On a brutally cold winter day, I walk into a large old white frame house.
It sits back only slightly from the sidewalk, the tiny front lawn piled
high with snow. From the outside, this house is nearly indistinguishable
from the neighboring, two-family homes on this residential street. But on
entering, I immediately feel as if I have traveled across the world. My
companions suggest we remove our shoes. I dread walking in stockinged feet
on the cold floor. Yet the inhabitants of the building appear unaware of
the temperature outside, for inside they might as well be in Cambodia.
On the walls are pictures and posters from their native country, part of
one-time French Indochina and, in more recent memory, the People's Republic
of Kampuchea. Some of the images, once meant for the eyes of potential tourists,
depict the beauty of the ancient palace of Angkor Wat or the grace of pretty
young women in traditional dress. Others photographs and drawings present
Southeast Asian landscapes and scenes from the life of the Buddha.
As quiet as these art works adorning the temple, a dozen monks sit together
on a raised platform. These are men, old and young, their heads shaved,
their orange garments resembling the saris of India. Beneath the robes their
chests are bare, and their feet are uncovered, but the monks do not appear
to be cold. Across from them, another platform is arranged as a shrine.
The brightly lit, tiered platform is covered with flowers, bowls of fruit,
candles, and burning incense. A statue of the Buddha sits peacefully staring
out at the room, oblivious to the gifts lying before him.
I have come with my co-researcher and friend, Eileen Skovholt, and with
two Cambodian teachers from the public school system to ask the leader of
the Cambodian Theravada Buddhist temple in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, the
High Monk, to talk to us about his people.
A different Cambodian community, that of Philadelphia, has been called an
"invisible" community (Weinstein-Shr, 1992). But the one that
supports this temple could be invisible only to those who do not wish to
see. Cambodians who were originally settled as refugees in Maine, Oregon,
Minnesota, Texas as well as in other parts of Massachusetts have migrated
to the Lowell area to join their compatriots. They add to the area's influx
of recent immigrants from Laos and Vietnam, from the Caribbean, from the
Azores, and from India -- mixing in with the descendants of earlier immigrants
from Poland, Greece, Canada, and Ireland. Signs in the Khmer language announce
the presence of Cambodian businesses all over the city: restaurants, groceries,
video shops, hairdressers, clothing and jewelry stores. And in almost every
public school classroom Southeast Asian pupils study. Some speak unaccented
English, others struggle to understand any English at all. The older Cambodian
students, born in their own country but raised for many years in Thai and
Filipino refugee camps, have learned English and are being educated in high
schools and in the local community college. But many of the youngest, born
here into homes where Khmer alone is used, enter school without speaking
English. Most of these begin their formal education in bilingual programs.
In Massachusetts, unless parents choose placement in all-English, "mainstream"
classrooms, children entering school without speaking English are placed
in transitional bilingual education programs where they are taught academic
subjects in their native language while they learn English. In bilingual
classes for Khmer students, the teachers are invariably Cambodian, since
few non-Cambodians speak the Khmer language. The Khmer teacher is usually
teamed with an English-speaking colleague who teaches the children English
as a Second Language. Such bilingual classes for limited English speaking
students are mandated by state law when at least 20 such students from the
same language group reside in the community. This law was established in
1971 when the needs of a large Hispanic population demanded the attention
of educators and legislators.
My first contact with Khmer children and classrooms came when I was asked
by Lowell's school department to help train the Khmer-speaking Cambodian
teachers, who might have had little teaching experience and who certainly
lacked familiarity with the bilingual education model. The rapid influx
of Southeast Asian children meant new classes were being established continually.
As the numbers of newly arrived children strained the seams of the school
system, many of the new classes were set up outside of school buildings
in whatever space could be rented. Even the Boys Club and the YMCA contained
multi-graded classrooms where the newest arrivals studied and taught. I
was called upon to help the newest teachers do what seemed impossible.
Despite my long professional experience in bilingual education, I was unsure
what the goals of the Cambodian teachers were, or what a successful classroom
or program for Cambodian children would look like. Surely, placing pupils
in classes where their native language was spoken would be most comfortable
for the children themselves, but the value of their becoming literate in
Khmer, a language spoken by relatively few, was perhaps open to question.
I never thought I would doubt the value of instructing students in their
native language; all the research points to native language instruction
as the key not only to learning English but also to true bilingualism and
academic success for language minority students. The notion that children
will easily absorb English if placed in all-English classrooms is a folk
myth that usually turns out to be false. And it has always seemed to me
that tearing children abruptly away from their language is cruel.
But at the outset of my work with the Cambodian teachers, I found myself
wondering about the value of Khmer/English bilingualism. While the languages
of a Japan or a China might pave the way for careers in international relations,
business, or diplomacy, would the language of a Cambodia? Could Khmer --
or any number of other languages supported by relatively small populations
-- even have the usefulness in everyday American life of Spanish? Perhaps
the Massachusetts Transitional Bilingual Education model, designed as it
was for Latino children entering mainland U.S. schools, did not fit this
new community of newcomers.
We educators fancy ourselves more sophisticated than we were back in 1971,
when the current laws regarding bilingual programs in the Commonwealth were
implemented. We have come to know that learning a new language is not the
only task facing students coming from another country and another culture.
And we know that learning and using language itself is done in culturally
defined ways, and that these ways of learning and knowing might not match
teachers' ways of teaching and using language.
Certainly we know that one's native language is an important connection
to one's family and heritage, and cannot be lightly tossed aside. Yet, generations
of immigrants have risked emotional and cultural losses in the hopes that
giving up the native tongue and adopting English would help their children
succeed. Khmer parents, as noted by Smith-Hefner (1990), played no role
in the planning of bilingual programs in Massachusetts. How, I found myself
wondering, might the Cambodian community size up the situation at hand?
Surely the Cambodian families settling here have no hopes or plans for going
back to their still-war-ravished country. Perhaps, unlike the Spanish-speaking
immigrant and migrant communities, whose native lands are geographically
and economically close, there is no need or desire to continue to speak
Khmer. What's more, under the rule of Pol Pot, the schools had been closed
for years. Many of the parents of today's school children lost their own
opportunity for literacy in Khmer. How could they succeed in socializing
their children into literacy in their native language?
As I observed the development of the Southeast Asian bilingual programs,
new questions arose. The English-speaking teachers in regular programs and
those teaching ESL embraced "whole language" and other holistic
practices. More and more, whole texts were emphasized in the reading program,
rather than the piecemeal and mechanistic "phonics" approach.
Students were asked to work collaboratively in groups and to talk to one
another about the material they were studying.
But in the classrooms of many Khmer teachers, children sat silently in rows,
poring over their papers as they copied letters and words from the blackboards,
or reciting in unison as they repeated those same words after the teacher.
After a morning in this decidedly Asian classroom, the students might cross
the hall and cross borders into another classroom with a distinctly American
accent. I wondered how it affected children to have two such different school
experiences every day, and what they expected from teachers when their experiences
were so different with Cambodian and American instructors.
I wondered, too, what their understanding of literacy might be when in one
class they struggled to master sounds and words from homemade, photocopied
books -- acquiring instructional material in Khmer is a challenge for any
American school system -- and in the other they saw beautifully illustrated
and professionally bound children's literature and instructional texts in
every subject. Were parents aware of the differences that existed between
the Khmer and English parts of the program? Did they have a preference for
how their children were taught?
With so many questions, my colleague and I approached the community of Khmer
parents and teachers to see if they could tell us what were their hopes,
desires, and expectations for the education of their children. We interviewed
parents of students in the bilingual education program, Khmer-speaking teachers,
and some English-speaking ESL teachers and school administrators. We asked
about their experiences with public schools, about their perceptions of
the role of teachers, and about the importance of maintaining the Khmer
language. We wanted to know, too, about home literacy practices and about
the ways parents helped children learn to read.
Among our questions, the most intriguing for us were those that touched
on the desirability of bilingualism itself, the purported goal of the bilingual
program. After all, if the Cambodian community in America were ultimately
to give up the Khmer language in favor of English, becoming a "language
shift" community, bilingual education might be much less supportable
for them than it has been historically for other groups. On the other hand,
language is always a link to culture, community, and history, and perhaps
there is a need to preserve Khmer that goes beyond practicality. What seemed
most important was to ascertain what the Khmer here in Lowell wanted for
their children, rather than to make assumptions based on the needs of other
communities. The answers we got reflected a continuum of views, but for
all parents -- for those placing children in bilingual programs as well
as for those electing the regular English language classes -- knowledge
of, and literacy in, the Khmer language proved important, not only for a
sense of continuity with the land of origin, but as a vehicle to preserve
the Khmer culture. One Khmer parent put it this way:
I do not teach them in Khmer. I don't want to mix the languages. I just
want them to learn in English. When they grow up I will teach them to read
and write in Khmer. We always speak Khmer in the house. They know both languages
equally. We live in the United States, so we have to speak English. English
is not just in the U.S.--it's all over the world. It's important for the
future. Khmer is not a world-wide language.
Another parent gave voice to a different perspective:
It's important that the children learn to read and write in Khmer and English,
too. I visit the school and I saw them teach in Khmer. ... I help them to
write in Khmer at home.
I am happy they have a Cambodian teacher. I want them to learn in Cambodian,
too. And I want the schools to teach Khmer at a higher level so the children
will learn to read and write at a higher level.
We asked a man from a city with no bilingual program if he and his wife
spoke Khmer at home to their children. "Yes," he said, "all
of the time. One hundred percent. Yes, since they are babies. But when they
went outside to play with the friends they start to speak English."
Had he ever tried to teach the children to read and write Khmer at home?
"Oh, no, because I don't have the time. I only able to teach one day
and a few weeks later another couple of words. Sometime I read them a Khmer
story. They like it. Then one night I showed the book and tried to show
a consonant."
A bilingual teacher, commenting upon his own
perception of the community's attitudes about keeping alive the Khmer language,
told us that not all Khmer parents care:
Some of them they feel like they came to the United States, they live in
the United States, they don't care. But most of them care. They want their
children to learn their own language. Even if they know that English is
the most important language, in the United States they still want to keep
their language.
This same teacher also expressed frustration because in the bilingual
program students don't get to stay long enough to achieve an adequate level
of literacy in Khmer:
I think with some children you should make the rule to keep them maybe five
years. The student can read and write, you know. Now, they just learn to
read and write and they go to mainstream. They're gone and then we expect
the parent to teach them at home. But they don't have time. That's why the
bilingual program doesn't help the children to learn or keep the native
language.
Despite this teacher's emphasis on the length of time it takes to become
literate, the community's concerns about passing on the native language
involved cultural considerations as much as linguistic. Interconnected in
many responses to our questions were desires to maintain the Khmer language,
to preserve the traditional role of the teacher, and to pass on the Khmer
culture:
I think it's very important to save our native language ... Even at home,
most parents speak to children in the native language. And most parents
always explain to the children in the Cambodian way, Cambodian culture,
and they want to keep identity language.
...Most of my parents, most my children's parents, they so happy when the
children--I got some children in Chapter 1 now, first grade. They speak
good in native language. They say, "Teacher, my mother want me to learn
Khmer. My mother so happy."
The Cambodian parents expect the children learn everything from the teacher.
And the Cambodian teacher will give the children a good education and help
the children in the future... Some parents never come to school because
they think, oh, the Cambodian teacher is really good and give good advice
to the children and good knowledge to the children and will provide a good
life....The parents expect the teacher will help the behavior, too, because
most children listen to the teacher. Most Cambodian children usually respect
and listen to the teacher....Values. Cambodian parents hope we will teach
values, like the polite ways children should use in the family. The parents
want, they like a homelike lesson.
This teacher explained how she teaches proper Khmer greetings to her
young students:
Every morning when the children come to my class I just tell them to say,
"Chumreep soo na kru" and they say, "Good morning teacher."
Before they go home, they say, "Chumreep lee na kru." That means,
"Goodbye, teacher."
We asked her if the children's parents tell them to use those traditional
forms of greeting.
"They don't tell them, they won't tell them," she asserted. "They
forgot about that. So I start to do that, and the first time I say, 'Right
now, today even, you go home, you do that, I want you to say "chumreep
soo ma, chumreep soo pa," say hello to your mom and dad.' Then they
start to do that to the parents. And one children they say that, 'Oh, I
do that to my father, he laugh!' I said, 'Why did he laugh? Ask him.' I
said, 'Maybe he's so excited because you do that, because you never do that
before. Now you know how to do that, so your father, your mom, excited.'
So I do that all the time. "
Another teacher shared his understanding of the role of the Cambodian teacher
in the community:
The community look at the teacher as the moral person. That's why if I go
to party I actually don't drink, but when I think about my job make me not
want to drink because I feel role model . We cannot do something that's
not good for the people, for the children. Because kru, kru
[teacher in Khmer]. . . in our language that means the moral person and
in English I don't know what that means -- just people who teach somebody.
In Cambodia, the teacher is very high.
This teacher's explanation of the kru's importance to the Khmer expresses
not only the status and respect conferred on educators, but is an example
of just one element of the Khmer social order. According to Ledgerwood (1990)
the emphasis on hierarchical relationships in Khmer culture is extreme.
Most of the Cambodian refugees who arrived here in the 1980's are from the
population of rural peasants. In Khmer society, they would fall on a rung
of the social ladder lower than teachers, who, along with merchants and
government workers belonged to a middle level -- above the farmers and below
the royalty and religious leaders who were at the highest level. However,
this is only the barest skeleton of a complex social and moral order. As
Ledgerwood (1990) explains, all beings are ranked in a larger cosmic order:
Humans exist beneath gods and above animals. Among human beings, all individuals
are ranked. Southeast Asian languages clearly demonstrate this through their
lack of generalized pronouns and their specialized vocabularies for addressing
royalty and clergy. In Khmer, basic verbs such as "eat" and "sleep"
change with the status of the person being addressed or referenced. Humans
are inherently unequal.
(Ledgerwood, 1990, p.14)
The prestige accorded persons of high status derives from their many previous
incarnations, their previous lives, in which they have accumulated merit,
or dharma, through selfless service to others, according to Buddhist belief.
Once someone has achieved a high rank in society, it is then his duty to
perform even more good deeds, thus accumulating even more merit.
When asked about the role of the Khmer teacher and the use of the Khmer
language in school, almost all the parents told us that they needed the
Cambodian teachers to teach the language and culture to their children.
But when asked what he meant by "teaching culture," a grandparent
linked language and culture as he talked about what he thought young children
needed to learn: "The Cambodian teacher must teach correct behavior.
When to bow, when to say excuse me, and how to formally address someone."
Another father said that everyone knows how to teach, but the teachers know
more than parents. The teacher needs to teach the children how to speak
and behave.
The combined effect of our respondents' comments was to remind me of what,
on some level, I have always known. However impractical it might be from
economic or political perspectives to know the Khmer language, those aren't
of primary import. What is significant, it seems, is that the use of the
Khmer language in or out of school is linked to one's identity as a Khmer,
and it is this identity that the Cambodian community wants to protect and
to nurture in its children. The language is linked to culture not only in
the way any native language is part of the culture to which it belongs,
but it is only through the Khmer language that relationships within the
Khmer social order could be authentically expressed. If children do not
learn this language, then the task of conveying the Khmer way of understanding
social relationships and moral responsibilities, so crucial to the Khmer
way of life, becomes almost impossible.
Yet perhaps because among English speaking teachers there is not much understanding
of Cambodian culture, we often hear the opinion that for the students' own
good, they should be encouraged to use only English in school. An ESL teacher
who works with Cambodian children in the bilingual program expressed views
typical of many teachers who work with immigrant children. It was her feeling
"that children first grade or lower shouldn't be in bilingual. . .
. They should be in a regular classroom -- They would be in English speaking
from the beginning."
Yet in the same interview this teacher also stated:
One of the things that I try to communicate to them is that I don't want
them to lose their first language, that I feel that this is something very
special, and I try to communicate that I wish I had it -- that I was able
to be bilingual. But that to survive they have to pick up this language
[English] and they have to know how to read and write in the language.
To survive -- that is key. What does it mean to the Khmer to survive?
"The Khmer in America," Ledgerwood asserts at the end of her dissertation,
"are afraid their children will cease to be Khmer. They see them losing
the use of this common language, they see them with fewer Khmer political
and religious leaders, they see them cut off from the cycle of rice production
and from the land itself" (Ledgerwood, 1990 p. 325).
So, we have come to visit the High Monk, someone whose whole life is dedicated
to the survival of the Khmer people, language, and culture here in the United
States. Like his religious followers, we have a sense that he will have
answers for us. What he tells us, though, seems more mundane, perhaps, than
we had hoped.
As a religious leader, he tells us, he feels very involved in the education
of the children and that the home, temple, and school have traditionally
formed a triangle which structures the rearing of children. But, it is not
the same here as it was in Cambodia:
It is two different things about temple here and temple in Cambodia. In
Cambodia it easy for the people to come to the temple but in here it hard
because they have a lot of jobs.
He also says that it is his role to teach the parents to help their children
succeed in school, even to explain the importance of checking the children's
report cards. "The temple must mold the parents first." The monks
are also directly involved in raising the children. "The parents bring
the child to the monk for discipline," he explains. "They trust
the monk completely. He can change bad behavior to good behavior."
He says that the temple is most important in keeping the Khmer language.
To provide appropriate education for the children, he tried at one time
to open a school. Unfortunately, this project failed, but classes in Khmer
are offered after school and during the summer. He is still attempting to
raise enough money to establish a school.
And he told us a story we had heard before in other versions, a story about
a family whose children no longer spoke Khmer while the mother spoke no
English. The parents and children, he said, were "at war with each
other."
This theme is echoed in an excerpt from a poem by the Cambodian poet, Chet
Chea.
The children don't know Khmer
Their mothers barely speak English
One day the child swears at her
And she says, "thank you"!...
On that day
In front of everyone
Friends and relatives
Hear the children curse their mother
They feel ill at ease
What kind of woman is she not to be ashamed?...
The children have forgotten Khmer
Because their parents
Are shortsighted
They're afraid their children won't know
How to speak English
They don't worry
That they've already forgotten Khmer!
--(Chet 1991)
Some of the High Monk's comments suggested that he saw his own role as
it might have been within the Khmer social structure in Cambodia, as one
upon whom authority was conferred to oversee children's upbringing and education.
He told us that he wished he could work with the public schools and particularly
with the bilingual teachers so he could guide them. I thought about how
the School Committee might object to deferring to a religious leader on
matters pertaining to public education, and yet, clearly, he is a cultural
and community leader as well. At the same time, the poet Chet would not
have to lament the loss of Khmer if all the Khmer in America agreed with
the monk about the importance of the children's continuing to know the Khmer
language and way of life.
As I heard from the Khmer-speaking Cambodians of Lowell their views about
education and their wishes for their children, I realized how the apparent
lack of practicality of teaching and learning in Khmer is a peripheral and
unimportant issue when considering what is best for these refugee children.
The Khmer are accustomed to turning their children over to trusted teachers
and monks to be educated, and to be educated means, in the words of the
High Monk, to learn "what it is to be Khmer" as much as it means
to be literate.
In this first generation of Cambodian settlement in the United States, many
Khmer are telling us that they need to hold on to their native language
to find the strength to survive. But parents in this community are working
too hard at overcoming their emotional and material losses to carry the
burden of teaching Khmer language and literacy on their own. They need the
bilingual program, already in place in many public schools, and the Khmer
teachers within it, to help them, so they can turn their children over to
trusted teachers, as they have always done. But if our educational policy
makers have already decided that it is best for Cambodian and other immigrant
and refugee children to simply learn English as quickly as possible, and
that native language instruction can only be a temporary aid to the learning
of English, then this policy will contribute to a loss of language, culture,
and even family unity that will only add to the profound losses already
suffered by the Khmer. Current calls for school reform stress the importance
of parent involvement; we must listen to what Cambodian parents are telling
us.
References
Chet, Chea (1991). "The Children Don't Know Khmer, Their Parents
Don't Know English." In Cambodia's Lament. trans. and ed. by
G. Chicas, 72-82. Miller's Falls, MA, Review of Asian Literature. Quoted
in Weinstein-Shr, 1992.
Ledgerwood, Judy (1992). Changing Khmer conceptions of gender:
women, stories, and the social order. Cornell University Ph.D.
Dissertation.
Smith-Hefner, Nancy (1990). "Language and identity in the
education of Boston-area Khmer." Anthropology and Education Quarterly,
21, pp. 250-268.
Weinstein-Shr, Gail (1992). "Learning lives in the post-island
world." Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 23, pp. 166-171.
Wong Fillmore, Lily (1986). "Teaching bilingual learners," in
Wittrock, M.C. (Ed.) Handbook of Research on Teaching, third edition.
New York: Macmillan, pp. 648-685.
Ellen Rintell is an Assistant Professor of Education at Salem State College. She coordinates the M.Ed Program in Teaching English as a Second Language. A former Boston area bilingual (Spanish/English) teacher, she currently serves on the planning team for the New School at Saltonstall, a collaborative project of Salem State College and the Salem Public Schools. The research for this article was supported in part by a Seed Money Grant from the Graduate School of Salem State College.