Li-fen Lin
Li-fen Lin
NNEST of the Month
February 2012
lifen [underscore] lin [at] hotmail [dot] com
Li-fen Lin recently completed her Ph. D. in the department of linguistics at the University of California at Davis. The title of her dissertation was On the Developmental Journey: An Ethnographic Study of Teacher Identity Development of NESTs and NNESTs in a US MATESOL Program. She began her university education by majoring in English language and literature at National Taiwan Normal University. After graduation she taught English at Taipei Municipal Ming Der Junior High School and later joined a three-year experimental research project on teaching English to elementary school students at the National Experimental High School (NEHS) in Hsinchu, Taiwan. While studying for a MA at the University of Southern California, she taught in the OIS ESL program. Upon graduation she returned to Taiwan and became a full-time lecturer in the English Department at National Central University in Taiwan for two years. There she taught undergraduate students academic English, and also designed and taught courses such as English Composition, Oral Training, Language Acquisition and Teaching, and Introduction to Linguistics to English major students. While she was a doctoral student at UC Davis, she taught academic writing to international graduate students new to UC Davis and also introduction to linguistics. After graduation from UC Davis she was a lecturer in Stanford University’s English for Foreign Students program in the summer of 2011. Also, Li-fen has been active in the TESOL and CATESOL organizations. She was the web manager of TESOL’s NNEST interest group from 2009 to 2011 and has been the coordinator of CATESOL’s NNLEI interest group from 2010 to present. She has also given several presentations at TESOL, CATESOL, and AAAL conferences.
NNEST February Interviewer: Terry Doyle
1. Tell us about your educational, linguistic, and teaching background. For example, why did you decide to enter the major in your university in Taiwan to prepare to be an English teacher in Taiwan? Also, what experiences have you had as an English teacher in Taiwan and in the United States?
I grew up speaking Taiwanese at home and learning and speaking Mandarin Chinese at school. I started to learn English in junior high school as everyone else in Taiwan at that time. I had great luck with my English teachers through high school, which helped me develop my interest in English language and literature. Also because of the high status of English as a foreign language in Taiwan (Chen, 2003; Tsao, 2004), I chose English as my major when I studied at National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU). As to why I decided to become a teacher, the feminization and high occupational prestige of the teaching profession in Taiwan (Fwu & Wang, 2002) “encouraged” me to think teaching would be the best career choice for me. And having found how much I love teaching since I was at NTNU, I have been committed to this profession, no matter whether I am given the chance to teach English or Chinese, young kids or adults.
I began my TESOL career teaching secondary school students English as a foreign language in Taipei. In my third year of teaching, I joined a three-year experimental research project on teaching English to elementary school students. Upon the finish of the three-year project, I attended the University of Southern California (USC) to advance my study in TESOL. At USC, I taught as an ESL Teacher in the OIS English Language Program, teaching English to visiting scholars, international graduate students and their spouses for a school year. Hereafter, I taught English to EFL and ESL students at primary, secondary and tertiary level. After graduation from USC, I returned to Taiwan and worked as a full-time lecturer in the English Department of the National Central University in Taiwan for two years. At UC Davis, besides working as a teaching assistant teaching introduction to Linguistics, I also taught as a graduate student teaching Chinese and Advanced Academic English for International Graduate Students. In the summer of 2011 I was a lecturer in Stanford University’s English for Foreign Students program.
2. How do you compare your experiences as an English teacher in Taiwan vs. your experiences in the United States, especially concerning the development of your teacher identity?
When I taught at the secondary school in Taipei, I was a homeroom teacher as well as an English teacher. I was responsible for every aspect of my homeroom students’ total education. My teacher identity was maintained and reassured through my success in performing the roles of an educator, an empathetic counselor, a language model and a grammar expert. Then when I participated in the 3-year research project, I had the chance to work with NESTs as a team member to design and develop English teaching activities and materials. Even though I was aware of the privileging of NESTs in Taiwan, especially from parents’ perception, I did not find my identity as an English teacher challenged. Rather, I recognized my strengths of sharing the L1 and culture with students and my ability to manage big classes and to act in different roles as needed (Llurda, 2004; Medgyes, 1994; Tatar & Yildiz, 2010). In fact, I embraced my new identities as an elementary school teacher, a materials writer and a researcher.
In the United States, I strived to reposition myself through my roles as an international graduate student in English in the US academic community, as an NNEST, and as a new member functioning in the society of my target language. At USC, I was the only non-native English speaker teaching in the OIS ESL program. This experience familiarized me with the diverse needs of students from different first language backgrounds and discrepant English proficiency levels. My confidence in ELT reached a new high because I found myself capable of adjusting and adapting teaching methods and styles in responding to these diverse needs. The positive teaching experience at USC gave new meanings to my identity as a TESOL professional. In short, my identity as an EFL/ESL teacher, as I reflected and wrote in the introduction of my dissertation, “has been in constant flux and change in relation to my linguistically and culturally diverse students and the immediate contexts in which we were situated” (Lin, 2011, p. 11).
3. When did your non-nativeness as an English teacher become visible to you, and how did this affect and shape your future research and career expectations?
What discrimination and unfairness have you experienced personally, and how have you dealt with these incidents? Were you treated differently as an English teacher in Taiwan and in the United States?
It was a discriminatory hiring practice that heightened my awareness of the gate-keeping role my nonnative status and race/ethnicity played in the TESOL profession, especially in American society. At the end of my first year as a doctoral student back in California, I was recommended and assigned to teach academic writing to international graduate students as a graduate student instructor for the following year. However, I was questioned by the graduate ESL program coordinator, who had an MA degree as I did, and was asked by her to take the very class I had been assigned to teach first. Her reason was that I was an international student and a non-native speaker of English. My nonnativeness suddenly became visible to me then.
My lived experience of marginalization pointed to “the absurdity of an educational system that prepares one for a profession for which it disqualifies the person at the same time” (Canagarajah, 1999, p. 77). To understand the “absurdity” of such an education system and practice, I started to investigate how the professional identities of both NES and NNES student teachers as ESL/EFL teachers are shaped by professional discourses in the MATESOL program, and how their (non)native status influences this enculturation process and their teaching practices. The purpose of my dissertation was to pursue an understanding of the discursive process of negotiation and construction of teacher identity.
4. Your dissertation completed for your PH. D. at the University of California at Davis last fall was a longitudinal ethnographic study in which you examined case studies of four student teachers in an MA TESOL program in one of the California State Universities; one participant was an international student, one an immigrant student, and two were “native speaker” students born in the United States. You state that one reason for choosing this topic was because “the NNEST/NEST dichotomy remains the most prevalent way of theorizing teacher identity in TESOL” and that “the process of the search for and construction of professional teacher identity, especially within MATESOL programs, is understudied in the field of TESOL and Applied Linguistics.” Can you explain how your study begins to fill the gap in the literature of TESOL and Applied Linguistics? How has your study added to the literature of Applied linguistics, teacher identity formation, and NNEST issues?
Before I answer this question, I want to thank Terry again for believing in my work and reading my draft. My dissertation study contributes to the previous NNEST literature and the literature on ESL/EFL teacher identity in three ways. First, drawing on ethnography as methodology, this longitudinal project contributes new insights into the importance of teacher identity development in the process of learning to teach in an MATESOL program from the student teachers’ perspectives. My participant and non-participant observation of the student teachers’ interactions in multiple dimensions inside and outside the classes they took or taught provides a situated description and situational comprehension of the kind of participation and negotiation that student teachers experience in the process of becoming an ELT professional. These are issues that quantitative research neglects to explore, and that interview-based research cannot provide data for (Lin, 2011).
Secondly, since no study has addressed the issue of teacher identity in TESOL and related fields by comparing the identity construction of prospective NNES and NES teachers within an MATESOL program, this study contributes to the bodies of existing research by providing a comparative study of NNES and NES student teachers’ identity construction within a MATESOL program. By including both NES and NNES student teachers, this study gives voices to student teachers coming from marginalized groups as well as from the dominant group. This dissertation adds to the understanding of how the idealized NES and the marginalized NNES student teacher negotiate and articulate their professional identities as they participate in dialogic interaction in the MATESOL program and in the wider TESOL community (Lin, 2011).
Finally, this study contributes to the understanding of teacher identity construction through a situated examination of the linguistic choices made by student teachers to position themselves in relation to their colleagues and other interpersonal, institutional, and social contexts. Following Weedon’s (1987) idea that language and identity are mutually constitutive, my dissertation study looks locally at multiple aspects of teacher identity in relation to the larger social, cultural and political contexts through language and discourse. (Lin, 2011).
5. The last sentence of your dissertation is “Developing and gaining one’s autonomy to navigate our continuous journey in development should be the central task for teachers, student teachers, and teacher trainers.” How has your research helped you, the participants in your research, and readers of your dissertation to develop and gain such autonomy?
Working with my participants in this dissertation project has allowed me to continuously examine and reflect on my professional self. In the course of writing this dissertation, I have found that my own teacher identity has been transformed over and over again through their narratives of struggles and growth. Their stories add to our understanding of the realities facing student teachers in the local contexts like this MATESOL program and how they navigate their developmental journey. I feel deeply grateful to my participants and it is my hope that this dissertation brings their voices, NESTs and NNESTs, to the dialogue on teacher identity in language teacher education and teacher development. It is also my hope that this dissertation and the stories of my participants will engage my readers in the dialogues with themselves and others, internally and externally, and hopefully help to develop and gain their autonomy in this life-long developmental journey.
6. As an ESL teacher in a community college which is in the same city as a well known and respected MA TESOL program in a large public university, each semester I have the opportunity to work with one or more student teachers from this MA TESOL program. What advice can you give me on how to better mentor student teachers? In particular, should I and if so how can I focus on their identity formation as a mentor teacher?
As I concluded in my dissertation, “a focus on teacher identity construction in a teacher preparation program allows student teachers to become more conscious and in control of their learning-to- teach trajectory” (Lin, 2011, p. 229). It is important that each student teacher has an individual sense of his or her identity development. Teacher educators and mentor teachers should support and encourage their student teachers to explore, experiment with, negotiate, and create their pedagogical selves. As I have known from your work, you have committed a great deal of time and work helping your student teachers develop pedagogy that is sensitive to their immediate local social and cultural contexts. Your work is an excellent example of how mentor teachers’ meta-awareness of student teacher identity development provides space and opportunities for student teachers to self-initiate their professional development.
7. You are a wife of a busy hard-working husband and also the mother of two young children. How do you find the time, energy, and motivation not only to complete a PH.D. degree, be the coordinator of CATESOL’s NNLEI interest group, be the web manager of TESOL’s NNEST interest group, give XX presentations at TESOL and CATESOL conferences in the past three years, be busy writing a book version of your dissertation which you hope to publish in the next year, AND take care of two kids and a husband?
Upon further reflection on my life as a doctoral student and a mother of two children, I am grateful to my family for their unflagging support and love. Without their support and love, I wouldn’t have the time and space to accomplish what I have been inspired to do.
Balancing motherhood and doctoral work had been a great challenge for me. One thing I learned from my own experience is to be flexible. I was a mother first, though it was my newly added identity. I cooked, fed, played, gave a bath to my children before I could open my dissertation file to take on the role of a doctoral student in front of my laptop. I was a wife last because I thought my helpful husband could take care of himself while I focused on being a mother and a graduate student. But there were always times when the situations went against the priorities I set. Sometimes I didn’t get to go near my dissertation file for two whole weeks when my children got sick. Very often, my helpful husband just wouldn’t take the kids to the park by himself because he wanted me there too. Not to mention that I had other various roles I played at the same: a daughter, a teacher, a friend, etc. So I needed to learn to be flexible to curb my anxiety of not being able to fulfill them all. I had to learn to set realistic goals for my daily schedule. And I had to admit it to myself that it takes a long time to earn a doctorate, especially juggling the conflicting demands of motherhood and doctoral studies at the same time.
As for the motivation, I have been inspired and encouraged by the work done by the leaders of our community. I have been fortunate to meet and get to know and work with some of these extraordinary leaders: Kathleen M. Bailey, Luciana de Oliveira, Terry Doyle, Lia Kamhi-Stein, Ahmar Mahboob, Ana Wu, to name a few. Working with them enables me to see the importance and action of shared leadership, mentoring and collaboration. I believe that active participation can lead to the changes we wish to see. So I follow their lead to assume leadership roles in hoping to help further the goals of our community. Inside or outside of TESOL, I hope I will be a part of the force that leads us to a better world.
References
Lin, L. F. (2011). On the Developmental Journey: An Ethnographic Study of Teacher Identity Development of NESTs and NNESTs in a US MATESOL Program. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of California, Davis.
Canagarajah, A. S. (1999). Interrogating the “native speaker fallacy”: Non-linguistic roots, non-pedagogical results. In G. Braine (Ed.), Non-native educators in English language teaching (pp. 77-92). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers.
Chen, S. C. (2003). The spread of English in Taiwan: Changing uses and shifting attitudes. Taipei: Crane Publishing Co., Ltd.
Fwu, B. J., & Wang, H. H. (2002). The social status of teachers in Taiwan. Comparative Education, 38 (2), 211-224.
Llurda, E. (2004). Non-native speaker teachers and English as an international language. International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 14(3). 314-323.
Medgyes, P. (1994). The non-native teacher. London: Macmillan.
Tatar, S., & Yildiz, S. (2010). Empowering nonnative-English speaking teachers in the classroom. In A. Mahboob (Ed.), The NNEST lens: Non native English speakers in TESOL (pp. 114-128). Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, Cambridge Scholars Press.
Weedon, C. (1987). Feminist practice and poststructuralist theory. Oxford: Blackwell.
ANNE-MARIE DE MEJÍA
NNEST of the Month
January 2012
Anne-Marie Truscott de Mejía is an Associate Professor at the Centro de Investigación y Formación en Educación at Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia. She holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics in the area of Bilingual Education from Lancaster University, U.K. Her research interests include bilingual classroom interaction, the construction of bilingual curricula and processes of empowerment, and bilingual teacher development. She coordinated a research project sponsored by the National Ministry of Education on the state of the art of bilingual education in different regions in Colombia, as well as a diagnostic study about the conditions and needs of three bilingual public (state) schools in Bogotá in their transition towards bilingualism. She is the author of a number of books and articles in the area of bilingualism and bilingual education both in Spanish and English. Her latest publications include Forging Multilingual Spaces (2008) and Empowering Teachers across Cultures (2011), jointly edited with Christine Hélot.
January Interviewer: Ana T. Solano-Campos
1. In Power, Prestige and Bilingualism, you point out that elite bilingualism is a world-wide phenomenon. What is elite bilingualism? And what are the implications of this for teaching and learning around the world?
From what I know of so-called “elite” bilingualism, most programmes, at least in Colombia and other parts of Latin America, have developed from private schools set up originally to cater to children of foreign speaking people who settled in the country. So today we still have various schools for French, German, Swiss, Italian, English and Hebrew speaking children. For many years, these were the point of reference for the elite bilingual programmes developed for Spanish-speaking Colombians. When they came into vogue, about 30-40 years ago, they were modeled on these community bilingual education programmes, and therefore paid a lot of attention to the development of the target language (in this case the international language the school had adopted rather than the student’s native language, or L1). In many cases, Spanish, the L1 of most of the students, was used in such subjects as Religion, Physical Education, and Music, while English or another foreign language was used for the “high profile” subjects of Math, Natural Science, Economics, and others. There was also very little reference to cultural considerations, as these were presumed to be non-problematic since the students came from the dominant language and cultural group. It was considered important to have native-speaking teachers of the target language, as the development of a “native-like” accent was (and still is) seen as essential. Moreover, most of the teachers hired had little knowledge of how to teach second or foreign language learners and therefore fell back on their knowledge of how to teach first language learners.
Now, although things have changed a lot in this respect and teachers and school principals are more conscious of the challenges involved in educating bilingual students, I think there are certain implications which can be drawn for teaching and learning around the world. First of all, it is important to recognize that in a profession which historically has had a monolingual, foreign language ideological orientation, as Grosjean (1985) has noted, a bilingual is not two monolinguals in one person; and that therefore a bilingual education programme needs to focus on the bilingual development of the learners and not on second or foreign language learning per se.
Furthermore, I think that the question of academic language and content learning needs to be balanced in the curriculum by attention to communicative language interaction if, as is often the case, parents expect their children not only to be able to do examinations in the foreign language, but also to interact with speakers of that language. I also feel that the notion of “the native speaker” and “native-like” accents needs to be problematized in light of the current debate as to whether the native speaker is now an anachronism. In my experience, many teachers currently teaching in elite bilingual programmes have not questioned the value of native speaker expertise. Rather, they automatically assume that native speaker expertise is superior to the expertise of high-level bilingual teachers, who can also act as linguistic and cultural role models for their students. This is especially important in these days where, according to Graddol (2006), most interactions in English are between non-native speakers of the language.
Finally, I would recommend that the sensitizing of students to cultural similarities and differences be carried out from an intercultural perspective which is not limited to the celebration of festivities per se, but which tries to engage learners in an on-going debate leading to deeper understanding of the meanings and implications of difference, diversity and similarity from a historically-situated viewpoint.
2. In what ways does the meaning of the term “bilingual education” differ in Latin American countries, like Colombia, and the United States?
As I understand it, this is a rather ironic situation. Whereas the term “bilingual education” in the US is generally seen from a rather negative point of view (one publisher told me that it was difficult to sell books with a title using the expression), the notion of “dual language education” is high profile. The situation in Colombia, and I believe in many other Latin American countries, is different. Bilingual education is often seen as the key to success, both in education and job-wise. People believe, often against contradictory evidence, that if they are bilingual, understood here as being proficient in English, then they are en route to a better future. Thus, bilingual education is a very positive selling point for private schools.
This, in fact, influenced the last government under Alvaro Uribe to name the language and education policy implemented in 2005 as “The National Bilingual Programme”, instead of referring only to ELT. It was considered a more international perspective. In fact, up to now, it has taken into account the learning of only one language, English, and coincides with what many of my students have told me when they interview people about being bilingual: that to the majority, bilingualism means “investing in English”. This “investment” has extended from the private sector to all public schools in Colombia and thus has made bilingualism potentially available to a much wider public.
3. How do notions of inequality, deficiency, or prestige permeate bilingual and intercultural education in Colombia? How are these notions currently being contested?
As Enrique Hamel (2008) has noted, in Latin America, there are two sets of actors involved in bilingual education, situated at different poles of the social and educational scale, who hardly ever meet. These are the teachers, researchers and school administrators who work in high prestige, bilingual education programmes for those learning so-called “majority” or international languages, where the bilingualism involved is valued and thus “highly visible”. At the other end of the scale are the programmes designed for speakers of “minority” languages, particularly indigenous languages, where bilingualism is frequently undervalued and discriminated against and is thus “invisible” to most of the mainstream.
In view of this situation, a group of academics decided to do something practical to try and reduce the gap between researchers, teachers, students and others concerned with different types of bilingualism and bilingual education in Latin America. In 2004, we organized a symposium in Buenos Aires, Argentina, (International Symposium on Bilingualism and Bilingual Education in Latin America – Bilinglatam) aimed at providing a forum for those working in bilingualism and multilingualism in both majority and minority languages. This was initially supposed to be a “one-off” event, but has, in fact, continued, with symposia being held in Bogotá, Colombia in 2006, in São Paulo, Brazil in 2009 and more recently in Oaxaca, Mexico in 2011. These events have helped to put people from Ethno-education programmes as these are known in Colombia (and as Intercultural Bilingual Education in the rest of Latin America), in contact with their counterparts who work with foreign languages. They have also helped to find points of contact among differences in policies and practices of bilingual and multilingual education in different Latin American countries, and thereby to contest the positioning of different types of programmes and languages as more or less prestigious and “useful” than others.
4. When did you first become interested in bilingual education? What motivated you to do research in this area?
My interest in bilingualism started, in fact, from very a personal situation. My husband is Colombian and speaks Spanish as a first language, while I come from London and my first language is English. I was trying to decide how to bring up our two children bilingual in English and Spanish and started asking around and reading about bilingualism. The “one person – one language” was the formula recommended and seemed to work, up to a certain point. I gradually became increasingly interested in the subject, and when I started work at Universidad del Valle, in Cali, I decided that I would like to do some research in the Colombian educational context on the effectiveness of foreign language teaching and learning. I had noticed that the level of English Language Teaching (ELT) in the public schools was extremely low and thought that there must be an alternative. The only other possibility seemed to be to look at the private bilingual school system, which had enjoyed a high level of prestige and success for over 80 years. This led, in fact, to my PhD research project on code-switching at preschool level in two bilingual schools in Cali.
At that time (the late 80s), there was very little research being carried out in the field in Colombia. Anything interesting in this area was related to indigenous bilingualism, but bilingualism in majority or international languages was not really recognized as a suitable study for research. I am glad to say that today this has changed radically and that bilingualism is commonly referred to in discussions about language and education in Colombia.
5. How can teachers become empowered?
In our most recent book, “Empowering teachers across cultures”, Christine Hélot and I try to tackle this question in different linguistic and cultural contexts. I don´t think there is any single way to bring this transformation about. What I do believe is that helping teachers to become aware of power differences, both in the classroom and in the education system they work in, may lead to a realization that they can take responsibility for decisions about such things as the curriculum, about teacher education, about the use (or not) of code-switching in their classrooms, grounded in their pedagogical knowledge and experience, and not necessarily think their voice is not valued in these types of decision. While it is a truism to state that no-one can empower anyone else, it is also possible to facilitate conditions where people can be helped to empower themselves, and the first condition for empowerment is conscientization, as Freire (1974) said many years ago.
When working with schools on these issues, what we have tried to do is literally to “let teachers´ voices be heard”. In the discussion groups on specific readings in the area of bilingualism and bilingual education in our projects, which include different actors from the school community, teachers, parents (when possible), head teachers, students, and academic researchers, we try to keep silent, to encourage others to relate aspects of their practice to the issues under discussion. This, in fact, is quite difficult to do sometimes, as we have found. As academics, we are perhaps very accustomed to giving our views about the topic under discussion and often find it hard to take a back seat. However, the result is worthwhile. In one of the projects, teachers from the preschool section, who are sometimes seen as the least capable participants in such discussions, took the lead and provided a wealth of interesting and valuable considerations on their experience of teaching their bilingual learners.
One important consideration that I have found in projects relating to teacher empowerment is that it is vital to involve school administrators, such as coordinators and school principals,in these activities. The decision making resulting from empowerment needs to involve both top-down, as well as bottom-up perspectives. Sadly, I know of cases where teachers have tried to bring about change, but these attempts have been thwarted by the school administration.
Another important aspect in helping teachers and their students to become more empowered is to encourage them to carry out small-scale classroom research projects, which may or may not be action research projects. Many teachers still think that research is done by those who work in universities, but often when they realize that they themselves can create knowledge and possibilities for change in their schools and classrooms by careful observation, analysis, and reflection on the implications of the findings of classroom data, then things begin to change. I´m not saying that all teachers will respond positively to the carrying out of classroom research project. Many will say that they do not have time in their busy schedules for such activities. However, in my experience, there are always one or two committed individuals who will be encouraged to take on the role of “teacher-researchers”. Then, of course, the door is open for teachers to work with their students on projects aimed at raising awareness on issues of power, resistance and empowerment.
6. What research projects are you currently working on?
At the moment, I am currently finishing two longstanding projects along with other colleagues. One has to do with the formulation of “Orientations” for schools in Colombia who wish to become bilingual or multilingual in international languages, such as English or French. The Ministry of Education commissioned this project and hopefully, in 2012, the document will be published as official Ministry policy.
The other project has to do with language and content teaching and learning at the primary school level. We looked at how teachers in eight bilingual primary schools in Bogotá taught content areas, such as Natural Science and Math in English, and their views on the difficulties, challenges and decisions involved in this.
Next semester, we are beginning a new project relating to teacher empowerment. This time we are going to work with another university in the west of the country, Universidad del Quindío, on a joint project looking at how certain teachers in bilingual schools in Bogotá and in Quindío implement change in their classrooms, leading to empowerment, not only of themselves but of other colleagues working in close collaboration with them.
Thank you very much for the opportunity to talk about some of the things we have been doing recently, here in Colombia, and I do hope some ofwhat I have said here resonates with people who may read this blog.
References
Freire, P. (1974). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Seabury Press.
Graddol, D. (2006). English Next. London: British Council. Available for free from the website of the British Council.
Grosjean, F. (1985). The bilingual as a competent but specific speaker-hearer. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 6, 467-477. Also in Cruz-Ferreira, M. (Ed.). Multilingual Norms. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2010 (19-31).
Hamel, R. E. (2008). Plurilingual Latin America: Indigenous languages, immigrant languages, foreign languages- Towards an integrated policy of language and education. In C. Hélot & A. De Mejía (Eds.), Forging multilingual spaces: Integrated perspectives on majority and minority bilingual education, 58-108. NY: Multilingual Matters.
Hélot, C., & de Mejía, A. (2008). Forging multilingual spaces: Integrated perspectives on majority and minority bilingual education. NY: Multilingual Matters.
de Mejía, A. M., & Hélot, C. (Eds). (2011). Empowering teachers across cultures. Frankfurt am Main : Peter Lang.
de Mejía, A. M. (2002). Power, prestige, and bilingualism: International perspectives on elite bilingual education. Buffalo, NY: Multilingual Matters.
Xuan Zheng
NNEST of the Month
December 2011
Xuan Zheng is a Ph.D candidate in Language and Rhetoric in the English Department at the University of Washington, where she serves as a graduate instructor of College Composition. Grew up in Wuhan, China and finished her BA degree in English Linguistics and Literature from Central China Normal University, she holds an MATESOL degree from the University of Washington. In China and the U.S. she has taught English language classes, Chinese language classes and College Composition. Her research interests include non-native English speaking teacher identity, intercultural rhetoric and communication, and global Englishes. She has presented (and is to present) in several international conferences in the U.S., Europe and Asia. Her publications have appeared in TESOL Newsletters and the International Journal of Learning. She is now writing her dissertation research, which is a qualitative exploration of how four international teaching assistants of College Composition negotiate their identities in becoming competent English writing teachers.
NNEST December Interviewer: Todd Ruecker
Could you please describe your background as a language teacher and talk some about the similarities and differences between your experiences teaching in the U.S. and China?
I started teaching as a student teacher in a high school in Wuhan, China. As a young, novice teacher, I had many creative ideas in making the English class more fun and communicative: e.g. using PowerPoint, pictures, and games. However, many classes in high schools in China at that time were still test-driven, so I didn’t have much freedom in creating materials. Besides, although as a young teacher I naturally got along with the students, I wondered whether the students learned. That’s why I came to the U.S. for an MATESOL program: to become a better English teacher. Once I started the program, I realized how different teaching was in the U.S. In my first ESL class as a student teacher, I was embarrassed by not being able to understand a student’s kind greeting “How are you doing” because I was not familiar with his accent. Luckily, my first-time teaching experience was quite pleasant: working with an experienced master teacher I not only learned to teach without a textbook, but also to provide opportunities (e.g. student-led discussions) for students to take ownership of their learning. The class was also a true intercultural experience for me: I have learned a lot about different cultures from my diverse group of students, who are from Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Saudi Arabia. Other than having more freedom and diversity teaching in the U.S., the other difference compared to China is that it is more challenging to feel like a legitimate English teacher in an English-speaking country.
How and when did you first become interested in researching NNEST issues?
Being an NNEST was never an issue before I came to the U.S. Since our English curriculum in China was based on a standard American/British English model, and we had relatively little contact with English speakers, students like me assumed that British/American English was more “native” and thus, better. I spent hours watching American TV shows, memorizing idioms, and polishing my accent towards an American one. Not until I got to the U.S. did I realize my English was never considered “true American.” Because of the insecure feeling about my accent, combined with the uneasiness of being a new teacher, I didn’t feel confident in starting teaching right away like most of my American classmates. Besides, I was denied the TA-ship in teaching ESL anyways because I didn’t get 290 out of 300 in an English-speaking test for non-native speakers.
At the time when I was considering whether I should change into teaching Chinese as a profession, I was introduced to the NNEST movement in the very first class I took in the MATESOL program at UW, taught by professor Yasuko Kanno. I felt extremely empowered when reading professor George Braine’s collection Non-Native Educators in English Language Teaching, because for the first time I felt I was not alone. The non-native authors in this collection, many outstanding scholars, certainly became my role models. Meanwhile, the literature on World Englishes and English as a Lingua Franca also changed my view on the ownership of English and reshaped my definition of English proficiency: the versatility to communicate with speakers from different linguistic backgrounds in English. I started to view myself as a bilingual, bicultural teacher whose linguistic and cultural background can benefit her students. I am very lucky to have many supportive mentors such as Sandra Silberstein, Suhanthine Motha, and Anis Bawarshi, who have always acknowledged the unique strengths I bring as a bilingual teacher, an international scholar and a human being. I also have many wonderful colleagues, American and international, who listen to my struggles and growth as an English teacher in the U.S. and offer their help generously. Because of these experiences and people I decided to do the NNEST research. I hope the literature can empower other international students like me in becoming a better English teacher.
You have described yourself as “an insider of the Chinese community in U.S. universities.” How has that insider status helped you in researching the experiences of Chinese students studying in the U.S.?
Since I came to the U.S., I have been living in a house with other Chinese international students. In interacting with my housemates and watching them (as well as myself) getting adapted to the life in the U.S., I felt like an ethnographer working “in the field.” When we go out to school everyday, we speak English and learn to become a professional in our fields. But when we return to our house, we discuss in our native Chinese tongue what we see as strange or interesting and share our strategies in surviving the challenges. Speaking Chinese creates this safe space for us to negotiate conflicting identities. Since I have stayed in the house for the longest period, I have interacted with different housemates who shared a similar acculturation process but also with individual differences. These day-to-day interactions and in-depth observations are invaluable resources for my studies on Chinese students in the U.S. because I know first-hand that the struggles many Chinese students have are not academic or linguistic; their academic endeavors are intertwined with their personal lives, their emotions and their investment in the future.
Congratulations on winning the NNEST Paper of the Year award for your recent TESOL presentation, “Teaching World Englishes to Undergraduates in the U.S.” In that presentation, you talked about a unique composition class you taught at a university in the northwestern U.S. Could you please describe that course for our readers and explain the rationale of focusing a composition course on World Englishes and the benefits of doing so?
This is a required College Composition class for freshmen students, which are usually taught by graduate students in the English department. The goal of the class is to practice academic writing. Although the outcomes of the class are the same, teachers all have freedom in choosing topics for students to discuss and write. I have chosen the topic of multilingualism and identity as the course theme. As course materials, I have assigned scholarly and popular readings on language attitudes and multilingual speakers’ lives: Amy Tan’s (2010) Mother Tongue, news articles about the English Only Debate in the U.S., TESOL articles on bilingual education, Lippi-Green’s (1997) Teaching Children How to Discriminate: What We Learn from the Big Bad Wolf, and the documentary American Tongues (see References). For writing assignments, students were asked to write reading responses to the articles, conduct interviews with multilingual speakers, reflect on their use of multiple languages/Englishes, make arguments about language policy, and do research on the value and usage of a non-mainstream variety of English.
I have designed the course this way not only because I have a TESOL background and found the topic empowering for a bilingual teacher like me. I also read that in today’s world where most people live in a multilingual context, it is increasingly important for native English speakers to think about the issues of linguistic diversity and their responsibility in an intercultural communication exchange. Later on I found to my surprise that my “native speaker American undergraduates” were actually a mixed group of Americans, immigrant students and international students. The topic on multilingualism and different Englishes generated a great amount of debate among them because of their diverse background, and it proved to be empowering for multilingual students who tend to struggle in a regular academic writing class where Standard English is emphasized.
In an article based on your TESOL Presentation, you wrote, “Although I am aware that terms such as ‘native speaker,’ ‘non-native speaker,’ and ‘standard English’ are problematic, labeling is inevitable in teaching this topic.” Could you talk more about the problematic nature of these labels and give advice on what teachers and researchers should consider when using labels, given that you acknowledge labeling is necessary?
This is the question that I have always wondered about and may not have a good answer to it. I found the terms problematic because ever since I came to the U.S., I did not meet anyone that speak or write in a “standard English” that I used to learn in China. People all seem to communicate in a different style and with a different accent. My “native speaker” students make grammar mistakes all the time in their papers. I have also met many people in the U.S. who moved here since young and do not know which language is considered their mother tongue.
I think I believed in these terms back then in China because I did not know how English was actually being used. Besides, images of “native speakers” in commercials for language schools as well as textbooks tend to be tall, good-looking Caucasians. In the commercials for test-preparation schools, they wear a tie; if the school is more modern and communicative, the teachers are young and attractive. Besides English schools, anything that has to do with America is good and will be sold well in China. For example, even a heater will sell better if it is named “Harvard Heater,” even when it has nothing to do with Harvard University.
Now, I knew new terms (e.g., “multilingual speakers,” “mainstream English”) were proposed to replace those problematic terms and I do believe the new terms are empowering in many contexts; however, I believe we as teachers and researchers should do more than just changing the labeling terms. In my Composition Class, I encouraged students to use “multilinguals” instead of “non-native speakers,” but later on this word in students’ writing gained the same negative connotation as “non-native speaker.” For instance, one student wrote, “…bilingual programs distract multilingual speakers from learning English fluently.” I think the problem is that the critique of language ideology tends to remain in academia, instead of the general public. There always seems to be a gap between what researchers know and what students (who are going into different fields) believe. To change people’s attitudes, if possible, I think this dialogue should be more accessible to a common audience such as through popular writings
In another article, you report on a case study of a Chinese student Fang and describe her tendency for silence in the classroom as a “situated and strategic” choice. Nonetheless, you find this choice problematic in that her contributions to the classroom were limited. In response to these findings, you suggest that instructors from all disciplines have training in cross-cultural communication. Could you please discuss what this training would focus on and how it could improve the teaching of multilingual students in the U.S.?
I have this ideal notion of a successful intercultural classroom, where the teacher and the students are equally responsible for making themselves understood. Silence from the students, for instance, tend be to considered as passivity or disengagement from a teacher’s perspective. However, in interviewing Fang I have found that her internal thinking was actually very active and critical; sometimes she wanted to speak up but she did not know how to get the floor. Fang chose to be silent for multiple reasons: to save face for not being able to use academic vocabulary freely, to be respectful to the teacher and peers, to rehearse what she wanted to say internally, to avoid stating negative comments about her home country, and etc. While the students know exactly what limits them from participating verbally, the teachers may not, because silence can easily be interpreted as non-participation in a western classroom. Trainings that can raise teachers’ cultural awareness and provide concrete strategies for teachers to equalize participation among students will benefit both sides.
To be specific, a teacher can take more initiative to create an inviting environment in class. A longer waiting time can generate more participation. It’s also important that a student feels comfortable to articulate their ideas: when they have a stake in the class topic (so they can construct positive identities), when they like their classmates (community building), when they trust the teacher (e.g., the teacher showed interest/knowledge in their cultures), and when they are engaged in a variety of activities (debate, presentation, pair work, online discussion), they may be able to participate more. These strategies not only benefit multilingual students, but also native speaker students with different learning styles. In a training for instructors who have multilingual students in their classes, it will be useful to provide them with the students’ perspectives on their academic challenges, the students’ educational experience in their home countries, campus resources that support multilingual students, and those strategies for encouraging students to participate as mentioned above. Multimedia materials seem to work most effectively in such trainings. For instance, the Writing Center at Oregon State University has developed a video documentary Writing Across Borders (see Robertson, 2011) for instructors to help with international student writers. Drawing on interviews with students, the video describes vividly the cultural challenges students face as well as strategies teachers could use to help students improve.
You explained to me that your dissertation is about the identity development of four international English TAs teaching composition to a diverse group of international students. You mentioned that one aspect of your project is showing the diversity of NNESTs’ experiences. Would you like to share a story or two from your dissertation with us or talk more about the diversity of your participants’ experiences and what we can learn from them?
I took a situated view to identity: that instead of a static category, a teacher’s identity is multiple, changing, and in constant conflict (Butler, 1992; Weedon, 1987; Norton, 2000). A dichotomous view of NESTs versus NNESTs is limiting because it has reinforced the idea that an English teacher’s linguistic background is his/her only relevant identity. In my dissertation study of four international teaching assistants (ITAs) of College Composition, I have found that the ITAs’ identity development is related with their linguistic membership, but not determined by it. Although the four ITAs all have concerns about their foreignness including linguistic differences (e.g., ITAs have to pass a SPEAK test prior to teaching), their self-perceptions, teaching strategies, and positioning as legitimate and competent teachers are all very different due to their personal histories. One of the factors that influences their identity construction is their disciplinary backgrounds: rhetoric, literature, TESOL, or another field. For instance, one ITA had a PhD in Chemistry before she became a PhD student in English. She switched departments originally because her advisor in Chemistry asked her to improve her English for writing her dissertation. But after she has taken a few English classes, she fell in love with it. Compared with other ITAs in English, she was one of the few who had actually taken 100 level English classes in the U.S. Because of the interdisciplinary experience as a student and researcher, she often drew on her expertise in two different disciplines (science and humanities) in her Composition class: e.g. the class theme is centered around the social effects of science; she was able to explain explicitly genre differences in different disciplines as well as linguistic differences (e.g. Mandarin and English). While I am still in the data analysis process and trying to make sense of the personal stories, one thing I learned from the study is that despite of social constraints such as the prevalent “native-speaker fallacy” discourse and ITAs’ limited access to mainstream culture, the ITAs were able to draw on their diverse and rich cultural, linguistic and disciplinary knowledge in their teaching, which greatly benefit the increasingly diverse student population.
You’ve certainly been a successful graduate student, presenting a number of times at major conferences such as TESOL and publishing several articles. What kind of advice could you give for other NNEST graduate students to have similarly successful graduate school experiences?
Thank you for the compliment. “Successful” is a “heavy” term to take on 
One important lesson I have learned in graduate school is that what we think of as “successful” scholars are humans as well. I used to look up to those scholars as if they were perfect superstars, who exceled in everything they do: publishing, giving public speeches, and changing people’s minds. What we do not see is the emotional and physical stress they as humans also have to deal with, especially when they have to work 24/7. Graduate school is about being a scholar, but it is also about being a happy human being. It is about learning to balance work and life (which is a life-long process, so don’t feel bad if you haven’t learned it yet as a graduate student). Many people think after graduate school they can have a life. So they put off things in order to meet the deadlines of papers/conferences/lesson planning. Soon you will learn there is no “end” of it. After coursework there is the general exam; after the exam there is the dissertation; after the dissertation there is job hunting; and after landing a job there is getting tenure…
Start having a life NOW.
If I have any advice to offer at this point, I’d like to emphasize the emotional aspect of your graduate school life, especially for NNESTs who tend to be marginalized in the English teaching profession. Don’t stress yourself out for being different, because you are and it’s wonderful to be different. Also, make friends with people you like, who have positive attitudes. Have multiple mentors that support you in your department as well as other disciplines. If you are burned out, take a summer off to travel to a different place. Meanwhile, exercise, sleep, read non-academic books and love. Finally, don’t blame yourself for not being “successful.” Attempting graduate school as a NNEST is hard enough. Enjoy the challenges because you may not experience this again!
References
Alvarez, L., Kolker, A., & Center for New American Media (1987). American tongues. New York, NY: The Center. Retrieved from http://video.pbs.org/video/1553932059/
Cummins, J. (2009). Multilingualism in the English-language classroom: Pedagogical considerations. TESOL Quarterly, 43(2), 317-321.
Case Study: The English Only Debate (2005). In P.A. Eschholz, A. F. Rosa, & V. P. Clark (Eds.) Language Awareness (pp.178-179). New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Lewis, G. (2005). An Open Letter to Diversity’s Victims. In P.A. Eschholz, A. F. Rosa, & V. P. Clark (Eds.) Language Awareness (pp. 196-199). New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Lippi-Green, R. (1997). English with an accent: Language, ideology, and discrimination in the United States. London: Routledge.
Robertson, W. (2011). Writing across borders. Retrieved from http://cwl.oregonstate.edu/writing-across-borders
Tan, A. (2010). Mother tongue. In A. Gross, A. Dwyer, and A. Bawarshi (Eds.). Acts of Inquiry (pp. 711-717). New York, NY: Bedford/St.Martin’s Press.
Patricia Friedrich
NNEST of the Month
November 2011
Patricia Friedrich is an Associate Professor at Arizona State University having received her PhD from Purdue University. She is an author of non-fiction and fiction, with two books by Continuum – Language, Negotiation and Peace: the use of English in conflict resolution and Teaching Academic Writing (ed.). She has also published some 25 articles and book chapters in such periodicals as Harvard Business Review and World Englishes. She has co-edited a special issue of World Englishes about South America and two areas of the Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics for Blackwell-Wiley. Her fiction work has appeared in several literary journals including Grey Sparrow, Eclectic Flash, Blue Guitar and The Linnet’s Wings. She is an editorial board member for several academic journals and now part of the editorial collective at Trivia. She teaches Critical Applied Linguistics, Composition and Sociolinguistics.
NNEST Blog November Interviewer: Isabela Villas Boas
1- Why did you decide to become an educator and what led you to engage in graduate studies in the U.S.?
I started teaching children when I was very young. My oldest memories of that time are of very eager faces, little minds that were curious about everything around them and ready to learn. Teaching and learning were not much different from playing, and I don’t think they ever need to be.
2- Are you an “Accidental teacher” like many of us – who thought that teaching was a temporary job – or had you already chosen teaching as your career?
My mother has had a wonderful career as an ESL teacher. From a young age, I loved watching her teach, so I never thought of it as temporary. In fact, I am a firm advocate of the professionalization of teaching at all levels. I don’t think there is a problem at all with starting “accidentally” but to not honor the profession by remaining uncommitted to pedagogical innovation and amelioration and irresponsive to deep language knowledge is a problem. Respect for teachers has to start from within the field.
Like most young people, when I finished college I wanted to travel and learn from different experiences in different environments. I was thrilled that the opportunity to study and subsequently teach and conduct research in the US came my way, but I would have been equally happy to have these experiences in another country or back in Brazil if I were still learning from them and helping others learn in the process.
3- What sparked your interest in intercultural communication, English as a lingua franca, and English for peace?
I started studying intercultural communication more for personal reasons than anything else. I believe I am very susceptible to the climate and mood of the environment, and I wanted to understand how certain forms of conflict could be explained in better ways than “that person is being difficult.” It soon became obvious to me that although when we teach English and other languages we are trying to help students negotiate meaning across linguistic and cultural lines, we spend much more time teaching the formal features of languages than their social milieu. We tend to do this despite all the knowledge we might have gained from World Englishes, sociolinguistics and language pragmatics.
My interest in English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) comes from a firm belief in the merit of diversity and variation and great reverence for human beings’ ability to negotiate meaning in specific contexts using a variety of skills. The idea of language that puts many people in contact, like a lingua franca does, is very appealing to me.
Finally, English for peace brings it all together. The point in understanding intercultural communication, in trying to contextualize and negotiate meaning in specific situations as we do in ELF is to move toward a more pacific existence.
4- You are a non-native speaker of English in an American higher education context, researching and writing about English for intercultural communication and English as a lingua franca, having both native and non-native speakers as interlocutors. In Friedrich 2011 (in press), you mention the changing face of communicative competence in ELF situations, especially at the strategic level in its sociolinguistic aspect. Baker (2009) brings culture to the forefront of this discussion, arguing that the “linguistic and cultural forms expressed through ELF are likely to be hybrid, dynamic and continuously adapting to local needs, global influences, and the demands of communicating across cultures”(pg. 574). Can you describe how you deal with these dynamics and how ELF-as-a-function is resorted to in your daily interactions?
I always chose to see my non-native status in a native environment as an asset rather than a liability. I consciously chose to do that early in my career, believing that others tend to see us in ways we ourselves hint at. Being a user of multiple languages allows me not only to interact with more people, but it also contributes in vital ways to the approach I use to construct and understand linguistic theory. I think my students also end up benefiting from a more varied set of examples, contexts and learning opportunities.
The concepts of purpose and audience, borrowed from Rhetoric and Composition, have everything to do with this paradigm and with the quote by Baker. One can only make decisions about linguistic forms, register, and appropriateness of utterances (to cite a few) in context. The ability to do so is paramount to successful ELF interactions.
5- Could you perhaps give one or two examples of concrete situations in which you felt your non-native status was an advantage, for the sake of illustration?
What I know about grammar, syntax and other aspects of linguistics comes at the cost of much work and study. I don’t know these things because they “sound right.” I know things because they are rule-governed (in the broader sense of the term). Such knowledge means that I can break the rules with a specific rhetorical purpose in mind, knowing that I am doing just that. When I explain concepts to my students (many of whom are native speakers of English), I can rely on that knowledge to show the beauty in realizing that language works as a system.
6- In Friedrich and Matsuda (2010), you propose that ELF should be conceptualized as a function, not a variety, since ELF is context and situation specific and its linguistic features cannot be described. In Friedrich, 2011 (in press), you propose some steps to be considered by teachers in dealing with ELF. In what teaching contexts and with what types of learners (age, proficiency level) do you think such discussions about ELF should be more heavily emphasized? How and to what extent should this approach be used with NNEST in expanding- circle contexts who don’t frequently interact with NS and haven’t themselves experienced communication in English with NNES from other nationalities?
I believe there is no limit to the applicability of these ideas with regards to level of proficiency, age or even interactional patterns. Of course the more advanced a student gets, the greater the opportunities for implementation. But thinking of ELF as a function (the idea had already been hinted at by Berns and Canagarajah independently) is more than anything a change in paradigm. Culturally, the Western world has shown a preference for binary, neat divisions (left and right, advantages and disadvantages, NNS and NS). Adopting an ELF perspective means inserting users in a context where everyone needs to negotiate meaning without a hierarchical, binary division. This kind of attitude you can practice in any classroom, with any level of proficiency.
7- In an April, 2011 post in his widely read blog – An A-Z of ELT - Scott Thornbury mentioned the plenaries and talks on English as a Lingua Franca, Global English, and English as an International Language in the TESOL 2011 program, focusing primarily on Ramin Akbari’s talk and his claim that ELF is a case of “linguistics applied”. Thornbury concludes his post:
It is the learner, in the end, who must decide what code best serves his or her needs, and what is achievable in the available time and with the available resources. For most learners, the arguments as to what constitutes the global variety are academic. As an article in a recent TESOL Quarterly put it, “To learners in developing, resource-poor EFL settings especially, it matters very little who says tomahto and who says tomayto. Knowing the word tomato is achievement enough” (Bruthiaux, 2010, p. 368).
How would you respond to this comment in light of your research and practice?
I was lucky enough to be a part of one of these plenary sessions, the one organized by Aya Matsuda, in which I had the privilege of presenting alongside Ryuko Kubota and Nobuyuki Hino too. I focused particularly on the cultural aspects of ELF. I was there to argue for greater “strategic level” emphasis in the classroom, which is in a way analogous to what Thornbury is saying in that post. We as users decide on form based on function and such aspects as time, familiarity with other participants of the interaction, goals of the interaction, etc. In that sense, ELF does not offer many certainties; there is no definitive form or utterance that will open all doors, no joke that will make everyone laugh, and no variety that will be completely intelligible in all contexts, but then again such is the nature of language itself. When we introduce an ELF perspective to our students, we are in a way making them feel more comfortable with uncertainty, unpredictability and variation, but at the same time, we are giving them the tools to help them do well in such situations. Even potentially underappreciated skills such as the ability to paraphrase, engage in circumlocution, ask for clarification, and guess from context are extremely useful in ELF situations, and we should make sure our students take those along in their toolkit wherever English may take them.
As for the Bruthiaux quote, I feel a little more ambivalent toward it. It seems to underestimate the capacity of learners everywhere to go beyond limits – their own and their environments’. Who says what to whom matters not because we necessarily need to copy those forms but instead because an analysis of those forms and of the users’ motivations tells us who they are/might be in the world and thus helps us decide how we want to interact with them. In that sense, I don’t believe in a “global variety.” Provided one has a choice between tomayto, tomato and what other forms may come, I am fine.
8- What advice in dealing with ELF would you give to practicing teachers of English to speakers of other languages?
It might seem that teachers need a complete overhaul of their practices and materials before they can deal with ELF in the classroom, but that is not the case. Every classroom activity, every material already has the potential to become part of an ELF pedagogy. What teachers need to do is look at those elements critically, asking important questions such as,
“What variation might there be to this form/utterance/interaction/habit?”
“How can I better present such variation to my students?”
“If we change the context of this particular interaction, what else will need to change?”
“Who are the participants in this interaction? What do we know about them? How does this kind of information help us make decisions about what and how to say what we have to say?”
“How do I as a teacher and person respond to difference and variation? How do my views of the above impact my teaching?”
“What is the context in which my students are likely to use language? Can I emphasize those while also introducing other scenarios/varieties of language/vocabulary items/cultural orientations?”
This of course goes for both oral and written language. The trick is really to show students what they already do all the time but might not be conscious of. They adapt and make choices about language sometimes from minute to minute in their native languages – they change their register to speak to a boss, they incorporate slang to gain membership in a community of friends, they use ‘big words’ to impress a teacher and simplified vocabulary to talk to a small child. ELF situations should be one more set of language occurrences in which students make adaptations to be better understood by and better understand other people.
REFERENCES
Baker, Will. (2009). The cultures of English as a lingua franca. TESOL Quarterly, 43 (4), 567-592 (26).
Friedrich, Patricia (2011). ELF, Intercultural communication and the strategic aspect of communicative competence (in press).
Friedrich, Patricia and Matsuda, Aya (2010). When Five Words Are Not Enough: A Conceptual and Terminological Discussion of English as a Lingua Franca. International Multilingual Research Journal, 4 (1), 20-30.
Thornbury, Scott. (2011). E is for ELF. An A-Z of ELT, Web. April 03, 2011. http://scottthornbury.wordpress.com/2011/04/03/e-is-for-elf/
Ali Fuad Selvi
NNEST of the Month
October, 2011
Ali Fuad Selvi is a PhD candidate in the Second Language Education and Culture program at the University of Maryland, College Park where he serves as a graduate teaching and research assistant. He is also the current president of the WATESOL (Washington Area Teachers of English to the Speakers of Other Languages) NNEST Caucus. His research interests include the global spread of English, second language teacher education, World Englishes, and issues related to non-native English-speaking professionals in TESOL. His publications have appeared or are to appear in research-oriented journals such as TESOL Quarterly, Applied Linguistics, World Englishes, Language Teaching Research, and ELT Journal, as well as in practitioner-oriented venues such as Essential Teacher, NNEST Interest Section Newsletter, and WATESOL Newsletter. His dissertation research is a multifaceted exploration of how TESOL teacher education program components provide affordances and constraints in developing a knowledge base for native and non-native English-speaking teacher candidates to work effectively with English language learners in diverse teaching contexts.
NNEST blog October interviewer: Shu-Chun Tseng
1. Could you tell us your linguistic, educational and professional background?
Let me start by thanking you for your invitation to be a part of the NNEST of the Month Blog. I am most certainly honored to be a part of this project, which is personally one of my most favorite bookmarks and an innovative utilization of technology for the exchange of ideas free from the constraints of time and space. I also feel very privileged to have the opportunity to share my experiences and perspectives with teachers and scholars who strive to provide better language teaching-learning opportunities for English language learners in the emerging global society of the 21st century.
Reflecting upon my personal history, I realize that my linguistic, educational and professional backgrounds have included a very complex network of relations and have distinctively influenced my educational history, personal values, standpoint in the field of TESOL and professional goals today. I would like to highlight three important figures to better explicate my journey into TESOL.
The first of these important figures is my father, who held the position as the chief correspondent of a news agency in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. Due to this relocation, I had the opportunity to live in Central Asia for about 4 years; there I had my first taste of a multilingual and multicultural social, educational and linguistic environment. The linguistic repertoire of this new context included four different languages, all of which acted like the gears of a perfectly-functioning machine. I was using Turkish with my family members and Turkish expats, Uzbek and Russian with friends and locals and as a subject at school, and English as the primary medium of instruction at school and as a “linguistic life vest” that I used to wear when communication was lost in any of the other three languages. This was certainly a very dramatic change in the role that languages and more specifically the English language played in my life. I used to feel that English, which is praised as the language which opens doors around the globe, was incapable of opening the door of my classrooms since language learning opportunities were by and large confined to walls of my classrooms. However, embracing the powerful role that English plays as a transcending and meaningful communicative tool planted the seeds of my initial interest in English language teaching. Thus, I embarked upon my journey into TESOL thanks to this opportunity of living in a multilingual/multicultural context, and also to the constant encouragement and support provided by my father who made all this possible. As a result, I obtained my bachelor’s (2004) and master’s (2007) degrees in English Language Teaching from Middle East Technical University (METU) in Ankara, Turkey. I also had the opportunity to work as an intensive English program instructor at Atilim University and as a teaching and research assistant at METU.
The second prominent figure is Joshua Bear (known as Joshua “hoca”, which means “master” or “teacher”), a professor of TESOL and Applied Linguistics at METU, who introduced me to many of the current issues and controversies structured around the spread of English, ownership of English, English as an international language, native speakerism, linguistic imperialism, and professional, attitudinal and discriminatory issues related to non-native English-speaking teachers (NNESTs) in our profession. As a graduate student who entered the program with the goal of deepening his understanding of second language acquisition theories and issues in pragmatics, I found myself immersed in and soon addicted to his thought-provoking and vision-enhancing graduate seminars and our extended conversations on problematizing and contextualizing issues embedded in the NNEST movement. Most notably and contrary to misconception, as a native-speaker (NS) of English he converted me to being a member of the NNEST movement. I have had the distinct opportunity to work under his supervision during the writing of my Master’s thesis (“A Multifactorial Sociolinguistic Analysis of Business Naming Practices in Turkey”), in which I investigated the reflection of the global spread of English in Turkish business discourse, and more specifically in business naming practices. Ultimately, with the encouragement and support I received from him, I joined the doctoral program at the University of Maryland, College Park (UMCP) with the intention of bridging second language teacher education with TESOL while adopting the NNEST Lens (Mahboob, 2010) as my central professional framework.
The last but certainly not the least important figure is Brock Brady, a professor of TESOL, the past-president of TESOL, and EFL curriculum specialist in the Peace Corps, who has graciously been a constant source of support, motivation and mentoring. I feel privileged and blessed to have numerous opportunities to work and collaborate with him in several projects within the WATESOL (Washington Area TESOL Affiliate) NNEST Caucus, and to be a part of the change that we believe in. His exemplary leadership and immense expertise have always served as a wonderful example to us as emergent scholars, leaders and educators. Working with Professor Brady in the NNEST Caucus not only enabled me to benefit from his tireless dedication and excellent leadership but also to take concrete steps towards reconceptualizing the ideologically-fused and false NS-NNS dichotomy within TESOL (Moussu & Llurda, 2008). Only half a decade after its establishment, our WATESOL Caucus continues to increase its accomplishments in terms of increasing awareness, spreading activism, and encouraging advocacy for NNESTs. The future goals of the Caucus include but are not limited to expanding membership outreach efforts, supporting Caucus members to engage in research and publication efforts focusing on NNEST issues, building alternative ways to support the professional growth of NNESTs, and creating new possibilities for NEST-NNEST collaboration.
2. Congratulations on receiving The Ruth Crymes TESOL Academies Fellowship in 2011. Please tell us about this award. How did winning this award affect you personally and professionally?
Thank you! I would like to take this opportunity to thank TESOL and the Award Committee for their generosity in supporting professionals in the field of TESOL.
I would first of all like to say that I was deeply impressed by the fact that The Ruth Crymes Fellowship Fund was established in memory of TESOL President (1979-1980) and TESOL Quarterly Editor Ruth Crymes, who was tragically killed in an airplane crash en route to the 1979 MEXTESOL Conference in Mexico City. This was a truly sad but a very profound example of how members of our profession are very eager to express their generosity and philanthropy. Thus, I feel it necessary to express my deep gratitude to Ruth Crymes and the donors of The Ruth Crymes Fellowship Fund for their vision and commitment. Second, I believe that the annual TESOL Conventions are pivotal in my professional development both as an English language teacher and as an emergent researcher. Although I constantly feel that it is difficult to be at four different presentations at almost the same time, I still feel that attending the presentations, workshops and meetings on a wide spectrum of topics in the field of TESOL and contributing to the convention by participating as a panel discussant, presenter, committee member and interest section leader are profoundly beneficial. Third, after each Convention, I usually get together with my colleagues and have extended discussions on ideas that we generate at the Convention, and find ways to maximize our professional gain. I also share documents, presentation notes, materials, books and resources with my fellow teachers and teacher educator colleagues outside the United States. Finally, I should add that TESOL Conventions are wonderful times to meet TESOLers from all around the world, and thus provide excellent networking opportunities. Although they are held in cities that you probably have never been to, you always feel like you are back home for a family reunion!
3. As a graduate student, you have been very active in professional organizations like WATESOL and TESOL. Currently, you are serving as the president of the WATESOL NNEST Caucus and as a Member-at-large in the TESOL NNEST IS.
a. How did you prepare yourself for these leadership positions?
Let me elaborate on my notion of leadership, which will give more insights into how I personally prepare myself for various leadership tasks. I believe that any leadership task requires the utilization of a set of communicative, organizational, performative, and reflective skills that one can develop over time. My personal guiding torch throughout any leadership process is constant and dynamic reflection. I conceptualize reflection as a sine qua non element of leadership since it provides (a) a conscious attempt to understand your point of departure in terms of skills and abilities and acts as a needs analysis tool (“What skills do I need to become an effective leader?”), (b) a developmental trajectory throughout the leadership process (“How am I doing as a leader in terms of achieving my goals as a leader?”), and (c) a retrospective reflective tool which will eventually redefine your goals, projections for the future and personal development (“What lessons do I get out of this leadership process?”). A leadership process which includes personal reflection is complemented by seeking mentoring and guidance throughout the leadership process. This is instrumental because it contributes to your effectiveness as a leader, provides you with an external feedback and support mechanism, thereby facilitating your development as an emergent leader, and helping you develop an understanding of what mentoring should (or should not) be.
In order to learn how to lead, you should give yourself a chance! No matter what sort of leadership task you undertake, it makes sense to begin by taking small steps. This tremendously facilitates your socialization into greater leadership positions, which require more time, energy, and expertise. Seeking opportunities for and during leadership tasks is critical in one’s development as an emergent leader. Although counter examples exist, it is often the case that one should seek novel ways to take responsibility. Therefore, I believe that one should always remain vigilant, full of enthusiasm and be willing to collaborate with others and of course, be willing to take on more responsibility
b. Have you ever encountered any challenges while serving in these leadership positions? If yes, how have you overcome them?
I have quickly become aware of the fact that challenges and leadership almost go hand in hand. Just like everything, there are various kinds of and different degrees of challenges. While some of them are superficial and therefore can be easily taken care of, others might jeopardize your ultimate goal, harm your effectiveness as a leader, have impact that persist for prolonged periods of times, and often lead to de-motivation or dropping out among team members. My personal rule of thumb to any sort of challenge is flexibility coupled with perseverance and utilization of a diverse network of resources.
Flexibility or adaptability is one of the unique characteristics of human beings and can be very instrumental when one is faced with challenges. Therefore, reorganizing tasks, redefining goals, revisiting the division of labor, maintaining willingness to devote extra time and energy, and seeking innovative ways are among many strategies that one can employ to overcome challenges. During this time, a leader should display perseverance and remain determined to achieve one’s ultimate goals.
In order to meet these challenges, it is very important to utilize a diverse network of resources to overcome challenges. Leaders collaborate with their team members and mentors, and develop other sources to undertake the changes necessary to achieve the ultimate goal. It is also imperative to develop an understanding that challenges will exist all the time and therefore one should seek various ways to meet them.
c. What advice would you give to NNES graduate students or novice teachers who are interested in pursuing leadership positions in professional organizations?
Here are my personal suggestions for graduate students and novice teachers who are interested in pursuing leadership positions in professional organizations:
Relax! – Most of the time NNES graduate students or novice teachers refrain from pursuing leadership positions merely because they find it a daunting task or feel that they might be underqualified to take. However, once they take the first step and begin this rewarding journey, they quickly realize that it is far less intimidating that it seemed and thereby develop a range of leadership skills. Give yourself a chance as a leader, and you will be very surprised by the results!
Everyone else is busy, too – Another widely heard reason preventing NNES graduate students or novice teachers from getting involved in leadership positions in professional organizations is the fact that they are busy, and they most certainly are. But here is the thing: everyone else is busy, too. If you are really interested in pursuing leadership positions, please carefully reconsider your schedule. There might be a little opening for this rewarding experience.
Make use of the opportunity – There might be a wide range of leadership tasks awaiting you and there is no such thing as a person for whom no position is appropriate. Carefully consider your personal and professional goals and make your move to undertake the one that is most appropriate for you. Some leadership tasks might seem inappropriate at first, but later you will find that you are perfect for this position.
Volunteer –The notion of leadership and service in our profession heavily relies on a volunteer workforce. It means that you need to demonstrate some initiative to make the first move. Once you express your genuine interest, you will be welcomed by many supporting mentors who will scaffold you throughout the process.
Ask others to volunteer –Twisting somebody’s arm, helping him or her to make the first move and scaffolding him or her afterwards is an excellent example of demonstrating leadership and mentoring. This will increase recruitment of new participants as team members, and contribute to the overall mission of our professional organization.
Keep your enthusiasm alive – There might be times when challenges seem insurmountable, or when you face unexpected negative reactions, which eventually deplete your enthusiasm. Think of such challenges as reality checks for your perseverance, determination, and enthusiasm as a leader, and try to stay on track!
Establish connections – Despite the fact that leadership is often conceived as a goal-oriented task, the process of becoming a leader is as important as the ultimate goal. During the course of your leadership training, you will develop a range of skills, develop resources, and establish connections, which might become very instrumental in case you face unexpected challenges.
Be proud of yourself – You should definitely be proud of yourself! Why? Because you invest time and energy and show dedication and commitment in undertaking responsibilities and thereby lead our profession in collaboration with others.
4. You also have remarkable experience in contributing to academic publications such as ELT Journal, World Englishes, TESOL Quarterly, etc.
a. What keeps you motivated to brainstorm new ideas and publish more and more articles?
What lies at the heart of my motivation to brainstorm new ideas and share them in scholarly venues is the power of academic voice which becomes a manifestation of my professional identity and goals as an emergent scholar. I acknowledge that unethical, unprofessional, and discriminatory practices in hiring and wage and workplace discrimination against NNESTs have long existed as bitter realities in the English language teaching profession. The “either/or” (NEST or NNEST) discourse within TESOL continues to polarize the field of English language teaching. Therefore, I believe that we need to take concrete steps towards establishing a more encompassing ‘both/and discourse’ (NEST and NNEST) that embraces the strengths and limitations of both teacher populations in various teaching settings (Selvi, 2011) and aims to establish a professional milieu that ‘welcome[s] ethnic, racial, cultural, religious, and linguistic diversity’ (Selvi, 2009, p.51). This sense of responsibility lies at the heart of my professional identity and is the main impetus for my writings. This view could also be perceived as implementing what Ahmar Mahboob calls the NNEST lens, “a fresh gaze at issues of theoretical, professional, and practical interest in TESOL and applied linguistics, which have traditionally been plagued with a monolingual bias (Kachru, 1994)” (Mahboob, 2010, p.). I believe that the NNEST lens has the potential for enabling members of the TESOL community to become more critical consumers of research.
b. What advice would you give to NNES graduate students or novice teachers who are interested in submitting a research paper for publication?
Publishing in scholarly venues is a rewarding process for any graduate student or novice teacher, and believe it or not, this holds true even your manuscript is rejected. Often times, authors are hesitant to participate in the whole process (preparation, submission, and publication) because it seems complicated, cumbersome, lengthy, and very competitive.
Although the publication process is often perceived as it is described by such adjectives that bear negative connotations, I would like to highlight some unique advantages available to graduate students who choose to participate. First and foremost, graduate coursework in TESOL or applied linguistics programs provides excellent opportunities to engage in deeper understanding of issues that might be of interest to students. Merging class requirements with developing a manuscript for publication is a very efficient way of making tremendous progress and is therefore a win-win situation for students. What is better than simultaneously devoting your time and energy to a manuscript dealing with a topic of your interest and getting a good grade at the end of the semester as well? In addition to fulfilling class requirements, you will have the opportunity to benefit from diverse internal feedback mechanisms embedded into the class such as feedback from your instructor, classmates and others beyond the class. The end of the semester might mean submitting a version of your paper for evaluation, but it often takes more time to brew a tasty manuscript. Therefore, seeking stylistic and content-related feedback and multiple revisions over a prolonged period of time might serve as a stepping stone towards a solid manuscript. Graduate students may even take these efforts to a next level by sharing their work in academic conferences and benefiting from extra feedback on their work.
In earlier stages of publication, it is quite likely that your audience is limited to the professor of the class you are taking and your colleagues in your class or workplace. In such cases, your work is targeted towards them and built upon a shared discourse with them. However, once you decide to share your work with a wider audience, as in the case of scholarly and/or practitioner venues, that means an important change in your target audience, which is now much broader in terms of depth and scope. Thus, determining audience is a key component in determining your own voice as the author and will be instrumental in adjusting the depth and scope of your content. Please refer to Matsuda (2003) for an excellent discussion of finding and developing your own voice as a graduate student.
Identifying a forum for your work is also an integral part of the process that involves determining your audience and finding your own voice. In light of your own personal and professional goals and the content of your work, you should carefully consider the options that are available to you including newsletters, research- or practitioner-oriented journals that are available in electronic or in print formats, and edited books. Since Egbert (2007) in his classification of the top seven journals in TESOL and Applied Linguistics estimated acceptance rates ranging from 8.5%-20%, a rule of thumb might be submitting your work to less competitive venues. This can help you gain expertise about the publication process, develop your voice and style as an author and boost your confidence as a scholar/teacher.
In Worstward Ho (1983), Irish playwright, novelist and poet Samuel Beckett eloquently utters one of my favorite and guiding quotes: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Failing better is one of the rules of the publishing game, but think it as a rule that you learn from, and a stepping stone towards perfection. Let us look at the process once again: You have written a piece, which you distilled through your own synthesis and edited multiple times in light of external reviews (your colleagues and professors).You have found a scholarly/practitioner venue that might be interested in your work. This is the critical moment. If you try and fail, you will fail with referee reports that clearly identify potential problems in your paper. This process will offer you a wonderful opportunity to improve your work, failing better each time until you get it accepted somewhere. However, if you do not try, it is true that you never fail, but it is also true that you never publish!
One personal macro strategy that I have developed over time is to think of the act of writing on NNEST issues as a way of raising awareness, building advocacy, and demonstrating activism. In other words, strategically engaging in academic work such as giving conference presentations and striving to publish writings on NNEST issues in scholarly and professional venues is in fact a very rewarding and motivating way to contribute to the expanding NNEST movement.
5. As an NNES graduate student in the United States, what has been the most vivid memory (positive or negative) of your academic and professional practices?
Moving to the United States for my doctoral studies has also meant an intellectual transformation and has given me distinct opportunities to genuinely embrace the issues related to NNESTs and make my contribution to the ongoing movement. Perhaps the most memorable moment is when I first attended a WATESOL NNEST Caucus meeting at UMCP and met Caucus members including founding members of the Caucus, Professor Brock Brady and Gloria Park. Thinking retrospectively, I feel like being in the right place at the right time only matters if you are with the right people, and I was very fortunate to be with the right people. The process of moving from conceptualization towards realization was complemented by our collective efforts of NNEST empowerment and promotion of NEST-NNEST collaboration. Today, I feel a distinct pleasure to be a part of this wonderful community, which has helped me to grow personally, professionally and academically.
6. Also, as an active NNES graduate student, what are the problems and issues that you would like to address about the needs and concerns of international students and NNES students? Why?
The “international students” is a very complex construct to define, as it is subject to a great variation in terms of linguistic, pragmatic, cultural and ethnic diversity. Just like many other indescribable constructs, the widespread discursal representations of the “international student” have been built greatly using stereotypes. The most common characteristics include that a reluctance to participate in class discussions, a strong preference for rote learning, and an apparent deficiency in terms of critical thinking skills. The hidden crux of this type of stereotyping is a shuttling between a deficit model and the discourse of othering. Thus, international students have been subject to the “us” and “them” dichotomizing, and are viewed as individuals who do not possess the qualities to succeed in the world of education.
As hundreds of thousands of NNES international students arrive in North American higher education institutions, they usually quickly find themselves immediately being challenged and measured against an idealized NS and United States-born student in terms of linguistic and cultural knowledge within the new academic and social setting. Use of this institutionalized deficit model by various stakeholders in institutions of higher education seriously impedes the transition of NNES international students into the new context and results in a series of psychological and sociocultural issues throughout their studies; it often leads to conflicts between domestic students or within-group marginalization.
The very first step in addressing this problem is to develop a collective sense of understanding that all stakeholders (instructional faculty, administration, student services, and students) have a responsibility to address the needs and concerns of international students. This notion of shared accountability will serve as the foundation for top-down and bottom-up practices ensuring the academic and social transition of international students. It is certainly important to define what we understand by “shared accountability”, which leads us to the following question: How do we conceptualize this student population? To be fixed? To be assimilated? To be improved? To be scaffolded? Perhaps, the critical issue here is to establish (and promote) a widespread understanding that “different” does not mean “lacking”; it means only “different”. The fact is that NNES international students might have different strengths, different needs, different concerns, and different skills. Only when all the stakeholders share this view and share the need to be accountable can they collectively work on finding novel and organic ways to promote student adjustment into the existing academic framework. Based on my personal experience, observations, and readings, I identify three main areas which have potential for the enhancement of international student development:
(1) Facilitating their adaptation to the new educational context and academic discourses.
This refers to both institutional and personal ways of understanding, reformulating, and working towards meeting the needs and expectations of the new educational context and academic discourse. Some strategies might include adopting/adapting an internationalized curriculum, making the course content, academic experience and assessment procedures more accessible, taking extra steps to learn more about the educational context and the intricacies of the academic discourse, and conceptualizing plagiarism as an educative tool.
(2) Enhancing their socio-cultural adjustment
This refers to viewing international students as whole individuals and acknowledging the vitality of their sociocultural adjustment as a critical component in their academic lives. It gives us a unique and perfect opportunity to develop a sense of the importance of intercultural competence for both international and domestic students.
(3) Continued efforts to develop one’s English language proficiency
This refers to the conceptualization that language learning is a lifelong enterprise and might require ongoing effort to develop or fine tune one’s communicative competence for various context-specific tasks such as engaging in small talk, teaching an undergraduate lesson, or writing an academic paper/conference proposal for submission.
Terry Doyle, ESL Instructor at City College of San Francisco (Questions 7-9)
7. In your article entitled “A Call to Graduate Students to Reshape the Field of English Language Teaching” you describe professional practices based on three A’s, “Awareness, Advocacy, and Activism.” I totally agree with you that such practices are very useful for NNES graduate students in MA TESOL programs. I am an ESL teacher in a community college, but I work with at least one and often two or three student teachers who are often international students (and therefore “non-native”). I find that they sometimes are not so familiar with the literature on non-native teacher issues, and also they sometimes feel a reluctance to show an interest in such issues maybe because they want to assimilate into the TESOL profession. This self-awareness step would seem to be antecedent to your three A’s. Can you suggest ways to make this kind of person aware of practices that favor native-English-speaking (NES) teachers or ignore NNES teachers and why knowing about these practices is important? Have you encountered this type of person?
Excellent question, Terry! I think you have just pointed out one of the greatest challenges for the NNEST movement which stems from great misconceptions. How do we promote self-awareness among TESOLers regarding the issues related to NNESTs?
I acknowledge the fact that any kind of transformation of a group starts with individuals who represent the core of that group. Therefore, self-awareness is absolutely antecedent to the three A’s I discuss (Awareness, Advocacy, and Activism), and serves as a foundation for the later stages of raising awareness, engaging in advocacy and demonstrating activism (Selvi, 2009). However, we are confronted with a second layer of complexity: many TESOLers (NS and NNS, in EFL and ESL contexts) have a very narrow understanding of and interest in the issues related to NNESTs and the NNEST movement per se. This poses the greatest challenge for the future of the NNEST movement. I have encountered many graduate students and teachers who have lack of interest in the NNEST movement thinking that this movement is “exclusive to NNESTs”, “ancillary to everyday teaching practices”, “often self-defensive”, and “all about discrimination”. In this plethora of misconceptions, NNES graduate students in TESOL can be the originators of a ripple effect, if they strongly believe that they can play a key role in promoting self-awareness and self-advocacy among TESOLers by establishing personal connections with fellow students in professional associations and online platforms and informing them what the NNEST movement is about.
Why is this important? We live in a world where non-native speakers of English are estimated to outnumber their native-speaking counterparts by three to one (Crystal 2003) , the ownership of English is shared by all its speakers, regardless of their ‘nativeness’ (Widdowson, 1994), and 80% of English language teachers worldwide are projected to be NNESTs (Canagarajah, 2005). Nevertheless, in the same world, the presence of ‘native speakerism’ (Holliday, 2005) leads to ‘unprofessional favoritism in institutions, publishing houses, and government agencies’ (Medgyes, 2001, p. 433), and results in unfair employment discrimination (Selvi, 2010). Therefore, the need to go beyond the NS as a standard in English language learning and teaching is more relevant than ever (Braine, 2010). Our collective efforts should be geared more towards highlighting the unique characteristics of our profession: all-encompassing boundaries that welcome ethnic, racial, cultural, religious, and linguistic diversity, and the promotion of collaboration among NESTs and NNESTs by legitimate participation of both parties.
8. How can people like me (an NES ESL teacher) begin to help people in our profession such as applied linguists and MA TESOL program professors and also ESL teachers like colleagues in my college to become more aware of practices that favor native-English-speaking (NES) teachers or ignore NNES teachers?
The issue of reluctance regarding the NNEST movement is unfortunately evident among many professionals such as professors teaching in MATESOL programs and ESL teachers. Nevertheless, I believe that our individual academic contexts provide an array of opportunities to promote awareness of issues related to NNESTs. Based my experience, I would definitely suggest starting by establishing close ties with faculty members and teachers whom you know individually as people and whom you think are open-minded on such issues. Personal connections would allow for long-standing intellectual conversations around these issues and have better chances to lead to a positive change. The medium of interaction very much depends on the individuals but the vast continuum can range from having a conversation over a cup of coffee (or tea) to sharing readings and audiovisual materials, to collaborative practices such as co-teaching/co-authoring/co-presenting about these issues. No matter what degree of interaction you might have, the importance of working with faculty and teachers is indispensable. Most importantly, this will help your voice of advocacy find a broader audience and might lead to more institutionalized influences for your colleagues’ future students.
A friendly reminder: As once happened to a very good NES colleague of mine, when you introduce your ideas and other writings on the NNEST movement to your colleagues, you might encounter a puzzled face and find yourself in a situation where you have to answer the question based on a great misconception: “Why do you bother yourself with the NNEST movement? You are not even one of them!”
9. I also read your article entitled “All teachers are equal, but some teachers are more equal than others: Trend analysis of job advertisements in English language teaching” with great interest. I have served on my college’s ESL department’s hiring committee three times. I am wondering if analyzing the job announcements of ESL departments would also reveal underlying discrimination against NNEST applicants. I know that in our field NES teachers and other professionals use various ways to maintain their power and the unfair advantage of NES applicants to obtain employment in not so obvious ways. I wonder whether job announcements might be one such area.
I decided to investigate job announcements in TESOL based upon the realization that while research investigating the market value of native speakers in TESOL was scarce, anecdotal accounts of hiring, wage and workplace discrimination was abundant. I believed that this would reveal important insights about the current status of professionalism in TESOL and draw a road map for the future of our profession. Sadly, the analysis of the advertisements empirically validated impressions of an undemocratic and unethical employment landscape in the English language teaching profession. Moreover, it revealed the multifaceted nature of discriminatory hiring practices, emphasized asymmetric credibility between NESTs and NNESTs, demonstrated institutionalization of discrimination, and consequently echoed the need for reconfiguring the profession.
There are two insightful points in your question. The first one concerns the viability of analyzing the job announcements of ESL departments. From this point of view, it would certainly be meaningful to cross-investigate the issue in other realms of the profession such as ESL departments, faculty recruitment in higher education and even in other content areas where NNES apply as teachers. The second, and more important, is that you acknowledge that “our professionals use various ways to maintain their power and the unfair advantage of NES applications to obtain employment in not so obvious ways”. There have been a number of institutionalized efforts to overcome widespread discriminatory practices such as the two position statements by TESOL (1992, 2006). It is certainly wonderful (and make us feel hopeful for the future) that TESOL, the global association for English language teaching professionals, acknowledges NNESTs as legitimate professionals in the field of ELT and values professionalism over any inherent characteristic such as race, gender, race, or nativeness. However, I have recently realized that some private language teaching companies have two different ads, one published in TESOL’s Online Career Center free of any discriminatory remarks and another one on their company website which requires native English pronunciation as a job qualification for application. This discrepancy is indeed a very sad example of what I call “creative manifestations of discrimination” and require us, the TESOL community, to “creatively” act against it. Personally speaking, I believe that we still have a long path towards a discrimination-free profession acting in accordance with internationally-recognized professional standards and human rights.
References
Beckett, S. (1983). Worstward Ho. London: John Calder.
Braine, G. (2010). Nonnative speaker English teachers: Research, pedagogy, and professional growth. New York: Routledge.
Canagarajah, A. S. (2005). Reclaiming the local in language policy and practice. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Crystal. D. (2003).The Cambridge encyclopedia of the English language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Egbert, J. (2007). Quality analysis of journals in TESOL and Applied Linguistics. TESOL Quarterly. 41 (1), pp.157-171.
Holliday, A. (2005). The struggle to teach English as an international language. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Mahboob, A. (2010). The NNEST lens: Non native English speakers in TESOL. Cambridge Scholars Press.
Matsuda, P. K. (2003). Coming to voice: Publishing as a graduate student. In C. P. Casanave& S. Vandrick (Eds.), Writing for publication: Behind the scenes in language education (pp. 39-51). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Medgyes, P. (2001). When the teacher is a non-native speaker. In M. Celce-Murcia (Ed.), Teaching English as a second or foreign language (pp. 429-442). London: Heinle & Heinle.
Moussu, L., & Llurda, E. (2008). Non-native English-speaking English language teachers: History and research. Language Teaching, 41(3), 315–348.
Selvi, A. F. (2011). The non-native speaker teacher. ELT Journal, 65(2), 187-189.
Selvi, A.F. (2010). ‘All teachers are equal, but some teachers are more equal than others’: Trend analysis of job advertisements in English language teaching. WATESOL NNEST Caucus Annual Review, 1, 156-181. Retrieved from http://sites.google.com/site/watesolnnestcaucus/caucus-annual-review
Selvi, A.F. (2009). A call to graduate students to reshape the field of English language teaching. Essential Teacher. 6 (3-4), 49-51.
Widdowson, H. G. (1994). The ownership of English. TESOL Quarterly, 28(2), 377-389.
Christine Hélot
NNEST of the Month
September 2011
Christine Hélot is a professor of English at the University of Strasbourg (France) and a teacher educator at the IUFM of Alsace. She has been researching the field of bilingualism and bilingual education since she obtained her PhD from Trinity college, Dublin (Ireland) in 1988. Her thesis was entitled: “Child Bilingualism : a linguistic and sociolinguistic study” and was carried out in the context of Franco-Irish families bringing up their children with two or three languages. In 2005 she obtained her « Habilitation for the direction of research » from the University of Strasbourg . This research looked at the way schools in France can support bilingualism developed in the home context. It was published in 2007 as Du bilinguisme en famille au plurilinguisme à l’école, by L’Harmattan in Paris.
September Interviewer: Ana Solano-Campos
1. Dr. Hélot, how and why did you get interested in languages and language learning?
I started learning English at secondary school in France at the age of 11. I cannot resist sharing with you an unforgettable anecdote: I failed my first English test because I did not understand the difference between this and these and that and those. I went home crying with a mark of 0 out of 20. Fortunately, my mother consoled me and convinced me I would do better on the next test. And strangely enough from then on, I always had excellent marks in English and it quickly became my best subject at school.
I often wonder what attracted me so much to the English language. I think retrospectively that this new language opened a door for me, a wide door onto an unknown world I wanted to discover and English was going to be my passport. Then when I was 18, my penpal from San Diego came to visit me in Paris and she had a great idea: she would ask her parents to help me find a job in California. Within a few weeks I had a plane ticket to Los Angeles and was going to work as an au pair for a year in a beautiful town by the beach.
That year changed my life, as not only did I learn to speak English fluently, but I looked after a little girl with Down Syndrome whom I helped to walk and talk. I think I took such an interest in her development that it gave me a desire to teach and a fascination for the way young children learn. I learned that one should never give up on children, however limited their abilities might seem. I understood the importance of taking into account each child’s special needs, emotional as well as cognitive and that in a secure and loving environment children always achieve far more than they might be expected to. Looking back today I believe the relationship I developed with her over that year taught me lessons for life, lessons going far beyond any competence in the English language.
After a year, I went back to Paris to study and the obvious choice for me was English. I got a BA in two years and then went on to do two MAs, one to teach English as a foreign language and the other to teach French as a foreign language. I thought the two MAs would give me better chances of employment.
Indeed it helped me when I went to Ireland two years later and I found work teaching French in two Dublin universities. I soon got a permanent job in one of these universities and was appointed head of the Language Centre. And clearly that is when my interest in sociolinguistics was born: I was meant to develop language laboratory courses for the Irish language, for French and for German. I took a course in Irish, discovered the different geographical varieties of the language and organized interviews with native speakers. It was then when I understood languages are not just abstract entities studied by linguists, but that speakers have special relationships to their languages and all kinds of attitudes to “foreign” languages they know or do not know.
I ran the Language Centre and taught applied linguistics courses in various language departments for 17 years while also doing a PhD thesis on bilingualism in the family context. I knew many Franco/Irish families and they were all having babies and wondering how to manage their two or three languages. They were all somewhat worried that bilingualism might cause some delay in their children’s language acquisition so I decided to carry out a study that would investigate their many questions. I also did a case study of family trilingualism to analyze how families cope with three different languages.
In 1990, I went back to France and chose to live in Alsace, a border area with Germany and a bilingual region (French/Alsatian; Alsatian is a German variety). I got a post in the Teacher Education department of the University of Strasbourg as an English Professor and I was meant to develop the teaching of English at primary level.
2. In “Language Awareness and/or Language Learning in French Primary Schools Today” you and Andrea Young address French language policies and their impact on linguistic/sociocultural pluralism. In what ways has educational reform in France influenced the way children in French schools view languages and language learning in primary schools?
Foreign language teaching at primary level in France was implemented nationally from the beginning of the 1990’s starting first at age 9 then, 8 and since 2002, foreign languages have been fully integrated in the National Curriculum and teaching starts at age 7. The Ministry of education statistics show that 90% of children study English at primary, but the interesting point about language policies in France is that in fact 8 languages can be taught at the primary level: English, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Mandarin and Arabic. The Ministry of Education has also published pedagogical guidelines for all these languages, but unfortunately English remains the dominant choice of parents. While I perfectly understand their preference for English, this reduces the possibility for other languages to be taught. And this focus on English at the primary level continues at secondary school and at university thus de facto constraining the diversification policy. The situation in France as regards this dominance in English is no different from other European countries where too many learners also think English is enough to get by in the world. However, European policies do insist that two languages other than the mother tongue should be taught during obligatory schooling, and this is a policy which has long been in existence in France. Spanish is the favorite second language of French high school students, but again many other languages are present in the curriculum but not necessarily offered in many schools.
As to how children view language learning at primary, based on what I have seen in many classrooms, I can say that they enjoy language learning very much, whether it is English or German (as in Alsace). The teaching approach is based on games and songs and on the whole involves the children more actively than other school subjects. Unfortunately, the approach becomes more traditional at secondary school and many learners quickly lose their early motivation. Indeed, I think it is a real pedagogical question: how to get young students to have fun learning a foreign language, but also to understand that it demands a certain effort to acquire vocabulary, for example, and to discover a whole new way of structuring sentences or of doing things with language. Of course some teachers manage it very well and there is a large choice of pedagogical materials available today, not to mention Internet resources, etc.
I should add that in France, primary teachers were at first reluctant to teach foreign languages, because mainstream teachers did not feel confident enough about their linguistic competence nor had they the necessary training. While a foreign language is now fully part of teacher education programs, many primary teachers still feel insecure teaching a language they feel they have not mastered sufficiently. The Ministry of Education decided from the start that it should not be specialist teachers of English going into primary schools, but that regular teachers should take on this new responsibility.
3. In your research you discuss/tackle “language hierarchies”, “ignored bilingualism,” “Language Awareness (LA)” and “the hegemony of French”. Can you elaborate on these concepts?
When I write about language hierarchies in the French education system, I want to point at the dominant place of the French language in the curriculum – which is normal of course – but there are also very strong values associated to our national language and it is not uncommon for people and teachers to have all sorts of attitudes that express either some belief that our language is superior to other languages or a kind of fear it might be in danger in the face of the spread of English. I believe it is the combination of these two attitudes that prevents the teaching profession at large to truly believe in the value of learning foreign languages. This is why I talk about the hegemony of the French language: it is not only the language of schooling, it holds such symbolic power in the minds of most French people, it is what cemented the Nation, it is what makes us citizens of the Republic and it is the job of teachers to promote these values in school.
This means that in our curriculum a large number of hours are allocated to the formal study of the French language, while foreign languages only have a 2 to 3 hour slot per week. Foreign languages do have more space than regional languages (such as Breton, Corsican, Catalan, Creole, Basque, etc.), which remain elective subjects, but which –however- can be taught in bilingual programs. And then at the very bottom of the upside down pyramid (as I represent this hierarchy) one finds the languages of immigration/immigrants (Arabic, Turkish, Polish etc.): these languages remain on the margins of the curriculum, taught mostly after school hours and by native teachers who are paid by their own government.
Yet many students in our classrooms today speak these languages at home. And because they learn French at school and speak a different language in their community, I strongly argue for these children to be called bilingual, or emergent bilinguals (term used by Garcia & Kleifgen, 2010). But for a lot of teachers still, these children are considered as having problems with the school language and their knowledge in their first language is not recognized. This is what I call the ignored bilingualism of children with a migration background.
I should stress here that I’m not blaming teachers who have been educated to insist on the importance of the French language, and who are not necessarily aware of the role of language ideologies on attitudes. There are still not enough teacher education courses in France dealing with the increasing diversity of languages and cultures in our classrooms or with anti-racist education.
4. In what ways is LA different from “language learning”?
Language awareness (LA) is a term which was first used by Hawkins (1987) in the UK to refer to a new approach in language education that would integrate the learning of the school language, of foreign languages and of the languages spoken by students in their community. It is an interesting pedagogical approach because its aims were to build bridges between these different languages and introduce children to the way language functions as well as to an understanding of linguistic diversity.
Language awareness projects as they have developed in different countries in Europe and Canada propose a first introduction to many languages which students might not have heard before, to different writing systems and encourage them to compare their own language(s) to those of others. One of the great advantages of this model is that teachers do not have to be fluent speakers of many languages to carry out LA activities; they just need to know some facts about various languages and where to find the relevant information or to ask expert speakers of that given language to help them. Language awareness activities are particularly well suited to young learners, I believe, because it gives them a taste of diversity, a taste for languages rather than enclosing them in a sole language like English from the start of schooling.
In the research I carried out with my colleague Andrea Young in a primary school in Alsace (Hélot 2007, Hélot and Young 2006), when we asked the children who had followed a three year program of LA activities what language (in the singular) they wanted to study at secondary school, they quoted a great variety of languages including sign language. They all gave two of three languages rather than just one, and English and German hardly appeared. They gave very clearly motivated reasons for their choice, either wanting to study a language because it was the language of their mother, or their grand-parents, or because it was a useful language like sign language, or because their curiosity had been aroused by a particular culture and they wanted to know more.
5. How does LA combat linguistic racism?
I believe LA activities can combat linguistic racism because their first objective is to give equal value to all languages. This means that any language can be the source of LA activities, dominant languages or minority languages, languages in danger and local varieties, including of course the school language; but the school language is not given more status than other languages. And giving equal values to all languages of course means giving equal recognition to the speakers of these languages.
Furthermore, LA activities offer a perfect opportunity to work with the family languages of bilingual students. Without stigmatizing speakers of other languages and remaining aware of the dangers of tokenism, the appearance of inclusion of minority groups by incorporating a person who would represent that group, LA activities can use the languages present in the classroom alongside other languages to learn different writing systems, different word order, as well as different cultural practices. It gives bilingual speakers a chance of being experts in their classroom, of having their languages valued by their peers and their teachers and of seeing their bilingual competence recognized. LA activities make students aware of the wealth of languages in the world and of the necessity to protect this diversity. Isn’t it strange that our curriculum includes the study of diversity in the natural world, of the world population and not of the languages people speak?
Language awareness as an approach works more on attitudes towards languages rather than on aptitude, and it can be considered as a first education to multilingualism based on the linguistic resources present in a classroom. The evaluation of the European project EVLANG (Genelot 2001) has shown that students must be exposed to these kinds of activities for a substantial amount of time (more than 40 hours in total) for positive attitudes to develop. It also showed that multilingual students were the most receptive students and low achievers benefitted most from this kind of approach.
However, it remains to be proved that LA activities have a positive impact on the learning of the school language or of foreign languages – a question often asked – but there is no doubt that it awakens young children’s sensitivity to language and help bilingual students to value their home language and feel their identity is no longer stigmatized at school. And finally LA activities are closely related to the aims of intercultural education (learning about others and about values such as tolerance and solidarity), since languages are the expression of different cultures
6. Why is the diversification proposed by the French education system not enough to fight the hegemony of English? And to that matter the hegemony of other languages such as Spanish and French?
Basically, the diversification offered in language education in France is impressive, but it is difficult to implement at the school level because a wider choice of languages in a school implies more teachers and perhaps smaller classes, which cost more money. Although there is a very strong social pressure on the French government to improve the teaching of foreign languages, and endless debates in the media on how ineffective this teaching is, basically foreign languages are not very high on the agenda of the Ministry of Education. French and Mathematics are much more important subjects if a student wants to pass the highly competitive exams which will allow her to go to a grande école. (Grandes écoles are third level institutions which are much more prestigious than universities; they train the future elite of the nation). For example, entry into such schools only requires one foreign language, when one would think that in our globalised world more than one foreign language is necessary.
7. You worked extensively with The Didenheim School Project in the province of Alsace. What lessons were learned from this project? What are the next steps?
The Didenheim project (see Hélot and Young, 2006) started in 2000 in a small school in the South of Alsace where two teachers wanted to tackle problems of racism between the pupils. They decided that rather than stressing differences, they should transform the linguistic and cultural diversity of the children into a learning resource for all the students in the school. Not knowing the languages spoken in many of their pupils’homes, they decided to invite parents to come into the school and to present their language and culture to the children in the first three grades. Over three years the children encountered 18 different languages and their cultures, including French sign language.
Although the teachers had never heard of language awareness approaches before, they in fact reinvented this model of language education and a marked change in attitudes developed as a result. The teachers understood better the bilingualism of their students and the importance of their home languages for their identity. The students became very curious about all the languages that were presented to them and last but not least the relationship between the parents and the teachers improved markedly. As myself and my colleague Andrea young analyzed in various publications, a phenomenon of empowerment developed at different levels but was most visible with parents and students of migrant background. The children became proud of their home languages and their bilingual competence and the parents realized their could bring some knowledge into a school and participate in building tolerance and respect in an educational environment.
The main lessons learnt from the Didenheim project is that it is possible to involve parents in the pedagogical activities of a primary school, including parents of migration background who do not necessarily speak French fluently. This is important because it is another point which should be explained about the French education system. The relationship between parents and teachers tends to be one of mistrust: teachers often blame parents for bad parenthood, and parents blame teachers for too many strikes, or not enough homework, etc.
The young student teachers I work with are for the most part afraid of parents and do not know how to deal with them. On the other hand, parents who have not had much schooling, or who do not speak French very well tend to shy away from teachers and schools. The Didenheim project was really innovative on that level. It lasted three years at the start and really permitted a strong and trustful relationship between many parents and the three teachers involved. The video film I made with my colleague Andrea Young clearly shows to student teachers how it is possible to build such a relationship by giving parents a real place in the classroom and a chance to share their knowledge with the students and the teachers.
The project is continuing today, but only in the first grade because from second grade on, German as a foreign language has to be taught and teachers find it hard to deal with a very ambitious curriculum over four days (there is no school in France on Wednesday nor Saturday). However the project has had a huge impact in many places in the world where the documentary film “Raconte-moi ta langue/Tell me how you talk” made by Mariette Feltin in 2008 is often shown at conferences where researchers, educators and teachers discuss multilingual classrooms and how to deal with the growing variety of languages spoken by students.
Rather than a model, I always explain that the Didenheim project is an example of pedagogical possibilities, of teachers negotiating their own language policies at the classroom level rather than waiting for top-down policies to address these issues, and of a form of engagement in defending one’s own educational values. As Ofelia Garcia (2009) writes, because of increasing global cross-border dynamics, bilingual education is the only way to educate the children of the 21st century, but very few children are lucky enough to attend bilingual programs. Thus, I believe the least we can do is to recognize and value the plurilingual repertoires of many of our students and make sure they don’t become monolingual again at school!
I would like to add that LA activities on their own are definitely not enough for bilingual students to maintain and develop their first language, biliteracy activities should also be part of the curriculum. Yet, LA is a first door that can be opened, or a first breach in school systems like in France which were built on the ideology of one language/one nation.
8. Are educators ready for approaches that acknowledge and encourage multilingualism? What would take to prepare them for such approaches? What are the implications of LA approach to teacher education?
I believe it is difficult for most educators to embrace and understand the extent of the mobility and migration processes at work in our contemporary societies. Since public schools were created at the end of the 19th century the main objective of education has been to make students literate in the national language of the state and up to a certain point to learn one and at best two foreign languages. Taking into account the various languages of multilingual students is not an easy task particularly when teachers do not know the languages involved, not even how they are called. Very little pedagogical materials are available to support students’ L1s, so it is a matter first and foremost of believing in the value of teaching and learning through different languages, and then of finding ways to accommodate one’s students’ needs.
I believe it is the real challenge of education in the 21st century. As far as teacher education is concerned, the issue of diversity should not only concern LA activities but should be dealt with across all the subjects in the curriculum, and by allowing bilingual students to use their first language for making sense of what is expected of them. It is not so difficult to educate teachers to include LA activities in their teaching; it is more difficult to get them to change their representations towards minority languages, for example, and to convince them of the weight of ideologies in preventing the opening of spaces for multilingual education. What I try and do in my classes (Hélot, 2011) is to show teachers that it is possible to work with languages one does not know and that the teaching of literacy must be rethought from a multilingual point of view. I work a lot with children’s literature and show them how to use books in translation, dual language, bilingual and multilingual books. Today, these materials are produced in many different languages and can address the needs of bilingual students. They also give excellent examples of writing activities which can be carried out in French as well as in the students’ languages. In other words teachers need not fear the languages of their students, but rather open to their students’ competence and help them to invest their identity in their learning through using all their languages. (See Cummins, 2006 for more elaborate discussion on this point).
9. What can teachers and communities do to incorporate LA programs in their schools? Where can they start?
I believe it is very easy to incorporate LA in a school, and I have seen many original projects throughout primary schools in the world (for examples across Europe see Kenner & Hickey, 2008). Once teachers decide to open to their classroom to other languages they have many possibilities: They can use their students’ knowledge of languages, they can invite parents or speakers of different languages / different language varieties in their classroom. Children should be given the opportunity to listen to the new languages, to see them written and to learn a few words so they experiment themselves with the new sounds and rhythm. They can read bilingual books if they exist or be asked to write stories in the school language incorporating some of the new words they have learned, and teachers can design metalinguistic activities where various languages are compared and analyzed.
At present in our teacher education department, we invite speakers from different countries to speak on language education and their language is declared language of the month. We then display labels in as many places as possible on the campus to make our students aware of the varieties of linguistic systems. The library also offers a special selection of books in or about that language. The labels work as a sort of linguistic landscape, which engages the students in discussions about languages and their diversity. Language awareness activities can also take place outside of the school: for example students can be asked to carry out a photographic survey on the languages used in their environment on shop fronts, advertising, graffiti, etc. (See Dagenais et al, 2009 for a more detailed description of such a project in Canada)
A final point
To conclude, I would like to say that I feel the same thrill today as when I was eighteen at hearing English spoken in all its extraordinary varieties. I prefer reading novels in English than in French and I loved listening to the Queen’s accent when she addressed the Irish people inDublin recently. But I was also impressed that she made an effort to say a few words in Irish. Looking back on my academic career, I am very aware that English has served me well. I have published far more in English than in French and I can attend conferences all over the world. I can also make friends all over the world. There is no doubt that being competent in English is a form of cultural capital, but over the years the English language has become part of my identity and not just my professional identity. For it is also a language I sometimes share with my three children who are all plurilingual.
Yet, English is definitely not enough, and there is nothing I like more than seeing my students in awe at different writing systems such a Georgian, Armenian, Korean, Laotian, Thai, Arabic, Hebrew, Mandarin, Amharic, Inuktituk, etc. I have a rich collection of Le Petit Prince books in many different languages which I use to show them the wealth of the world’s languages and to convince them that this diversity needs to be protected at all costs. As I said at the beginning of this interview, languages exist only through their speakers, thus students’ plurilingual competences should be supported and valued at school and all children should be able to learn through their first language(s) alongside the school language.
Thanks Dr. Hélot for sharing with us!
References
Cummins, J. (2006). Identity Texts: the imaginative construction of self through multiliteracies pedagogy. In Ofelia Garcia & al (Eds.) Imagining Multilingual Schools. Languages in Education and Glocalisation (pp. 51-68). Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.
Dagenais, D. [need names of other authors].(2009) Linguistic Landscare and Language Awareness. In E.Shohamy, & D.Gorter (Eds.) Linguistic Landscape. Expanding the scenery (pp. 253-269). London, UK: Blackwell.
Feltin, M. (2008) Raconte-moi ta langue/Tell me how you talk. 52‘ documentary film about the Didenheim project (Alsace, France) produced by La Curieuse, Paris. www.racontemoitalangue.net
Garcia, O. (2009). Bilingual Education in the 21st Century. A Global Perspective. Chichester, UK: Blackwell.
Genelot, S. (2001) Evaluation quantitative du cursus EVLANG. Rapport de recherché du programme EVLANG :http://jaling.ecml.at
Hawkins, E. (1987). Awareness of Language. An Introduction. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Hélot, C., & Young, A. (2006) Imagining Multilingual Education in France: a language and cultural awareness project at primary level. In Garcia, O. Skutnabb-Kangas, T. and Torres Guzman, M. E.(Eds.) Imagining Multilingual Schools, (pp. 69-90).Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.
Hélot, C. (2007) Du bilinguisme en famille au plurilinguisme à l’école. Paris: L’ Harmattan.
Hélot, C. (2007). Awareness Raising and Multilingualism in Primary Education. In J. Cenoz, & N. Hornberger(Eds.), Encyclopedia of Language and Education, Second Edition, Volume 6: Knowledge about Language. (p : 371-384). Berlin: Springer.
Hélot, C. (2011) Children’s literature in the Multilingual Classroom. Developing multilingual literacy acquisition.In C. Hélot & M. O’Laoire (Eds.) Language policy for the Multilingual Classroom. Pedagogy of the possible. (pp. 42-64). Brighton, UK: Multilingual Matters.
Kenner, C., & Hickey, T. (Eds.) (2008) Multilingual EuropeDiversity and Learning. Stoke on Trent, UK: Trentham Books.
Laxman Gnawali
NNEST of the Month
August 2011
LAXMAN GNAWALI, MA (Nepal) and M ED (UK), is Associate Professor of ELT at Kathmandu University and Former Senior Vice President of NELTA. He is a dedicated EFL professional with wide experience in teaching English to primary, secondary and tertiary level learners and also in training primary and secondary level teachers of English in Nepal. He leads and facilitates degree and short-term teacher-training and trainer training programs in the field of ELT in Nepal. He has written EFL school textbooks for younger learners and special education learners in Nepal and co-authored an English language improvement course for English teachers of South and South East Asia. He has contributed papers on teacher training and teacher development to national and international collections. He has presented papers at a number of international ELT conferences in the South and East Asia region. Currently, he is pursuing his PhD, doing research on EFL teacher professional development through teacher networking.
NNEST Blog August Interviewer: Isabela Villas Boas
1. Why did you decide to become an educator? Please talk a little about your Englishlanguage-learning and English-language-teaching trajectory.
I think I became an educator because perhaps this was the only profession I had seeneducated people would take in my village. The question why I became an English teacher is related to my heart. When I was a school student, I was fascinated by the people who spoke English. I used to imagine myself speaking to people in English. So, when I was in college, I enrolled in the Education stream and chose English as my major. This was my first step towards the English teaching profession. When the stipend I received from the college was not enough to support my living and college expenses, I sounded out if somebody knew about a vacant teaching position. Luckily, one of my classmates was a school principal of his own private school and he offered me a position at his school. I went to college in the morning and taught during the day. I was doing my BA at this time. And this was the time when I improved my English language proficiency.
Though the trajectory above sounds linear, I underwent a winding path of English learning and teaching. The school I went to up to Grade 10 was a Sanskrit school. Though English was one of nine subjects we had to study, most students did badly in English as the focus was on Sanskrit. For me, written tests did not bother me much, but speaking was a problem. I could hardly say a sentence in this foreign language. At the college, I secured good marks on written tests but speaking did not improve. My first job at the private school brought a turn. The school was an English only zone. We had a rule: if anyone was found speaking in Nepali and not in English, he/she had to take all teachers to a restaurant after the school was over. A school teachers’ salary and a restaurant bill would not go together, so everyone used English whatever the quality. The result was that everybody’s fluency in English improved. After completing my BA in English Literature and with good English language proficiency, I moved to Kathmandu for an MA. Due to political ups and downs, the University calendar was disturbed and it took four years for me to complete a two -year Masters. Besides my study during this period, I taught at a school to support myself.
After my Masters, which I finished in 1991, I went to my home village to teach at a higher secondary school. But my aim was to become a University teacher, so one year later I returned to Kathmandu and started working as a Lecturer at Kathmandu University. In 2000 the Hornby Trust gave me an opportunity for a degree programme in the UK. I was placed in the College of St. Mark and St. John (Marjon), Plymouth (now University College Plymouth St. Mark St. John) where I did M Ed in TTELT (Teacher Training for ELT). This was the time when I improved my speaking mainly in terms of the stress pattern. Since my return in 2001, I have been working as an English teacher educator at the School of Education, Kathmandu University. I teach M Ed students Study Skills and Academic Writing, ELT Methodology, Curriculum Design and Materials Development, Teacher Development for ELT, and Classroom Research. Apart from course delivery, tutorials and counselling, I supervise dissertation research. Outside the University, I have co-authored a school textbook series, Symphony: An English Course, and conducted teacher training throughout the country. I also work as a simultaneous interpreter between English and Nepali during high profile workshops and seminars. The last two activities have helped me to explore different nuances of English.
2 – You are the Acting President of NELTA (Nepal English Language Teacher Association). How and why did you get involved with your country’s teachers’ association and what have you learned through this experience?
I first attended the annual conference of NELTA in 1996. I felt that if I joined NELTA I would learn, so I took membership and started attending and delivering workshops it organized mainly in Kathmandu. In fact, the opportunity I received to study in the UK came to me because I was an active member and this scholarship was given to only active NELTA members. Since my return from the UK, I have been heavily involved in the NELTA activities and I would like to quote from my Presidential Speech I delivered in the last Conference to say what I have learnt being part of NELTA:
In Sanskrit, there is a saying ‘Sanghe shaktih kalau yuge’ which means organization holds the key to strength in modern times. Here the word organisation means association and network. Being on a network makes a crucial difference in one’s career and professional attitude. With the help of network, one not only develops and rises, but also snowballs strength to help others to move on. The members help the network to grow. This is true to NELTA. At NELTA, there has been a literal give and take. NELTA is what Emilie Durkheim calls organic bonding which acts as a tool to help the individuals grow in the profession, self-actualise and be recognized in a broader circle. It helps them realise their full potentials. NELTA provides its members with opportunities to realise their potentials and with those realised potentials, the members explore newer avenues for NELTA to grow into a bigger platform. Mike Solly rightly put at the end of his presentation in an ELTeCS meeting in Sri Lanka a few years ago:
Tell me and I will… Forget
Show me and I will. …Remember
Involve me and I will…Understand
Network me and I will. …Grow (and help others to grow)
This is not just a theory now. It is a reality.
3 – Could you please provide some examples of teacher development initiatives that NELTA helps promote and explain how these initiatives have contributed to the improvement of English Language Teaching in your country?
NELTA promotes teacher development for ELT through its own initiatives and also in collaboration with other organizations. It organizes annual conferences which are attended by over 1000 teachers. Short-term teacher trainings are a regular phenomenon for teachers of different parts of the country. NELTA members receive free personal copies the NELTA Journal and the English Teaching Forum on a regular basis. Most branches have a resource centre with books on ELT. Exposure visits to other countries mainly to attend workshops and conferences are regular opportunities for Nepalese English teachers. NELTA also gets Hornby scholarships for its members to do a Masters course in ELT in the UK. TEFL International provides scholarships each year for its certification courses.
These opportunities have been instrumental to develop ELT situation in the country. At least in the urban areas English teaching has visibly improved. We now have trainers who can travel to different parts of the country to run training. Until a few years back we used to depend on textbooks from India. Now there is a competition within the country among textbook writers and publishers. Nepalese ELT practitioners have started contributing to the International journals which is a significant sign of development.
4 – Many websites such as: http://www.projects-abroad.co.uk/volunteer-projects/teaching/nepal/ and http://www.transitionsabroad.com/listings /work/esl/articles/workinasia.shtml
offer teaching positions to native-English-speaking teachers with little training and experience. Is it because there’s a lack of qualified teachers in your country or do you feel that NEST have better opportunities than NNEST with the same experience?
Though there are enough NNEST in Nepal, there is still a feeling among the stakeholders that NEST are better because they speak proper English. So, it’s not uncommon to see individuals from the UK or USA working at some schools. However, the number of expatriate teachers who receive salaries for work is very small. Those NEST who come as volunteers do not replace NNEST. They come for a short time and help regular teachers in their classroom teaching. So, the advertisements the NGOs place are actually responded by people who want to gather some experience of working in a country like Nepal.
5 – In your Presidential Address given at the 16th NELTA International Conference in March (http://neltachoutari.wordpress.com/2011/03/01/presidential-address-sixteenth-nelta-international-conference/) , you mentioned a survey of ELT in Nepal, in which NELTA working with the National Planning Commission, the Ministry of Education, the British Council and the US Embassy. Why was there a need for such survey and what type of information does NELTA hope to obtain from it? Do you have any preliminary information about the number of NEST and NNEST in your country and if there is a difference in their salary and teaching status, for example?
The survey I mentioned has been proposed in order to develop a common data bank and reference document on the ELT situation in Nepal. The first survey was conducted in 1984 and now the information from that report is obsolete. So, this second survey is expected to document updated data on the major aspects such as teachers, students, teaching learning materials, testing, trainers and training etc. Though I do not have an exact number of NEST and NNEST, I can now say that the number of NEST is very small. Only a very small number of NEST who are showcased to boost the business of the private schools receive higher salaries. It won’t be an exaggeration to say that Nepal is not a market for those who are looking for a lucrative teaching job. The opportunities are limited to the British Council Teaching Centre, Lincoln School, the British School, Kathmandu International Study Centre and other schools, specially set up for children of the expatriates.
6 – As a teacher educator, how do you balance global and local tendencies towards ELT in general and teacher development, in particular?
Our ELT practices are directly and indirectly guided by the international development in ELT and also in teacher development. We always try to read the latest books and research reports from the BANA countries (Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and North America) thinking that there must be something out there. This is because very little has been published within the country. So, more than balancing, we try to import knowledge from outside. Yet, I have one particular issue related to the idea of balancing. The international trend is that the trainings and workshops should be participant centered, and participants should be encouraged to contribute; in the language classes, learners should be given a chance to speak and work on their own. But here in Nepal, many teachers expect the trainer to deliver content-rich lectures; otherwise, they think the trainer did not work, just fooled around. The same goes in the ELT classrooms. Teachers who have been trained in the participant centered environment try to organize activities and get students to carry out tasks. The result is that parents complain to the head teachers that the English teachers has fun in the classroom and does not actually teach. In such situations we try to take a middle path.
7 – What message would you like to leave to your ELT colleagues from all around the world?
Colleagues, if we are on a network, we can grow and help others grow. So, let’s join a network. If there is no network where we are, let’s start one and “learn and let learn” because together we can make things possible.
Jennifer Jenkins
NNEST of the Month
July 2011
J [dot] Jenkins [at] soton [dot] ac [dot] uk
Jennifer Jenkins is professor of global Englishes at the University of Southampton, United Kingdom. She first became interested in the phenomenon of ELF in the 1980s and researched it for her doctoral thesis. ELF is also the focus of most of her numerous books and articles, which have played a substantial role in establishing ELF internationally as a major field of enquiry. Professor Jenkins has also served on the advisory boards of many international journals and is one of three coeditors who will be launching the new Journal of English as a Lingua Franca (de Gruyter Mouton) later this year.
NNEST Blog July Interviewer: Davi S. Reis
1. Could you tell us about your educational and professional background, and why you decided to become an educator?
I began my professional life in TESOL teaching English to immigrants in London (known as ESL in the UK), and then EFL at a private language school. I later became a teacher trainer for both pre- and in-service training (the Cambridge CELTA and DELTA, as they’re now known). Subsequently I moved into the university sector, initially as a teacher of English for academic purposes, and later of applied linguistics at BA, MA and still later, doctoral, levels.
As to why I decided to become an educator, I was always interested in language and linguistics, and specialised in these for my undergraduate degree in English language and literature. Earlier on, my main interest was in old languages, particularly Old English and Old Icelandic, and I spent some time researching these at Oxford and doing a little teaching of Old Icelandic. But when it came to a ‘proper’ job, I decided that it would be more useful – and easier to find students! – if I switched to something more up to date, and so began the history that I’ve outlined in my previous paragraph. And having found how much I enjoyed teaching, I’ve stayed with it in one form or another throughout my working life.
2. English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) is sometimes confused with other related notions, such as Lingua Franca English (LFE), English as an International Language (EIL), and Global Englishes. In your view, what are the main controversies or misunderstandings surrounding ELF currently? Where do you stand on these controversies (or could you clarify any misconceptions about ELF)?
There is a great deal of confusion over what ELF actually is, and this isn’t helped by the fact that some scholars who don’t themselves research ELF have introduced other terms and acronyms. At its simplest, ELF could be described (as I described it in the 2nd ed. of my university course book, World Englishes) as “English as it is used as a contact language among speakers from different first languages” (p.143). It should be evident from this that in my (and almost all ELF researchers’) view, ELF doesn’t exclude native English speakers of English (NESs). The point is simply that when NESs take part in ELF communication, they shouldn’t expect to set the linguistic agenda and for the non-native English speakers (NNESs) to defer to them. Instead, the kind of English used in ELF interactions is (or should be) co-constructed with no expectation that forms preferred by NNESs and not by NESs are, by definition, ‘incorrect’.
Unfortunately, some who comment on ELF (with, to my mind, rather limited knowledge of it) promote the notion that ELF is used only by NNESs. A few such commentators have even proposed that there should be a division between ELF (NNESs only) and EIL (English as an International Language), which should be the term for communication involving both NNESs and NESs. I personally find this distinction unworkable, as interaction is never as tidy as it implies. Another term that is being promoted by some non-ELF researchers is LFE (Lingua Franca English). But again, it has been rejected by the majority of bona fide ELF researchers, myself included, because of its implication that ELF is a variety of English on a parallel with, e.g., Indian English, Singapore English, British English (though curiously, those who prefer the term LFE seem to believe that it is more plurilinguistic than ELF in its connotations!). Over the past ten years or so, ELF research has demonstrated very clearly that ELF is neither a single variety nor a group of varieties, but that it is more fluid and flexible than other kinds of language use with which we’ve been familiar up to now. Indeed, its context-related variability is thought to be one of its defining characteristics, and one prominent ELF research, Barbara Seidlhofer, has argued that ELF’s variability calls for new ways of approaching traditional concepts of ‘language variety’ and ‘speech community’, as ELF communication does not conform to conventional expectations.
3. How have you conceptualized “accommodation” in the context of ELF? One might speculate that this notion can be threatening to some inner-circle speakers of English, who may be used to being ‘accommodated to’ much more often than doing the accommodating themselves. In this light, how can we prepare ELF speakers to be empowered in interactional instances when NSs from inner circle countries are resistant to accommodating?
It’s true that many NESs assume that the way they speak is internationally intelligible and that it’s for NNESs to make all the adjustments. In many cases, this isn’t based on an ideological position, but simply because a lot of NESs don’t know any different (better!). They’ve been brought up to understand that ‘everyone speaks English’, and therefore they don’t themselves need to learn other languages, and that their own (i.e., what is known as standard British or American English) is best and most intelligible. So when they meet with NNESs, they don’t realise that the way they speak English, often with heavy use of local idioms, phrasal verbs and, pronunciation-wise, lots of elisions and assimilations, is not in fact widely intelligible, and is merely their local dialect. On the other hand, many NNESs, who by definition speak at least one second language, seem not to assume that their own kind of English will be easily understood by all, and to be much more ready to make adjustments to it. In my view, all English speakers, whether non-native or native, should learn about the importance of accommodation, and how to develop their accommodation skills, during their school years. This will empower everyone who takes part in ELF communication.
4. In reference to the power of the ELT literature, you have stated (Jenkins, 2007) that
“It seems that the sheer weight of the NS ideology being communicated to NNS teachers around the world on a regular basis is convincing many of them (along with NS teachers, should they need convincing) that ‘good’ English is NS English, and that its most important experts are NSs in terms of both the language itself and by a somewhat curious and tenuous link, its teaching. Much of this may take place below the level of consciousness for, as Holliday (2005: 10) observes, ‘native speakerism is so deep in the way in which we think about TESOL that people are standardly unaware of its presence and its impact’. This, in turn, goes a considerable way to explain NNSs’ admiration for NS norms, their deficit view of their own NNS Englishes (which they see as characterized by errors rather than local NNS variants), and their sense of linguistic insecurity, all of which inevitably reduce their receptivity to the notion of ELF” (p. 58-59).
Unfortunately, many (if not most) NNESTs have experienced this sense of “linguistic insecurity” in both their personal and professional lives. Some never seem to move beyond it. How can those in TESOL who see the inherent legitimacy of ELF and World Englishes work to undermine such pervasive and harmful ideology, both in research and practice? More specifically, how can teacher educators make a positive difference in preparing NNESTs to become aware of and work against the NS myth?
This is a difficult question. But I think that even in the few years since I wrote the piece you quote above, things have started to move on. It seems to me that it’s primarily a case of awareness, and that the best way those in TESOL who see the legitimacy of ELF can best undermine native speakerist ideology is by raising awareness of it and of the (ELF) alternative at all levels of teaching and teacher training. I’d recommend that it should be introduced into course books and courses for English learners, starting with a few basic simply expressed facts for lower level learners and moving on to serious conceptual discussions and debates for the highest levels. I also believe that awareness of ELF should be incorporated in a major way into all teacher training and teacher education programmes. This has recently started to happen, if in a small way as yet, in the Cambridge-ESOL teacher training programmes (CELTA and DELTA), but I’m not sure that there’s anything comparable going on elsewhere. And of course, until the hugely anachronistic examination boards show some understanding of how English is used in the world today, and a willingness to start testing this instead of the kind of English used between one NES and another, teachers will be obliged, however good their understanding of ELF, to continue teaching native English when it comes to getting their learners through exams.
5. You have previously pointed out that “…a [large] number of users [of English] seem to have been convinced by the prevailing native speaker ideology into believing that their English is interlanguage or fossilized if it is non ‘native-like’.” (Jenkins, 2007, p. 240). Do you believe things have changed in this respect? Or is the influence of traditional SLA research on gatekeeping practices still just as strong as it was a few years ago?
As I said in my answer to the previous question, I think things are starting to move on. Some SLA researchers have begun to engage with ELF, and are beginning to have an influence. But the gatekeeping practices are so firmly entrenched that it will take a while before their influence is substantially weakened. We still see plenty of adverts asking for teachers or authors with native or near-native English, and one way we can challenge this kind of gatekeeping is to always contact the institution or publisher concerned, ask why they believe this is necessary, and educate them about the current demographics of English.
6. Have you personally either witnessed or experienced any instances of ‘native speakerism’ or linguistic racism that you would like to share with our readers?
I can’t remember any specific examples, but I’ve quite often noticed NESs pretend not to understand someone with a NNES accent. Sometimes, though, it’s not so much a question of pretence but of being unwilling to make the effort to understand an accent which isn’t like their own. Which takes us back to accommodation…..
7. What advice would you offer to teachers and NNS worldwide who are subject to native speakerism on a frequent, sometimes daily basis?
It’s impossible to generalise. So much depends on whether the teacher/NNES is located in the world, and the specific situation in which the native speakerism occurs. And as an NES, it would be too easy and glib for me to simply say ‘be yourselves’. But native speakerism is disgraceful and I do believe that we should all, NNES and NES, do all we can to draw attention to it, ridicule it where this is feasible, and contribute to its demise.
8. How did the writing of World Englishes: A resource book for students (Jenkins, 2009) come about? What were your motivations and hopes for this publication?
When I was asked to contribute a course to a new BA programme, English language and communication, at my previous university, I decided it was time that students learning about English should learn about English around the world and not only about the English spoken by a tiny proportion of its speakers (i.e., the natives). But when I hunted around for materials for my course, I realised there were very few suitable sources and no single book that could be used as a core text. So I began to design my own course materials. At exactly that moment, Routledge approached me to write a book for their new Routledge English Language Introductions, a series of course books for undergraduates, so I offered to turn my World Englishes course into a book for their series, and piloted it on my own first cohort taking the course with me. It was first published in 2003 and proved a very popular book, so I was very soon asked to write the 2nd edition (2009), and am now being persuaded to start work on the 3rd edition, which I’ll do as soon as I’ve finished writing the monograph that I’m currently working on.
9. Could you tell us about the Lingua Franca Core (LFC; Jenkins, 2000) in terms of how it evolved, the challenges that it still faces, and future directions? For example, what are the implications of the various and diverse, as well as changing sociolinguistic contexts around the globe in terms of keeping the LFC current?
Oh my goodness, I could write a book on this. Well, actually I have done – the one you mention! The LFC arose out of my PhD research, which was actually on phonological accommodation among NNESs. My data also demonstrated how certain pronunciation features were/weren’t intelligible, and from this data came the LFC. I said at the time that it wasn’t definitive and needed lots of replication. After all, it was just one piece of research! So far, the replications that have been done have, in the main if not entirely, supported my original findings, but more are still needed before the LFC can be fine tuned and then, perhaps, incorporated into pronunciation teaching. Having said that, as you point out, the LFC is not a once for all set of features, so the research will need to be ongoing in order to identify any future changes in what is/n’t mutually intelligible in ELF communication. This could mean that some core features become non-core and vice versa. It could also mean that some features that are core/non-core in, say, East Asia are the opposite in Europe and Latin America. But these things haven’t been much researched, and I hope that a new generation of researchers might be interested in taking on the challenge.
10. How has Corpus Linguistics research and the use of corpora such as VOICE influenced the ELF research arena? In turn, have these influences started to make their way into teaching practice and pedagogy?
I’m not a good person to ask about corpus linguistics, as I’m not myself a corpus linguist. But as far as I know, for the time being we are still with description and analysis. Although corpus findings from VOICE and ELFA (the corpus of English as a Lingua Franca in Academic Settings) are much discussed in the academic literature and even in the teacher training literature, to my knowledge they haven’t yet begun to make their way into the teaching of English. One reason for this is that ELF researchers are very reticent about telling teachers what they should do. We believe that it’s for teaching professionals to decide what is most appropriate for their own learners and to take from ELF research as they see fit. In this sense, we see ELF as offering teachers and their learners more choice.
11. Do you have any updates on the Journal of English as a Lingua Franca (JELF) that you would like to share with our readers?
JELF was formally launched by a representative of its publisher, De Gruyter Mouton (Berlin) at the 4th International ELF Conference in Hong Kong in May 2011. The first issue will appear early in 2012, and the articles for that are now being reviewed and edited. A further piece of news is that De Gruyter are also going to publish a book series, Developments in English as a Lingua Franca, to be co-edited by me and my colleague Dr. Will Baker, also at the University of Southampton. Several key ELF researchers have already offered to write for the series and we hope that the first books will appear in 2013.
References:
Jenkins, J. (2009). World Englishes: A resource book for students (2nd ed.). London: Routledge.
Jenkins, J. (2007). English as a lingua franca: Attitude and identity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jenkins, J. (2000). The phonology of English as an international language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Péter Medgyes
NNEST of the Month
June, 2011
Péter Medgyes is Professor of Applied Linguistics at the Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest. Previously, he was a school teacher, teacher trainer, vice rector of his university, deputy state secretary at the Hungarian Ministry of Education and the ambassador of Hungary posted in Damascus. Professor Medgyes is the author of numerous books and articles, including The Non-Native Teacher (1994, winner of the Duke of Edinburgh Book Competition), Changing Perspectives in Teacher Education (1996, co-edited with Angi Malderez), The Language Teacher (1997), Laughing Matters (2002), and Golden Age: Twenty Years of Foreign Language Education in Hungary (2011). His main professional interests lie in curriculum studies, language policy, and teacher education. He can be reached at medgyesp@citromail.hu.
NNEST blog June interviewer: Shu-Chun Tseng
1. Could you tell us why and how you decided to become an educator?
(Ana Wu, ESL instructor at City College of San Francisco)
Dr. Medgyes: Frankly, when I was a university student the last thing on my mind was to become a teacher. In my youth I didn’t like going to school plus my mother kept saying that she didn’t want her son to become “a slave of the nation”, implying that teachers in Hungary have always been very poorly paid. My dream was to become a literary critic. However, I was so exhilarated by the practicum experience in the last year of my university studies that I felt I was born to be a teacher. (Youngsters are full of self-confidence, you know.)
2. In your teaching journey, what are your own terms of being “an ideal teacher”? And, how do you achieve your own goals?
(Shu-Chun Tseng, PhD, Indiana State University)
Dr. Medgyes: I don’t believe there’s such a thing as an ideal teacher. However, the best way for a teacher to approximate this ideal is to take into consideration the personal and learning needs of their group of learners. So if you teach seven-year-olds, for example, don’t expect them to understand the difference between the past tense and the present perfect, whereas if you happen to teach adults preparing for a tough language exam, don’t waste time on light-hearted activities.
3. Your work has led us to understand the bright and dark sides of being NNESTs. However, in the real society, it’s not just how we, NNESTs, perceive ourselves, but also how others (like parents, students, or administrators) perceive us. Some of them still believe that the native speakers are better role models for English language learners. With your own experience, have you ever noticed these negative attitudes? Also, how would you suggest NNESTs to overcome the negative attitudes and communicate with parents, students, and administrators?
(Shu-Chun Tseng, PhD, Indiana State University)
Dr. Medgyes: To answer the first part of the question, I don’t think we can directly overcome the negative attitudes of parents because we scarcely meet them. School administrators are a different matter. In Hungary this isn’t really a problem because there are hardly any native speaker teachers available to emulate us nonnatives. Private schools, on the other hand, are driven by survival and profit, and native teachers are undoubtedly a major attraction. As for students, they may have reservations about me as a nonnative in the beginning, but I hope to prove through my professionalism and dedication that I’m well worth it.
4. Much research has been done and much has been written since your groundbreaking work was published in the early nineties. As the NNEST “movement” continues to grow stronger and move forward, what advice would you have for beginning scholars and researchers in this area, both in terms of research questions and research methods?
(Davi S. Reis, Assistant Professor of Education, Duquesne University)
Dr. Medgyes: The native/nonnative issue is a very complex one, including political, educational, linguistic and other aspects. If you are a beginner researcher, I’d suggest you should not be carried away by your emotions but focus your efforts on searching for impartial evidence, which may or may not corroborate your assumptions. Nothing can be more elevating than when a researcher admits the illegitimacy of their prior beliefs.
5. Your work on the differences between NESTs and NNESTs (especially Medgyes, 1992 and Medgyes, 1994) has been regarded as pioneering and has been widely cited in the Applied Linguistics literature in general and in the expanding body of research on NNEST-related issues, in particular. But some scholars have also criticized certain aspects of your work, claiming, for example, that it helps fuel the NS/NNS dichotomy and that it positions NNESTs as inherently deficient speakers when compared to NESTs (Mahboob, 2010) . How have these criticisms, as well as your professional experiences in the past two decades, affected your thinking about the NS/NNS dichotomy, if at all?
(Davi S. Reis, Assistant Professor of Education, Duquesne University)
Dr. Medgyes: First of all, I must admit that the native/nonnative dichotomy doesn’t stand up to close scrutiny. Several other terms have been offered to replace it, but none of them seems to have stood the test of time. The most promising new avenue of research has been conducted on disentangling the complexities of the term English as a lingua franca. While there have been several attempts at describing certain features of ELF, a thorough description thereof has not as yet been made to my knowledge. Considering the heterogeneity of ELF that is spoken by a rapidly growing number of people all over the world, I doubt that there ever will be such a description available.
(Ana T. Solano-Campos, PhD Candidate at Emory University, Questions 6, 7, and 8 )
Dr. Medgyes, humor is an important theme in your work and a key element of some of your narratives.
6. When did you first encounter “humor in the language classroom”? Do you have any funny anecdotes about the challenge of being humorous in another language?
Dr. Medgyes: What I’ve come to realise over the years is that humour doesn’t equal jokes – it’s a far more comprehensive feature of human beings and far more valuable too. The point is not so much whether you as a teacher are good at cracking jokes in the classroom (I’m not a very good joke-teller myself – by the time I reach the punchline I usually forget what it is), but rather whether you are a person who can look at the world (including the school and the English language) from both sides. The funny and serious perspectives shouldn’t be separated, they belong together. That’s why I love understatements and tongue-in-cheek remarks. Humourless people are dangerous – and so are humourless teachers. Oh, and the most important thing: self-irony is one of the most valuable human traits. No funny anecdotes about the challenge, I’m afraid…
7. What prompted you to write “Laughing Matters: Humor in the Language Classroom”?
Dr. Medgyes: What triggered my thoughts was that I realised there was a gap in ELT literature. By the way, never before had I suffered so much as while I was writing this book. Since I was aware that this book was going to be used anywhere in the world, I found it was terribly difficult to find the common denominator. Will this joke go down well in Patagonia as well as in Myanmar? Is it PC enough? I was full of doubts (and still am), but I trust I found the right balance on the whole.
8. In what ways have you incorporated humor in the different stages in your life, as a student, teacher, professor, vice-rector, and Deputy State Secretary for International Relations in the Hungarian Ministry of Education and Culture?
Dr. Medgyes: Need I tell you how difficult life can be? We all know it, don’t we? The only thing that kept me going through the ups and downs of my career has been the invincible yen to laugh. As long as I can laugh at other people’s and my own folly, I can be sure that I’m still alive.
Acknowledgments
Special thanks to Dr. Péter Medgyes for his generous participation in this interview. Many thanks go to all NNEST Blog Team members. This interview was a collaborative process to which all NNEST Blog Team members contributed in different capacities.
References
Mahboob, A. (Ed.). (2010). The NNEST lens: Non native English speakers in TESOL. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Medgyes, P. (1992). Native or nonnative: Who’s worth more? ELT Journal, 46(4), 340-349.
Medgyes, P. (1994). The non-native teacher. London, UK: Macmillam Publishers Ltd.
Medgyes, P. (2002). Laughing Matters: Humor in the Language Classroom. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Suhanthie Motha
NNEST of the Month
May, 2011
swmotha [at] uw [dot] edu
Suhanthie Motha is an Assistant Professor at the University of Washington. Her research explores the intersection of race, empire, and identity in the context of TESOL teacher education. Her work has appeared in TESOL Quarterly, Modern Language Journal, Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, TESL Canada Journal, Educational Practice and Theory, Language Teaching, Peace and Change Journal, and the International Journal of Innovation in English Language Teaching & Research in addition to several book chapters. She serves on the editorial advisory board of TESOL Quarterly.
NNEST blog May interviewer: Todd Ruecker
Could you tell us why and how you decided to become an educator?
Before I answer that question, let me thank you for having me on the NNEST of the Month Blog, which is one of my favorite columns to read. It’s an innovative and engaging format, and I’m honored to be a part of it.
There are two answers to the question about my journey into TESOL. The first, which parallels the experiences of most of my colleagues, is that it was a serendipitous accident: I walked alongside TESOL for a while, pursuing a different path working for an economic consulting firm but volunteering at night teaching English to immigrant adults. I became aware that I was looking forward to my evenings with my students with a jubilant anticipation that I never experienced around my daytime job, which was itself beginning to feel increasingly devoid of meaning and consequence. For a while, TESOL escaped my notice as a possibility for a profession, and by the time I recognized my growing passion for the work, I felt as though I had somehow tripped and fortuitously fallen into it. I enrolled in a master’s program at the University of Maryland, College Park (UMCP), at first part-time and then leaving my full-time position. I was blessed with stimulating, supportive faculty and a lovely, lovable cohort of classmates. When I graduated, I taught in a variety of contexts, most notably teaching at and eventually coordinating the intensive English program of a small university in the Bay Area. I ultimately returned to UMCP for a Ph.D. with two foci, Teacher Education and TESOL. I am now at the University of Washington in Seattle, having completed two years of my tenure track.
The second answer is a bit more complex. I could capture it by turning to the title of Kathleen Casey’s (1993) book on women teachers: I Answer with My Life. My linguistic history is complicated, and the language socialization of my grandparents and great-grandparents has meant that my relationship with English has been somewhat knotty since before my birth. I was born in Sri Lanka and raised primarily in Australia and Nouvelle Calédonie (a small island-nation in the South Pacific colonized by France). TESOL is not a surprising career choice when I consider that I have on some level been untangling for many years the ways in which English becomes mine yet is simultaneously alien at the confluence of my race, heritage, and postcoloniality.
In your Critical Inquiry in Language Studies 2006 article on decolonizing ESOL, you wrote about your heritage language loss of Singhalese and Tamil and your family’s privileging of English. While admitting that English has served you well, you acknowledge some loss. What advice do you have for others struggling with the loss of their heritage language(s) or the pressure to deny their background in a quest to speak fluent English?
Thinking about how language ideologies become naturalized has been a long, befuddling voyage for me, a voyage that I suspect may have no endpoint. It’s taken a while for me to appreciate the ways in which what Gogolin (1994) terms monolingual habitus makes itself evident on an individual level, the inscribed and reinscribed normalization of monolingualism through discursive practices, the notion that one must develop a primary allegiance or identification with one language over another. I am also still learning to recognize the ways in which some language identities become more desirable because they are associated with privilege, Whiteness, modernity, trendiness, and the concept of “Western-ness.” As a field, we are still learning to understand how desires are formed and fed and the role they play in shaping language choices. I’m optimistic that as we come to understand better how these types of language ideologies work, we will be better equipped to avoid heritage language loss. In many contexts, heritage language maintenance is difficult. On an individual or family level, it requires a glaring intentionality and continuous critical analysis of surrounding discourses. For instance, Aneta Pavlenko draws our attention to a passage in the biography of Dominican-American author Julia Alvarez (1998, in Pavlenko, 2001). Alvarez tells of the time when her mother was speaking to her daughters in Spanish in a store in New York City. A stranger commented that if they wanted to be in the country, they should learn the language. Many ideologies are embedded within the stranger’s few simple words: the ever-present monolingual habitus—the notion that if you are speaking Spanish, you are unable to speak English; the assumption that a mother in New York should be speaking only English with her children, regardless of what language is intimate; the idea that this stranger would know better than a Spanish-speaking mother what is best for herself and her children. If we are not vigilant, these ideologies remain unquestioned and become naturalized. Alvarez describes her mother’s response. ‘I do know the language,’ my mother said in her boarding school English, putting the woman in her place” (p. 61-62). Her response challenges some ideologies, but it does so by summoning others. For instance it invokes class privilege, raising other questions: Do mothers who do not have the class privilege that usually accompanies boarding school have the legitimacy to make language choices for their children? If she were to respond in a different form of English, for instance English that the speaker might associate with undocumented day laborers, would her choice to speak Spanish have carried less authority? Beyond the family level, heritage language maintenance requires a concerted recognition among individuals, schools, institutions, policymakers, and parents of the value of heritage language maintenance and can be difficult for a family to achieve alone. Lately, I’ve been thinking about the multiple ways in which linguistic identity intersects with class, for instance of discourses that attach English monolingualism to class privilege—in many EFL contexts, English proficiency has historically telegraphed class privilege, but English monolingualism even more so—and of the ways in which these contribute to heritage language loss.
A few of your early articles focused on ESOL programs in K-12 settings. How did you get involved in this type of research and have you been conducting any other studies in this area?
I care deeply about school reform. Schools offer great promise for engendering widespread social change, and I am (usually) optimistic about the role that education can play in making the world a better place for all its inhabitants. As a novice teacher myself in the Washington, D.C. suburbs, I became intrigued by the ways in which the institution of public schooling served to socialize teachers and children into certain positionalities, and I was particularly surprised by the gap between what I had learned in my teacher education program and what I experienced in K-12 schools. TESOL had been an alluring career option for me for several reasons, one of the most significant being its potential to provoke social change. My master’s program helped me to think about and talk about my commitments to anti-oppressive pedagogical practice and to supporting social justice in my future teaching contexts. However, in the hallways of the underresourced elementary school I eventually found myself in, my pursuits seemed to lose their viability. For instance, I still look back with puzzlement upon one conversation I recall, wondering at my lack of critical questioning when in a discussion of a lesson on voting rights, my mentor teacher explained to me that “Democratic classrooms don’t work, they’re a nice idea, they’re just not practical with these students.” Later, as a supervisor of student teaching for several years during my doctoral program, I often heard my own earlier dilemmas mirrored in the words of the teacher candidates whose practica I was coordinating, and I became interested in exploring how teachers came to terms with these fissures and made sense of their practice in such fragmented terrain. This pondering led to my dissertation study, which was an ethnographic study of four first-year K-12 teachers’ processes of learning to teach. In terms of current research projects, I tend to be more comfortable researching a site or participants with whom I have some familiarity, so I’m currently working on knowing more intimately local educational contexts and building relationships in my new space in the Pacific Northwest.
In the abovementioned articles, you drew rather extensively on race and postcolonial theory in analyzing the power dynamics in K-12 ESOL programs. Was your interest in these theories sparked by your own language experiences? Could you explain how these theories have been useful in your scholarship and how they can help scholars and teachers address inequalities in TESOL?
It’s actually quite difficult for me to carry out any analysis of TESOL that doesn’t draw on theories around race and empire because these form the basis of our field (Motha, 2006a; 2006b; 2006c; Motha, Jain, and Tecle, forthcoming). The historical dissemination of the English language was racialized and rooted in colonialism, and the contemporary proliferation of English continues to be entrenched in racialized and (neo)colonial power relations, so I remain interested in these theoretical frames. Theories of race and empire offer great promise in helping us to understand the role played by English in the inequitable distribution of resources and power globally and the differential English learning experiences of learners in different contexts. They help to explain why English language varieties are assigned different values and the consequences of these differences socially. They shed light on possible avenues for transformation and as such offer exciting potential for shaping the ways in which we as a field approach teacher education. As I began my master’s degree, I was fortunate to have a sociolinguistics class with Shelley Wong, who was artful in explicating the relevance of race theories and postcolonial theories for TESOL. The class highlighted for me the importance of including this type of theoretical content in TESOL teacher education.
Many years later, I remain intensely interested in these theories. I am currently teaching a new graduate seminar at the University of Washington titled: Race and Empire in TESOL. The class is filled with exciting emerging scholars who are already doing engaging and important work that draws on these frames to look at how race and postcolonialism intersect with language minority rights, evangelism, globalization, gender, representations of English as a lingua franca, sexual identities, the supremacy of native speaker identity, and numerous other themes. Most of my writing these days is for my book Looking at the Light Cast by Someone Else’s Lamp: Race and Empire in English Language Teaching.
In addition to applying the abovementioned theories, you have used feminist theories as well as theories such as Norton’s (2000, 2001) theory of imagined communities and Foucault’s (1980) theory of regimes of truth in your work. Could you explain why your work is so theoretically driven and provide advice for teachers and graduate students seeking to understand and apply theories in challenging the linguistic equalities they witness in the TESOL profession?
I think of some of the work you refer to as theoretically informed rather than theoretically driven. I try to avoid attempts to “apply” a theory or force a real-life situation into a theoretical framing, rather than the converse—that is, rather than allowing theory to flow from critical reflection on life. For me, it is helpful to have as a point of departure the concrete and tangible, whether this takes the form of data, people, pedagogical practice, incidents, or conversations. For instance, the work you refer to, which brings together the two frameworks of imagined communities (Norton, 2000) and regimes of truth (Foucault, 1980), emerged from conversations with my co-authors, Sherrie Carroll and Jeremy Price, in which we struggled to understand the tension between on one hand language learners’ creative and inspiring imaginings of their future selves and on the other hand dominating, even unattainable images of who they should be. The theorizing was spawned within our conversations of patterns and themes that cut across the lives of both Sherrie Carroll’s participants and mine. Of course, working with the concrete in isolation is equally dissatisfying. Theories can offer explanatory power and help us to understand individual interactions more deeply; they give us access to understanding across incidents, contexts, and disciplines. Freire’s (1998) words often come to mind when I contemplate the tension between theory and practice in my teaching but also in my research and scholarship: “Critical reflection on practice is a requirement of the relationship between theory and practice. Otherwise, theory becomes simply ‘blah, blah, blah,’ and practice, pure activism” (p. 30).
One of the data sources for one of your studies included afternoon tea sessions, and you ended up privileging the data from these discussions over other data collected during this study. You wrote about the value of this unorthodox method in a 2009 book chapter. Could you explain your research choice in this instance and the value of challenging accepted methodologies, especially in addressing inequalities?
Over the years, tea has come to take on rich meanings in my day-to-day life. I serve it during my practicum classes, my office hours, upon returning home with my young daughters after picking them up from school, in gatherings of my writing collective. I sip it continuously wherever I write, in the island cabin I sometimes escape to, in my favorite Seattle tea house writing spot. Tea has come to represent for me comfort, community, contemplation, consolation, camaraderie, and creativity. I add other troubling cs to my associations with tea—for instance, in the context of Sri Lanka: colonization. Another c is ceremony, evoking the ways in which obfuscated social knowledge surrounding formal teas has served to reinscribe social hierarchies. In her wonderful new book, Interrogating Privilege, my friend and mentor Stephanie Vandrick (2009) similarly connects tea with various associations, including, she tells us: “…my childhood in barely post-colonial India, my Anglophilia, my beloved English novels, women’s groups…” (p. 18) and expresses misgivings that resonate with my own: “… it is also a source of ambivalence because of its postcolonial and social class associations.” (p. 18).
The afternoon teas weren’t even in the initial proposal for my study of four first-year ESOL teachers; they arose quite organically from my study-partners’ desire for a space in which to come together and support each other. The study was designed to draw primarily on interview and classroom observational data over an academic year. Within the first fortnight of the study, two of my study-partners, Alexandra and Katie (names are pseudonyms), asked whether they could start meeting with their former classmates, and the five of us began gathering in my living room every two or three weeks after the last school bell rang. As I began to analyze my data, it became clear to me that the afternoon tea data were quite different from all of the other data, particularly the interview transcripts and observation field notes, in three important ways. First, they positioned me more closely to the teachers’ voices than the observations ever could have. In my observation field notes, I was relating the events of classrooms that I did not belong to. The afternoon tea transcriptions afforded me an extra layer of proximity to the teachers’ interpretations of their pedagogies because in the afternoon teas, the teachers recounted their own lives. I hasten to add here that I do not claim, of course, that I am offering an accurate or complete representation of my study-partners or their teaching lives: in my telling of events I still choose which pieces of data to include or exclude, how to frame each piece, and which other scholars to put the data into conversation with, so my narration of the afternoon teas remains me telling someone else’s stories. Second, absent in the observational and interview data was the element of community. As the teachers began to support each other, they changed their own but also each other’s and my practice as they coached, mentored, and worked through challenges with each other. The sociocultural richness of this dimension would have been more elusive without the afternoon teas as a data source. And thirdly, the afternoon teas were for me a hospitable site for praxis. Because in the afternoon teas, teachers were sharing their thinking about their teaching, the teas brought together teachers’ pedagogies and their theorizing about practice.
As I became more appreciative of the connection between the afternoon tea transcriptions and these three elements, voice, community, and praxis, I felt a growing need to find a way to privilege that data. I used constant comparative methodology, but I coded the afternoon tea data first, then introduced other data only as they related to the themes that I had seen emerging from the afternoon tea data. In this way, I sought to create a space that honored, methodologically speaking, the teachers’ voices, power of community, and praxis.
References
Casey, K. (1993). I answer with my life: Life histories of women teachers working for social change. New York: Routledge.
Carroll, S., Motha, S., & Price, J. N. (2008). Accessing imagined communities and reinscribing regimes of truth. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, 5(3), 165-191.
Foucault, M. (1980). Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings 1972–1977. C. Gordon (Ed.). London: Harvester.
Freire, P. (1998). Pedagogy of freedom: Ethics, democracy, and civic courage. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Gogolin, I. (1994). Der monolinguale Habitus der multilingualen Schule. Münster: Waxmann-Verlag.
Motha, S. (2009). Afternoon tea at Su’s: Participant voice and community in critical feminist ethnography. In S. Kouritzin, N. Piquemal, and R. Norman (Eds.), Qualitative research: Challenging the orthodoxies. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Motha, S., Jain, R., and Tecle, T. (forthcoming). Translinguistic identity-as-pedagogy: implications for teacher education. International Journal of Innovation in English Language Teaching & Research, 1(1).
Motha, S. (2006). Racializing ESOL teacher identities in U.S. K-12 public schools. TESOL Quarterly, 40(3), 495-518.
Motha, S. (2006). Decolonizing ESOL: Negotiating linguistic power in U.S. public school classrooms. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, 3(2/3), 75-100.
Motha, S. (2006). Out of the safety zone. In Curtis, A. and M. Romney (eds.), Color, race, and English language teaching: Shades of meaning. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Norton, B. (2000). Identity and language learning: Gender ethnicity and educational change. Harlow, England: Pearson Education.
Norton, B. (2001). Non-participation, imagined communities and the language classroom. In. M. Breen (ed.), Learner contributions to language learning: New directions in research (pp. 159–171). Harlow, England: Pearson Education.
Pavlenko, A. (2001). In the world of the tradition, I was unimagined: Negotiation of identities in cross-cultural autobiographies. International Journal of Bilingualism, 5(3), 317-44.
Vandrick, S. (2009). Interrogating privilege: Reflections of a second language educator. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
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