Multilingual everyday uses vs. monolingual school views =Guest post=

by Jasone Cenoz

I would like to discuss an issue I have been thinking about lately because it is related to my work and my personal life.

I am a specialist in multilingual education, a multilingual speaker and a mother of a multilingual teenager. I live in the Basque Country, in the city of Donostia-San Sebastián where Basque and Spanish are spoken. Basque is a minority language that has become the main language of instruction at school. As schoolchildren are exposed to Spanish, the majority language, they become fluent in Spanish as well (Cenoz, 2009). English is a third language at school and it is an additional language of instruction in some schools.  

Nowadays the need to learn English is strongly felt in society. At the same time, a lot of effort is made to maintain and develop the use of Basque. Basque is an ancient non-Indoeuropean language that has survived for many centuries surrounded by Indoeuropean languages. Schools in Donostia-San Sebastián also offer French and in some cases German and Latin as optional subjects.

The issue I would like to comment on is multilingual teenagers’ use of languages among themselves, and how far their language use is from the way languages are taught at school. This is even emphasized if we look at the way adolescents chat on the internet, as it can be seen in the following example. The actual words are in italics.

         Miren:  zmz?? 
                     (Zer moduz/‘How are you?’)

         Jon:     osond ta z 
                     (Ondo eta zu/‘Well and you?’)
         Miren:  osond te e vistoo
                     (Oso ondo te he visto/‘Very well I saw you’)
         Jon:      yaa yo tambienn pero stabas lejos 
                     (ya yo también pero estabas lejos/
                      ‘I saw you too but you were far’)
         Miren:  jajajja lasai te e visto tambien kon el skate  
                     (jajajja lasai te he visto también con el patín/
                      ‘jajajja don’t worry I have seen you also with the skate’)
         Jon:     jajjaja es de un amigo 
                    (jajjaja es de un amigo/‘jajjaja it belongs to a friend’)

         Miren:  ok

A Facebook conversation between two Basque teenagers

(red=Basque; green= Spanish; blue=English; purple=non words)

This short exchange shows that the three languages are mixed and also that teenagers adapt these languages to their needs, and use them in non-conventional ways. These uses have increased with access to the internet, but code-switching and code-mixing have always been characteristic of bilingual and multilingual speakers. The text shows that these teenagers are creative and not only mix languages but also add “non-words”, change the spelling conventions or emphasize words and syllables by increasing the number of vowels.

But let’s focus on the mixing of languages. The greetings are in Basque, which is the school and family language, but then Spanish, the majority language, becomes the main language. The use of English is more limited but the words used (skate, ok) can be common in this age group even if not for other speakers.

This way to use the languages is in clear contrast with the way languages are taught at school. Most language classes follow the “one language only” policy, whether Basque, Spanish or English, depending on which language is used as the medium of instruction or subject matter at a specific time. The use of any other language is avoided, even when other languages, which are also taught and used at the same school, could be an important reference and even facilitate the learning process. The language practices are separated in an artificial way that is different from the way multilinguals use their languages in everyday life. Separation creates tension.

What can we do about this? The first step would be to consider students as multilingual speakers/learners rather than as learners of each language. In this way they could be encouraged to use their resources when learning and using languages. It could also help to have more coordination among teachers of the different languages so that they plan their syllabuses thinking about the way they can benefit from the children’s multilingualism.

The idea could be to encourage interaction between language teachers and also between languages. In this way, teenagers would not only benefit more from their knowledge and use of other languages but their language practices at school would also be more related to their out-of-school practices. Interaction is more natural.

Jasone Cenoz is Professor of Research Methods in Education at the University of the Basque Country. She is editor of the International Journal of Multilingualism.

© Jasone Cenoz 2011

Next post: One person, one ___. Wednesday 16^th February 2011.

Multilingual adventures in School-Land

Schooling marks The Great Divide between babyhood, when you learn what matters around you, and studenthood, when you learn what other people decided should matter around you. For multilingual children, one issue that becomes relevant for schooling purposes is how their multilingualism matters.

For many centuries, language subjects have been on offer as compulsory subjects in standard schooling packages, in many places around the world. This must mean that educationists generally agree that knowledge of more than one language is a good thing. But what does “knowledge of more than one language” mean, exactly?

School language subjects do not aim at turning students into users of languages. If they did, it wouldn’t make sense for, say, monolingual Portuguese children to have a compulsory school subject called “Portuguese”. The goal is to provide students with a different skill: the means to talk about language through a specialised language, just like specialised languages are also provided in school to talk about numbers or the human body. Fair enough, and kudos to boot. I would be the last person to question the relevance of this goal: as a linguist, the language of language is my work and my passion.

However, school language subjects are not called talk-about-language subjects, being instead identified by names of particular languages. You then have to take a particular-language subject, in order to learn to talk about language. In contrast, you don’t need to examine a particular-human-body in order to learn to talk about the human body: examining models, drawings and photos of it usually does the trick. Add to this the assumption that language learners, by default, come equipped with a single language, and multilingual schoolchildren may well find themselves in a bind.

My children did. All three of them, users of Swedish and Portuguese at home, and of English in school, faced French as their first second language, which happened to be their fourth, learned in third place. Besides the number jumble, one other thing that never became clear to me was: why French? Learning languages and learning to talk about language are distinct things. Young children use their languages without being able to talk about them, and old linguists talk about languages without being able to use them. You can learn to talk about language using any language as model, so why French?

Let me make myself very clear here: I love French. I was nurtured in French, and Frenchness, for 10 whole years in school, together with Portuguese. I love French culture, literature, people, music, food, drink, façons. I am, in short, a devoted francophile (in lower case, à la française). Maybe I’m odd, who should have rejoiced that my children would have a chance to acquire another one of “my” languages. But I didn’t. I couldn’t for the life of me understand why multilingual-without-French children like mine had to learn to talk about past tenses, subject complements and attributive adjectives in English, their school language, with French as example – in Singapore, to top it all, where French has little everyday relevance and four official languages have a lot of everyday relevance. My children were as baffled. As one of them expressed it pithily (in Portuguese): “If I don’t need to speak French, why do I need to learn French?”

So what I mean is perhaps not why French?, but why is a learner’s natural multilingualism shunned in class, in favour of syllabus multilingualism-of-sorts. My children’s French lessons proceeded in exactly the same fashion as my English lessons, 30-odd years before: in the single language of schooling assigned to the language subject, and treating the learner as a user of that single language.

The next post, a guest post, looks into similar practices from a different part of the world, Europe.

© MCF 2011

Next post: =Guest post= Multilingual everyday uses vs. monolingual school views, by Jasone Cenoz. Saturday 12^th February 2011.

Socialising in tongues

We start socialising when we realise, by around age 3, that being human means finding ways to get along with other human beings. People socialise chiefly through language, so we need to learn to make sense of linguistic signals from our fellow interactants, in order to find our place in our social groups.

Learning to interpret language takes time, energy and investment, but we can’t spend our whole lives investing: we must reap some reward, sometime. So we need to find our groups too, the ones that satisfy our socialising investments with reasonable reward.

The British anthropologist Robin Dunbar has quite a few interesting things to say about how we do this. He asks, for example, How many friends does one person need? His findings became known as Dunbar’s number, reflecting the “cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships” – about 150, give or take a few. The book that started me off on Dunbar’s work has the appealing title Grooming, gossip and the evolution of language, and is as entertaining as the title promises.

I came to think about significant limits to socialising (or do I mean limits to significant socialising??) when I was writing about globalisation. Our social groups and our socialising have certainly evolved. Physical proximity is no longer an issue, for example. We are all on Facebook, but we may have no idea who our next-door neighbour is; we’re permanently connected, with no time to meet; and we may send electronic greetings to the colleague sitting next to us at work. From social networking to smart phones and smarter apps, I came to think about the new language that we are all learning to use, to deal with them: we currently txt, ROFL, :D, and are *.*, O.o, and ^_^. I should add here that, being as I am a non-native user of this language, I asked the natives (my children) for confirmation that the words(!) above are printable in a blog like mine.

We thus learn to use languages in order to satisfy our socialising needs, and we learn new languages to satisfy new such needs. This cannot be fundamentally different from what a multilingual does. It is not even different from what monolinguals do too, if we replace the word languages with the more general expression “ways of using language” (registers, in the jargon). We learn to use our languages in different ways, so that we can socialise in different ways. We speak differently to children and adults, or to shop assistants and our boss, for example. Multilinguals and monolinguals alike switch register in their languages in this way, the difference being that multilinguals may also switch language to switch among registers. The learning process that produces this skill and the skilled product that enables effective socialising are the same for all of us.

Our social groups usually start at home, among our families, and I will have much to say about uses of language in multilingual families, in coming posts. The next significant group, for most of us, must be our school(s). I wrote about schooling of multilingual children before, but I didn’t mention then how schooling in language subjects manages the learners’ multilingualism. Being multilingual appears to stand in the way of becoming multilingual the school way. The next post reports a few observations about this.

© MCF 2011

Next post: Multilingual adventures in School-Land. Wednesday 9^th February 2011.

When in Rome, do as the Romans do? =Guest post=

by Sunita Anne Abraham

Politeness and its counterpart, impoliteness, are twin issues that concern linguists and language users, monolinguals and multilinguals alike. Perhaps the most well-known work in this area is Brown and Levinson’s (1987) Politeness: some universals in language usage, inspired by Erving Goffman’s (1967) notion of face work, derived from the Chinese notion of “face”. Drawing on data from a variety of languages, Brown and Levinson argue that politeness strategies exist in all communities as a means of managing our own and others’ face needs.

What counts as polite behaviour, however, and how this behaviour is enacted linguistically, varies across language varieties. Given that different languages have different social and linguistic norms, how is a multilingual speaker to decide whose norms to follow, when and where?

Consider, for example, the English politeness formulas please and thank you, which are more widespread in the UK than in many Asian varieties of English. Failure to mind one’s Ps and Qs can result in one’s being perceived as an uncivilised foreigner (or barbarian, to quote our Ancient Greek friends). I grew up in Penang, Malaysia, speaking English, Malay, Malayalam and Tamil; and, while my mother wanted us to mind our Ps and Qs, my father found the same behaviour laughably priggish and stand-offish.

More recently, a newly-arrived American colleague sent round an email chastising my colleagues and me for “failing” to address our elderly Malay cleaning lady by her given name. In Malay (as in Chinese, Tamil, and various other languages), it is considered the height of impudence to address one’s elders (and betters) by name. So, most of us had taken to addressing the aforesaid lady as Makcik (the appropriate Malay honorific for a woman of her advanced years). Indeed, one knows that expatriates in Singapore have acculturated to Singapore English when they address unrelated older people as auntie or uncle, as a mark of respect.

Brown and Levinson (1987) discuss two kinds of face needs and their corresponding politeness strategies. Positive politeness strategies attend to our positive face needs – our desire to be liked and admired – by emphasising solidarity (e.g. using in-group identity markers like nicknames), reciprocity, interest in and sympathy for one’s interlocutors.

Negative politeness strategies in turn attend to our negative face needs – our desire not to be imposed on – by showing deference, indicating pessimism about the likelihood of a request being granted (e.g. I don’t suppose I could borrow your umbrella for just a few minutes) or impersonalising directives (e.g. Patrons are reminded not to walk on the grass).

But, figuring out what counts as an imposition can be tricky. In the US, it’s generally considered polite for hosts to offer guests to their home a choice of refreshments. In Japan, the same behaviour would be perceived as placing a burden on one’s guest. There, the polite thing to do would be to “just serve the tea”, as a Japanese colleague recently told me.

Travelogues and textbooks on cross-cultural communication are full of stories about the strange and exotic customs of others. The question they don’t fully answer is how monolinguals and multilinguals decide whose norms to follow, when, where, and to what extent, in an increasingly globalising world.  

Sunita Anne Abraham is an Associate Professor at the Department of English Language and Literature, National University of Singapore, and a Fellow of the NUS Teaching Academy.

© Sunita Anne Abraham 2011

Next post: Socialising in tongues. Saturday 5^th February 2011.

Second tongues and foreign tongues

By the logic of numbers, a second language must be the one that you learn in second place, after your first and before your third. By the logic of definitions, a foreign language must be a stranger to you, because that’s what foreign means.

A second language is said to be used where you happen to be learning it, whereas a foreign language isn’t. In any case, the logic of these labels doesn’t serve too well their use as cover terms for your new languages, whether we take into account the learners or their reasons for learning. Take second, for starters (pun intended, though see below). I suppose we don’t need to think very hard to guess how this label originated, and how many languages the typical language learner is assumed to have before acquiring a new one. What is interesting is that even if you have more than one “first language”, even if you’re learning your 7^th or 28^th language, and several new languages at the same time, you’re still a “second language” learner.

Take foreign, next. One of the reasons for learning new languages is certainly that your school syllabus forces you to. I’ll come back to this in another post. But if you’re learning new languages because you need to use them, you’ll be using them yourself. Using something involves making that thing yours. If I read a book that you recommended to me, I read it for my own purposes; if I borrow your car, I’ll drive it my way. But a foreign thing cannot be made yours because it is not part of you: think about, say, a foreign body in your eye, whether a piece of grit or a contact lens. New languages appear to belong together with grit and prostheses: if I “borrow” your language, one requirement seems indeed to be that I use it your way. I briefly mentioned issues of language “ownership” before, and I will also have more to say about them in future.

Acronyms like SLA, for ‘Second Language Acquisition’, or FLL, for ‘Foreign Language Learning’, have nevertheless immortalised the gist about our new languages. Granted, perhaps we shouldn’t split hairs about what’s in a name: we go on saying that the sun rises and sets, Galileo Galilei notwithstanding; and during my school time, blackboards became green without ever being acknowledged as greenboards – although the more recent whiteboards gained instant recognition by name.

Vagaries of naming, no doubt. But: just like the label multilingual, these language-related labels stick to you too. They can do so in paradoxical ways. It may well happen, for example, that plain mistakes that you make in your new language (like the rest of us, including in our old languages), or your creative uses of it, or what you intend as language play in it (see above), end up dismissed as second-rate, alien proficiency in it. At the same time, what you do, or fail to do, in your new languages may be taken as proficient use of it, on the assumption that if you’re using one specific language, you’re using it like everyone else does: my previous post reported a botched attempt at a polite excuse, rendered in second/foreign English as a rude insult.

Politeness matters, because it can open or close doors for you in this way, although it hardly finds mention in traditional second and foreign language teaching. Jonathan Culpeper’s recent resource, Impoliteness: Using and understanding the language of offence, helps us make sense of it, for users of English.

Your tones of voice, what linguists subsume under the label prosody, find a similar fate in language classes: you’re not taught how to “sing” your new languages. No wonder they remain second and foreign, despite Kenneth L. Pike’s observation, in his 1945 book The intonation of American English, that “if a man’s tone of voice belies his words, we immediately assume that the intonation more faithfully reflects his true linguistic intentions”. Prosody happens to be one of my pet subjects, incidentally, so I will have quite a lot to say about it in coming posts.

Tone of voice and politeness often go hand in hand: male uses of high pitch, for example, signal politeness in some Asian cultures. Assertive tones may do so elsewhere.

So how do we manage someone else’s (im)polite behaviour, in someone else’s language – or language variety? The next post, a guest post, tells us more about this.

© MCF 2011

Next post: =Guest post= When in Rome, do as the Romans do?, by Sunita Anne Abraham. Saturday 29^th January 2011.