Book Review
Sabiha Mansoor, Language Planning in Higher Education: A Case Study of Pakistan (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 445. price. Rs. 595.00.
Sabiha Mansoor is the pioneer of sociolinguistic research in Pakistan. She carried out a survey of the attitudes of the students of Lahore’s educational institutions towards English, Urdu and Punjabi in 1990-1991. This was published as a book entitled Punjabi, Urdu, English in Pakistan: A Sociolinguistic Study (1993). It is still a landmark in this type of research in the country.
The book under review is the author’s doctoral thesis submitted to a British university in 2003. The aim of the study is to understand the role of English at the college and university level in Pakistan. Besides the introduction, which expatiates upon this objective and places it in the context of relevant academic work, the book has six chapters out of which this the last summarizes the research findings and gives a conclusion. The other five chapters are devoted to the development of the main arguments. In Chapter 1 the author defines the key concepts, in the next two chapters she looks at the existing literature on language planning and the theories used to study the use of language in education. The next two chapters contain the survey of students, teachers, administrators and others to ascertain their views about their linguistic needs and behaviour. There are lists of tables, appendices of data and an extensive bibliography. These increase the value of the work since so much data is generally not available in one source.
Sabiha Mansoor carried out her survey through questionnaires for students, teachers and parents. In addition to that she interviewed administrators and prominent personalities connected with education. The subjects were chosen through two-stage cluster sampling. In the first stage educational institutions were chosen while in the second, students were chosen out of each. The sample size was of 2,450 students distributed in the capital cities of the four provinces of Pakistan—Karachi (Sindh); Lahore (Punjab); Peshawar (NWFP) and Quetta (Baluchistan). However, Hyderabad, also in Sindh, was chosen in addition to Karachi because the latter city has a concentration of Urdu-speakers who do not represent the interior of Sindh which is Sindhi-speaking. Hyderabad, on the other hand, has many Sindhi-speaking students. Besides students, teachers were also selected for the sample from the clusters (education institutions) located in these cities.
The author tested 18 hypotheses relating to the medium of instruction, the language actually used in class rooms and the availability of English. Some of these had been tested in her earlier book but this time she was working with a larger sample so it was useful to test them out again.
On the basis of this survey Sabiha Mansoor presents her conclusions and recommendations. The major conclusion is that the desire to learn English by all groups of students is very high. This is not surprising considering that power and prestige within the country as well as abroad is available only if one knows English. It is also not surprising that the ‘regional languages’—by which term she means the indigenous languages of Pakistan such as Punjabi, Sindhi, Pashto, Balochi etc—are ‘seen as deficient for educational purposes’ (p. 241). After all, no government of Pakistan has developed them or given them any respect. But what is surprising is that Sindhi-speakers ‘use Urdu more in the informal domain (77 per cent) than Sindhi (25 per cent)’ (p. 242). As the present reviewer studied the connection between Sindhi ethnic identity and the Sindhi language in 1994 in the province of Sindh, his impression was that Sindhis use their own language rather than Urdu between themselves as a matter of self-conscious policy (Rahman 1996). However, as the present conclusion is based on a survey while the connection between the Sindhi language and Sindhi identity was a perception of the reviewer, it might be that Mansoor’s data is correct. One would still suggest that it may be confirmed at some future date in the interior of Sindh and not in a large city like Hyderabad where there are many Urdu-speakers and the Urdu media is ubiquitous. Moreover, as only 4 per cent Sindhi-speakers were represented on the sample (otherwise Sindhi-speakers constitute 14.10 per cent of the population), the sample may not have been representative of Sindhis.
One of the author’s hypotheses is that Punjabi-speaking students display a language shift from their mother tongue, a minority language, to Urdu the majority language’ (. 134). This seems to suggest that Urdu is the ‘majority’ language in Pakistan whereas, according to the latest census of 1998, there are over 44.15 per cent mother-tongue speakers of Punjabi vis a vis only 7.57 per cent of Urdu (Census 1998). Urdu is, of course, the second language of all educated, urban Pakistanis and the major language of the sample presented here. Thus, it is probably only with reference to the sample she is dealing with that the author makes this claim. However, this should have been made very clear otherwise it may lead to misunderstanding.
Sabiha Mansoor’s recommendations about the language policy to be adopted in higher education is somewhat problematic. For instance, she suggests that the teaching of English should be strengthened at the higher education level. First, she cites what appear to be democratic reasons such as the demand by stake-holders. In this context she says that the attitude of students may ‘have changed radically from ambivalence and hostility to English’ to ‘an enthusiastic acceptance’ of that language (p. 342). In fact, apart from some protest against elitist English-medium schools during the sixties, there was never any significant level of hostility to English in Pakistan. English was never part of the anti-colonial movement in South Asia even though Gandhi did try to recruit it in his anti-colonial rhetoric. This general acceptance of English is not democratic consensus. It is merely the pragmatic acceptance of reality by the common people who are resigned to their fate and feel that the market conditions which privilege English will not change so they should acquire it somehow. This acquiescence of the people should not blind us to the fact that English does privilege a narrow elite; it does make it difficult for the under-privileged to seek elitist employment and social prestige and it puts pressure, along with Urdu, on the languages of the people which are becoming weak and some of which may disappear soon. These problematic issues are not given the attention they deserve though Sabiha Mansoor does suggest that ‘regional languages’ should be taught. But teaching languages is seen as a burden by students if they neither lead to a job nor to prestige. So, if the present policy of privileging English is to continue—as the author’s recommendations suggest—the price of it would be paid by the common people of Pakistan and their languages.
Essentially,Sabiha Mansoor does not suggest any radical change in the present language policy. When suggests that English and Urdu should be used as alternative medium of instruction till class-12 (p. 353), she is continuing with the present language-teaching policy. She says that children can choose between the two mediums of instruction because poor children simply cannot afford the expensive schools where the medium of instruction is English. This means that, contrary to her claim, this policy does not aim at ‘democratization and empowerment of the masses’ (p. 357). It may, of course, teach English more proficiently at the higher education level but this does not change the fact that the children of the rich and the powerful will arrive at this level, just as they do now, with far greater proficiency in English than their vernacular-medium counterparts.
If Sabiha Mansoor had looked at the connection between Urdu and Islamic fundamentalism, Urdu being associated both with the lower middle and middle classes and Islam in Pakistan, and then emphasized the teaching of English as an antidote she might have had an unanswerable argument. As such, it is not clear in whose interest except the westernized elite, of course, the proposed policy would be.
Although I have clarified and emphasized my own disagreement with Sabiha Mansoor’s recommended language-teaching policies, her book is useful for many reasons. First, it is the first major survey of language attitudes in the country. Second, it is the only major survey of the educational needs of students, teachers, parents and administrators. And, thirdly, it provides a major source of the analysis and discussion of documents on language and education policies. For these reasons it will long remain a major land mark in educational linguistics in Pakistan.
REFERENCES
Census. 1998. 1998 Census Report of Pakistan Islamabad : Population Census Organization,
Statistics Division, Govt of Pakistan,
2001.
Rahman, Tariq. 1996 Language and Politics in Pakistan Karachi : Oxford University Press
Dr Tariq Rahman