These umbrellas quickly became the trademark of ISB11, and could be spotted all over Limerick – and beyond!

In June this year, I was fortunate to attend the 11^th International Symposium of Bilingualism (ISB) at the University of Limerick, Ireland (11-15 June). Since its initiation in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1997, ISB has been held bi-annually in eight different nations and become the premier conference for scholarly debate on multilingualism. This year marked ISB’s 20^th anniversary, attracting over 950 delegates from 65 countries to give papers, posters and colloquia on topics devoted to the overarching theme ‘Bilingualism, Multilingualism and the New Speaker’. The ‘new speaker’ paradigm primarily evolved from studies on language revitalisation, yet it has also come to refer to migrant and transnational language learners. This extension of the paradigm is intended to call the binary categorisation of native versus non-native language users into question (Smith-Christmas et al., 2018).

The conference theme invited scholarly debates on bi- and multilingual speakers’ language learning trajectories and experiences, and how these are shaped by individuals’ beliefs towards their new speech communities.

Abstracts of the presentations can be found in the conference brochure.

I attended ISB11 on an invitation to present my on-going PhD research on the language learning, leisure and work experiences of German backpackers in Australia as part of a panel on ‘Entrepreneurial visions of the self: language teaching and learning under neoliberal conditions’. This panel was chaired by Martina Zimmermann (University of Teacher Education Lucerne) and Sebastian Muth (University of Fribourg), with Cécile Vigouroux (Simon Fraser University) as discussant.

The panel comprised of three papers.

Firstly, Sebastian Muth spoke about the language learning trajectories of students in the Department of Slavonic Languages of a public university in India. As India’s medical tourism industry seeks to accommodate patients from the former Soviet Union, there is a growing demand for Russian-speaking interpreters and so-called medical facilitators. This ethnographic study explored how the demand for language work is reinforcing social inequalities in India. Unlike more prestigious Western European language subjects, Russian Studies has no entry requirements, therefore attracting students from lower middle-class backgrounds. Muth concluded that there are growing tensions between language learners’ desires to capitalise on their language skills, and the realities of finding work in the neoliberal service economy.

Secondly, Martina Zimmermann described her multi-sited ethnography exploring how mobile students, who cross Switzerland’s language borders to attend university, envisage their multilingual repertoires as future assets. These beliefs are reinforced by the Swiss higher education system who market “multilingualism” in their promotional materials. Zimmermann compared these individual and institutional discourses, arguing that these multilingual assets form a shared, yet unchallenged vision of a future in which these repertoires may no longer translate into the imagined outcomes.

Lastly, my paper asked how German backpackers in Australia negotiate language learning opportunities whilst working and travelling. The working holiday has become increasingly commercialised as a meaningful gap year opportunity that facilitates language learning and enhances a CV. An investigation of bottom-up discourses suggests that young Germans’ desires to capitalise on their English language skills in the future clashes with the experiences of their current selves on the road. When engaging in leisure travel, they mainly encounter other German speakers rather than “more desirable” interlocutors. Work is therefore seen as an opportunity for more sustained naturalistic exposure to English. However, backpackers are often faced with communication barriers associated with Australian English. How they speak about navigating these dilemmas can be considered a key site where they construct neoliberal personhood.

The research that was assembled in the panel highlights how language is envisioned as a future asset and career-shaping skill across various contexts: from interpreters in India’s growing medical tourism industry, via Swiss university students, to working holidaymakers in Australia. Across these contexts, individuals share a sense of responsibility for their own social and economic future successes through the acquisition of particular forms of bi- and multilingualism. Whilst some language learners must engage in these forms of bi- and multilingualism through necessity, others may take a more laissez-faire approach to acquiring language competencies for their envisioned futures.

As the year draws to a close, and we are all reflecting on our achievements, I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Martina and Sebastian for inviting me to participate on this inspiring panel. As my first international conference, ISB11 marks a significant milestone in my PhD journey.

The 12^th International Symposium of Bilingualism will be held 24 – 28 June 2019 at the University of Alberta, Canada.

Reference

Smith-Christmas, C., Ó Murchadha, N. P., Horsby, M., & Moriarty, M. (2018) (Eds.). New speakers of minority languages: Linguistic ideologies and practices. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Everyone wants to be a winner in the dating game; but it doesn’t always work that way …

A 2015 article in the New York Post argued that mobile dating apps, such as Tinder and its many clones, are ultimately ‘tearing society apart’ by drastically changing the way young single adults in Western society seek and pursue romantic and sexual partners.

A recent study by Mitchell Hobbs, Stephen Owen and Livia Gerber (2016) asks whether that assessment is really true. The project explores the experiences of dating app users and investigates how the technology has influenced their sexual practices and views on romantic ideals and long-term relationships.

Offline desires, online realities

Meeting sexual and romantic partners specifically through dating apps has four characteristics: First, users are able to engage in casual, one-off or short-term, sexual encounters without engaging in any further social interaction. Second, dating apps allow users to broaden their romantic networks, extending beyond their existing social networks. Thirdly, dating apps are an efficient means of connecting with several potential partners at the same time. And, fourth, the emergence of dating apps has perpetuated a culture in which communication is increasingly focused around self-presentation and self-commodification.

The latter characteristic in particular may generate a sense of anxiety and frustration around the need to create a successful profile.

Self-presentation in the dating game

Mobile dating apps were initially designed as a type of game to take the stress and emotional investment out of dating. The tactile functionality of the app, combined with users’ photo-based profiles resembles a virtual stack of cards: Profiles are presented like playing cards, and the user can swipe left on the screen to ‘dislike’ or swipe right to ‘like’ a profile. These profiles are only shown once – swiping left to ‘dislike’ therefore eliminates these profiles from the ‘game’. Mutual right swipes result in a ‘match’ and only then can communication be initiated. Successful tindering is therefore in part measured by the amount of matches one obtains, as one of our participants explained:

Yeah when you get matched it’s like ooh! That’s quite cool, that’s the fun part and that’s also probably quite the addictive part of it as well, I’d imagine. And yeah it’s obviously good for good feelings.

Despite this elation of getting a match, many – particularly male – participants expressed a sense of frustration over their lack of success (i.e. their lack of matches) when using dating apps, indicating that dating apps may be perpetuating the exact anxiety they were designed to eliminate:

Tinder is purely based on looks. It’s a numbers’ game essentially. It’s swipe how many times you want. Um so I don’t personally like it still as a primary means of finding a relationship.

Engagement with the ‘game’ creates a level of anxiety that appears to stem from not gaining access to the smorgasbord of potential sexual and romantic partners theoretically available through dating apps. As another male participant remarked:

Everyone is copping a root but me.

In the online sphere, unattractive men have less chances at winning mutual matches, creating a sense that the average-looking guy is missing out on the dating game:

The 10% of highly attractive people fucking all the time make the rest of us feel bad.

In an offline context, ‘average-looking’ guys might be able to harness their interpersonal and communication skills instead:

I’m not suited to this app. I’m trying to find the right phrase but like the profiles that you think would get like high likes because of certain things they put in isn’t really me and I don’t try and do it. I also just think I’m more traditional in so far as I like to bump into someone at a bar or room across- eyes across a room that’s how I actually connect with people because I think half of meeting someone the fun is body language like reading little bits of body language.

In sum, how to present oneself in the best possible light online is a major concern for the users of dating apps. Whilst some participants felt that they are not suited to mobile dating apps due to a lack of successful self-presentation strategies, others engage in self-commodification in an attempt to increase their dating app success.

Self-commodification in the Tinder game

Self-commodification becomes an essential part of designing one’s profile. One interviewee described how he helped his friend to improve his Tinder profile:

So I ask ‘Can I look at your profile and can I change it for you?’ So I get him a different picture and I make his profile his ‘buyer’ – he didn’t have a buyer. I made his profile a buyer, and said ‘You can always go back’ and it blew up! It was almost like in the movies.

Users have the option of adding additional information or captions (referred to here as a ‘buyer’ and elsewhere as ‘digital pick-up line’) to their profiles. While some profiles strategically communicate very little, some male participants reported feeling put off by long digital pick-up lines:

So most of the time apparently it’s just a highly sexualised or very blunt statement of intentions. Um there are funny ones. But um and then some like you see some girls will put- um have like a really long thing, really long statement about fun-loving. Everyone in the world apparently is fun-loving. Oh god. Worst, most overused statement I’ve ever- but anyway [sighs] um the- at the very end of these monstrous spiels sometimes they’ll write ‘say orange if you’ve read this.’ And so you’re expected if you match, the first thing you say to them is orange to show that you’ve actually read through it.

In general, men appear to be less particular about whom they swipe right on in an attempt to increase their chances of gaining a match. However, these swipes do not always result in the kind of match the users were looking for, as another participant indicated:

He was frustrated cause of like five matches he’d had in the last two weeks four of them turned out to be prostitutes. The thing that made him so angry was that one of them actually talked to him for a whole week before she told him her rates.

In sum, male participants reported many frustrations related to looking for love on the move: getting a match was not actually ‘as easy as play’ – and even if they got matches, they were not always the kind of match they desired.

Changing communication strategies for the sexual marketplace

Dating apps certainly do not take the stress out of trying to find love, sex and romance. On the contrary, they may be creating new anxieties around online communication strategies. Male users, in particular, expressed frustration over the need to brand themselves as desirable commodities in the sexual marketplace. If dating apps are indeed ‘tearing society apart’ it is not because they result in everyone having casual sex all the time but because they create many more desires than they can fullfil.

If you like this post, you might also like

• No Sex for Generation On-the-Move
• Language shift and phone sex
• To English with love

Reference

Hobbs, M., Owen, S., & Gerber, L. (2016). Liquid love? Dating apps, sex, relationships and the digital transformation of intimacy Journal of Sociology DOI: 10.1177/1440783316662718

Background

In 1994, when I was in kindergarten, as part of a project on multiculturalism, my primary school in Newcastle, NSW, conducted interviews with pupils from immigrant backgrounds. My family had only arrived in Australia a few months prior: my parents knew very little English, and I knew none. As part of the project, a picture book was made by the school, with photographs and descriptive captions telling the story of each pupil’s previous life in far-away places; Switzerland, in my case. On the very last page of this picture book, there is a photo of myself, proudly wearing my first school uniform during my first Easter Hat Parade. Below the photo, a short note, obviously dictated, and copied in the unsteady hand of a five-year-old. In the note, I thank the children in my class for taking care of me and for ‘writing for me all the words I need’. Although my primary school was evidently interested in making its multicultural students feel welcome, their focus, unsurprisingly, was primarily on my (linguistic) integration: the ‘words I needed’ were English words. This obviously left the maintenance of my mother tongue to my parents. At the same time as the local school was pressuring my parents to make certain I learnt English as quickly as possible, my mother was relentlessly pressured by my grandparents to ensure their grandchildren would not forget their Swiss-German roots.

Bilingual child-rearing in an English-dominant environment is not an easy task. In a society that largely sees English monolingualism as the norm, promoting a language other than English, often with little community or institutional support, can be a daunting undertaking. The paradox of my five-year-old self’s thank-you note in a book celebrating multiculturalism and multilingualism, sparked my interest in the tension between the dominance of English and the valorisation of diversity as it is experienced by families.

Giving your child the gift of bilingualism (Image source: babybliss.com.au)

Abstract

My thesis seeks to explore the ideologies underpinning parental decisions on family language policies in a predominantly English monolingual environment. Focussing on how the notion of ‘good’ parenting is linked to bilingualism as a child-rearing strategy, the discursive construction of bilingual parenting is explored in one of the largest online parenting communities in Australia, essentialbaby.com.au, using critical discourse analysis. The corpus consists of 15 discussion threads totalling 266 comments posted between 2007 and 2014 by parents and carers seeking and giving advice on bilingual child-rearing. This forum was chosen for three reasons: first, with over 255,000 members it is one of Australia’s largest online parenting forums and it enjoys a broad audience. Secondly, this is a ‘mainstream’ forum that is not a priori concerned with language. It is not specialised in bi-or multilingualism, so members are largely non-experts, making it possible to analyse peer advice as opposed to expert advice. Lastly, an investigation of parental beliefs about bilingual child-rearing in a general parenting forum will reflect more widely popularised discourses within the wider public. Therefore, these – mostly anonymous – conversations can be understood as a manifestation of public knowledge about bilingual parenting. Specifically, the online parenting forum is seen as an environment to explore how parents talk about bilingual child-rearing, and the language ideologies that underlie parental advice on ‘good’ bilingual parenting.

The Bilingual Bonus

Findings suggest that raising a child in two or more languages is often associated with providing the child with what I term the bilingual bonus. Bilingual competencies are associated with a range of cognitive, health, personal, and economic benefits that are unavailable to monolingual peers. Therefore, the increased dissemination of the benefits associated with bilingualism, particularly in the popular media, valorises parental decisions on bilingual child-rearing. Additionally, bilingual family language policies, such as the ‘one parent – one language’ strategy, have become incorporated into mainstream parenting strategies due to the increasing valorisation of bilingualism in general discourses. As a result, parents strongly believe that bilingual competency can only be achieved by implementing a bilingual language learning strategy that promotes double monolingual language acquisition. Overall, parental efforts in raising children with an additional language positions parents as ‘good’ caregivers who are providing their children with an advantage in life. Nevertheless, this study finds that parents are often faced with contradictory bilingual child-rearing realities that inform their language-related parenting decisions. These contradictions indicate that the same tension exists today that existed over two decades ago when I wrote my thank-you note: the tension between the dominance of English and the valorisation of bilingualism. The research extends existing literature on how the monolingual mindset operates on an individual level, and has implications for language policy at individual, institutional and state levels.

Livia and her classmates at a crossroads the year before entering (or not) Gymnasium (Switzerland, 2004)

Let me bust a prevalent urban myth: You do not need to be bi- or multilingual to become a linguist. There, busted. In fact, being bilingual initially brought me to a crossroads where I was nearly denied access to the academic pathway I am embarking on today. In Australia, despite native-like English proficiency, my migrant background dictated that I visit ESL classes throughout primary school; during secondary school in Switzerland, my Australian passport resulted in obligatory participation in Deutsch als Fremdsprache classes [German as a foreign language]. This ironic situation of seemingly being deemed ‘not good enough’ at either nation’s language of instruction initially crushed my hopes of being recommended for Gymnasium – the main entry ticket to tertiary education in Switzerland. Fortunately, thanks to a loophole or two, and an additional entry exam, my teachers were able to grant me the much desired recommendation. Without it, I would not have had the opportunity to undertake an academic pathway. Undoubtedly, mine is not the only story influenced by language learning trajectories.

Multilingual values at a crossroads

Multilingual students with migrant backgrounds are particularly vulnerable to academic exclusion in countries such as Switzerland or Germany, where the transition from primary to secondary school is marked by rigorous selection processes. These processes are based on both academic achievement and language proficiency. In a recent article published in Multilingua, Gabriele Budach (2014) suggests that these selection processes predominantly favour monolingualism. Budach (2014) argues that “in primary years multilingualism is drawn on as a capital for social inclusion”; as opposed to secondary schools which “value languages as capital for social distinction and an indicator of individual achievement” (p. 526; italics in the original). Needless to say the shift in values and the transition from one level of education to the next has implications for students’ educational trajectories.

Bilingual communities of practice at a crossroads

Four years after her ethnographic fieldwork in a German-Italian Two-Way-Immersion program in a primary school in Frankfurt (2003-2007), Budach (2014) organised a reunion with her former students. The now fourteen-year-olds had once “enjoyed their bilingual experience” (p. 531); however, now, languages were an academic subject and a terrain for competition like any other school subject. In primary school, the students were encouraged to participate in the common endeavour of sustaining an inclusive pedagogical environment in which multilingualism was utilised across the curriculum. Multilingualism was valued as a means of promoting “social integration as well as intercultural experience” (p. 547).

This is in stark contrast to mainstream education where a ‘monolingual mindset’ prevails. Once the students left the immersion program and went on to attend mainstream secondary schools, most had no further opportunities to use Italian in school. If Italian was available in their secondary school it was purely in the form of foreign language teaching, or Fremdsprachenunterricht. Therefore, and despite their high-level bilingual proficiencies, students from the immersion program struggled to get a foothold in the mainstream and felt that their multicultural knowledge was not recognised and was indeed devalued.

For one student in Budach’s (2014) study, a German-Australian girl, Italian was not offered again as a third foreign language until Year 8. During her primary years, German and Italian were used to teach all subjects; in secondary school the transfer of knowledge was restricted to German. As a result, multilingual students see their linguistic repertoires as being devalued.

The monolingual fork in the road

Budach (2014) writes that only five out of her twenty-three students were able to continue their secondary education in a comparable bilingual program. Other students either did not achieve the recommendation for Gymnasium or chose other pathways within the Gymnasium stream (e.g. they chose a school with musical or artistic profile). Therefore, the value ascribed to languages became dependent on the school curriculum – all subjects were henceforth taught in German, and Italian was either not offered, or only offered within the scope of foreign language teaching as a subject. Students’ bilingual careers had more or less ended in a monolingual cul-de-sac.

Indeed, even the five students who continued in the bilingual Gymnasium found themselves faced with a similar dilemma. Students in this stream can choose whether they want to complete the German school leaving certificate (Abitur), or a combined German/Italian certificate that is also recognised in Italy (matura). Completing the combined matura increases the value of multilingualism and creates “a form of capital for social mobility and distinction” (p. 546). However, for Budach’s students this proved a risky choice that threatened their overall marks.

It seems to me that – even within bilingual secondary education – there is a shift towards mainstream monolingualism. This creates a sense of detachment from the bilingual community of practice which was so important in the students’ primary years. Moreover, the dominance of German as the national language devalues their multilingual repertoires. In their primary school years, students in the bilingual immersion program are able to access curricular knowledge through multilingual learning. At secondary level, regardless of the educational trajectory they choose, students have only limited possibilities to apply their multilingual knowledge across different subjects. At this level, multilingualism is primarily valued within the foreign language leaning curriculum where linguistic competence is evaluated according to the subject’s grading criteria (e.g. whether students use correct grammatical structures, can string sentences together and can complete small translation tasks). Later in life, young job-seekers’ multilingual resources are a nice addition to their résumés, and therefore act as a tool for social distinction. Although multilingualism is believed to lead to greater success in the employment market and to maximise social mobility, the monolingual mindset influences the perception of academic achievement. Therefore – ironically – without monolingual academic distinction, multilinguals cannot succeed.

Beyond the crossroads

In a day and age where cultural and linguistic diversity are an inescapable reality, it seems instrumental to give all students the chance to undertake the educational pathway that best matches their abilities and aspirations, regardless of their linguistic background. To ensure that fewer children fall between the cracks – as I nearly did – it is vital that policy makers, educational stakeholders and sociolinguists work together to turn the monolingual impasse into a gateway to multiple possibilities.

Reference

Budach, G. (2014). Educational trajectories at the crossroads: The making and unmaking of multilingual communities of learners Multilingua, 33 (5-6) DOI: 10.1515/multi-2014-0027