Subjective Academics: A More Realistic Objective…?

While I do believe that the re-visioning of TESOL as TEGCOM, laid out in by Lin et al., is an admirable course to set with for the future of the field, I find that some of their other arguments, especially those by Richardson to be troubling.

When I tried to work out if the dichotomy set up by even the nomenclature  of TESOL or ESL or EFL rely on essesitalizing and othering paradigms, I realized that no matter how you dissect the rhetoric they all offer superior status to those who already have English within their cultural capital. Changing our perspective to observe World Englishes or EIL, through the Teaching English for Glocalized Communication seems to be a powerful forward thinking, and true attempt to neutralize English. My concern however, is that the approach laid out in this article will be met with great opposition by politicians who are not experts in the field.

I understand how "present day applied linguists 'objective' writing is but another example of how unequal power relations between the allegedly rational objective researcher (Self), who is constructed a capable of conducting meta-analysis and rational theorizing on the allegedly subjective researched (Other)" (297), to a certain degree perpetuates dichotomies across the board. Yet, I fear that if we move away from empiricism, no matter if it is merely an appearance, in the humanities (which has been the case for many many years, until recently, at least in literature), then in many respects the credibility of our studies may be lessen. We look to science as a space for factual evidence. Granted the human narrative, both epistemologically and cognitively may be skewed from understanding facts, or unchanging scientific laws, these gray areas of Arts Based Research seem hard pressed to create actual change in government policy.

So while I applaud these brave scholars in their work, and wish them the best, I fear that the improvements that they and I would like to see enacted in our world, may have difficulty coming to fruition.

Linguistic Ecology

This metaphor seems to be very fitting for the varied and interdependent relationships between dialects and it seems to be a necessary paradigm that should, but most often is not, recognized. Bi-dialectism seems to acknowledge and move towards a solution,y et it only appears to address "oratory" language issues.

My question then with regards to TESOL pedagogy is, are we working toward a reading/writing comprehension, or a "Standard English" literacy, or is it necessary that we teach our students how to speak standard English.

Perhaps, it comes down to the simple appreciation of dialect difference, and "a pedagogy of critical language awareness. [That] involves a pedagogy that teaches students how 'notions of facts' about language are actually 'elements of a larger narrative, an elaborate construction deployed for larger social needs and political ends, and that as such the should be question, and if necessary, made differently"(Bokhorst-Heng and McKay 117).

Encouraging students' critical awareness of their own heritage, both culturally and linguistically, will inevitably be the driving force that pushes English through its process of evolution. What we romanticize about standard English of the past, will one day be the sentiment of the "standard English" we use today. It joys me that the term "standard English" is so problematic, because if it were a stable entity then English would be considered a dead language, like latin for example, which is reliable in its unchanging form that we can apply it universally in service of other stalwart phenomena like scientific laws. The reason perhaps that there is so much quarreling about the standardization of English is that the language's future is yet to be determined. English, like any ecology is in a constant state of change, and it is this linguistic volatility that requires our constant and vigilant attention as educators.

Well, Folks, Go-on Home and Undastand Y'all Family First

I came across a very interesting yet saddening article from my hometown of Raleigh, NC this weekend titled "Raleigh has lost its drawl, y'all". And indeed it has lost it's distinctive Southern drawl. I cannot count the number of times in my travels that people have asked where my Southern accent is, if I am truly from North Carolina, and I have not been able to provide them with an answer. But apparently this is what I should be telling folks:

“There’s no question as to when the change happened, based on the birthdates of the speakers,” NCSU linguistics professor Robin Dodsworth said. “You went within the space of two or three generations from being an unambiguously Southern-speaking city to an unambiguously non-Southern-speaking city.”
If anything, people in Raleigh are sounding more Eastern than Southern, linguistics experts say. While characteristic accents linger in the rural South, urban centers along the East Coast talk more like each other.
“Raleigh has some features that other cities along the Eastern Seaboard share, and Philadelphia has, historically, been one of these,” Dodsworth said in response to a question about Raleigh’s linguistic brethren. “Also D.C., Richmond, even Charleston, to some extent.”

I would take this one step further in saying that Raleigh has undergone, via the influence of increased immigration from other linguistic regions of the US, a turnover in diglossic power. In the past, our quaint Southern dialect was once considered the H-varity, yet as more people relocated from large urban centers (and by this I mean to imply areas such as New York who bring with them a large degree of cultural capital), and the rise in international technology industry in the area, a less dialect heavy language became more prevalent. As the southern dialect began to lose dominance it also lost its H-varity status. Now, unfortunately, the Raleigh dialect, is moving into an L-varity, one that is less suited for business and government and understood as an antique.

Much of the discussion in both the Kubota and Ward (2000) and McKay and Bokhorst-Heng (2008) articles for this week call for an integration of both L-varity and H-varity into the classroom. My point in calling attention to the gradual but definitive loss of the Raleigh dialect, is that the effects of globalization on English should not exclusively be concerned with foreign-immigration, and that many distinct and historically valuable diglossia's are present in every region of our own country. When we look at the pedagogic and ethical concerns presented in both of these articles, they highlight the struggle that First Circle countries experience when creating ESL policies in primary schools. I found that most of the policies presented, as well as the solutions by the authors, still toiled with issues of Otherization.

I do not mean to have a solution for this tremendous problem, however I believe that a vital part of helping students comprehend World Englishes is to have them first understand local Englishes. Brief exposure to a WE from India that they may never experience in person does not seem that it would have lasting affects on their conception and empathy for other WE. If they were to start in their own backyard however, and could identify WE in their own community, perhaps they would more readily understand and empathize with the vast multiplicities in which English has taken shape.



http://www.newsobserver.com/2013/04/06/2806388/raleigh-has-lost-its-drawl-yall.html

English Neutrality or Ubiquity…?

"Indeed there is a constant insistence on the neutrality of English, a position that avoids all the crucial concerns around both the global and local politics of language"(qtd. in Bokhorst-Heng and McKay 3)

It seems that claiming English as a neutral linga franca of the world is a double edged sword—"a join us or die claim" if you will (ironically, this was one of the slogans used by the American Revolution when they split from England, and now we see the globalized power of the US perpetuating the linguistic hegemony of English throughout the world). I say this because English's spread has not come without an exertion of power. I find it dubious to believe that people around the world just simultaneously decided that English seems to be the best language that they could all learn to communicate together. In fact, I would argue that there has been resistance from the the first spread of English language and western culture, and there is a strong resistance to it still.

The problem however with such a global phenomena perhaps, is that English's gradual spread has grown to such a large degree that it has developed a ubiquitous presence it begins built a following that supports the dominate position it has taken in the world:

"It is the main language of books, newspapers, airports and air-traffic control, international business and academic conferences, science, technology, medicine, diplomacy, sports, international competitions, pop music, and advertising" (qtd. in Bokhorst-Heng and McKay 7).

My question then is: How can people resist such a hegemonic force? Or how can do we insure that the architecture and history of this power structure is made plain to see for all, no matter where they stand in relation to hierarchy?

 

Learning As Educators: It begins from the self

Ibrahim’s article raises several vitally important questions that we must consider when working as a TESOL professional. What I think is most valuable that we can take from this article however, is that we must also consider what position we hold within the hegemony. In order to understand what our students might feel/perceive us to be, we must be able to discuss and understand how our race, ethnicity, language skills, gender, economic status, etc. increase or decrease our own symbolic capital both inside and outside the classroom. Without this understanding I do not think we will be able to offer much assistance to our students in their own search for identity.

Our future students in the ESL classroom will more often than not be a global embodiment of racial identities, and without a basic awareness of the paradigms that our students face in SLA as a racialized (or marginalized) body. We have to ask:  “How do we practically combat this?” but I would add, “How do we manage our own predetermined roles as gate keepers to these racial essentialization? How do we fight against that?”

Under the Guise of Philanthropic Gesture

These chapters reminded me of a research paper I wrote last semester called, "Shortcut Pedagogy: The Incomprehensibly Irrelevant Trainings of BPO Call Center Employees", about the reprehensible corporate use of Business Process Outsourcing (BPO), and how they chose to instruct EFL to their employees. This except below is specifically relating to Indian call centers:

Finding properly trained trainers is an investment with which these large multination corporations constantly struggle—whether through ignorance or unavailability it is hard to say. Even the best trainers who understand that the intercultural aspects of their pedagogy, “…are not always able to acknowledge the extent to which culture is embedded and reflected in its language(s). Corporate trainers are often in a position where they are teaching cultural awareness without the time, expertise or resources to look at any but the broadest linguistic aspects of the new culture” (Hayman 149). This fissure in the timetable created by the circumstances of businesses’ needs and the reality of proper language acquisition may be an obstacle that BPOs are never capable of overcoming.

What most new hires encounter, as did Marantz, is a trainer, “…reading from a photocopied pamphlet while 100[s] of us took notes…[and for] five hours, we sat stiffly while she recited the entire pamphlet” (Marantz 6)—a pedagogic technique that leaves no room for any student interaction, let alone the trainer presenting the information in an engaging manner.

Perhaps more appalling than the tepid lack of pedagogy exhibited by trainers, might be the poor, inaccurate, and derogatory quality of the information these businesses include in their curriculums. On the second day of Marantz’s cultural training, a twenty-minute lecture was given on “the Australian psyche”, which was described as follows:

“Australia is known as the dumbest continent. Literally, college was unknown there until recently…Australians drink constantly…If you call on a Friday night, they’ll be smashed—every time. Oh, and don’t attempt to make small talk with them about their pets, okay? They can be quite touchy about animals…They are quite racist. They do not like Indians. Their preferred term for us is…‘brown bastards.’ So if you hear that kind of language, you can just hang up the call” (Marantz 11).

How could it even be possible to approach an Australian customer contacting a call center with a single ounce of respect after this officially endorsed, audaciously crude profile has been taught as fact? This type of training is analogous to the use of Pidgin English novels to educate westerners about East Asian cultures. This use of shortcut-stereotype cultural education is a prime example of the danger prevalent for trainers to fall into playing “…the role of the ‘top-down’ imparter of information rather than allowing the participant to learn through a more typical adult learning experience of reflection, exploration and testing of new concepts” (Hayman 153). Where fault lies may be up for debate, but it is hard to argue that corporate heads are ignorant or powerless to change these pitiful excuses for pedagogy.  

Subramaniam, L. Venkat. “Call Centres Of The Future.” itmagazine. 2008. Web. 9 Nov. 2012. 

Hayman, Jane. “Talking about talking: Comparing the Approaches of Intercultural Trainers and Language Teachers.” Globalization, Communication and the Workplace: Talking across the World. 147-158. London, England: Continuum, 2010. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 10 Nov. 2012. 

What interests me most in Gaischi and Taylor-Mendes's articles are the examination of the the role of ESL/EFL teachers in uncovering the Biopower (a technology of power, which is a way of managing people as a group. The distinctive quality of this political technology is that it allows for the control of entire populations. It is thus an integral feature and essential to the workings of—and makes possible—the emergence of the modern nation state and capitalism, etc. Biopower is literally having power over bodies—Foucalt from Wikipedia) at play in the educational materials they use, as Gaischi notes: 

It seems opportune to make clear and available to ESL teachers how ideologies are being packaged and presented to them and how they themselves may be positioned: "People internalize what is socially produced and made avail- able to them, and use this ... to engage in their social practice" (35).

If we as teachers cannot recognize the ways in which institutions of power work to remove our agency as individuals, be it through an overt or subconscious implementation, then we also lead our students into a similar state of helplessness. While I do not believe it is our job as educators to become activists, I do believe it is our duty to enlighten our students to the forces that work both for and against them. Images in a textbook may seem harmless, yet unconsciously they work to reinforce essentialist views of culture, gender, race, locality and physicality. And in doing so, they remove agency from a population that already has little. 

When we consider English as a lingua franca, and the power that is gained from English fluency, it may become more obvious why those with power would strive to maintain their dominance. Even though, "the number of people affected by the flow of ESL teaching materials from English-speaking cultures" is in a continual and massive growth, "the fundamental link between private industry and an ostensibly philanthropic far-reaching government agency" (Gaischi 32) should not be ignored. In fact I would offer that the subtle gestures made through skewed or misrepresented cultural realities, is a deliberate, aggressive act of biopower to globalize American and British cultural and language under the guise of philanthropic gestures.

These chapters reminded me of a research paper I wrote last semester called, "Shortcut Pedagogy: The Incomprehensibly Irrelevant Trainings of BPO Call Center Employees", about the reprehensible corporate use of Business Process Outsourcing (BPO), and how they chose to instruct EFL to their employees. This except below is specifically relating to Indian call centers:

Finding properly trained trainers is an investment with which these large multination corporations constantly struggle—whether through ignorance or unavailability it is hard to say. Even the best trainers who understand that the intercultural aspects of their pedagogy, “…are not always able to acknowledge the extent to which culture is embedded and reflected in its language(s). Corporate trainers are often in a position where they are teaching cultural awareness without the time, expertise or resources to look at any but the broadest linguistic aspects of the new culture” (Hayman 149). This fissure in the timetable created by the circumstances of businesses’ needs and the reality of proper language acquisition may be an obstacle that BPOs are never capable of overcoming.

What most new hires encounter, as did Marantz, is a trainer, “…reading from a photocopied pamphlet while 100[s] of us took notes…[and for] five hours, we sat stiffly while she recited the entire pamphlet” (Marantz 6)—a pedagogic technique that leaves no room for any student interaction, let alone the trainer presenting the information in an engaging manner.

Perhaps more appalling than the tepid lack of pedagogy exhibited by trainers, might be the poor, inaccurate, and derogatory quality of the information these businesses include in their curriculums. On the second day of Marantz’s cultural training, a twenty-minute lecture was given on “the Australian psyche”, which was described as follows:

“Australia is known as the dumbest continent. Literally, college was unknown there until recently…Australians drink constantly…If you call on a Friday night, they’ll be smashed—every time. Oh, and don’t attempt to make small talk with them about their pets, okay? They can be quite touchy about animals…They are quite racist. They do not like Indians. Their preferred term for us is…‘brown bastards.’ So if you hear that kind of language, you can just hang up the call” (Marantz 11).

How could it even be possible to approach an Australian customer contacting a call center with a single ounce of respect after this officially endorsed, audaciously crude profile has been taught as fact? This type of training is analogous to the use of Pidgin English novels to educate westerners about East Asian cultures. This use of shortcut-stereotype cultural education is a prime example of the danger prevalent for trainers to fall into playing “…the role of the ‘top-down’ imparter of information rather than allowing the participant to learn through a more typical adult learning experience of reflection, exploration and testing of new concepts” (Hayman 153). Where fault lies may be up for debate, but it is hard to argue that corporate heads are ignorant or powerless to change these pitiful excuses for pedagogy. 

Subramaniam, L. Venkat. “Call Centres Of The Future.” itmagazine. 2008. Web. 9 Nov. 2012.

Hayman, Jane. “Talking about talking: Comparing the Approaches of Intercultural Trainers and Language Teachers.” Globalization, Communication and the Workplace: Talking across the World. 147-158. London, England: Continuum, 2010. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 10 Nov. 2012. 

What interests me most in Gaischi and Taylor-Mendes's articles are the examination of the the role of ESL/EFL teachers in uncovering the Biopower (a technology of power, which is a way of managing people as a group. The distinctive quality of this political technology is that it allows for the control of entire populations. It is thus an integral feature and essential to the workings of—and makes possible—the emergence of the modern nation state and capitalism, etc. Biopower is literally having power over bodies—Foucalt from Wikipedia) at play in the educational materials they use, as Gaischi notes: 

It seems opportune to make clear and available to ESL teachers how ideologies are being packaged and presented to them and how they themselves may be positioned: "People internalize what is socially produced and made avail- able to them, and use this ... to engage in their social practice" (35).

If we as teachers cannot recognize the ways in which institutions of power work to remove our agency as individuals, be it through an overt or subconscious implementation, then we also lead our students into a similar state of helplessness. While I do not believe it is our job as educators to become activists, I do believe it is our duty to enlighten our students to the forces that work both for and against them. Images in a textbook may seem harmless, yet unconsciously they work to reinforce essentialist views of culture, gender, race, locality and physicality. And in doing so, they remove agency from a population that already has little. 

When we consider English as a lingua franca, and the power that is gained from English fluency, it may become more obvious why those with power would strive to maintain their dominance. Even though, "the number of people affected by the flow of ESL teaching materials from English-speaking cultures" is in a continual and massive growth, "the fundamental link between private industry and an ostensibly philanthropic far-reaching government agency" (Gaischi 32) should not be ignored. In fact I would offer that the subtle gestures made through skewed or misrepresented cultural realities, is a deliberate, aggressive act of biopower to globalize American and British cultural and language under the guise of philanthropic gestures.

The Hidden Hegemony in Speech Acts

While SLA at the most basic mechanical language learning level may seem like an achievable act I agree with Judd that "It is necessary to learn how to understand and create language that is appropriate to the situations in which one is functioning…" because "the possibility of a total communication breakdown and the stereotypical labeling of the second language users as people who are insensitive, rude or inept," (152) is a complete, albeit unfortunate, reality.

The problem is however is how can we bring this guarded information into the ESL classroom, and once it is there, how can we present it in such a manner that our students can replicate in real life situations. And even if it is possible to create such a situation inside the safety of a classroom, we cannot guarantee that we as educators will be able to cover all of the possible variations needed to navigate local pragmatic language situations. To make matters worse, even if we do pursue research to better inform our students, "native speakers often do not report accurately what they really do in natural language situations because they may not want to reveal that information to strangers (especially, to non-native speakers of the language)" (156).

What may be most important for us to consider then, is that situations that require these specific speech acts are exemplars of cultural capital at work. Native speakers do not wish to give up their positions that they are able to hold through their awareness of these speech acts (cultural capital) and thereby work to gate-keep non-native speakers from easily entering into positions of power, and thereby generating competition for power.

It is unfortunate that we cannot separate these pragmatic language rules from power dynamics, but for certain our students' lack of knowledge or ability to apply these speech acts can and will prevent them from gaining access to different parts of society from healthcare, to schooling, to employment.

Strangeness Will Always Win

Harklau's and Kachru's chapters were very troubling for me as a student of creative writing. Though I do not yet have experience in the TESOL classroom from what I gather it seems to be very similar to the environment of the creative writing workshop. In a workshop each student comes from a different background of literature study, and in this respect each student comes with their own unique language. What an instructor of a creative writing workshop attempts to do, in a sense is to promulgate a new language understanding and practice. From the accounts of these two chapters I believe that ESL and creative writing workshops have nearly the exact same goals. However, a key difference in creative writing classroom and ESL writing classrooms is apparent, especially in the disturbing quotes from ESL teachers in Harklau's chapter: 

So she [Grayson] picks the  paper and she,…goes, "This is not your work!…No, I don't believe it This is perfect you could have not do it…No…It's odd for you to write about Germany!

and

He complained that she was writing very "romantic" essays talking about cultural identity and feeling stranded between cultures, which he characterized as expressive writing that did not meet course goals.

and

 Other people from Vietnam disagreed. You'll have to talk to one another!

It is my severe hope that this cited incidents were merely an unfortunate occasion of ignorant, bad teachers, however I have the inclination that these types of interactions are not isolated. 

When approaching the teaching of writing, even if it is in a person's or group's L1, experimentation and writing towards subjects for which student are enthusiastic, must always be encouraged. It may seem contradictory to encourage non-traditional styles of writing, when attempting to improve students' academic approach, but I believe that allowing students to explore the L2 writing in a way that actively engages their thoughts and interests, as opposed to shutting them down often to a point of creating classroom resistance behaviors, will allow them not only to open-up new language code pathways into the academic style of writing, but it will also help to foster the formation of a more confident L2 cultural identity (in whatever form that may present itself). It seems vastly ironic to me, that the ESL writing classroom environment seems to be one of identity restriction because as Harklau cites in her chapter: 

Learning how to writing in another language produces profound changes in those who live and work in other countries…"writing is so tied to thinking—the inner expression of a person's being—and to communicate style—its outer expression—thus touching the core of the writer's identity" (120). 

It would be a valuable experience for TESOL/ESL writing instructors to take a creative writing workshop so that they too could experience the difficulty it is to write in a foreign language, and furthermore how troubling it can be to have others critique a piece of personal writing that may be held very close to one's heart. As Kachru points out it important perhaps to remember that "a narrow view of what constitutes good writing may shut out a large number of original studies from publication and dissemination because most information technology is controlled in the Inner Circle." The hegemony of native English writers may, in blatant self-righteousness, work to diligently exclude non-native approaches to writing simply because their individual style (that is often multicultural/bilingual in its conception and execution when writing in English), does not conform to preconceived notions about what standard English is, or should be. 

Weirdness, estranged, broken, disjointed, and unfamiliar uses of English however, are encouraged in the creative writing classroom. And where does new literature begin its journey to the public readership? In the writing classroom where innovation is encouraged.

In an essay by Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Robert Brinley entitled "What Is a Minor Literature?", these types of L2 writings are encouraged. In fact they claim that all of Franz Kafka's achievements in literary greatness stem directly from the strangeness in his German, German being his L2. It is the "desiccated vocabulary, incorrect syntax…[that] in general we could call intensive or tensor the linguistic elements (however varied) which express the 'inner tensions of a language,' (22) that make writing interesting.

So, I beg you future ESL/TESOL educators, spare your students conformity and help them embrace the  strange and peculiar territory of writing in their L2.

 

English Pronunciation

If you can pronounce correctly every word in this poem, you will be speaking English better than 90% of the native English speakers in the world.

After trying the verses, a Frenchman said he’d prefer six months of hard labour to reading six lines aloud.

Dearest creature in creation,
Study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
I will keep you, Suzy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.
Just compare heart, beard, and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word,
Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
(Mind the latter, how it’s written.)
Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as plaque and ague.
But be careful how you speak:
Say break and steak, but bleak and streak;
Cloven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe.
Hear me say, devoid of trickery,
Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore,
Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles,
Exiles, similes, and reviles;
Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
Solar, mica, war and far;
One, anemone, Balmoral,
Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel;
Gertrude, German, wind and mind,
Scene, Melpomene, mankind.
Billet does not rhyme with ballet,
Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.
Blood and flood are not like food,
Nor is mould like should and would.
Viscous, viscount, load and broad,
Toward, to forward, to reward.
And your pronunciation’s OK
When you correctly say croquet,
Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve,
Friend and fiend, alive and live.
Ivy, privy, famous; clamour
And enamour rhyme with hammer.
River, rival, tomb, bomb, comb,
Doll and roll and some and home.
Stranger does not rhyme with anger,
Neither does devour with clangour.
Souls but foul, haunt but aunt,
Font, front, wont, want, grand, and grant,
Shoes, goes, does. Now first say finger,
And then singer, ginger, linger,
Real, zeal, mauve, gauze, gouge and gauge,
Marriage, foliage, mirage, and age.
Query does not rhyme with very,
Nor does fury sound like bury.
Dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth.
Job, nob, bosom, transom, oath.
Though the differences seem little,
We say actual but victual.
Refer does not rhyme with deafer.
Fe0ffer does, and zephyr, heifer.
Mint, pint, senate and sedate;
Dull, bull, and George ate late.
Scenic, Arabic, Pacific,
Science, conscience, scientific.
Liberty, library, heave and heaven,
Rachel, ache, moustache, eleven.
We say hallowed, but allowed,
People, leopard, towed, but vowed.
Mark the differences, moreover,
Between mover, cover, clover;
Leeches, breeches, wise, precise,
Chalice, but police and lice;
Camel, constable, unstable,
Principle, disciple, label.
Petal, panel, and canal,
Wait, surprise, plait, promise, pal.
Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair,
Senator, spectator, mayor.
Tour, but our and succour, four.
Gas, alas, and Arkansas.
Sea, idea, Korea, area,
Psalm, Maria, but malaria.
Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean.
Doctrine, turpentine, marine.
Compare alien with Italian,
Dandelion and battalion.
Sally with ally, yea, ye,
Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, and key.
Say aver, but ever, fever,
Neither, leisure, skein, deceiver.
Heron, granary, canary.
Crevice and device and aerie.
Face, but preface, not efface.
Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass.
Large, but target, gin, give, verging,
Ought, out, joust and scour, scourging.
Ear, but earn and wear and tear
Do not rhyme with here but ere.
Seven is right, but so is even,
Hyphen, roughen, nephew Stephen,
Monkey, donkey, Turk and jerk,
Ask, grasp, wasp, and cork and work.
Pronunciation (think of Psyche!)
Is a paling stout and spikey?
Won’t it make you lose your wits,
Writing groats and saying grits?
It’s a dark abyss or tunnel:
Strewn with stones, stowed, solace, gunwale,
Islington and Isle of Wight,
Housewife, verdict and indict.
Finally, which rhymes with enough,
Though, through, plough, or dough, or cough?
Hiccough has the sound of cup.
My advice is to give up!!!

English Pronunciation by G. Nolst Trenité

Dual-Culture/Citizenship: A Place Not for Pride

A Step From Heaven was a very saddening book for me. I say this because I it seems that so many different positive actions could have been made by each member of the Park family that could have improved their situation. When making the decision to immigrate to a different country it is of paramount importance to research and find ways to ease integration, or acculturation. To, as Dr. Kang mentions in her article, have a family plan for the management of combining two different cultures and languages, and furthermore to deal with the grief that may, and almost always does, occur from loss or disconnection with native culture and country.

Perhaps this book was also so affecting to me because I was constantly reminded of the struggles that my fiancée, Zhenya and her parents must have experienced as they immigrated from the USSR to the US when she was only seven. I have only received glimpses of her memories from this time, but some of them were very similar to Young Ju’s (aside from the abusive family situation, thank heavens). Unlike the Parks, Zhenya’s parents both have PhDs, and therefore did not have to enter the low-wage workforce from the book. They did however, live for ten-years in a lower-income, predominately immigrant populated apartment complex. And while, Zhenya may not cite the same reasons for not bringing many friends to her home, I know that her family life was and still remains a private space, one that can only be entered by very close friends. This to me reflects the two simultaneous cultures existing alongside one another: Russian at home, American in public. Zhenya and her parents, while all fluent in English, keep their home culture fairly Russian. Yet, just as we can see in A Step From Heaven, Zhenya, like Young Ju, speaks to her parents in a mixture of English and Russian, even though she could communicate exclusive in one or the other language with them (for example when I am with her at home, they kindly speak in English for me and when I am not there they speak in Russian). What this points to in my observation, is Zhenya’s (or Jane, as she goes by for ease of American pronunciation, Zhenya is even a nickname from the Russian, Evgeniya, her full name), cross-cultural existence. Just has she has both Russian and US passports and citizenship; she is culturally Russian and American.

When we were working abroad together, other Russians would even joke with her about her American accent when she spoke Russian with them. Something interesting about these types of experience of her dual-cultured-citizenship is that she can take offense sometimes from being called either too American, or too Russian. This must be a disorienting experience of identity, and I greatly admire her strength. An important reason that she is able to stay so unwavering with her complex identity I believe is due to the ways that her parents reached out to both American and other Russian communities when they moved to America.

If the Parks had not cloistered themselves away from their Korean friends, or if they had started to participate in the Korean church community when they first entered the US then perhaps Apa would not have felt such intense pressure to support everything on his own. Also, if Young Ju’s parents had embraced other American’s like the Doyle family, perhaps they would have discovered ways to navigate American culture more easily. But I do not think the fault lies completely with the Park parents, for if Young Ju would have not felt so ashamed of her family’s difference from American culture perhaps she could have helped her parents make more connections, again for example the Doyle family.

I think the lesson may be, that no matter what one’s native culture may dictate about pride, when immigrating, travelling into, or even interacting with people from a foreign culture, it is necessary to be open to receiving other’s help. Otherwise it will be very difficult to acculturate.

How To Pack and Unpack Sound Advice: Investment and Imagined Community as an Authority Figure Using Their L2

From 2010–2012 I worked as a sound technician for the company Holiday on Ice, with a show that toured through France and Germany. The company operates in English, but employs local crew members, of whom ninety-percent or more do not speak English at all. In this strange paradigm where English was the native and simultaneously the non-native language, I often found myself in a strange no-mans-land of social power relationships. Having studied two-years of French during my undergraduate career, I felt that my L2 French proficiency was at least basic. In the anecdote that I will share it becomes obvious however, that my self-perception as an adequate L2 speaker existed only in my imagined community (where my "desired community...offer[ed] possibilities for an enhanced range of identity options in the future" (Norton "Language and Identity" 355)) and not reality.

As head sound technician for the show I was responsible for set-up and breakdown of the equipment that we toured in tractor trailers from city-to-city (the show played national hockey arenas to provide a scale of the production). In order to do this a second technician, Justin, and I were assisted by two local crew members. The local crew in this particular city spoke exclusively French. Justin is Belgian and to our advantage he is fluent in French. After packing all of our equipment into its cases, we began to load the truck. Justin had just recently joined us at this point in the 9–month tour, and therefore was following my lead for the packing order. In order for everything to fit it had to be packed in a specific order and stacked from floor to ceiling, front to back. Easy enough, right? As I began to rattle-off instructions to the local crew (in what to my ear sounded precise and confident French) Justin responded with full hearted, commiserating laughter, advising, "Brian, you sound like an idiot. Just speak English because, seriously man, you're just confusing them."

While Justin's intentions were compassionate and true, the power dynamic not only between the two of us, but also between the local non-English speaking crew, instantly shifted. I went from a state of positive investment (and place of authority) in my attempts to speak and practice my L2, to a shutdown uninvested state of powerlessness. Also, the imagined community that I saw for my future-L2-fluent-self, and felt that I was fully integrating into, dismantled.

What I find most interesting and instructive about this instance, is how it illuminated the vital importance of encouraging instruction. While as a "rough crew member", it may be effective to dish out every bit of criticism with blunt, tough-love it is not an effective technique of guiding one toward a heightened enthusiasm toward improving SLA.

In the classroom of course, the implementation of tough-love is highly unlikely it may be encountered "beyond the four walls of the class room" (Noroton 355). In reading some of the turn-of-the-twentith-century autobiographical accounts from Pavlenko's "The Making of an American", I realized that I had been creating my own identity narrative for my L2 experience. The European crew member narrative I created enabled me to integrate and maintain respect from my colleagues, and it required a de-Americanization of my native-identity narrative. I had to embrace the idea of multilingualism (as Americans are so adamant mono-linguists) and, for this particular social situation, to perform an unnatural toughness. Ironically I found that nearly every crew member was also performing this toughness, and in reality we were all empathetic, open-minded, and compassionate people. Without the creation of my European crew narrative, I would not have survived the two-years of being the only American in Holiday on Ice's over fifty international, mostly European crew members.

I think that opening up this unconscious act of identity narrative creation, that we all do when entering new social situations especially those that are outside of our native culture, would be an essential exercise in helping students make conscious, and thereby more directed and positive, decisions about the narrative they choose to compose for themselves.

Is It Our Culture or Our Language That Makes Us Plan A Month In Advance…

What I found most interesting about this weeks readings was the disagreement about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis—whether language in any way actually influences thought, or whether it may be that language and cultural are inextricably intertwined. While I do understand the argument made by Pinker, which articulates the inaccuracy of Whorf's hypothesis based on the lack of true empirical cognitive science evidence, I believe that Whorf has a point. 

The way in which we speak about the world undoubtedly shapes the thoughts that we have about the world. It seems that Kumaravadivelu's presentation of the invalidity of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is based on his observation that "if the connection [between language and thought] were inextricable...we would not be able to translate successfully from one language to another", which is only true to an exaggerated extent. I do believe however, that if we, as educators, do not consider the implications that language patterns which differ from our own have an effect on the ways we approach thinking, then we may in fact jam ourselves between a rock and a hard place.

I was reminded of an excerpt form an article that I recently read from the Russian American Cultural Heritage Center, by Olga Zatsepina, Ph.D. and Julio Rodriguez M.A., called "American Values Through Russian Eyes". What particularly stood out in contrast to Kumaravadivelu's argument was the difference in ways in which Russian and English languages deal with issues of time and control:

American's language is filled with references to time, giving a clear indication of how much it is valued. Time is something to be on, to be kept, filled, saved, used, spent, wasted, lost, gained, planned, given, made the most of, even "killed."

Interestingly enough, this American value was the most criticized [by Russians].

"My friend told me that when she lived in the USA her friends there planned where to go to spend 3 days in the end of May at the beginning of April. Isn't it boring when you have to plan your life many months before. I plan my work during the week but it is very flexible plan and I have some time free to change."

This is a typical response of a Russian. In the first place, historically, a plan in Russia was something that had to be accomplished at any cost (five year plans, etc.). Russians still feel the sense of a "Plan" as a "mandate," a command. They do not sense it as an anticipated route on a map, to be followed only so long as it helps get to the destination efficiently, a path to be modified by experience. Instead, a plan is felt as an imposition.

Then too, with so many changes and unpredictable situations happening every day within the country and in the lives of individuals, it is hardly possible for a Russian to believe that you can plan a vacation so long ahead, or, for that matter, trust that any future expectation will actually come to realization.

American preoccupation with time was also seen as demonstrating that people are valued well below promptness.

"It seems that Americans are more concerned with accomplishing things on time than they are with developing interpersonal relations."
"No time control can be compared with friendship. Human interaction is no doubt much more important in life."
These comments show how the Russian students oppose time control with interpersonal relations. They believe that with such a tense schedule of living, Americans are limiting their opportunities for more valuable interpersonal relations. 

The American English use of such intense and violent descriptors for time reflects their cultural practice of planning ahead, being prompt, and meeting deadlines at all costs, whereas Russian culture and language (though the examples are not present from this excerpt) reflect a more leisurely and free interpretation of time through the ways in which the speak about time. The question however, and perhaps this is where both arguments fall short, becomes one of language vs. culture—which in many situations is a "chicken or egg" debate. It may be impossible to neither confirm nor deny that language influences thought, just as it may be impossible to deny that our culture influences our language.

What is Culture?

After reading both Morgan articles I have come to this definition of culture:

Culture is a shared understanding and perception of reality comprised of physical, intellectual, emotional, and linguistic objects that are in a constant state of re-development, which all exist in a constant flux of conscious and unconscious awareness of the individual participants.

The key elements from Morgan's articles that influenced my definition are the Explicit and Tacit "Cultural Iceberg", the emphasis and necessity of community, and the "Verbal" (as opposed to static "Noun") quality of culture. 

I found the use of the three-demensional iceberg depiction of the five dimensions of culture to be very helpful in moving from a conceptual to applicable explanation of how culture effects and affects our understanding of our identity as an individual and as a community member. What amazed me was the large degree to which the products, practices, persons, and communities, that make up the Explicit aspects of culture, all rest on the unconscious, Tacit, realm of perspectives. This depiction however, seems accurate—the greatest influence our cultural has over its manifestations in our daily life are built upon the historical foundations, or the perspectives (in the form of traditions, folklore, foods, humor, etc.), that have stood the test of time and therefore influence peoples across multiple generations. With that observation however, it should be noted that even the deep-set Tacit perspectives of culture are subject to alteration, and those that become out-dated due to technological or social changes, can and will be disowned. This amazing part of the flexibility of culture is that it is able to evolve with civilization (without this capacity it would cultures become merely passing fads?).

As language teachers, I found that the call that "this kind of culture description and analysis calls for research outside ourselves" (Morgan 29), is of paramount importance. In order to most accurately teach a second language, I believe that teachers must be able to understand not only their own Explicit and Tacit culture, but also that of the target language, and furthermore they must also be open to the cultures that their students bring into the classroom. Second language acquisition comes with its own set of anxieties solely from the act of speaking, writing, and reading—however, if we approach SLA from a holistic viewpoint, including cultural education, then students can build a comfort zone of confidence around their self perception and their perception of the culture which they are entering through language. It seems that culture can never be ignored. If we ignore the interaction between individual and community, of personal and foreign culture, then we ignore the communal basis which cultural is based upon.

Foundations for a TESOL Beginning

My hope for this course is that it will assemble my many experiences and ideas about the ways in which culture and language are interdependent. Having worked in Europe for two years with a company that employs people from several countries around the world but operates in English, I know how influential the mingling cross-overs of culture can be when attempting to communicate and create both professional and friendly bonds. It was very humbling for me to be a foreigner with the luxury of working with locals who could, and would, only communicate with me in their second language (I am currently monolingual, with only basic capacity in French and Spanish). Too often I find that our (and my own) egocentric and arrogant views of our own culture and language close our minds to the multitude of possible cross-cultural enlightening encounters out there. Culture and language are indelibly linked, in my experience at least, and when we attempt to communicate across cultures without this in mind all too often we fall back on stereotyping and prejudice. 

With this in mind, I am very excited to delve into the theoretical and applicable understandings and applications of the cross-cultural world—and I think that beginning with a foundation in the cross-cultural issues in TESOL will serve me well in my future as an educator and in life, as a global citizen.