Imagine stepping into a classroom where students expect you to embody English in its “native” form, fluency, and culture. For many non-native English-speaking teachers (NNESTs) in Australia, this expectation is a daily challenge. Yet, these teachers refuse to let such pressures define them. Instead, they embrace a “hybrid professional becoming”—an ongoing process of identity formation—seeing themselves, in many ways, as “cyborgs” in the classroom.

Inspired by Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto, NNESTs use the cyborg metaphor to navigate and redefine their professional lives. They mix their multilingual and multicultural lived experiences with digital tools and fluid teaching methods, transcending rigid binaries of “native” versus “non-native” speakers. In this role, they create richer, more inclusive learning environments that challenge hegemonies.

Breaking Down the Native-Speaker “Myth”

Australian classrooms are highly diverse, yet the teaching workforce remains predominantly English monolingual and native-speaking. Many students here learn English as an additional language, making teachers’ lived experiences crucial for bridging linguistic and cultural gaps. However, native-speakerism—an age-old ideology favouring native English speakers—still shapes perceptions. NNESTs are often viewed through a deficit lens, yet they challenge this by showing that effective English teaching goes beyond birthplace or accent.

Phở bò (Image credit: Vinnie Cartabiano, Wikipedia)

Consider Natalie, a teacher from Bangladesh. Despite her experience, she often felt misjudged: “I didn’t just sense that students valued native English-speaking teachers more—I was even asked to be replaced by native speakers before I had a chance to start speaking”. Though these intersectional judgments were hard to ignore, Natalie turned them into a source of multiplicity. “It made me work harder to show that my teaching had depth and cultural awareness,” she explains.

To engage her students, Natalie wove stories, humour, and cultural anecdotes into her lessons, using language-bridging strategies to foster inclusivity. For her Vietnamese students, she joked about the pronunciation differences between “phở” (a noodle soup) and the English word “fur”, drawing laughter as they discussed similar linguistic misunderstandings. For her Lebanese students, she shared stories about common culinary traditions, sparking discussions about cultural similarities and differences. By weaving in phrases like “cảm ơn” (thank you) with her Vietnamese students and “Malual noor” (family is wealth) with her Sudanese students, she created a space where language and cultural understanding flourished, bridging worlds in a shared learning journey.

Embracing the Cyborg Identity in Teaching

Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto frames the cyborg identity as one of assembling diverse parts into a constantly evolving whole. For NNESTs, this hybrid identity defies narrow definitions of an English teacher. Their methods connect students with English while honouring their own cultural heritage, engaging students in ways that promote inclusivity.

Mahati, an Australian qualified teacher from India, exemplifies this hybridity. Though passionate about teaching, adjusting to Australian classrooms wasn’t easy. After working various odd jobs, she found her place in adult migrant education. “Teaching for me is not just a job—it’s my second home” (मेरे लिए पढ़ाना सिर्फ एक नौकरी नहीं है—यह मेरा दूसरा घर है।), she shares. Entwining her cultural heritage in literature and music with modern teaching tools, Mahati creates meaningful connections with her students. “We end sessions with fun songs from Sing with Me Book 1, and I incorporate technology to keep students engaged”, she explains. This approach enriches her classroom with a dynamic, inclusive atmosphere.

Reflective Practice: A Tool for Hybrid Becoming

Reflection is essential to this cyborg-like emergence. For NNESTs, critical reflection goes beyond simple self-assessment; it’s a transformative process to reshape and redefine their roles, tailoring their approaches to the diverse needs of multilingual classrooms and imagining themselves as cosmopolitan teachers of English.

Natalie’s experience with reflective practice exemplifies this plasticity. Despite her extensive teaching background, she continually revisits her lessons to meet her students’ evolving needs. “One of my students once laughed at me for mispronouncing a Vietnamese dish,” she recalls with a smile. “It was a learning moment for both of us—I embraced it and encouraged my students to teach me more about their culture”. Through such exchanges, Natalie moves beyond rigid teaching roles, fostering an environment of mutual learning and responsiveness.

Janaki’s story further illustrates this process. Initially, she felt out of place teaching refugees and migrants in the AMEP (Adult Migrant English Program), many of whom had experienced significant hardship. “It’s been humbling—I had to understand their backgrounds and be patient”, she shares. Reflecting on her experiences, Janaki adapted her methods, drawing on colleagues’ advice and exploring new strategies to better serve her students.

Technology: Expanding the Cyborg Identity

Technology plays a crucial role in helping these teachers develop their cyborg identities. Digital tools enable them to adapt and extend their teaching practices, creating a more inclusive classroom environment.

Namani, a young teacher who initially felt intimidated by her non-native status, illustrates this shift. She struggled with technology, worried about being seen as less competent. “I was so concerned if something went wrong with a digital tool”, she recalls. But instead of avoiding it, she mastered tools like MS Teams and Zoom, transforming her classroom. “Once I felt confident, I realized technology was actually empowering me to be a better teacher”, she reflects.

Frida took this approach even further during the pandemic, recording demo classes to improve timing and engagement. Her experience with technology underscores the cyborg concept, intermingling cultural knowledge with technical proficiency to support students. Using online platforms, she stayed connected despite the distance, teaching her students not just English but also essential digital literacy skills.

Moving from Marginalization to Empowerment

The cyborg identity empowers NNESTs to transcend limitations imposed by native-speakerism. By embracing hybridity, they resist marginalization and actively redefine their roles, affirming their experiences as cosmopolitan educators of English. The cyborg metaphor captures a journey from marginalization to empowerment, where NNESTs reclaim the narrative and leverage their unique identities as strengths.

Laura’s journey illustrates this shift. Coming from a small town in the Philippines, she initially faced students who doubted her due to her accent. “I noticed some of my students were unsure of me, maybe because of my accent”, she recalls. Though it initially unsettled her, Laura decided to use it as a teaching tool. “I always wanted to be a teacher—even as a kid, I’d teach my dolls and pretend to mark papers”, she says with a smile. By sharing her story, Laura highlighted the richness of multilingualism, encouraging students to explore their identities and celebrating diversity in her classroom.

One of Jasha’s most powerful stories involves a Lebanese student whose linguistic journey reflected the beauty of multilingualism. “She spoke French and Arabic at home, then moved to Israel, where her three boys started school”, Jasha recalls. By the time they relocated to Australia, the boys had developed a unique assemblage, mixing French, Arabic, Hebrew, and English in daily conversations. “Listening to them was an absolute joy—I’d try to catch familiar English words,” she shares. This experience reinforced Jasha’s philosophy: learning English best occurs immersively, by discussing texts without a dictionary and encouraging students to “think” in English through activities like jumbled sentences and interactive games. Her approach to grammar focuses on context rather than correctness. “Grammar is just a means to an end”, she says, embedding it within the meaning her students wish to convey.

Toward a New Paradigm in English Language Teaching

The lived experiences of these NNESTs underscore the need for a shift in English language teaching paradigms. Embracing cyborg identities, these teachers demonstrate that an educator’s value lies not in their accent or birthplace but in their hybridity, engagement, and inspiration. Recognizing NNESTs’ hybrid professionalism can help educational institutions move beyond outdated binaries and create spaces where diverse voices are celebrated.

Through their stories, NNESTs like Natalie, Mahati, Janaki, Namani, Laura, and Jasha embody Haraway’s cyborg vision: educators who transcend boundaries, integrate facets of their identities, and reshape the future of education. By embracing cyborg identities, they enrich the classroom and create a new model for English teaching in today’s interconnected world. In their journey from marginalization to empowerment, these teachers remind us that education is a space for hybridity, inclusivity and horizons of possibility—qualities that benefit students, educators, and society alike.

Reference

The blog is based on:
Nigar, N., Kostogriz, A., & Hossain, I. (2024, aop). Hybrid professional identities: Exploring non-native English-speaking teachers’ lived experiences through the Cyborg Manifesto. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 1–23.

Author Bios

Dr Nashid Nigar teaches at the Faculty of Education, University of Melbourne, and has diverse experience in English language and literacy teaching, academic writing, and teacher education. Her recently completed PhD thesis, focusing on language teacher professional identity at Monash University, was graded as Exceptional—Of the highest merit, placing within the top 0.1% to fewer than 5% of international doctorates. Her ongoing research interests include language teacher professional identity and language/literacy learning and teaching.

Alex Kostogriz is a Professor in Languages and TESOL Education at the Faculty of Education, Monash University. Alex’s current research projects focus on the professional practice and ethics of language teachers, teacher education and experiences of beginning teachers.

A wonderful companion read to this episode is Distinguished Ingrid Piller’s Can we escape the textocalypse? Academic publishing as community building.

If you liked this episode, check out more resources on technology and language: Will technology make language rights obsolete?; the podcast Tech Won’t Save Us; and Are language technologies counterproductive to learning?

(Image credit: EduResearch Matters)

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Transcript (by Brynn Quick, added on February 21, 2025)

Brynn: Welcome to the Language on the Move Podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Brynn Quick and I’m a PhD candidate in linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. My guest today is Dr. Sue Ollerhead.

Sue grew up in multilingual South Africa, a country with 12 official languages, where she learned English, Afrikaans, Isizulu, Isikosa, and French at school and university. She is currently a Senior Lecturer in Languages and Literacy Education and the Director of the Secondary Education Program at Macquarie University. Her expertise lies in English language and literacy learning and teaching in multicultural and multilingual education contexts.

Her research interests include translanguaging, multilingual pedagogies, literacy across the curriculum and oracy development in schools. Sue is currently Editor of TESOL in Context, the peer-reviewed journal of the Australian Council of TESOL Associations. She serves on the Executive Board of the English as a Medium of Instruction Centre, EMI, at Macquarie University.

Today, Sue and I are going to chat about an article that she’s recently written for the Australian Association for Research in Education, entitled, Teachers Truly Know Students and How They Learn, Does AI? We’ll discuss the emergence of AI platforms like ChatGPT and how they are affecting teacher training and student learning. Sue, welcome to the show, and thank you so much for joining us today.

Dr Ollerhead: Hi, Brynn. Lovely to be here today.

Brynn: To get us started, can you tell us a bit about yourself and about how you became an educator in the English as an additional language space?

Dr Ollerhead: Thanks, Brynn. As you said, I grew up in what you would call a super diverse country, South Africa, which is also very multilingual with 12 official languages. So as well as you said, I learned English, Afrikaans, Isizulu, Isikosa, and French at school.

I would also hear a plethora of language mixing or translanguaging by people all around me all the time. And when I finished university, I began my teaching career at a TESOL Medium Primary School and then went on to teach Zulu-speaking factory workers in South Africa’s Adult Migrant Literacy Program. I’ve also spent a large part of my working life teaching English and working in educational publishing in Sub-Saharan Africa and the United Kingdom.

So always within very multilingual and multi-cultural context. And I guess what surprised me when moving to Australia in my mid-30s, was the monolingualness of the schools and working environments that I was working in, which seemed to be at odds with what I knew to be a significant proportion of people living in Australia, speaking languages other than English at home. It was almost as though those became invisible in the public sphere and English seemed to dominate everything.

So, I guess that questioning of monolingual public spaces and how they include or exclude people has driven a lot of my research work. I think particularly how children who speak languages other than English at home can be excluded within classrooms that adopt an English only approach to learning. I guess the focus of my academic career over the past 10 to 15 years has always been to train students to become knowledgeable, reflective, and responsive teachers of learners from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds.

Brynn: That’s amazing. You really did have a lot of multilingual experience. That’s so cool that you were able to be in an environment with so many different languages like that.

And I think that that must be really useful for you as an educator for not just students like primary or secondary school students, but now that you teach future teachers how to teach. So, let’s talk about this article that you’ve written called Teachers Truly Know Students and How They Learn, Does AI. So, this article discusses the use of AI and platforms like ChatGPT in this teacher training, which you do.

And one important part of learning how to teach is learning how to write effective lesson plans. I mean, I remember doing that for my own teacher training course that I went through when I became a TESOL educator as well. So, talk to us about, I guess, the importance of lesson plans and also about this emerging use of AI in lesson plan creation and what we know about the percentage of teachers who are actually using AI to create their lesson plans.

Dr Ollerhead: I think I heard a statistic the other day that teachers have, on average, about eight minutes to plan lessons over and above the other duties they have. So, we know that teacher workload is a very big issue. And there’s no surprise then that busy teachers are turning to GenAI models like ChatGPT or Perplexity to streamline lesson planning.

I certainly am no expert on AI, but it’s very much part of the landscape now in teacher education. And we know that for teachers, simply by entering prompts, like generate a three-lesson sequence on maybe something like Agricultural Innovation in Australia, they can quickly receive a detailed teaching program tailored to the lesson content, compete with learning outcomes, suggested resources, classroom management tips, and more. So, this is fantastic.

It represents a pragmatic solution to busy teachers, to overwhelming workloads. And it also explains why they’re being taken up quite readily by school teachers and also in places of higher education and teacher training environments. And as far as how many teachers use AI for lesson planning, I suppose a useful survey would be one that was run by the Australian Association of Independent Schools in 2023, where they reported over 70% of primary teachers and 80% of secondary teachers were using generative AI tools in their work.

And the lesson planning or learning design was rated as the top AI assisted task. Now, granted the survey dates back to August 2023, but one could assume that uptake is even greater by now. And in my work as a secondary teacher educator, my observations of AI use amongst teachers across government, independent and Catholic sectors generally support these findings.

Brynn: I can understand why, honestly, because, I mean, we are both educators and I get it, our workloads are huge, and especially if you think about teachers who, I guess, are working in the primary and the secondary school levels, they are not just working from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. every day. They are putting in so many more hours that people don’t actually see happening.

And then to have to create, not just create lesson plans, but I think maybe people don’t realize that various departments of education or different sectors require you to document these lesson plans in a very specific way and you need to map them onto learning outcomes and objectives and things like that.

So, it’s not just quote unquote creating a lesson plan. You have to really put a lot of effort into it. And if you’re saying that teachers are only getting something like eight minutes to do that, that’s unfathomable. That’s untenable.

Dr Ollerhead: Absolutely. Very, very overwhelming. And we know that lesson planning is really, really important.

A well-planned lesson is really fundamental to classroom management, to effective differentiation, to really, really considering the accessibility of the content. But it is a big task on top of, as you say, all the other tasks that teachers are having to fulfill on a daily basis.

Brynn: You just mentioned something called differentiation. And I think that this is a really important point to talk about. So, talk to us about this concept of differentiation in teaching.

What does it mean? And why is it a concept that teachers need to keep in mind when they’re planning their lessons?

Dr Ollerhead: The D word, yes, differentiation. It’s probably one of the most important and most challenging things to learn when training to become a teacher. And it really, Brynn, it really lies at the heart of Australian Professional Teaching Standard 1.3, which is “know students and how they learn”.

And especially knowing about how to differentiate for students from different cultural, linguistic, religious and socio-economic backgrounds. Differentiation in general refers to the practice of tailoring instruction to meet the varied learning profiles, backgrounds and abilities of each child or student in your class. And it starts with really understanding the diversity profile of your class.

So, for example, I said in the article that let’s say you teach a class where 95% of your class comes from a language background other than English. And you might think, well, that’s unrealistic. Actually, in Sydney, it really isn’t.

There are many areas where that would be the norm rather than the exception. In fact, in New South Wales, one in three students comes from a language background other than English. And in your class, your class comprises a mix of high achieving, gifted and talented individuals, some of whom are expert English users, while others might be newly arrived in Australia and they might have been assessed as emerging on the ELD Learning Progression, which is a tool that we use to measure where students are in their English language learning trajectory.

Now, these students need targeted language support to be able to even access the content of the curriculum. And let’s say your students come from various backgrounds. Some might be Aboriginal Australian students, others might come from countries as diverse as Sudan, China, Afghanistan, Bangladesh.

Some might even have spent three or more years in refugee camps before arriving in Australia, with no access to formal education at all. Others live in Sydney without their families. So, yeah, some are highly literate.

And while others have yet to master basic academic literacies and literacy skills in English. So given this diverse scenario in one class, and as I said, that is actually often the norm, rather than the exception. Differentiation can include things like the types of teaching strategies that you use.

So, using a variety of teaching strategies to engage students at different levels. So, for example, your highly proficient English users might work on extension activities that challenge their critical thinking. New arrivals who are still coming to grips with English as a medium of instruction could benefit from visual aids, graded texts, interactive group work to help them grasp key concepts.

We could also differentiate in terms of the assessment that we use. So, we might implement diverse assessment strategies that allow students to demonstrate their understanding in ways that align with their language proficiency and educational background. So, this might include allowing students to present their knowledge through oral projects or visual representations rather than traditional written assessments.

I always give the example of the water cycle. A child doesn’t necessarily come to the classroom not knowing anything about the water cycle. It’s just that they’re not able to understand it.

They’re not able to express that knowledge in English. So, giving them another mode through which to express that knowledge is really, really important. Of course, language support is very important as well.

So, for those students who are especially new arrivals, who are emergent on the EAL/D learner progression, we can provide targeted language support to scaffolding techniques that can involve using sentence starters, graphic organisers, active vocabulary acquisition activities, specifically designed for the content being taught. You know, in second year, we have a lot of technical vocabulary that is very specific to the field in which you’re teaching. So, for example, the word culture in science means something very different to the way it’s used in society and culture, for example.

And we actually need to think, well, this needs to be, these differences need to be made explicit for our learners, especially those who come from EAL/D backgrounds. But I guess one aspect that’s often overlooked is cultural differentiation. And this refers to modifying lesson content to be culturally relevant and accessible to all students.

So, it’s not just a sink or swim situation where we expect students to come to Australia and understand everything about Australia and its culture. What it means is integrating examples and materials into your lesson that reflect the backgrounds of your students and the various cultural contexts they come from and connecting your curriculum to their experiences. So, Robin Maloney and Leslie Harbin and Susan Oguro have written an amazing book that actually encourages teachers to teach for linguistic responsiveness.

And they encourage teachers to ask questions like, before you teach content, it’s really helpful to ask yourself questions such as, what are my own biases and blind spots related to the subject matter? What insights might my students have that I’m unaware of? So, for example, we know in maths, all countries have mathematical systems that are very particular to their cultural context.

And those can be very rich learning opportunities for all students in the classroom. Also important is what sensitivities could arise in discussions about this content with concerning values, knowledge and language. And I think most importantly, how can I teach this material in a culturally and linguistically responsive manner that promotes my students’ well-being and achievement?

So, do my students see themselves reflected in this content? Or is it presented in a very sort of Australian, monocultural, monolingual way? That is the challenge that I always set for my students to master as teachers who are going into contexts where they’re going to be teaching in very diverse settings.

Brynn: And what I’m hearing in that explanation is that teachers are not just planning this, you know, one lesson plan, saying, okay, everybody in the class is going to be able to do this skill and they’re all at this level. Because even if we had a classroom of monolingual English Australian born students, there is no classroom in which every single student is at the same level on particular skills or in particular classes. So, teachers are already having to do this work constantly, even if they’re in this sort of more monolingual, monocultural environment.

But what I’m hearing you say, and it’s true, is that our reality, as people who live in Sydney and the surrounding suburbs, is that we are becoming more and more and more multilingual, multicultural, and that this is just reality, that teachers are having to now have these additional thoughts and these additional considerations as they plan lesson plans. And the thing is, with this expectation of, well, can teachers just use AI to plan lesson plans? Now we have to think, well, can AI actually take these things into consideration?

Dr Ollerhead: That’s exactly right, Brynn. And it really gets to the heart of what we know about teaching. We know that teaching is not just a science.

It’s not just a process of knowing a series of principles, a series of methods and applying them. It’s actually also an art in terms of that element of, I always say that I think the most important material for success as a teacher is the ability to listen well. So, a teacher that’s in tune with their students will really by default be able to differentiate because in the moment they’re hearing, OK, I’m not sure if my class has actually been taken along with me in this lesson.

I think I might have lost them somewhere. So, I’m not going to ask the question, does everybody understand? Because of course, you’re going to get the answer, yes, of course.

Nobody wants to say they don’t understand. It’s really about the art of listening in, of asking the right questions. And then based on the answers you get to those questions, saying, OK, how can I tailor my delivery to respond to the needs of my learners?

So, I can do many things really, really well. And there’s no doubt there’s a role for it in lesson planning. But I think I guess what I was hoping to explore in that article is that there’s an essential element of listening that is very human, listening and responding with empathy in the moment contingently, that at the moment is still very human, I think.

And I would like to think that with the rise of AI, and we’ve seen it just completely overtake all our expectations, instead of trying to compete with AI, I think what we need to do is to get better at what we do, and that’s being human. And I think that very human empathetic element of listening to our students, finding out more about who they are, where they come from, how they’re feeling today, are they actually even in a space to be learning about equations when they’re still trying to understand the new culture that they found themselves in. So, I guess that’s my biggest hope is that we’re going to graduate a generation of teachers who are really checking in and attuned to the wonderful diversity we have in our classrooms.

Brynn: I think that the whole concept of differentiation in teachers is inherently human. And another part that you talk about in the article that I think is along the same lines is thinking about lesson plan creation in conjunction with the concept of the quote virtual school bag, which I love.

So, what is a virtual school bag? And why is it something that teachers need to think about when planning their lessons, especially when considering linguistic and cultural diversity within a classroom? And then there’s this question of can we expect AI to be able to consider a student’s virtual school bag?

Dr Ollerhead: I’m so glad you asked about that, because that to me has always been a really powerful visual metaphor. And that’s the concept of the virtual school bag comes from Pat Thompson and the work that Barbara Koma has done from the University of Queensland. They’ve done amazing work on looking at the rich cultural and linguistic resources that students from language backgrounds other than English come with to the classroom.

And they conceptualize it in the form of a visual metaphor. And they say that many children come to school with their virtual backpack that’s filled with things like cultural knowledge, geographical knowledge, practical knowledge of cultures and customs and skills from their own context. We call those funds of knowledge.

But what happens is that often they’re asked to leave that schoolbag at the classroom door and not to unpack it. And it’s only really the mainstream resources that are unpacked in the classroom. And so, they say it’s very dehumanizing if children are prevented from showing others what’s in their backpack, what they have to bring to learning, what they have to bring to the teacher.

You know, as teachers, we’re constant learners as well. So, I find that a very powerful metaphor. And you can only really discover what’s in students’ or children’s virtual backpack if you create a space in which all knowledges and cultures are valued in the classroom.

Now, AI is a tool, but it’s not an environment, it’s not a climate, it’s not an ecosystem where children feel safe. That is the teacher’s role. And so, I work a lot with a concept, a theory and a practice of full translanguaging.

And we call that a translanguaging space or a stance where the teacher does not have to be proficient in every single language of the classroom but makes space for the articulation of those languages and cultures throughout certain aspects of their teaching.

Brynn: I think that it gets to this point that I do think that we’ve been seeing more and more in education in general over the last even just decade, which is that we can’t expect every student in a classroom to fit into this one mould. I’m thinking of even just different neuro types or different learning styles, let alone linguistic and cultural backgrounds. And I do think that as a society, we’re getting better at making space for all of those differences.

But I think that we have to keep in mind this long educational tradition of almost trying to force the mainstream that we saw happening, you know, kind of since the beginning of education, really. You know, I’m thinking back to like one room schoolhouses and things like that. And we have to think, okay, we know that that did not work.

You know, we’ve, I mean, I’m a millennial, and that was still very much the education system that I grew up with, was trying to fit all of these kids into this one mould. And so, what I can almost hear is people saying, well, but if we’ve got these multilingual, multicultural students, shouldn’t they just have to learn English? Shouldn’t they just have to assimilate and fit into Australian culture?

But you mentioned the humanity of the teacher and the teacher really recognizing the humanity of the students. And, you know, some people might say that actually, you know, using AI to create these lesson plans, it’s fine, because AI can be more objective. It can almost, you know, force this mainstream.

So, tell me what you would say to those people that are saying, like, well, shouldn’t we all be sort of fitting into this one mould?

Dr Ollerhead: Yeah, that’s a great question, Brynn. And I think it kind of taps into some very powerful discourses at the moment about things like explicit teaching and, you know, being very clear about what the outcomes are for lessons. And there’s definitely merit to explicit teaching and making, you know, making visible the things that students need to achieve in a lesson.

What I want to emphasize is that including students’ cultures and language in the classroom is not antithetical to teaching them how to learn in English. In fact, what we find is that it supports their English learning. And you know why it does that?

It’s because it validates students’ identities. It sees what they come with as a strength and it gets them engaged in lesson content and lesson activities. If you come to school and you don’t see a place for yourself in learning, you’re going to disengage.

And we know that that is a big barrier to successful learning. So these things do not actually necessarily that they don’t preclude each other. So we need to remember that the complete understanding of a student’s unique cultural background, their personal experiences and their emotional needs is complex and often requires human empathy and insight.

And if you’re ever in a classroom, I’m really fortunate to work with some incredible teachers. And I see so many teachers who have been in the field for a very long time. They might not even call what they say differentiation, what they do as differentiation, but they do it instinctively because it’s second nature to them to just tap into where students are, to listen intently, to quickly in the moment tweak their instruction or their strategies to meet their students’ needs.

But we can’t expect new teachers to understand that. We can’t expect new teachers to have the wherewithal to immediately differentiate, especially because our classrooms are becoming more multicultural and multilingual, because of globalization, because of migration. But strangely enough in Australia, that hasn’t actually meant that our teaching practices have become attuned to that increasing diversity.

And it’s something we can’t shy away from. It’s actually something that needs to be dealt with not just in early childhood or primary or secondary, but also at universities. And we really need to, I guess, rethink this “it’s simpler if everybody learns English” because that just doesn’t cut it anymore. We know that it benefits everybody when we have plurality in classrooms where we can learn from each other, where there’s genuine intercultural sharing and understanding. And I guess what we want to do as teacher-trainers and teacher-educators is to say teaching is an ongoing learning process.

But if you understand from the outset that the key to being an effective teacher is actually exercising that empathy, exercising that insight, I think that sets you up for success and it certainly sets your learners up for success. We know that even though AI is amazing in the way that it can analyse and recommend resources related to a student’s virtual school bag, teachers still play a crucial role in ensuring that those resources are integrated in a way that is thoughtful and responsive to each student’s needs.

Brynn: I love that idea of not denying the fact that we have AI, AI is here, people are using it. I mean, this is a whole other episode, but we see students use it as well in their writing.

It’s not something that we can close our eyes to and say, “No, no, this doesn’t exist. Let’s just pretend like it’s 25 years ago.” So, I love that you’re acknowledging, yeah, it exists, it can be a tool for certain things, especially for those busy, busy teachers who have so much that they have to accomplish in such a short amount of time.

But I just really love this idea of fundamentally, teachers have to tap into their humanity and their empathy, and they have to recognize the humanity in their students in order to create a more meaningful and productive classroom, because it’s really only going to be a net positive when we have that integration of cultures and languages and students working together, because in our globalized world, that’s what they’re going to have to do when they’re grownups anyway, you know?

So, you said that you can see AI being used as a tool. Where do you see it going? Where do you think it’s heading in the education and teacher training sectors, for good or for bad?

Dr Ollerhead: Yeah, I mean, you’ve summarized it so well Brynn, but I think it’s, I guess my hope is, and again, I mean, I don’t have a crystal ball, and you know, there’ve just been such rapid changes within the last two years. But my hope is that it will become a symbiotic relationship, where, I mean, for sure, the educational sector will not simply adopt AI, it will embrace it as a catalyst for enhancement. But I think the key there is the word enhancement.

It augments things. It’s really amazing at generating big data sets. And you know, that’s what it does.

I don’t think we could ever hope to compete with that. But again, getting back to the hope that there can be a relationship between AI and education that is symbiotic. So I guess what I mean by that is sort of a balancing act where technology supports, not just supports, but actually amplifies the irreplaceable human qualities that drive effective teaching and learning.

And as AI continues to evolve, I’m excited about the possibilities it presents, I guess, for enriching education and empowering students and teachers. But I’m very much aware that we can’t deny that it’s here. But I’m also very wary of outsourcing crucial things like differentiation for control and linguistic diversity to AI, without actually understanding the fundamental knowledge on which we have to base our judicious use of lesson planning.

Brynn: I love that answer. I think that that’s a perfect summary of where we’re at and where, hopefully, we are headed. So, Sue, thank you so much for talking with me today, and thank you for being on the show.

Dr Ollerhead: It’s been a pleasure, Brynn. Thanks so much.

Brynn: And thank you for listening, everyone. If you liked listening to our chat today, please subscribe to the Language on the Move Podcast, leave a five-star review on your podcast app of choice, and recommend the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner, the New Books Network, to your students, colleagues, and friends. Until next time.

Broadly speaking, Croatian Studies in Australia attracts three groups of students: first, children and grandchildren of immigrants from former Yugoslavia who learned the language at home and want to study it formally to develop higher levels of proficiency, including academic literacies; second, students with a heritage connection who did not learn the language in the home but want to develop some level of proficiency to connect with extended family, also on visits back to Croatia; and third, a small but growing number of students, with no heritage connection who have developed an interest in Croatian for various reasons. The latter include mature age students who take up the challenge of learning another language later in life for reasons of personal interest and intellectual development.

Dr Jasna Novak Milić in the Croatian Studies Centre Library at Macquarie University

Croatian is a fascinating language in many ways and so the conversation is also a springboard to speak about language politics and language naming, both back in Croatia/former Yugoslavia and in the diaspora. Croatian speakers first came to Australia in the early 20th century but mass migration from former Yugoslavia was a phenomenon of the second half of the 20th century.

The Croatian Studies program at Macquarie University developed in this context and during Australia’s decisive turn to multiculturalism from the 1980s onward. The Croatian Studies Centre today enjoys strong community support through the Croatian Studies Foundation and is also benefitting from the commitment of the Croatian state, a member of the European Union, to the Croatian diaspora.

Beyond the specifics of Croatian language learning, our conversation also turned to broader issues related to “small” languages in Australian higher education, and why the availability of languages programs in higher education is critical for heritage language maintenance.

Enjoy the show!

This is early days for the Language on the Move Podcast, so please support us by subscribing to our channel on your podcast app of choice, leaving a 5-star review, and recommending the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.

Related resources

• About the Croatian Studies Centre at Macquarie University
• Study Croatian at Macquarie University
• “Easy Croatian” Podcast” hosted by Dr Jasna Novak Milić on SBS
• Keynote lecture by Dr Jasna Novak Milić, “Why Australia needs Croatian Studies“
• Petition to save Croatian, German, Greek, Italian, and Russian at Macquarie University

Join us on Thursday, December 14, at Macquarie University for a workshop to explore Linguistic Inclusion Today.

The aim of the workshop is to take stock of the state of linguistic inclusion in Australia, as we see ever-increasing linguistic diversity clashing with the continued monolingual hegemony of English. Following our CfP, we have put together an exciting program of keynote lectures and panels focusing on multilingual practices and policies in families, schools, healthcare settings, and government.

The workshop includes a special symposium focusing on the situation of languages in Australian Higher Education. Languages programs at Australian universities operate under the ever-looming threat of cuts to small programs, a threat that has gained new currency due to the rise of automated translation and generative AI.

The symposium “Languages in Australian Higher Education” can be attended as part of the full-day workshop or as a standalone option. For background reading on declining language learning opportunities in Australian higher education, see this new article by Svetlana Printcev over at SBS.

Program

9:00-9:15 Welcome
9:15-10:15 Keynote: Alexandra Grey, Linguistic Inclusion and Good Governance in Multilingual Australia (Chair: Yixi Isabella Qiu) (view abstract)
10:15-10:30 Break
10:30-12:00 Panel, Multilingualism in Australian Families (Chair: Hanna Torsh) (view abstracts)

• Speaker 1: Priyanka Bose, Conceptualisation of family and language practice in family language policy research on migrants
• Speaker 2: Sithembinkosi Dube, Bringing emerging African languages into the social inclusion agenda
• Speaker 3: Undarmaa Munkhbayar, Heritage Language Maintenance in the Mongolian Community in Australia
• Speaker 4: Emily Pacheco, Sign language maintenance among children of migrant Deaf adults in the diaspora
• Speaker 5: Muhammad Iqwan Sanjani, Constructing transnational family language policy through translanguaging

12:00-1:00 Lunch
1:00-2:00 Keynote: Trang Nguyen, Language Policy and Individual Voices: Introducing “Individual Language Policy” (Chair: Jinhyun Cho) (view abstract)
2:00-2:15 Break
2:15-3:45 Panel, Language Polices for Inclusion in the 21^st Century (Chair: Loy Lising) (view abstracts)

• Speaker 6: Jie Zhang, Between vulnerability and agency: crisis communication with Deaf communities in Wuhan during the Covid pandemic
• Speaker 7: Brynn Quick, How are language barriers bridged in hospitals?
• Speaker 8: Natalie Skinner, Cultural and linguistic diversity in children with a disability affecting their communication
• Speaker 9: Yixi (Isabella) Qiu, Navigating epistemic injustice
• Speaker 10: Tazin Abdullah, Citizen science: inclusive practices in data collection

3:45-4:00 Break
4:00-5:30 Symposium, Languages in Australian Higher Education

• Keynote: Jasna Novak Milic, Language Preservation and Identity: The Story of Croatian Studies in Australia (view abstract)
• Chair: Ingrid Piller
• Discussants: Antonia Rubino, Mark Matic, Jane Hanley
• Zoom host: Agnes Bodis

5:30-7:30 Reception

Registration

Attendance is free but spaces are strictly limited so register asap to avoid disappointment.

There are three attendance options:

• Full day (register here) [sold out]
• Only symposium, Languages in Australian Higher Education, and Reception (register here) [sold out]
• Virtual attendance at only symposium, Languages in Australian Higher Education (register here)

Abstracts, Keynotes

Dr Alexandra Grey, UTS, Linguistic Inclusion and Good Governance in Multilingual Australia

This presentation reports on my 2018-2021 investigation into ‘Good Governance in Multilingual Urban Australia’. That project included three studies: an audit of NSW legislation and policy that does (not) provide a framework for decision-making and standards of multilingual government communications (undertaken with A Severin); a case study of such communication outputs from the NSW government, across portfolios (undertaken with A Severin); and a case study of multilingualism in public Covid-19 communications from NSW and Commonwealth governments.

The Covid case study also includes an analytic review of international human rights about language and health, as well as the commentary of international organizations as to how to take a rights-based approach to pandemic communications in order to fulfill certain international law obligations upon Australia (and other nations). That review found new expectations emerging that governments’ multilingual health communications be not merely partially available, but rather produced without (unreasonable) linguistic discrimination; with minority communities’ involvement at preparatory stages; strategic planning; and an eye to effectiveness. In explaining what more effective communication could entail, I advocate assessing government communications’ Availability, Accessibility, Acceptability and Adaptability — that is, the ‘Four As’ recognized by the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and crisis communications scholars.

In this keynote at Macquarie University’s Workshop on conceptual and methodological challenges in linguistic inclusion, I will explain my interdisciplinary methodology, present the key findings of each of these three studies, and draw them together by inquiring whether developments in governments’ public communications during the pandemic have given Australia any lasting improvements in the linguistic and social inclusion. The research leads to a novel suggestion for 3 Rs of response to recurrent problems in governments reaching, and including, linguistically diverse publics: (further) Research; Redesigning online communications; and Rights-based Regulation (or Standard Setting). I will end with a reflection on the path ahead for researchers by noting how three studies have each also given rise to an awareness of ‘dead-ends’ and a need for government-partnered research in this space.

Dr Trang Nguyen, Melbourne University, Language Policy and Individual Voices: Introducing “Individual Language Policy”

Language policy often refers to regulations and rules made by governmental or institutional bodies to determine and influence the use of languages in a society or community. Such a common understanding of the term may lead to an impression among the public and authorities that language policy making should be the task of officials and governors rather than ordinary people, thus potentially creating conceptual challenges in incorporating individual voices into the policy making process. Recognising that there is also a language policy at an individual level, which is a critical part of higher-layer language policies and a link of the complex language policy circle, may contribute to addressing these conceptual challenges.

In this talk, I will introduce the concept “individual language policy” which I built in reference to a combination of language policy theories in an attempt to attract attention to such a language policy at an individual level. I suggest that individual language policy is a kind of implicit policy that individuals discursively define and apply to themselves in their daily language behaviours under the influence of external forces and higher-level language policies in the environments where they are living. Individual language policy comprises three main components: practised language policy (guiding language practices), perceived language policy (informing language beliefs), and negotiated language policy (directing language management) (Nguyen, 2022). Individual language policy does not stand independent of other-level language policies, but can be considered as the first step on the path to the outcomes of the top-down policies (Grin, 2003). In our advocacy for policy change towards language inclusion and justice, we should, therefore, emphasise the importance of individual language speakers and their individual language policy, as “it is at the individual level that the success or failure of a language policy is finally revealed” (Spolsky, 2022, p.x).

Dr Jasna Novak Milić, Macquarie University, Language Preservation and Identity: The Story of Croatian Studies in Australia

Among the approximately 200,000 Croats believed to reside in Australia, a significant majority have undergone assimilation, with English often serving as their primary functional language. When the largest wave of Croatian immigrants arrived in Australia during the 1960s and 1970s, the struggle for linguistic identity accompanied them. This struggle led to the recognition of the Croatian language in Australia as early as 1979, well before the declaration of Croatian independence in 1991. Subsequently, ethnic schools were established, and in the 1980s, Croatian language courses were introduced at the high school level. In 1983, Macquarie University launched the study of Croatian language and culture, a program through which several thousand students have passed over its four decades of existence. Initially funded by the Croatian community in Australia, this program began receiving financial support from the government of the Republic of Croatia about two decades ago. This support reflects the recognition of the program’s significance in preserving the language and community identity. However, within the predominantly monolingual mindset, the future of Croatian Studies in Australia faces renewed uncertainty.

Abstracts, Multilingualism in Australian Families

Priyanka Bose, UNSW, Conceptualisation of family and language practice in family language policy research on migrants

Family language policy (FLP) is increasingly recognised as a distinct domain of language policy concerned with the family as an arena of language policy formulation and implementation. While FLP is a relatively new research area, its conceptualisation of family and language practice requires re-examination due to social changes and technological developments, including the expansion of digital communication within families and the rise of globally dispersed families, a product of global migration and transnationalism. In this systematic review of migrant FLP research, we investigate how the notions of family and language practice are conceptualised in research. Following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines, we identified a total of 163 articles for analysis. Our analysis reveals that the majority of studies were conducted in nuclear families, i.e., those consisting of a father, a mother, and one or more children. Studies also tend to conceptualise the family as fixed and physically located in one place. Paradoxically, around half of the studies acknowledge the presence of geographically dispersed family relations, but this does not necessarily affect their conceptualisation of what comprises a family. Language practice was conceptualised as physical and face-to-face communication in 51% of instances, with only 11% incorporating an analysis of digital communications. Based on our review, we recommend that FLP researchers researching migrant families reconceptualise the family as geographically dispersed and language practice as digital and multimodal when necessary. Such a reconceptualisation will help researchers understand the hitherto underexamined contributions of dispersed family members and multimodal digital
communications in migrant FLP.

Sithembinkosi Dube, MQ/UNSW, Bringing emerging African languages into the social inclusion agenda

When compared to other English-speaking nations, Australia is regarded as a leader in the provision of community language services (Edwards, 2004). Since the initial establishment of ethnic language schools, the government understood that community languages are critical for the equitable delivery of major community services (health, justice & social services). However, the current structures and policies for community language schools are blind to the smaller communities with emerging languages, thus undermining the social inclusion agenda (Piller & Takahashi, 2011). This talk will highlight how LangDentity, an online Shona-Ndebele Community school, is overcoming these hurdles to maintain Zimbabwean heritage languages.

Undarmaa Munkhbayar, MQ, Heritage Language Maintenance in the Mongolian Community in Australia

Maintaining heritage languages is of paramount importance to immigrants all over the world as the language is not just a communication tool. It carries our culture, tradition, belief, and identity. Australia is ideologically monolingual, yet factually multilingual and numerous minority languages exist here. Based on a small interview study with Mongolian families in Sydney, it was found that English is the main language of Mongolian children and parents struggle to support the heritage language. Sending children to Mongolian language community schools, opting for Mongolian language in the home, investing in extra tutoring sessions, joint reading, and perusing video contents can facilitate the preservation of Mongolian into the second generation.

Emily Pacheco, MQ, Sign language maintenance among children of migrant Deaf adults in the diaspora

About 90% of Deaf parents’ children are born hearing. Culturally, these individuals identify as Codas: Children of Deaf Adult(s). The linguistic practices of Codas have been minimally explored in sociolinguistics research. An aspect of this research is child language brokering (CLB), from which sign language brokering (SLB) emerged. This project aims to draw from these two concepts to investigate the experiences of children of migrant Deaf adults (Comdas). Through a scoping review and semi-structured interviews, data will be collected and later analysed through thematic analysis. By uncovering the experiences Comdas have towards SLB, this project hopes to highlight an often-overlooked population of sign language users in heritage language maintenance research.

Muhammad Iqwan Sanjani, UNSW, Constructing transnational family language policy through translanguaging

This study investigates the roles of home and school in constructing translanguaging spaces among Indonesian transnational families in Australia using an ecological approach to language policy. Data were collected from recordings of naturally occurring conversations, interviews, and diaries, and also interviews with teachers who teach the children of participant families. Preliminary evidence suggests that translanguaging serves as a means for transnational families to fight for epistemic inclusion in a context where monolingualism is prevalent and where their perspectives are often disregarded.

Abstracts, Language Polices for Inclusion in the 21^st Century

Jie Zhang, ZUEL/MQ, Between vulnerability and agency: crisis communication with Deaf communities in Wuhan during the Covid pandemic

Previous studies have demonstrated that deaf people are an underserved vulnerable community before, during, and after emergencies. At the same time, deaf people can also mobilize their agency to produce linguistically and culturally appropriate information and services to deaf communities in the absence of accessible crisis communication provided by the government, and even participate in crisis management. Adopting a community-based participatory approach to research, the study involves researchers and community members as equal partners in the research process. Drawing on in-depth interviews, this study describes the needs of and barriers faced by deaf people during the 76-day lockdown after the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in Wuhan in 2020 as perceived by a group of deaf volunteers, and how the deaf volunteers collaborated with the Wuhan Deaf Association, other civil groups, community workers, volunteers, medical staff, and psychological consultant to respond to deaf people’s needs. The study shows that challenges faced by deaf people include barriers to accessing information and aids, barriers to communication with stakeholders, as well as compound disadvantages caused by communication barriers. Deaf volunteers, apart from providing emergency services tailored to specific needs of deaf communities, helped empower ‘vulnerable’ deaf people in emergency responses and resilience building, and effectively raised the awareness of accessible communication among stakeholders and the public. The study demonstrates the critical role of deaf volunteers, who are highly motivated, fully aware of the needs of deaf people, well-networked both within the deaf community and with the broader community, in providing a bridge between stakeholders and deaf communities. Therefore, the study calls for a shift from a top-down emergency management approach in which emergency management organizations provide special services for deaf people to a participatory and inclusive approach that actively involves deaf people in designing and implementing plans tailored to specific needs of deaf communities in emergency settings.

Brynn Quick, MQ, How are language barriers bridged in hospitals?

This presentation explores how hospitals communicate multilingually to bridge language barriers experienced by linguistic minority patients by asking how hospital staff assess a linguistic minority patient’s language proficiency and identify the need for a multilingual communication strategy. It also examines the language support strategies that hospitals use to communicate with these patients. This is done through a systematic literature review of 50 studies. The findings show that current literature most often examines spoken language barriers bridged through interpreters. The problems identified with consistent interpreting service provision relate to time constraints and inconsistencies in procedures related to assessing a patient’s linguistic proficiency.

Natalie Skinner, MQ, Cultural and linguistic diversity in children with a disability affecting their communication

Communication disability is not typically included in discussion and research around linguistic inclusion. For children with a disability affecting their communication, there is a significant lack of research on cultural and linguistic diversity that can be used to guide the development and delivery of speech pathology services. Services incorporate language technologies, including Alternative and Augmentative Communication systems, that facilitate social participation. Interviews were conducted with 23 speech pathologists across Australia, exploring provision of appropriate services for children with a communication disability, in families who speak a language other than English. While cultural and linguistic diversity is acknowledged and valued, English is pervasive in services and associated resources.

Yixi (Isabella) Qiu, Fudan U/UNSW, Navigating epistemic injustice

Informed by the perspective of “epistemic (in)justice” and “epistemic agency”, this study explored how multilingual teachers and students negotiate a more epistemologically effective and equal access to knowledge negotiation in an EMI program in a Chinese university. A variety of data were collected in the study, including lesson recordings, multilingual notes, reflective journals, and stimulated recalls, to understand how the transnational teachers and students as epistemic agents negotiate disciplinary concepts and engage in knowledge co-construction to express silenced voices, countering epistemic oppression and enhancing participation.

Tazin Abdullah, MQ, Citizen science: inclusive practices in data collection

The field of sociolinguistics has seen an emerging method of data collection known as Citizen Science (CS), whereby members of the public are enlisted to collect data. The utilization of CS allows for large volumes of data collection and enables researchers to tap into the diverse sociolinguistic knowledge of the participants. This paper discusses the innovative use of CS in a Linguistic Landscape study, in which specific groups of participants were engaged to take photographs of signs that were used for analysis. The study notes how the utilization of CS acknowledges diversity and offers an approach to build inclusivity into sociolinguistc methodologies.

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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.

During the NSW school closures in 2020, Amelia Baggerman and Bonnie James undertook a TESOL practicum as part of their Applied Linguistics and TESOL degree at Macquarie University. The practicum is convened by Agnes Bodis. During the practicum, the majority of time is spent in a placement at a language teaching institution. Trainee teachers conduct observations, materials preparation, and supervised teaching practice. The unit design is underpinned by reflective teaching practice and aims to enhance the capacity of taking informed actions in teaching and engaging in the process of continuous learning.

Learn more about the Graduate Certificate of TESOL and the Master of Applied Linguistics and TESOL at Macquarie University by clicking on the links.

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Amelia Baggerman and Bonnie James

The pandemic turned out to be a learning opportunity (Image credit: Tonik, at Unsplash)

COVID lockdowns all over the world have undeniably affected the way we learn and teach. Teacher training courses have adapted various methods to continue their practices and also prepare student teachers for the changed teaching conditions (Bodis, Reed & Kharchenko, 2020; Pinar, Derin & Enisa, 2020).

The two of us had enrolled in the online stream of the Graduate Certificate of TESOL through Macquarie University the year before the COVID pandemic hit and were committed to finishing it in June 2020. However, due to COVID, our practicum at the Technical and Further Education (TAFE) institute was delayed until the second half of the year.

“How else would our practicum be affected?”, we wondered. Could we still use classroom techniques like pair work, and would we learn everything we needed to?

We need not have worried because completing the Graduate Certificate of TESOL during a pandemic turned out to be quite an enriching experience; perhaps even more valuable than what we were expecting.

Virtual classrooms enhanced our learning experience

Prior to COVID, there was something undeniably isolating about catching up on recorded lectures alone at home. For us, it came as a great relief to hear that our remaining classes would be on Zoom during the pandemic.

Zoom transformed the traditional lectures into small interactive sessions with our professors and fellow students which led to more memorable and in-depth learning. The rapport in the classroom was alive and dynamic, unlike in traditional lectures where professors are physically removed from the audience and mostly provide a unilateral dialogue. On Zoom, we could see our professors and fellow students face to face and interact with them in what seemed to be a more natural medium of communication.

The virtual classroom had an impact on how memorable the sessions were. Our lecturers also encouraged us to form study groups on Zoom. From these study groups and the active interactions with our professors grew colleagueship and an ongoing professional network across different cities in Australia. This ongoing support gave us the confidence that we would not continue our professional development alone upon graduation because we would have a whole community behind us for support.

An unusual practicum experience

Our practicum experience was anything but usual. We commenced our practicum near the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, during a time of uncertainty and fear in the community, so much so that a single clearing of the throat would turn heads. One of us remembers swallowing water down the wrong hole whilst watching the mentor teacher. I hadn’t known my mentor teacher for very long and I didn’t feel we had built much of a relationship yet, so I simply tightened my muscles to force the cough down and as tears built up in my eyes, I hoped no one would notice but I thought, if they did, at least I wasn’t coughing! Tears were less of a concern than a clearing of the throat!

During the pandemic, we not only learned to practice teaching, we learned how to handle a pandemic in a learning environment for adults. Upon entry and exit of the classroom, everyone had to sanitise their hands. We had to ask everyone if they were well and if anyone showed any possible cold and flu symptom and at times advise them to get a COVID-19 test.

How do you square pair work and social distancing?

While we were both eager to try out different pair/group work activities that we had learnt about, facilitating said pair/group work turned out to be quite the challenge as social distancing had to be strictly enforced. This meant that the desks were arranged in rows with a minimum of 1.5 square metres between them. Students were allowed to swivel their chairs around to face their partner/s but were supposed to keep to their own desks. This forced us to think creatively, and I (Amelia) was relieved to discover that board games were still an option, even if it meant printing out several A3 copies so that everyone could see. Quizlet and Kahoot games were also an excellent option, as they allowed the students to engage with the material, and each other, without moving at all.

Experiencing the holistic role of teachers

During a time of political ambiguity many decisions had to be made including whether to keep adult institutions such as TAFE open or closed and for how long. It was our head teachers who stepped in to make these important, swift and unprecedented decisions in the best interests of their staff and students; something from which we have learned and will forever admire.

We were reminded of our holistic role as teachers and the significance of this. We were not there to simply teach English. We were there to assist our students in various ways to cope in English-speaking communities, jobs and then, a pandemic. We had a responsibility to ensure that our students understand their responsibilities in response to COVID-19 and the daily updates regarding the pandemic. Some students thought the situation was worse than it was, whereas others were convinced it was less serious than it was. The challenges lay in assessing the readability of the information at hand and then adapting it so that it could be understood by our students without missing important details.

Teaching is a calling

Face-to-Face teaching has returned to many universities and colleges now in Australia. The technical and pedagogical skills we and our lecturers have acquired are staying with us.

Studying and completing our teaching practicum during the pandemic certainly brought about many challenges, but it also made for a particularly enriching and memorable learning experience. Had it not been for Zoom classes, the two of us would not even have met, much less formed the friendship we have today. We discovered that, despite widespread fear in the community and amidst hand sanitisers and socially distanced desks, meaningful learning can very much still take place.

Most importantly, however, we discovered firsthand that the influence of a teacher extends far beyond the four walls of the classroom and into the community at large. This brings with it great responsibility, and great privilege.

References

Bodis, A., Reed, M., & Kharchenko, Y. (2020). Microteaching in isolation: fostering autonomy and learner engagement through VoiceThread. International Journal of TESOL Studies, 2(3), 1-12. https://doi.org/10.46451/ijts.2020.09.14
Ersin, P., Derin, A., & Enisa M. (2020). Boosting preservice teachers’ competence and online teaching readiness through e-practicum during the COVID-19 outbreak. International Journal of TESOL Studies, 2(2), 112-124. https://doi.org/10.46451/ijts.2020.09.09
Piller, I. (2020). Does every Australian have an equal chance to know about COVID-19 restrictions? Language on the move (01 September 2020): https://languageonthemove.com/does-every-australian-have-an-equal-chance-to-know-about-covid-19-restrictions/
Zhou, N. (2020). Australian Universities Plan to ramp up in-person learning in early 2021, The Guardian Australia (20 January 2021) https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/jan/20/australian-universities-plan-to-ramp-up-in-person-learning-in-early-2021

Bioblurbs

Amelia Baggerman has always been passionate about travelling, foreign languages and cultures; interests which dovetailed nicely into an ESOL teaching career. After some volunteer teaching in Indonesia and some private tutoring in both Germany and Colombia, she was convinced that teaching foreigners to speak English was the perfect career for her. She completed her CELTA in 2016 and then spent the next few years teaching in private ELICOS centres, before deciding that it was really something she wanted to pursue. This led her to completing a Graduate Certificate of TESOL through Macquarie University in 2020 and now she has very happily settled into her new role teaching at TAFE in Sydney. She looks forward to seeing her students every day and considers it an honour to be entrusted with their education.

Bonnie James commenced her journey in teaching by being a volunteer language tutor whilst studying law at the University of Newcastle. After graduating and working in the legal field with a combined degree in Laws (Honours) / Diploma of Legal Practice and a Bachelor of Arts, she realised that law probably wasn’t the career for her. Once again, she set out to volunteer but this time she volunteered at her local TAFE in the English language department where she found inspirational mentors. This led to Bonnie achieving a 120 hour TESOL Certificate which allowed her to become an online English Foreign Language teacher for primary school students predominantly based in China. To expand her professional opportunities, she completed the Graduate Certificate of TESOL through Macquarie University this year and commenced teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL). Bonnie is thankful for all of the wonderful mentors she had including the teachers at TAFE and professors at Macquarie University who made her dream to become an ESOL teacher possible.  linkedin.com/in/bonnie-james-3a31a41a5

Editor’s note:

To view the other RECLAS ethics rants, click here.

***

Approaches, frameworks, methodologies, and research designs have consequences for research ethics. Here I will discuss some things I have learned in my career as a fieldworker and researcher mainly while meeting minority language speakers in remote places and while trying to formulate practical relevance of my research for the wider public. I will specifically address the perception of research by research participants,  and the ethics of interviewing and other methods. I will close by sharing my take on researcher activism.

What’s in it for research participants?

All research should ideally benefit the researched communities and individuals in some meaningful and sensible way.

In general, participants have been happy to discuss language issues with me, some have even considered the interviews as an opportunity to tell their life stories to somebody and to have it recorded. Others mentioned, that, as a linguistic minority, they  have been “forgotten”. Participating in research felt like a good way to them to place their lives or their village on the map.

Petteri with research participants during fieldwork (Photo by Karina Tímár)

To meet my participants’ expectations, I have found it especially important to publish and present results not only in dominant languages and academic forums but also in the local language(s) and in accessible forums: in my case that has meant Hungarian and open access journals. Research published in English is largely irrelevant to my participants as it is mastered only by few of them.

In short, I consider it an important part of research(er) ethics to practice multilingual research multilingually (see Piller 2016 on the critique of doing research on multilingualism monolingually).

Beyond the research interview

In my dissertation, I provided detailed analyses on the constraints of the research interview as an ‘objective’ research tool by pointing out that the views on language produced in an interview are co-constructed by the interviewee and the interviewer. This helped me to see the research participants and researchers as equal partners in the production of information and knowledge, and my dissertation work made me very critical also towards objectivizing stances to research interviews. For example, certain things are often mentioned (or not and in a certain way) by an ‘informant’ only because they were asked (or not) by the researcher (in a certain way).

Most importantly, however it turned my attention to research ethics of treating the people we study as equal research participants, not merely as ‘informants’.

During my post-doctoral project (2011—2013), I became interested in the study of linguistic landscapes. The study of linguistic landscapes, or visual semiotics represents a turn “from spoken, face-to-face discourses to the representations of that interaction order in images and signs” (Scollon & Wong Scollon 2003: 82). In my current project (2016–2021), my fieldwork and data generation has also been focused on visual methods.

Originally developed to minimize the impact that researchers have on shaping the data, these methods have the potential to address the basic challenge research interviews have: interviewing appears to put the researcher in a dominant position.

Practicing inclusive research

Taking the concerns of research participant’s positionality and agency vis-a-vis the researcher seriously is a cornerstone of inclusive research. In my current project, I employed a local research assistant, who has been a significant help in building shared interest with the participants and partner institutions.

Revitalization program teachers have come to see our research as beneficial, especially due to the use of digital visual methods, which have provided examples of pedagogical experiments. To take one example: we have carried out iMovie projects with children, where the children’s first video recorded their villages and self-selected topics at home with an iPad provided by the project. Then they edited iMovies with the iPads during a revitalization class and finally showed the final recordings to other children, researchers, parents, and teachers.

Fieldwork projects, such as the iMovie project have served my research aims to gain analysable data through visual methods and thus getting access to participant language views and language practices.

Teachers’ views of research may have been changed as well: some more experienced teachers mentioned that previous research has not been similarly rewarding and that it had been difficult to engage the children in activities such as filling out questionnaires and surveys. In our case, they could see an immediate benefit for the program in the heightened student motivation to use the revitalization language.

Should researchers be activists?

To address this question, I need to begin by reflecting on my analytical framework, the study of language ideologies. I define language ideologies broadly as common linkages between language and non-linguistic phenomena in a given community. In the study of language ideologies I follow, it is a basic assumption that no idea or view about language comes from nowhere. As Silverstein (1998:124) explains:

We might consider our descriptive analytic perspective […] as a species of social-constructionist realism or naturalism about language and its matrix in the sociocultural realm: it recognizes the reflexive entailments for its own praxis, that it will find no absolute Archimedian place to stand – not in absolute “Truth”, nor in absolute “Reality” nor even in absolute deterministic or computable mental or social “Functional Process”. Analysis of ideological factuality is, perforce, relativistic in the best scientific (not scientistic) sense.

From an ”activist” approach, we could investigate how inequality is constructed through language ideologies and then show how such language ideologies are untrue, or “bad” representations of reality or how ideology is produced by “false consciousness” (as argued by Marx, see Blommaert 2006). Such an interpretation of ideology as a distortion of reality performed in order to naturalize a questionable political ideology, has been embraced by certain strands of Critical Discourse Analysis, where the analyses thus examine different linguistic forms and processes of twisting the truth (e.g., the use of metaphors to mislead interpretation, see Reisigl & Wodak 2001).

However, the activist goal of “speaking truth to power” is not an aim shared by researchers in linguistic anthropology, since language ideologies are everywhere and due to the lack of the “Archimedian place” mentioned by Silverstein above, they are false or true according to the perspective we choose or premise we follow (see also Gal, 2002).

To conclude, our research participants and their communities should benefit from the research. To reach this goal, my approach has been to focus on inclusive ethnography and methods of data collection that provide meaningful activities, events and discussions for the research participants and participating institutions. I have focused on examples of best practices, and at the same time remained critical by not trying to pretend that I can speak truth to power.

Finally, a goal for every study should also be to help people understand why research in general is needed and beneficial for people outside of academia.

References

Blommaert, J. 2006. Language Ideology. In Brown, K. (ed). Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics. Second edition, vol. 6. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 510-521.
Gal, S. 2002. Language Ideologies and Linguistic Diversity: Where Culture Meets Power. A magyar nyelv idegenben. Keresztes, L. & S. Maticsák (eds.). Debrecen: Debreceni Egyetem, 197-204.
Nind M. 2014. What is inclusive research? London: Bloomsbury.
Piller, I. 2016. Monolingual ways of seeing multilingualism. Journal of Multicultural Discourses, 11(1), 25–33.
Reisigl, M. & R. Wodak 2001. Discourse and Discrimination. Rhetoric’s of Racism and Anti-Semitism. London: Routledge.
Scollon, R. & Wong Scollon, S. 2003. Discourses in place. Routledge: London.
Silverstein, M. 1998. The Uses and Utility of Ideology: A Commentary. Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory. Schieffelin, B., K. Woolard & P. Kroskrity eds. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 123-148.

The project team at a partners meeting in Leeuwarden, Netherlands

Europe recently experienced a dramatic influx of refugees. By the end of 2015, the European Union as a whole had received over 1.2 million first-time asylum claims (IOM, 2015). A small but significant sub-group of these people on the move are highly qualified professionals – doctors, architects, lawyers, teachers, engineers – who often find themselves in low-skilled, minimum-wage jobs for which they are over-qualified. Their skill sets and professional experience often count for little, as host countries in an alarming number of cases fail to utilise the potential of much sought-after qualified personnel. The integration of these highly-skilled individuals into the labour market is crucial in order to avoid their long-term dependency and marginalization, and to create a positive image in the eyes of the public.

Against this backdrop the ‘Critical Skills for Life and Work’ project (2017-2019), funded by the European Union’s flagship research programme Erasmus+, sought to identify and articulate the profession-relevant communicative, interactional and intercultural needs of highly-skilled refugees, which would enable them to find employment in a professional domain for which they are qualified.

The multinational consortium was led by Newcastle University in the UK in partnership with the University of Graz in Austria, Fryske Academy in the Netherlands, and Action Foundation, a Newcastle-based refugee charity.

Trialling workshop in the Netherlands

The team’s ultimate aim was to design and implement effective training tools for enhancing the professional intercultural communicative competence (PICC) of highly-skilled refugees and the language teachers who work with them. The four project partners worked with a number of highly-skilled refugees and migrants, and with teachers across the UK, Austria and the Netherlands to co-create a set of resources that can be useful in a diversity of European contexts. The result was an online toolkit for teachers and learners.

The toolkit was developed as part of a two-stage collaborative process.

In stage one (research stage) the team investigated in detail the lives and experiences of people who had successfully made the transition from refugee status back into the professional sphere. This was done through ethnographic interviews (‘success stories’) which sought to discover exactly how these people had made the transition, what had helped them, what had hindered them, and what they could pass on to others like them by way of advice. Additionally, focus groups were held with learners and teachers in the different locations, to gauge current provision and their needs in relation to developing PICC.

Findings from this stage pointed to the importance of agency, resilience, self-motivation, as well as language and intercultural communication skills.

Structure of the toolkit

In stage two (co-production), the team worked closely with local refugees and volunteer language teachers to develop learning and teaching materials. These were then piloted and trialled through a series of workshops and multiplier events with different target groups, including agencies working with skilled refugees, teaching organisations such as colleges of further and higher education, and relevant employers and employment agencies. The aim was to create a model which can be extended to other contexts.

The final version of the toolkit was launched at the project conference on 21^st June 2019.

The toolkit offers two modules:

Module A: Teaching professional intercultural communicative competence
Module B: Professional intercultural communicative competence for work and life

Each module consists of five parallel units: (1) context & background, (2) finding a job, (3) applying for a job, (4) being interviewed and, (5) starting a job. Each unit includes a set of activities designed for classroom use (for teachers) or for self-study (learners). All activities relate to the development of PICC. Supplementary materials and extension tasks are included at the end of each unit.

The units are self-standing to allow teachers and learners to choose units and activities depending on their own specific needs and circumstances.

From a linguistic perspective, the toolkit is built around the assumption that refugee and migrant professionals will have some linguistic capital. The primary aim of the toolkit is to develop PICC, as opposed to linguistic proficiency in any specific ‘target language’. Using all their plurilingual resources, learners might engage with input in one language and generate meaning in contextually appropriate ways.

The toolkit is available to download for free on the project website (http://cslw.eu/). Relevant sections of the toolkit have been translated and localised into German and Dutch, and the team are hoping to provide further translations and different language versions in due course.

Follow our updates on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/cslwproject/ or find us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/critical-skills-for-life-and-work/

Reference

IOM (2015). Global migration trend factsheet. Retrieved from http://gmdac.iom.int/global-migration-trends-factsheet

Cover page of the first textbook in the Lift Off series

Although the Saudi government does its best to provide effective English language teaching and learning, there are widespread concerns in the country about the low level of achievement in English among Saudi students. Many researchers have tried to identify the reasons for this situation. My research focusses on the representations of culture and cultural identities in English language textbooks used at different stages in Saudi schools. As textbooks are the main teaching resource in Saudi English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) classrooms, my research investigates the imagined communities created in these textbooks.

My MRes thesis explored how the two imagined communities of the Saudi source culture and the foreign target culture are created for Saudi students In six textbooks of the Lift Off series that is compulsory in Saudi middle schools.

Findings show nuanced and diverse representations of Saudi characters. By contrast, the representation of foreign characters is overly simplistic and involves heavy gender imbalances. While equal numbers of Saudi men and women are represented, representations of foreign women are relatively rare.

In addition, the findings show a nuanced portrayal of Saudi and Islamic cultures (i.e. the religion of Saudi learners), while representations of Western culture(s) are uniform and reductionist.

Gender segregation is represented as the norm in this Saudi EFL textbook

The compulsory EFL textbooks examined in my MRes research could be described as embracing a Saudi-centric ideological perspective, which creates a strong connection between learning English, Islam and Saudi cultural practices. At the same time, these books only show aspects of Western culture that are acceptable from an Islamic perspective, whereas aspects that are incompatible with Saudi culture and Islam are largely ignored. For example, gender segregation is represented as the norm not only in Saudi culture but also in the target cultures of English language learning.

This misrepresentation and oversimplification may impact Saudi learners and their English learning negatively by depriving them of learning about the culture and communities of the target language. Therefore, my research suggests that the administrators of EFL programs and curricula in Saudi Arabia should pay closer attention to the importance of introducing language textbooks that include rich imagined communities and characters with complex identities from both the source and the target culture to help students understand these communities and attain a high level of linguistic and intercultural competence in English.

Reference

The full text of my MRes thesis entitled “Evaluating the Representations of Identity Options and Cultural Elements in English Language Textbooks used in Saudi Arabia” is available here.

Native and non-native teachers at Lord Harris’ School, Royapett, Madras, 1865 (Source: British Library)

For some time now, a debate has been raging in TESOL about the relative merits of native and non-native speakers as English language teachers. While many people in the field are critical of the continued dominance of native speakers as “ideal” teachers, proposals for change have largely been ineffectual.

True, job ads asking for “native speakers” are now widely considered discriminatory and the relative strengths of both groups are spruiked at conferences. However, none of this has much changed the fact that institutions, students and parents, by and large, continue to prefer TESOL teachers who they consider to be native speakers; that such teachers are oftentimes paid more and hired into more secure employment; and that teachers considered non-native are regularly subject to micro-aggressions such as having their expertise called into question.

Is there a more effective way to overcome native speaker hegemony other than to educate people about the native speaker fallacy?

Absolutely. It has been done before. The following object lesson of native speaker subordination comes from an unlikely source, namely the British Empire and specifically the East India Company.

Persian – India’s power code

To understand this case study, a bit of historical context is required: when the British brought the Indian subcontinent under colonial control, they displaced an existing state, the Mughal Empire. The Mughals’ state language was Persian. In the 18^th century, when the British rapidly expanded and consolidated their possessions on the subcontinent, Persian had been India’s written language, its power code and its lingua franca for over three centuries. In other words, Persian was the Moghuls’ “technology of governance” (Fisher, 2012, pp. 328f.).

Officer of the East India Company being coached in Persian by a private tutor (Source: Massey & Massey, 1968, p. 473)

In order to rule India, it was therefore essential to know Persian. And Indians knew Persian. Britons did not.

As the East India Company tightened its grip on India, it approached this problem gradually by first replacing Indian speakers of Persian with British speakers of Persian and, further down the track, replacing Persian with English as the language of the state. It is the first step in this process that concerns us here: how did the East India Company go about replacing Indians with Britons as privileged knowers of Persian?

Establishing a Persian language teaching industry

Initially, British colonial officials who wanted to learn Persian (or any other Indian language) were largely left to their own devices and such language study was a matter of private enterprise. Many hired Indian language teachers as private tutors.

Gradually, Persian language learning became more formalized and dedicated language training institutes were established. The most important of these were Fort William College in Calcutta, and, back home in Britain, Haileybury Imperial Service College and Addiscombe Military Seminary. These institutes all opened in the first decade of the 19^th century.

Since the 18^th century, Persian-speaking Indian elites had increasingly shifted from working for the Mughal Empire and its ever smaller and more fragmented successor states to accepting employment from the British. For many of them this meant becoming language teachers.

In India, teaching was a highly respected profession and Indian teachers of Persian initially assumed a high-status position vis-à-vis their British students. They were in a bull market, or so it must have seemed: Persian language teaching became ever more widespread and profitable, not only in the colony, but also in Britain, where middle-class families clamoured for an education that would ensure their sons’ future in lucrative colonial positions. Just how profitable the teaching of Indian languages was can be seen from the autobiography of one such language teacher, Lutfullah:

I regularly held the profession of a teacher of the Persian, Hindustani, Arabic, and Marathi languages to the new comers from England, from time to time, and place to place, as their duty obliged and caprice induced them to go. Upwards of one hundred pupils studied with me during the above period, and none of my scholars returned unlaureled from the Government examination committees. I have a book of most flattering certificates in my possession, and I may say that I was better off than many by following this profession. (Lutfullah, 1858, p. 139)

Haileybury College (Source: Wikipedia)

In the colonial logic of the assumed inferiority of the colonized, high-status Indian language teachers with a good income soon became the targets of envy and efforts to undermine them got underway. Returned colonial officials, in particular, wanted teaching positions for themselves rather than see them occupied by Indians. Given their clout and connections, many of them managed to be recruited into Persian language teaching positions in the new imperial training institutes. That their language competence was sometimes almost non-existent did not matter.

The Professor of Oriental Literature at Addiscombe, for instance, was one John Shakespear, who not only drew a professorial salary but supplemented his income by publishing numerous textbooks and teaching aids. His most successful textbook was one of the earliest grammars of Urdu, A Grammar of the Hindustani Language. First published in 1813, it was reprinted and re-issued in new editions for almost half a century. The above-mentioned Lutfullah met Shakespear during his visit to England in 1844 and describes his encounter as follows:

[I] had the honour of being introduced to three men of learning, viz., John Shakespear, the author of the Hindustani Dictionary […]. Knowing the first-named gentleman to be the author of a book in our language, I addressed to him a very complimentary long sentence in my own language. But, alas! I found that he could not understand me, nor could he utter a word in that language in which he had composed several very useful books. (Lutfullah, 1858, p. 389)

Subordinating native speakers

The above example can leave no doubt that the linguistic qualifications of Indians were superior to those of British language teachers. Even so, the former were excluded almost entirely from the enterprise of Persian language teaching, well before that enterprise was abandoned entirely in favour of making Indians learn English.

Addiscombe Military Seminary, c. 1859 (Source: Wikipedia)

The subordination of native speaker teachers was achieved in two ways, namely through arguments related to teacher identity and through a reorganization of language teaching.

The arguments related to teacher identity basically stated that Muslim men were unfit to teach Christian boys and young men. The board of Haileybury College, for instance, decided in 1816 that “the linguistic advantages of having a ‘native speaker’ teach British students was outweighed by the alleged disruption these Muslim Indian men had on the students’ moral education” (Fisher, 2012, p. 344). As in other language training institutions, Indian teachers were replaced with British teachers.

Reorganization of language teaching meant that Indian ways of language teaching (through the study of literature) were devalued in favour of British ways of language teaching (through the study of grammars and dictionaries). While the former approach requires a high level of language competence of the teacher, the latter does not.

Furthermore, Indian teachers were reframed as specialists in pronunciation, and pronunciation as a language skill was marginalized. Instead of hiring them into teacher roles, Indian teachers were offered positions as drill masters and teaching assistants of British teachers. The latter were fashioned as experts both in methods of language teaching and in the grammar skills that were now considered the essential test of language competence.

By the 1840s, all Indian language teachers had been removed from imperial language training institutes and the newly established university chairs in Persian, Arabic and other oriental languages all went to Britons. Any Indian language teachers who remained in Britain were relegated to the private tutoring market, which was shrinking, too, as a knowledge of Persian and other Indian languages became increasingly irrelevant to pursuing a career in the colonies.

Fort William College (Source: Navrang India)

Who is to be master?

As is obvious from this brief account, the battle between Indians and Britons over who was a better teacher of Indian languages was fought on linguistic terrain only on the surface. Some of the British 19^th century superstars of oriental language teaching such as John Shakespear obviously had serious linguistic deficits. That did not keep them from becoming privileged knowers of colonial languages. A holistic knowledge of the language, cultural competence and conversational fluency were all devalued in favour of a focus on methods and a narrow understanding of language proficiency as grammatical mastery.

Ironically, once Persian was out of the way as the power code of India and the global English language teaching enterprise got underway, the rules of the game were re-written yet again. What we consider desirable linguistic competence today is to a significant degree shaped by the strengths and weaknesses of the new privileged language knowers, native speakers of English.

References

Eastwick, E. B. (Ed.) (1858). Autobiography of Lutfullah, a Mohamedan Gentleman; and the transactions with his fellow-creatures; interspersed with remarks on the habits, customs, and character of the people with whom he had to deal. London: Smith, Elder & Co.
Fisher, M. H. (2012). Teaching Persian as an Imperial Language in India and in England during the Late 18th and Early 19th Centuries. In B. Spooner & W. L. Hanaway (Eds.), Literacy in the Persianate world : writing and the social order (pp. 328-358). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Massey, R., & Massey, J. (1968). Lutfullah in London, 1844. History Today, 18(7), 473-479.

Tapas bar Samsara

Strolling in Barcelona’s city center reveals an astounding variety of spoken languages: there are the languages used by the throngs of visitors coming from literally everywhere, and also the languages of the 300,000 registered foreign citizens from more than 160 nationalities. Residents of Barcelona speak “a total of 277 languages.” These languages cannot only be heard but also seen: Besides Latin script, at smaller or specialized businesses (along with Catalan, which is compulsory but not exclusive on signage in Catalonia) we find Cyrillic (Russian), Chinese, Arabic, Urdu, and … Devanāgarī, the script of Hindi, Nepalese, and of the classical language of India, Sanskrit.

Sanskrit names in Barcelona are obvious on Indian restaurants and, of course, Yoga centers; but they are not exclusive to these: we can find a tapas bar (“tapas” are tasty small local appetizers) called “Samsāra” (the cycle of reincarnation), a marriage agency with the same name, a ladies’ apparel shop called “Dharma” (the Cosmic Law), a cosmetics shop called “Ādhāra” (“support”), and many more.

Marriage agency Samsara

Why was the verb form “Bhavantu” (“may they become”) chosen for a clothing shop for babies? Its owner, Mr. Rodrigo, born in Argentina, explained: “When my wife was pregnant with our baby we used to listen to an Indian mantra: ‘sarve bhavantu śaraṇam’ (‘may all beings be protected’). We do not practice Yoga, but we liked the sound of that word.”

A “mālā” is a rosary for mantra repetition (“japa”), so the name of the ladies’ apparel shop “Japamala & friends” owned by Mr. Sandro, of German origin, was intriguing. Mr. Sandro kindly indicated to me that his former partner was of the opinion that “names with many “a” sounds are better for business than names with many “o” or “u” sounds.” Mr. Sandro added that he has kept the name because “it sounds good.”

Sweet Minu Madhu

The “sweetest” experience in my quest was with a “fake” Sanskrit word. Walking in the old town I came across “Minu & Madhu”, another ladies’ apparel shop. The shop is run by Mrs. Martine, the friendliest lady from Périgord in France you could ever meet. She welcomed my explanation of the meaning of “Madhu” as “sweet” or “honey”: “Indian ladies tell me that it is a person’s name but they were not able to tell me what it means! People ask me so often about it and now I will be finally able to explain it, “je vous aime!”

Mrs. Martine got the owner, Mrs. Laura Serrat, a Catalan of French descent, on the phone: “I am sorry if this comes to you as disappointment”, she said, “but I did not choose the name for any reason connected to India. ‘Minou’ is what we endearingly call in French kitten or children, and ‘Madhu’ is what I used to call my Grandmother.” Assuming that this was a diminutive for “Madeleine”, I asked whether it should not be spelt “M-a-d-o-u”, instead. Mrs. Serrat’s response was: “I thought that it sounded sweet this way.” Well, isn’t this exactly what “Madhu” means?

Bhavantu baby store

Does Sanskrit then have a euphonic quality to itself? I asked Doctor Maria Elena Sierra, teacher of Sanskrit at the University of Barcelona. Dr. Sierra explained that interest in Sanskrit has grown in the past ten years, and so have the course offering of this language at the University. She told me that half of her students are foreigners who have gone as far as extending their stay in Barcelona in order to be able to complete their studies. They come from Belgium, the UK, Italy, Latin America and elsewhere; even including Indians and Nepalese residing now in Catalonia.

Dr Sierra teaching Sanskrit at the University of Barcelona

As to why Sanskrit “sounds good”, Dr. Sierra explained that the culture of ancient India was very concerned about the vibrations of spoken language. So, does Sanskrit have any special system to deal with the quality of sound? Dr. Sierra pointed to “Sandhi”, a rule of phonetic alteration, which she explained as “aimed at avoiding cacophony.” Besides, “Sanskrit shows a consonantism of a much older stage common to all Indo-European languages, which we recognize when we hear it.”

It is not only Sanskrit words in the Latin script that can be found in Barcelona, but imitations of Devanāgarī script are common too, as shown on the board of an attraction called “Shambhala” at the theme park of Port Aventura in the coastal area of Salou-Vilaseca.

Indexing “the exotic Orient”: fake devanāgarī on amusement park ride

The aesthetics of signs such as these is still tied to the Western idea of the “mysterious East”, crafted by colonial travelers and unmasked in Edward Saïd’s Orientalism (1978).

In other examples, as in the Nepalese restaurant “Himāli”, the signs are in both “Indianized” Latin script and in the actual Devanāgarī script. Diversity appears as important as communication here, and signage evidences that “we live in a new paradigm where homogeneity is no longer sustainable and cannot be simulated and where identities must be projected in global settings”, as Pujolar et al. (2011, p. 81) argue.

Surya Restaurant

Devanāgarī script may even appear without translation or transliteration, as on the sign of restaurant “Sūrya”. The sign displays the name of the Sun-God above a subtitle that reads: भोजनालय “bhojanalāya” (“dining hall” or “restaurant”).

The subtitle “Indian Street Food & Drinks” provides an explanation. The sign appeals to an experience of “authenticity”: only those who have travelled to India (or Sanskrit students) will be able to fully savor the term भोजनालय … and the delicacies of Indian street cuisine. At the same time, the sign exhibits a “de-territorialisation effect on cultural practices” (Pujolar et al., 2011, p.80; drawing on Appadurai).

Global culture is made of mobile individuals who link distant cultural spaces, as proven by the presence of the classical language of India in Barcelona. And since Sanskrit does indeed sound very good, let me end by saying: ॐ सर्वे   भवन्तु   सुखिनः (“Om sarve bhavantu sukhinah”), “Om, may all beings be happy!”

Reference:

Pujolar, Joan; Fernàndez, Josep-Anton; Subirana, Jaume. Language, Culture and Identity in the Global Age. Digithum, May 2011. ISSN 1575-2275. Available at: <http://journals.uoc.edu/index.php/digithum/article/view/n13-identicat>. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.7238/d.v0i13.1186.

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 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?

An East Timorese girl speaking Bunak, Tetum, Fataluku and Portuguese (Source: Wikipedia)

A response to Alexandra Grey, “We do aid, not English”

In my experience English is often promoted by aid organisations as part of a package and served up with very little consultation of recipients and not much concern for the local language ecology or the consequences of promoting English. In East Timor, where I have done a lot of research, monolingual English-speaking aid workers often expect their local counterparts to use English and even select them on the basis of their ability to speak it. Native English-speakers have earned a reputation for insensitivity to the constitutional provisions for language and flout them regularly, e.g., by using the fact that English is a working language as a get-out clause, circulating official documents in English and making no real effort to learn the official languages. Ten years after independence, English-speakers still criticise the decision to officialise  Portuguese and Tetum. These two languages are embedded in East Timorese history, culture and national identity and yet the tedious, ethnocentric, Anglophone narrative about how foolish the Timorese were to officialise these languages persists.  In his witty and critical travelogue Beloved Land, Gordon Peake takes aim at well-meaning foreigners who don’t even trouble to learn the local language and would much rather talk to each other than to the people they are trying to help.

My study of the linguistic landscape in downtown Dili (Taylor-Leech, 2012) showed how English is increasingly visible in the commercial, urban landscape, if not yet in the official one. This process contributes to a kind of double diglossia which also reflects the growing social divide that has sprung up in the wake of the aid industry. There are already Portuguese-speaking elites, a hangover from the country’s days as a Portuguese colony but now there are also English-speaking elites with the linguistic capital to make careers in the aid industry, while those who lack the capital to break out of unemployment or low-paid jobs get little opportunity to progress.

I think aid workers need to show sensitivity to local language situations and be aware of how they can promote the hegemony of English to the detriment of local language(s) and culture. I’d go further and say that if aid workers are paid to do development aid work then that indeed is what they should do. If the outcomes of development aid projects are to outlast the lifetime of the (usually short-term) project, it seems to me doubly important that aid workers build lasting relationships and do so by endeavouring to understand the local linguaculture. Capacity-building, like teaching, is not a one-way street and should build on local skills, traditions and knowledge. How is that done effectively in a dominant foreign language? There are lots of irritations that flow from being an elite foreign worker in a poor country but they are minor compared to the humiliations that aid recipients suffer from high-handed “experts” who don’t speak their language.

When I taught English in Mozambique, Mozambicans would frequently ask me how I could help them obtain status symbols like blue jeans or luxury food items. To them people like me seemed impossibly rich, although I was not on a high salary. I would count informal English lessons as a similar sort of status symbol. And be wary that people are not befriending you for those sorts of reasons, which can lead to heartbreak and cynicism. I say get engaged in local culture and local ways of knowing. Let English take a back seat and a low profile, unless you are an English teacher but even or especially then, tread lightly and carefully though the local language ecology.

A shining example of this approach can be seen in the work of one-time Portuguese teacher and now Tetum-Portuguese interpreter and author João Paulo T. Esperança. The photo above was used as illustration in a Portuguese language course in Tetum; lessons were published weekly in the East Timorese newspaper Lia Foun (New Words). João is also the author of the Tetum version of the much loved children’s story Liurai Oan Ki’ik , known in English as The little Prince.
Taylor-Leech, Kerry (2012). Language choice as an index of identity: Linguistic landscape in Dili, Timor-Leste International Journal of Multilingualism, 9 (1), 15-34 DOI: 10.1080/14790718.2011.583654

Should ‘helping with English’ be part of the brief of humanitarian aid workers? (Source: helpage.org)

Over a few years of involvement in the aid sector in Asia, I became aware that aid workers turn their noses up at ‘English work’. Managers for my Australian government volunteering program encouraged us not to be sucked in to being human dictionaries while on NGO postings. In China, where I was, there was a bristling critique because USA’s Peace Corps volunteers were “only” sent to teach English: ‘How linguistically imperialist!’, we thought.

However, our local colleagues at NGOs and so called ‘development-sector’ government agencies often made requests of us native English speakers: to talk English with them, proofread and draft reports, apply for grants, translate the organisation’s website, help with overseas university applications and tutor their friends’ children. This sparked complaints like ‘I feel like I’m here mostly to translate’ and ‘I’m doing proofreading and admin tasks which I don’t see as capacity building’.

It sure is frustrating to move overseas and find you are expected to provide little but ‘white face time’ in your job. But is English language aid underrated?

Discounting ‘English work’ doesn’t happen because aid workers are haughty. These people have professional training in fields like environmental science or public health and believe they were hired to contribute in those areas. Moreover, many native English speakers recognize that they have no professional language teaching experience. Most aid workers are conscientious global citizens, wary of being language imperialists. But these ‘good reasons’ are misconceived, I argue.

Wrong Skills

Without teacher training, you are a less-than-ideal candidate to teach, no question. But in the regions I’m talking about, learners seldom get to select from a smorgasbord of English-speaking trained teachers and native English-speaking non-teachers. Even the Peace Corps receive some teacher training and teach in impoverished areas where TESOL staff-members are otherwise in short supply. Moreover, when learning a new language, important learning is done beyond the classroom and after childhood: for instance, between aid workers and their adult colleagues. Psychologist Vygotsky showed peer group learning with ‘more knowledgeable others’ was a productive part of language acquisition, with no teacher needed. Modelling grammatical and pragmatically-appropriate language provides useful input for learners. In short, helping colleagues with their English tasks or even just conversing can be valuable for their language learning and is within any English speaker’s ability. 

Imperialism?

In many countries, people see access to a native English speaker as a boon. Why not give communities what they think would assist their upward mobility? The contribution to informal, out-of-classroom English learning these native speakers provide is something their colleagues and communities may find even more valuable than the specific aid project, especially as the expense, scarcity and systemic preference given to children’s classes make formal language learning inaccessible to many adolescents and adults who want it.

As Kamwangamalu (2013, p. 328) notes of Africa – and I’ve found this in China, too – ‘stakeholders reject their own indigenous languages […] because they consider them insignificant and of no practical value in the linguistic marketplace.’ In this, local stakeholders are not wrong; English is indisputably of greatest value in many markets. Many (including me) would say this is evidence of linguistic hegemony and non-native English speakers are complicit in their own linguistic domination by prioritising English, embracing the coloniser’s model of the world. Even so, is it an incoming English speaker’s place to decide to attack hegemony by refusing to help people proofread?

Often, English is the language of power and funding, particularly for international aid, and non-elites may well perceive English as a resource monopolized by elites to preserve their status. For instance, Ghanaians ‘expressed the view that using the vernacular as an instructional medium was a subtle strategy employed by the elite to perpetuate communities’ marginalization from mainstream society’ (Mfum-Mensah 2005, p. 80).

Whether or not we oppose English’s dominance ideologically, it is beneficial to proofread co-workers’ donor reports, make templates for the office and attend events to speak for the organisation or those it assists, in English. The more co-worker inclusion in these activities, the better. That oft-encountered request to help a friend-of-a-friend with a personal English task should likewise be accepted, because language competencies can function as collective resources. Indeed, many linguists now advocate studying ‘actual linguistic, communicative, semiotic resources’ rather than ‘languages’ (Blommaert, 2010, p. 102). English resources can benefit networks rather than merely individuals. In expanding the networks around English resources, inequality and elitism is reduced.   

Both national politics and international development are ‘Fields’ (Bourdieu 1991). English is both economically and symbolically valuable in these Fields. Native English speakers – especially professionals doing aid volunteering – have an ability to use professional-register English at less expense (a Bourdieuian ‘Habitus’).  So it’s efficient for them to do tasks requiring professional English. Importantly, this is not short term efficiency at the expense of long term efficiency; helping out with English tasks now doesn’t preclude co-workers’ language acquisition in the longer term. Rather, it can play a part in their improvement so the ‘cost’ of professional English for colleagues will decrease over time. English-speaking aid workers, in doing ‘English work’, can improve their hosts’ access to material support and their ability to be heard in international forums.

The benefit of mobility of individuals, of organisations and across community networks is hard to weigh against the detriment of linguistic imperialism, but this weighing up should not be shirked, and nor should the ‘English work’ involved.

References

Blommaert, J. (2010). The Sociolinguistics of Globalization. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Bourdieu, P. (1991). Language and symbolic power. Cambridge, Polity.

Kamwangamalu, N. M. (2013). Effects of policy on English-medium instruction in Africa. World Englishes, 32 (3), 325-337 DOI: 10.1111/weng.12034

Mfum-Mensah, O. (2005). The impact of colonial and postcolonial Ghanian language policies on vernacular use in two northern Ghanaian communities. Comparative Education 41 (1), 71-85.

Business card promoting private English tuition

In Iran, as in many other countries around the globe, the craze for learning English has been on the rise. This tendency is attributed to, inter alia, the country’s rather young population who need the language for various purposes such as furthering education abroad, immigration or trade. As a consequence, all kinds of English teaching have become big business. While the majority of learners of English attend private English language institutes, private tutoring, too, has mushroomed in the past few years.

In the past few months, I have been collecting marketing materials for private English language tuition in Isfahan. While well-established language institutes usually rely on local newspapers, magazines or TV channels to promote their English classes, individual language tutors choose less expensive methods of advertising. The main promotional method is the distribution of brochures, fliers and business cards.

Despite the low costs associated with their production, these advertising materials can easily be distributed among target audiences which often include those who need a certain score on standardized tests such as TOEFL or IELTS in a rather short period of time. Business cards are usually personally distributed among tutors’ networks. Additionally, they are also found in the city’s language bookshops. Brochures and fliers are found in all kinds of public spaces frequented by young people.

A close look at such marketing materials enables us to explore social issues embedded in the discourse of the private TESOL industry in Iran today. In my corpus of more than 100 marketing materials for private tutoring, the following ideologies of English language learning can be found:

• Learning English is associated with personal success. One business card, for instance, has the Persian mottoدانش زبان انگلیسی قدرت دنیای امروز است  on the front and the English translation “English knowledge is power” on the back.
• The ideal tutor is a person who has the experience of living in an English-speaking country, usually in Australia, Canada and the UK. Another business card, for example, describes the tutor as a person who has lived in Australia for five years (٥ سال زندگی در استرالیا) and uses the slogan Learn English from one who has lived in an English-speaking country.
• The ideal tutor is linked to an international organisation. Examples of such organizations, which are typically included in brackets after the tutor’s name, include “TEFL Canada”, “British Council” and “ETS”.
• English learners come in distinct groups based on age, gender or occupation. One example promotes semi-private English classes for housewives (انگلیسی برای خانمهای خانه دار), who, as the description on the flier reveals, “are usually free in the morning and are able to attend English classes.” In this context the English language is dividable into different packages which are separately accessible. Other examples includeانگلیسی برای کودکان  (English for children), انگلیسی برای نوجوانان (English for teenagers), انگلیسی برای توریست ها (English for tourists) andانگلیسی برای تجار  (English for businessmen), to name a few. No information is provided about the course content and the name of the course corresponds to the social role of the target group (e.g., ‘housewives’).

Overall, the unprecedented demand for English has caused English tutors in Iran, as in many other countries in the world, to compete for students. In this respect, English language tutors are driven by the competition for profit and English language learning is thus marketed in specific ways. As my corpus shows, private tutors typically use a variety of strategies in order to be deemed legitimate and meritorious. It appears that in this context the quest for a better tutor (as a form of identity) has long replaced the identification of practices designed to address the complexity of language learning.