Onwards and Upwards: Space, Placement, and Liminality in Adult ESOL Classes

We then describe the context of the study upon which this articledraws: a project investigating placement practices how students areplaced or place themselves in adult ESOL and literacy

Onwards and Upwards: Space,

Placement, and Liminality in Adult

to researching the spaces of language learning, and the identitypositions that are routinely made available to English speakers of otherlanguages (ESOL) learners, drawing on approaches from culturalgeography and linguistic ethnography We illustrate the discussion withdata from a study investigating the placement practices by which ESOLstudents in England are placed and place themselves in particular types

of educational provision (Simpson, Cooke, & Baynham, 2008),investigating why some may choose the identity of second languagelearner and others orient toward mainstream education opportunities

We conclude with a discussion of new identity positions, understood asspaces of becoming created by the levels and progressions of curriculumframeworks, drawing on Bernstein’s (1999) notion of vertical andhorizontal discourses

to the abstract space of a National Qualifications Framework (NQF) To

do so we draw on a distinction made by the philosopher Henri Lefebvre(1974/1991) and the cultural geographer Harvey (1989) betweenmaterial spatial practices, representations of space, and spaces of representa-tion, discussed later First, however, we introduce the discussion with ashort review of relevant policy background on ESOL in England, Wales,and Northern Ireland (there is a different system in Scotland), to set thescene We then describe the context of the study upon which this articledraws: a project investigating placement practices (how students areplaced or place themselves) in adult ESOL and literacy courses which liewithin the scope of England’s Skills for Life policy Using an illustrativevignette, we discuss how a community-based context of ESOL teachingand learning occupies and appropriates liminal material spaces, makingthem over for pedagogical purposes.

Turning to more abstract dimensions of practices of placement, we go

on to investigate how movement through learning is also constructed inthe talk of ESOL learners and teachers as a spatial process, in particular

as progression through the abstract space of the NQF, arguing that this

is a representation of space in Harvey’s terms Drawing on Bernstein(1999), we sketch out the dimensions of this representation of space,discussing how progression within the NQF can be described in terms of

a vertical or a horizontal trajectory: Progression through the curriculumframework is understood as following an upward path, while at the sametime other aspects of students’ learning trace a horizontal route which isapparently less valued How are the abstract spaces of the curriculumframework appropriated by students? How are learning spaces under-stood as central or peripheral? How, if at all, does progress along thevertical trajectory connect with the horizontal? We conclude byconsidering the new identity positions—spaces of becoming—created bythe discourses of progression and placement

THE POLICY CONTEXT: ESOL IN THE UNITED

KINGDOM

Going back to the 1990s, adult ESOL provision in England was largelyneglected in policy circles A major watershed came at the turn of thecentury, with the decision to bring the fragmented field of ESOL undercentralised control, linked to a more general overhaul of the provision

of adult literacy and numeracy, as the government put in place anational strategy for adult basic education, Skills for Life Throughinitiatives involving literacy, numeracy, ESOL, and, more recently,computer skills training, the purpose of Skills for Life has taken a humancapital approach, aiming to mobilize individual potential and humancapital to support economic growth (for a discussion of these issues in

the Australian context, cf Falk, 2001) ESOL was not originally included

as a skill for life; the publication of a government working group report,Breaking the language barriers (Department for Education andEmployment, 2000), recommended incorporating the field into theSkills for Life strategy ESOL was thus encompassed by literacy andnumeracy policy, yoking basic literacy and ESOL together, mirroringtrends in other English-dominant countries such as the United Statesand Australia, where again the development of human capital throughbasic skills training is linked to economic growth (cf McKay, 2001) Foradult migrant learners of English, having their ESOL classes undercentralised control within Skills for Life has meant that both theirlearning and the ways they and their teachers talk about their learningare funnelled in particular directions, with a consequential shaping andindeed narrowing of the identity options offered to them

First, students and their teachers are now subject to a statutorynational ESOL curriculum (Department for Education and Skills, 2001),which is accompanied by associated learning and teaching materials.The model of language adopted by the curriculum has its origins in theadult literacy curriculum, upon which it is based Language is brokendown into word/sentence/text, in contrast to the whole text and genre-based view of language taken in, for example, the equivalent Australiancurriculum With Standard English as the referent, and its failure torespond to the multilingual reality of much of modern Britain, thecurriculum also contributes to the powerful discourse of monolingual-ism that is prevalent in education and in British society more broadly.Second, and of particular relevance to this article, ESOL students,along with the other Skills for Life students in literacy and numeracyclasses, work towards qualifications based on national standards, withinthe NQF(see Department of Education and Skills, 2001, p 4) Thenational standards are specified at entry level (broken down intoPreentry, Entry 1, Entry 2, and Entry 3), Level 1 and Level 2 These levelsare aligned with the school national curriculum: Level 2 nominallycorresponds with a GCSE (i.e., school-leaving exam) pass at grades A to

C These levels are (again nominally) mapped to the CommonEuropean Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR; Council ofEurope, 2007), with Entry Level 3 matching CEFR Level B1 (indepen-dent user/threshold) Moreover, students’ achievement of qualificationaims is of central importance to their institutions Because the furthereducation sector, where most ESOL provision is situated, operates with afunding regime which requires that most provision leads to qualifica-tions, funding drives practice, as institutions are under huge pressure toensure students—including ESOL students at all levels—both take andpass exams, preparation for which has come to dominate practice Thusthe identity imposed upon students by policy and institutionally—if not

by their teachers—is that of student as test taker, whose test resultscontribute towards the achievement of government targets It should beemphasized, however, that the intention of this article is not to deny theeducational achievements which are valuably opened up by a qualifica-tions framework and curriculum pathway as such, but simply to point out

a turning away from other kinds of outcomes, less easily quantifiable yetarguably no less valuable

As well as the effects wrought by Skills for Life, ESOL has beeninvoked in bigger political debates surrounding citizenship, cohesionand integration, and national security A key plank in recent Britishpolicy on ‘‘community cohesion and integration’’ has been theimplementation of ceremonies for new British citizens and theintroduction of a citizenship test, the Life in the UK test, which bringstogether ESOL and immigration policy The Nationality, Immigration,and Asylum Act of 2002 requires United Kingdom residents seekingBritish citizenship, and since 2007 those requesting permanentresidence, to show formally ‘‘sufficient knowledge of life in the UnitedKingdom and of the English language’’ (Office of Public SectorInformation 2002) The citizenship test is a multiple-choice test taken

on a computer Those who have not reached the level of Englishnecessary to take the test, or who do not have the required level ofliteracy, must enroll on an approved course of English language in acitizenship context and demonstrate that they have ‘‘made relevantprogress’’(United Kingdom Border Agency, 2010 ).Hence ‘‘moving up alevel’’ on the NQF becomes the de facto requirement for gainingcitizenship, and now, indefinite leave to remain

This recent focus on citizenship arose out of the high-profile terroristattacks of the early 2000s, and creates an explicit linkage of citizenship tofluency in English This has had the effect of radically shifting theemphasis from policies that promote diversity and tolerance (multi-culturalism and antiracism) to those that promote integration and socialcohesion In turn, this has created a new set of constraints for Englishlanguage learners and teachers, because achievement of particularlanguage levels (as described earlier) is linked with gaining citizenship

In sum, the connection between national security, immigration,integration, social cohesion, and language learning and teaching isbecoming progressively tighter (Cooke & Simpson, 2008)

This then is some of the background on English language provisionfor adult migrants in England, whose learning sits within a policyenvironment that makes ESOL a very particular branch of Englishlanguage teaching It is also the background to the Placement PracticesProject (Simpson, Cooke, & Baynham, 2008), the research on which thisarticle draws

ESOL AND LITERACY PLACEMENT PRACTICES

Part of the Skills for Life strategy involved the establishment in 2002

of the National Research and Development Centre for Adult Literacyand Numeracy (NRDC), providing funding for a range of researchprojects designed to provide the strategy with a research base TheNRDC’s Placement Practices Project (Simpson et al., 2008) started with aquestion: How do ESOL or bilingual students get placed or placethemselves in literacy and/or ESOL classes? Although colleges orcentres in multilingual cities or neighbourhoods might have well-developed ESOL provision, their literacy classes also show hugelinguistic diversity At around Entry Level 3 and Level 1 on the NQF,bilingual students might end up studying in either ESOL-designatedclasses or literacy classes What are the institutional and personalpractices at play when the decision is made about whether an ESOL or aliteracy route is taken at Entry 3 or Level 1? To answer these questions westudied the literacy and ESOL placement practices in two colleges offurther education: Rushton College, a large college in inner-cityLondon, and Cranshaw College, a smaller one in a Yorkshire town,reflecting the metropolitan/regional dimension of difference

Through a combination of interviews, focus groups, and observation,the research sought to ascertain both what is said and what is done aboutplacing learners in ESOL or literacy classes in the two centres.Observation of enrolments, placement interviews, and tests for newESOL and literacy learners took place across different sites of eachcentre, and detailed field notes and audio recordings were taken.Placement documentation and artefacts from each centre (e.g., copies

of placement tests) were collected, and front desk or first point ofcontact practices with new learners were also observed

In the course of these observations, six classes, three at each centre,were identified as being at around Entry Level 3 and Level 1, the focus ofour interest The classes were ESOL and Childcare Entry 3, ESOL Entry

3 Literacy, and Literacy Entry 3 (at Rushton); and ESOL Level 1,Literacy Workshop, and ESOL Entry 2+ (at Cranshaw) The names ofthe classes themselves reflect something of the ambiguity and institu-tional uncertainty about the two areas of provision Although someclasses are designated ESOL or Literacy, one at Rushton is called ESOLEntry 3 Literacy This class, as we discuss later, is for bilingual studentswho fall into the ESOL category at placement, and who have beenidentified by teachers as requiring specific attention to literacy, ratherthan to oral communication skills The six classes were the basis of sixcase studies, informed by lesson observations and group and individualinterviews with learners, teachers, managers, and support staff.Syllabuses, teaching materials, and samples of learners’ work from their

lessons were also collected The interview data were first analysedthrough a content analysis employing a constant comparative method.This involved the main coding categories being agreed after an analysis

of early interviews, then collapsed or expanded through analysis of therest of the data set Observation data (field notes and recordings) andother artefacts such as emails, prospectuses, notices, and data fromlessons, informed the descriptive aspect of the research, providing aholistic picture of placement practices at each research site

A key underlying idea of the project was that there are two dimensions

to placement: certainly that prospective students are placed in particulartypes of provision and particular types of classes, but also that studentsactively place themselves in particular types of provision (ESOL orLiteracy) This links with ideas in identity work and positioning theory(Baynham, 2006; Davies & Harre´, 1990; Le Page & Tabouret Keller,2006): People both position themselves and are positioned There isobviously also an implicit spatial metaphor in the notion of positioning

So an issue which is apparently down to earth and practical, such as howstudents get placed in particular classes, can be understood productively

in terms of space and place, positioning and identity How do studentsplace themselves, and how are they placed institutionally, as ESOL orLiteracy students? What kinds of learner identities are implied by suchchoices? How does the actual material space of the class relate to moreabstract understandings of space, placement, and progression? Such arethe kinds of issues that are raised when we start to look below the surface

as Entry 2+; that is to say, it is a nominally lower-intermediate, ability class The class has been provided by Cranshaw College at the

mixed-centre for the past three years, as part of its off-site or communityprovision; the class teacher, Sue, is employed by the college The Entry2+ lessons are held in the Borderlands Community Centre, andspecifically in the main entrance hall of the centre Although it is nottypical for off-site ESOL classes to take place in such seemingly ad hocconditions, it is by no means unusual (see Baynham, Roberts, Cooke,Simpson, & Ananiadou, 2007) A classroom, the office, and the cre`cheall lead off from the room in which lessons take place The followingvignette draws on field notes made during one particular lessonobservation in November 2006.

This ESOL Entry 2+ class meets two mornings a week from 9.30–12.30 in theBorderlands Community Centre Their classes are held in a large openroom, the first which a visitor enters coming into the building Its grilledwindows look out onto a pedestrian precinct with a newsagent, chemist, postoffice and medical practice It is also the room through which parents andchildren must pass to access the cre`che, the toilets, other teaching rooms

On the other side of a closed door is the lively hubbub of the cre`che.Occasionally children are brought through to the toilets and a moreenterprising child might break out and run once or twice around theteaching room, before being intercepted and shepherded back into thecre`che room

There are 12 students in the group, all women, except for one young malestudent, a migrant worker from one of the Eastern European EU accessionstates The majority of students are asylum seekers, living in the housingestate surrounding Borderlands, from Congo, Somalia, Eritrea, Algeria,Palestine and Turkey One student is from the local settled Pakistanicommunity The majority of students are recruited by word of mouth, theasylum seekers also coming to Borderlands for a drop-in morning Somestudents have been referred to these classes from other sites, because thelevel is more suited to their needs and because of the cre`che

The students arrive in a piecemeal way, sign the register then start in onindividual work, talking quietly to their neighbours They seem to havegrouped themselves by language (Somali, Arabic, Urdu) Sue circulates,talking to students individually and in small groups She has a special latenote worksheet on the table nearest to the door

One of the issues in this class seems to be that of setting boundaries and creating

a pedagogical frame in this very fluid and open ended space Sue does this very effectively through framing activities, and this excuse sheet is part of the process.

Sorry I’m late Because……

Sue then brings this stage of the lesson to a close by collecting the folders in and transitions to a spelling test (all the while people moving quietly across the room

to other offices or classrooms) A father arrives with the child of one of the students, she leaves to settle him in the cre`che Sue transitions into the main body

of the lesson, linking it back to the lesson last week and introducing some Skills for Life materials and realistic examples of different kinds of notes and messages She asks the question: What are they? Why have they been used? (While this is going on F arrives late and rather distressed Sue settles her down, talking sympathetically in a low voice and not insisting she completes the late excuse worksheet.) Sue goes on to contrast the different notes and messages in terms of formality/informality of register The next phase of activity is a Skills for Life exercise on openings and closings in letters and messages Sue groups the students carefully for the activity, in pairs or individually The next activity is a story sequencing one, followed by a break After the break, Sue introduces a roleplay which the students engage in with animation, involving a mother taking

a child to the doctor V throws himself with some gusto into the part of the badly behaved boy!

REFLECTIONS ON THE OBSERVED LESSON

A striking aspect of the lesson is the way that Sue and the studentshave created a busy and focussed pedagogic space out of the anteroom

in which the class is situated It is impressive how they manage tomaintain concentration The whole situation evokes the concept ofliminality (Latin limen 5 threshold) Liminality as a theoretical constructwas developed by the sociologist Turner (1969) in his work on ritual tocharacterize circumstances of in-between-ness,neither one thing nor the other.The class described in the vignette is literally situated in an in-betweenspace, in a kind of anteroom which everyone in the building, adults andchildren, must be able to pass through freely We suggest later that there

is also a kind of liminality in the Pre-entry and Entry qualification levels

of the NQF, a sense that students at these levels are not yet fullyequipped to participate The liminality of the physical space isadditionally echoed in the in-between-ness of the life situation of thestudents, most of whom are asylum-seekers, in a kind of in-between spacebefore the decision to grant refugee status is decided In this case theliminality can become a way of life; decisions about asylum claims can beprolonged over as much as five years The class is shaped by thisprovisionality but also seems to be characterized by an attitude of carry on

as if—as if in this case a student’s life in the United Kingdom could not

be abruptly terminated by a decision not to allow asylum

APPROPRIATING SPACE

Spatial practices, as defined earlier, involve the production, ment, and appropriation of spaces and their investment with activitiesand meanings They also involve relationships of power and inequality:Space is unequally distributed and valued The sociologist de Certeau(1988) suggested that people occupy and make over places, throughtheir practical activity appropriating spaces: For de Certeau ‘‘space is apracticed place Thus the street geometrically defined by urbanplanning is transformed into a space by walkers’’ (p 117) TheBorderlands ESOL teacher, for example, is teaching an off-site classwhich in itself creates a centre–periphery spatial relationship with mainsite, which we discuss later It is located in an open-plan room close to theentrance to the community centre The teacher and the studentsappropriate and transform that space, to turn it into somewhere wherelearning can happen Through all the accompanying activity, Sue andthe students maintain focus, despite the comings and goings aroundthem It is striking here how effectively a learning space is created out ofquite unpromising conditions The lateness excuse worksheet is onedevice for creating this pedagogical space, though of course it brings in atemporal dimension: The classroom space is defined in time, thestarting and finishing time of the class, for which participants can beearly, on time, or late, reminding us that spatial practices cannot beseparated from practices involving time

deploy-Both de Certeau and Harvey distinguish between the spatial practices

of powerful agents who control and manipulate space and those of userswho are, however, not simply subjected to the control and manipulation

of powerful agents but also appropriate and make over such spaces fortheir own purposes In the work of de Certeau the distinction is madebetween strategies understood as the domain of the powerful (whichproduce, tabulate, and impose spaces) and tactics (which use, manip-ulate, and divert these spaces; de Certeau, 1988, p 30), whereas Harveymakes a similar distinction between ‘‘the appropriation and use ofspace’’ and ‘‘the domination and control of space’’ (Harvey, 1989,

p 220) Sue and her students thus use tactics to appropriate and use thespace available On the other hand, the NQF is put in place as part of apolicy-driven strategy which, as we see in the following section, produces,tabulates, and imposes a kind of abstract progression space into whichstudents and teachers can insert themselves This progression space is atonce enabling, in that it creates possibilities for students and teachers toimagine progression on to future goals in education, training, and work,yet also constraining, as we would argue it makes it more difficult toimagine and recognize the value of other types of outcomes Thestrategic purpose of the NQF is at once to provide a framework for

student progression, but at the same time it is a means of measuring andquantifying progress and reporting on the achievement of governmentpolicy objectives.

MOVING ON AND UP: ABSTRACT SPACES, LEARNING PATHWAYS, AND QUALIFICATIONS LADDERS

In talking about spatial practices and the production of space, Harvey,drawing on the work of Lefebvre, makes a three-way but interrelateddistinction between material spatial practices, representations of space, andspaces of representation (Harvey, 1989, pp 218–219) So far we havediscussed material spatial practices: The ways that everyday real-timespaces are created and inhabited by teacher and students and theconsequences thereof Representations of space refer to the linguisticand semiotic resources available to talk about and understand space,whereas spaces of representation are ‘‘mental inventions thatimagine new meanings or possibilities for spatial practices’’ (Harvey,

1989, pp 218–219) There is, however, another more abstract dimension

to the spatial practices of placement, involving both representations ofspace and a space of representation: the NQF In Lefebvre and Harvey’sterms, the NQF is a space of representation, in that it is initially a thingcreated or imagined, brought into existence by a policy intervention Assuch it indexes and draws on broader teleological notions of individualprogress and achievement, movement upwards towards a goal, be itwork, citizenship, or the other social benefits that can arguably resultfrom educational achievement Once in existence, strategically deployed

as a government policy, it becomes part of the language that studentsand teachers use to represent themselves as progressing (or not) withinthe NQF space As outlined earlier, students are assessed and placedaccording to national qualification levels (Pre-entry to Level 2), whichcreates in effect an abstract space that they move through as theyprogress, via achieving qualifications, towards ever higher levels Thestrong spatial metaphors at work here (moving up a level) suggest thevalue of examining how progression is constructed as a space ofrepresentation in Lefebvre and Harvey’s terms, creating new meaningsand possibilities onto which ESOL students and teachers are encouraged

to map themselves:1

So the (.) the idea the course is to move up (.) move on into Entry 3 ESOLbut to (.) to contextualise it so that instead of doing say the Skills for Lifematerials which are about somebody (.) other (.) well I can’t think of what (.)

1 Transcription conventions: (.) short pause; , comments on aspects of the talk in angle brackets; [ ] overlapping talk in square brackets; […] omitted talk or turns.