Cindy is passionate about inclusion, helping other educators develop leadership in EAL/D and cater for the academic and wellbeing needs of multilingual learners, including students from refugee backgrounds. She is an author of professional publications, served as President of the Association for Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (ATESOL) NSW and is Member of the Board of Directors of Primary English Teaching Association of Australia known as PETAA.

Cindy Valdez teaching in Cambodia (Image credit: Cindy Valdez via SBS)

Additional materials

• “They changed me”: Filipina educator on helping refugee students survive peace, SBS Filipino (2023)
• Valdez Adams, C. (2022) “Including” English as and Additional Language or Dialect (EAL/D) Learners in Your Classroom. Journal of Professional Learning 2

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Transcript (to follow soon)

Have you ever listened to a language you don’t know and thought you recognized a word—only to realize later that you were completely mistaken? Our ears play tricks on us.

A while ago, I ran a small experiment with my German students. I played them two short sentences in Czech, my native language, and asked them to transcribe what they heard. The results were fascinating.

For example, about 90% of the forty students wrote down the Czech word malí [maliː] ‘small’ as mani [maniː]. To me, this seems puzzling—there is no n in the word! But for my students, the Czech l-sound somehow resembled the German n-sound. None of the Czech speakers I consulted ever had this impression.

This little classroom experiment shows something important: we don’t all hear sounds the same way. Our ears—or better said, our brains—are tuned by the language(s) we grow up with.

Why do we hear differently?

Image 1: Oscillogram and spectrogram of the Italian words papa ‘Pope’ and pappa ‘porridge’

Long before we speak, we are already great language users. Research shows that newborn babies can already distinguish speech sounds from noises. Even more surprisingly, they are able to recognize the rhythm of their native language from a non-native one before birth.

After birth, infants are surrounded daily by an enormous amount of speech input. Step by step, they build categories for the sounds of their native language. Up until around 8 to 12 months they can distinguish nearly all of the world’s speech sounds, even those that never appear in their environment.

A Japanese baby, for example, can hear the difference between r and l just as well as American or German babies can. But this ability does not last. As children grow, their brains focus on the categories that matter in their own language and ignore the rest—like the difference between r and l. This is why many Japanese adults often find it notoriously difficult to distinguish the two consonants in languages like English. What was once easy for the baby can become very challenging for the adult.

We perceive foreign languages through native filters

Learning the sound system of a language doesn’t stop with vowels and consonants. It also includes rhythm and intonation. And even for individual sounds like a or o, it’s not only about how you articulate them but also how long you hold them. This brings us to segmental quantity, or length. It refers to the use of duration (short vs. long) of vowels or consonants to distinguish lexical meaning. Quantity shows remarkable cross-linguistic variation.

The case of long consonants in Italian

Image 2: Soundproof cabins at the Free University of Berlin (left) and University of Helsinki (right)

What feels natural in one language may not exist in another. Take Italian. It belongs to just 3.3% of the world’s languages that distinguish short from long consonants (Ladefoged & Maddieson 1996).

This contrast appears in more than 1,800 Italian words, such as papa /ˈpapa/ ‘Pope’ versus pappa /ˈpapːa/ ‘porridge’ (Image 1). To be understood and to speak well, learners must get long consonants (called geminates) right—although it can be very challenging (e.g., Altmann et al. 2012).

Cross-linguistic differences in learners

In our project “Production and perception of geminate consonants in Italian as a foreign language”, we examine how Czech, Finnish, German, and Spanish learners acquire this feature.

The selection of these languages is not random. They all handle consonant length differently. German, for example, has no consonant length but contrasts short and long vowels in stressed syllables (e.g., Stadt [ʃtat] ‘city’ vs. Staat [ʃtaːt] ‘state’). Czech, like German, distinguishes vowel length, but unlike German, it does so in both stressed and unstressed syllables (e.g., nosí [ˈnosiː] ‘(s/he) carries’ vs. nosy [ˈnosɪ] ‘noses’). Finnish is the most similar to Italian, since it has both vowel and consonant length (e.g., muta [ˈmutɑ] ‘mud’ vs. mutta [ˈmutːɑ] ‘but’). And finally, Spanish has no length contrasts at all.

This diversity allows us to test how a learner’s native language shapes the way they hear and produce length in Italian.

How good are learners at perceiving length in Italian?

In a laboratory setting (Image 2) and by means of a perception experiment, we tested and compared 20 Czech, 20 Finnish, 20 German, and 20 Spanish learners of Italian.

We used 45 short nonsense words that followed Italian spelling and sound rules but had no meaning. Each word had two versions, differing only in whether a consonant was short or long (e.g., sàpolo vs. sàppolo; milèta vs. millèta).

The words covered different consonants and stress positions and were recorded by a native Italian speaker. In every trial, participants had to answer the question: “Does the audio pair you hear belong to the same or different word?”

What we found

Image 3: Learner accuracy in perceiving Italian consonant length in comparison to native listeners

First language has great impact! Finnish learners, whose native system is closest to Italian, were the most accurate in hearing the difference between short and long consonants.

Czech learners followed, while German and Spanish learners struggled more (Image 3). Other factors also played a role. Learners heard contrasts more easily when the crucial sound appeared in stressed syllables, and some consonants were easier to notice than others.

Proficiency helped too—advanced learners did much better than beginners.

However, it is unexpected that the German group scored lower than the Spanish group—sometimes research simply surprises us!

Many factors could explain this, since every learner has their own story. Things like previous language experience, weekly study time, exposure to Italian, time spent in Italy, Italian friends, motivation, and personal talent can all play a role.

In our case, German learners had spent fewer hours per week learning Italian and had less experience studying or staying in Italy. Immersion—the experience of being surrounded by a language in real-life settings—seems a plausible factor behind their performance.

Why perception matters in language learning?

Why does pappa sometimes turn into papa in the ears of Italian learners? Because we all hear foreign languages through the features we are familiar with.

Our experiment showed that perception is difficult—but it can be improved. The key is to notice what is different and to train your ears. This means: Pronunciation training must start with perception (e.g., Colantoni et al. 2021).

In the end, learning a language is not just about new words—it’s about learning to hear differently.

References

Altmann, H.; Berger, I., & B. Braun (2012). Asymmetries in the perception of non-native consonantal and vocalic contrasts. Second Language Research 28(4), 387–413.
Colantoni, L., Escudero, P., Marrero-Aguiar, V., & J. Steele (2021). Evidence-based design principles for Spanish pronunciation teaching. Frontiers in Communication, 6, 639889.
Ladefoged, P., & I. Maddieson (1996). The sounds of the world’s languages. Oxford: Blackwell.

Acknowledgement

This blog post was written as part of the DFG-project “Production and perception of geminate consonants in Italian as a foreign language: Czech, Finnish, German and Spanish learners in contrast”, funded by the German Research Foundation (Project number 521229214) and executed at the Free University of Berlin. Project website: https://italiangeminates-project.com/

Handed my MA dissertation in four years ago on this day. This article by Piller and Takahashi, "A Passion for English: Desire and the Language Market" from @Lg_on_the_Move, directly inspired my dissertation and my subsequent PhD research. https://t.co/4i3gjY3UqJ

— Dr Owen Minns (@OTMinns) September 24, 2019

Teaching English in Japan

Even before I set foot in Japan, being a white, university-educated male from England gave me access to jobs at commercial language schools and teaching programs like the JET Program. The first school I taught at, a commercial language school (Eikaiwa in Japanese), advertised itself as a British English school. The company’s adverts featured pictures of young, white, smartly dressed teachers reflecting the trends identified by Piller and Takahashi. I later taught at a private high school where being a British passport holder was one of the requirements for employment. In this school, the foreign teachers were collectively addressed as “natives” by the Japanese teachers, and we had an ambivalent position in the school despite prominently featuring on the school’s website and at open days.

While being white, British, and male gave me privileged mobility to gain stable employment in Japan, both my employers offered little or no encouragement for Japanese learning. This meant that after 6 years of teaching in Japan, I developed a bittersweet relationship with Japanese, characterised by periods of both engagement and non-engagement with learning Japanese.

After returning to the UK to study for a master’s, reading Piller and Takahashi’s work connected many of the dots I had felt while in Japan. Throughout my time in Japan, I met teachers with varying Japanese proficiency levels. There were constant discussions about the need to speak Japanese and even some tension between teachers about their Japanese levels, but there was little institutional support for Japanese learning. Reading about the ideologies identified by Piller and Takahashi on learners led me to wonder how these forces influenced teachers in Japan when they were learning Japanese, so I made this goal of my Ph.D. research.

My research

Poster for an English language school in Japan (Image credit: Shinshin50)

I researched how two groups, newly arrived and long-term teachers learned Japanese. For the newly arrived teachers, 9 took part in a 6-month diary study in which they wrote weekly diaries about their Japanese language learning and participated in monthly interviews. For the long-term teachers, I interviewed 13 teachers who had made lives in Japan about their Japanese language learning histories.

The newly arrived teachers had to self-direct their learning while trying to find their position in the classroom, the school, and Japan. The newly arrived teachers found it challenging to develop consistent learning routines. While they had access to countless online self-study learning resources and approaches, they struggled to consistently use these resources and find appropriate face-to-face Japanese classes. One teacher felt she had to choose between her own mental well-being and Japanese learning, while other newly arrived teachers found managing Japanese learning alongside working and living in Japan caused them stress and mental health issues.

The long-term teachers also experienced trouble regulating Japanese language learning on a long-term basis. Some teachers were able to build long-term learning approaches that combined Japanese study with involvement with local communities, while others experienced more fluctuating Japanese learning, interspersing periods of engaged learning with periods of disengagement. Finding opportunities to use Japanese was a struggle for both groups of teachers as building connections with Japanese people depended on introductions from employers, connections teachers had before they arrived in Japan, or the areas they were placed in.

The deep impact of the desire for English in Japan on the lives of these foreign teachers could be seen in the lives of long-term foreign teachers in Japan. Often these teachers used English in romantic relationships, with one male teacher describing how marrying an English-speaking foreigner was seen as a way out of Japanese society by Japanese women. Due to the enduring desire for English in Japan, many long-term teachers with children in my study used English with their children to transfer their linguistic capital of being a native English speaker to their children. As they became long-term residents of Japan, the value of studying for academic and teaching qualifications that would help advance in their English teaching careers often trumped the symbolic capital Japanese learning gave them.

The key for both groups of teachers to sustaining Japanese learning and use was facilitative communities and individuals to use Japanese with. These individuals and communities often modified their Japanese and encouraged English teachers to learn and use Japanese. They were found within local areas, workplaces, and community groups. They invested in these teachers as Japanese speakers despite ideologies that saw foreign English teachers as short-term visitors to Japan and foreigners as deficient Japanese speakers. The depth and sustainability of each teacher’s Japanese engagement was strongly impacted by whether a learner had access to individuals and groups willing to invest in them as Japanese speakers.

The Future

Given the recent increases in migration to Japan, the importance of providing opportunities for migrants to learn Japanese will only increase in the coming years. Despite this, 70% of Japanese learning programs in Japan outside of the higher education sector are taught by community volunteers, many of whom do not have formal teaching qualifications. One recent study of Japanese foreign language programs in Tokyo found that in one large central ward of Tokyo, the lack of community-based classes meant that: “In 2020, Shibuya reported 10,597 foreign residents; if all of these residents want to complete the ward-sponsored courses, it would take more than 100 years”. Due to the “desire” of Japanese people to learn English, foreign English teachers will no doubt continue to live and work in Japan. Some teachers like me and the participants in my research in Japan will build lives in Japan. It remains to be seen whether there are the learning resources to meet the needs of migrants in Japan.

Being “the desired”

While being “the desired” in Japan gives English teachers “privileged mobility” to access jobs in Japan, the Japanese learning of the teachers in my study was dependent on each teacher’s own agency, their access to facilitative individuals and communities in Japan, and their ability to deal with the stress of learning Japanese while living and working in Japan. Being the “desired” for their English within Japan influenced the teachers in three significant ways: it mediated their access to communities of practice in which to use Japanese, it dictated the support English teachers had for their Japanese learning, and how English teachers and broader Japanese society valued Japanese learning.

One unintended consequence of my research was that it forced me to examine my relationship with Japanese learning and using Japanese. Examining how these teachers learned and used Japanese made me re-evaluate and change my approach to learning Japanese. These changes have allowed me to engage more with learning and using Japanese.

While I outlined some of the broader conclusions of my PhD here, because of the large amount of data I collected, there are even more insights to come from my research in the future.

References

Hatasa, Y. and Watanabe, T. (2017). Japanese as a Second Language Assessment in Japan: Current Issues and Future Directions. Language Assessment Quarterly, 14(3), pp.192-212. https://doi.org/10.1080/15434303.2017.1351565
Lee, S. J., & Niiya, M. (2021). Migrant oriented Japanese language programs in Tokyo: A qualitative study about language policy and language learners. Migration and Language Education, 2(1), 17–33. https://doi.org/10.29140/mle.v2n1.489
Minns, O. T. (2021). The teacher as a learner: English teachers learning Japanese in Japan [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. Anglia Ruskin University. Available at: https://arro.anglia.ac.uk/id/eprint/707748
Piller, I., & Takahashi, K., 2006. A passion for English: Desire and the language market. In A. Pavlenko (ed.), Bilingual Minds: Emotional Experience, Expression and Representation. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, pp. 59 – 83.
Takahashi, K., 2013. Language Learning, Gender and Desire: Japanese Women on the Move. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.

Map of Transoxania (Source: Wikipedia)

Editor’s note: Arabic language learning is experiencing a revival in many parts of the world, such as China, where it may be a source of empowerment for impoverished Muslim women. This post by Mehrinigor Akhmedova (Bukhara State University, Uzbekistan) and Rizwan Ahmad (Qatar University, Qatar) takes us to Uzbekistan, a part of the post-Soviet world, where some aspects of Transoxania’s multilingual past are being revived for religious and economic reasons.

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Mehrinigor Akhmedova, Bukhara State University, Uzbekistan
Rizwan Ahmad, Qatar University, Qatar
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Recently, interest in the learning of Arabic language and script among the young generation of Uzbeks has been rising. Young Uzbeks are learning Arabic not simply because of their faith, Islam, but also because it is desirable in the domestic job market and opens a window of opportunities in the Arabic-speaking Gulf states.

In September 2023, the Department of Islamic History Source Studies, Philosophy at Bukhara State University invited a professor from Egypt’s Al-Azhar University to teach courses in Arabic. This is a significant change in the history of Arabic and Islamic learning in Uzbekistan. During the Soviet rule and early years of independence in 1991, Uzbekistan witnessed many ups and down regarding the place of Islam in the constitutionally secular Uzbek society. In 1998, fearing radical Islamic ideologies, the government closed many madrasas, traditional schools of learning, established soon after the independence.

Liquidation of Madrasas and Teaching of Arabic in Uzbekistan

Although the repression of Islam in the former Soviet republics, including modern-day Uzbekistan, began during the Tsarist regime, it reached its climax during the Soviet rule following the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. The state repression of Islam took many forms, including the persecution and killing of mudarris and ulama, teachers and scholars of Islam, nationalization of vaqf properties, Islam endowments, and forceful removal of veils from Muslim women, known as the hujum campaign.

Dome of the Mir-i-Arab Madrasa (Image credit: Wikipedia)

On the educational and sociolinguistic fronts, the repression led to the dismantling of the centuries old traditional Islamic educational system of maktabs and madrasas where students learned to read and recite the Qur’an in Arabic. In 1928, the Fourth Meeting of the Central Executive Committee of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic issued an order on the liquidation of all old method schools and madrasas. According to Ashirbek Muminov and Rinat Shigabdinov, before the 1928 decree, there were 1,362 madrasas in Uzbekistan with 21,183 students enrolled in them.

Another measure that damaged Arabic teaching and learning was the decision to replace the traditional Arabic script of Uzbek with a Latin-based writing system in 1927. Ten years later in 1937, as a measure of Russification, the Cyrillic script replaced the Latin script. These measures dealt a death blow to the teaching of Islam and Arabic language and script in Uzbekistan. In 1945, as a token of acceptance of religious institutions, Stalin allowed Mir-e-Arab madrasa, established in the 16th century, in Bukhara, to reopen with a limited number of students. Subsequently, two more institutions of Islamic learning were established; namely, madrasa Baraq Khan in 1956 and Tashkent Islamic Institute of Imam al-Bukhari in 1971.

Arabic within Multilingual Transoxiana

Present-day Uzbekistan, which in pre-modern times, was part of the larger Transoxiana region in Central Asia, was a thriving center of Arabic language and literature. The Persian-speaking Samanids (819-999 AD), who ruled Central Asia from their capital in Bukhara under the suzerainty of the Arabic-speaking Abbasids, maintained Arabic as the language of administration, Islamic learning, and sciences. The Samanids simultaneously encouraged use of Persian in the court. Under their patronage, many Arabic texts were translated into Persian, including the Quranic tafsir, exegesis, of Al-Tabari (d. 923 AD) and the Kalila wa Dimnah, a collection of fables, originally written in Sanskrit.

1958 Soviet stamp celebrating the 1100th birthday of Rudaki (Image credit: Wikipedia)

Rudaki (858-940), born and raised in Bukhara and regarded as the founder of New Persian Poetry, was granted the esteemed position of the court poet of the Samanids.

In this multilingual linguistic and intellectual environment, there emerged in Bukhara two towering figures among the scholars of Hadith, the most foundational Islamic text after the Quran, namely Muhammad ibn Isma’il al-Bukhari aka Imam Bukhari (810-870 AD) and Muhammad ibn Isa known as Al-Tirmidhi (824-892). Both were born in the Bukhara region of what is today Uzbekistan. In pursuit of the compilation of the Hadith, the sayings of Prophet Muhammad, they travelled widely to different parts of the Muslim world. They wrote their collections of hadith in Arabic, known as Sahih Al-Bukhari and Sunan Al-Tirmidhi respectively.

To the illustrious history of Bukhara as a center of Arabic can be added the polymath and physician Ibn Sina (980-1037), known as Avicenna in Latin Western sources. He is considered to be the father of early modern medicine. Born in Afshona in Bukhara, Ibn Sina, had memorized the whole of the Quran before the age of ten. Later he turned his attention to the study of medicine. He authored many books in Arabic on philosophy, mathematics and other branches of knowledge. In medicine, his famous work is Al-Qanoon fi Al-Tib, “The Canon of Medicine.” This work consists of five volumes with over 1 million words. He was the physician of the Samanid ruler Nuh II (976-997).

In September 2023, in a speech delivered in the UN, Shavkat Mirziyoyev, the president of Uzbekistan, named Imam Bukhari and Ibn Sina, among others, as scholars who richly contributed to science and showed that Islam was a religion of knowledge and peace.

Rise of Interest in Arabic in contemporary Bukhara

After the repression of Arabic and Islamic teaching during Soviet rule, there are signs of change in today’s Uzbekistan. In addition to official institutions such as Bukhara University encouraging the teaching of Arabic, many private language centers have also recently emerged in the city of Bukhara. There are over 50 private language centers in Bukhara, including popular ones like Takallum, An-Nisa, and Naqshbandi School.

Drawing of viscera from Ibn Sina’s “Canon of Medicine” (Source: Wellcome Collection)

On their Facebook page, Takallum invites students as follows, “…reciting the Qur’an with Tajweed is our obligatory deed and our deed will lead us to Paradise! Lead your friends to paradise, help them read the Quran, be a true friend for them”. Evidently, for Takallum the learning of Arabic is coupled with Islamic beliefs and practices.

Based on a pilot study conducted in September-October 2023, we found that there are clear signs of the rise in the interest in Arabic learning. First, we discuss a survey that was given online to an active Telegram group called NIسA_School, Ayollar Maktabi, with over 14,000 women members. The use of the Arabic letter س in the first word of the group is indexical of the fact that it brings back the Arabic language and its history in Uzbekistan.

Next, we discuss statistics of students who received Arabic language proficiency certificates from Davlat Test Markazi Buxoro Viloyat Bo’limi, National Test Center, Bukhara Region.

In response to the survey question ‘what was your goal of learning Arabic?’, an overwhelming 82% of the participants (N=347) answered that they considered learning Arabic as most important knowledge for their self-development. Related to this personal/spiritual goal of learning Arabic was the response from 14% of the participants who learned Arabic in order to teach it to others.

It is important to mention here that Muslims believe that God rewards those who read the Qur’an in the original Arabic, even if they do not understand its message. This means that the original Arabic text has spiritual value that cannot be gained by reading it in translation.

The remaining 4% learned Arabic because they wanted to live and work in an Arabic-speaking country.

Another indicator of the rising interest in Arabic comes from the data of students who have received a proficiency certificate in Arabic based on the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR). In 2022, Uzbekistan started to use the six-point CEFR proficiency levels from A1-A2, basic user, through B1-B2, independent user, to C1-C2, proficient user. Since the implementation of CEFR in 2022, the total number of students receiving CEFR enrolled in different Arabic language teaching centers in the Bukhara region alone was 3,079. The vast majority of them (92%) received B1 and B2 and the remaining 8% received the higher proficiency level C1. No Uzbek students attained C2, the highest-level proficiency.

Post-Soviet transformations

Bukhara, Old City (Image credit: Wikipedia)

Another important factor propelling people’s interest in Arabic learning is that the Government of Uzbekistan encourages learning of foreign languages and rewards those who earn high-level proficiency certificates in them. According to a presidential decree of 2021, teachers of Arabic and other foreign languages with a C1 certificate will be paid an additional bonus of 50% of their basic salary. Similarly, employees in any government agency possessing any national or international certificate in a foreign language will receive an extra bonus of 20% on their basic salary. Furthermore, students applying for admission into master’s and Ph.D. in the philological studies must show a C1 level proficiency in a foreign language and those in non-philological fields must have a B2 level proficiency.

The discussion above clearly suggests that the changes following the collapse of the Soviet Union have transformed the linguistic and educational fields. Uzbekistan, one of the great centers of Arabic language during the medieval era is witnessing a renaissance in the learning of Arabic after a long period of state suppression. Many young Uzbeks are rediscovering their history by learning the Arabic language and its script. The government’s incentives of learning a foreign language make Arabic learning even more attractive.

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Akhmedova Mehrinigor Bahodirovna is Associate Professor of Linguistics in the Department of English Literature & Translation Studies at Bukhara State University. Her research covers issues related to translation, literature, spirituality and sociolinguistics.

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Jeffrey Gil and Minglei Wang

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Taiwan is promoting its linguistic and cultural diversity (Image source: Taiwan Today)

Taiwan faces a dire international environment manifested in a lack of formal diplomatic recognition and a serious threat to its existence from the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Under these circumstances, Taiwan must communicate narratives and project images about itself to the international community in order to “increase Taiwan’s visibility and gather moral support”, especially from other democratic societies.

Taiwan has used language policy as one means of doing this, in particular by emphasising its democratic values and cultural heritage to highlight the differences between itself and the PRC. Examples can be seen in the Indigenous Language Development Act of 2017, which recognised indigenous languages as national languages and contained provisions to support and expand their development, teaching and use. The National Languages Development Act, passed in 2018, extended national language status to Holo (Southern Min variety of Chinese), Hakka (Kejia variety of Chinese) and Taiwanese Sign Language. It also aims to provide greater support for the use of these languages in education and society. According to Vickers and Lin (2022), an important purpose of such language policies is to portray Taiwan as “something more or other than simply a ‘Chinese’ society—that is, as a diverse, multicultural Asian democracy”.

In September 2021, Taiwan created the Taiwan Centre for Mandarin Learning (TCML) to teach and promote Mandarin abroad. We argue that the TCML initiative is also intended to enhance Taiwan’s international profile by distinguishing it from the PRC. Following a brief overview of the origins of the TCML, we focus on how Taiwan has attempted to contrast the TCML with the PRC’s Confucius Institutes (CIs), which have dominated the global promotion of Mandarin for the past two decades.

Establishment of the TCML

TCML promotional video

The TCML initiative is overseen by the Overseas Community Affairs Council (OCAC), a cabinet-level agency under the Executive Yuan, that is responsible for facilitating exchanges and interactions between Taiwan and communities of ethnic Taiwanese and Chinese in foreign countries. There are currently 66 TCMLs in the world, with 54 in the US and 12 in Europe.  Taiwan aims to increase the number of TCMLs to 100 by 2025, with a concurrent goal to establish what it describes as an “international status of Taiwanese Chinese language teaching”.

The origins of the TCML lie in the launch of the Taiwan-US Education Initiative in December 2020. A Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on international education cooperation was signed between the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office and American Institute in Taiwan (AIT),^[1] specifying that this partnership:

is expected to enhance and expand existing Mandarin and English language opportunities in the United States and on Taiwan. The MOU also encourages the exploration of opportunities for Mandarin and English language teachers and resources to be deployed to language programs at U.S. universities and Taiwan educational institutions, and facilitates greater exchange between U.S. and Taiwan institutions on best practices.

To the Taiwanese government, this signalled US support in “emphasizing and consolidating Taiwan’s important role in providing Mandarin learning opportunities for students from the US and other countries”, hence motivating the TCML project.

The establishment of the TCML was also facilitated by the US and Europe’s change of stance on the PRC’s dominating role in spreading Mandarin, as manifested in the shutdown of CIs. The CI project has caused concerns about its influence on teaching and research on China, the propagation of the Chinese government’s views, censorship on sensitive issues, and potential spying activities due to their links to the Chinese government and physical location on university campuses. Compounded by worsening relations between the PRC and the US and Europe, which generally hold an unfavourable image of China due to the country’s domestic and international behaviour, these concerns triggered the termination of CIs. The US, for example, has so far terminated 89 out of 122 CIs, while 19 CIs have been shut down across France, Sweden, Germany, Spain, Denmark, Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland.

TCML promotional poster

This subsequently leads to opportunities for Taiwan to fill the demand gap for Mandarin learning in the US and Europe, where TCMLs have thus far been established. It is in this sense that the inauguration of the TCML project is situated in a geopolitically competitive environment.

Framing the TCML: Mandarin with Taiwanese Characteristics

The TCML’s website highlights Taiwan’s intention to use the TCML to champion such values as “freedom, diversity, academic freedom, and freedom of speech”, which, in the eyes of the Taiwanese government, “form Taiwan’s key competitiveness” in the world. They have constructed a contrast between the TCML and CIs, although Taiwanese officials and directors of TCMLs have been reluctant to directly admit such a strategic orientation.

When commenting on the purpose of launching the TCML project, Tong Zhenyuan, former Chairman of OCAC, explained that:

we are not competing with Confucius Institutes, which are restricted by the American government and even driven out of the US. We, Taiwan, are collaborating with the US government to promote Mandarin teaching and learning on a different level, and we are confident in this situation to gain more support from America’s mainstream society, as we share the same values with the US.

Despite this, Tong emphasised at the inauguration of a TCML in Irvine, California that the aim of the centre was to provide a language learning environment that values “freedom and democracy while respecting cultural diversity” and this was “something that Confucius Institutes can simply not compete with”.

In a similar vein, Li Wenxiong, member of the OCAC, further elaborated that:

it is obvious that Confucius Institutes are basically used by the Chinese government to spread its communist ideology. I think Taiwan, most importantly, conducts teaching activities in a more open, democratic, and free manner, hence facilitating its educational approach into mainstream society as much as possible.

Kou Huifeng, director of the TCML in Silicon Valley, also held that the distinction between the TCML and CI was that “we have a free and open learning environment”. As Kou further noted, “we don’t compete [with CIs], what we do is to hope to let overseas non-Chinese have free choices [when learning Mandarin]”.

Another facet of diversity: Taiwan was the 1st country in Asia to legalize same-sex marriage (Image source: 360info)

This image of Taiwan as a provider of Mandarin language education is also displayed in the TCML’s promotional videos. One such video features several students expressing positive views of studying Mandarin in Taiwan. For instance, an American student said that “when you’re in a free country, which you’re able to express your own feelings and ideas, the Internet is not restricted, which makes studying easier”. Another student from the US shared that “in Taiwan, I’ve never run into any freedom of speech problems”. Likewise, an Israeli interviewee pointed out that there were “so-called sensitive issues” associated with her previous experience learning Mandarin which she had not experienced Taiwan. A Swiss/German learner even argued that Taiwan “is pretty much the only choice you have right now to study Chinese”, as “there is not much choice if you want to study Chinese in a free environment without having to be afraid for being arrested”.

This is not to say that the TCML is free of political constraints. The OCAC’s requirement that teachers employed by TCMLs “must not hold passports from Mainland China, Hong Kong or Macau” is similar to the PRC’s request that language instructors hired at CIs are not allowed to practice certain religious beliefs, such as Falun Gong. Furthermore, there appears to be political intervention from the Taiwanese government in some of the TCML’s media engagement. As reported by Nikkei Asia, a previously arranged interview with staff at a TCML in Heidelberg “was cancelled on short notice after a senior official in Taiwan intervened”.

Conclusion

The TCML has been conceived and portrayed as an alternative to the CIs. From the Taiwanese government’s perspective, emphasising values of democracy and freedom as the foundation for the TCML is a means through which Taiwan can compete with the PRC for the hearts and minds of Mandarin learners. The activities and reception of the TCML need to be further explored to determine whether this initiative will be successful in improving Taiwan’s international environment.

Acknowledgement

Our research project on the TCML is supported by the Flinders University College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (CHASS) Research Grant Scheme.

Jeffrey Gil

Jeffrey Gil is a Senior Lecturer in TESOL at Flinders University. He has also taught English as a Foreign Language (EFL) and Applied Linguistics courses at universities in China. His main research interests are English as a global language, English language education policy and planning in Asian contexts and the use and status of Chinese in the world. He has published widely on these topics. He is also the author of two books, Soft power and the worldwide promotion of Chinese language learning: The Confucius Institute project (Multilingual Matters, 2017) and The rise of Chinese as a global language: Prospects and obstacles (Palgrave, 2021), and co-editor of Exploring language in global contexts (Routledge, 2022).

Minglei Wang

Minglei Wang is a Ph.D. candidate and research assistant at Flinders University. His research topic is related to Chinese cultural diplomacy, with a specific focus on the China Cultural Centre. Minglei also holds an M.A. in Culture, Communication and Globalization from Aalborg University, Denmark.

[1] The Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office is a de facto embassy or consulate of the Republic of China (Taiwan), established in certain countries that have formal diplomatic relations with the PRC. The US does not formally recognise Taiwan as a sovereign country but conducts unofficial relations with it through the AIT, which effectively functions as its de facto embassy in Taiwan.

Professor Peter Siemund, Hamburg University, during his guest lecture at Macquarie University

It is easy to assume that bilinguals are better at adding another language to their repertoire. But is that always true?

Evidence from English language learning in multilingual classrooms in Europe

School children in European countries such as Germany all study English as a foreign language as part of their education. Most of these school children will be monolingual in German but an increasing number speaks a language other than German at home. How do these students’ monolingual repertoires in German or bilingual repertoires in German and another language affect their learning of English?

This is the question explored by Professor Peter Siemund from Hamburg University in his lecture in the Lectures in Linguistic Diversity series at Macquarie University.

Professor Siemund started out by identifying a paradox of multilingualism research: multilingualism is often thought to be an advantage for both cognitive development and learning, but, at the same time, cross-linguistic influence research shows that speaking more languages often leads to more negative interference in the learning of subsequent languages.

For instance, he cited research (Lorenz, 2018) that found that Turkish and Russian monolingual learners of English were able to get the meaning of the English progressive aspect right 100% of the time. In contrast, German-Turkish and German-Russian bilinguals only got it right about as frequently as monolingual German speakers. It seems obvious that transfer from German, which has no progressive aspect, negatively affected the English language learning of these bilinguals. So in this case, bilingualism did not help but hinder when it came to this particular grammatical feature of English language learning.

Different languages, different findings

In another study described by Professor Siemund the relationship between reading comprehension scores in German and another language on the one hand and test scores in English on the other were examined. It was found that German comprehension skills correlated with English test performance for German-Russian bilinguals but not for German-Turkish bilinguals. This highlights the fact that bilingualism is not a unitary phenomenon and is different depending on which languages are involved.

The trade-off between linguistic accuracy and fluency (Source: Peter Siemund)

Accuracy versus flexibility

It is not only bilingualism that is not a unitary phenomenon but the same is true of language learning. What do we mean when we say that someone is a good language learner?

One relevant dimension is linguistic accuracy; another is linguistic fluency. In my own experience as a language learner and teacher, learners who are more accurate are often less fluent, while those who are more fluent often sacrifice accuracy.

This was also the conclusion reached by Professor Siemund, who argued that there is a trade-off between accuracy and flexibility. While monolinguals might be more accurate, plurilinguals might be more flexible. He closed by suggesting that bi-and trilingualism might be equilibrious points where accuracy and flexibility are most likely to be in balance.

What do these findings mean for advocacy?

For those of us who are interested in advocating for the rights of migrant language speakers, it can be tricky to talk about the disadvantages of being bilingual or multilingual. It is a balancing act between supporting linguistic diversity and fighting against the discrimination experienced by speakers of minority languages. Supporting linguistic diversity in the abstract sometimes overshadows the fact that some kinds of bi/multilingualism are clearly more equal than others. In fact we already know that being multilingual can be disadvantageous in education and at work, whether it’s for minority language-speaking children who are unable to access education in their first language and standardised tests which discriminate against them or migrants whose linguistic repertoires are problematized in the workplace.

Maybe we need to reframe the question: instead of asking what the advantages or disadvantages of bi- and multilingualism might be, we should ask how we can help ensure equality of opportunity regardless of linguistic repertoire, as Ingrid Piller does in her recent book Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice.

References

Lorenz, E. (2018). “One day a father and his son going fishing on the Lake”: A study on the use of the progressive aspect of monolingual and bilingual learners of English. In Bonnet, A. and P. Siemund (eds.) Foreign Languages in Multilingual Classrooms (pp. 331–357). Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Piller, I. (2016). Linguistic diversity and social justice: an introduction to applied sociolinguistics. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

Language choice in bilingual couples as habit (excerpt from Piller, 2002, p. 137)

In my research with bilingual couples, habit emerged as one of the main reasons for a couple’s language choice. Partners from different language backgrounds met through the medium of a particular language and fell in love through a particular language. Once they had established a relationship through that language, it became a relatively fixed habit.

This means that entering a couple relationship was a moment of linguistic habit formation. At the same time, it was also a moment of drastic linguistic habit change, at least for one partner. At least one partner had to change their habitual language from one language (usually their native language) to another (usually an additional language).

The question of habit formation is an important one in language learning research. Around the world, education systems invest enormous sums of money into language teaching but the outcomes in terms of getting students to actually speak the language(s) they are learning outside the classroom are often unclear.

Efforts to revive Irish Gaelic provide a well-known example. In the Republic of Ireland, Gaelic is part of the compulsory curriculum of primary and secondary school students. Even so, only around 40% of the population reported in the 2016 census that they could speak Irish. However, when asked whether they actually did so, only 1.7% of the population reported that they regularly used Irish. So, knowing Gaelic and using Gaelic are clearly two different things.

The explanation for this pattern is simple: habit. Studying a language gives learners a new tool. But to actually use that tool on a regular basis outside the classroom requires a change of linguistic habit. In other words, language knowledge needs to be activated.

For the native German speakers in my bilingual couples research, falling in love and establishing a couple relationship with a native English speaker provided such a transformative moment that allowed them to activate the English they had studied throughout their schooling. (The converse pattern was much rarer as native English speakers rarely had studied German and so no basis for a linguistic change of habit existed).

Other than linguistic intermarriage, what transformative moments are there across the life course when people might change from one habitual language to another?

Professor Maite Puigdevall during her guest lecture at Macquarie University

This is the question Professor Maite Puigdevall (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Spain) addressed in her inaugural lecture in linguistic diversity at Macquarie University. Professor Puigdevall and her colleagues use the Catalan word muda (“change, transformation”) to refer to such biographical junctures where a linguistic change of habit is likely. They have identified six such transformative junctures across the life course:

• Primary school
• High school
• University
• Workplace entry
• Couple formation
• Becoming a parent

At each such juncture, a person starts to move in new circles, make new friends and establish new networks. Establishing oneself in such a new way may lead to all kinds of changes and new habits and a switch in the habitual language may be one such transformation.

Professor Puigdevall and her colleagues have used the muda concept particularly in relation to minoritized languages such as Catalan, Basque or Gaelic. At each juncture, such languages acquire “new speakers” (as opposed to the ever-shrinking number of heritage speakers). However, the life-course approach they propose has at least two implications for language policy elsewhere, too, including Australia.

First, language learning is a long-term investment. Results should not be expected immediately but are more likely to accrue later in life. A good reminder that the old adage non scolae sed vitae discimus (“we learn not for school but for life”) holds for language learning, too, and that we should vigorously contest the “languages are useless” argument that we so often hear, particularly in the Anglosphere.

Second, an investment in language education in school will pay off most when it is complemented by other policy interventions in favor of a particular language. For instance, in comparative research related to Catalan, Basque and Gaelic, Professor Puigdevall and her colleagues found that a significant inducement to turn Catalan into a habitual language was constituted by the bilingual (Catalan, Spanish) language requirement present for employment in the civil service in Catalonia.

Professor Puigdevall’s lecture inspired us to focus on moments in the life-course where bilingual proficiencies may be turned into bilingual habits. What new things will we learn in our next lecture in linguistic diversity when Dr Sabine Little (Sheffield University, UK) asks what we inherit when we inherit a language?

References

Piller, I. (2002). Bilingual couples talk: the discursive construction of hybridity. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Puigdevall, M., Walsh, J., Amorrortu, E., & Ortega, A. (2018). ‘I’ll be one of them’: linguistic mudes and new speakers in three minority language contexts. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 39(5), 445-457. doi:10.1080/01434632.2018.1429453
Pujolar, J., & Puigdevall, M. (2015). Linguistic mudes: How to become a new speaker in Catalonia. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 231, 167-187.

Diego Marani’s novel New Finnish Grammar (translated by Judith Landry from the Italian original, Nuova Grammatica Finlandese) has won multiple awards and has already been reviewed many times. The (English language) reviews discuss Marani’s fascination with language in both this and his other novels, mentioning his professional background as a translator and Europanto, the “mock” language he created. The novel has even been reviewed in the Australian Journal of Linguistics (Libert, 2014).

As the glowing reviews indicate, while the novel indeed discusses language, its structure, and acquisition, it does so in a poetic and engaging way. However, even more striking for me were the links between language learning and migrant identity. This really is a story about language on the move. As I read about Sampo’s emotionally charged and difficult journey to rediscover his lost language and identity, co-narrated by Friari, who reflects on his own experiences as a migrant, I began to consider it a metaphor for the migrant’s journey of building an identity and sense of belonging in a new place, all while adopting a new language. Sampo’s struggles learning Finnish and trying to find his place in a country he is supposed to come from but of which he has no memory, and his striving for authenticity as a speaker (and thus a member of the society) are beautifully portrayed throughout the novel:

My words betrayed my outsider status: my very voice gave off sounds that did not ring true, like a cracked glass. The language did not flow with ease; I had to construct each word carefully before pronouncing it, laboriously seeking the right amount of breath, the correct pressure of the lips, sounding out my palate with my tongue in search of the only point which could produce the sound I was looking for and then turning it into the right case before actually delivering it up…. It seemed impossible to me that everything should be played out within those fractions of a millimetre, that a segment of muscle, if too tense, should alter a meaning completely, that one puff of air too much, or too little, should be enough to cause me to be mistaken for an Estonian or Ingrian, or indeed break off the thread of meaning entirely.

Akseli Gallen-Kallela’s famous 1896 painting, The defense of the Sampo (Source: Wikipedia)

Reading the novel also encouraged me to learn a little bit about Finnish history and led me to consider Sampo’s individual journey as representing, or at least being similar to, Finland’s recent history. I realized that the novel involves multiple references to language (and identity) on various levels.

In Finland, Sampo’s language acquisition continues with the assistance of his new friend, Koskela, a somewhat eccentric priest. Koskela helps him learn the language by telling him about Finnish history, sharing his thoughts on geopolitics, and through the Kalevala, a collection of epic poems from Finnish mythology and folklore, which was compiled in the 19^th century after being passed down orally through songs.

The Kalevala constituted an important tool for developing and protecting a Finnish national identity against Swedish and Russian influence, as Karner (1991) argues. It was published at a time when Finland was emerging from 600 years of Swedish rule, which ended with (semi-autonomous) integration into the Russian Empire. Despite such a long period under Swedish rule, the Finnish language had largely survived, with only around 14% of the population speaking Swedish. However, Karner argues, Finland was lacking a clear national identity. The Kalevala came to form a pivotal role in the construction of this national identity in what was otherwise a void of “we are neither Swedish nor Russian”. Compiled by Elias Lönnrot, who collected the folklore from rural Finns throughout the country, and published it in 1835, the epic soon became famous throughout Europe, and regarded as constituting complete and “authentic representations of Finnish history: heroes, customs, and religion” (p. 159).

Therefore, the Kalevala forms an important parallel or analogy in New Finnish Grammar: much like Sampo who has no memory of his past, the Finnish nation relies on reconstructing a set of Finnish folktales to reclaim and reconstruct a past Finnish identity, bypassing the preceding 600 years of Swedish rule. In fact, even Sampo’s name itself comes from the Kalevala. As the priest explains to him, the Sampo was a magical and much-coveted object throughout the mythical stories. However, once again resembling Sampo’s own story, nobody is quite sure what it was.

Poster for the 1959 Russian film “Sampo” based on the Kalevala (Source: imdb)

In both cases, the Finnish language is the crucial conduit to reconstructing identity and a sense of history. Language and emerging identity are interconnected and interdependent in both the individual and national. In Finland’s case, in the 1800s, elite Finns spoke Swedish, and Finnish had been maintained through the peasant communities. The Kalevala’s fame and acceptance as an authentic artefact of Finnish history and culture created a renewed value in the Finnish language. Therefore, acquiring and using Finnish was an essential part of national identity formation (Karner, 1991, 159-160).

Likewise, for Sampo, a crucial step in recreating himself, fulfilling his yearning to uncover his past and thus learn who he is, is to learn Finnish. This is a monumental undertaking that he documents throughout the journals that form the medium through which the novel is presented. As he sits watching the priest Koskela discuss the Kalevala in a Finnish that is much too fast and complex for him to understand, he reflects:

I had grasped the bare bones of it even if much escaped me, above all those strange words, those fantastical objects whose shape the pastor outlined vainly with his hands: I had never seen anything like them. But I had been captivated by seeing the sounds forming themselves in his mouth, to be turned into words, then melt away. When I could not understand them, I listened to them like music, a fascinated witness to their fleeting life. How many words needed to bring a man to life!

Language, and the Finnish language in particular, is therefore a fundamental part of Sampo’s struggle to rediscover himself. Set against the bleak backdrop of World War II Finland, it is far from an easy exercise, and in the end – without revealing too much – not a very successful one either.

Diego Marani’s acclaimed novel is therefore much more than an essay on language learning. He seamlessly threads together different languages and identities as they operate on different scales: the individual migrant language-learning struggle, with that of national discourse creation about language and identity against the background of sweeping geopolitical change. While the novel is full of struggle, these engaging themes and the poignant, near-poetic way the story is told (even in its English translation) make reading New Finnish Grammar both a pleasurable and fulfilling undertaking.

References 

Karner, T. (1991). Ideology and nationalism: the Finnish move to independence, 1809-1918. Ethnic & Racial Studies. Vol. 14, No. 2, pp. 152-169.
Marani, D. (2011). New Finnish Grammar (trans. J. Landry). Sawtry, UK: Dedalus Books.
Libert, A.R. (2014). Book review of New Finnish Grammar. Australian Review of Linguistics. Vol. 34. No. 2, pp. 292-293.

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Fictional accounts of language learning

• Two caravans

“How bad is your cultural cringe?” (Source: Jenna Guillaume, BuzzFeed)

Keith: I’m still really shit at pronouncing Lisa’s surname. With the umlaut o.
Hanna: What is Lisa’s surname?
(laughter)
Keith: Do I get three goes?
(Keith, Australian, in a relationship with Lisa from Germany)

Despite the increasing value of multilingualism in a globalised world, English-speaking countries such as Australia remain stubbornly monolingual. At the same time the benefits of speaking more than one language are regularly touted in public discourse. My research investigates how speakers of Australian English with a partner from a non-English-speaking background feel about their linguistic repertoires. Embarrassment, as in the example above from Keith (all names are pseudonyms), comes up a lot. So does inferiority. Because of their low proficiency in foreign languages (often as a consequence of their poor quality or limited language learning experiences in formal education) these participants feel they are bad language learners. This response seems to be one way of engaging with and mitigating their own privilege as native speakers of the powerful global language, English, compared to their partners who learned English as an additional language.

“It’s my deficiency”: being a bad language learner

And I I think I was completely in awe of that the fact that she could speak so many different languages freely, and a little bit jealous, and at the beginning was a bit more kind of definite about trying to learn German, um and I think the whole experience intimidated me cause I think I’m the kind of person who if they don’t pick something up really quickly kind of just gives up very quickly (…) (Keith)

For Lisa and Keith, Keith’s first and Lisa’s second language, English, has been the language of their relationship. Keith sees Lisa’s language skills as impressive while blaming himself for his own inability to learn German. He feels that Lisa “probably speaks better English than most native English speakers in Australia”. While Lisa learnt languages formally in her school education as a child and young adult, Keith faces all the frustration of learning another language as an adult.

In his own education Keith’s choices were limited. Although he comes from an Italian migrant background, Italian was not available at his public school in inner Sydney in the 1990s. He decided to take Latin instead, but he dropped it after junior high school when he lost interest in his schooling. He has done no further foreign language study in contrast to Lisa, who studied four languages over many years in her schooling in Germany. So when it comes to saying Keith’s Italian surname their pronunciation reflects their differing language learning trajectories:

Hanna: And how are you at pronouncing Keith’s last name (laughs)?

Lisa: I am tempted to pronounce it Italian which then nobody understands (laughs).

Keith: She- like I’m reading out a, a pizza on the pizza menu from our local pizzeria and she makes fun of my Italian accent. You know like quattro formaggi, she’s like (puts on a strong Australian accent) quattro formaggi. ‘Cause she speaks Italian, you know, these fucking Europeans!

(laughter)

In Keith’s comment about his partner’s Italian pronunciation of his Italian surname we could read humorous disparagement of her ability to pronounce it in the Italian way; in Australia foreign names are usually anglicised or pronounced in an English way. Both his lack of educational opportunity to study Italian and his Anglicized pronunciation cause him in that moment to position himself as a (monolingual) Australian in opposition to (multilingual) Europeans.

Stephen, from Australia, who is married to Christina from Argentina feels similarly critical of his own poor Spanish skills. He describes his attempts to learn Spanish as “a token effort”, says he “hasn’t got an ear for languages” and it dismissive of his own attempts to learn Spanish:

Hanna: You said you’re the odd one out; how do you feel…

Stephen: No, not at all, because uh because I recognise that it’s my deficiency in not having had the time to devote to learning a language. Now, I I make the standard joke I have 50 words of [unclear] of Spanish that I know. I work very hard and uh it’s a standing family joke (…)

In fact, Stephen studied Spanish at night, has a Spanish speaking community in Sydney and has two children who are bilingual. He also regularly visits Argentina and has frequent Argentine house guests. Spanish is a regular feature in his life. In the interview he also says that learning Spanish is “a commitment I’ve probably made and haven’t fulfilled” and feels he is a “handicapped Aussie” compared to his multilingual relations.

Another participant, Amy, has a strikingly similar evaluation of her own language skills. When I asked her why she was interested in talking to me about language she said:

Well, I suppose, I suppose it’s just there and I suppose for me it’s that I’ve got to learn more Spanish (…) And I went to lessons and I started learning and I was enthusiastic because we were going to Columbia, but as soon as we came back from Columbia I was just like that’s it, I’m just not interested anymore. And I learnt that I’m not a good language learner(…) (Amy, in a relationship with German from Columbia)

Amy’s language learning experiences at school were typical for my participants. In twelve years of state school education all she studied was ten weeks each of Italian, German and French in her seventh school year. In contrast, she praises her partner for his excellent English language skills which he acquired in Columbia from the “movies and music” he consumed from their powerful northern neighbour.

A new kind of language cringe

It seems these participants characterise their persistent monolingualism as a personal failing, a source of embarrassment, a source of language cringe. In Australia language cringe is a child of the cultural cringe. It has traditionally been associated with being embarrassed about speaking Australian English, rather than the more highly valued British English of the mother country. However, in my research I have found a new form of language cringe, related to monolinguals who speak the most valuable global language compared to multilinguals who are non-native speakers. This kind of language cringe contradicts the idea that a native speaker will always be “better” than a non-native speaker through an acknowledgment of the level of skill and knowledge which come with learning an additional language to a high proficiency.

This is most obvious when it comes to accent, because language cringe views an Australian native accent as lower value than (some) non-native accents. Lisa points out that she found the Australian accent strange on first hearing.

Lisa: I just remember the first Australian I ever met in my life (…) we started talking in English and I just thought who the fuck is this person? (laughter) It sounded so outlandish I’d never heard that before.

When I asked Keith about what kind of accent he would like his daughter to have, he reluctantly admitted that he wanted hers to be more “international”. Stephen points out that on first travelling to the United States with his wife, the locals “struggled” with his “obvious Australian accent” while she “was much more readily understood”. The implicit high value of a native accent is challenged by the transferability of a more international non-native accent.

Understanding and being able to explain the grammar of a language is another site where language cringe manifests itself. Paul, from Sydney, met Sara from Spain while travelling around South America. He was quickly hired as an English teacher because he was a native speaker. But it was Sara who taught him enough English grammar to make it through the first lesson.

(…) when Sara and I first met I needed to get some work and we were in Chile, um I just before I arrived to Chile we’d split up for a few weeks on the way to. and I’d asked Sara can you hand out a few CVs to English schools when we get there, or when you get there, which she did and I basically arrived and there was a job waiting for me which was perfect. But I’d never taught, I’d never thought about English I had no idea [Sara laughs]. and so the very first lesson I had to do (…) and uh [laughs] they, you know, the school said uh here’s the book this is Headway, this is what you’re using, they’re up to page thirty two or whatever. I opened it up and it was the present perfect and I looked at it and I was like what’s the present perfect, what’s a past participle and Sara sat down and taught me. (Paul, my emphasis)

Sara also spoke four languages to, at that time, Paul’s one. Although Sara is the one with the multilingual skills, Paul was seen by the language school as a better language user because he is a native speaker.

Managing native speaker privilege

Like Keith, Paul is impressed by his wife’s linguistic skills but he also recognises that because of the privilege of the English native speaker Sara’s multilingualism may be less valued. Rather than being embarrassed about his own failings as an individual language user Paul draws attention to the wider failings of the native speaker ideology in terms of its tenuous relation to actual knowledge about language as a system or teaching expertise. Paul acknowledges his partner’s linguistic superiority and the inherent injustice of an employment situation where he benefitted from a discriminatory language ideology because he is a native speaker.

For my other participants it may be that their conception of their own language skills as inferior in relation to the linguistic repertoire of their partners is their way to manage the inequalities brought about by this privilege. Recognising their own limited linguistic repertoire and casting it as a personal failing may be a way to tip the scales back in favour of the linguistic repertoire of a multilingual partner.

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

PASCH Schools: Partners for the future

Last week I was privileged to attend the 3^rd Conference of School Principals of PASCH Schools in Southeast Asia. A ‘PASCH school’ is a regular secondary school with a particular emphasis on the learning and teaching of German as an additional language. PASCH schools constitute a global network of more than 1,700 schools. ‘PASCH’ stands for ‘Schools – Partners of the Future.’ Funded by the German government, the PASCH network was initiated in 2008 in order to offer opportunities to youths from around the globe to learn German and to develop a positive relationship with modern Germany. PASCH supports professional development training for teachers, provides language learning resources for schools, offers scholarships for students to study in Germany, and numerous other virtual and non-virtual exchange and collaboration opportunities, including global student newspapers.

Attended by representatives of various national ministries of education, school principals, German language teachers, industry representatives and former students from across Southeast Asia and Australasia, the conference provided an excellent opportunity to gain an understanding of the state of the art of language education in the region.

Most language teaching efforts across the region are, unsurprisingly, devoted to English. However, there is a clear sense that English is no longer enough. To begin with, the countries of the region are characterized by enormous linguistic diversity and mother tongue education in addition to instruction in the national language is increasingly incorporated into curricula.

Second, with the greater regional integration that the introduction of the ASEAN Economic Community in 2015 promises neighbouring languages are gaining in importance. While as yet weakly integrated in most curricula, their role is set to expand.

Finally, there are other international languages such as Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Japanese or Spanish. Offering the latter in the curriculum is often a niche effort of schools who are trying to differentiate themselves from other schools and who are attempting to provide their students with an additional edge. That teaching international languages other than English is intended to create a small elite group of cultural mediators is best illustrated with the example of Singapore. There, the opportunity to study a third foreign language is offered to students who achieve in the top ten percent in the primary school leaving certificate. Only these top academic achievers are able to pursue a third language in high school by attending a Ministry of Education Language Centre (MOELC) in addition to their regular studies. The languages on offer include Arabic, Bahasa Indonesia, French, German, Japanese, Malay and Spanish.

While German may seem like a relatively irrelevant language to pursue in Southeast Asia, this is in fact not true for students at PASCH schools. These highly motivated students do so with two main goals in mind: to pursue tertiary education at a university in Germany and/or to pursue employment with a German company. Speakers at the conference included a number of students who had achieved their goal and who spoke about their experiences of learning German in school, participating in exchange programs, studying at a German university and working in a role where their German skills are advantageous.

In addition to achieving personal aims, fostering German skills among a small group of cultural mediators also benefits the wider society, as speakers from various national ministries of education stressed. These benefits are related particularly to knowledge transfer. Interesting examples include partnerships with German companies to deliver an innovative automotive engineering program in a Malaysian college or partnerships between Singaporean polytechnics and German small-to-medium enterprises to deliver a dual vocational training program. In fact, attending industry representatives stressed the importance of combining language skills with strong academic and vocational skills for success in the global workplace.

Finally, a number of school representatives argued that a focus on German had improved overall language education in their school. A teacher from an Australian high school, for instance, mentioned that – in the context of Australia’s notorious ‘monolingual mindset’ – his school’s focus on German has had positive effects on language learning more generally. As students in the German immersion program have discovered the value of learning German, their desire to learn another language has also increased and the school has unexpectedly seen enrolments in its Japanese language program rise, too.

In Indonesia, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam, the positive side-effects of a school’s focus on German are different and relate to improved teacher quality. Speakers from these countries explained that teacher quality – both in terms of proficiency and pedagogy – was a concern. This affects predominantly English language teachers, as English is the most widely taught language. Participating in the professional development opportunities offered by the PASCH school program has helped to disseminate pedagogy training across languages and thus has resulted in improving the professionalism of English language teachers, too.

Despite their diverse backgrounds all speakers stressed that the problems facing humanity today are global problems and that the world needs to move beyond competition to become an international learning community. Linguistic diversity will inevitably mediate the success of our partnerships for the future.

The researcher wearing a Zhuang employee’s work uniform at the Black Clothes Zhuang House in the Ethnic Minorities Village, Nanning, China, 2014

I was surprised, frankly, during my recent fieldwork to find Zhuang language being used in a QQ chatroom in China. Surprised because Zhuang text is absent from the linguistic landscape. Surprised because many of my interview participants reported they had no Zhuang literacy practices: some young Zhuang people had not even realised local street names and a line on the every Chinese bank note were in Zhuang; it’s written in the Latin alphabet, so they had assumed it was English. But on social media, there it was.

Zhuang is the name of a minority ‘ethnic nationality’ originally from Southern China, and Zhuang is also the name of their language. There are about 18 million Zhuang people, but the proportion who are of native, fluent or partial speakers of Zhuang is hard to pinpoint. Certainly, there is a trend away from using Zhuang at home, in public and in traditional media, especially in cities. I’m currently investigating Zhuang language use, with a focus on the ways that legally enshrined language rights do (or do not) affect the maintenance of a minority language in China. Around the time I was on QQ, various other data were also suggesting to me that online there is more space for Zhuang than there is offline, and definitely more space for Zhuang activism. Some of the online Zhuang language use is organised and some dissipated and impromptu; some is deliberately activist and some seems a less conscious promotion of Zhuang. But all of it is grassroots – or bottom-up – language revitalisation, an approach very different to the top-down language rights and minority language policies existing in China. Looking at my QQ screenshots, I began asking myself what special opportunities social media is providing Zhuang language but also whether using Zhuang on social media has any special impact on offline. In what climate do the grassroots grow into something bigger?

Snippet of QQ chatroom screenshot, June 2014

There’s a crop of grassroots language initiatives springing up on online platforms, for all languages all over the world. For example, during my fieldwork, I was asked by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences to present on Australian Indigenous language maintenance and in preparing I came across this Yugambeh indigenous language app developed by a local museum-cum-research-centre in Queensland, north-eastern Australia. The app’s effect is amplified through the local primary schools’ Write into Art competition, in which kids use the app to compose poetry. This example, even more than Zhuang use in QQ chatrooms, raised for me the question of how to get grassroots revitalisation which sprouts online to flourish offline.

Transplanting grassroots activity

The link between online language activism and offline language revitalisation movements is a subject Josep Cru (2014) deals with in his recent article. Cru’s case study of grassroots, social-media-enabled language revival follows Mexican university students – Yucatec Maya speakers and would-be-speakers – chatting together on Facebook. Cru (2014 p3) argues that “social media are being appropriated by Maya speakers as a catalyst for language advocacy and activism”. He suggests that part of the impact social media is having on Maya revitalisation stems from the fact that, on Facebook, “Maya can be used on par with dominant languages” (p. 7). But are online platforms always such a level field? They have the potential to be.

Potential online language use

Cru (2014, p. 10) suggests that social media is “a potential catalyst among some youngsters for ethnolinguistic awareness and even political positioning, which is an essential aspect of language revitalisation.” In this way, social media is more than just a “productive new space” for writing down a language typically marginalised in literacy practices. That is, online spaces have a special potential that other media and other domains lack.

But where does this potential come from? I suggest the potential comes from the normative micro-climate of online communication. While Cru’s Facebookers, the kids using the Yugambeh app and my QQ chatters probably have differing levels of social organisation, differing political views about revitalisation, different audiences, and different impacts, one commonality is that online, and especially online on social media, they can all use language in less formal and less standardised ways than they can offline. I’m not arguing online communication has no rules and no norms, simply that they are different from – and often less constraining – than norms in other forms of communication.

Part of the fun, informal, flexible nature of online communication, especially on social media, is that the “fuzziness and the arbitrariness of language boundaries” (Cru 2014, p. 7) is not problematized to the same extent as it is offline in formal use, and especially in offline written forms. Because the integration of different languages and of non-standard spelling and grammar is less remarkable and less of a (socially-constructed) problem in online communication, linguistic features associated with a minority language can be employed online in ways that may not be available in offline, or which may be penalised offline rather than receiving a “valuation-enhancing effect” (Eisenlohr 2004). So this is, arguably, an inherent property of online communication which creates the potential for a minority language to be used on par with a dominant language.

But that potential is not always going to be realised.

Online communication, when it integrates linguistic features associated with minority languages, has the potential to challenge norms of offline minority language (dis)use. But it also has the potential to reproduce those very language norms through which the minority language is dominated.

Actual online language use

It may well be that for Yucatec Maya, the level playing field of Facebook is fertile soil for grassroots language revitalisation. Unfortunately, for many other minority languages, dominance creeps in to online spaces. My own data, while still in the process of analysis, is already suggesting that Zhuang cannot be used on par with dominant languages online.

Social and power structures which minimise Zhuang speech are reproduced online in many ways. For starters, many young Zhuang people have no literacy in Zhuang and almost all non-Zhuang people have no Zhuang language competence whatsoever, so the informational utility of sending an Instant Message in Zhuang is severely restricted. The symbolic and/or phatic use of Zhuang on QQ is sometimes policed by other young Zhuang people: in one instance of my QQ data, a university student uses the Zhuang “haep bak” [‘shut up’] and another student responds “他不是有意的，不理那些话” [‘It has no meaning, ignore those words’]. Even if not receiving a scolding, using some Zhuang language does not import the value of ‘cool-ness’ into communications, largely because minority culture – Zhuang in particular – is still evaluated as ‘backwards’ rather than ‘cool’ in the offline sociolinguistic environment. This perception of low “social capital” is reinforced by the low capital of Zhuang language in both education and employment. This means young people have less reason to use Zhuang online (unless they are deliberately trying to make it cool). Zhuang seems to be rarely used as a resource to create a “we-code” because there is not a wide consciousness of We amongst Zhuang young people.

All this happens with a banality characteristic of linguistic hegemony. In other, less banal circumstances around the world, minority language speakers whose language is associated with civil disobedience, separatism or terrorism may find their online use is policed not just by subtle social processes and throw-away online rebukes, but by state security forces. Online, language choice may be easier, but language choice is also easily monitored.

Becoming a grassroots Green Thumb

My point is that while online minority language use can catalyse grassroots language revitalisation, it can also reproduce processes of minoritisation. What makes a grassroots movement flourish?

Does it depend on how organised the online users are in networks or communities of practice? Does it depend on the form of online media? Does it depend on grassroots activity happening at the same time but offline? In regards to Zhuang in China, the development of one or two shoots to a grassroots movement to a broader change is likely to depend on all three, and more. Certainly, whether online activity in China is actually a hothouse of grassroots political change generally – not just in regards to language revitalisation – is the subject of an ongoing debate (e.g., contrast Yang 2011 and Leibold 2011).

There is still a lot more research to be done on how grassroots politics of language revitalisation develop, online and offline, and how online grassroots activity adds to (or challenges) both top-down policies of language revitalisation and offline grassroots activities.

References

Cru, Josep (2014). Language Revitalisation from the Ground Up: Promoting Yucatec Maya on Facebook Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 1-13 : 10.1080/01434632.2014.921184

Eisenlohr, Patrick (2004). Language Revitalization and New Technologies: Cultures of Electronic Mediation and the Refiguring of Communities. Annual Review of Anthropology, 33 (1): 21–45.

Leibold, James (2011). Blogging Alone: China, the Internet, and the Democratic Illusion? The Journal of Asian Studies, 70 (4): 1023-1041.

Yang, Guobin (2011). Technology and Its Contents: Issues in the Study of the Chinese Internet. The Journal of Asian Studies, 70 (4): 1043-1050.

German International School Sydney

It is one of the great narratives of our time that the market will fix everything. In education this means that parental choice is assumed to improve education. Rather than the state supplying high-quality education, the neoliberal credo is that parental choice will create high-quality education. Does that mean that we do not have high quality language education in Australia because there simply is not the demand for language education?

Or could it be the other way round? Could it be that the state of languages in Australia is “a national tragedy and an international embarrassment,” as Michael Clyne, Anne Pauwels and Roland Sussex put it in 2007, simply because the supply is not there? A case study of what happens when high-quality bilingual education becomes available in a community could prove just that.

In 2008, the German International School Sydney (GISS) moved to a new location in the suburb of Terrey Hills, about 25km north of the Sydney CBD. GISS runs a high-quality K-12 English-German bilingual immersion program that is accredited by both the German Ministry of Education and the NSW Board of Studies, and leads to the International Baccalaureate. The 2008 GISS relocation in conjunction with Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) census data from 2006 and 2011 allow us to explore how the linguistic profile of a community changes when high-quality bilingual education becomes available.

By way of background, it is important to know that German in Australia is the second least maintained migrant language (after Dutch); i.e. German speakers shift from German to English at very high rates and the rate of German transmission from one generation to the next is relatively low (see Clyne 2005 for details). Low language maintenance rates for German are usually attributed to cultural affinity to the dominant English-speaking culture; to the fact that language is not a core value for Germans; to relatively high proficiency rates in English among German migrants; to relatively high rates of exogamy; and to low ethnic concentrations (see Clyne 2005, Ch. 3). All these reasons could be described as market model reasons: the ‘demand’ for German among German migrants is low and so they give up the language. My case study suggests that supply – or rather the absence of a supply of high-quality bilingual education – may be another crucial factor.

Terrey Hills, where GISS has been located since 2008, is in the Local Government Area (LGA) of Warringah, and it is also conveniently accessible to residents of two other LGAs, namely Pittwater and Ku-ring-gai. So, has the presence of German increased in these LGAs? Census data allow us to approach this question through two data sets, namely ‘country of birth’ and ‘language spoken at home.’

Figure 1: Percentage of residents born in Germany

To begin with, as Figure 1 shows, the percentage of residents born in Germany increased in both Warringah and Pittwater between 2006 and 2011. For Ku-ring-gai it remained virtually unchanged. These figures are in contrast to those for Greater Sydney and Australia as a whole where the percentage of residents born in Germany slightly decreased during the same period.

Second, the figures for German as a home language show the same tendencies but the changes are more pronounced (Figure 2). This means that there were markedly more residents who spoke German at home in Warringah and Pittwater in 2011 than in 2006.

Figure 2: Percentage of residents speaking German at home

Third, the census data also allow us to compare the figures of residents born in Germany with the figures for those who claim German as a home language. We can use ‘born in Germany’ as a proxy for ‘speaking German as a first language.’ Admittedly, this is a crude measure as it excludes ethno-linguistic minorities born in Germany as well as German speakers from Austria, Switzerland and other European countries. It also excludes those Australian-born residents who speak German as their first language. Even so, relating the number of Germany-born residents to that of German speakers allows us to gauge language maintenance and shift: if the number of those who claim German as their home language is lower than the number of Germany-born residents, we can consider this as evidence of language shift from German to English in the first generation. If, on the other hand, the number of those who claim German as their home language exceeds the number of Germany-born residents, then we can consider this as evidence of language maintenance. These additional German speakers can be assumed to be mostly second-generation Australians of German ancestry. They might also include intermarried families. The latter would be particularly intriguing as the sociolinguistics literature typically assumes that exogamy results in the adoption of the majority language (i.e. English) as the family language.

Figure 3: Residents who claim German as their home language as a percentage of the Germany-born

Figure 3 confirms what we know from the literature about language maintenance among German migrants – but only for Australia as a whole and for the Greater Sydney area. In both these locales the number of residents who speak German at home is much lower than the number of the Germany-born. In Australia, there were 108,001 Germany-born residents in 2011 but only 80,370 who used German as their home language. The figures for Greater Sydney are 19,340 and 15,894 respectively. That means the rate of language shift from German to English is at least 25% in Australia as a whole and at least 17% in the Greater Sydney area.

Against this background, the figures for Warringah, Pittwater and Ku-ring-gai are highly exceptional. With the number of German speakers between 11.7 and 13.1 per cent higher than the number of Germany-born residents, the German language is clearly thriving in these areas.

Can this be just a coincidence with the fact that a high-quality bilingual English-German immersion school is available to the residents of these areas? I don’t think so. While mindful of the fact that correlation does not equal causality, the data presented here would plausibly suggest that the presence of GISS has attracted both Australian residents born in Germany and Australian residents speaking German at home (two overlapping but not identical categories) to Warringah, Pittwater and, to a lesser degree, Ku-ring-gai.

Furthermore, these data would also seem to suggest that it is the presence of GISS that enables local residents to raise their children bilingually. A project that is not feasible for many German speakers elsewhere in Sydney and in Australia – however much they might wish for it.

Clyne, Michael (2005). Australia’s Language Potential. Sydney, UNSW Press.

Chinese university students in a debate, 2011 (Photo by Nikki Feng)

Public speaking can constitute an excellent language learning tool, as I discovered through participating in public speaking activities in China. Over time in these activities, participants became better public speakers in both their first and second languages (L1 and L2) AND improved their L2 in other ways.

The public speaking activities I participated in included an adults’ public speaking club, students’ advocacy training and university classes. I joined Beijing Bilingual Toastmasters to develop my Mandarin, other members were learning English. We all had to chair meetings, speak off-the-cuff, evaluate others and prepare speeches in both languages.

Together with others, I also designed and implemented a public speaking tournament at a Chinese NGO. Through experiential activities we trained Chinese university students. Students could pre-select participation in Mandarin or English, and, in practice, were free to code-switch. Finally, I also taught public communication at a Beijing university to one cohort of Chinese students and one international cohort, mostly non-native English speakers. Both groups were required to deliver short unprepared speeches, prepared speeches and debates in English.

Most learners in these activities got nervous about public speaking (myself included). However, our discomfort helped us succeed as uneasiness about public speaking served to channel and divert L2 anxiety. Public speaking helped learners focus on an overarching communicative goal, rather than stalling on every sentence. Particularly with the advocacy trainees, public speaking seemed a challenging step up from other L2 tasks, such that other L2 situations became comparatively less stressful. In my own case, the organisation and rhythm of a speech at Toastmasters kept me from continuously seeking the perfect phrase. Instead, I used my L2 resources better to avoid the embarrassment of failing to make a speech, a prospect that was much more stressful than the discomfort of making a small error.

Public speaking in an inclusive environment

Like with any public speaking activity, some participants dreaded speaking. That discomfort doesn’t necessarily make public speaking bad for language learning. Overcoming a fear or learning something you didn’t realise you could learn are empowering. Of course, public speaking can also be disempowering if it serves to crush the learner’s confidence.

The discomfort of public speaking can make speakers self-effacing, which seems to discourage people from showing off. In my experience, rather than creating competition, which may discourage learners from trialing new uses of their L2, the three public speaking activities constituted highly supportive environments. In particular, the Bilingual Toastmasters Club and the advocacy training tournament were both new initiatives, so each learner was also contributing to getting them off the ground. A common cause can help create an inclusive language environment. As group membership was not reliant solely on  language, learners could practise their L2 without risking their group inclusion. Learners had chosen to join Toastmasters and the advocacy training in order to improve both their public speaking and their L2. Such agency also contributed to the inclusive learning environment.

Moreover, public speaking was being practiced through sequential lessons and with feedback, creating an environment markedly different from a learner delivering a speech in their L2 to a group of non-learners, e.g. at a conference. Speaking to fellow participants, people saw themselves as competent adults choosing to learn a new skill, rather than as deficient learners. They were therefore likely to see other participants reciprocally. The groups respectfully listened, clapped and congratulated each other, offered constructive tips and discussed ideas raised by the speaker, and then had a go delivering speeches themselves. All of this validated each speaker not only as a public speaker but also as an effective L2 communicator. In addition, there was no perfect bilingual taking the authoritative teacher role, so feedback was reciprocal.

Public speaking as a ‘real world’ challenge

Finally, the public speaking activities described here demanded real communication but with low stakes. Using an L2 for ‘real-world’ communication can build communicative skills and develop a learner’s confidence. However, reciprocal public speaking simulates the ‘real world:’ there is no exploitative taxi driver to rip off the learner and no high-stakes assessment. All there is to public speaking in these contexts is a little discomfort which the learner is not facing alone. In this way, public speaking may be a relief, not a threat, to those otherwise learning their L2 outside the cocoon of the classroom.

The National Institute of the English Language in Tehran has used the slogan “A new language is a new life” for more than 50 years

I’m preparing my lecture on “Internationalization and Multilingualism” for a language teaching conference in Bangkok later this week and I’ve been looking for a pithy proverb or quote about the joys of language learning. I’ve discovered more than I can possibly use and so am sharing some below.

The idea that learning a new language extends your horizons, makes you wiser and allows you to live your life more fully can be found in a number of intellectual traditions. This idea is based on the fact that each language is related to a particular cultural and intellectual tradition and a particular world view. As the language philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein put it:

Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt. (“The limits of my language are the limits of my world.”)

Obviously, one way to extend the limits of one language is to learn another one. For instance, the medieval Franciscan friar Roger Bacon, who was also known as doctor mirabilis (“wonderful scholar”), described language learning as the main way to gaining wisdom:

Notitia linguarum est prima porta sapientiae. (“Knowledge of languages is the main door to wisdom.”)

A Chinese proverb makes the same point:

学一门语言，就是多一个观察世界的窗户。(“To learn a language is to have one more window from which to look at the world.”)

I have not been able to discover any further information about the context of this saying and maybe one of our Chinese readers can help us out! A similar Persian proverb, for instance, has been used as the slogan of a the Tehran-based language teaching institute National Institute of the English Language (NIEL) for over 50 years and has since acquired the status of an international proverb:

یک زبان جدید یک زندگی جدید است. (“A new language is a new life.”)

There seems to be wide agreement with the idea that a new language is a new life and makes us more human. This Turkish proverb provides another example (again, further details about the context would be welcome!):

Bir dil bir insan, iki dil iki insan. (“One language, one person; two languages, two persons.”)

The first president of Czechoslovakia after WWI, Tomáš G. Masaryk, made the same point when he wrote:

Kolik jazyků znáš, tolikrát jsi člověkem. (“The more languages you know, the more human you are.”)

While I was looking for proverbs and sayings about the value of language learning, I also discovered a fair number of proverbs that have a more nationalistic tone and celebrate the mother tongue (whichever one it may be …) as superior to all other languages. I’m not going to reproduce any of these quotes here but will leave the last word to one of the great writers in the German language, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who argued that unless you know foreign languages you are not qualified to speak about your own language:

Wer fremde Sprachen nicht kennt, weiß nichts von der Eigenen. (Those who don’t know foreign languages know nothing of their own.)

Do you know any other quotes or sayings about language learning and multilingualism?

Multilingual Hyderabad (Source: Wikimedia)

It is by now widely known that bilingualism delays the onset of dementia. What is less widely known is the fact that this knowledge is almost exclusively derived from Canadian research conducted by Ellen Bialystok and her team (e.g., Bialystock et al., 2007). The data for these studies come from comparing monolingual English-speaking native-born Canadian dementia sufferers with their bilingual counterparts. The bilinguals are all migrants to Canada who had learned English during adolescence or young adulthood and come from a variety of first-language backgrounds with Central and Eastern Europeans predominating.

This data base raises an obvious problem: is it bilingualism that delays the onset of dementia or is it the fact of migration or other confounding variables?

Research published in Neurology last week addresses exactly this bias in a study of the relationship between bilingualism and onset of dementia in a non-migrant population in India. The researchers, Alladi et al., investigated age at onset of dementia in a group of more than 600 dementia sufferers in Hyderabad, the capital of Andhra Pradesh. Hyderabad constitutes a highly diverse linguistic environment: the official languages of Andhra Pradesh are Telugu and Urdu; English and Hindi are widely spoken due to their official status on the national level; other languages with significant numbers of speakers include Tamil, Marathi and Kannada.

Bi- and multilingualism are indigenous to Hyderabad – as they are to most of India – and bi- and multilinguals do not systematically differ from monolinguals on migration status or other variables.

In this cohort, the researchers found that the onset of dementia in the bilingual population was delayed by 4.5 years (a finding very similar to the 4.3 years found by Bialystok et al. in Canada).

A variable that often correlates with bilingualism in these studies is education and here Alladi et al. are also breaking new ground by including an illiterate cohort. Among illiterates (defined as people without any formal education), the protective effect of bilingualism was even greater: the onset of dementia in bilingual illiterates was 6 years later than in their monolingual counterparts.

Why does speaking more than one language have these protective effects? Having to switch between languages on a regular basis enhances “executive control:” making frequent linguistic choices – activating one language and suppressing another – is a form of practicing cognitive multitasking. Like other forms of cognitive practice – participating in continuing education, undertaking stimulating intellectual activities, engaging in physical exercise – bilingualism thus contributes to an individual’s “cognitive reserve” and wards off the effects of aging a bit longer.

Confirmation that bilingualism delays the onset of dementia in a different bilingual population than the one studied to date is good news for bilinguals.

Even more importantly, the study by Alladi et al. makes a significant contribution to bilingualism research by extending the evidence base to a population with a very different sociolinguistic profile from the one that predominates in the literature. Even so, psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic approaches to bilingualism still have a long way to go before they will truly meet.

The gap between the psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics of bilingualism is nicely illustrated by another of Alladi et al.’s findings: in the Hyderabad sample, the protective effect of bilingualism does not increase with speaking more than two languages, i.e. from the perspective of the delayed onset of dementia, trilingualism or quadrilingualism do not offer any more benefits than bilingualism. This finding is in contrast to another Canadian study (Chertkow et al., 2010). Those researchers found – similarly to Bialystok et al. – that the onset of dementia was delayed in bilingual immigrants to Canada and in French-speaking Canadians. However, they did not find that bilingualism was similarly beneficial for English-speaking Canadians. In fact, in that study the onset of dementia was later in monolingual English-speaking Canadians than in bilingual English-speaking Canadians. For language learning and use to have a protective effect for English-speaking Canadians, they needed to be at least trilingual. Chertkow et al. concluded that bilingualism was sometimes beneficial in delaying the onset of dementia but multilingualism was always beneficial.

Alladi et al. draw on sociolinguistics, specifically language ideologies, to explain their differential findings:

In places in which an official dominant language coexists with a number of minority languages, it can be reasonably assumed that the amount of language switching between languages is proportional to the number of languages spoken: the more languages people know, the more occasion they will have to switch between them. In the strongly trilingual environment of Hyderabad with Telugu, [Urdu] and English being used extensively and interchangeably in both formal and informal environments, with high levels of code switching and mixing, it could be speculated that those speaking 2 languages have already reached a maximum level of switching and the knowledge of additional languages will not be able to increase it. Such an interpretation would be supported by the view that neural mechanisms underlying cognitive control demands in bilingual communities with high levels of code switching are different from bilingual communities with practice in avoiding language switching or mixing. (Alladi et al., 213, pp. 4f.)

One of the frustrating aspects of much psycholinguistic research addressing the cognitive advantages – or otherwise – of bi- and multilingualism lies in the fact that the findings of different researchers frequently conflict. As long as bi- and multilingualism are taken as unitary phenomena inherent in the individual, this will always be the case. Not only do we need to extend the evidence base to include different linguistic, cultural and national contexts, we also need to bring psycho- and sociolinguistic research together to get a better understanding of what “bilingualism” might actually mean in a particular context. Alladi et al. have taken a most welcome step in the right direction.

References

Alladi S, Bak TH, Duggirala V, Surampudi B, Shailaja M, Shukla AK, Chaudhuri JR, & Kaul S (2013). Bilingualism delays age at onset of dementia, independent of education and immigration status. Neurology PMID: 24198291
Bialystok E, Craik FI, & Freedman M (2007). Bilingualism as a protection against the onset of symptoms of dementia. Neuropsychologia, 45 (2), 459-64 PMID: 17125807
Chertkow H, Whitehead V, Phillips N, Wolfson C, Atherton J, & Bergman H (2010). Multilingualism (but not always bilingualism) delays the onset of Alzheimer disease: evidence from a bilingual community. Alzheimer disease and associated disorders, 24 (2), 118-25 PMID: 20505429