Language learners and linguistic resourcefulness

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 utilitarian purposes we’re commonly told we should learn languages for.

I mean the fun of cracking, bit by bit, on our own, the puzzles 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.

Exploring possibilities in this way is what learning is all about. Children do it – which may well explain why they are said to be expert language learners. Encouraging similar exploration among older learners, including of the mistakes 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 The ownership of English, and so did Guy Cook in Language Play, Language Learning.

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 Undoing appropriateness: Raciolinguistic ideologies and language diversity in education. 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 ‘native speaker’ standards. And second, the predication of creativity on multilingualism while condemning multilingual creativity for not being monolingual.

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 previous post makes clear. Or not traditionally correct: a recent discussion at ResearchGate, on How advanced must L2 speakers be before native speakers accept their neologisms as acceptable rather than inaccurate?, highlights the focus of traditional language teaching on the languages and their mythical homogeneity, rather than on the learners. We keep confusing languages with textbook samples 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.

Wanting to be taught language that matters to us, 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. Nancy Bell and Anne Pomerantz 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, Humor in the Classroom. A Guide for Language Teachers and Educational Researchers, 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.”

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.

Flores, N., & Rosa, J. (2015). Undoing Appropriateness: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and Language Diversity in Education. Harvard Educational Review, 85 (2), 149-171. DOI: 10.17763/0017-8055.85.2.149

Widdowson, H. (1994). The Ownership of English. TESOL Quarterly, 28 (2). DOI: 10.2307/3587438

© MCF 2016

This will be my last regular post on this blog.

There are 160 posts for you to enjoy, on the blog’s core topics of

myths and misconceptions about being multilingual
in the home, in school and in clinic.

Thank you for your reader support so far!

Multilingual novelties

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 multilingual norms, most research has proceeded through the bias of monolingual standards, which is not so good for the obvious reason that multilinguals aren’t monolinguals. 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.

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 born and bred into, or for whom learning a new language has become more or less synonymous with learning ‘our’ language. Research such as Herbert Schendl’s, specifically on English in the Middle Ages, tells quite a different story.

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 common denominator to users of any other languages, complete with a misleading aura of stable uniformity across space and time. The word English features in time-honoured acronyms like EFL, ESL, ESOL (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 E-acronyms era. And a label like ‘Old English’, 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.

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 Carmina Burana, part of which Carl Orff immortalised in a musical piece of the same name, and the Finland-based news service Nuntii Latini.

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 unscathed 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 Code-Switching in Early English, 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 before. Early multilingualism in Britain was also the topic of a conference, promoted by the Magdalene Society of Medievalists, addressing “the mainstream trilingual culture of England”. Doesn’t the collocation of these three words, mainstream, trilingual and England look exciting, nowadays?

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 The Tragedy of the Templars, for example, Michael Haag quotes The Chronicle of Fulcher of Chartres, where the author marvels:

“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.”

Fulcher hadn’t perhaps been familiar with the military forces of earlier multilinguals such as the Polyglots in Roman Antiquity, 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.

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 publications, 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. Attitudes 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.”

We have, in short, been there and done that, as far as multilingualism is concerned: so much for our ‘increasingly’ multilingual 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.

Laes, C. (2013). Polyglots in Roman Antiquity. Writing Socio-Cultural History Based on Anecdotes. Literatūra 55(3).

Schendl, H. (2015). Code-switching in early English literature. Language and Literature, 24 (3), 233-248 DOI: 10.1177/0963947015585245

© MCF 2015

Next post: The perfect multilingual. Saturday 13^th June 2015.

The languages that matter

Regular messages that I get from parents who have decided to bring up their children multilingually often have “Which languages should I use with my child?” in the subject line. The body of the messages, as often, nevertheless ends up answering this question: the parents say things like “my wife speaks X and Y, I speak X and W, and my mother, who will babysit the child most of the time, speaks only W”. That’s three languages, and choosing at least two of them, in this case dad’s languages, seems straightforward: use X, mum and dad’s shared language, I write back, and W, for granny’s sake. And, I go on, if mum feels that Y matters, too, by all means go ahead and use it, too.

Most of these messages, however, do not stop here. Those parents who don’t write to me in English, or for whom this isn’t one of “their” languages, as they put it, hasten to clarify in the next sentences that they also speak English (let’s call it Z, and use this symbol to refer to any of the “big” languages currently looming above us), as if not being a Z user were somehow unnatural, or mortifying. The real question then comes towards the end of the message: “So which languages should I use with my baby in order to give her a good head start in life?”

Mentions of Z invariably carry a Z-must undertone, even (especially?) when parents explain that this is a very non-native and very non-family language to them, while at the same time asserting their belief that early home exposure to any Z, rather than to no Z, will trigger the desired lifelong edge. There’s no undertone when parents add that Z will have to replace one of the family languages that might otherwise have been a good candidate for home nurturing, because “I don’t want to burden my child with too many languages”.

Which gets me wondering: why don’t the subject lines ask about “Which languages should I not use with my child?” instead, since the questions are about discarding languages? If X, Y and W matter, not least monolingually, because they’re family languages, how do we decide which one of them will mean a waste of child time and cognitive potential, as some parents see it fit to argue, because Z matters no matter what? Which arguments, I also wonder, can ease parental consciences about the burdensome language(s) that must cease to matter?

I confess my mixed feelings about all this. The good news is that agonising over whether to bring up children multilingually is becoming old hat. I also get fewer and fewer questions from, for example, multilingual parents wishing to bring up their children monolingually in the foreign, global and mainstream language used where they’ll move to, and where, their reasoning goes, no other language can possibly matter. But the questions that bloom in their stead are no less disquieting. What matters now is being multilingual-with-Z, in the sense that if I’m multilingual in, say, Icelandic and Bhutanese, I certainly lack the edge of fellow multilinguals in, say, Mandarin and Spanish – or in one of the former languages with one of the latter.

What “edge” are we talking about, and when do we reckon it will deploy its effects? These questions about choice of home languages have two things in common. First, they ask, here and now, about how we can make or break our children’s adult welfare against the competition by talking to them in the right or wrong languages. Which leaves open (closed, actually) the question of what we should talk to our little ones until they’re big ones, including for granny’s sake, since she will share the children’s here and now for a while yet. Planning home language policies has started to look a lot like investing in futures, in other words. Do we know which languages will matter to our children where and how, when they’re no longer children? Or are we attempting to create their future ourselves, by opening certain doors for them and shutting down others as soon as they’re born?

Second, these questions reflect parents’ persuasion (or helplessness, or guilt) that their non-Z languages may be expendable because they’re non-Z. Ever since it became fashionable to talk about multilingualism as an investment, nobody dares follow their parental instincts any more (or plain commonsense) about deciding which languages actually matter to the family. We’re urged to follow the crowd, whether at home, in school or in clinic. Maybe this is why I feel strangely refreshed when I read about what matters to organisations like OLCA (Office pour la Langue et la Culture d’Alsace) or to people like Aaron Carapella.

Worrying about our children’s future is of course part and parcel of being a parent. But I find it exceedingly difficult to plan that future, not least linguistically and not least because the children will also have their say about what matters to them, often much earlier than we suspect. In my family, for example, we parents started off communicating with one another in English, then learned one another’s languages because English didn’t feel to us like a family language at all, to later have our children make English not only a family language but the one which they use among themselves, still today. Which made me realise that I should stick to worrying about investing in parenting instead, in whatever language.

The belief that some languages are more entitled to life than others is particularly insidious where sign languages, as opposed to spoken ones, enter the fray. The next post offers a few thoughts on this.

© MCF 2014

Next post: Sign-speech multilinguals. Saturday 20^th September 2014.

Mother tongue education or flexible multilingual education?=Guest post=

by Jean-Jacques Weber

Mother tongue education is often advocated as the ideal system of education for all children in our late-modern, globalized world. However, in this blog post I provide a critique of mother tongue education, arguing that it is not always the panacea it is frequently made out to be. This is also the theme of my new book, Flexible Multilingual Education: Putting Children’s Needs First, where I criticize mother tongue education programmes for being too rigidly fixed upon a particular language (the ‘mother tongue’), and explore more flexible and more child-focused forms of multilingual education.

A first problem with mother tongue education is what could be referred to as ‘the challenge of superdiverse classrooms’. Indeed, in many classrooms of today’s globalized world, there may be students with a wide range of different home languages, which makes mother tongue education increasingly difficult to implement. This allows governments to opt out of their responsibilities, by means of the commonsensical argument that in any case it would be impossible to organize mother tongue education for each individual child.

A second problem with the call for mother tongue education is that it can involve a kind of arrogance on the part of the (frequently white, Western European or US American) ‘expert’ who tells people what is good for them – e.g. that they should keep up their minority language. It has been too easy for researchers to take an attitude of superiority and to look upon (e.g.) South African parents who prefer their children to be educated through English rather than an indigenous African language as ‘victims of false consciousness’ or as ‘afflicted by an attitudinal malaise or syndrome’.

A third problem is that mother tongue education tends to lead to rather fixed multilingual education systems, because politicians, policy-makers and teachers often rely on a discourse of ethnolinguistic essentialism in attributing a ‘mother tongue’ to the schoolchildren. In many cases, however, attribution of a single mother tongue involves at least a simplification of an increasingly complex multilingual reality. The problem is that ‘mother tongue’ is a politicized concept, and hence not the best one for a pedagogical approach to be based upon.

There is therefore a need to move from rather fixed mother tongue education programmes to more flexible multilingual education. While mother tongue education tends to be focused on the standard variety (the ‘mother tongue’) ascribed on the basis of children’s perceived ethnicity, flexible multilingual education builds upon children’s actual home linguistic varieties, upon the whole of their multilingual repertoires including non-standard varieties, urban vernaculars, etc. Moreover, while mother tongue education tends to provide delayed access to a global language such as English, flexible multilingual education prefers very gradual shifts between local and global languages from an early stage (at least for children with multilingual repertoires).

Furthermore, there is a key difference in the primary aims of flexible multilingual education, as opposed to mother tongue education. The latter is often concerned with the revitalization of a particular local language, which is to be achieved through a struggle against the hegemonic encroachment of (usually) English. In the process, it sometimes overlooks the needs of particular groups of students such as migrant students. On the other hand, the primary concern of flexible multilingual education is to include all schoolchildren and to provide them with high-quality access to the languages that they need for educational and professional success. Take, for example, the mother tongue education systems in francophone Canada or Catalonia. The fact that the system may impede migrant students’ access to a global language such as English is ignored by the mother tongue education advocates, in whose eyes the maintenance of French or the revitalization of Catalan is the overarching goal, in front of which everything else pales in significance.

Finally, with its focus on the standard variety of the assumed ‘mother tongue’, mother tongue education frequently erases non-standard varieties or ‘dialects’, which as a result are not seen as worth preserving. This has happened in Singapore, where the focus on the ‘official’ mother tongue – Mandarin in the case of the Chinese community – involves the deliberate eradication of all other varieties of Chinese. Somewhat surprisingly, even academics tend to look upon this as a highly successful language policy to the extent that it has managed to supplant the different varieties – Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese, etc. – with the standard variety, Mandarin. The same is happening in China, where nation-building efforts involve the imposition of standard Chinese – here referred to as Putonghua – and the marginalization of the other varieties of Chinese. In light of the political nature of the distinction between language and dialect, these are very disturbing policies and attitudes that seem to be encouraged by mother tongue education: only the standard variety is perceived as being in need of protection and preservation, whereas non-standard varieties are largely erased and considered to be worthless. Another example of this can be found in parts of South Africa, where some mother tongue advocates object to the use of mixed Xhosa-English varieties in the classroom – though these correspond to many urban children’s actual home linguistic resources – and aim to enforce instead the use of a ‘pure’, standard variety of Xhosa, even though this may seem like a foreign language to many students.

In my book, I explore these and numerous other case studies from around the world and show that flexible and child-centred multilingual education programmes would be preferable to mother tongue education, in that they would allow a full acknowledgement of the hybrid and transnational linguistic repertoires that people actually deploy in our late-modern, superdiverse societies.

Jean-Jacques Weber 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 Flexible Multilingual Education: Putting Children’s Needs First (2014), Multilingualism and Mobility in Europe (2014), Multilingualism and Multimodality (2013) and Introducing Multilingualism: A Social Approach (2012).

© Jean-Jacques Weber 2014

Next post: Some languages are more languages than others. Saturday 26^th July 2014.

Learning languages – what for?

It has somehow become politically incorrect to question the current upswing in the seesaw about multilingualism, to the effect that we should all dedicate ourselves to learning languages.

I personally think it’s great fun to learn languages just because they’re there, probably because I work with them as a linguist, but there’s one other reason why I learned the languages that I use, which is, simply, that I have to use them. I wouldn’t be able to function in my everyday environments with a single language. What I find intriguing is the blank encouragement to learn languages for apparently no other reason than everyone else saying that we should. Do we know why we’re joining the chorus? Or are we just doing our best to prove R. W. Emerson’s point that “Nothing is more rare, in any man, than an act of his own” – to which Oscar Wilde added that “Most people are other people”? It grieves me to find languages ranking among the new desirables, on the strength of decidedly consumerist hype: what matters is how many you have.

Multilinguals have “many” languages for the same reason that a lot of people have more than one of anything, from pairs of shoes to smartphones, not out of endemic acquisitionitis but because they need them for everyday purposes. Saying this, however, is about as interesting as saying that monolinguals have one language for exactly the same reasons: we all acquire whatever number of languages we need to use in our daily business. Are multilinguals and monolinguals all that different, then? And is it worth spending time and resources on spot-the-difference activities? Nothing is easier, in fact, than finding differences: as the saying goes, we’re all unique just like everyone else. What grieves me even more is that the current drive to (apparently) eradicate monolingualism ends up pitting people against people for yet another reason which defies rational comprehension.

Multilingualism is not “modern”, despite the peddling of its conceptualisation as new. It is in fact so old that our historical records contain no special mention of it by name: it’s taken for granted. Using more than one language is, and has always been, natural. What’s new is not the number of languages that we’ve ever had as individuals, what is new is this idea that talking about linguistic arithmetic makes sense.

The idea grew, in all likelihood, out of current preoccupation with “global” languages, as if they were also new, which in turn highlights our apparently sudden realisation that many users of those languages are monolingual – and likely to have no problem remaining so. After all, they do have a good excuse for not bothering to walk all the way to the mountain, if the mountain keeps racing towards them. But this also makes them easy targets of the charge that there’s something wrong with them for being unwilling language learners. Unfairly, I think.

What should we learn languages for? Language courses routinely offer grammar courses instead. The conviction behind this choice is roughly equivalent to believing, say, that swimming courses should offer familiarisation with aquatic dynamics and the physics of flotation. Monolinguals don’t need to become multilingual in order to become acquainted with grammar, if learning grammar is their purpose. But if their purpose is to be able to use other languages because they’ve found a need to do so, then their awareness of that need is encouragement enough to learn those languages – just like multilinguals.

Multilingualism isn’t a purpose in itself, to be worn, as it were, for ornamental purposes, nor is it something to pitch against monolingualism, as Western-minded linguistic ideology has conditioned us to do. “Against”-ideologies are not, I don’t think, the best way of driving home the physical and mental well-being that multilingualism is said to promote among human beings. Such mindsets don’t help us understand multilingualism either, because they go on portraying it as “special”. Being different doesn’t mean being better or worse, and striving to be different from what we are doesn’t mean becoming better or worse. It just means becoming different. Default or “ideal” human linguistic states aren’t found in the number of languages that we have, they’re found in our ability to make sense and make use of the languages that we need, for our purposes.

I’ll have some more to say about language learning purposes next time. Meanwhile, let me leave you with a thought for the day, Shakespeare’s dejection about other kinds of compulsive gatherers:

“What hast thou then more than thou hadst before?” 

© MCF 2014

Next post: Learning to use languages. Saturday 5^th April 2014.

The globalization of English: implications for the language classroom =Guest post=

by Robin Walker

The globalization of English is now an undisputed fact. One of the major effects of this is that English has taken on the role of lingua franca in many contexts. The Toyota-Peugeot factory in the Czech Republic, for example, uses English as a lingua franca among the staff who work there, as do the Nokia factories in Finland. English is also the working language for major international trade associations such as the G7, BRIC or ASEAN. That is to say, the globalization of English has added a new role to the existing ones, namely the role of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF). This new role requires us to rethink our goals for the language classroom. It is no longer appropriate to assume that what native speakers (NS) do when they use English amongst themselves is automatically relevant to communication between non-native (NNS) interlocutors.

A critical outcome of English becoming a lingua franca is that it will be modified through use. One of the principal mechanisms in language change anywhere is contact with the speakers’ first language(s). This mechanism has already given rise to Indian or Nigerian Englishes, for example, and Henry Widdowson argued some time ago that with English the non-native speakers have the right to make changes, since ownership of the language belongs as much to them as to its native speakers. His article, The ownership of English, was published in TESOL Quarterly (28/2, pages 377-389).

Of course, it is possible that language contact might drive the emerging Englishes in different directions depending on the L1s at play. This could lead to the development of mutually unintelligible variations. However, David Graddol contests this outcome in English next, and even suggests that it is frequently the absence of native speakers in ELF interactions that results in communication being successful.

Research has been going on for some time as to the nature of English as a Lingua Franca. In terms of grammar, certain features of ELF, such as the “s” of the 3rd-person singular of the verb, are regularly seen to differ from standard NS English norms without impacting negatively on communication. ELF is also characterized by lexical variation. In some cases, such variation is the result of poor English or of performance mistakes, and is not effective. Thus, May I forguest Please reftain no check good. (seen on the door of a public toilet) is neither good ELF nor good EFL (English as a Foreign Language). The English used completely fails to convey any intended message.

In contrast, Please do not plug out!, which I found by a telephone jack-point in a Prague hotel, is entirely effective. Even though plug out does not conform to the NS norm, which only permits plug in, the ELF coinage not only displays a full understanding of the meanings of plug and out, but also reveals competence in the functioning of English phrasal verbs. The NNS author of the sign has merely “played” with the potential for meaning of the language. Legitimate, effective creativity of this sort characterizes ELF vocabulary, and learners need training in such creativity if they are to make the most of their own language resources.

The area of ELF most people are familiar with is pronunciation. Analysis of empirical data from NNS-NNS spoken interactions gave rise to the Lingua Franca Core (LFC) (Jenkins 2000). In her seminal work, Jennifer Jenkins suggested that mutual intelligibility would be retained when speakers are competent in the main areas of the LFC, namely:

• the consonants of English (except voiced and voiceless “th”);
• the correct treatment of word-initial consonant clusters;
• variation in vowel length (as opposed to vowel quality);
• tonic stress placement.

Apart from facilitating intelligibility between NNSs, an ELF approach to pronunciation offers teachers and learners significant benefits. Overall, it offers them a lighter workload, and it is broadly achievable through classroom teaching, unlike certain significant aspects of most NS accents. In addition, an ELF approach allows speakers to retain their identities through their accents, a linguistic right that very few would dare to deny to native speakers, but which non-native speakers are continually denied. Until now, L2 “accent” has been judged in terms of distance from a standard NS phonological norm, generally RP (Received Pronunciation) or GA (General American), with “foreign” accents almost automatically being equated to poor intelligibility and poor learning. With an ELF approach to pronunciation this need no longer happen.

Robin Walker is a freelance teacher, trainer and ELT author. He has been in ELT for 30 years, and is the current editor of Speak Out!, the newsletter of the IATEFL Pronunciation Special Interest Group. He is the author of Teaching the Pronunciation of English as a Lingua Franca, a title in the Oxford Handbooks for Teachers series.

© Robin Walker 2011

Next post: You speak with an accent. I don’t. Saturday 16^th April 2011.

Going global, full monolingualism ahead?

I cannot predict the future, but I suppose I can safely guess that global monolingualism is not in the stars. I have two reasons for saying this. One is that, historically, monolingualism has hardly been a global trend; the other is that monolingualism can hardly become a global trend.

Many of us are monolingual, but I also suppose I can safely argue that most of us have nevertheless experienced non-locality in some way or other. I say that I speak Portuguese, for example, but I don’t, really. What I speak is the variety of it that was used where I happened to spend my first Portuguese-learning years. But, like most of us, I can both understand different varieties of my language(s), and make myself understood to users of different varieties than mine. 

What happens within (what we may choose to call) a single language happens across languages too: we can all adopt bits and pieces of other localities, and shed bits and pieces of ours, respectively, in order to engage in business that matters to us. Going global involves awareness that there are other landscapes out there, besides our own navel. It means realising that our locality is just that, our locality: one qualified locality among many others – all of them qualified as “ours” by those of us who share them.

I mean the word business, above, quite literally. Let’s face it: excepting those of us who collect languages like others collect cats or bumper stickers, the reason why people want to go global, language-wise, is money. Or economic power, or employment opportunities, or head start in life, or other paraphrases of this word. In more than one way, we’re all selling something. Helmut Schmidt, the former German chancellor, once expressed the linguistic connection to this by saying that if you want to sell to someone, then you must speak their language. (I think it was Helmut Schmidt who said this, by the way, and I also think he was quoting Gabriel García Márquez, but I may have got all my sources wrong.)

Human beings have had global business and related global languages for a long, long time. The charm of the current global language, English, dates only from after World War II which, globally speaking, is a tiny time frame. Human beings have also had several global languages to choose from, not just successively, but also simultaneously, because not all of us need to go global in the same way. If Koreans, say, become interested in doing business in, say, Brazil, they will learn Portuguese, not English: as we were taught in geometry classes in school, the most cost-effective route to a goal is a straight line.

Globalising means linguistic diversification in another, related, sense: the languages that go global bear the marks of this process, because their users are linguistically diverse (or they wouldn’t need one common language), and because they necessarily adapt their common language to their diverse purposes (or they wouldn’t have any use for that common language). This is how local words, for example, become global words, and this is how global languages become usable across the board, including for new local purposes that are different from the original local purposes to which globalised languages were put, and continue to be put.

Putting different languages to different uses is what being multilingual is all about, as I’ve noted before. Most of us who currently use (or want to use) English as a global language learn(ed) it in school, which means that most users of global English are (becoming) multilingual. But many users of English are not. So how can one teach, and learn, a language where so much monolingual and multilingual variety is the rule, in ways that make global sense? The next post, a guest post, gives a number of answers to this question.

© MCF 2011

Next post: =Guest post= The globalization of English: implications for the language classroom, by Robin Walker. Saturday 9^th April 2011.

Using someone else’s language(s)

I learned English in Portuguese. English was a school subject, not a language, and so, like its fellow curricular subjects, it was taught through the language of schooling. We pupils were not preparing to speak English, just like we were not preparing to speak Botany or Geometry. We were preparing to sit, and preferably pass, tests in our school subjects.

The environment, in my English class, was Portuguese. We behaved in Portuguese, we misbehaved in Portuguese, we spoke Portuguese, and we spoke English in Portuguese. It is a safe guess that the same happened to other English-learning children (I was 10 years old, at the time), and that the same is true for many adult learners, in their respective schools.

Learning English has become a must-do, given the omnipresence of the language wherever we turn to. The question then arises of whether students of English around the world are in fact studying the same thing – a question that we can of course also ask about Botany, Geometry and other less aseptic school subjects, and about other languages that are school subjects.

Do you speak English? is a loaded question, and Yes, I do a loaded answer to it. They query and acknowledge an unqualified entity, whereas what they mean is the qualified ‘the same kind of thing that I was told is English’. They cannot mean otherwise, in fact. It’s the same for questions like Can you cook pasta? and their answers, but we do need to be aware that there is pasta and pasta, cooking and cooking, and that there’s English and English. The latter observation is just one additional piece to the hopeless puzzle of attempting to define language boundaries.

Those of us who added English in this way to our linguistic repertoires became multilingual with English in this way. We became English users our way. We are different multilinguals-with-English from those multilinguals who are raised with English from birth, not least because they are taught English in English. Some of us went on to make use of the language beyond school certification requirements. I use it for work-related matters, for example, like I’m doing here.

But using someone else’s language for “work” doesn’t mean that that language has become a neutral vehicle of your professional thoughts, or that you’ve become immune to the way you learned it. In coming posts, I will deal with the consequences of having to use someone else’s language in order to give visibility to your work, and with what kind of visibility is actually achieved by doing that. The point here is that you are still you, when you’re using someone else’s language to work, and that you need to express yourself through it, when you’re working.

One example of what I mean is an episode that I witnessed at an international (=English-only) conference in Asia, many years ago, and at which I still cringe, still today. An Asian participant gently reminded the Scandinavian presenter that she had exceeded her allotted speaking time, and wondered if he could please ask some questions about her very interesting paper. The presenter checked her watch, and looked genuinely baffled by her miscalculation. Turning to the Asian gentleman, she cried “It’s not true!”, a literal English translation of a heartfelt apology in her language. The reaction of the Asian participant, and of most of the remaining audience, was to leave the room. The presenter had just insulted her audience by implying that they were liars. The irony is that the topic of the conference was the teaching of English as a second language.

Maybe part of the trouble lies in the names that we call the languages that you learn outside of home: unfriendly names like second language, or the even more unwelcoming foreign language. These are languages that do not rank at the top, and that are alien to you. These are languages that thus remain someone else’s. I’ll offer some thoughts about this in my next post.

© MCF 2011

Next post: Second tongues and foreign tongues. Wednesday 26^th January 2011.

Global individuals

I thought of talking a bit about globalisation today, for two reasons. First, because it is fashionable to talk about globalisation. And second, because I have no idea why it should be fashionable to talk about it.

Globalisation is currently hailed as an exciting, recent development, which is spreading like wildfire as we speak, or email, globally. Just like multilingualism, which is apparently as thrilling, new and infectious. But saying that being global and being multilingual are the fruits of our time forgets that we human beings have been there and done that over and over again since we started being human beings, and fails to interpret our history from these twin perspectives. Were the Islamic Golden Age, or the Viking Age, or the Roman Empire, or the Portuguese Expansion, for example, monolingual local phenomena?

Take another example. Elizabeth Wayland Barber is a linguist, an archaeologist, and an expert in ancient textiles (isn’t this a wonderful combination of interests, by the way??). In her book The Mummies of Ürümchi (or Urumqi, an alternative spelling), she writes, on page 184, that “By 40,000 B.C. people were also carrying far and wide such new language-mediated behaviors as religion and art”. Note: far and wide, language-mediated. People couldn’t possibly be all speaking the “same” language, whatever “same language” might mean.

Note also: thousands and thousands of years ago. It should perhaps not surprise us, then, that the youthful 4,000-year-old mummies that Barber studied turned out to provide evidence of other language-bound globetrotting: these mummies, found in Xinjiang’s Tarim Basin, in North-western China, are of tall, ginger-haired and in all likelihood blue-eyed people. The weaving techniques of the plaid woollen twills that they wore show striking similarities to the ones of contemporary Celtic tartan found in European archaeological sites.

Wow!, I thought, when I first read this book. But then I thought again: Wow!, why? What were these people doing that is remarkable? Travelling, and living and dying away from what we presume was their home? These future mummies couldn’t possibly be speaking just one language either, all the way through their cross-continent trek. But what is it that is remarkable about that too? My current guess is that 2,000 B.C. news reporters would be as excited to learn about Celtic clothes fashion in Tarim as we would nowadays to find remains of an Italian suit in a Brazilian tomb dating from the end of last century.

Perhaps what struck me then was the thought that these ancient peoples were being global without access to the technology, of the electronic and cybernetic kind, that we nowadays tend to associate with globalisation. But we’re not being global only when we fly, or when we opt for video conferencing because we cannot fly. If I walk to the next village, or if I take my vegetables to market on my donkey cart, I’m also being global – and so is the donkey. 

Cartoon © Dinusha Uthpala Upasena

In Cruz-Ferreira, M. Multilinguals are ...? 

As individuals, we can’t be global in any literal sense because we’re limited by space and time – our bodies, their stamina, their life-spans. Being global is rather a matter of being not-local. Just like when we talk about seeing “the world” we mean seeing a couple of places where we haven’t been before. Globalisation, in turn, cannot mean uniformity, not least because the “globe” is anything but uniform. We can be global in many different ways.

In order to be(come) global, we usually step on someone else’s territory, usually a territory of whose desirability we became persuaded. Since territories are peopled by individuals, and individuals speak particular languages, linguistic territories are high on the global wish-list. Along our recent Western history, we had to speak Latin, then French, and now English, in order to gain non-local visibility. Globalisation thus commonly collocates with multilingualism, which is probably to be expected, although it can do so in unexpected and even paradoxical ways. For example, if you want to matter beyond your own territory, learn languages; but if you want to take part in current global goodies, learn English and forget your other languages. I’ll have quite a few things to say about these matters in future.

Next time, I’ll attempt to explain how individuals who wish to become international (or global) communicators can be tricked by the uniformity that global territories appear to promise: I’ll be talking about whether “using one global language” means ‘using the same language’.

© MCF 2011

Next post: Using someone else’s language(s). Saturday 22^nd January 2011.