Some stuff on cosmopolitanism and language

I have a huge knee-jerk reaction against the term 'cosmopolitanism.' Probably because of, you know, Cosmopolitan magazine. But I'm trying to understand it.

Martin Guardado, "Toward a Critical Multilingualism in Canadian Classrooms: Making Local Inroads into a Cosmopolitan Identity":

Drawing on recent work on cosmopolitanism, global citizenship, and critical applied linguistics, this article examines the concept of cosmopolitanism as a viable goal in education in Canada. Particular attention is paid to the inclusion of global citizenship objectives in K-12 language programs in general and in heritage language (HL) curricula in particular. I make a case for consideration of the concept of cosmopolitanism as a key guiding principle at diverse levels of education in formal, non-formal, and informal settings. I argue that in the Canadian context, multilingual education could play a more prominent role in educational agendas as it has the potential to promote cosmopolitan ideals. I conclude that in the framework of official bilingualism and multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism can fruitfully add to discussions about the role of education in the emergence of a Canadian identity.

Suresh Canagarajah , Translingual Practice: Global Englishes and Cosmopolitan Relations:

Translingual Practice: Global Englishes and Cosmopolitan Relations introduces a new way of looking at the use of English within a global context. Challenging traditional approaches in second language acquisition and English language teaching, this book incorporates recent advances in multilingual studies, sociolinguistics, and new literacy studies to articulate a new perspective on this area. Canagarajah argues that multilinguals merge their own languages and values into English, which opens up various negotiation strategies that help them decode other unique varieties of English and construct new norms.

Suresh Canagarajah , "The Possibility of a Community of Difference"  (concluding paragraph)

TO SOME EXTENT, THE ARTICULATION of my position on cosmopolitanism in this article has itself been dialogical. I have drawn from my South Asian, multilingual, and postcolonial backgrounds to engage with the scriptures as an evangelical. As a scholar, I am happy to negotiate with other scholars from different belief systems on common projects of intellectual inquiry or social change. Though I start from my position as a South Asian evangelical, I am open to learning from my engagement with others, critiquing my positions, and moving to more hybridized and richer positions. I want to have the humility to let God speak through the social encounters he has arranged for me. To think that I have nothing more to learn is to be proud. To fear that open engagement with others will damage my faith is to underestimate God‘s power and sovereignty. My faith and social positions do influence my teaching practice. As an instructor of English, I strive to teach students negotiation strategies that will enable them to engage with others of different languages and cultures. I remind Anglo-American students that rather than resting on their status as native speakers, they should treat English as a language commonly owned by diverse people around the world, with whom they have to negotiate on equal terms. I encourage both native and nonnative students to shift their perspectives from correctness to contextual negotiation; from mastery of a single code to developing a repertoire; from individual achievement to social collaboration; from treating their first language or culture as problems to treating them as resources; and from being product-focused to being process-orientated in their negotiation of diverse languages and cultures.

"Wrong Word"

To say a writer used the "wrong word" (cf Lunsford and Lunsford, 2008, p. 789) is a pretty serious claim, it seems to me*.

(*This is probably only something a PhD student would say.)

Still.

What is the difference between the following: "wrong word"/ "word choice error" / "inappropriate for an academic essay" / and just a stylistic preference?

And how on earth am I going to categorize this kind of thing?

For example, here are 6 people rejecting the use of the phrase "it is known to all" in an essay:


1 It is known to all: 
Not necessary – if its known to all then why state it

2 It is known to all:
I didn’t know that!  I always advise students to avoid this kind of phrase

3 It is known to all:
Overused, meaningless expression that makes a false claim (it may not be known to all).

4 known to all:
well-known (otherwise this is a bit presumptuous)

5 known to all:
Proper expression: “common knowledge”

6 to all:
Best to avoid superlatives and absolutes in a serious essay-unless there is strong supporting evidence. Try “it is commonly known”, or “many people know”

1-3 seem to be doing basically the same thing -- rejecting it because it's cliche, or a kind of 'empty phrase' that they don't like. (NESTs tend to really go after these things, by the way -- Chinese teachers do it much more rarely.)

4 verges on that, but you could also say it's arguing this is a 'word choice' problem, with a simple substitution of a more appropriate phrase (which again, is a register thing, too).

5 is straight-up correction, probably related to register, but possibly not -- I could just as easily imagine it as a correction of an 'awkwardly worded' phrase ("it is known to all" does sound weird to me).

6 is very clearly looking at it from the perspective of what is considered appropriate for a serious academic essay written by a university student.

So, my question is, does it matter if I differentiate what is going on in each of the comments? Because if I do, I might drive myself crazy.

I can hear the voices of my committee echoing in my head: "It depends on what your research question is."

Oh, but my research questions are damn slippery things that seem to grow and change and shift whenever my mind isn't on them.

I need to print those suckers out, tattoo them on my arms, repeat them like a mantra. I really do.

Right Grammar, Wrong Habit

This about sums up the views of one of my participants, which I've seen in some other participants' responses to 'unacceptable' language:

"The student actually is not wrong in terms of grammar," but the "language habit" is wrong.

Several Chinese teachers refer to "language habit," which I still don't have a clear handle on the meaning of, but in this case she explained that she was referring to a kind of native speaker habit.

Which, considering that mention of habitus and hypercorrection the other day, makes sense. Though I still think calling this "hypercorrection"isn't really fair. It's more like NESTs are "hyper-relaxed" about grammar -- the Chinese teachers are just being "strict," as the participant said. Or, as she also put it: "Your emphasis is on meaning, but my emphasis in on whether they can use language in the right way."

Perhaps it's only from the perspective of the Centre that we have the luxury to focus on meaning and not form -- probably because facility with English means something different here than it does there, so to speak. In China, as many other Asian countries, being good at English isn't really for the purpose of communicating, per se, but for mastering a subject to pass tests, gain knowledge, gain access to jobs, etc.

I hope I don't sound like I'm denigrating that. We NESs get a little precious about our language sometimes when we feel like people don't view it as the magical wonderful beautiful language of the King James Bible and Shakespeare -- which it is, of course! -- and it would probably be better if we accept that for some people, writing an essay is really just a way to demonstrate that you studied hard and know your stuff.

On the other other hand (?), plenty of Chinese teachers I talked to bemoaned students' utilitarian attitudes about English. There is still -- for many English teachers NS & NNS -- a kind of push-and-pull between English as in applied linguistics and English as in the humanities. I suppose there is room for that tension.

The Future of Applied Linguistics

"What do aspiring applied linguists see as their own future needs and goals? Where do they want to be placed? Which sorts of issues do they want to deal with and in which countries or communities? Are they confident that on the basis of their graduate-level education they have the resources and experience to deal with the range of future challenges awaiting them? And what exactly are those challenges?"

Patricia Duff, Facing the Future Now: Reflections from a Student of Applied Linguistics, 1992 

Kind of amazing to see something written by one of my committee members, and a very distinguished scholar, at the beginning of her academic career. Worth thinking about these questions, though perhaps they can only be answered in retrospect. The second two questions are kind of haunting to me -- I've got applications in to two incredibly different institutions at the moment, though won't be doing any more apps until next year. If I got either job my future would be vastly different (a small local school with a speciality vs. huge international research university). I wonder if much has changed in the 20 years since she wrote this?

Notes on Wendell Berry, globalization, language, & education

• When Berry talks about poetry he is talking about his vision for the right use of language.  I don't know if he views poetry as the highest/best use of language but when he talks about it he is usually talking about ethics and standards in language.
• In general Berry is against "specialization" in language and knowledge, i.e. the way universities arrange disciplines. I think this has to do with uprooting human action from community/place.
• Berry suggests these questions should be asked of poetry, rather than taking it as a professional, disembodied, specialized field where poets write for other poets:

• What good is it?
• Is it at home here?
• What do the neighbors think of it?
• Do they read it, any of them?
• What have they contributed to it?
• What does it owe them?
• We could/should probably ask the same questions of the language(s) and communication strategies we teach. This makes good sense if you are in a community ESL situation where your primary goal is to welcome immigrants, newcomers, etc. to your community
• But the issue here, as Berry rightly notes, is that the globalized industrial economy has created a situation of "destroyed communities." Two related problems for language education: genuine community life is barely possible, and the motives and purposes people have for language learning are frequently not based on being rooted in a place.
• We are encouraged to think of neoliberalism / late capitalism / globalization as the Way it Is now, and that we need to educate for this -- think of James Gee's "people as portfolios," or human capital. That this should be an accurate or ethical view of humanity seems inimical to Berry's though, Christian though, or humanist thought more generally.
• Yet it is clear that most English teachers and students buy into globalization pretty wholeheartedly, either because we see it as offering good possibilities for human flourishing on an individual scale (though again, Berry would probably rightly suggest that it does not allow for community flourishing, which ultimately is detrimental to individuals and humanity as a whole), or because we see that it is an inevitable organizing principle of who we are and what we do.
• I'm concerned that we can't necessarily escape having a "global orientation" to our language and our profession because of current material conditions -- concerned because, as Berry writes, the idea of a "global community" or "global village" is a metaphor that could (should!) never actually exist. This may result in a rejection of "imagined communities" at a conceptual level (even though we should certainly allow students to be motivated by their own desires).
• The question I'm left with is "How can we integrate the slow, the small, the permanent, and the communitarian into a world where the fast, the large, the transient, and the cosmopolitan are basically the rule?" I can't think of a good answer, though there are several, probably:
• Commitment to living and working in one place
• Intentional cultivation of (temporary) community in classrooms, institutions, etc (this isn't very satisfying, but a posture of inclusivity and love probably goes a long way)
• Refusal to view people as portfolios/capital, even though we want to teach strategies that will allow people to get to where they want to be; view people as individuals rooted in communities, and encourage them to view themselves 
• ...

• There is probably more to be said here, especially about Berry's rejection of specialization, and some basic ideas of contemporary rhetoric (e.g., ambiguity, flexibility of language and meanings, etc). Overall I'm concerned about whether Berry's vision of ethics and standards in language use (and by extension teaching and learning,  I think) can a) be shown to be other than the Complaint Tradition, and b) square with ideas of polysemy, heteroglossia, ELF without a common grammatical core, and so on. I think we could take Berry to say that "Standard" language should actually be rooted in its attachment to communities and local ways of being, and merely lament that strong communities are rare in many of the situations where we live and work.

The accountability of language

“Any coherent account of the capacity of human speech to communicate meaning and feeling is, in the final analysis, underwritten by the assumption of God’s presence.”

George Steiner, Real Presences

"The author of the utterance, with greater or lesser awareness, presupposes a higher superaddressee ...whose absolutely just responsive understanding is presumed, either in some metaphysical distance or in distant historical time. In various ages and with various understandings of the world, this superaddressee and his ideally responsive understanding assume various ideological expressions (God, absolute truth, the court of dispassionate human conscience, the people, the court of history, science, and so forth)."

M.M. Bakhtin, Speech Genres

"My concern is for the accountability of language -- hence for the accountability of the users of language.  To deal with this matter I will use a pair of economic concepts: internal accounting, which considers costs and benefits in reference only to the interest of the money-making enterprise itself, and external accounting, which considers the costs and benefits to the 'larger community.' ...One of the primary obligations of language is to connect and balance the two kinds of accounting....A reliable account is personal at the beginning and religious at the end.

Wendell Berry, Standing By Words

2013 Conferences

Some things that are happening this year that may be of interest. Obvs not going to them all!

AAAL: Dallas, Texas March 17-20 [Presenting on dissertation research]

CELT: Dallas Baptist U, March 20 [Presenting Wendell Berry & ELT]

TESOL: Dallas Convention Center Dallas, Texas, USA March 20-23, 2013 [not going]

BCTEAL: Douglas College, April 26-27 [deadline Feb 22]

CILS (UBC): May 3 [deadline Feb 28] not going

IOP (UBC):  May 11 [deadline Feb 26] not going

LLED Grad Conference (UBC): May 25 [deadline Feb 8] not going

ACLA: UVic, June 3-5 [presented on pluralizing high-stakes academic writing]

SSLW: Shandong University, People's Republic of China, early October [no CFP yet] not going

IAWE 19: Arizona State University, Nov. 16-18 [April 15 deadline] presenting on PhD study

"Highly Comprehensible, Reasonably Unirritating, but Linguistically Unacceptable"

The title comes from Santos 1988. I just emailed Terry to let her know that after re-reading her article, I found it ironic that I was pretty much doing a study almost exactly like hers. I don't think her work had a big influence on my decision to go the direction I'm going, but I feel like I have a better sense of how to marry "acceptability judgments" + "world Englishes" + "L2 writing" after looking at her framework more carefully.

For me, the framework and ideas behind the AJT come from a sociolinguistic framework. It's an interest in variation and how people make decisions about what's 'in or out' according to their (socially mediated) intuitions, beliefs preferences, and other words for subjective feelings or whatever.

The world Englishes stuff is just a natural result of the globalization of English, the de/re-centerting of composition and applied linguistics, and the importance of China in global discourse about education and English.

The L2 writing stuff, I now realize, is a very direct connection to the streams of thought that like to look at two things: 1) "What makes ESL writers' texts different than non-ESL writers?" and 2) "How do readers react to those differences (aka errors)?" #1 is a unique area for L2 writing as a field, but #2 can be traced back to composition studies in the 70s and 80s (Shaugnessy, Lunsford & Connors, etc) -- and ultimately can be traced back to the beginning of time, when the first teacher said "Man, kids today really don't know how to write! They keep putting apostrophes in the wrong places [or whatever]."

Anyway, the title: "Highly Comprehensible, Reasonably Unirritating, but Linguistically Unacceptable." Those are her findings about how content professors reacted to errors in L2 student writing. Isn't it pretty wack how those things don't all add up? That's why I want to keep doing this kind of research.

Incidentally, her definition of acceptability is "the degree to which the interlocutor regards the speech or writing of the NNS as approximating the target language norms." Of course, I'm not really working in an SLA framework, so my definition is necessarily different. Though my working definition is basically "anything that makes somebody go 'waaaait a minute...'" Which is not that scientific, but in a pinch, it'll do.

NOTE: One of my participants used the words "understandable, but unacceptable." Which is very interesting to me since native speakers (and most teachers in fact) are quick to say that they are most likely to go after those things that interfere with 'meaning.'

Wendell Berry on Language

From Wendell Berry's Community by Anne Husted Burleigh

How is understanding of the Incarnate Word essential to our understanding of the relationship of language and truth?

I believe that we have to try to make our words faithful to reality. Language has to maintain its power of reference to actual things, and everything depends on that power of reference and that community of knowledge, or else the word doesn’t get out.

In our age, people don’t have common understanding of the same words.

That makes for considerable difficulties, especially if they don’t talk carefully with one another. It is always good to talk with people who understand things differently from your way, but that requires careful talk. Any common effort obviously requires careful talk.

If we believe that words do refer to reality and our words have to be true, we still have to communicate with those who have accepted individualism and subjectivism. They operate on the premise that words really don’t mean anything except what the individual wants them to mean. Can we bridge that gap?

No. All one can do is speak as truly and clearly as one can. I think one’s abilities to correct anything are limited. It is important to know what the limits of your abilities are. A person can make a difference within a fairly small boundary. Not very many people can change very much.

They can’t change the world, but they can change their little corner of the world.

Well, I know that you can improve a few acres. You can take good care of a few acres. Your ability to take care of other humans is more limited than your ability to take care of an acreage simply because humans, in the main, would rather take care of themselves.

------

(there's a lot more, but I don't have books in front of me. More on this soon.)

Hypercorrection and Prepositions

"This hyper-correction of speech is a sign of a class divided against itself, whose members are seeking, at the cost of constant anxiety, to produce linguistic expressions which bear the mark of a habitus other than their own."
 - Pierre Bourdieu 

 Of course ironically hypercorrection marks you as the very thing you probably do not wish to be. I don't really like applying this to Chinese English because it's so influenced by the idea of social class, and I don't want to promote the idea of a linguistic hierarchy -- although there probably totally is one, and in terms of the popular imagination of English-speaking people, China is pretty low on the English totem pole, despite statistics (take this clever but ultimately insulting fake Chinglish article in the Telegraph, for example).


 But there may be something to it. Chinese English teachers seem to follow 'the rules' (whatever they are, and the source of 'the rules' is interesting and not at all clear to me) of English usage more assiduously than native speaker teachers, especially when it comes to "the small words" -- prepositions especially. It's a kind of paradox -- preposition errors are one of the most obvious markers of non-native speaker status, yet concern with preposition errors is one of the most notable differences between native and non-native speaking teachers. (At least anecdotally as I'm going through my notes.)

 In fact it probably isn't the Chinese teachers who are overcorrecting so much as the NESTs are undercorrecting -- but that's the privilege of the NS. You're allowed to not care as much about 'the rules' if you have enough cultural/linguistic capital in the eyes of the (imagined?) custodians of the rules.

Awesome Spam

Sometimes you just get amazing weird fake emails. I just got this one.


SUBJECT: "I dunno why yet but I am sure it will be excellent" (which is so great already.)

BODY:

The woman was beggarly, but of a analogous and active apportion, as spiral frosted dissipate been to scan the pit of the civic fate clarity was smashed to her garter.

Aloud endless this is! pulley must nod wretchedly striped of Willoughby, if, after all that has barely bowed between statement, seduction can tentacle the sandbank of the footlights on gave them are apparently.


(For more on this topic I recommend Kedrick James' article Poet, Pirate, Netbot, although it's a bit of a long/tricky read.)

Greenbaum's "Acceptability in Language"

If you have read this blog and attempted to make sense of the entries, which are obscure notes to myself that happen to be posted in public, you may have noticed that I appear to be on a one-man crusade to renew interest in the concept of "acceptability"in applied linguistics. Why? Because it's versatile, it spans a variety of areas in language study, it's sociocultural, it's about grammar, and everybody has something to say about it. Really: just ask the nearest person to you how to use 'who' and 'whom,' or what kind of word it's OK or not OK to end a sentence with. (Ha.)

In my own reading about acceptability, I've been working my way backwards from a 2003 article by Christina Higgins, usually ending up back someplace in the 1960s or 70s, with Chomsky setting up the need to study 'competence' and linguists coming up with Grammaticality Judgment Tasks, and the realization that there is a distinction between grammaticality and acceptability. Most of what I've been working on is meant to get people involved in the study of English worldwide to take an interest in the relevance of acceptability judgments to our work.

But there's one major publication on acceptability I've never really looked into, and that is Sidney Greenbaum's Acceptability in Language, an edited collection published in 1977. Greenbaum wrote the Oxford Companion to the English Language entry on "Grammaticality," and he is one of the authors of the imposing Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. (He died in 1996.)

Anyway, I'm going to read part of the book this week, and take notes on it here, starting with the

Introduction by Sidney Greenbaum

Greenbaum summarizes and comments on the 13 studies presented in the collection. His second paragraph explains the importance of acceptability to social descriptions of language: "the macro-level concerns attitudes toward the acceptability of a language or a of a variety within a language, whereas the micro-level concerns the acceptability of specific linguistic features" (p. 1). (The methods I use in my own research are meant to bridge the gap between these two, by the way.) He mentions that some studies will "consider the contrast that many linguists make between grammaticality and acceptability " and mentions that the "underlying system in the language" and "the acceptability judgments of individual speakers" are different. (Indeed, I think the latter are worth focusing on for that reason.)

Greenbaum comments on the "crucial significance  of acceptability judgments for linguistic theory and practice, and the reliance of researchers on "the intuitions of native speaker" -- he doesn't particularly criticize this (and I think it doesn't need criticizing, just expansion to a variety of speakers, NS and NNS alike), but does criticize linguists for using "their own intuitions" rather than those of non-linguists. (I wasn't aware this was a big problem, though some of the studies I read from the 1980s do specifically use specialists. In fact, I think the use of specialists is totally fine, but I agree that you probably shouldn't be relying on your own intuitions. I haven't come across any of those studies, however.)

However, a number of the papers in the collection criticize the elicitation of judgments as a method for sociolingusitics (I think Im going to need to read this Labov 1972 paper), arguing that "speech samples" should be the primary data. (Maybe so, for 'pure' sociolx, but again, AJTs are valuable for other reasons ) Greenbaum says that "acceptability intuitions and language behavior do not necessarily coincide and....informant reactions do not always reflect actual usage (p. 5)." "The producible is not always identical with the acceptable."There's a tension within sociolinguistics regarding speech vs intuition -- the question is sociolx is (I think) "how do we account for variation" (both macro and micro) , and I think you probably need both actual usage and attitudes to account for that, at any level.

Grammaticality vs acceptability:
 Grammaticality: is this feature 'in or out?'
Acceptability "does not require a binary distinction between the acceptable and the unacceptable: we can recognize a continuum..." (p. 6)


To read:

From this book:
Acceptability in Context (ch 4) -  van Dijk
Sociolinguistic Reflections on Acceptability (ch 5) Eagleson
Acceptability in a Revived Language (ch 10) Rabin
On the Secondary Nature of Syntactic Intuition (ch 11) Snow and Meijer
Variation, Acceptability, and the Advanced Foreign Learner (ch 13) Tottie

and also
Labov 1972  - Sociolinguistic Patterns (uh oh, it's a book - just find the relevant stuff)

Grammar is Social

Grammar: not (only?) a model as embedded someplace deep in your mind, but a part of the model of the world that you build (and that the world builds for you) as you move through life.

Grammar is learned and maintained along with your image of the world, the world you build. Yes indeedy, grammatical correctness is socially constructed. But in a globalized world the many forces acting on how that is constructed makes it very confusing indeed.


AND ALSO

I'm starting to get why people find it necessary to critique linguistic nativism, but I'm not too concerned with it. It seems fine to say that we both are innately primed for language and that it's something we learn.

EVEN THOUGH

I'm really not a linguist.

Just listened to this On Being podcast with Jean Berko Gleason. V. interesting.

Thinking Through Data Analysis

Gotta loosen up, sit with the data for a long long while. That's how ideas come. Need to be both mentally and physically limber -- yet even one or the other at a time is hard to muster!

Here's what I'm thinking though --

I've got 2 sets of data. Comments on essays, and interviews about same.

Analysis of the comment data can only go so far -- looking at what was commented on, looking at what they said, and categorizing both. (Eg, 20 people commented on this use of a preposition, X number commented on prepositions in general, X number commented on the use of the phrase "harmonious society" across several essays; most common word used in comments was "wrong" or "native" or whatever.)

There are a lot of ways analysis of interviews can go, though -- I'm thinking of going with sort of 'how language attitudes are constructed' in a sense, or how acceptability is negotiated between interviewer and interviewees.

[SIDE NOTE -- I sometimes hate the postmodern thing of being like "see, I'm really totally being critical and analyzing everything because I included myself in the analysis like I'm just one of the participants" -- it's actually very good in the sense that it takes the researcher's role seriously -- I'm a social actor in this project, just like everyone else --  but it also sort of tries to offer reflexivity as proof of critical rigor, an innoculation against invalidity. (Is that a word?) Couldn't I, in the end, be totally wrong in my analysis of how what I'm doing influences others, or how what they're doing influences me? Analysis is only as strong as the theory you use to do it, and I'm suspicious of theories.]

Anyway, I like this, because in a lot of ways the interviews go differently depending on my relationship with the interviewee and how I relate to their position. At least I think they do - see "side note." I said in a term paper for a doctoral seminar that

Recognizing my professional identity/ies as multiple and shifting, I believe I can identify with, in some ways, the North American academy, the Chinese ELT community, foreign teachers in China, and international graduate students studying English in China, among others. If I can recognize each of these communities as having some impact on my own construction of English writing in China, perhaps the co-constitutive character of my own research and writing will be bolstered.

Despite that sounding a little naive and/or jargony, I do think it's related here. I think I'm trying to be "all things to all people" in a way. With Chinese teachers: "we all teach in CHinese universities, we all know what it's like." With foreign Ts in China, "we all know what it's like to be a whitey in China." With non-Chinese teachers in Canada, "Yeah, we do things differently here than they do over there."

Anyway....I don't need to go too much further with this train of thought, but it's something to think about. 

Oh yeah: the other thing I was going to say was that interviews don't have to directly correlate to specific stuff in the comments. Obvs they mostly do, but they can be more about understanding the process of negotiating the concept of 'acceptability' (or what is or isn't standard E / Chinese E) than about how specific decisions about comments were made and how that relates to the comment data. I think.