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.
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