tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11325473201967152832024-03-13T23:34:41.295+08:00Being MultilingualMadalena Cruz-Ferreirahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14782492322928803326noreply@blogger.comBlogger161125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1132547320196715283.post-69797051289225415552018-02-28T14:08:00.002+08:002018-02-28T15:33:01.626+08:00Multilingual ‘deficiencies’ or assessment deficiencies?<style type="text/css">
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The Roman poet </span><a href="http://www.ancient-literature.com/rome_juvenal.html" style="font-family: inherit;" target="_blank">Juvenal</a><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">is credited with asking</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span><i style="font-family: inherit;">Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?</i><span style="font-family: inherit;">, sometimes translated as ‘Who guards the guardians?’ The question doesn’t boil down to simple word play: guardians do need their own guards, as much as teachers need teachers, or doctors doctors. Assessments need assessments, too. Unfortunately, where assessment of linguistic communicative abilities is concerned, particularly among multilingual children, the consensus about X needing X appears to break down.</span><br />
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</span></span> <span style="font-family: inherit;">Communication takes place through the use of a shared code (e.g. a language), by means of code-bound rules that enable coding and decoding of messages between a sender and a receiver, respectively. It follows that if the code is </span><i style="font-family: inherit;">not shared</i><span style="font-family: inherit;">, there will be either no communication or deficient communication, which would seem to be a pretty basic inference to draw. Assessment tool designers, however, apparently believe instead that any code that happens to be familiar to them is, or should be, shared by any potential test-takers.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The rationale behind communicative ability tests in common use in schools and speech-language clinics hinges on two assumptions: first, that languages amount to sets of well-defined, discrete items and rules such as sounds, words, or word order which, being quantifiable, will provide a straightforward and statistically reliable measure of the test-taker’s ‘command’ over them; and second, that languages are <a href="https://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2012/05/language-integrity.html" target="_blank">clear-cut entities</a> enjoying a stable, homogeneous life of their own which is independent from the uses that their users make of them. These two assumptions make it clear that language proficiency tests assess linguistic mechanics, not linguistic use, and explain the belief that any language is, or should be, shared by all of its users, in the same way.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Communicative assessment tools test single languages, those that are normed to represent the official (or national, or mainstream, or ‘standard’, or ‘good’) <i>variety</i> of the language in use in the official institutions where assessment happens to take place. Being designed to evaluate ideal monolingual uses of language, they naturally fail to account for <a href="https://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2016/06/switching-languages-mixing-languages-or.html" target="_blank">real-life multilingual communication abilities</a>. It is therefore small wonder that multilingual children’s test scores remain under (monolingual) par, resulting in suspected or confirmed diagnoses of communicative ‘deficiency’, first in <a href="https://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2016/02/being-multilingual-in-school.html" target="_blank">school</a> and then in <a href="https://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2016/03/being-multilingual-in-clinic.html" target="_blank">clinic</a>, to where schoolchildren are referred and where the same traditional assessment instruments are used. The deficiency li<span style="font-family: inherit;">es instead in inappropriate use of assessment tools among multilingual populations – a deficiency that extends to assessment of <a href="https://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2012/05/little-multi-dialectals.html" target="_blank">users of non-‘standard’ monolingual varieties</a>.</span></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Current assessments of communication abilities among multilingual children safeguard a mythical </span></span></span>‘integrity’ of the languages in which assessment necessarily takes place, to the detriment of language users.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Image: <a href="http://educationmattersmag.com.au/multilingual-children-misdiagnosed-expert-says/" target="_blank">EducationMattersMag</a>, via <a href="https://www.mcera.org.au/" target="_blank">MCERA</a></td></tr>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In Plato’s <i>Republic</i>, the guardians of Kallipolis should educate their souls in, among other virtues, wisdom, courage, and justice, because it is always better to be just than unjust. The same applies, to my mind, to those who should assess assessment tools, to ensure that they represent a fair assessment of what they purport to assess. This is no word play either. I take the lack of scrutiny in academic and clinical assessment matters to constitute a violation of human rights, and I contributed an article on this topic to the <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/iasl20/20/1" target="_blank">special edition</a> of the <i>International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology</i> celebrating the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17549507.2018.1392607" target="_blank">Assessment of communication abilities in multilingual children: Language rights or human rights?</a> As I say in the conclusion to the article, “Ensuring that children can exercise their right to communicate […] remains with those who can speak for them”.</span></span><br />
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</span> <span class="Z3988" title="ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Ajournal&rft.jtitle=International+Journal+of+Speech-Language+Pathology&rft_id=info%3A%2F10.1080%2F17549507.2018.1392607&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fresearchblogging.org&rft.atitle=Assessment+of+communication+abilities+in+multilingual+children%3A+Language+rights+or+human+rights%3F&rft.issn=&rft.date=2018&rft.volume=20&rft.issue=1&rft.spage=166&rft.epage=169&rft.artnum=http%3A%2F%2Fdx.doi.org%2F10.1080%2F17549507.2018.1392607&rft.au=Madalena+Cruz-Ferreira&rfe_dat=bpr3.included=1;bpr3.tags=Medicine%2CSocial+Science%2CResearch+%2F+Scholarship%2CLinguistics%2C+Pathology%2C+Education%2C+Policy%2C+Ethics%2C+Science+Communication">Madalena Cruz-Ferreira (2018). Assessment of communication abilities in multilingual children: Language rights or human rights? <span style="font-style: italic;">International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 20</span> (1), 166-169. DOI: <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17549507.2018.1392607" rev="review">10.1080/17549507.2018.1392607</a></span><br />
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<br />Madalena Cruz-Ferreirahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14782492322928803326noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1132547320196715283.post-40639461456979672092016-09-17T00:00:00.000+08:002018-01-25T03:33:56.500+08:00Language learners and linguistic resourcefulness<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Learning new languages can be a source of unexpected pleasure. I don’t just mean the perhaps more familiar prospects that making sense of the languages will make sense of people and cultures that up to then had struck us as ‘odd’, or allow us to acquire, first-hand, knowledge and wisdom that we had no idea existed because we had no idea how to access the code that gives them voice. I also mean making sense of the languages as objects of discovery themselves, which goes well beyond the <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2014/03/learning-languages-what-for.html" target="_blank">utilitarian purposes</a> we’re commonly told we should learn languages for.</div>
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I mean the fun of cracking, bit by bit, on our own, the <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2013/12/multilingual-crosswords.html" target="_blank">puzzles</a> that languages are, as when we start asking ourselves questions like Can we say things this way? or How come there are words for this? Eventually, such ‘this’ questions lead to their ‘that’ counterparts – How about that way? Can there be words for that, too? Asking ‘that’ questions means that we’re ready to take ownership of our new languages, prompting us to attempt to answer these questions ourselves. </div>
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Exploring possibilities in this way is what learning is all about. <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/10/children-toys-and-languages.html" target="_blank">Children do it</a> – which may well explain why they are said to be <a href="http://linguistlist.org/ask-ling/lang-acq.cfm" target="_blank">expert language learners</a>. Encouraging similar exploration among older learners, including of the <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/04/globalization-of-english-implications.html" target="_blank">mistakes</a> that inevitably follow and that provide evidence of learning, would thus appear to assist language learning. H. G. Widdowson thought so, when he argued that “proficiency only comes with nonconformity” in <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.2307/3587438/abstract" target="_blank">The ownership of English</a>, and so did Guy Cook in <i><a href="https://elt.oup.com/catalogue/items/global/linguistics/oxford_applied_linguistics/9780194421539?cc=se&selLanguage=en" target="_blank">Language Play, Language Learning</a></i>. </div>
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Yet learners’ attempts at putting their linguistic resourcefulness to good use in their learning are deemed inappropriate, as Nelson Flores and Jonathan Rosa discuss in <a href="http://www.hepgjournals.org/doi/abs/10.17763/0017-8055.85.2.149?journalCode=haer" target="_blank">Undoing appropriateness: Raciolinguistic ideologies and language diversity in education</a>. Curtailing learner inventiveness in judgemental terms draws on two paradoxes. First, the framing of learners’ “linguistic practices as deficient regardless of how closely they follow supposed rules of appropriateness”, in Flores and Rosa’s words, that is, of how closely they follow <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/05/non-native-common-ground.html" target="_blank">‘native speaker’ standards</a>. And second, the predication of <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2016/04/multilinguals-and-creativity.html" target="_blank">creativity</a> on multilingualism while condemning multilingual creativity for not being monolingual. </div>
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We seem to want to find fault with features of language because finding fault with features of language users is not politically correct, as a <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2015/08/language-multilingualism-and-racism.html" target="_blank">previous post</a> makes clear. Or not traditionally correct: a recent discussion at ResearchGate, on <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/post/How_advanced_must_L2_speakers_be_before_native_speakers_accept_their_neologisms_as_acceptable_rather_than_inaccurate" target="_blank">How advanced must L2 speakers be before native speakers accept their neologisms as acceptable rather than inaccurate?</a>, highlights the focus of traditional language teaching on the languages and their mythical <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2012/05/language-integrity.html" target="_blank">homogeneity</a>, rather than on the <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/09/teaching-languages-vs-teaching-learners.html" target="_blank">learners</a>. We keep confusing languages with <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2015/07/textbook-languages.html" target="_blank">textbook samples</a> of them, on the conviction that what matters for language teaching and learning isn’t what matters to the learners, here and now, but what mattered to textbook creators, there and then.</div>
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Wanting to be taught <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2013/01/abandon-all-hope-ye-who-enter-here.html" target="_blank">language that matters to us</a>, wondering about ‘this’ and ‘that’ questions in our new languages, and wanting to be allowed to find answers to them are signs of linguistic competence. <a href="https://english.wsu.edu/nancy-bell/" target="_blank">Nancy Bell</a> and <a href="http://scholar.gse.upenn.edu/pomerantz" target="_blank">Anne Pomerantz</a> have researched these issues for the past two decades, pointing out the fictional nature of traditional language learning materials and encouraging the expansion of learner repertoires through active engagement with the languages. In their new book, <i><a href="https://www.routledge.com/Humor-in-the-Classroom-A-Guide-for-Language-Teachers-and-Educational-Researchers/Bell-Pomerantz/p/book/9780415640541" target="_blank">Humor in the Classroom. A Guide for Language Teachers and Educational Researchers</a></i>, they argue that understanding and producing language play is a good indicator of proficiency, too. They reject the contention that “humor and play have no place in the serious business of scholarship, let alone language education”, by revisiting misconceptions about “unconventional talk, particularly as they relate to how we understand language use, language learning, and language teaching in educational spaces.”</div>
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Addressing language learners’ linguistic resourcefulness in teaching materials, teaching methods and classroom practices might mean unlearning the modes and contents of what we’ve come to expect of traditional language teaching, for both instructors and learners. But I suspect there may well be unexpected sources of teaching and learning pleasure in starting to ask ‘that’ questions about our current language teaching philosophies, and looking for answers to them.</div>
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Flores, N., & Rosa, J. (2015). Undoing Appropriateness: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and Language Diversity in Education. <span style="font-style: italic;">Harvard Educational Review, 85</span> (2), 149-171. DOI: <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.17763/0017-8055.85.2.149" rev="review">10.17763/0017-8055.85.2.149</a><br />
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Widdowson, H. (1994). The Ownership of English. <span style="font-style: italic;">TESOL Quarterly, 28</span> (2). DOI: <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3587438" rev="review">10.2307/3587438</a><br />
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This will be my last regular post on this blog. </div>
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There are 160 posts for you to enjoy, on the blog’s core topics of</div>
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myths and misconceptions about being multilingual<br />
in the home, in school and in clinic. </div>
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Thank you for your reader support so far! </div>
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Madalena Cruz-Ferreirahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14782492322928803326noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1132547320196715283.post-44086018719614837912016-07-23T00:00:00.000+08:002017-03-11T22:00:13.797+08:00Nature, nurture, and linguistic giftedness<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
I met a Scandinavian couple the other
day, who had visited Portugal countless times. They waxed lyrical
about the country, its beauty, its history, its food, its people (I can, by the way, impartially confirm that their comments were spot
on), and told me they would be moving there soon. Paperwork,
housing and banking matters were all good to go, and they were
delighted to have found a native who could answer their less
bureaucratic questions.</div>
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“So when will you start learning
Portuguese?”, I asked in turn. “Oh, no need for that!”, they
waved me aside, “Everyone speaks English there”. They do?, I
thought, wondering what <i>everyone</i> and <i><a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/01/using-someone-elses-languages.html" target="_blank">English</a></i> might mean, whenever anyone says what they’d just said. Okay, I
went on thinking, so they’re aiming to make a <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2012/01/my-homeland-is-my-language.html" target="_blank">home</a> of Portugal’s beauty, history, food, and people in <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2012/11/linguistic-ghettos.html" target="_blank">a language that is neither theirs nor the country’s</a>.
How will that work itself out?, I wanted to ask next but, before I
could, they added: “Besides, we’re not good at languages.”</div>
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I must have mumbled something in
response, and we probably went on talking about the marvels, the
enrichment, etc. etc., afforded by travelling the world. I can’t
remember. I’ve learned to switch to sociable autopilot after that
line, one that I’ve heard countless times and as infinitely tried
to counter, to null effect. The cumulative facts that I use more than
the magical number of just <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2012/04/languages-of-multilinguals.html" target="_blank">two languages</a> in my daily life and that I <a href="http://beingmultilingual.com/Services.html" target="_blank">‘work with languages’</a> apparently make me
unsuitable to speak for the learning of new ones. “You’re gifted
for languages”, people nod knowledgeably at me and, as far as
they’re concerned, this compliment ends the argument.</div>
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The issue is, of course, that this is
no compliment at all. It makes light of the tremendous amount of time, will, engagement, openness to input, readiness for practice that goes into learning any language, any time, whether we’re <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2010/11/age-decay-and-missed-opportunities.html" target="_blank">big</a> or <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2010/12/linguistic-virtuosi-prestissimo.html" target="_blank">small</a>. It tells me and other language learners that
we’ve learned our languages because we were, literally, <i>given</i>
something that we didn’t need to have merited to earn. It tells me
and other believers in hard work that we should believe instead in
easy handouts that we can’t help being awarded – or <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/12/language-geniuses-and-language-dunces.html" target="_blank">not awarded</a>:
the corollary of gift theories of learning is that some of us “are
not good” at learning certain things, and can’t help it either. </div>
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The issue is also that the
gifted-for-languages reasoning is flawed. It says that in order to be
able to learn languages we must be good at languages. So are we all
gifted, since all of us are good at learning at least one language,
or does linguistic giftedness apply only to multilinguals? In that
case, the gift can only reveal itself after we’ve learned a couple of languages, since nobody is born using them. So was there a gift to
start off with, or did we acquire language learning skills on the
job? Are we talking nature or nurture?</div>
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Understand me right: I’m not denying
giftedness. I’m saying that arguing that you can only learn to use
new languages if you’re gifted for languages makes as much sense as
arguing that you can only learn to use new smartphones if you’re
gifted for smartphones. I can’t deny giftedness because the single
most important thing I’ve learned from my 40+ years as a teacher is
that we’re all gifted. The trick is to find where that gift lies,
which is not necessarily where entitled education policy-makers keep
telling us <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/10/children-toys-and-languages.html" target="_blank">where to look</a>.
In order to be good at what we do, what we need to be <i>given</i> is
the chance to develop what we’ve got. Francis Bacon dixit, in <i><a href="http://www.constitution.org/bacon/nov_org.htm" target="_blank">Novum Organon</a></i>, 1: CXXI:
“So again the seeds of things are of much latent virtue, and yet of
no use except in their development”. Or, as Edward M. Hundert puts
it in the last paragraph of his book <i><a href="http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674525412" target="_blank">Lessons from an Optical Illusion. On Nature and Nurture, Knowledge and Values</a></i>, we
must strive to “nurture that nature that has nurtured us”.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Let me leave you with two other nuggets
of wisdom about learners and learning: Aristotle’s “Consuetudo
est altera natura” (‘Habit is second nature’) and Quintilian’s
“Consuetudo certissima est loquendi magistra” (‘Usage is the
best language teacher’). <i>Consuetudo</i> is where we find the gift.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
I’m sure that my new friends will
enjoy living in Portugal – their way, with <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2014/01/expats-and-immigrants.html" target="_blank">expat</a> English among English-speaking Portuguese. They won’t notice, and I
won’t tell them, what they’ll miss about Portugal’s <i><a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2010/10/languages-come-in-flavours.html" target="_blank">consuetudines</a></i>. Or about exploring unsuspected language learning skills, more on which next time.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
© MCF 2016</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<i>Next post: </i><i><b><a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2016/09/language-learners-and-linguistic.html" target="_blank">Language learners and linguistic resourcefulness</a>.</b></i><i> Saturday 17</i><sup><i><span style="font-size: xx-small;">th</span></i></sup><i>
September 2016.</i></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
Madalena Cruz-Ferreirahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14782492322928803326noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1132547320196715283.post-26505297045559959052016-07-09T00:00:00.000+08:002017-03-11T22:02:56.265+08:00Being multiscriptal: why our alphabets matter=Guest post=<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDGVW6ied1vBYnybXz8GGG6MSMwNbV9ewzJJOehWusl98vNiwbw9RYXSWyUJBe5PXgsHY3IV55zoQrZlc28-G1Fqj8H0eLhzrJmOyaV36nGej_3Lxjy5UKOntnJwZO7gzaAH9Jg-SJBDvI/s1600/Tim+Brookes.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDGVW6ied1vBYnybXz8GGG6MSMwNbV9ewzJJOehWusl98vNiwbw9RYXSWyUJBe5PXgsHY3IV55zoQrZlc28-G1Fqj8H0eLhzrJmOyaV36nGej_3Lxjy5UKOntnJwZO7gzaAH9Jg-SJBDvI/s200/Tim+Brookes.jpg" width="158" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Photo credit: Matt Thorsen</div>
</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
by Tim Brookes<br />
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Before I started the <a href="http://endangeredalphabets.com/" target="_blank">Endangered Alphabets project</a>, I thought of myself as being multilingual: good
French, decent German, solid Latin, tourist Spanish and Italian,
toasts in Russian and obscenities in half a dozen languages.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Now, after seven years of carving the
world’s most obscure and endangered writing systems, it’s clear
what a novice I am. I just received a Facebook birthday card from a
colleague who wrote in a dozen languages, most of them endangered.
And my ethnocentricity has been challenged head-on by the fact that
in doing more than 100 carvings in more than 30 different minority
scripts I can now read precisely one word in a non-Latin script: the
Balinese word <i><span style="background: transparent;">suksma</span></i>,
meaning ‘thank you’.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiadACqgLvuQqal8kbQfAK07R2jtPliir6IPnTMgUGEbu6eozP-9mMCrMdKw-i_RhgLXwf5xVIXLqKLmYm8HMpjnD2kqRtSZU8lm8k-6Ut9Wpb-oGxr-eMmFAK95dAOcQlPUyXQrY41BcH_/s1600/Balinese.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="298" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiadACqgLvuQqal8kbQfAK07R2jtPliir6IPnTMgUGEbu6eozP-9mMCrMdKw-i_RhgLXwf5xVIXLqKLmYm8HMpjnD2kqRtSZU8lm8k-6Ut9Wpb-oGxr-eMmFAK95dAOcQlPUyXQrY41BcH_/s320/Balinese.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in; orphans: 2; widows: 2;">
<span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial;">The
Balinese word “</span>suksma<span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial;">”
(‘thank you’).</span></div>
<div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in; orphans: 2; widows: 2;">
<span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial;">Carved
in cherry</span></div>
<div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in; orphans: 2; widows: 2;">
<span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial;">Photo
credit: Tom Way</span></div>
</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
Yet oddly enough my insular limitations
have also been a strength in this ongoing project, or at least have
offered me perspectives that might otherwise be hard to come by. My first exhibition of carvings, all of
which featured <a href="http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/" target="_blank">Article One</a> of the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights in endangered writing systems, grew out of my stumbling upon
<a href="http://omniglot.com/" target="_blank">Omniglot</a>, the online encyclopedia of writing
systems and languages. It was a revelation. I thought of myself as
fairly well-traveled and widely-read, yet I’d never heard of
probably 85% of the languages on Omniglot. And the texts themselves
were all Greek to me – well, more than Greek, given that in many
cases I couldn’t pronounce a single glyph or understand a single
word-cluster.</div>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; orphans: 2; text-align: left; widows: 2;">
<span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial;">
</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
In a way, that was an advantage. I saw
those languages not in terms of the communication of meaning but as a
series of symbols that had evolved (or in some instances been
created) <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/03/learning-to-read-in-multilingual.html" target="_blank">for a reason</a>, or a series of reasons. My ignorance led me to
ask questions that might never occur to someone versed in that
language. Why was the Inuktitut script so mathematical? Why was
Baybayin so damn thin it was hard to carve and even harder to paint?</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
</div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggF91JZYridtfLmJSYE2-KugjAE9I2VYEk_XGR9D3aborzXxMk7EI-9WgWs9psyJ7V-Kfk1PLVqRuVTX9-jKTzVLywBC3csYoQkM1i_cpRlpA-CuTRbwT6Mpu7udpuV5EKu30EUhCahGoW/s1600/Baybayin.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggF91JZYridtfLmJSYE2-KugjAE9I2VYEk_XGR9D3aborzXxMk7EI-9WgWs9psyJ7V-Kfk1PLVqRuVTX9-jKTzVLywBC3csYoQkM1i_cpRlpA-CuTRbwT6Mpu7udpuV5EKu30EUhCahGoW/s320/Baybayin.jpg" width="256" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in; orphans: 2; widows: 2;">
The
phrase “mother tongue” in Baybayin, the pre-colonial script of
the Philippines,
</div>
<div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in; orphans: 2; widows: 2;">
based
on calligraphy/graffiti by Kristian Kabuay.
</div>
<div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in; orphans: 2; widows: 2;">
Carved
in flame cherry</div>
<div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in; orphans: 2; widows: 2;">
Photo
credit: <span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial;">Tom Way</span></div>
</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
Why were the letters of Samaritan off
balance? Why did Cherokee have serifs on curves – and come to think
of it, why did it have serifs at all?</div>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
And the more I looked at these
unfamiliar scripts, the more I realized we English-speakers never
stop and ask ourselves basic questions about our own language and alphabet.
Why were we so smitten with the Latin alphabet – to such an extent
that the default academic font was called Times New Roman? Why were
we so keen on parallels, right angels, circles, the Euclidean forms
that are in fact impossible to write freehand? What does English have
against <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/07/mobile-multilingualism.html" target="_blank">diacritics</a>,
when other languages embrace them to such an extent that some scripts
look like a large wet black dog shaking itself?</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
But the really interesting questions
were about language itself, and the way people instinctively think
about it. For example: it has been fascinating to me how often people
look at my Alphabet carvings and say, “That one looks like an <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2012/03/attitudes-towards-language-uses.html" target="_blank">alien script</a>”.
I even though so myself when I first started. I’ve come to think of
this as the Stonehenge phenomenon: when people look at Stonehenge
they see <i>pattern</i> and therefore <i>intent</i> but they can’t
see <i>meaning</i>. That’s a powerful, magnetic phenomenon. They
can’t look away or stop wondering what it means and why it was
created.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
I think an “alien” alphabet has the
same qualities: we can see it has shape and purpose and therefore
intent, but it’s so utterly unfamiliar we can’t understand it,
and we can’t even imagine understanding it. So we assume it must
not be of this Earth. More and more, I find myself thinking in such
galactic terms and seeing and hearing language as a series of
variations on the concept of <i>pattern</i>. </div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
</div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaR6PMzLQVjIUelFA9tC_uRiu6deOrjO1d9Ymd4K65ao9ue1gQfY4YbSQJoiLBFqeSBROWDllO_OcmeZZ9y9wckPUtRzPVLf7BIr2S3J84yiI4XqVGOYN5W8rhRg1N0U4_rOyATSc37-R1/s1600/Mongolian.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaR6PMzLQVjIUelFA9tC_uRiu6deOrjO1d9Ymd4K65ao9ue1gQfY4YbSQJoiLBFqeSBROWDllO_OcmeZZ9y9wckPUtRzPVLf7BIr2S3J84yiI4XqVGOYN5W8rhRg1N0U4_rOyATSc37-R1/s320/Mongolian.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in; orphans: 2; widows: 2;">
“Happy
New Year” in Mongolian calligraphy,
</div>
<div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in; orphans: 2; widows: 2;">
based
on the work of Sukhbaatar.
</div>
<div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in; orphans: 2; widows: 2;">
Carved
in pau amarillo</div>
<div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in; orphans: 2; widows: 2;">
Photo
credit: <span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial;">Tom Way</span></div>
</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in; orphans: 2; widows: 2;">
<br /></div>
<div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in; orphans: 2; widows: 2;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
Let me explain. When I’ve finished
carving and painting one of my scripts into, say, a piece of curly
maple and then I add the first coat of tung oil, an extraordinary
three-dimensional change takes place. The wood acquires both luster
and depth, as if rising and sinking at the same time. Faint shadows
become deep currents. Knots become cyclones. The grain ripens one
way, but in the same instant a different set of ripples will often
appear running perpendicular to it. The wood becomes anatomical,
muscular. And the black text seems to float both in and above it, as
if it is both part and not part of the wood.</div>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The first time I really looked at this
transformation, it struck me that something fascinating was taking
place in terms of pattern. The grain in the wood and the ripples
running more or less perpendicular to it, looking like patterns in
wet sand, are expressions of the rhythms running through everything.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikwq8gV6xOCCHKg3Yv5JzsvZYjznNStXDxFiCvS7qiNzcch97oKPltD1G81L8LBPvEGPJm_zF5vDQVxSRwD17Ds5QZXf4y9jHm-mkji3mNog0IQKOjdTb6E8BRRrRnXCMsLPJGygV9JdL8/s1600/Nom.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikwq8gV6xOCCHKg3Yv5JzsvZYjznNStXDxFiCvS7qiNzcch97oKPltD1G81L8LBPvEGPJm_zF5vDQVxSRwD17Ds5QZXf4y9jHm-mkji3mNog0IQKOjdTb6E8BRRrRnXCMsLPJGygV9JdL8/s320/Nom.jpg" width="314" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The verb “la” (‘to
be’) in Nom, the pre-colonial script of Vietnam.
</div>
<div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Carved in quilted maple</div>
<div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in; orphans: 2; widows: 2;">
Photo
credit: <span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial;">Tom Way</span></div>
</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br /></div>
<div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
Trees have been on this planet for some
370 million years, and the patterns in the grain – well, they
illustrate forces that have been acting on matter since the dawn of
the universe.</div>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Part of the human condition, though, is
to try to see the shape and drift of those forces. We’re
pattern-seeking creatures, after all. And what struck me about
languages, especially when carved in wood, is that they show our own
efforts to understand the world by creating patterns – patterns
that others can recognize and convert into speech, into ideas –
overlaid on the deeper, older, more complex patterns that have made
us what we are.<br />
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Tim Brookes is the founder of the
<a href="http://endangeredalphabets.com/" target="_blank">Endangered Alphabets project</a>,
whose carvings have been exhibited all over North America including
at Harvard, Yale, and the Smithsonian Institution. He is also the
author of 16 books, details of which can be found at <a href="http://www.timbrookesinc.com/" target="_blank">his homepage</a>.</blockquote>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
© Tim Brookes 2016</div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; orphans: 2; widows: 2;">
<i>Next post:</i><i><b>
<a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2016/07/nature-nurture-and-linguistic-giftedness.html" target="_blank">Nature, nurture, and linguistic giftedness</a></b></i><i>.</i><i><b>
</b></i><i>Saturday 23</i><sup><i><span style="font-size: xx-small;">rd</span></i></sup><i> July 2016.</i><br />
<i><br /></i></div>
</div>
Madalena Cruz-Ferreirahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14782492322928803326noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1132547320196715283.post-74518667678622666832016-06-25T00:00:00.000+08:002020-04-15T18:45:42.059+08:00Switching languages, mixing languages – or using languages?<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Many years ago, I went, as usual, to
fetch my children from <a href="https://utbildningsguiden.skolverket.se/grundskolan/val-av-grundskola/svensk-skola-utomlands" target="_blank">Swedish Supply School</a>, which met once a week after regular (English-medium) school in
Singapore, where our family lived. On that particular occasion, one
of the children was especially eager to start telling me all about
her day. She spoke Portuguese, this being the language that the
children and I have always shared, and she speckled it with so much
English and Swedish that I felt compelled to interrupt her.
“<i>Querida!</i>”, I giggled, “<i>Que língua é que estás a falar?!</i>”
(‘Sweetheart! Which language are you speaking?!’). She stared at
me briefly as if I were a clueless <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2015/04/the-aliens-in-our-midst.html" target="_blank">alien</a> and then snapped, in squeaky clean Portuguese: “<i>Uma qualquer, para
dizer o que eu quero!</i>” (‘Whichever, to say what I want to say!’).
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
What was I doing, here? I was giving
evidence that being multilingual, as I am, hadn’t immunised me against the
persuasion that languages are <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/05/big-multilinguals.html" target="_blank">objects of reverence</a>:
they are there to be respected. Which meant that I was paying
attention to my girl’s languages, not to her.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
What was she doing? She was giving
evidence that being multilingual, as she is, had made it clear to her
that languages are tools: they are there to serve our needs. She had
last used Portuguese in the early morning, a long time before the end
of her <a href="http://www.mumabroadlife.com/?p=556" target="_blank">working day</a>, which had
taken place first in English and then in Swedish. So why not use, in
“whichever” language, the bits and pieces of the other language(s)
in which those bits and pieces first became meaningful to her? All of
my children did this, as I discuss in Chapter 10 of my book <i><a href="http://www.multilingual-matters.com/display.asp?isb=9781853598388" target="_blank">Three is a Crowd?</a></i>.
I found it particularly revealing that later, when they and I talked
about these episodes, it was their turn to giggle when reporting
their <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2010/11/brains-and-fears.html" target="_blank">unawareness</a> that they had been ‘mixing languages’, as this behaviour is
usually called. Besides, as my girl then added about this episode,
she knew that I knew all three languages in question, so “there was
no problem there, right?”
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Again, she left me without arguments.
It may be true that only multilinguals in my children’s three
languages might understand what they were saying when they used their
languages in this way, but any multilingual in any languages would
understand what they were <i>doing</i>: they were being typical
multilinguals. The question then arises of why we came to talk about
a feature of typical multilingualism as ‘mixing’, a word with
rather negative undertones. Conversely, we might also ask what it
means to not mix, or switch, languages or codes. Multilingual mixes
usually <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2016/04/multilinguals-and-creativity.html" target="_blank">raise judgemental or worried eyebrows</a> as providing evidence of bad or impaired use of language,
respectively. But “bad/impaired use of language” in fact means
‘bad/impaired use of a language’, and there is a world of
difference between <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/11/language-and-language.html" target="_blank"><i>language</i> and <i>a language</i></a>.
So why don’t <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2012/06/mixes-matches.html" target="_blank">monolingual mixes</a> cause generalised unease, and where do we draw the line?
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The issue is precisely one of lines.
Like country boundaries, language boundaries are figments of our
collective imagination. Not even <a href="http://www.ethnologue.com/about/problem-language-identification" target="_blank">linguists</a> have any idea what or where they might be. So why do we go on
interpreting multilingual mixes as offending language boundaries?
<a href="http://ofeliagarcia.org/" target="_blank">Ofelia García</a>, in an interview
conducted by François Grosjean on his blog <i>Life as a Bilingual</i>
and titled <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/life-bilingual/201603/what-is-translanguaging" target="_blank">What is Translanguaging?</a>,
answers this question pithily:</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“<i>Linguists often refer to the
behavior of bilinguals when they go across these named language
categories as code-switching. It is an external view of language. But
translanguaging takes the internal perspective of speakers whose own
mental grammar has been developed in social interaction with others.
[…] Translanguaging is more than going across languages; it is
going </i><i><b>beyond</b></i><i> named languages and taking the
internal view of the speaker’s language use.</i>”
</blockquote>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The book that Ofelia García edited
with Li Wei, <i><a href="http://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9781137385758" target="_blank">Translanguaging: Language, Bilingualism and Education</a></i>, has more on how
translanguaging characterises everyday multilingual practices.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Languages are there to be used as the
tools that they are, not replicated as straitjacketed <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2010/11/code-makers-and-code-breakers.html" target="_blank">instruction manuals</a>.
Different languages make sense to us precisely because they allow us
to engage with what matters to us in different ways, and to give the
right <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2010/10/languages-come-in-flavours.html" target="_blank">flavour</a> to what we wish to say. To use one of my favourite analogies, how we
deal with our languages is no different from how we deal with our
food. There are (standard) recipes, that we haven’t been called
upon to put together because they were devised and tried by other
people; there are ingredients, and tips about method and seasonings.
But then we do it <i>our</i> way, because <i>we</i> are the ones
doing <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2012/06/mixed-recipes.html" target="_blank">the cooking</a>.
Favouring observation of each of the languages of multilinguals over
what the multilinguals themselves <i>do</i> with them is like
analysing recipes to find out how they taste. Multilinguals only
<i>trans</i>gress those rules that <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2012/04/braving-monolingual-worlds.html" target="_blank">never took multilinguals themselves into account</a>.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The next post, a guest post, keeps to
the topic of creativity, this time about how and why we find ways of
preserving our languages in printed form.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
© MCF 2016</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<i>Next post: </i><i><b>=Guest post=
<a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2016/07/being-multiscriptal-why-our-alphabets.html" target="_blank">Being multiscriptal: why our alphabets matter</a></b></i>,
by Tim Brookes. <i> Saturday 9</i><sup><i><span style="font-size: xx-small;">th</span></i></sup><i>
July 2016.</i></div>
</div>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<i><br /></i></div>
Madalena Cruz-Ferreirahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14782492322928803326noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1132547320196715283.post-63819397549835108162016-05-28T00:00:00.001+08:002017-03-28T01:25:12.690+08:00Teaching languages through drama/theatre positively impacts oral fluency=Guest post=<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: center;">
by Angelica Galante and Ron I. Thomson</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiI_PxlRjy2PrRpJoT0LveK7MkYlCC227StplF7zrfJAWgZFu6TqoGxf0WXmn2f7cfgfgVsRgqEJ7A7rSD9iLvV3kJu7pWwa5eR6uinC6y9bkl5pYXzJrHTyjUtcy6m90w4epoTZt9KqN72/s1600/Angelica+Galante+%2526+Ron+Thomson.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="171" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiI_PxlRjy2PrRpJoT0LveK7MkYlCC227StplF7zrfJAWgZFu6TqoGxf0WXmn2f7cfgfgVsRgqEJ7A7rSD9iLvV3kJu7pWwa5eR6uinC6y9bkl5pYXzJrHTyjUtcy6m90w4epoTZt9KqN72/s320/Angelica+Galante+%2526+Ron+Thomson.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<i>Do you speak another language?</i>
Many people who have heard this question don’t necessarily speak a
second language (L2) fluently. Learning to speak a new language is
challenging, but fluency in the L2 is a goal many people share.
Contrary to what most people believe, opportunities to interact in
the L2 do not necessarily guarantee a learner will come to speak it
fluently (<a href="https://academic.oup.com/applij/article-abstract/29/3/359/152627/A-Longitudinal-Study-of-ESL-Learners-Fluency-and?redirectedFrom=fulltext" target="_blank">Derwing, Munro, and Thomson, 2008</a>; <a href="http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/10.3138/cmlr.987" target="_blank">Ranta and Meckelborg, 2013</a>), so finding
ways to improve fluency in the classroom is important. From our
recent research, it seems that drama and theatre can help.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
If you have ever taken a drama or
theatre class, you will probably agree that it is a lot of fun. But
drama is not all about the entertainment; it can also help language
learners develop speaking abilities (<a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/1567503683" target="_blank">Kao and O’Neill, 1998</a>; <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-1770.1980.tb00152.x/abstract" target="_blank">Stern, 1980</a>;
<a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08929092.2006.10012585" target="_blank">Stinson and Freebody, 2006</a>)
and can impact oral fluency and pronunciation in particular (<a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/tesq.290/abstract" target="_blank">Galante and Thomson, 2016</a>). We
have both taught English as a foreign/second language for many years
in Canada, Brazil, Korea, Oman, and Pakistan. In our constant pursuit
of new ways to help our students develop fluency and pronunciation we
thought we’d give drama/theatre a try.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiaCN6HYWZnnKIewJvurjB5N7illHbh8K2f9Px1yOph_MFcEeR8lymDPf8JbtuGmMhu_SHd4u4SrVqoL9jUO1Jq2sct5afoqcqJvj9SL4aPxw3vv4omprKsdzJ0004V19-s4pQl-66RBTMs/s1600/Greece.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiaCN6HYWZnnKIewJvurjB5N7illHbh8K2f9Px1yOph_MFcEeR8lymDPf8JbtuGmMhu_SHd4u4SrVqoL9jUO1Jq2sct5afoqcqJvj9SL4aPxw3vv4omprKsdzJ0004V19-s4pQl-66RBTMs/s400/Greece.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Theatre of Dionysos, Athens, Greece</span></div>
<div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Photo credit: <a href="https://cavaninconvo.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">Dan Cavanagh</a></span></div>
</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
With my (Angelica’s) background in
theatre, I began using drama techniques to teach my own English
language classes in the late 1990s. I immediately noticed this was
very helpful for learners’ oral development, especially among those
learners who were somewhat shy or reluctant to speak in class. I also
observed that during drama activities, students would practice
aspects of the language not typically offered in traditional language
classes: <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/05/speaking-out-of-tune.html" target="_blank">intonation, rhythm</a>,
intention, meaning-making, <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2016/09/language-learners-and-linguistic.html" target="_blank">improvisation</a>, among others. Because my
drama classes were very well received, I was invited to develop a
language program for a prominent English language institute in São
Paulo, Brazil, which focused on teaching English through drama and
theatre. The program was later distributed among 17 other schools in
the country.<br />
<br />
At first, teachers were hesitant to apply drama
techniques because they felt they had to be actors to do so. However,
after some initial short training sessions, teachers implemented
drama in their classroom and were quite satisfied with the positive
results. Despite teachers’ accounts of the success of drama in
their classes, I wondered what particular aspects of oral
communication actually improved. To find out, I proposed carrying out
a study during my Master’s program at Brock University, in Canada,
where Ron Thomson became my thesis supervisor. His extensive
background in second language oral fluency and pronunciation research
was a perfect match.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
In drama/theatre classes, there is
quite a lot of speaking practice and both of us knew it was likely
that learners could develop speaking abilities anyway. But we were
interested in finding out whether drama classes could improve
learners’ speaking abilities compared to classes that also focused
on oral communication. We tracked the oral development of 24
Brazilian learners of English in four different classes over the
course of four months: two English drama classes and two English
communicative classes. We collected samples of their L2 speech in
five different tasks (monologue, dialogue, etc.) before and after the
program, all audio-recorded. We then recruited 30 Canadians to listen
to the learners’ speech samples and provide their perceptions on
three specific aspects of their oral performance: fluency,
comprehensibility and accent. After running several statistical
analyses, we found that learners in the drama group experienced
significantly greater improvement in their oral speaking skills
compared to learners in the traditional communicative language
classes.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgORwKvaa-KbQwIKqArymKz2IXw8oKXmQaz8yrZ-HYxwcoCbbQwJSE6aU36uDj7joNbylFjh7q9q6cfI3H9ynzx44kQin4hUXwfZHokivMud9OoNODDx0m36AqJRSBbVWq6huERR9z4Dj8u/s1600/Theatre.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgORwKvaa-KbQwIKqArymKz2IXw8oKXmQaz8yrZ-HYxwcoCbbQwJSE6aU36uDj7joNbylFjh7q9q6cfI3H9ynzx44kQin4hUXwfZHokivMud9OoNODDx0m36AqJRSBbVWq6huERR9z4Dj8u/s400/Theatre.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">Photo credit: João Urbilio</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
In particular, we found that learners
in the drama group experienced significant improvements in fluency
and comprehensibility compared to learners in a communicative
language class. Some of the strategies used in the drama classes had
a particular focus on improving fluency: learners practiced
performance in front of a group, speech with emphasis on
meaning-making, and speaking without inappropriate pauses and
hesitations. This result supports the idea that teaching aspects of
oral language explicitly can result in larger gains in oral fluency
compared to using simple communicative tasks.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Another important finding was that
although all the English learners were perceived as having a first
language (L1) accent (Brazilian Portuguese), this was not an issue
when understanding their speech. This is also important because it
tells us that having L1 accent is not a problem when communicating in
the L2. This can be surprising to some who falsely believe they need
to lose their L1 accent in order to be fluent in the L2. We have
always believed that <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/09/teaching-languages-vs-teaching-learners.html" target="_blank">“accent reduction”</a> courses do not really have a place in language learning, and our
study provides evidence to support this belief.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
If you’re interested in learning more
about how drama/theatre can improve speaking skills in a second
language, you can watch the video <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYUUc5ZMiyo" target="_blank">abstract</a> of our study or read
the article we have recently published in <i><a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/tesq.290/abstract" target="_blank">TESOL Quarterly</a></i>.
There, you will find more details about the study and its
methodology. We also provide samples of the classroom activities we
used.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Angelica Galante is a doctoral
candidate in Language and Literacies Education at the Ontario
Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) at the University of
Toronto and a sessional lecturer at York University. Her research
interests include innovative pedagogical applications in language
classrooms, drama in language learning, and plurilingual education.
You can follow her on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/GalanteAngelica" target="_blank">@GalanteAngelica</a> and visit her website
<a href="http://www.breakingtheinvisiblewall.com/" target="_blank">Breaking the Invisible Wall</a> for
samples of digital projects with language learners.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://brocku.ca/social-sciences/departments-and-centres/applied-linguistics/faculty-staff/ron-thomson" target="_blank">Ron I. Thomson</a> is an Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics/TESL at Brock
University, in St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada. His research spans L2
oral fluency and pronunciation development, computer-assisted
pronunciation teaching, and ethics in pronunciation teaching. Ron is
also the creator of <a href="http://www.englishaccentcoach.com/" target="_blank">English Accent Coach</a>, a free evidence-based online tool
that helps learners improve their pronunciation of English vowels and
consonants.</blockquote>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
© Angelica Galante and Ron I. Thomson
2016</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<i>Next post: </i><i><b><a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2016/06/switching-languages-mixing-languages-or.html" target="_blank">Switching languages, mixing languages – or using languages?</a></b></i><i>
Saturday 25</i><sup><i><span style="font-size: xx-small;">th</span></i></sup><i> June 2016.</i> </div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
Madalena Cruz-Ferreirahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14782492322928803326noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1132547320196715283.post-66750060006798785162016-04-30T00:00:00.000+08:002017-03-28T00:57:34.952+08:00Multilinguals and creativity<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Multilingualism is generally assumed to
entail creativity. This raises the very interesting issue of whether
becoming multilingual makes us become creative, and suggests the even
more interesting conclusion that most of the world’s population,
being multilingual, must also be creative.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
At the same time, since I find it quite
difficult to discern the effects of so much global creativity on the
continued design and implementation of, say, our global economic,
political or educational systems, a closer inspection of what we
actually <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/06/how-do-we-know.html" target="_blank">know</a> (as
opposed to believe) about this might be in order. A sample of studies
from the past decade shows mixed (un)certainty about correlating
multilingualism with creativity, let alone asserting that
multilingualism causes (or enhances, favours, develops, etc.)
creativity, as follows.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Olusola O. Adesope and colleagues
assessed findings from previous research in <a href="http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3102/0034654310368803" target="_blank">A systematic review and meta-analysis of the cognitive correlates of bilingualism</a>, and concluded
for positive correlations between multilingualism and increased
cognitive outcomes on, for example, memory, attention and abstract
skills. Bernhard Hommel and colleagues, in <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3212749/" target="_blank">Bilingualism and creativity: Benefits in convergent thinking come with losses in divergent thinking</a>, compared
the creative performance of low-proficient and high-proficient
bilinguals, finding that “bilingualism should not be related to
‘creativity’ as a unitary concept but, rather, to the specific
processes and mechanisms that underlie creativity”. Hangeun Lee and
Kyung Hee Kim, in <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886911000602" target="_blank">Can speaking more languages enhance your creativity?</a> likewise examined the relationship
between creativity and “degree of bilingualism”, taken to reflect
“multicultural experiences”, to find that “degree of
bilingualism and creativity are positively correlated”. Mark
Leikin, in <a href="http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1367006912438300" target="_blank">The effect of bilingualism on creativity</a>, reported that
“both early bilingualism and some form of bilingual education”
appear to affect (non)mathematical creativity, concluding that there
are “differences between two types of creative ability in the
context of bilingual and monolingual development.” Anatoliy
Kharkhurin’s study, <a href="http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1367006910363060" target="_blank">Bilingual verbal and nonverbal creative behavior</a>, in turn, offered evidence to dampen any
blanket statement that multilingualism necessarily implies
creativity.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
It becomes obvious from the research
literature that there simply are too many variables at stake, whether
linguistic, cognitive, cultural, educational, and so on, to allow
clear-cut isolation of multilingualism as a factor of creativity.
These variables, however, aren’t inherent to multilingualism: they
have absolutely *nothing* to do with its purported ‘complexity’,
and all to do with our choices to study them <i>in relation to</i>
multilingualism. As much complexity, of the exact same kinds, would
emerge if we ever decided to compare creativity among low-proficient
vs. high-proficient <i>monolinguals</i>, for example, or among
degrees of <i>monolingualism</i>. </div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
But we don’t do this. Why we
don’t study monolingualism in the same way that we study
multilingualism only proves our <i>assumption</i> that monolingualism is
‘simple’. It doesn’t prove that monolingualism <i>is</i>
simple. This assumption is ideological, not empirical, as Li Wei and
Chao-Jung Wu observe in <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13670050802153210" target="_blank">Polite Chinese children revisited: Creativity and the use of codeswitching in the Chinese complementary school classroom</a>: “The ideology of monolingualism
prevails throughout society, including within minority ethnic
communities who are bilingual and multilingual.” My take is that if we wish to
answer apparently straightforward questions about multilingualism and
creativity in any useful way, we must first make sure that we
understand what exactly we’re asking, and from within which
premises.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Li Wei and Chao-Jung Wu’s topic,
codeswitching (sometimes also called code-mixing or simply, <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2012/06/mixes-matches.html" target="_blank">mixing</a>),
lays bare another very relevant take on multilingualism and
creativity. This is the double standard in our theoretical stances
about multilingualism, on the one hand, which nowadays is unquestionably ‘good’,
against our practical management of <i>being</i> multilingual, on the other, which
may not be so good after all, as I pointed out <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2016/04/attitudes-to-multilingualism-or-to.html" target="_blank">here</a>.
Li Wei and Chao-Jung Wu’s statement that “There is still
widespread fear of bilingual and multilingual practices such as
codeswitching” remains as cogent. So why isn’t codeswitching
‘creative’ (and therefore ‘good’), since it is evidence of
multilingualism?
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The answer may have to do with what
we mean by creativity. Does it have to do with how we use things and
languages, or with how many things and languages we use? Quality or quantity? Learning to
use what we need to use, for example languages, means learning how
they work – their rules, in the descriptive, <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2012/10/teaching-about-languages.html" target="_blank">procedural</a> sense of this word. These rules don’t exist in nature, they <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/06/people-see-people-do.html" target="_blank">emerge from everyday behaviour</a>.
But learning rules entails learning how to <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2010/11/code-makers-and-code-breakers.html" target="_blank">break</a> them, too, and not playing by the rules is as good a definition of
being creative as any. ‘Creativity’, however, depends on
who’s deciding which rules – or rather <i>whose</i> rules – can
and cannot be broken. This is why we award literary and other prizes
to certain rule-breakers: we praise them for doing things outside the
box. And this is why multilinguals don’t
get prizes for breaking rules when they mix languages: we don’t
praise those who do things outside the language.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
I’ve dealt <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2012/04/languages-of-multilinguals.html" target="_blank">before</a> with this misconception that multilingualism is best approached by
investigating the languages of multilinguals instead of the language
users themselves, and I’ll return to it <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2016/06/switching-languages-mixing-languages-or.html" target="_blank">very soon</a>.
Meanwhile, still on the topic of creativity, I’ll have to qualify
what I say in my second paragraph, above. The next post, a guest
post, offers evidence that rethinking approaches to teaching, and
implementing novel methodologies, have more than welcome effects
on how we engage with our new languages.<br />
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© MCF 2016</div>
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<i style="orphans: 2; widows: 2;">Next post:</i><i style="orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><b>
=Guest post= <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2016/05/teaching-languages-through-dramatheatre_28.html" target="_blank">Teaching languages through drama/theatre positively impacts oral fluency</a></b></i><i style="orphans: 2; widows: 2;">,</i><i style="orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><b>
</b></i><i style="orphans: 2; widows: 2;">by Angelica Galante and
Ron I. Thomson. </i><i style="orphans: 2; widows: 2;">Saturday 28</i><sup style="orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">th</span></i></sup><i style="orphans: 2; widows: 2;">
May 2016.</i></div>
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</style>Madalena Cruz-Ferreirahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14782492322928803326noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1132547320196715283.post-73281349716597643432016-04-02T00:00:00.000+08:002017-03-11T22:55:19.931+08:00Attitudes to multilingualism – or to multilinguals?<blockquote class="tr_bq">
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“<i>The human understanding, once it
has adopted an opinion, collects any instances that confirm it, and
though the contrary instances may be more numerous and more weighty,
it either does not notice them or else rejects them, in order that
this opinion will remain unshaken.</i>”
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Francis Bacon (1620), <i>Novum Organon</i>
1: XLVI</div>
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Few of us might nowadays wish to voice
out loud doubts about the ‘benefits’ of multilingualism, or about
<a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/06/how-do-we-know.html" target="_blank">how and why</a> this current choir of praise came to be. Not all that long ago,
however, equally loud choirs were as adamant about the
‘disadvantages’ of multilingualism.
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The <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2010/11/multilingual-woes-and-joys.html" target="_blank">pendular backlash</a> that we witness today comes from realisation that research supporting
multilingualism-is-bad vogues was in fact no research at all, in that
it failed to control variables. For example, it compared multilingual
children from lower socio-economic strata with monolingual children
from higher ones. The turning point dates from 1962, and is credited
to Elizabeth Peal and Wallace E. Lambert’s study <a href="http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/1964-08464-001" target="_blank">The relation of bilingualism to intelligence</a>. It also compared
multilinguals to monolinguals, but it removed confounding variables
to find that “bilinguals performed significantly better than their
monolingual controls” on intelligence tests.
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From then on, we seem to have decided
that if multilingualism isn’t bad after all, then it must be good.
Why? Because it doesn’t seem to cross our minds that
multilingualism can simply <i>be</i>. Because we can’t but find
deviation, which we then label as good or bad, when we randomly take
one instance of natural behaviour as <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2012/03/attitudes-towards-language-uses.html" target="_blank">‘the’</a> instance of natural behaviour: monolingualism has served as this
benchmark for far too long. Because when we compare, we look for
<a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/10/multilingual-beginnings.html" target="_blank">what’s not there</a>.
Multilingualism is bad when we look for what’s not there in
multilinguals. Compared to monolinguals, they ‘lack’ vocabulary,
for example. Human beings also lack four legs, compared to horses. In
contrast, multilingualism is good when we look for what’s not there
in monolinguals. Multilinguals ‘outperform’ monolinguals in
social empathy, for example. Human beings also outperform horses in
vertical locomotion. I find this habit of listing absences a bit like
putting in our CV what we haven’t done: not very enlightening, and probably quite wordy.</div>
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The question then arises of whether
this seesawing of opinions about multilingualism calls into question
Francis Bacon’s insight about our understanding. I don’t think
so, for two reasons. First, because we go on mistaking opinions for
facts which, to me, is the core of Bacon’s observation: we seem to
find it exceedingly difficult to look at things <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2013/06/you-speak-so-therefore-you-think-so.html" target="_blank">without judging</a> them.
And second, because the view that multilingualism is special, that
is, not normal, and therefore in need of ‘special’ treatment,
remains unshaken: we remain comforted that the current ‘findings’
nicely confirm our current expectations, and blissfully immune to
whatever facts may shatter our convictions – in which connection I
must hail the inclusion of <i>faktaresistens</i> in the list of new
Swedish words for 2015, courtesy of <a href="http://www.sprakochfolkminnen.se/sprak/nyord/nyordslistor.html" target="_blank">Språkrådet</a>.
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The current consensual <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2010/12/we-shall-overcome-monolingualism.html" target="_blank">‘goodness’</a> of multilingualism, however, doesn’t somehow seem to extend to
multilinguals. If it did, why would so many of us keep advising
multilinguals to <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2016/02/being-multilingual-in-school.html" target="_blank">become monolinguals</a>,
or treating them like <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2015/09/multilingualism-and-disorders.html" target="_blank">disordered</a> or <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2015/06/the-perfect-multilingual.html" target="_blank">failed</a> (multi-)monolinguals, or all of the above? Multilingualism is good,
but being multilingual apparently isn’t.
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This intriguing paradox is rooted in an equally intriguing refusal to deal with multilingualism from a
multilingual perspective. Evidence? Look for the sources of
judgements about multilingualism and check whether and how they refer
to real-life multilinguals. Look for the resonators of these
judgements and check their familiarity with real-life multilinguals.
Not least, look for the languages in which these sound bites
originate and propagate, and check their relationship to real-life
multilinguals. Does it show that research on
multilingualism (as on virtually anything else) goes on being
published and disseminated in <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/03/language-of-science.html" target="_blank">a single preferential language</a>?
As Anthony J. Liddicoat argues in <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17447143.2015.1086361" target="_blank">Multilingualism research in Anglophone contexts as a discursive construction of multilingual practice</a>,
this gives “the impression that
research communicated in other languages is of marginal relevance for
researching the multilingual world. [...] The monolingualism that
exists within the research field is not only a linguistic phenomenon,
but can also be understood as the development of <i>a monoculture of
knowledge</i> [my emphasis].” Liddicoat concludes that “research into multilingualism largely constructs
multilingualism as a subject to be studied from a perspective that
lies outside the phenomenon of multilingualism itself”. That is,
outside of what multilinguals do.</div>
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This is why we’re not being
multilingual, we’re being <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2012/10/secret-languages.html" target="_blank">rude</a>,
or <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/07/blingualism.html" target="_blank">showing off</a>,
or refusing to answer ‘simple’ questions like in which language
do we <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2013/06/thinking-in-tongues.html" target="_blank">think</a>,
<a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2013/09/multilingual-dreams-and-nightmares.html" target="_blank">dream</a>,
<a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2013/07/multilingual-rudeness.html" target="_blank">swear</a> or <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2013/10/numbers-and-languages.html" target="_blank">count</a>,
or like which <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2012/11/wait-where-are-you-from.html" target="_blank">country</a> (or better still, <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2012/01/do-you-feel-swedish.html" target="_blank">nationality</a>)
do we plead allegiance to. This is why schools favour curricular
multilingualism in the (desirable) languages that matter to the
school over actual multilingualism in the (real-life) <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-languages-that-matter.html" target="_blank">languages that matter</a> to the children, as Jasone Cenoz showed in a <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/02/multilingual-everyday-uses-vs.html" target="_blank">guest post</a> to this blog, and I’ve also discussed <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/02/multilingual-adventures-in-school-land.html" target="_blank">here</a>.
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This is why having to ‘deal with’ multilinguals appears to raise adrenaline to such levels that
intelligent, sensible people lose their linguistic bearings – and
their commonsense. One example: my family’s friends, speakers of
either Portuguese or Swedish, knew that our children, then aged 2 or
3, were being raised in both languages. The children naturally used
Swedish or Portuguese according to interlocutor and, as naturally,
used <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2013/03/children-speak-child-speak_23.html" target="_blank">2-3-year-old</a> versions of each language. But, because the children were known to be
‘special’, being multilingual, some of these friends used to
apologise to them for not being able to use “their language”
(i.e., ‘the other one’), and they did this in English, a language
that they also knew wasn’t part of the children’s repertoire at
the time. The persuasion that multilinguals must have one and only
<a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/03/first-main-best.html" target="_blank">one ‘good’ language</a>,
which never is the one that they are using at any given time, was
shared by our <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/02/monolinguals-in-family.html" target="_blank">relatives</a>, and unsurprising to me. But I had to marvel at the additional
assumption that English might well be a sort of innate language that
everyone who acts linguistically <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2015/04/the-aliens-in-our-midst.html" target="_blank">less conventionally</a> understands by default.</div>
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Such attitudes to multilinguals stem
from judgemental discussions of multilingualism which pay lip service
to the stylised <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2015/10/multilingualism-is-about-multilinguals.html" target="_blank"><i>-ism </i><span style="font-style: normal;">contraption</span></a> that results from dysfunctional reverse engineering of bits and
pieces of imaginary multilinguals. From there to assuming that
real-life multilinguals must abide by idealised conceptions of
multilingualism is but a small step indeed. We keep looking at what’s
not there.</div>
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Which reminds me of another quote, this
time from my fellow countryman and Nobel laureate <a href="http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1998/" target="_blank">José Saramago</a>,
in his novel about the death of one of <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2012/01/my-homeland-is-my-language.html" target="_blank">Fernando Pessoa</a>’s
heteronyms, <i>O Ano da Morte de Ricardo Reis</i>: “não somos o que
dizemos, somos o crédito que nos dão” (‘we aren’t what we
say, we are the credit we’re given’ [my translation]).</div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuDYf4RiZ_ojH0KoObaETfYPOj2RRhAIwwUPi_LK0A9NUekjHWXnaTqfodZbDOEkdpmULzHMZsg8kIE-TtB8JafiBikVTkib6Kd3vswgCKgHYUOs3He7-BGPU2AaogaHReiw7aDnxfZ6yG/s1600/800px-Paul_Klee_O_die_Geru%25CC%2588chte.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuDYf4RiZ_ojH0KoObaETfYPOj2RRhAIwwUPi_LK0A9NUekjHWXnaTqfodZbDOEkdpmULzHMZsg8kIE-TtB8JafiBikVTkib6Kd3vswgCKgHYUOs3He7-BGPU2AaogaHReiw7aDnxfZ6yG/s400/800px-Paul_Klee_O_die_Geru%25CC%2588chte.jpg" width="291" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Paul Klee, <i>O! die Gerüchte! </i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">(Image source: Wikimedia Commons)</span></div>
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Next time, I’ll deal with creativity.
Are multilinguals also ‘specially’ creative?</div>
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© MCF 2016</div>
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<i>Next post: </i><i><b><a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2016/04/multilinguals-and-creativity.html" target="_blank">Multilinguals and creativity</a>.</b></i><i> Saturday 30</i><sup><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">th</span></i></sup><i>
April 2016.</i></div>
<br />Madalena Cruz-Ferreirahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14782492322928803326noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1132547320196715283.post-60985694595748625202016-03-05T00:00:00.000+08:002018-03-02T19:38:47.129+08:00Being multilingual in clinic<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
When we feel that we’re not feeling quite like ourselves, we may choose to consult a specialist in (un)well-being to find out what might be going on. Our decision will draw on what feeling well has felt like to us, which is our baseline for comparison. In order to decide that we’re unwell, in other words, we compare ourselves to ourselves.</div>
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Children can’t make decisions of this kind on their own, so we adults will have to step in on their behalf. But who are ‘we’? We parents may resort to the same kind of baseline that we use for ourselves and compare the child to itself, because no one knows our children better than we do. This is true of suspected language disorders, too: if a child who is less lively than usual may be running a fever, so a child who is using, say, <a href="https://www.academia.edu/922847/Flerspr%C3%A5kighet_och_spr%C3%A5kutveckling_hos_barn" target="_blank">fewer words</a> than usual may be having language problems. We teachers, in contrast, are of necessity less likely to get to know the children in our care in as much detail. This is why teachers are also more likely to compare individual children to generally accepted norms which, also of necessity, were standardised through other children. Because such norms are standardised, that is, statistically validated, they claim an impartiality which cannot always be ascribed to parental norms.</div>
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Most referrals of multilingual children to special/remedial services come from school, typically following subpar ranking in language aptitude screening procedures in the school’s mainstream language. Tests in other languages that the children may use, where available, will show similar results, raising suspicion that the children lack a <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/11/half-linguals-and-semilinguals.html" target="_blank">complete language</a> or, as described in Jeff MacSwan’s report <a href="http://www.cascadilla.com/isb4.html" target="_blank">The “non-non” crisis and academic bias in native language assessment of linguistic minorities</a>, that they are non-nons: nonverbal in all of their languages. Failure to perform up to test standards is in all good faith feared to reflect a linguistic disorder.</div>
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Enter the clinician who, to a significantly higher degree than a teacher, will also be a <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2016/02/being-multilingual-in-school.html" target="_blank">stranger</a> to the child. Like the child’s teachers, the clinician will typically be unfamiliar with multilingual linguistic behaviour, a finding that my study <a href="http://www.academia.edu/922849/Assessing_multilingual_children_in_multilingual_clinics._Insights_from_Singapore" target="_blank">Assessing multilingual children in multilingual clinics. Insights from Singapore</a> was the first to report for clinicians who are themselves multilingual. Like the tell-tale school tests, the <a href="https://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2018/02/multilingual-deficiencies-or-assessment.html" target="_blank">assessment instruments</a> available to the clinician will as typically be monolingual, normed for (mainstream) monolinguals, and thereby likely to confirm a diagnosis of disorder. The child now has a clinical record, having been duly sanctioned as special by a specialist.</div>
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But there is a snag. Several, actually, which can be summarised like this: the languages of a multilingual cannot be monolingually ‘complete’, because multilinguals aren’t monolinguals. It is the <i>persuasion</i> that they should be that leads to mistaking their full linguistic repertoire for a null linguistic repertoire. The assumption that testing one of the languages of a multilingual – *any* of the languages of a multilingual – yields reliable insight about multilingual linguistic ability draws on three misconceptions. First, the belief that multilingualism is the addition of monolingualisms that I’ve termed <i><a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2015/06/the-perfect-multilingual.html" target="_blank">multi-monolingualism</a></i>. It’s not: if multilinguals could use all of their languages in the same way that monolinguals use their <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2016/01/being-multilingual-at-home.html" target="_blank">single one</a>, they wouldn’t need all of their languages. </div>
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Second, the persistent confusion between the two meanings of <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/11/language-and-language.html" target="_blank">the word ‘language’</a>. Language disorders affect <a href="http://blog.asha.org/2010/12/16/multilingual-typicality-vs-speech-language-disorder/" target="_blank"><i>all</i> the languages</a> of a multilingual, and cannot therefore be diagnosed from proficiency, or test scores, in <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2012/12/language-therapy-or-language-tuition.html" target="_blank">one particular language</a>.</div>
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And third, the myth that monolingualism equals unquestionable linguistic health, whereby we misrepresent deviations from single-language tests as linguistic impairment. Since the tests are monolingual but the child is multilingual, multilingualism must be the <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2014/12/the-multilingual-scapegoat.html" target="_blank">cause</a> of deviation, if not the <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2015/09/multilingualism-and-disorders.html" target="_blank">deviation itself</a>, and must therefore be <a href="http://blog.asha.org/2011/08/02/recommending-monolingualism-to-multilinguals-why-and-why-not/" target="_blank">eradicated</a>. Treating the child for multilingualism will, no less, fail to identify and remedy disordered multilingualism, which research such as <a href="http://www.speechpathology.com/articles/supporting-two-languages-in-bilingual-1218" target="_blank">Kathryn Kohnert</a>’s, and <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1460-6984.12199/abstract" target="_blank">Elizabeth Peña’s and colleagues</a> has shown must take into account the child’s <i>full</i> linguistic repertoire. Why? Simple <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2010/11/fight-for-fair-deal.html" target="_blank">fairness</a>: that’s what we do for monolingual children.</div>
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Encouragingly, there is growing awareness among professionals that monolingual assessment tools should be used with <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2013/02/speech-language-clinics-cultural.html" target="_blank">great caution</a> for multilingual populations. Brian A. Goldstein alerted to this in a guest post to this blog, <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/12/providing-clinical-services-to.html" target="_blank">Providing clinical services to bilingual children: <i>Stop Doing That!</i></a>, and so did I, in a book chapter titled <a href="https://www.academia.edu/922770/Sociolinguistic_and_cultural_considerations_when_working_with_multilingual_children" target="_blank">Sociolinguistic and cultural considerations when working with multilingual children</a>. </div>
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The question then arises of how to assess the language ability of children who use languages for which there are no norm-referenced tests, or who don’t share a language with the clinician. The tempting answer is that this is virtually impossible, because of the <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2012/04/languages-of-multilinguals.html" target="_blank">‘complexity’</a> of multilingualism: there are just too many multilingualisms, given the number and type of languages involved in each individual’s case. But if this is true, then it is also true that there are too many monolingualisms as well: if multilinguals in languages A, B and C are fundamentally different from multilinguals in languages Y and Z, then monolinguals in C are as fundamentally different from monolinguals in Y – which is an additional reason why multilinguals shouldn’t be assessed by monolingual standards: monolingualism, like multilingualism, matters locally, so which monolingualism do we choose? </div>
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The factual answer is that <a href="http://www.asha.org/Practice/multicultural/issues/Dynamic-Assessment/" target="_blank">dynamic assessment</a> provides methods of evaluating language ability regardless of ability in specific languages, and that clinicians can avail themselves of practical assessment guidance where no shared language of intervention exists. This is the topic of an article currently in press, authored by the <a href="http://www.csu.edu.au/research/multilingual-speech/position-paper" target="_blank">International Expert Panel on Multilingual Children’s Speech</a> of which I am a member, and titled <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/304571997_Tutorial_Speech_assessment_for_multilingual_children_who_do_not_speak_the_same_languages_as_the_speech-language_pathologist" target="_blank">Tutorial: Speech assessment for multilingual children who do not speak the same language(s) as the speech-language pathologist</a>. </div>
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Multilingual children must be assessed as multilinguals, so we can tell whether their language development raises cause for concern. The reason why multilinguals outnumber monolinguals in special/remedial care is that we go on blaming multilingualism for deviations to our assessment standards, instead of querying the appropriateness of those standards. Multilinguals are special only in the <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/07/effects-of-monolingualism.html" target="_blank">special attention</a> we keep paying to them, to which I turn next. </div>
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<span class="Z3988" title="ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Ajournal&rft.jtitle=In+S.+McLeod+%26+B.+A.+Goldstein+%28Eds.%29%2C+Multilingual+Aspects+of+Speech+Sound+Disorders+in+Children+%28pp.+13-23%29.+Bristol%3A+Multilingual+Matters.&rft_id=info%3A%2F&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fresearchblogging.org&rft.atitle=Sociolinguistic+and+cultural+considerations+when+working+with+multilingual+children.&rft.issn=&rft.date=2012&rft.volume=&rft.issue=&rft.spage=&rft.epage=&rft.artnum=&rft.au=Cruz-Ferreira%2C+M.&rfe_dat=bpr3.included=1;bpr3.tags=Social+Science%2CLinguistics%2C+Clinic%2C+Assessment%2C+Speech-language+pathology%2C+Multilingualism%2C+Child+language%2C+Culture">Cruz-Ferreira, M. (2012). Sociolinguistic and cultural considerations when working with multilingual children. <span style="font-style: italic;">In S. McLeod & B. A. Goldstein (Eds.), Multilingual Aspects of Speech Sound Disorders in Children (pp. 13-23). Bristol: Multilingual Matters.</span></span><br />
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Cruz-Ferreira, M. & Ng, B.C. (2010). Assessing multilingual children in multilingual clinics. Insights from Singapore. <span style="font-style: italic;">In M. Cruz-Ferreira (ed.). Multilingual Norms </span><span style="font-style: italic;">(pp. 343-396)</span><span style="font-style: italic;">. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.</span><br />
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Kohnert, K. (2007). Supporting two languages in bilingual children with primary developmental language disorders. <span style="font-style: italic;">In Kohnert, K. Language Disorders in Bilingual Children and Adults. San Diego, CA: Plural.</span><br />
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MacSwan, J. (2005). The “Non-Non” crisis and academic bias in native language assessment of language minorities. In <span style="font-style: italic;">J. Cohen, K. McAlister, K. Rolstad, & J. MacSwan (Eds.), ISB4: Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Bilingualism (pp. 1415-1422). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press. </span><br />
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McLeod, S., Verdon, S., & International Expert Panel on Multilingual Children’s Speech (2017). Tutorial: Speech Assessment for Multilingual Children Who Do Not Speak the Same Language(s) as the Speech-Language Pathologist. <span style="font-style: italic;">American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology.</span> DOI: <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1044/2017_AJSLP-15-0161" rev="review">10.1044/2017_AJSLP-15-0161</a><br />
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Peña, E., Bedore, L., & Kester, E. (2016). Assessment of language impairment in bilingual children using semantic tasks: two languages classify better than one. <span style="font-style: italic;">International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders, 51</span> (2), 192-202. DOI: <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1460-6984.12199" rev="review">10.1111/1460-6984.12199</a><br />
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<i>Next post: </i><a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2016/04/attitudes-to-multilingualism-or-to.html" target="_blank"><b><i> Attitudes to multilingualism – or to multilinguals?</i></b></a><i> Saturday 2</i><sup><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">nd</span></i></sup><i> April 2016.</i></div>
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Madalena Cruz-Ferreirahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14782492322928803326noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1132547320196715283.post-1926314323287896312016-02-06T00:00:00.000+08:002018-05-28T16:58:00.332+08:00Being multilingual in school<style type="text/css">P { margin-bottom: 0.08in; }</style> <br />
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Schooling nurtures development of academic ways of talking about things. This has come to be called ‘education’, in the sense that an ‘educated’ person is able to use language in this way. Schooling teaches us how, why and with whom our languages can be used to acquire knowledge formally, about history, chemistry, or geography, things that not all of us will have encountered at home, by these or any other names. It also teaches us that knowledge, of these and other things, can come to us from strangers, not just from people whom we’ve been familiar with from birth.</div>
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Since all of us must be schooled in some language, those strangers will use their language(s) to us. This means that we’ll be facing new ways of using our old languages, or new ways of using new ones. For some children, the ability to switch use of their language(s) appropriately, according to purpose, topic or interlocutor, won’t be new at school start. Preschoolers know how to deal with linguistic register (the <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/1456458639" target="_blank">technical term</a> for this) both passively, as Laura Wagner and colleagues report in <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2010.01502.x/abstract" target="_blank">Development in children’s comprehension of linguistic register</a>, and actively, as Melissa Redford and Christina Gildersleeve-Neumann show in <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19951923" target="_blank">The development of distinct speaking styles in preschool children</a>. </div>
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For all children, however, using languages in school-bound ways will be new, because school will be a new environment to them. For multilingual and monolingual children alike, home and school uses of language won’t match. Tradition has it that we label such monolingual uses ‘language varieties’ (or <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2012/05/little-multi-dialectals.html" target="_blank">dialects</a>, or registers) and multilingual ones <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2010/10/putting-languages-to-work.html" target="_blank">‘languages’</a>, although what the children will need to learn is exactly the same: to sort out their linguistic resources appropriately. </div>
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All of us, young and old, learn to manage register switches on the job and because of different jobs. Children will acquire school uses of language by being exposed to those uses and practising them in a <i>school</i> environment, just like they acquired home uses of language through exposure and practice <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2016/01/being-multilingual-at-home.html" target="_blank">at home</a>. Exposure and practice is what teaches us linguistic skills, and what generates awareness that our languages offer differentially appropriate choices to what we wish to say. We’re not born knowing how to use our languages before we start using them.</div>
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Home and school uses of language are, indeed, differentially appropriate, each befitting its environment qualitatively. They do not represent the <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/03/language-percentages.html" target="_blank">gradable quantities</a> of linguistic competence that popular and very unfortunate labels such as ‘basic’ (for home uses) and ‘academic’ (for school uses) appear to imply, whether applied to languages or language varieties. In the case of multilinguals, reliance on judgemental labels such as these has meant repression of all their languages except the ‘good’, ‘rich’, worth-developing school language. </div>
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Forbidding the use of the home language(s) not just in class but in school premises may no longer involve the <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2014/09/sign-speech-multilinguals.html" target="_blank">physical violence</a> it once did, for both spoken and sign languages, but advice to parents to switch to the school language at home, in order to “enhance” their children’s academic performance still abounds. Such advice may include <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2014/12/the-multilingual-scapegoat.html" target="_blank">threatening assertions</a> of dire consequences, for the children, of continued use of “too many languages at home”. Parents in multilingual families keep writing to me agonising over what to do about this, given their inability to use the school language in school-bound ways, or to use it at all, or their unwillingness to comply, objecting to what they deem an intrusion: just like school language practices are decided in school, not at home, home language practices are decided at home, not in school. </div>
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School recommendations of this kind reflect an intriguing view that multilingual schoolchildren must strive to become monolingual both in school and at home. They come not only from local schools in places traditionally associated with monolingualism, but also from international schools, whose designation itself traditionally associates with multilingualism. Why should multilingualism be undesirable for academic achievement? The answer might lie in simple ignorance of what multilingualism is.</div>
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There is, first, the myth that multilingualism is <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2010/11/brains-and-fears.html" target="_blank">subtractive</a> by definition, whereby learning a new language means losing other languages. Second, the myth that only one language can promote <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2013/06/thinking-in-tongues.html" target="_blank">‘higher’ academic goals</a>. And third, the myth that only school languages and school environments support intellectual sophistication. What’s ‘basic’, I wonder, about cooking dinner with our children, say? This is likely to take place at home rather than in school, through home languages rather than school ones, and this is <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/03/language-of-science.html" target="_blank">doing science</a>, besides being an excellent (and fun) way of honing cultural, gastronomic and maths skills. </div>
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Other reasons to promote mainstream monolingualism, equally rooted in zero-sum ideologies, relate instead to power relations within communities. <a href="https://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2018/02/multilingual-deficiencies-or-assessment.html" target="_blank">Entitlement to one’s languages</a> (and to calling them languages rather than, say, <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2012/05/being-multilingual-in-single-language.html" target="_blank">dialects</a>) carries entitlement to what those languages represent, and therefore threatens the entitlement of the powers that be to decide who is entitled to use which languages. Do we want to pursue the scenario described in Ray Bradbury’s <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17470674-fahrenheit-451" target="_blank"><i>Fahrenheit 451</i></a>? On first suspicion of Guy Montag’s deviation from standard book burning rituals, Captain Beatty lectures him: “We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, [...] but everyone <i>made</i> equal.” And he adds: “[T]he home environment can undo a lot you try to do at school. That’s why we’ve lowered the kindergarten age year after year until now we’re almost snatching them from the cradle.” </div>
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Or do we want to make it clear to ourselves and the children in our care that there is no conflict between home and school uses of language because they serve distinct environments? To my mind, school would be an ideal environment to teach children both that using language(s) at home and in school is a matter of appropriate choices, and <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2012/11/linguistic-ghettos.html" target="_blank">why these choices matter</a>. Where else, in fact, can we be educated about this? Simply suppressing inappropriate home uses of language in school won’t work, because we can’t make choices if we don’t know that there <i>are</i> choices to make. </div>
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School-bound linguistic resources are not synonymous with ‘linguistic resources’, whether we’re monolingual or multilingual. We can talk about anything in any language, if we so wish, because the languages aren’t in charge: <i>we</i> are. If using the same language at home and in school were the key to enhanced academic accomplishment, children growing up in monolingual environments would outperform their multilingual peers academically. I’m sure that the parents who worry about these school recommendations would be very interested to know about research supporting this. So would I.</div>
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In contrast to mythical beliefs in redemption through ‘higher’ monolingualism, what research does show is that nurturing the learners’ <i>full</i> linguistic repertoire in school favours academic achievement. Virginia Scott and María José de la Fuente show this in their paper <a href="http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/modl/2008/00000092/00000001/art00010" target="_blank">What’s the Problem?</a>, and so does Joana Duarte in <a href="http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11159-011-9251-7" target="_blank">Migrants’ educational success through innovation: The case of the Hamburg bilingual schools</a>. </div>
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Nurturing schoolchildren’s multilingualism, by the way, doesn’t mean the other mythical absurdity that everyone in school must become fluent in everyone else’s languages. It means nurturing schoolchildren’s multilingualism. See, for example, Maurice Carder’s book, <a href="http://www.multilingual-matters.com/display.asp?K=9781853599408" target="_blank"><i>Bilingualism in International Schools. A Model for Enriching Language Education</i></a>; or Jean-Jacques Weber’s <a href="http://multilingual-matters.com/display.asp?k=9781783091980" target="_blank"><i>Flexible Multilingual Education. Putting Children’s Needs First</i></a>, on which the author contributed a guest <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2014/06/mother-tongue-education-or-flexible.html" target="_blank">blogpost</a> to this forum; or Sandie Mourão and Mónica Lourenço’s collection <a href="https://www.routledge.com/products/9780415705271" target="_blank"><i>Early Years Second Language Education</i></a>, to which I wrote a <a href="http://www.academia.edu/7888192/Foreword_to_Mour%C3%A3o_S._and_Louren%C3%A7o_M._eds._Early_Years_Second_Language_Education_International_Perspectives_on_Theory_and_Practice._Abingdon_Routledge" target="_blank">Foreword</a>.</div>
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Being multilingual in school is a norm, not <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2010/12/schooling-in-tongues.html" target="_blank">an affliction to excise</a>. I mean the word <a href="https://www.peterlang.com/view/product/64593?format=PBK" target="_blank"><i>norm</i></a> quite literally: multilinguals are special only when misconstrued through monolingual lenses. This is why most referrals of multilingual schoolchildren to <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2015/09/multilingualism-and-disorders.html" target="_blank">‘special/remedial’ intervention</a> come from schools where monolingualism still reigns as unquestionable benchmark of linguistic skills. The next post has some more on this.</div>
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Redford, M.A., & Gildersleeve-Neumann, C.E. (2009). The development of distinct speaking styles in preschool children. <span style="font-style: italic;">Journal of speech, language, and hearing research, 52</span> (6), 1434-48. PMID: <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19951923" rev="review">19951923</a><br />
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SCOTT, V., & FUENTE, M. (2008). What's the Problem? L2 Learners' Use of the L1 During Consciousness-Raising, Form-Focused Tasks. <span style="font-style: italic;">The Modern Language Journal, 92</span> (1), 100-113. DOI: <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-4781.2008.00689.x" rev="review">10.1111/j.1540-4781.2008.00689.x</a><br />
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Wagner, L., Greene-Havas, M., & Gillespie, R. (2010). Development in Children’s Comprehension of Linguistic Register. <span style="font-style: italic;">Child Development, 81</span> (6), 1678-1686. DOI: <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2010.01502.x" rev="review">10.1111/j.1467-8624.2010.01502.x</a><br />
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<span lang="en-GB"><i>Next post: </i></span><span lang="en-GB"><i><b><a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2016/03/being-multilingual-in-clinic.html" target="_blank">Being multilingual in clinic</a></b></i></span><span lang="en-GB"><span style="font-style: normal;">.</span></span><span lang="en-GB"><i> Saturday 5</i></span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><sup><span lang="en-GB"><i>th</i></span></sup></span><span lang="en-GB"><i> March 2016.</i></span></div>
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Madalena Cruz-Ferreirahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14782492322928803326noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1132547320196715283.post-46642973695841280852016-01-09T00:00:00.000+08:002017-05-24T22:47:31.431+08:00Being multilingual at home<style type="text/css">P { margin-bottom: 0.08in; }</style> <br />
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Apportioning of linguistic space to the languages of a multilingual family is best viewed as a process rather than a final product, in that what once seemed like a sensible, natural choice may prove irrelevant or unnecessary later on. My family, for example, started off with two home languages and ended up with three, when the children realised that they, too, were <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/02/sibling-talk.html" target="_blank">entitled to decide</a> who speaks what to whom. A transcript of a dinner table conversation involving all five family members documents this transition, in Chapter 10, section ‘Language dominance?’, of my book <a href="http://www.multilingual-matters.com/display.asp?isb=9781853598388" target="_blank"><i>Three is a Crowd?</i></a>, available online. </div>
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Multilingual home language policies, in other words, must serve all involved, and must evolve with them, independently from the linguistic landscape outside the home. This is also true of monolingual home language policies in same-language monolingual settings – whether we choose to call them by this or any other name. The point is that home uses of any language do not match the broader community’s, including school uses, because home is not the broader community: we don’t talk about the same things in the same way with the same people, at home and outside. </div>
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The fact that home and community environments are different, and therefore demand different linguistic expression, needs to be made very clear: a common misconception has it that ‘knowing a language’ means being able to use it in all possible ways. Nothing could be further from the truth, whether for <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2012/05/little-multi-dialectals.html" target="_blank">native languages</a> or for <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/01/using-someone-elses-languages.html" target="_blank">languages learned in school</a>. Children nurtured in home Portuguese, say, won’t automatically develop ability to use <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/12/bookworming.html" target="_blank">school Portuguese</a>, just like educated, literate adults may have no idea how to use their language(s) for academic publication or business purposes, for example. In <a href="http://trove.nla.gov.au/work/21675838?q&versionId=26030792" target="_blank"><i>The Ecology of Language</i></a>, Einar Haugen further observed that linguistic knowledge is individual: “the competence [each child] acquires is different from that of every other child”.</div>
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Our children acquire the uses of language to which <i>they</i> are <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/10/trick-is-in-input.html" target="_blank">exposed</a>, in those environments where their language(s) come to make sense. It follows that home uses of language serve <i>home</i> linguistic needs, developing their own norms out of daily interaction. Each home language will in addition serve those needs in different ways, say, mum’s language for playground outings or baking cakes, dad’s for story time or cooking pasta.</div>
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Language-related playground and pasta activities are probably as common in multilingual homes as in monolingual ones, but using stern-sounding words like <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/02/one-person-one.html" target="_blank">‘policy’</a> or ‘management’ to single out what goes on, linguistically, in multilingual homes, might explain why so many parents in multilingual families raise concerns about which languages to use at home with their children, and how. Policy and management discourses suggest that there are one-way roads, no-nos, accepted conventions, fatal errors, and best procedures that we parents ought to research in depth before we even think of opening our multilingual mouths at home. But are there, really? And <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/06/how-do-we-know.html" target="_blank">who’s saying so?</a><br />
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I think that having to learn parenting, on the job, is enough to keep us quite busy, without the need to overburden ourselves structuring language plans to fit breastfeeding timetables, potty-training management and tantrum-dealing policies. Parents don’t write to me agonising over whether to wear a sari, or a cheongsam, or jeans, in front of their children, so why should the languages that go together with clothing, or food, or songs, or celebrations, or anything we do at home create a fuss? We just introduce our children to our (and their) languages in the same way that we introduce any other tenets of our (and their) cultural background.</div>
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Introducing languages to our children doesn’t mean <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2013/02/teaching-children.html" target="_blank">‘teaching’</a> them in any formal sense of this word: it means using our languages to serve our daily routines. In this way, we teach our children what matters to us and to them, our languages included. The children will learn much more from <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/06/people-see-people-do.html" target="_blank">what we do</a> and what we have them do with our languages, naturally, spontaneously, every day, than from what we think we can teach them about those languages in dedicated ‘language-learning’ sessions. Effective language lessons don’t target the languages themselves, because we learn best by <i>using</i> what we’re learning. </div>
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The number of home languages comes a close second among parents’ concerns, expressed in fears that there may be too few or too many languages around a child. On the too-few side, parents worry that their children may not become multilingual enough, soon enough, to corner the job market once they grow up, as I discussed <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-languages-that-matter.html" target="_blank">before</a>. Since we can’t predict job markets 20 or so years from now, I usually reassure parents that their babies aren’t likely to miss out on anything by not learning an extra language before they can walk. </div>
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On the too-many side, especially in connection with a <a href="http://www.mumabroadlife.com/?p=556" target="_blank">move abroad</a>, parents ask me about replacing one or more of their languages with the host country’s (usually) single language at home <style type="text/css">P { margin-bottom: 0.08in; }</style>– sometimes monolingually <style type="text/css">P { margin-bottom: 0.08in; }</style> –, on the grounds that what matters is their children’s swift integration in the new environment. This certainly resonates with globe-trotting parents, but I remain doubtful that this strategy may nurture a home away from home, for three main reasons. First, as said above, using a language at home won’t facilitate its use in a different environment. Second, children’s linguistic integration in a new community pretty much takes care of itself pretty quickly, as parents who have chosen to retain their languages at home find out, <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2012/02/making-home-for-new-languages.html" target="_blank">for better</a> or <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/11/invisible-but-actively-present.html" target="_blank">for worse</a>. And third, many of these parents (and sometimes their now grown-up children, too) later report to me regretting this decision: instead of ‘giving’ their children a language, as was their best intention, they’ve deprived them of another/others, and thereby of fluent bonding with the people and the <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2010/10/languages-come-in-flavours.html" target="_blank">culture</a> using them. </div>
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I don’t think there can be too few or too many home languages around a child. There can only be the exact number of languages that matter for the family’s daily business. But homes aren’t isolated bubbles within a larger community, they’re functional parts of it. Two other environments, <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2016/02/being-multilingual-in-school.html" target="_blank">schools</a> and <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2016/03/being-multilingual-in-clinic.html" target="_blank">clinics</a>, are likely to claim entitlement to a say in multilingual home language policies, to which I turn in the next couple of posts.</div>
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<span style="float: left; padding: 5px;"><a href="http://www.researchblogging.org/"><img alt="ResearchBlogging.org" src="http://www.researchblogging.org/public/citation_icons/rb2_large_gray.png" style="border: 0;" /></a></span><br />
Haugen, E. (1972). The ecology of language. <span style="font-style: italic;">In Dil, A.S. (ed.). The ecology of language. Essays by Einar Haugen. Stanford: Stanford University Press (pp. 325-339).</span><br />
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© MCF 2016</div>
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<span lang="en-GB"><i>Next post: </i></span><span lang="en-GB"><i><b><a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2016/02/being-multilingual-in-school.html" target="_blank">Being multilingual in school</a></b></i></span><span lang="en-GB"><span style="font-style: normal;">.</span></span><span lang="en-GB"><i> Saturday 6</i></span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><sup><span lang="en-GB"><i>th</i></span></sup></span><span lang="en-GB"><i> February 2016.</i></span></div>
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Madalena Cruz-Ferreirahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14782492322928803326noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1132547320196715283.post-17525701319624803812015-10-31T00:00:00.000+08:002017-03-27T21:57:18.440+08:00Multilingualism is about multilinguals<style type="text/css">P { margin-bottom: 0.08in; }</style> <br />
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<span lang="en-GB">Multilinguals are quite ordinary people. Not only do they <a href="http://www.multilingual-matters.com/display.asp?K=9781853593628" target="_blank">outnumber monolinguals</a>, worldwide, they’ve also been around for <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2015/05/multilingual-novelties.html" target="_blank">quite a while</a> and they’re <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2012/11/wait-where-are-you-from.html" target="_blank">all over the place</a>. Why is it, then, that specialist and lay outlooks alike continue to associate multilingualism with loaded words such as ‘challenge’, ‘complexity’, ‘(super)diversity’, ‘cost’, ‘benefit’, and to collocate the word with vocabulary evoking deviation, like ‘special’ or ‘exceptional’? </span> </div>
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<span lang="en-GB">I can think of one reason: we’ve somehow lost track of the meaning of the word </span><span lang="en-GB"><i>multilingualism</i></span><span lang="en-GB"> to designate the status of being multilingual, as in the title of this blog, although <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2015/10/what-does-multilingual-mean.html" target="_blank">there is no multilingualism without multilinguals</a>. The result has been that multilingualism, like other </span><span lang="en-GB"><i>-isms</i></span><span lang="en-GB"> before it, acquired a life of its own, whereby we feel free to talk about it without needing to refer to the people that it supposedly describes. Simply using the word, for example, is nowadays a must, in ways that sometimes remind of the reverential tributes we feel we ought to pay to things that we do not really understand, </span><span lang="en-GB"><i>-isms</i></span><span lang="en-GB"> included. The abstract of Hervé Adami and Virginie André’s recent book, </span><a href="https://www.peterlang.com/view/product/46037" target="_blank"><span lang="en-GB"><i>De l’idéologie monolingue à la doxa plurilingue: regards pluridisciplinaires</i></span></a><span lang="en-GB">, precisely captures the current awed stance about multilingualism, of which this excerpt is worth quoting in full:</span></div>
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“<span lang="en-GB"><i>Le vent ayant tourné en faveur de la “pluralité”, sous toutes ses formes, le plurilinguisme est devenu une notion à la mode puisqu’il s’inscrit dans le sacro-saint “respect de la diversité” qui constitue le socle idéologique de la bien-pensance d’aujourd’hui. Dans cette communion collective autour des bienfaits et des avantages du plurilinguisme, on a oublié qu’il devait constituer un objet d’étude plutôt qu’un objet de culte.</i>”</span></div>
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<span lang="en-GB">Cult objects tend to develop (evil? benevolent? mysterious?) strangleholds on us common mortals, making us do things and be things that we’re powerless to control. Multilingualism does or doesn’t do this and that to us, ought to be something but mustn’t be the other, we should and should not, can and cannot do so much or so little about it – is this what being multilingual is all about? Do we really want to go on stockpiling opinions about multilingualism until this <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2010/12/we-shall-overcome-monolingualism.html" target="_blank"><i>-ism</i> fad</a> </span><span lang="en-GB">inevitably burns itself out and the next one enters the stage? </span> </div>
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<span lang="en-GB">Or do we want to start dealing with multilingualism for what it factually is, the </span><span lang="en-GB"><i>natural</i></span><span lang="en-GB"> linguistic state of over half of humankind, across time and space? This means start dealing with people, not words, because multilingualism is about multilinguals. It means start looking at </span><span lang="en-GB"><i>what</i></span><span lang="en-GB"> multilinguals do, </span><span lang="en-GB"><i>how</i></span><span lang="en-GB"> they do it and </span><span lang="en-GB"><i>why</i></span><span lang="en-GB">, to find out <a href="https://www.peterlang.com/view/product/64593?format=PBK" target="_blank">what’s going on</a>, not what we’ve been told <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/06/how-do-we-know.html" target="_blank">must be going on</a>. It means focusing away from two myths which have compounded the purported intractability of multilingualism. </span> </div>
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<span lang="en-GB">First, the myth that monolingualism is an unquestionable norm of linguistic behaviour, as Liz Ellis was among the first to question in a collection titled </span><a href="https://www.equinoxpub.com/journals/index.php/SS/issue/view/646" target="_blank"><span lang="en-GB"><i>Monolingualism</i></span></a><span lang="en-GB">. Monolinguals use their single language for all purposes, with all people, at all times. This is <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2010/10/not-being-monolingual.html" target="_blank"><i>not</i> what multilinguals do</a>, whether with all their languages or just one of them. The only similarity between multilinguals and monolinguals is that all of us go about our daily business making use of our </span><span lang="en-GB"><i>full</i></span><span lang="en-GB"> linguistic repertoires.</span></div>
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<span lang="en-GB">Second, the myth that observing <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2012/04/languages-of-multilinguals.html" target="_blank">the languages of multilinguals</a> means observing multilingualism. What we call ‘languages’ exist only in our <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2010/10/putting-languages-to-work.html" target="_blank">collective imagination</a>. What we call ‘features of languages’ exist only in <a href="https://www.createspace.com/3507578" target="_blank">linguistic theories</a> – all of which are monolingual-based, by the way. In a collection of essays edited by Anwar S. Dil and titled </span><a href="http://trove.nla.gov.au/work/21675838?q&versionId=26030792" target="_blank"><span lang="en-GB"><i>The Ecology of Language</i></span></a><span lang="en-GB">, Einar Haugen reminded us that “[t]he concept of a language as a rigid, monolithic structure is false, even if it has proved to be a useful fiction in the development of linguistics” and that “[a language] has no life of its own apart from those who use it”.</span></div>
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<span lang="en-GB">Languages are tools that we create, develop and mould to serve </span><span lang="en-GB"><i>us</i></span><span lang="en-GB">. They’re not straitjackets to which users must accommodate, a misconception which <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/05/big-multilinguals.html" target="_blank">isn’t exclusive to research on multilingualism</a> but which continues to shape this research. Languages aren’t there to be reproduced and respected as-is, because language users aren’t language curators. </span> </div>
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<span lang="en-GB">Language users interact with their environment, their linguistic environment included. They are the real-life people that we parents, teachers, clinicians, encounter in our everyday lives, whose real-life language needs we feed, and whose real-life language uses feed back into our own. Language users are, in short, what we need to address. I</span><span lang="en-GB"><span lang="en-GB">’ll do that in t</span>he next couple of posts, dealing with home, school and clinical environments.</span></div>
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<span style="float: left; padding: 5px;"><a href="http://www.researchblogging.org/"><img alt="ResearchBlogging.org" src="http://www.researchblogging.org/public/citation_icons/rb2_large_gray.png" style="border: 0;" /></a></span><br />
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Ellis, E. (2008). Defining and investigating monolingualism. <span style="font-style: italic;">Sociolinguistic Studies, 2</span> (3). DOI: <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1558/sols.v2i3.311" rev="review">10.1558/sols.v2i3.311</a><br />
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Haugen, E. (1972). The ecology of language. <span style="font-style: italic;">In Dil, A.S. (ed.). </span><span style="font-style: italic;">The ecology of language. Essays by Einar Haugen. </span><span style="font-style: italic;">Stanford: Stanford University Press (pp. 325-339).</span><br />
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© MCF 2015</div>
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<i>Next post: </i><span lang="en-GB"><i><b><a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2016/01/being-multilingual-at-home.html" target="_blank">Being multilingual at home</a></b></i></span><span style="font-style: normal;">.</span><i> Saturday 9</i><span style="font-size: x-small;"><sup><i>th</i></sup></span><i> January 2016.</i></div>
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Madalena Cruz-Ferreirahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14782492322928803326noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1132547320196715283.post-59188786260579683232015-10-03T00:00:00.000+08:002019-10-30T00:03:26.408+08:00What does ‘multilingual’ mean?<style type="text/css">P { margin-bottom: 0.08in; }</style>
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What, exactly, do we mean by the label
‘multilingual’? I don’t mean dictionary-sanctioned definitions
of the word, nor what the word should mean according to more or less
entitled opinions, I mean what linguists mean when we talk about word
meanings: what does the observation of <i>uses</i> of the word
‘multilingual’ tell us about its meaning? In order to find out,
we can do what linguists do, which is to collate a sample of contexts
where we find the words that interest us.
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We observe, first, that ‘multilingual’
appears in contexts such as “... bilingual and/or multilingual
...”, implying a core distinction between two and more than two
languages. The dichotomy, however, seems exclusive to <i>bi-</i> vs.
<i>multi-</i>, in that we don’t find contexts such as “trilingual
and/or multilingual”, “quadrilingual and/or multilingual”, and
so on. The reason might well be that two languages were long thought
to be the <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2012/04/languages-of-multilinguals.html" target="_blank">crowning achievement</a>
of human linguistic ability. Evidence of this belief lingers on in
our current terminology, where we still talk about SLA (<i>Second</i>
Language Acquisition) to refer to any number of languages learned
beyond our native ones, or about <i>L1</i> to refer to <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/03/first-main-best.html" target="_blank">a (single) language</a>
learned from birth, the assumption here being that there must be some
<a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2014/10/native-multilinguals.html" target="_blank"><i>L2</i></a> politely waiting in line to become part of one’s linguistic
repertoire. Habitual use of cardinal/ordinal 2-related words in these
contexts, lacking relationship to the meaning of ‘2’,
explains why the word <i>bilingual</i> has come to mean ‘more than
one language’ or ‘two or more languages’. Which is rather
confusing, to say the least: just imagine using words like <i>bifocal</i>
or <i>bilateral</i> to refer to ‘two or more’ focal lengths or
sides, respectively. This is why I prefer <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2010/10/being-multilingual.html" target="_blank"><i>multi-</i><span style="font-style: normal;">words</span></a>
to refer to ‘more than one’.
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We observe, second, that the word
‘multilingual’ collocates with <i>family</i>, <i>school</i>,
<i>clinic</i>, on the one hand, and with <i>child</i>, <i>teacher</i>,
<i>clinician</i>, on the other. This sample shows that the word is
used as a qualifier (we could call it an adjective) of another word
(a noun). The same goes for contexts like <i>The family/child/ ... is
multilingual</i>. More uncommon are collocations such as <i>A
multilingual is ...</i>, <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/p/multilinguals-are-book-reviews_11.html" target="_blank"><i>multilinguals are ...</i></a>,
or <i>a/the multilingual.</i>, where a final stop follows the word: <i>I
am / They are multilingual</i> is sanctioned by use, but <i>I am a
multilingual / They are multilinguals</i> apparently isn’t. Not all
that long ago I had to add the plural form <i>multilinguals</i> to
the dictionary in my word processor, which kept marking it with a
no-no wavy red line. We’re not comfortable using this word as a
noun – yet: it could well be only a matter of time for
<i>multilingual/multilinguals</i> to become as noun-worthy as
<i>bilingual/bilinguals</i>, given that our attention to
non-monolinguals dates from <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2010/11/multilingual-woes-and-joys.html" target="_blank">quite recently</a>.</div>
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A third observation is that when we’re
talking about, say, multilingual schools and multilingual teachers,
we’re talking about two different multilingualisms – and yes, my
word processor also had issues with this plural. A multilingual T,
including families, schools, clinics, countries, environments, is a
T(hing) where more than one language is used, whereas a multilingual
P, including children, parents, teachers, clinicians, individuals, is
a P(erson) who uses more than one language. This is not splitting
hairs: the verbal form “is used” indicates a passive
construction, probably familiar from <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2015/07/textbook-languages.html" target="_blank">school textbooks</a>
in interesting sentences like <i>The bone is eaten by the dog</i>. In
language textbooks, the <i>by</i>-phrase is always there, because the
purpose of textbook passives is to teach that they must match an
active counterpart, in this case <i>The dog eats the bone</i>.
Language students apparently need not be taught that we use passives
precisely to be able to ignore the <i>by</i>-phrase, either because
we have no idea who is actively doing the action represented by the
verb, or because we prefer not to say. Exactly as when we define,
say, a multilingual school as a school where more than one language
is used. By whom? We don’t know.
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What we do know is that families or
schools, being institutional abstractions, can’t ‘use’
languages: <i>people</i> can. We also know that when we say that a
school or a country ‘has’ more than one language, we’re using
<a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2013/08/metaphors-and-multilinguals.html" target="_blank">metaphor</a>.
Schools and countries can’t own anything, except metaphorically:
<i>people</i> can. Which means that talking about, say, multilingual
environments is not the same as talking about multilinguals: a
multilingual environment is one where different languages <span lang="en-GB">are
involved, but not necessarily multilingual people. </span>Multilingual environments can feature monolinguals, as in
multilingual schools or clinics where the students or clients are
multilingual whereas the staff are not, and that’s why multilingual
signs exist for the benefit of those who use only one of the
languages in them.
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In
Cruz-Ferreira, M., <i><a href="https://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/p/multilinguals-are-book-reviews_11.html" target="_blank">Multilinguals are ...?</a></i>,
Chapter 11</div>
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Failure to realise that multilingualism
has to do with <span style="font-weight: normal;">*multilinguals*</span>
explains the obsession with the <i>languages</i> of a multilingual
that has characterised specialist and lay quests into
multilingualism. We select multilinguals’ <a href="http://www.academia.edu/922847/Flerspr%C3%A5kighet_och_spr%C3%A5kutveckling_hos_barn" target="_blank">vocabulary sizes</a>,
accents, grammar, pragmatic proficiency, for comparison with
monolinguals’, to ascertain the presumed state of health, or
<a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2012/05/language-integrity.html" target="_blank">integrity</a>,
or <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/03/language-percentages.html" target="_blank">wholeness</a>,
of multilinguals’ languages, apparently expecting to find the key
to multilingualism in the languages themselves. A bit like saying
that the key to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMQXIH0FH-E" target="_blank">Maria João Pires</a>’ performance lies in
her pianos. We’ve even started comparing trilinguals to bilinguals,
those not-so-exciting-any-more language geniuses of yore, and I’m
sure the day will come when we’ll compare octalinguals to
heptalinguals, to find out... What, exactly? I wonder, too. This way
of looking at multilingualism takes it as a property of languages,
which is clearly nonsensical. Languages can’t be multilingual:
<a href="http://www.academia.edu/922730/Multilingualism_language_norms_and_multilingual_contexts" target="_blank"><i>people</i> can</a>.
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If we want to understand
what being ‘multilingual’ means, we need to shift our focus from
the languages to the language users. Only then can we stop asking
useless questions about <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2015/09/multilingualism-and-disorders.html" target="_blank">what different languages do to people</a>
and start asking relevant questions about what people do with
different languages. Next time, I’ll try to work out what <i>this</i>
means.</div>
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<i>Next post: </i><span lang="en-GB"><i><b><a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2015/10/multilingualism-is-about-multilinguals.html" target="_blank">Multilingualism is about multilinguals</a></b></i></span><span style="font-style: normal;">.</span><i>
Saturday 31</i><span style="font-size: x-small;"><sup><i>st</i></sup></span><i> October 2015.</i></div>
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Madalena Cruz-Ferreirahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14782492322928803326noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1132547320196715283.post-35692500870719711192015-09-05T00:00:00.000+08:002017-03-26T23:38:35.985+08:00Multilingualism and disorders<style type="text/css">P { margin-bottom: 0.08in; }</style> <br />
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Norms of conduct, including linguistic norms, are social constructs. They vary in space and time, and they can be of two types. Descriptive norms draw on observation and tell us what people do, for example that interrupting your conversation partners is common in parts of southern Europe (which can be a sign of polite engagement in the exchange), or that fermented herring is a delicacy in parts of northern Europe (which can be a sign of Nordic stoicism). Prescriptive norms draw on judgement and tell us what people should do, for example that we must respect our elders’ conversational turns, or abstain from consuming fermented food in the presence of sensitive noses. </div>
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Norms are useful constructs because they help us <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2012/06/fitting-in.html" target="_blank">regulate our behaviour</a> among fellow human beings – although it remains entirely up to us to choose, say, to <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2012/01/do-you-feel-swedish.html" target="_blank">be a Roman in Rome</a>, or to insist that <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/06/i-hate-that-guy.html" target="_blank">only Romans should be heard in Rome</a>. Norms are useful also because they underpin comparative analyses which can help us decide what isn’t normal, and act upon that decision. On one condition: that we know what we’re talking about, when we’re talking about norms.</div>
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Taking descriptive norms to apply to populations beyond those which supplied the norming standard is a telling sign that we have no idea what we’re talking about: for example, assuming that all Europeans enjoy fermented fish meals. Another is confusing descriptive and prescriptive norms: for example, insisting that we should never interrupt people. Unfortunately, both signs are richly documented in our ways of dealing with multilingualism. </div>
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Descriptions of linguistic behaviour that apply to monolinguals because they were normed for monolinguals have arbitrarily, though routinely, been generalised to multilingual behaviour. They provide the benchmarks through which we assess multilinguals, on grounds that would make us <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2010/10/not-being-monolingual.html" target="_blank">cringe</a> if our reasoning hadn’t become so dulled by their familiarity.</div>
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When we select multilinguals for comparison with (experimental) populations containing no multilinguals, while never giving a thought to performing comparisons <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/07/effects-of-monolingualism.html" target="_blank">the other way around</a>, we’re doing two things. One, we’re saying that monolingualism is a useful and unquestionable linguistic norm from which to draw useful and unquestionable conclusions about non-monolingual behaviour; and two, we’re singling out multilingualism as the reason for the comparison, thereby self-fulfilling the prophecy that multilingualism is a deviation from <i>those</i> norms. What else could we expect to find from these comparisons, really?? Such practices turn multilinguals into the platypuses of lingualism: they’re funny not because they are funny, but because the norms guiding our taxonomies are. Interrupting people and basking in fermented herring are also deviations from <i>some</i> norm. </div>
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Respectable academic publications have indeed taught us that multilingualism is deviant. Only in the last two decades, they have featured, say, the linguistic development of multilingual children alongside linguistic development in clinical conditions such as deafness, blindness, autism, prematurity, specific language impairment and genetic disorders, or socioeconomic conditions such as extreme poverty, under headings titled <i>varieties</i> of development, or development in <i>exceptional</i> circumstances. The thinly veiled <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2015/08/language-multilingualism-and-racism.html" target="_blank">political correctness</a> of the italicised words in fact sanctions multilingual development as atypically <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2012/11/linguistic-ghettos.html" target="_blank"><i>other</i></a>. My articles <a href="http://www.academia.edu/1107744/First_language_acquisition_and_teaching" target="_blank">‘First language acquisition and teaching’</a> and <a href="http://www.academia.edu/922770/Sociolinguistic_and_cultural_considerations_when_working_with_multilingual_children" target="_blank">‘Sociolinguistic and cultural considerations when working with multilingual children’</a> give an overview of these matters.</div>
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Conclusions sanctioned by authoritative reports such as these expectedly lead parents and educators to take multilingualism as a disorder, best addressed by specialists.</div>
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In Cruz-Ferreira, M., <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/p/multilinguals-are-book-reviews_11.html" target="_blank"><i>Multilinguals are ...?</i></a>, Chapter 1</div>
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Mistaking observed norms for prescriptions, in turn, is the natural consequence of our ignorance that descriptive norms, in the plural, must be established for every normal population. A norm describing <i>us</i>, here and now, cannot apply to <i>them</i>, elsewhere and evermore. The dearth of descriptions of <a href="https://www.peterlang.com/view/product/64593?format=PBK" target="_blank">multilingual normality</a> explains that discussions about multilinguals concern not what they do, but what they should do, according to monolingual standards. This is why recommended behaviour for multilinguals invariably targets the <a href="http://blog.asha.org/2011/08/02/recommending-monolingualism-to-multilinguals-why-and-why-not/" target="_blank">elimination of multilingualism</a> itself, in the same way that we’d do well to eradicate other pathogenic agents.</div>
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To me, the issue is that laypeople and specialists alike seem to have great difficulty understanding that <i>difference</i> is not synonymous with <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2014/02/accent-dialect-or-disorder.html" target="_blank"><i>deviation</i></a>, and this is why we go on <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2013/04/shibboleths-co.html" target="_blank">maltreating differences</a>. Add to this the misconception that multilingualism has more to do with languages than with the people who use them, and we have the perfect recipe counting multilingualism as an ingredient of clinical conditions: we remain persuaded that multilingualism is about what languages can do to people, instead of <a href="http://www.academia.edu/922730/Multilingualism_language_norms_and_multilingual_contexts" target="_blank">what people can do with languages</a>.</div>
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Multilingualism is *not* a disorder. Neither does it cause, avoid, worsen, or repair disorders, because it doesn’t even <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2013/01/what-causes-what.html" target="_blank"><i>correlate</i></a> with disorders of any kind. One of the reasons for the widespread belief that it is and it does relates, no doubt, to our additional difficulty in providing precise definitions for the terms that we use. What, exactly, do we mean by the label ‘multilingual’? I turn to this next.</div>
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<span class="Z3988" title="ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Ajournal&rft.jtitle=AILA+Review&rft_id=info%3Adoi%2F10.1075%2Faila.24.06cru&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fresearchblogging.org&rft.atitle=First+language+acquisition+and+teaching&rft.issn=1461-0213&rft.date=2011&rft.volume=24&rft.issue=&rft.spage=78&rft.epage=87&rft.artnum=https%3A%2F%2Fbenjamins.com%2Fcatalog%2Faila.24.06cru&rft.au=Cruz-Ferreira%2C+M.&rfe_dat=bpr3.included=1;bpr3.tags=Social+Science%2CLinguistics%2C+Child+language%2C+Myth%2C+Language+teaching%2C+Multilingualism"><br /></span>
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<span class="Z3988" title="ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Ajournal&rft.jtitle=AILA+Review&rft_id=info%3Adoi%2F10.1075%2Faila.24.06cru&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fresearchblogging.org&rft.atitle=First+language+acquisition+and+teaching&rft.issn=1461-0213&rft.date=2011&rft.volume=24&rft.issue=&rft.spage=78&rft.epage=87&rft.artnum=https%3A%2F%2Fbenjamins.com%2Fcatalog%2Faila.24.06cru&rft.au=Cruz-Ferreira%2C+M.&rfe_dat=bpr3.included=1;bpr3.tags=Social+Science%2CLinguistics%2C+Child+language%2C+Myth%2C+Language+teaching%2C+Multilingualism">Cruz-Ferreira, M. (2011). First language acquisition and teaching. <span style="font-style: italic;">AILA Review, 24</span>, 78-87. DOI: <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/aila.24.06cru" rev="review">10.1075/aila.24.06cru</a></span><br />
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Cruz-Ferreira, M. (2012). Sociolinguistic and cultural considerations when working with multilingual children. <span style="font-style: italic;">In S. McLeod & B. A. Goldstein (Eds.), Multilingual Aspects of Speech Sound Disorders in Children (pp. 13-23). Bristol: Multilingual Matters.</span><br />
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<i>Next post: </i><span lang="en-GB"><i><b><a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2015/10/what-does-multilingual-mean.html" target="_blank">What does ‘multilingual’ mean?</a></b></i></span><span style="font-style: normal;"></span><i> Saturday 3</i><span style="font-size: x-small;"><sup><i>rd</i></sup></span><i> October 2015.</i></div>
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Madalena Cruz-Ferreirahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14782492322928803326noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1132547320196715283.post-10108614610225925662015-08-08T00:00:00.000+08:002018-08-31T16:12:08.337+08:00Language, multilingualism and racism=Guest post= <div lang="en-GB" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
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by Jean-Jacques Weber</div>
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Since the 2008 election of
President Obama in the United States of America, we are increasingly
told that we are witnessing the end of racism. I would argue, on the
contrary, that racism is still all-pervasive but that it has been
normalized.</div>
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Racism has become such a
part of everyday common sense that we often do not even notice it any
longer. We do notice it at certain times, as when in Europe and
elsewhere, Far Right parties score electoral victories, with
increasing numbers of people voting for them and their elected
representatives sitting in the European Parliament, or in national
parliaments and local communes, whether in Austria, France, Greece,
Hungary, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Finland, or many other
countries.</div>
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It is easy, at times like
this, to construct those who vote for such parties as the racists and
us, by implication, as non-racist. In fact, however, these seemingly
opposed views actually exist on a continuum, on which it is easy to
slide from softer to harder forms of racism. None of us is immune
from racist views and in particular the language racist views that
our Western societies are steeped in. Language racism refers to the
manifold ways in which language is increasingly used nowadays as a
proxy for race in order to exclude people.</div>
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Before I discuss some
examples, there are two important points that we need to keep in mind
about racism. First, racism is not only cognitive but also structural
and institutional. Racism is not just a matter of individual beliefs,
which can be abolished by changing these beliefs. There are also
structures and institutions that are bolstered by the racial ideology
and that help to maintain and reproduce racial privilege and
inequality. Secondly, the biological racism built around a
distinction between superior and inferior races has nowadays
metamorphosed into a cultural racism focused on <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2012/03/attitudes-towards-language-uses.html" target="_blank">cultural differences</a>,
which can be linguistic, religious, etc. In this way, many racial
discriminations are also about religion, language, social class or
gender. The point is precisely that different types of discrimination
overlap, and that race, class, gender, religion and language issues
intersect in all sorts of ways.</div>
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However, mainstream
contemporary discourses are marked by what is usually referred to as
‘colour-blind racism’, which consists in the denial (or erasure)
of race and racism. An illustration of this would be the August 2014
events in Ferguson, Missouri, a small town located within the
metropolitan area of St Louis. Long-standing spatial, economic and
cultural segregation in Ferguson has involved a high level of
distrust between the largely black community and the mostly white
police force, which culminated in the shooting of unarmed black
teenager Michael Brown by white police officer Darren Wilson on 9
August 2014, which in turn sparked off massive protests on the
streets of Ferguson and all over the USA.</div>
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One widely reported
comment after this tragic event was that of the white Republican
mayor of Ferguson, who insisted that we need to ‘blame poverty, not
race’ (<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/23/ferguson-michael-brown-blame-poverty-not-race" target="_blank">Guardian, 23-08-2014</a>).
In this way, he attempted to shift the blame away from white
supremacy and the structural racism of the social system, and upon
poor people, who could then be looked upon as responsible for their
own poverty. Thus the erasure of race and racism involves a number of
factors:</div>
<ul>
<li>an emphatic assertion
that we, or a particular individual (Darren Wilson), are not racist;</li>
<li>an inability – or
unwillingness – to see the wider picture of structural racism in
the social system;</li>
<li>a mistaken belief in the
one factor that explains it all: ‘it’s about poverty, not race’.</li>
</ul>
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<div lang="en-GB" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Language racism works in a
similar way. A recent example of it occurred in Luxembourg, the
country where I live and work. Luxembourg is a highly multilingual
country, with three officially recognized languages (Luxembourgish,
French and German). It has a high number of foreign residents
(45.3%), with the largest immigrant community being the Portuguese.
Many foreign residents speak French (as well as other Romance
languages such as Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, Romanian, Cape
Verdean Creole). As a result, French, which used to be the
language of prestige and of the educated elite, has now become
associated with migrants and is being viewed in an increasingly
<a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2012/11/linguistic-ghettos.html" target="_blank">negative light</a>
by many locals. They fear that the rapid spread of French may
endanger the small Luxembourgish language and, concomitantly, the
Luxembourgish <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2012/01/do-you-feel-swedish.html" target="_blank">‘nation’</a>
itself.</div>
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<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="en-GB">On 7 June</span><span lang="en-GB"> 2015, the Luxembourgish citizens were asked in a referendum to
decide for or against extending the right of vote in legislative
elections to foreign residents. The government campaigned in favour
of a ‘yes’ vote, as a way of reducing the ‘democratic deficit’
in Luxembourg, where only about half of the population are allowed to
vote in legislative elections. However, the motion was rejected by
78% of the voters. In the aftermath of the referendum, many of these
‘no’ voters felt the need to defend themselves against possible
charges of xenophobia and racism, by arguing (in online comments,
letters to the editor, etc.) that theirs was not a vote against
foreigners but against the French language. In the following letter
to the editor, for example, it is claimed that the sole aim of the
‘no’ voters was to defend the Luxembourgish language against an
encroachment by French:</span></div>
<div lang="en-GB" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in;">
<span lang="en-GB"><i>The
80% against voting rights for foreigners is not a vote against
foreigners. It was a vote against the further ‘Frenchification’
of the country … That proves: we are not hostile to foreigners.</i>
(</span><a href="https://www.wort.lu/de" target="_blank"><span lang="en-GB">Luxemburger Wort</span></a><span lang="en-GB">, 17-06-2015)</span></div>
</blockquote>
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<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="en-GB">Here we have another
instantiation of the ‘denial of racism’ strategy (‘it’s about
language, not race’), and we are reminded that multilingualism does
not automatically tally with tolerance and open-mindedness. Even more
worryingly, this form of language racism underlies widespread
societal discourses which are ostensibly about language but are often
tied up in more complicated anxieties about race, for example the
politics of integration in Europe and the English Only movement in
the United States. Anybody interested in this topic will find further
examples and analyses in my new book </span><a href="https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9781137531063" target="_blank"><span lang="en-GB"><i>Language Racism</i></span></a><span lang="en-GB">.
</span>
</div>
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<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in;">
<span lang="en-GB"><a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jean_Jacques_Weber" target="_blank">Jean-Jacques Weber</a> is Professor of English and Education at the University of
Luxembourg. He has published widely in the areas of discourse
analysis, multilingualism and education, including </span><a href="https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9781137531063" target="_blank"><span lang="en-GB"><i>Language Racism</i></span></a><span lang="en-GB">
(Palgrave, 2015), </span><a href="http://multilingual-matters.com/display.asp?k=9781783091980" target="_blank"><span lang="en-GB"><i>Flexible Multilingual Education: Putting Children’s Needs First</i></span></a><span lang="en-GB">
(Multilingual Matters, 2014) and </span><a href="https://www.routledge.com/Introducing-Multilingualism-A-Social-Approach-2nd-Edition/Horner-Weber/p/book/9781138244498" target="_blank"><span lang="en-GB"><i>Introducing Multilingualism: A Social Approach</i></span></a><span lang="en-GB"> (Routledge,
2012).</span></div>
<div lang="en-GB" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
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<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
© Jean-Jacques Weber 2015</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
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<i>Next post: </i><i><b><a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2015/09/multilingualism-and-disorders.html" target="_blank">Multilingualism and disorders</a></b></i><span style="font-style: normal;">.</span><i>
Saturday 5</i><span style="font-size: x-small;"><sup><i>th</i></sup></span><i> September 2015.</i></div>
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Madalena Cruz-Ferreirahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14782492322928803326noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1132547320196715283.post-34673986334370231312015-07-11T00:00:00.000+08:002020-05-30T17:24:49.899+08:00Textbook languages<style type="text/css">P { margin-bottom: 0.08in; }</style> <br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="en-GB">Wanting to learn a language doesn’t always result in learning the language that we want. This is so even when the language that we want to learn and the one that we end up learning go by the same name – let’s call it </span><span lang="en-GB"><i>X</i></span><span lang="en-GB">. One reason for this is that most language teaching proceeds through what we’ve come to identify as the language’s holy writ, namely, the X textbook. </span> </div>
<div lang="en-GB" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="en-GB">A textbook is a book. Like all books, it uses printed modes of language, with two consequences: first, that textbooks can’t serve those of us who wish to learn to <i>speak</i></span><i><span lang="en-GB"><span style="font-style: normal;"></span></span></i><span lang="en-GB"> X, because <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2012/09/unconnected-speech.html" target="_blank">spellings do *not* represent actual speech</a>. </span><span lang="en-GB">The printed nature of textbook languages is what explains, among other things, the proverbial failure of X learners to acquire <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/05/speaking-out-of-tune.html" target="_blank">X-like accents</a> – for which the learners are conveniently <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2010/11/age-decay-and-missed-opportunities.html" target="_blank">blamed</a>, by the way. Is it any wonder that accents learned through print remain <i>print</i>-like?</span><span lang="en-GB">? The second consequence is that only those of us who are literate can access textbooks. This includes e-books and other e-novelties in written form, in that technological innovations seem to have had no noticeable effect on pedagogical innovation.</span></div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0mC6-tQ50rpajhV1JjmL2LtLZjSE4HwPxgr9j00gB58OyiQeXXAKc26nyBh7_nRmufDGNVg8onzwNPF_R-tK-PF-I24iQrFWkM-aaSZ1VNoWJ71e8PIxmNBDj7ctq8lu0MZkmTudziizh/s1600/Sutterlin.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0mC6-tQ50rpajhV1JjmL2LtLZjSE4HwPxgr9j00gB58OyiQeXXAKc26nyBh7_nRmufDGNVg8onzwNPF_R-tK-PF-I24iQrFWkM-aaSZ1VNoWJ71e8PIxmNBDj7ctq8lu0MZkmTudziizh/s1600/Sutterlin.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><div align="CENTER" lang="en-GB" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<i>Lärobok i tyska språket</i> (1858)</div>
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Image source: Wikimedia Commons</div>
</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span lang="en-GB">A textbook is also <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2012/10/teaching-about-languages.html" target="_blank">a grammar of X</a>. Rather than real-life X, it offers boring, trite, irrelevant, at worst embarrassing, at best <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2013/01/abandon-all-hope-ye-who-enter-here.html" target="_blank">infantile</a> examples of dialogues (sentences, situations, narratives, descriptions) for learners to memorise and/or enact, which are tailor-made for the sole purpose of introducing points of X grammar. The etymological relationship of the word </span><span lang="en-GB"><i>grammar</i></span><span lang="en-GB"> to printed modes of language is the likely reason behind this strange pedagogy. The facts are that we’ve been teaching languages in this way <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/01/speech-passes-print-endures.html" target="_blank">since the Ancient Greeks</a>.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="en-GB">A textbook is, further, a preview of things to come, namely, its twin sidekicks tests and exams, also holy writ. Textbooks contain the <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2010/11/fight-for-fair-deal.html" target="_blank">correct answers</a> that we learners will need to provide to printed assessment questions, in order to have our learning of X certified, also in print. The teaching-to-the-test nature of language textbooks is what explains that certified X learners can’t </span><span lang="en-GB"><i>use</i></span><span lang="en-GB"> X. On my </span><span lang="en-GB"><span lang="en-GB">first visit to an English-speaking country, Britain,</span> I brought along nine solid years of enviable marks in my <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/01/using-someone-elses-languages.html" target="_blank">school English</a>. As soon as I landed, I realised that I could both describe the past perfect continuous and declaim perfectly grammatical sentences like ‘My sister’s bookcase is taller than mine’ to anyone who would listen (no one would), but that I couldn’t order a snack or communicate with bus drivers, receptionists, or anyone else in sight. I had no idea </span><span lang="en-GB"><i>what language</i></span><span lang="en-GB"> they were speaking over there, I’d never heard it before. Or seen it, for that matter: brochures, placards, newspaper articles, were as unintelligible to me. And I won’t bore you with what happened in my later encounters with <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2012/05/being-multilingual-in-single-language.html" target="_blank">this ‘same’ X</a> in places like India, Hong Kong, Australia or <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/06/people-see-people-do.html" target="_blank">Singapore</a>, for example. </span> </div>
<div lang="en-GB" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="en-GB">A textbook is, finally, a publication. Like all publications, textbooks have editions, copyrights, publishers, distributors, marketers, advertisers, sellers, prices, and they are dated, in both senses of this word. They also have authors who, in the case of language textbooks, are often monolingual. What language textbooks seem to lack is a specific readership. Since the ideal publication must appeal to ‘any’ consumers, they’re invariably geared to “anyone seeking to improve their X”, or “X learners from any language background”. The problem is that one-size-fits-all language products fail to serve any consumers, for the simple reason that real life is anything but one-size-fits-all: language </span><span lang="en-GB"><i>users</i></span><span lang="en-GB">, in real-life times and real-life places, are what makes up any X. </span> </div>
<div lang="en-GB" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="en-GB">Through their equally time- and space-bound makers, textbooks serve the languages that they feature in their titles, rather than <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/09/teaching-languages-vs-teaching-learners.html" target="_blank">the language learners</a>, who are instead brainwashed into believing that they must accept what ‘the market’ has on offer. This is why textbook languages disregard local cultures, as Ross Forman reports in <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07908318.2013.868473" target="_blank">How local teachers respond to the culture and language of a global English as a Foreign Language textbook</a>, or John Gray discusses in <a href="https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9780230222588" target="_blank">The Construction of English. Culture, Consumerism and Promotion in the ELT Global Coursebook</a>. This article from </span><span lang="en-GB"><i>The Economist</i></span><span lang="en-GB">, <a href="http://www.economist.com/news/international/21643148-why-are-countries-failing-so-badly-teaching-english-mute-leading-mute?fsrc=scn/tw_ec/the_mute_leading_the_mute" target="_blank">The mute leading the mute</a>, shares equally interesting insights on this matter. </span> </div>
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<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="en-GB">This is also why textbook languages allow no room for learners’ engagement with them, to make them </span><span lang="en-GB"><i>theirs</i></span><span lang="en-GB"> by building the <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/05/non-native-common-ground.html" target="_blank">common ground</a> that using a language means, not least where <a href="http://www.academia.edu/922853/Multilingual_accents" target="_blank">accents</a> are concerned. You need to follow the book: questioning (textbook contents, methods or goals) and thinking (about alternative language uses and <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/10/children-toys-and-languages.html" target="_blank">how they might work</a>), which define healthy learning, are discouraged as a waste of precious time needed to prepare for almighty <a href="https://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2018/02/multilingual-deficiencies-or-assessment.html" target="_blank">assessment pieces</a>. </span><br />
<br />
<span lang="en-GB"><style type="text/css">P { margin-bottom: 0.08in</style></span><span lang="en-GB">I see no reason why we should remain in awe of the magic of printed symbols and go on teaching languages the way we were taught. No reason, in fact, to let any one-size-fits-all standard symbology constrain our engagement with </span><span lang="en-GB"><i>people</i></span><span lang="en-GB"> and their languages. This seems to be common practice in clinical settings, for example, and I’ll come back to this specific issue </span><a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2015/09/multilingualism-and-disorders.html" target="_blank"><span lang="en-GB"><span style="background: transparent;">very soon</span></span></a><span lang="en-GB">. Meanwhile, the next post, authored by a guest whom I’m delighted to welcome to this blog for the second time, offers broader reasons for ways in which we currently engage with fellow human beings.</span><br />
<span lang="en-GB"><br />
</span> <br />
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<span lang="en-GB"> <span style="float: left; padding: 5px;"><a href="http://www.researchblogging.org/"><img alt="ResearchBlogging.org" src="http://www.researchblogging.org/public/citation_icons/rb2_large_gray.png" style="border: 0;" /></a></span><br />
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<br />
<span class="Z3988" title="ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Ajournal&rft.jtitle=Language%2C+Culture+and+Curriculum&rft_id=info%3Adoi%2F10.1080%2F07908318.2013.868473&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fresearchblogging.org&rft.atitle=How+local+teachers+respond+to+the+culture+and+language+of+a+global+English+as+a+Foreign+Language+textbook&rft.issn=0790-8318&rft.date=2014&rft.volume=27&rft.issue=1&rft.spage=72&rft.epage=88&rft.artnum=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.tandfonline.com%2Fdoi%2Fabs%2F10.1080%2F07908318.2013.868473&rft.au=Forman%2C+R.&rfe_dat=bpr3.included=1;bpr3.tags=Psychology%2CSocial+Science%2CLinguistics%2C+Lingua+franca%2C+Language+teaching%2C+Culture%2C+Emotion%2C+Multilingualism"><br />
</span></span><br />
<span lang="en-GB"><span class="Z3988" title="ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Ajournal&rft.jtitle=Language%2C+Culture+and+Curriculum&rft_id=info%3Adoi%2F10.1080%2F07908318.2013.868473&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fresearchblogging.org&rft.atitle=How+local+teachers+respond+to+the+culture+and+language+of+a+global+English+as+a+Foreign+Language+textbook&rft.issn=0790-8318&rft.date=2014&rft.volume=27&rft.issue=1&rft.spage=72&rft.epage=88&rft.artnum=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.tandfonline.com%2Fdoi%2Fabs%2F10.1080%2F07908318.2013.868473&rft.au=Forman%2C+R.&rfe_dat=bpr3.included=1;bpr3.tags=Psychology%2CSocial+Science%2CLinguistics%2C+Lingua+franca%2C+Language+teaching%2C+Culture%2C+Emotion%2C+Multilingualism"><br />
</span></span> <span lang="en-GB"><span class="Z3988" title="ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Ajournal&rft.jtitle=Language%2C+Culture+and+Curriculum&rft_id=info%3Adoi%2F10.1080%2F07908318.2013.868473&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fresearchblogging.org&rft.atitle=How+local+teachers+respond+to+the+culture+and+language+of+a+global+English+as+a+Foreign+Language+textbook&rft.issn=0790-8318&rft.date=2014&rft.volume=27&rft.issue=1&rft.spage=72&rft.epage=88&rft.artnum=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.tandfonline.com%2Fdoi%2Fabs%2F10.1080%2F07908318.2013.868473&rft.au=Forman%2C+R.&rfe_dat=bpr3.included=1;bpr3.tags=Psychology%2CSocial+Science%2CLinguistics%2C+Lingua+franca%2C+Language+teaching%2C+Culture%2C+Emotion%2C+Multilingualism">Forman, R. (2014). How local teachers respond to the culture and language of a global English as a Foreign Language textbook. <span style="font-style: italic;">Language, Culture and Curriculum, 27</span> (1), 72-88. DOI: <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07908318.2013.868473" rev="review">10.1080/07908318.2013.868473</a></span><br />
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<span lang="en-GB">© MCF 2015</span></div>
<span lang="en-GB"> </span> <br />
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</span></div>
<span lang="en-GB"> </span><br />
<div lang="en-GB" style="margin-bottom: 0in; orphans: 2; widows: 2;">
<span lang="en-GB"><i>Next post:</i><i><b> =Guest post= <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2015/08/language-multilingualism-and-racism.html" target="_blank">Language, multilingualism and racism</a></b></i><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">, by Jean-Jacques Weber. </span></i><i>Saturday 8</i><span style="font-size: x-small;"><sup><i>th</i></sup></span><i> August 2015.</i> </span></div>
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Madalena Cruz-Ferreirahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14782492322928803326noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1132547320196715283.post-8184827616326755122015-06-13T00:00:00.000+08:002017-04-02T18:17:44.479+08:00The perfect multilingual<style type="text/css">P { margin-bottom: 0.08in; }</style> <br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span lang="en-GB">In case you’re wondering, let me reassure you straight away that yes, the title of this post is meant to be sarcastic. Perfect multilinguals do exist, </span><span lang="en-GB"><span style="text-decoration: none;">of course</span></span><span lang="en-GB">, though only in the minds of those of us who mistake ideals of perfection for reality. </span> </div><div lang="en-GB" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span lang="en-GB">Multilingual perfection awardees must satisfy a number of criteria. If you are, or were, a language learner as an adult, forget it: not having acquired all of your languages as a young child automatically makes you a non-multilingual. Either your <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/04/you-speak-with-accent-i-dont.html" target="_blank">accent</a>, or your choice of words, your delivery, proficiency, <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2012/09/unconnected-speech.html" target="_blank">fluency</a>, grammar, conversational skills, in one or more of your languages, or your <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2014/11/nativeness-curse-and-blessings-of-genes.html" target="_blank">physical appearance</a>, or all of the above, won’t pass the perfection litmus test, which is a match to <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/05/non-native-common-ground.html" target="_blank">native(-like) standards</a>. This is an intriguing criterion, because it assumes that we know what <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/04/natives-and-speakers.html" target="_blank">native users</a> are, look like, and do with their languages. I recently came across a very entertaining report in </span><a href="http://www.nature.com/news/scientists-offer-advice-on-how-best-to-respond-to-reviewers-1.17640?WT.ec_id=NATURE-20150604" target="_blank"><span lang="en-GB"><i>Nature</i></span></a><span lang="en-GB">, about the woes of having articles submitted to journals anonymously peer reviewed in order to assess their scholarly quality, where I found this gem: “Another reviewer suggested that the [article] authors should find ‘someone who speaks English as a first language to proofread the paper’, even though all four authors – including two tenured professors – were native English speakers.”</span></div><div lang="en-GB" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span lang="en-GB">If, on the other hand, you’re a child acquiring your languages from birth, you may stand slightly higher up the qualifying ladder. But only slightly, because even though you might technically qualify as a <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2014/10/native-multilinguals.html" target="_blank"><i>native</i> multilingual</a></span><span lang="en-GB">, there have been studies on such children reporting on their </span><span lang="en-GB"><span style="font-style: normal;">foreign</span></span><span lang="en-GB"> accent in one or more of their languages, numbering their languages L1, L2, L</span><span lang="en-GB"><i>n</i></span><span lang="en-GB"> to suggest </span><span lang="en-GB"><span style="font-style: normal;">sequential</span></span><span lang="en-GB"> language learning, or arguing that one of their languages is dominant across an often unspecified board. As a young child, you are also bound to fail the LSRW condition, stipulating that being multilingual means proficiency in Listening, Speaking, Reading and Writing all of your languages. This acronymic criterion does two things: first, it disregards all of us for whom language use involves <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2014/09/sign-speech-multilinguals.html" target="_blank">neither listening nor speaking</a>; and second, it adds the ‘RW’ twist, drawing on the well-attested confusion between languages and their <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/01/speech-passes-print-endures.html" target="_blank">printed counterparts</a>. If I read and write Latin, but don’t speak it, am I multilingual with Latin? If I’m a native user of <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2012/05/little-multi-dialectals.html" target="_blank">Singlish</a>, but never wrote anything in it, am I multilingual with Singlish? Fascinating questions, and fascinating criterion, because it means that young multilinguals, as well as multilinguals who are illiterate, or happen to use one or more of the vast majority of the world’s languages which lack printed versions, aren’t perfect multilinguals either. </span> </div><div lang="en-GB" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span lang="en-GB">So who is? The issue is not so much that defining multilinguals looks pretty much like an exercise in shooting at a moving target: every time you think you’ve answered a question, about yourself or others (</span><span lang="en-GB"><i>Am I multilingual? Are you?</i></span><span lang="en-GB">), you find that the question has changed. The issue is that the perfect multilingual matches the mythical being that I’ve called </span><a href="https://www.academia.edu/922730/Multilingualism_language_norms_and_multilingual_contexts" target="_blank"><span lang="en-GB"><i>multi-monolingual</i></span></a><span lang="en-GB"> and that can be represented like this:</span></div><div lang="en-GB" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span lang="en-GB"><span style="font-style: normal;">Cover of Cruz-Ferreira, M., </span></span><a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/p/multilinguals-are-book-reviews_11.html" target="_blank"><span lang="en-GB"><i>Multilinguals are ...?</i></span></a><span lang="en-GB"><span style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span> </div><div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span lang="en-GB"><span style="font-style: normal;">Image © </span></span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="en-GB"><span style="font-style: normal;">Dinusha Uthpala Upasena</span></span></span></div></td></tr>
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</div><div lang="en-GB" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"></div><div lang="en-GB" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Perfect multi-monolinguals, in short, have <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/11/half-linguals-and-semilinguals.html" target="_blank">complete</a>, <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2012/05/language-integrity.html" target="_blank">unmixed</a>, and <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/03/language-percentages.html" target="_blank">parallel</a> command of all of their languages. If taken seriously, this means, for example, that they must be <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2012/04/dominant-languages-and-balanced.html" target="_blank">dominant in all their languages</a> which, if taken seriously, makes one wonder about the seriousness of the paradoxical claim that multilinguals must develop <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/03/first-main-best.html" target="_blank">a single dominant language</a>. </div><div lang="en-GB" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span lang="en-GB">Instead of taking seriously claims about multilingualism which make no sense at all, let’s leave the sarcastic mood and take a serious look at what these criteria imply: they say that there are perfect, and therefore imperfect, uses of language, which means that those uses are best </span><span lang="en-GB"><i>judged</i></span><span lang="en-GB"> rather than observed. They say that living up to </span><span lang="en-GB"><i>language</i></span><span lang="en-GB"> standards is what steers our language uses, which means that languages exist independently of their users. </span>And they compound the myth that being <span lang="en-GB"><i>multi</i></span><span lang="en-GB">lingual means being </span><span lang="en-GB"><i>lesser</i></span><span lang="en-GB"> lingual. There is one good reason why questions about the perfect (real, proper, true, etc.) </span><a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/07/effects-of-monolingualism.html" target="_blank"><span lang="en-GB"><i>monolingual</i></span></a><span lang="en-GB"> aren’t ever asked: they would just make us laugh. Which monolingual has perfect command of their single language, according to the criteria that should define a perfect multilingual? </span> </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span lang="en-GB">Real-life multilinguals are as linguistically perfect as their monolingual counterparts. All of us draw on all of the linguistic resources at our disposal in space and time, whether we label these resources mono- or multi-. And all of us are fair game for <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2012/03/attitudes-towards-language-uses.html" target="_blank">judgement</a> and <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2012/08/good-standard-and-other-intriguing.html" target="_blank">deprecation</a> according to someone else’s and, not least, our own ideals of perfection. </span> </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span lang="en-GB">The questions that make sense aren’t about linguistic perfection, they’re about why claims of linguistic perfection go on being made. Asking these questions is important also because the mix of ingredients in funny criteria purporting to define multilingualism carries over to funny methods that we go on using to teach and assess those who are (becoming) multilingual in school. I turn to this next. </span> </div><div lang="en-GB" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
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<span class="Z3988" title="ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Ajournal&rft.jtitle=Nature&rft_id=info%3Adoi%2F10.1038%2F522009f&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fresearchblogging.org&rft.atitle=Scientists+offer+advice+on+how+best+to+respond+to+reviewers&rft.issn=0028-0836&rft.date=2015&rft.volume=522&rft.issue=7554&rft.spage=9&rft.epage=9&rft.artnum=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nature.com%2Fdoifinder%2F10.1038%2F522009f&rft.au=Woolston%2C+C.&rfe_dat=bpr3.included=1;bpr3.tags=Psychology%2CSocial+Science%2CResearch+%2F+Scholarship%2CLinguistics%2C+Publishing%2C+Science%2C+Human+Factors">Woolston, C. (2015). Scientists offer advice on how best to respond to reviewers. <span style="font-style: italic;">Nature, 522</span> (7554), 9-9. DOI: <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/522009f" rev="review">10.1038/522009f</a></span><br />
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</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><i>Next post: </i><i><b><a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2015/07/textbook-languages.html" target="_blank">Textbook languages</a></b></i><span style="font-style: normal;">.</span><i> Saturday 11</i><span style="font-size: x-small;"><sup><i>th</i></sup></span><i> July 2015.</i></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div>Madalena Cruz-Ferreirahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14782492322928803326noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1132547320196715283.post-34969122912618574732015-05-16T00:00:00.000+08:002018-06-01T03:09:21.567+08:00Multilingual novelties<style type="text/css">P { margin-bottom: 0.08in; }</style> <br />
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Research on multilingualism has mushroomed over the past 50 years or so, which must be a good thing. Although some publications do take multilingual norms as <a href="https://www.peterlang.com/view/product/64593?format=PBK" target="_blank"><i>multilingual</i> norms</a>, most research has proceeded through the bias of monolingual standards, which is not so good for the obvious reason that <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2010/10/not-being-monolingual.html" target="_blank">multilinguals aren’t monolinguals</a>. Equally biased is the academic and media hype spawned by the flurry of interest in current multilingualism, which risks spawning, in turn, the belief that multilingualism is newsworthy not because this interest is new, but because multilingualism itself is new.</div>
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Multilingualism may indeed strike as novel those of us who go through life lacking everyday access to, and need for, other languages than the single one we were <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/04/natives-and-speakers.html" target="_blank">born and bred</a> into, or for whom learning a new language has become more or less synonymous with <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-languages-that-matter.html" target="_blank">learning ‘our’ language</a>. Research such as <a href="https://univie.academia.edu/HerbertSchendl" target="_blank">Herbert Schendl</a>’s, specifically on English in the Middle Ages, tells quite a different story. </div>
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English is a relevant example because, in addition to its current favoured status both as object and medium of discussions of multilingualism, it has paradoxically been marketed as a desirable, single <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/04/going-global-full-monolingualism-ahead.html" target="_blank">common denominator</a> to users of any other languages, complete with a misleading aura of stable uniformity across space and time. The word <i>English</i> features in time-honoured acronyms like <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_as_a_second_or_foreign_language#Terminology_and_types" target="_blank">EFL, ESL, ESOL</a> (and a whole host of others), which all appear to refer to ‘the same’ English regardless of where it’s used, and to suggest that multilingualism with English dates from this <i>E</i>-acronyms era. And a label like <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2010/10/putting-languages-to-work.html" target="_blank">‘Old English’</a>, which refers to the mix of languages used in Britain from the Anglo-Saxon settlement to the Norman invasion, seems to imply that this same language is only somewhat younger nowadays.</div>
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The facts are that English was, and continues to be, a product of multilingualism: it emerged as a creole through language contact, and has thrived by means of thriving multilingualism to keep itself in good working order, wherever and whenever it has been used. The history of Latin, the lingua franca of its time, confirms that barring language contact, no language can aspire to cater to a ‘global’ clientele: two of my favourite examples are the collection of manuscripts known as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmina_Burana" target="_blank"><i>Carmina Burana</i></a>, part of which <a href="http://www.classical.net/music/comp.lst/works/orff-cb/carmlyr.php" target="_blank">Carl Orff</a> immortalised in a musical piece of the same name, and the Finland-based news service <a href="http://areena.yle.fi/1-1931339" target="_blank"><i>Nuntii Latini</i></a>.</div>
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No language is an island, in other words, as John Donne might have put it. Against the myth that (some) languages, whatever name we choose to call them by, sail monolingually <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/05/big-multilinguals.html" target="_blank">unscathed</a> through space and time, a look at historical records documenting our linguistic uses offers excellent evidence that multilingualism through language contact has been the rule, rather than exceptional. In their book <a href="http://www.degruyter.com/view/product/129032" target="_blank"><i>Code-Switching in Early English</i></a>, Herbert Schendl and Laura Wright report that language mixes abound in poems, letters, sermons, charters, as well as in medical, science and everyday texts, and that this is so for the good reason that language switches signal one way of reaching out to the people who matter to us. This, incidentally, is something that children who are raised multilingually learn to do from the outset, as I’ve noted <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2015/03/child-musings-on-being-multilingual.html" target="_blank">before</a>. Early multilingualism in Britain was also the topic of a conference, promoted by the <a href="https://magdalenemedievalists.wordpress.com/conference/" target="_blank">Magdalene Society of Medievalists</a>, addressing “the mainstream trilingual culture of England”. Doesn’t the collocation of these three words, <i>mainstream</i>, <i>trilingual</i> and <i>England</i> look exciting, nowadays? </div>
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Multilingualism has ruled elsewhere, too, of course. We may not know about those who don’t make it to historical records, but they couldn’t have gone on pilgrimages, say, or taken part in conquest and marketing sprees which, still today, keep so many of us so busy, without linguistic ways of feeding and transporting themselves beyond the humdrum ones back home. In <i>The Tragedy of the Templars</i>, for example, <a href="http://www.michaelhaag.com/" target="_blank">Michael Haag</a> quotes <a href="http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/1486.html" target="_blank">The Chronicle of Fulcher of Chartres</a>, where the author marvels: </div>
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“<i>But who ever heard such a mixture of languages in one army? There were Franks, Flemish, Frisians, Gauls, Allobroges, Lotharingians, Alemanni, Bavarians, Normans, Angles, Scots, Aquitanians, Italians, Dacians, Apulians, Iberians, Bretons, Greeks and Armenians. If a Breton or Teuton questioned me, I would not know how to answer either. But though we spoke diverse languages, we [...] seemed to be nearest kin.</i>” </div>
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Fulcher hadn’t perhaps been familiar with the military forces of earlier multilinguals such as the <a href="http://www.journals.vu.lt/literatura/article/view/2504" target="_blank">Polyglots in Roman Antiquity</a>, as studied by Christian Laes, but he might as well be describing, mutatis mutandis, the linguistic composition of modern armies and the multilingual strategies required to coordinate them. </div>
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So what else is new? Not the terminological mess pervading research on multilingualism, which Schendl and Wright also note in their book. My own academic <a href="https://independent.academia.edu/MadalenaCruzFerreira" target="_blank">publications</a>, this blog included, show how (un)intentional imprecision blinds us to what multilinguals do and have done with their languages. Calling past instances of multilingual productions ‘macaronic’ or current ones ‘mixed’, for example, makes it look like we’re talking about two different things. <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2012/03/attitudes-towards-language-uses.html" target="_blank">Attitudes</a> from users of empowered languages aren’t new, either. Michael Haag further reports Fulcher’s observation that “the Franks learned the local languages, which meant Greek, Armenian, Syriac and Arabic; this stood in contrast to the Arabs and the Turks, for whom there is very little evidence that they could speak the others’ language or troubled to learn the languages of the people they had conquered and oppressed.” </div>
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We have, in short, been there and done that, as far as multilingualism is concerned: so much for our <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/01/global-individuals.html" target="_blank">‘increasingly’ multilingual</a> world. History matters, so we don’t waste time and resources mistaking things for our newfound awareness of them. Multilingualism needs no attention as a ‘novelty’, whereas the misconceptions which keep blurring our understanding of it certainly do. The next post has more on this.</div>
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<span class="Z3988" title="ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Ajournal&rft.jtitle=Literatura+55%283%29&rft_id=info%3A%2F&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fresearchblogging.org&rft.atitle=Polyglots+in+Roman+Antiquity.+Writing+Socio-Cultural+History+Based+on+Anecdotes&rft.issn=&rft.date=2013&rft.volume=&rft.issue=&rft.spage=&rft.epage=&rft.artnum=&rft.au=Laes%2C+C.&rfe_dat=bpr3.included=1;bpr3.tags=Social+Science%2CLinguistics%2C+Multilingualism%2C+History">Laes, C. (2013). Polyglots in Roman Antiquity. Writing Socio-Cultural History Based on Anecdotes. <span style="font-style: italic;">Literatūra 55(3).</span></span><br />
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<span class="Z3988" title="ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Ajournal&rft.jtitle=Language+and+Literature&rft_id=info%3Adoi%2F10.1177%2F0963947015585245&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fresearchblogging.org&rft.atitle=Code-switching+in+early+English+literature&rft.issn=0963-9470&rft.date=2015&rft.volume=24&rft.issue=3&rft.spage=233&rft.epage=248&rft.artnum=http%3A%2F%2Flal.sagepub.com%2Fcgi%2Fdoi%2F10.1177%2F0963947015585245&rft.au=Schendl%2C+H.&rfe_dat=bpr3.included=1;bpr3.tags=Social+Science%2CLinguistics%2C+Multilingualism%2C+Literature%2C+Codeswitching%2C+Translanguaging">Schendl, H. (2015). Code-switching in early English literature. <span style="font-style: italic;">Language and Literature, 24</span> (3), 233-248 DOI: <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0963947015585245" rev="review">10.1177/0963947015585245</a></span><br />
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<i>Next post: <b><a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2015/06/the-perfect-multilingual.html" target="_blank">The perfect multilingual</a></b>. Saturday 13<span style="font-size: x-small;"><sup>th</sup></span> June 2015.</i></div>
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Madalena Cruz-Ferreirahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14782492322928803326noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1132547320196715283.post-78398457858403741102015-04-18T00:00:00.000+08:002018-04-09T20:44:26.942+08:00The aliens in our midst<style type="text/css">P { margin-bottom: 0.08in; }</style>
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Those of us who were brought up in
monolingual homes may feel rather unsettled about how to deal with
little multilinguals in the family. This is the case even if we are
multilinguals ourselves, because the key words here are <i>bring up</i>
and <i>home</i>: it’s one thing to be multilingual, and quite
another to nurture multilingual children.
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One common reason driving parents to
raise their children multilingually relates to the languages used by
each parent, and so to the languages that are relevant to each side
of the family. Parents are likely to want their children to be able
to talk to grandparents, little cousins, and other big and small
relatives and friends in those relatives and friends’ own
language(s), which may well be a single one, thereby adding the benefit of engaging relatives and friends in the process of making the
children <i>theirs</i>, too.
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This means nurturing children to feel
at home in distinct linguistic and cultural environments. Although
there is no fundamental difference between doing this and raising
children to become linguistically and culturally appropriate in
<a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2012/05/little-multi-dialectals.html" target="_blank">distinct monolingual environments</a>,
as all parents do, many of us remain persuaded that we’re
navigating uncharted waters as soon as we start using multi- (or bi-)
prefixed words to refer to behaviours and uses of language, on the
belief that only such words refer to <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2012/01/multiculturalism-and-other-big-words.html" target="_blank">‘diversity’</a>.
On the related belief that multilingual/bilingual children must
therefore remain forever partial strangers to each ‘mono-’ side
of a mixed family, well-meaning relatives and friends will scrutinise
the children’s linguistic and cultural behaviour for evidence
supporting this belief – and will, naturally, find it.
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Words that “all other children know”
are missing, whereas the words that these children do know are used
and pronounced in funny ways. The multilingual nature of the
children’s linguistic <a href="http://linguistlist.org/ask-ling/lang-acq.cfm" target="_blank">creativity</a>, language <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/10/children-toys-and-languages.html" target="_blank">play</a>,
<a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2013/03/children-speak-child-speak_23.html" target="_blank">child-speak</a>,
or plain, typical, nonsensical child gibberish, turns to evidence of
fluency in “other” languages, which “our” language
conspicuously lacks. Whatever the children do, or do not do, in
short, fails to match standard behaviour associated with <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/02/monolinguals-in-family.html" target="_blank">the monolinguals in the family</a>.
And, of course, any perceived deviation in the children’s ways of
expressing themselves is immediately attributed to their <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2014/12/the-multilingual-scapegoat.html" target="_blank">‘multi-’ status</a>:
the children’s desired well-being (read: conformity to familiar
mono-prefixed standards) is being threatened by their parents’
bizarre (read: multi-) linguistic choices.
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The colourful variety of opinions on
raising children in any family, pitting mums against dads, parents
against grandparents, and so on, finds itself compounded in
multilingual families, particularly where the languages and customs
of each side are mutually unintelligible. Sharing a grandchild (or
cousin, or friend) with ‘foreigners’ and <i>their</i>
Foreign-Speak may feel like an intrusion on <i>our</i> <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2012/03/attitudes-towards-language-uses.html" target="_blank">territorial rights to people</a>,
spawning anything from bewilderment to mild conspiracy theories. In
my family, for example, we had Swedish relatives gape in awe at their
realisation that our toddlers could inflect Portuguese verbs (see
Chapter 7 of my book <a href="http://www.multilingual-matters.com/display.asp?isb=9781853598388" target="_blank"><i>Three is a Crowd?</i></a>
for more on this): “They must be so <a href="http://www.bilingualavenue.com/episode-37-addressing-common-misconceptions-about-multilinguals/" target="_blank">gifted for languages</a>,
everyone knows how difficult Portuguese inflections are!”, with no
mention of the equally ‘difficult’ Swedish inflections that the
children were also producing at the same ages. And we had Portuguese
relatives frown at me when I failed to react to the children’s
addressing, in English, a slice of <i>bolo inglês</i> (which
translates properly as ‘fruit cake’, though literally as ‘English
cake’) on their plate: “Why don’t you tell them to speak
Portuguese in Portugal?”
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Both sides of the family winced, in
other words, at the suspicion that their own flesh and blood might
well belong to alien hordes instead.
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Image ©:
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“Do you really mean to force the poor
things to speak so many languages?” or “Shouldn’t you have a
doctor check out their gobbledygook?” became standard questions to
us parents. They were asked with unmistakable signs of distress,
often in the presence of the gobbledygook-speakers themselves, and
apparently with no thought of how adult uneasiness might reflect on
the children’s behaviour, thus self-fulfilling the expectation of
‘strangeness’.
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Concerns such as these appear to me to
draw on subtractive conceptions of multilingualism, where different
languages compete in a zero-sum game, and where, therefore, more than
one language doesn’t mean ‘more than one language’ but <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/11/half-linguals-and-semilinguals.html" target="_blank">‘many partial languages’</a>.
Multilingual children naturally <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2012/06/mixed-recipes.html" target="_blank">mix</a>
both their languages and their cultures, but mixes are taken as evidence of gaps in particular languages, rather than the <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2015/02/child-musings-on-being-multilingual.html" target="_blank">token of healthy multilingualism</a>
that they are.
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Parents must of course use some
language to rear their children. If we stop to think for a while that
multilingualism is as <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2010/10/typical-multilinguals.html" target="_blank">typical</a>
as monolingualism, rather than a manifestation of linguistic
‘otherness’, we’re likely to conclude that, really, what could
be more natural than using with our children <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-languages-that-matter.html" target="_blank">the languages that matter</a>
to our respective families? There are no aliens descending on any of
us after all: raising multilingual children in traditionally
monolingual environments is simply a different way of being
different in those environments. Differences of this kind may
sometimes feel overwhelming, because so many of us have been
persuaded that being multilingual is a headline-deserving novelty.
But is it? That’s what I ask next time.</div>
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© MCF 2015</div>
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<i>Next post:</i><i><b>
<a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2015/05/multilingual-novelties.html" target="_blank">Multilingual novelties</a></b></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">.</span></span><i><b>
</b></i><i>Saturday 16</i><span style="font-size: x-small;"><sup><i>th</i></sup></span><i> May 2015.</i></div>
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Madalena Cruz-Ferreirahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14782492322928803326noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1132547320196715283.post-79283634360513186852015-03-21T00:00:00.000+08:002017-03-11T23:51:10.885+08:00Child musings on being multilingual – The language users<style type="text/css">P { margin-bottom: 0.08in; }</style>
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Popular lore has it that children who
are raised multilingually confuse their languages. One piece of
presumed evidence for this belief comes from the fact that such
children mix their languages.
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Mixing languages is indeed <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2010/10/languages-come-in-flavours.html" target="_blank">typical of multilinguals</a>,
of all ages: if using words (or grammar) of one language in another
were a sign of linguistic or mental disarray, probably in need of
<a href="http://blog.asha.org/2011/08/02/recommending-monolingualism-to-multilinguals-why-and-why-not/" target="_blank">therapeutic correction</a>,
we would need to conclude that users of at least all major world
languages are potential clinical cases. Those languages are
<a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2010/10/putting-languages-to-work.html" target="_blank">historically mixed</a>,
made up and being made up of bits and pieces from other languages
which, in turn, borrowed and keep borrowing bits and pieces from
them. Just like their users, languages need to adapt in order to
survive, because they’re there to serve those users.
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The myth that linguistic mixes ‘mean’
language confusion confuses facts with interpretations – besides
indulging in common <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2013/01/what-causes-what.html" target="_blank">causality fallacies</a>.
Child mixes can just as well provide evidence of early awareness of
distinct languages, as shown in a study that I carried out on my own
children’s trilingual language development, <a href="http://www.multilingual-matters.com/display.asp?isb=9781853598388" target="_blank"><i>Three is a Crowd?</i></a>.
One of their differentiation strategies involved slotting together
<a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2015/02/child-musings-on-being-multilingual.html" target="_blank">languages and language users</a>,
for example by asking who speaks what (including <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/02/sibling-talk.html" target="_blank">newborn babies</a>),
on the sensible assumption that languages are there <i>for</i>
people, and <i>because of</i> them. Another favourite strategy, which
I called <i>Turn-to-stare</i>, assisted them whenever words in one of
their languages for some reason <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2013/03/children-speak-child-speak_23.html" target="_blank">failed them</a>:
they mixed words of another language, turning to face ‘rightful’
users of that language as they switched to it, so as to engage them
in the exchange. It’s of course up to us analysts to then choose to
account for similar behaviours in terms of <span style="font-style: normal;">linguistic</span>
<a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2010/10/not-being-monolingual.html" target="_blank"><span style="font-style: normal;">confusion</span></a>
or of linguistic <span style="font-style: normal;"><a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2012/06/mixes-matches.html" target="_blank">appropriateness</a>.</span></div>
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<span style="font-style: normal;">Propriety
appeared in fact to rank quite high among the children’s
expectations, once the users’ linguistic property rights, as it
were, became clear to them. Establishing who has the right to say
what is an important sociolinguistic skill that must be acquired: all
of us, monolinguals or multilinguals, learn that different uses of
language(s) <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2012/06/fitting-in.html" target="_blank">fit different situations</a>, as
different people do, too. Assigning distinct territories to languages
in this way also matches nicely small children’s keen sense of
property. Just like my children knew very well which <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/10/children-toys-and-languages.html" target="_blank">toy</a>
belonged to which sibling, they became quite intolerant of what they
must have perceived as breach of language ‘copyright’. This
could happen within each of their languages, when they would, say,
tell me off for using Portuguese words and expressions which they
strongly associated with other Portuguese speakers: they would frown
and fall silent or, later, respond with something to the effect that
“Mummy doesn’t say so, uncle does”. This could also happen
across their languages, when parental word choice or accent in
another language deviated from the standard they associated with
other users of that language. </span>
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<span style="font-style: normal;">Telling
parents off for linguistic shortcomings was in fact a favourite child
pursuit in our home, particularly when one parent used the language
of the other. It came complete with explicit apologies to the
presumedly offended receivers, ranging from asserting that “Mum
can’t speak Swedish” when I </span><i>was</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
speaking Swedish, to nodding a patronising “He’s Swedish”
towards shop assistants in Portugal, upon dad’s completion of a
transaction in Portuguese. They, the children, were the <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/04/natives-and-speakers.html" target="_blank">‘proper’ users</a>
of each of their languages, and were therefore entitled to judge
because they knew best. Perhaps we can witness here the
(?spontaneous) emergence of <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2012/03/attitudes-towards-language-uses.html" target="_blank">linguistic bigotry</a>
among fellow human beings? </span>
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<span style="font-style: normal;">Responses
such as these to perceived ‘wrong’ uses of language may well
follow from a broader sense of wrongness. One of the children’s
most profound disenchantments related to their realisation that their
beloved cartoon videos, in Swedish or in Portuguese, were actually
dubbed from English-language originals. They felt duped: they had
been enjoying something in a language which isn’t </span><i>its</i><span style="font-style: normal;">,
and they then wondered whether that wasn’t the case, too, for
everything else that they had ever watched, or read, or listened to,
or been told. Another interesting episode relating to those videos is
<a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2012/02/speaking-like-mummy-and-speaking-like.html" target="_blank">here</a>.
(An immediate consequence of all this was heavy on the family
finances, by the way: we had to invest in a brand new collection of
the same videos, in English.) Simply hearing the ‘wrong’ language
from any speaker could in fact trigger quite strong adverse reactions
at a <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/10/learning-to-be-multilingual.html" target="_blank">very early age</a>,
as well as later on: when we parents found it necessary to switch
from one of the home languages to a school language in order to
<a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2013/10/numbers-and-languages.html" target="_blank">assist with homework</a>,
it took quite a lot of cajoling to make the children stop cringing
and wailing “Don’t speak that to me!”. </span>
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<span style="font-style: normal;">The
children were well aware that different languages serve different
topics (skiing, for example, was consistently discussed among
themselves in Swedish) but, to them, language-topic bonds were
apparently weaker than language-people bonds – the extreme form of
which is found in <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/02/one-person-one.html" target="_blank">‘one person-one language’</a>
prescriptivism, as I discuss in a podcast, <a href="http://www.bilingualavenue.com/episode-37-addressing-common-misconceptions-about-multilinguals/" target="_blank">Addressing common misconceptions about multilinguals</a>.
Their own bond to their languages shows from their early linguistic
practices, in interactions involving, say, me and Swedish relatives
or friends: they would use Portuguese to me, as usual, but they would
translate the gist of our exchanges for those whom they knew didn’t
understand Portuguese.</span></div>
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<span style="font-style: normal;"><a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2014/05/translators-and-multilinguals.html" target="_blank">Translating</a>
and <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2012/06/mixed-recipes.html" target="_blank">switching</a>
languages as needed, for the sake of fellow participants in
linguistic exchanges, are part and parcel of being multilingual,
though often misconstrued as ‘special’ skills. Next time, I’ll
have a look at other feelings of ‘strangeness’ that little
multilinguals tend to arouse. </span>
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<i>Next post:</i><i><b>
<a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2015/04/the-aliens-in-our-midst.html" target="_blank">The aliens in our midst</a></b></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">.</span></span><i><b>
</b></i><i>Saturday 18</i><span style="font-size: x-small;"><sup><i>th</i></sup></span><i> April 2015.</i></div>
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Madalena Cruz-Ferreirahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14782492322928803326noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1132547320196715283.post-77128420675091037102015-02-21T00:00:00.000+08:002018-08-28T19:06:53.862+08:00Child musings on being multilingual – The languages<style type="text/css">P { margin-bottom: 0.08in; }</style> <br />
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In 1987, Michael Clyne published a study titled <a href="https://benjamins.com/catalog/z.lt2.13cly/details" target="_blank">“Don’t you get bored speaking only English?” Expressions of metalinguistic awareness in a bilingual child</a>. I was by then quite engaged in collecting data from my children, from birth, for a study on child trilingualism, <a href="http://www.multilingual-matters.com/display.asp?isb=9781853598388" target="_blank"><i>Three is a Crowd?</i></a>. So I made a mental note not to forget to document the children’s many comments on many different multilingual matters, throughout the broad age range that the book spans. They are featured, in particular, in Chapters 5 and 9 to 11. </div>
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Multilingual children have good reason to talk and ask about <i>different</i> languages, since different languages make up their linguistic resources. We are of course free to interpret this ability as evidence of those multilingual “advantages” that tend to crop up in current news. To me, it simply means that multilingual children are being multilingual. It’s all about <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/10/trick-is-in-input.html" target="_blank">exposure</a>: children who use both chopsticks and fork and knife will show motor advantages over chopstick-only or fork-and-knife-only peers, children not nurtured around <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/12/bookworming.html" target="_blank">books</a> won’t talk about books. My point is that children will develop awareness of what strikes them as worthy of attention in their surroundings, and the related willingness to talk about it. </div>
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Clyne’s study confirmed my hunch that what children express about their own and others’ use of more than one language offers a rich source of insight into multilingualism. A refreshing one, too: research about language acquisition offers mostly adult takes, and mostly from monolingual environments. This post and <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2015/03/child-musings-on-being-multilingual.html" target="_blank">the next one</a> discuss a sample of my children’s own takes on being multilingual, starting with the languages themselves: how the children used them, expressed themselves about them, and assessed their usefulness. </div>
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The first expressions of my children’s awareness of <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2012/02/parental-adventures-in-multilingual.html" target="_blank">their (then) two languages</a> came from their uses of prosody, the melody of speech that is necessarily present in any spoken utterance. Adults assume that very young children have limited ways of expressing themselves, because we also assume that linguistic expression follows adult standards. We don’t know, in other words, whether the limitations that adults talk about reflect infant abilities or adult interpretive skills. A common assumption is, for example, that we need words to express ourselves, and so that infants are at a <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/05/learning-to-speak-in-tune.html" target="_blank">“pre-linguistic” stage</a> before they produce words. But languages aren’t just words, of course, and words don’t even come to us <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/10/multilingual-beginnings.html" target="_blank">first</a>: we’ve known for quite a while that the acquisition of prosody precedes the acquisition of words, and that prosody is as <i>linguistic</i> as words (and grammar). My children’s earliest attempts at verbal communication showed <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/02/little-multilinguals_26.html" target="_blank">distinct uses of prosody</a><span style="background: transparent;"> in</span> their babble to users of Portuguese or Swedish. In lone play, they directed the same kind of utterances to toys and other objects that they associated with each of the languages. The children soon found that such productions made linguistic sense because adult listeners reacted with full attention to what sounded like fluent use of language. This taught me that looking for what multilingual children do with their languages is rather more enlightening than looking for what they <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2010/10/not-being-monolingual.html" target="_blank">do not do</a>.</div>
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When words finally appeared in the children’s repertoire, the first <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2012/06/mixed-recipes.html" target="_blank">mixes</a> did so, too. Little multilinguals mix their languages not because they’re ‘confused’ or suffer from vocabulary ‘deficiency’, but because of vocal tract <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2013/03/children-speak-child-speak_23.html" target="_blank">immaturity</a>: some words may happen to be more <a href="http://linguistlist.org/ask-ling/lang-acq.cfm" target="_blank">baby-friendly</a> in one language than in another. One example is the Swedish word <i>titta</i> (‘look’), compared to its Portuguese equivalent <i>olha</i>, so <i>titta</i> became my children’s choice to call both parents’ attention to something interesting. That the children weren’t confused at all shows in another strategy, at around the same one-word stage, whereby they would pronounce similarly-sounding and similarly baby-friendly words in both languages in a maximally different way, for example the words for <i>banana</i> or <i>crocodile –</i> or <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2013/05/multilingual-names.html" target="_blank">their own names</a>.</div>
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The way they identified languages then took other turns. In order to talk about language, we may need to develop a specialised metalanguage (another name for <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/1456458639" target="_blank"><i>linguistics</i></a>), but we can certainly make do with what we’ve got available to us, something at which children excel. At the stage when multilingual children start <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/10/learning-to-be-multilingual.html" target="_blank">associating different people with different languages</a>, and even when not knowing the name of the language – or that languages have names –, the children would seek confirmation of whether a new acquaintance spoke Swedish by asking me <i>Fala jaha?</i> (Portuguese ‘s/he speaks’, Swedish ‘jaha’), <i>jaha</i> being a very common and very conspicuous conversational device in Swedish, and the whole utterance being, technically, another mix. At the same age, they made profuse use of <i>mamma säger </i>(‘mum says’) to dad and <i>papá diz</i> (‘dad says’) to me in both statements and questions about each language, and they used the same utterances to excuse their mixes: a Portuguese word in a Swedish utterance, say, would invariably be followed by <i>mamma säger</i>. </div>
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These and other successful strategies that multilingual children devise to manage their languages might predict equal success in learning more languages, regardless of where and how. As the saying goes, children, and only children, are very good language learners because they’re <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2010/11/age-decay-and-missed-opportunities.html" target="_blank">young</a>. At least for my children, the outcomes of their learning of further languages were dismal from day one: their attitude towards this new school subject was dismal, their marks were even more dismal. And they explained why: their first language subject was French, and they had no idea how to find motivation to learn a language that they had <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/02/multilingual-adventures-in-school-land.html" target="_blank">absolutely no need for</a> in Singapore, where they then lived. My podcast <a href="http://www.bilingualavenue.com/episode-37-addressing-common-misconceptions-about-multilinguals/" target="_blank">‘Addressing common misconceptions about multilinguals’</a> discusses the age myth about language learning, among others, <a href="https://twitter.com/bilingualavenue" target="_blank">@bilingualavenue</a>. For sensible takes on young learners of further languages see Sandie Mourão and Mónica Lourenço’s book <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Early-Years-Second-Language-Education-International-perspectives-on-theory/Mourao-Lourenco/p/book/9780415705271" target="_blank"><i>Early Years Second Language Education: International Perspectives on Theory and Practice</i></a>, to which I wrote a <a href="http://www.academia.edu/7888192/Foreword_to_Mour%C3%A3o_S._and_Louren%C3%A7o_M._eds._Early_Years_Second_Language_Education_International_Perspectives_on_Theory_and_Practice._Abingdon_Routledge" target="_blank">Foreword</a>. </div>
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My children’s own languages, in contrast, first the two home ones and later English, their school language, proved indeed useful to them, in more than an everyday sense. The children understood that different languages also mean different ways of behaving, in them and through them, so they became rather skilled at using their multicultural background as both a shield and a valuable bartering asset. In Portugal, say, when reprimanded about unacceptable child behaviour across the board, they asserted that that’s OK in Sweden and that they were being Swedish that day. And in school, when teased by peers about, say, subpar maths skills, they countered with <i>But I speak Portuguese and Swedish and you don</i><i>’t</i>.</div>
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The next post turns to multilingual children’s thoughts on the users of their languages. </div>
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Clyne, M. (1987). "Don't you get bored speaking only English?" Expressions of metalinguistic awareness in a bilingual child. <span style="font-style: italic;">In R. Steele & T. Threadgold (Eds.), Language topics: essays in honour of Michael Halliday, Volume 1 (pp. 85-103). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.</span> DOI: <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/z.lt2.13cly" rev="review">10.1075/z.lt2.13cly</a><br />
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<i>Next post:</i><i><b> <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2015/03/child-musings-on-being-multilingual.html" target="_blank">Child musings on being multilingual – The language users</a></b></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">.</span></span><i><b> </b></i><i>Saturday 21</i><span style="font-size: small;"><sup><i>st</i></sup></span><i> March 2015.</i></div>
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Madalena Cruz-Ferreirahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14782492322928803326noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1132547320196715283.post-63011936460254956702015-01-24T00:00:00.000+08:002017-03-26T20:27:45.348+08:00Multilingual neuromyths <style type="text/css">P { margin-bottom: 0.08in; }</style> <br />
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Neuromyths are misconceptions about how the brain works. They are the topic of the <i>Nature Neuroscience </i><span style="font-style: normal;">editorial</span> <a href="http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v17/n9/full/nn.3802.html?WT.ec_id=NEURO-201409" target="_blank">The mythical brain</a>, which highlights that they are as false as they are appealing, and that their appeal is what explains their resilience.</div>
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<i>Appealing</i> seems to be the key word here, in its sense of ‘engaging’ with little or no rational engagement. Deena Skolnick Weisberg and colleagues showed this in <a href="http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/jocn.2008.20040#.WNaoxBJ97sH" target="_blank">The seductive allure of neuroscience explanations</a>: when asked to choose between alternative nonsensical explanations of the same brain function, their informants systematically preferred the ones containing “logically irrelevant neuroscience information”. The mere mention of intimidating concepts like <i>brain</i> or <i>neurology</i> appears to lend credibility to any statement where they appear, in other words. </div>
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Statements about the so-called <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2010/11/brains-and-fears.html" target="_blank">‘bilingual/multilingual brain’</a> are no exception, in the wake of the current exponential growth of academic and media news about brains and neuro-prefixed things. This growth reflects a shift in our ways of thinking about our brain along the past couple of decades. Late last century’s trends modelled the brain on the most sophisticated information gathering and processing device of the time, the computer. Since models naturally constrain our ways of thinking about what we’re modelling, our views of the brain came complete with computer-bound characteristics: brain space got allocated once and for all, and brains developed one way, towards decay. Related neuromyths had it that more than one language takes up brain space, or that aged brains lose language learning abilities. </div>
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Early 21<span style="font-size: xx-small;"><sup>st</sup></span> century findings then spelled the death of brain death myths: ageing, which is what the brain and the rest of our bodies do from the moment we’re born, doesn’t entail brain <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2010/11/age-decay-and-missed-opportunities.html" target="_blank">decay</a>. Brains were all but static, degenerative, limited-capacity CPUs: neural structures and functions evolve and regenerate themselves after all, in response to our experiences and needs, and both young and old brains retain the agility to do so. Brain plasticity duly became the new mantra and, not least, we could capture brains in action through imaging, our latest model. Related neuromyths have it that we now know what’s going on because we can see it, as Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil argue in <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1207/s15516709cog2605_1/abstract" target="_blank">The misunderstood limits of folk science: an illusion of explanatory depth</a>. They show first, that we are experts at fooling ourselves that we “understand complex phenomena with far greater precision, coherence, and depth” than we actually do, and second, that “The illusion for explanatory knowledge is most robust where the environment supports real-time explanations with visible mechanisms.”</div>
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Likewise, in <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15903115" target="_blank">What can functional neuroimaging tell the experimental psychologist?</a>, Richard Henson warns us of the “real danger that pictures of blobs on brains seduce one into thinking that we can now directly observe psychological processes”. Blob-based evidence nevertheless continues to flourish, all the way from forensics, as Richard K. Sherwin observes in <a href="http://www.nylslawreview.com/201213-volume-57-number-1/" target="_blank">Visual jurisprudence</a>, to education, as Sanne Dekker and colleagues show in <a href="http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00429/full" target="_blank">Neuromyths in education: Prevalence and predictors of misconceptions among teachers</a> or Paul A. Howard-Jones shows in <a href="http://www.nature.com/nrn/journal/v15/n12/abs/nrn3817.html?WT.ec_id=NRN-201408" target="_blank">Neuroscience and education: myths and messages</a>. The seductive appeal of visual animations is irresistible, in sum, and it naturally sells very well, which is the topic of Diane M. Beck’s study <a href="http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1745691610388779" target="_blank">The appeal of the brain in the popular press</a>. </div>
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But there are two problems. One is that the seduction is selective. Is it true, for example, that there is a bilingual/multilingual ‘advantage’, which may include inhibition of brain deterioration? Ellen Bialystok and colleagues say yes in <a href="http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/pag/19/2/290/" target="_blank">Bilingualism, aging, and cognitive control: Evidence from the Simon Task</a>, Shanna Kousaie and Natalie A. Phillips say no in <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17470218.2011.604788#.VKlGJSdQJGQ" target="_blank">Ageing and bilingualism: Absence of a “bilingual advantage” in Stroop interference in a nonimmigrant sample</a>, and J. Bruce Morton and Sarah N. Harper, in <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-7687.2007.00623.x/abstract" target="_blank">What did Simon say? Revisiting the bilingual advantage</a>, reserve judgement about whether multilingualism relates to brain performance at all until we understand <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2013/01/what-causes-what.html" target="_blank">what is really causing what</a>. Meanwhile,
Angela de Bruin and colleagues, in <a href="http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797614557866" target="_blank">Cognitive Advantage in Bilingualism. An Example of Publication Bias?</a>, conducted a meta-analysis of studies published between 1999 and 2012
on the so-called ‘bilingual advantage’, to conclude that the
advantage may well lie in cherry-picking of findings.<br />
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A recent issue of the <i>Applied Psycholinguistics</i> journal, dedicated to <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/applied-psycholinguistics/issue/journal-aps-volume-35-issue-5/64DF40637CFBDF4D4A68D095F0BED2E7" target="_blank">Bilingualism and neuroplasticity</a>, reviews what (little) we know about this topic, but the myth that multilingualism is ‘good for your brain’ goes on making headlines: it’s simply too appealing to not be true. Apparently, it doesn’t sell to popularise research finding that multilingual brains may be as exciting as monolingual ones – which I, for one, find extremely appealing. <br />
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The other problem is that academic and media reports don’t speak the same language. Media headlines stating that multilingualism “keeps the brain young” or that you should learn a new language in order to “boost your brain power”, though claiming to draw on scientific research on languages and brains, in fact <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2010/11/multilingual-woes-and-joys.html" target="_blank">misrepresent actual findings</a> to go on feeding current neuromyths. In my academic courses, in one of the assignments that became most popular among students, I had them search for <i>wow!</i> media headlines about multilingualism, retrieve the original studies quoted in those pieces, and assess matches between headline and content of the piece, on the one hand, and content of the piece and the studies, on the other. Expectedly, very few matches were found. And unfortunately, given that academic publications aren’t regularly made available outside of academia, very few of us are able to judge for ourselves <a href="http://www.nature.com/news/spin-cycle-1.16567?WT.ec_id=NATURE-20141218" target="_blank">spin cycles</a> and <a href="http://www.nature.com/news/study-points-to-press-releases-as-sources-of-hype-1.16551?WT.ec_id=NATURE-20141218" target="_blank">hype</a> of this kind. Simple repetition of appealing myths doesn’t turn them into facts.</div>
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Keeping (somewhat) to the topic of what we like to believe, my next post departs from the adult world to check out how children look at their own multilingualism. </div>
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</span> <span class="Z3988" title="ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Ajournal&rft.jtitle=Perspectives+on+Psychological+Science&rft_id=info%3Adoi%2F10.1177%2F1745691610388779&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fresearchblogging.org&rft.atitle=The+Appeal+of+the+Brain+in+the+Popular+Press&rft.issn=1745-6916&rft.date=2010&rft.volume=5&rft.issue=6&rft.spage=762&rft.epage=766&rft.artnum=http%3A%2F%2Fjournals.sagepub.com%2Fdoi%2F10.1177%2F1745691610388779&rft.au=Beck%2C+D.&rfe_dat=bpr3.included=1;bpr3.tags=Social+Science%2CLinguistics%2C+Neuromyth%2C+Science"><br />
</span> <span class="Z3988" title="ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Ajournal&rft.jtitle=Perspectives+on+Psychological+Science&rft_id=info%3Adoi%2F10.1177%2F1745691610388779&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fresearchblogging.org&rft.atitle=The+Appeal+of+the+Brain+in+the+Popular+Press&rft.issn=1745-6916&rft.date=2010&rft.volume=5&rft.issue=6&rft.spage=762&rft.epage=766&rft.artnum=http%3A%2F%2Fjournals.sagepub.com%2Fdoi%2F10.1177%2F1745691610388779&rft.au=Beck%2C+D.&rfe_dat=bpr3.included=1;bpr3.tags=Social+Science%2CLinguistics%2C+Neuromyth%2C+Science"><br />
</span> <span class="Z3988" title="ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Ajournal&rft.jtitle=Perspectives+on+Psychological+Science&rft_id=info%3Adoi%2F10.1177%2F1745691610388779&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fresearchblogging.org&rft.atitle=The+Appeal+of+the+Brain+in+the+Popular+Press&rft.issn=1745-6916&rft.date=2010&rft.volume=5&rft.issue=6&rft.spage=762&rft.epage=766&rft.artnum=http%3A%2F%2Fjournals.sagepub.com%2Fdoi%2F10.1177%2F1745691610388779&rft.au=Beck%2C+D.&rfe_dat=bpr3.included=1;bpr3.tags=Social+Science%2CLinguistics%2C+Neuromyth%2C+Science">Beck, D. (2010). The Appeal of the Brain in the Popular Press. <span style="font-style: italic;">Perspectives on Psychological Science, 5</span> (6), 762-766. DOI: <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1745691610388779" rev="review">10.1177/1745691610388779</a></span><br />
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Bialystok, E., Craik, F., Klein, R., & Viswanathan, M. (2004). Bilingualism, Aging, and Cognitive Control: Evidence From the Simon Task. <span style="font-style: italic;">Psychology and Aging, 19</span> (2), 290-303. DOI: <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0882-7974.19.2.290" rev="review">10.1037/0882-7974.19.2.290</a><br />
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<span class="Z3988" title="ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Ajournal&rft.jtitle=Psychological+Science&rft_id=info%3Adoi%2F10.1177%2F0956797614557866&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fresearchblogging.org&rft.atitle=Cognitive+Advantage+in+Bilingualism.+An+Example+of+Publication+Bias%3F&rft.issn=0956-7976&rft.date=2015&rft.volume=26&rft.issue=1&rft.spage=99&rft.epage=107&rft.artnum=http%3A%2F%2Fjournals.sagepub.com%2Fdoi%2F10.1177%2F0956797614557866&rft.au=de+Bruin%2C+A.&rft.au=Treccani%2C+B.&rft.au=Della+Sala%2C+S.&rfe_dat=bpr3.included=1;bpr3.tags=Social+Science%2CResearch+%2F+Scholarship%2CLinguistics%2C+Multilingualism%2C%2C+Ethics%2C+Publishing%2C+Science+Communication%2C+Neuromyth">de Bruin, A., Treccani, B., & Della Sala, S. (2015). Cognitive Advantage in Bilingualism. An Example of Publication Bias? <span style="font-style: italic;">Psychological Science, 26</span> (1), 99-107. DOI: <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0956797614557866" rev="review">10.1177/0956797614557866</a></span><br />
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Dekker, S., Lee, N., Howard-Jones, P., & Jolles, J. (2012). Neuromyths in Education: Prevalence and Predictors of Misconceptions among Teachers. <span style="font-style: italic;">Frontiers in Psychology, 3</span>. DOI: <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00429" rev="review">10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00429</a><br />
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Editorial. (2014). The mythical brain. <span style="font-style: italic;">Nature Neuroscience, 17</span> (9), 1137-1137. DOI: <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nn.3802" rev="review">10.1038/nn.3802</a><br />
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Editorial. (2014). Spin cycle. <span style="font-style: italic;">Nature, 516</span> (7531), 287-288. DOI: <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/516287b" rev="review">10.1038/516287b</a><br />
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Henson, R. (2005). What can functional neuroimaging tell the experimental psychologist? <span style="font-style: italic;">The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology Section A, 58</span> (2), 193-233. DOI: <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02724980443000502" rev="review">10.1080/02724980443000502</a><br />
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Howard-Jones, P. (2014). Neuroscience and education: myths and messages. <span style="font-style: italic;">Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 15</span> (12), 817-824. DOI: <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nrn3817" rev="review">10.1038/nrn3817</a><br />
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Kousaie, S., & Phillips, N. (2012). Ageing and bilingualism: Absence of a “bilingual advantage” in Stroop interference in a nonimmigrant sample. <span style="font-style: italic;">The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 65</span> (2), 356-369. DOI: <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17470218.2011.604788" rev="review">10.1080/17470218.2011.604788</a><br />
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Morton, J., & Harper, S. (2007). What did Simon say? Revisiting the bilingual advantage. <span style="font-style: italic;">Developmental Science, 10</span> (6), 719-726. DOI: <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7687.2007.00623.x" rev="review">10.1111/j.1467-7687.2007.00623.x</a><br />
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Rozenblit, L., & Keil, F. (2002). The misunderstood limits of folk science: an illusion of explanatory depth. <span style="font-style: italic;">Cognitive Science, 26</span> (5), 521-562. DOI: <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1207/s15516709cog2605_1" rev="review">10.1207/s15516709cog2605_1</a><br />
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Sherwin, R. (2012). Visual Jurisprudence. <span style="font-style: italic;">SSRN Electronic Journal.</span> DOI: <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2135801" rev="review">10.2139/ssrn.2135801</a><br />
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Weisberg, D., Keil, F., Goodstein, J., Rawson, E., & Gray, J. (2008). The Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations. <span style="font-style: italic;">Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 20</span> (3), 470-477. DOI: <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/jocn.2008.20040" rev="review">10.1162/jocn.2008.20040</a><br />
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Woolston, C. (2014). Study points to press releases as sources of hype. <span style="font-style: italic;">Nature, 516</span> (7531), 291-291. DOI: <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature.2014.16551" rev="review">10.1038/nature.2014.16551</a><br />
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<i>Next post:</i><i><b> <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2015/02/child-musings-on-being-multilingual.html" target="_blank">Child musings on being multilingual – The languages</a></b></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">.</span></span><i><b> </b></i><i>Saturday 21</i><span style="font-size: small;"><sup><i>st</i></sup></span><i> February 2015.</i></div>
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Madalena Cruz-Ferreirahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14782492322928803326noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1132547320196715283.post-15262441894764691822014-12-13T00:00:00.000+08:002017-03-26T01:14:17.892+08:00The multilingual scapegoat<style type="text/css">P { margin-bottom: 0.08in; }</style> <br />
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Scapegoating has historically been instrumental in alleviating consciences. The fact that scapegoating, as historically, has had no effect whatsoever on what caused those consciences to become burdened in the first place doesn’t seem to deter its continued practice.<br />
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Multilingualism has served as a handy goat candidate for a good while now. In typically recurrent scenarios, if a child presents with a (suspected) language-related disorder, and that child is multilingual, then the child’s multilingualism is to blame for the disorder. It happened in my family, too. A few weeks into one of my children’s first preschool experience, her teachers reported to me their concern about her behavioural issues. Among other things, she preferred to entertain herself on her own rather than seeking group play, she grabbed at the faces of both children and adults who addressed her, and she was disruptive at story time, when everyone sat on the floor around the reader. The teachers completed their report by sternly advising me that the burden, as they put it, of dealing with two languages from birth might well have started taking its toll on her. </div>
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You may have guessed what was really going on: the specialist test that I requested at the next paediatric check-up showed that my girl had 40% deafness. If you can’t hear in an environment meant for <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2014/09/sign-speech-multilinguals.html" target="_blank">typical hearing</a>, if you need to have other people face you when they talk to you in order to lip-read and, likewise, if you can’t see their lowered faces when they’re reading to you, my child’s behaviour becomes no issue after all. </div>
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Throughout my children’s early schooling years, other rounds of this Blame Multilingualism game only served to confirm that the multilingual scapegoat, like its predecessors, didn’t arise out of inherent goat properties but out of our propensity to explain what we don’t understand by means of what we understand even less. In the words of David L. Rosenhan’s report <a href="http://www.bonkersinstitute.org/rosenhan.html" target="_blank">On being sane in insane places</a>: “Whenever the ratio of what is known to what needs to be known approaches zero, we tend to invent ‘knowledge’ and assume that we understand more than we actually do. We seem unable to acknowledge that we simply <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/06/how-do-we-know.html" target="_blank">don’t know</a>.”</div>
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The reason we don’t understand multilingualism is that we refuse to deal with it <i>as</i> multilingualism: we prefer to check it out as an indicator of <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/07/effects-of-monolingualism.html" target="_blank">(in)conformity</a> to other linguistic behaviours, as is evident from the profuse academic and lay literature reporting findings about multilingualism through the bias of monolingual lenses. Taking other-than-multilingual as a norm expectedly results in assessments of multilingualism as ‘special’, whether <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2010/11/multilingual-woes-and-joys.html" target="_blank">special-bad or special-good</a>. Special things demand explanations which depart from the ‘ordinary’ explanatory norms which made them special, and thus self-fulfil their special status. Add to this our readiness to explain things by means of <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2013/01/what-causes-what.html" target="_blank">causality</a>, and we’re ready to conclude that some of us are special <i>because</i> we’re multilinguals.</div>
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Blaming multilingualism for a (suspected) problem is equivalent in practice to <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2010/11/fight-for-fair-deal.html" target="_blank"><i>diagnosing</i> people with multilingualism</a>. Multilingualism <i>is</i> a problem and must therefore be banished: that’s why so many of us, parents, educators, clinicians, advise <a href="http://blog.asha.org/2011/08/02/recommending-monolingualism-to-multilinguals-why-and-why-not/" target="_blank">monolingualism as a cure</a>. Proclaiming that we’ve found an answer to a problem has an immediate effect, which is to stop asking questions, our own and especially others’: our quest is ended and we may sleep with a clear conscience. Anything, in other words, feels and looks better than simply acknowledging our ignorance. This is why typically developing multilingual children continue to be over-referred to specialist care, <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2012/12/language-therapy-or-language-tuition.html" target="_blank">wasting</a> precious time as well as human and financial resources. Not to speak of the stigma attached to those diagnosed as ‘special’, of course. As Rosenhan’s unsettling study crucially found, simply entering the special care circle is enough to confirm that special care was needed in the first place, and so that the special diagnosis was warranted: once a special label sticks to you, whatever you do will serve as proof that you deserved to be labelled.</div>
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Mythologies typically generate their own evidence in this way. This is why scapegoating goes on saving both our faces <style type="text/css">P { margin-bottom: 0.08in; }</style>and our prejudices. Is it so that we care more for upholding our ingrained beliefs than for the people who come to us for help? What seems to matter is to make the stray sheep return to the normality fold of our collective imaginary: what matters is conformity to an illusionary norm. As Thomas Szasz compellingly shows in <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/0815604610" target="_blank"><i>The Manufacture of Madness</i></a>, “Safety lies in similarity”.</div>
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Believing that multilingualism is the problem further prevents us from accepting it as a norm in itself, blinding us to <a href="http://blog.asha.org/2010/12/16/multilingual-typicality-vs-speech-language-disorder/" target="_blank">disordered multilingualism</a>. As Annick De Houwer, Marc H. Bornstein and Diane L. Putnick argue in <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/applied-psycholinguistics/article/div-classtitlea-bilingualmonolingual-comparison-of-young-childrenandaposs-vocabulary-size-evidence-from-comprehension-and-productiondiv/371B0CE6D281FD84B905229DD74C2DA8" target="_blank">A bilingual-monolingual comparison of young children’s vocabulary size</a>, if there are any concerns about bi-/multilingual children’s language development, “reasons other than their bilingualism should be investigated.”</div>
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Next time, I’ll keep to matters of gathering knowledge about multilingualism.</div>
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<span class="Z3988" title="ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Ajournal&rft.jtitle=Applied+Psycholinguistics&rft_id=info%3Adoi%2F10.1017%2FS0142716412000744&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fresearchblogging.org&rft.atitle=A+bilingual%E2%80%93monolingual+comparison+of+young+children%27s+vocabulary+size%3A+Evidence+from+comprehension+and+production&rft.issn=0142-7164&rft.date=2013&rft.volume=35&rft.issue=06&rft.spage=1189&rft.epage=1211&rft.artnum=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.journals.cambridge.org%2Fabstract_S0142716412000744&rft.au=DE+HOUWER%2C+A.&rft.au=BORNSTEIN%2C+M.&rft.au=PUTNICK%2C+D.&rfe_dat=bpr3.included=1;bpr3.tags=Social+Science%2CLinguistics%2C+Language+comprehension%2C+Language+production%2C+Child+language%2C+Multilingualism">DE HOUWER, A., BORNSTEIN, M., & PUTNICK, D. (2013). A bilingual–monolingual comparison of young children's vocabulary size: Evidence from comprehension and production <span style="font-style: italic;">Applied Psycholinguistics, 35</span> (06), 1189-1211 DOI: <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0142716412000744" rev="review">10.1017/S0142716412000744</a></span><br />
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Rosenhan, D. (1973). On Being Sane in Insane Places <span style="font-style: italic;">Science, 179</span> (4070), 250-258 DOI: <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.179.4070.250" rev="review">10.1126/science.179.4070.250</a><br />
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© MCF 2014</div>
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<i>Next post:</i><i><b> <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2015/01/multilingual-neuromyths.html" target="_blank">Multilingual neuromyths</a></b></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">.</span></span><i><b> </b></i><i>Saturday 24</i><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><sup><i>th</i></sup></span><i> January 2015.</i></div>
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Madalena Cruz-Ferreirahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14782492322928803326noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1132547320196715283.post-89259516557241086592014-11-15T00:00:00.000+08:002017-03-27T00:15:05.796+08:00Nativeness: The curse and blessings of genes, geography and cadence=Guest post= <style type="text/css">P { margin-bottom: 0.08in; }</style>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrK28xqAoe0nFiOj9wYH3Q-RAUAvVGfb11eX8yGoC83Xkr5U1-JFlMNBjm5uvq_jrg2gM3lYg68FG8Ijzz0JWoRuUkjvFF3gKxWmH1uEI_XwmIJ01E0zwa2lH1cgfY0R38FuZGGDgez_C9/s1600/Ng+Wan+Qing+Jessie.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrK28xqAoe0nFiOj9wYH3Q-RAUAvVGfb11eX8yGoC83Xkr5U1-JFlMNBjm5uvq_jrg2gM3lYg68FG8Ijzz0JWoRuUkjvFF3gKxWmH1uEI_XwmIJ01E0zwa2lH1cgfY0R38FuZGGDgez_C9/s1600/Ng+Wan+Qing+Jessie.JPG" width="150" /></a></div>
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by Ng Wan Qing Jessie</div>
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I am of Chinese descent, with dark hair
and eyes. I was born in Singapore, raised in a trilingual family. My
parents spoke to each other in their respective <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2014/07/some-languages-are-more-languages-than.html" target="_blank">‘dialects’</a>
– Teochew and Hokkien, and spoke to us in Mandarin. A large part of
my childhood revolved around these three languages, and it was not
until I started attending kindergarten that I had to learn English.
Boy, was it a struggle! I distinctly remember how, at the age of 5, I
could not even tell the teacher that I wanted to go to the bathroom.
It took the aid of a Mandarin-speaking teacher to do the appropriate
translation before I could avoid the embarrassment of wetting my
underwear.</div>
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Fast forward to 2014. I am now working
as an English language teacher in a local secondary school, having
completed the Singapore-Cambridge GCE ‘O’ and ‘A’ level
examinations, a Bachelor degree, a postgraduate diploma in Education,
and a Master degree, entirely in English. Admittedly, I have not had
the need to sit for IELTS (International English Language Testing
System) or TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language), so I cannot
tell you about my language proficiency in those terms, but I would
think that it is sufficiently high for you to be able to understand
what I am rambling on about here. However, I am disgruntled that as a
trained and experienced teacher of English, I regularly face the
discrimination that I am not a competent one.
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Competence in a language, for reasons
unbeknownst to enlightened scholars, appears to be defined by DNA,
accent
or citizenship. My dark hair and eyes, as well as my <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/04/you-speak-with-accent-i-dont.html" target="_blank">Singaporean accent</a> and, to some extent, the red passport I hold, seem to label me
as a second-rate English language teacher. In my own country, the
prejudice is not that bad, although once we had a Science teacher
from mainland China joining our school and I overheard people gushing
about how good she must be, because she has an ‘American accent’.
Occasionally, I do hear random and, dare I say, ill-informed people
on the streets making comments on how their child’s teacher is
‘better’ (presumably than typical, Asian-looking local teachers)
because he is ‘ang moh’ – which literally translates to ‘red
hair’ and is a popular local term used to describe Caucasians –,
but that has, mercifully, decreased over the years. Ironically, this
is probably aided in part by the rise of xenophobia among the young
in recent years, which led to the sudden realisation that ‘non ang
mohs’ could also be competent English teachers.<br />
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Or maybe I have
just gone selectively deaf. In any case, when I started looking for
opportunities to diversify my teaching experience overseas, I fell
victim once again to the curse of my chromosomal makeup. I have read
quite a few ESL/EFL (English as a Second/Foreign Language) teaching
position descriptions with much enthusiasm, only to have my hopes
shattered at the end when I realise that they were looking only for
‘native speakers’ or ‘native-sounding speakers’. In some
instances, they would list the countries where the potential
candidate’s academic certificates were obtained from as
pre-requisites. So far, the only success I have had is in countries
where schools offering the Singapore curriculum have been set up.</div>
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Recently, I have been harbouring
suicidal thoughts. No, not of the literal sort, but the semi-literal
kind. I have been feeling restless after completing my Master of Arts
degree in June 2013, and slowly but surely, the fatal thought of
enrolling in a PhD programme has been creeping up on me.
Understanding the importance of casting my academic net far and wide,
I pored over my options. It was to my dismay to discover that many
institutions require me to submit either IELTS or TOEFL scores, even
though I had completed both my undergraduate and graduate studies in
English. It was even categorically stated by one particular
institution, and I quote, </div>
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“<i>All applicants whose native language is
NOT English or who have NOT received their undergraduate education in
a country where the native language is English MUST submit scores
from one of two internationally recognised assessments of English
language proficiency, IELTS or TOEFL. Receiving your bachelor’s
degree in a country that lists English as an official language such
as India, Pakistan, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Nigeria, or Singapore
does not exempt you from the English language proficiency
requirement.</i>” </div>
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I guess many of the young Singaporeans who are raised
in English-speaking homes, and hence would logically qualify as
<a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2014/10/native-multilinguals.html" target="_blank">‘native speakers’</a>,
would now be quite confused about their ‘native language’. I can
hardly blame them, because I am confused too. Instead of being
defined by the language spoken from birth, native language users seem
to be defined by the country they took their first breath in.</div>
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All hope is not lost, however.
Recently, I was invited to attend an interview for an English
language teaching position in Japan. They were looking for
Singapore-trained teachers. My interest was automatically piqued
because this seemed to be in such contrast to what I have known all
along. At the interview, I asked my interviewer why his company was
specifically looking for English teachers in Singapore. After all, I
probed, would it not be far ‘better’ to look for candidates from
‘native-speaking countries’? His response revived the dying flame
in me that, with my profile, I could actually be considered as being
on par with the traditional perception of a ‘native speaker’ as
having certain <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/04/natives-and-speakers.html" target="_blank">skin pigments, accent or nationality</a>.
He spoke of his admiration for our education system, our working
language as English, and our teachers having to go through rigorous
training in a world-renowned teacher training institution. The
parting line left a smile on my face: “I do think you are a native
speaker, never mind if your accent is different!”</div>
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<a href="mailto:ms_bobdog@yahoo.co.uk" target="_blank">Ng Wan Qing Jessie</a> is a Science-turned-English language
teacher. She graduated from the National Institute of Education
(Singapore) in 2013 with a Master of Arts (Applied Linguistics)
degree, with a focus on multimodal discourse analysis. A copy of her
dissertation may be requested from the <a href="https://repository.nie.edu.sg/handle/10497/13650" target="_blank">NIE Digital Repository</a>. She is
currently working as an adjunct teacher in a secondary school in
Singapore, while considering graduate school options.
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© Ng Wan Qing
Jessie 2014</div>
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<i>Next post:
<a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2014/12/the-multilingual-scapegoat.html" style="font-weight: bold;" target="_blank">The multilingual scapegoat</a>.<b> </b>Saturday 13</i><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><sup><i>th</i></sup></span><i>
December 2014.</i></div>
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Madalena Cruz-Ferreirahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14782492322928803326noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1132547320196715283.post-49413125714531823772014-10-18T00:00:00.000+08:002018-08-28T18:43:23.976+08:00Native multilinguals<style type="text/css">P { margin-bottom: 0.08in; }</style> <br />
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Some of my language teaching students sometimes express out loud their heartfelt desire to become native speakers. I was quite baffled the first time I heard this: we’re all native speakers, surely, and we can’t <i>become</i> natives, if we take the word “native” to mean what I supposed it is meant to mean, ‘from birth’. But does it? It turned out that my students’ previous teacher training had included the mantra that “native” means ‘flawless’ in this collocation, and flawless, whatever we take <i>this</i> word to mean, is certainly something that all of us can at least aspire to become. </div>
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This latter meaning of the word “native” has in fact been made quite explicit in the literature about <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/01/second-tongues-and-foreign-tongues.html" target="_blank">“second” (or “foreign”) languages</a> – with my profuse apologies for the scare quotes that will crop up all over this post: I’ve no idea what the scared words might mean, in this literature. This meaning explains, for example, why some of us think it a worthwhile endeavour to compare school language learners to “native speakers”, for purposes of language quality assessment. But there is a snag: if learning languages from birth entails flawless use of those languages, how come multilinguals <i>across the board</i>, including simultaneous multilinguals who learn more than one language from Day One, go on being compared to “native speakers”? </div>
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The thing is that “native speaker” has yet a third meaning, <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/04/natives-and-speakers.html" target="_blank">‘monolingual’</a>, this time a covert one, which nevertheless heeds the overt, systematic practice of <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2010/10/not-being-monolingual.html" target="_blank">comparing any multilinguals to monolinguals</a>. This meaning explains, for example, the virtual absence of acknowledgement that multilinguals can be “native” users of their languages. If we accept that multilingual proficiency should be assessed through comparison with “native” proficiency, then we’re saying that multilinguals and natives are two distinct kinds of language users, since we can’t compare a thing to itself.</div>
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But there is another snag. If multilinguals aren’t native users of their languages, then they must be “non-native”, by the logic of the assumedly useful labels which populate research on language uses. However, they aren’t, because <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/06/people-see-people-do.html" target="_blank">multilinguals get compared to non-natives</a>, too. In addition, simultaneous multilinguals can’t be “non-native”, if their languages are there for them from Day One, which is one of the meanings of “native”. Multilinguals, in sum, appear to inhabit a <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2012/11/wait-where-are-you-from.html" target="_blank">Linguistic No Man’s Land</a>.</div>
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“Day One”, unfortunately, may not be what clinches the issue either. If the language(s) in which we’re brought up from birth happen to be <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2010/11/outsourcing-language-products.html" target="_blank">imported languages</a>, then those languages aren’t “ours”. And if we learn a new language in early childhood, though not exactly from Day One, how many days should we count to count as a native user of it? Can I, for example, claim French as native language, having lived with it from just before age 3? Or was I then already way <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2010/11/little-perfect-lingual-and-big-bad.html" target="_blank">past my native learning prime</a>, as I must have been when I learned my other languages <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2010/11/age-decay-and-missed-opportunities.html" target="_blank">several years later</a>? If you’re interested in the mysteries of “critical periods” which snipe at “native” language learning abilities, Carmen Muñoz and David Singleton’s state of the art discussion, <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/language-teaching/article/div-classtitlea-critical-review-of-age-related-research-on-l2-ultimate-attainmentdiv/6030287858C91932F2A594E805BD23C0" target="_blank">A critical review of age-related research on L2 ultimate attainment</a>, is a must-read. </div>
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Scare-quoted terminological acrobatics about multilingualism would be hilarious, of course, if it didn’t appear in “serious” research, thereby proving that we’ve no idea what we’re talking about. Have a look in my article <a href="http://www.academia.edu/1107744/First_language_acquisition_and_teaching" target="_blank">First language acquisition and teaching</a>, to see what I mean. The muddle got compounded when researchers developed a preference for labelling the languages of a multilingual by means of numbers, possibly on the belief that identifying things by numbers makes them look scientifically unquestionable. There’s always some “L1” lurking in there somewhere, which means that there must be rankings of L2, ... L<i>n</i>, where the numbers apparently serve the purpose of showing that languages either politely follow one another or should do so. </div>
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But what do these numbers mean when, say, <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/02/multilingual-adventures-in-school-land.html" target="_blank">simultaneous multilinguals learn one or more new languages</a> in school? Not much, it seems, because we prefer to stick to labels rather than acknowledge their undefinable uselessness. Since “L1” represents an inherently singular concept (in more than one sense of “singular”), the logic of cardinal and ordinal numbering requires that L1 = “first language”, whereby everyone must have a single “first” language, endowed with rights of primogeniture associated with other firstborns. If there’s no single chronological first language, no problem: we just assign one to children, for reasons of administrative expediency, and call it their <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2010/12/mother-tongues.html" target="_blank">“mother tongue”</a>. Finally, by the logic that <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/03/first-main-best.html" target="_blank">first = “best”</a>, we end up talking about <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2012/04/dominant-languages-and-balanced.html" target="_blank">“dominant” and “balanced” languages</a>, and about all the other hopeless labels which do no more than betray our hopeless beliefs that multilinguals are, in fact, <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/p/multilinguals-are-book-reviews_11.html" target="_blank">funny monolinguals</a>. </div>
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This state of affairs may well explain why multilingualism goes on being blamed for anything that deviates from monolingualism, to which I’ll return <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2014/12/the-multilingual-scapegoat.html" target="_blank">some other day</a>. Meanwhile, the next post, a guest post, goes back to where this post started, to report vivid encounters with “nativeness” from a language teacher who’s also had plenty of reasons to wonder about the meaning of this word.<br />
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<span style="float: left; padding: 5px;"><a href="http://www.researchblogging.org/"><img alt="ResearchBlogging.org" src="http://www.researchblogging.org/public/citation_icons/rb2_large_gray.png" style="border: 0;" /></a></span><br />
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<span class="Z3988" title="ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Ajournal&rft.jtitle=AILA+Review&rft_id=info%3Adoi%2F10.1075%2Faila.24.06cru&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fresearchblogging.org&rft.atitle=First+language+acquisition+and+teaching&rft.issn=1461-0213&rft.date=2011&rft.volume=24&rft.issue=&rft.spage=78&rft.epage=87&rft.artnum=https%3A%2F%2Fbenjamins.com%2Fcatalog%2Faila.24.06cru&rft.au=Cruz-Ferreira%2C+M.&rfe_dat=bpr3.included=1;bpr3.tags=Psychology%2CSocial+Science%2CResearch+%2F+Scholarship%2CLinguistics%2C+Cognitive+Psychology%2C+Language+learning%2C+Child+language%2C+Multilingualism%2C+Education"><br />
</span> <span class="Z3988" title="ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Ajournal&rft.jtitle=AILA+Review&rft_id=info%3Adoi%2F10.1075%2Faila.24.06cru&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fresearchblogging.org&rft.atitle=First+language+acquisition+and+teaching&rft.issn=1461-0213&rft.date=2011&rft.volume=24&rft.issue=&rft.spage=78&rft.epage=87&rft.artnum=https%3A%2F%2Fbenjamins.com%2Fcatalog%2Faila.24.06cru&rft.au=Cruz-Ferreira%2C+M.&rfe_dat=bpr3.included=1;bpr3.tags=Psychology%2CSocial+Science%2CResearch+%2F+Scholarship%2CLinguistics%2C+Cognitive+Psychology%2C+Language+learning%2C+Child+language%2C+Multilingualism%2C+Education"><br />
</span> <span class="Z3988" title="ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Ajournal&rft.jtitle=AILA+Review&rft_id=info%3Adoi%2F10.1075%2Faila.24.06cru&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fresearchblogging.org&rft.atitle=First+language+acquisition+and+teaching&rft.issn=1461-0213&rft.date=2011&rft.volume=24&rft.issue=&rft.spage=78&rft.epage=87&rft.artnum=https%3A%2F%2Fbenjamins.com%2Fcatalog%2Faila.24.06cru&rft.au=Cruz-Ferreira%2C+M.&rfe_dat=bpr3.included=1;bpr3.tags=Psychology%2CSocial+Science%2CResearch+%2F+Scholarship%2CLinguistics%2C+Cognitive+Psychology%2C+Language+learning%2C+Child+language%2C+Multilingualism%2C+Education"><br />
</span> <span class="Z3988" title="ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Ajournal&rft.jtitle=AILA+Review&rft_id=info%3Adoi%2F10.1075%2Faila.24.06cru&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fresearchblogging.org&rft.atitle=First+language+acquisition+and+teaching&rft.issn=1461-0213&rft.date=2011&rft.volume=24&rft.issue=&rft.spage=78&rft.epage=87&rft.artnum=https%3A%2F%2Fbenjamins.com%2Fcatalog%2Faila.24.06cru&rft.au=Cruz-Ferreira%2C+M.&rfe_dat=bpr3.included=1;bpr3.tags=Psychology%2CSocial+Science%2CResearch+%2F+Scholarship%2CLinguistics%2C+Cognitive+Psychology%2C+Language+learning%2C+Child+language%2C+Multilingualism%2C+Education">Cruz-Ferreira, M. (2011). First language acquisition and teaching. <span style="font-style: italic;">AILA Review, 24</span>, 78-87 DOI: <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/aila.24.06cru" rev="review">10.1075/aila.24.06cru</a></span><br />
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Muñoz, C., & Singleton, D. (2010). A critical review of age-related research on L2 ultimate attainment. <span style="font-style: italic;">Language Teaching, 44</span> (01), 1-35 DOI: <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0261444810000327" rev="review">10.1017/S0261444810000327</a><br />
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© MCF 2014<i> </i></div>
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<i>Next post:</i><i><b> =Guest post= <a href="http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2014/11/nativeness-curse-and-blessings-of-genes.html" target="_blank">Nativeness: The curse and blessings of genes, geography and cadence</a></b></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">, by Ng Wan Qing Jessie.</span></span><i><b> </b></i><i>Saturday 15</i><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><sup><i>th</i></sup></span><i> November 2014.</i></div>
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Madalena Cruz-Ferreirahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14782492322928803326noreply@blogger.com2