Interactions and Inter-relationships Around Text: Practices and Positionings in a Multilingual Classroom in Brunei

Abstract

This paper emerges from a microethnographic study of a number of classrooms in different areas of Negara Brunei Darussalam (henceforth Brunei), a small Malay Islamic Monarchy on the northern coast of Borneo, Southeast Asia. The official language is Bahasa Melayu, and a local variety of Malay, referred to as Brunei Malay, is the language of everyday communication. Since independence in 1984, English has been one of the languages in the sistem pendidikan dwibahasa or bilingual education system. In this system Malay is the language of instruction for the first three years of schooling. From the fourth year, English becomes the language of instruction for most subjects in the curriculum. The focus of this paper is one classroom in a small up-river school away from the Malay centre, and in one of the few areas in the country where a form of Malay is not the major language in the community. The area consists of three ethnic groups, the Dusun, Penan and Iban, groups which have their own languages. The paper describes the reading practices in the classroom, and discusses the positionings of the participants, and the languages used to accomplish literacy events. In particular, it focuses on the inter-relationships between monolingual text and the participants' multilingual talking text into being.