelligible.
So how does all this relate to storytelling traditions in the home and community? Unfortunately, there is very little information in the literature about storytelling. Tolstaya
1981, when writing about the mid-nineteenth century in a brief introduction to a descriptive grammar of the Panjabi language, says the following: “Apart from a rich folklore
nothing was written in Panjabi except Sikh religious works”. This tantalizing allusion says nothing about the content of this folklore or whether it is accessible to all Panjabi speakers
or only to those who are literate or happen to be Sikhs. Is it an oral tradition which has been committed to writing or does it only exist as a literary genre? Much more is known
about Hindu folklore. The tales of the gods are preserved in the great epic poems, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, probably completed by the second century B.C. The
Ramayana tells the life story of Rama or Ram, an avatar or reincarnation of Vishnu. It describes the love of Rama and his wife, Sita, which remained constant through many
trials, the loyalty of Rama’s brother Lakshman, and the assistance rendered to them by Hanuman, the monkey god, which secured the release of Sita from the demon, Ravana,
and brought about a happy ending to the story. Whether stories such as these are told or read in Hindu homes, we do not know, nor
whether children’s storybooks are available. LMP certainly mention the viewing of Indian Hindi-Urdu films and videos in the home 1985:273. However, according to our teacher,
in the majority of Moslem homes there is no storytelling tradition because the mothers are illiterate and do not know any Panjabi stories. Although storytelling does not have literacy
as a prerequisite, some cultural connection between the two is clearly seen here. So for the most part, it would seem that second-language learners are not introduced to storytelling
until they start school or attend a nursery class, unless their mothers happen to have received some education.
3.8.2 Storytelling in School and L2 Acquisition of English Storytelling Skills
