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.