Educator's Views 1

Background

Paul Dufficy taught in a primary school in TESOL role with a small group of Tongan students. These TESOL classes were conducted away from the rest of the school and Paul had close contact with this group of students.

Observations

South Pacific Islanders suffer from a situation in which they are a minority group among minority groups. They are not numerous, do not have a strong voice, and tend to be overlooked by the power group which allocates funding and positions to ethnic communities. Therefore, there is not a strong commitment to support South Pacific Islanders first language use and, as a result, students cognitive development, self esteem, sense of identity and affinity with South Pacific Islander culture are detrimentally affected.

In the school Paul was teaching in there was a strong commitment to multi-cultural integration. TESOL had a prominent profile (Pauls office was next to the principals). End-of-year concerts and plays were performed in Lao, Vietnamese, Arabic and English. A tremendous number of parents came to these events and the response from the community was very positive.

The Tongan students however, didnt display any interest in their first language. They were reticent to talk about it in answer to questions and even used English amongst themselves in the playground. Some of their parents were very willing to come and perform cultural material and first language was encouraged within the school, but they persisted in using English.

Paul also observed that the Tongan boys were not embarrassed about being emotional. At the end of year when he told the class, who were considered to have behavioural problems, that they would be integrated into normal school classes next year, the leader of the group of Tongan boys began to cry in front of the whole class. Others of the group also began to cry.

The Islanders also were not interested in long-term learning goals, in Pauls experience. They were also very group-oriented.

Attitude of teaching staff

Most of the teachers had the perception that the Islander students were unwilling to learn, no-hopers. They were commonly seen as unintelligent and their poor performance in IQ tests appeared to support this. Teachers were also intimidated by the physical size of the students and considered them violent. These expectations often affected their interpretation of events that occurred and, as is the nature of expectations, began to be fulfilled by the students.