Re: emulsifying bilingualism

From: Molly Freeman (mollyfreeman@telis.org)
Date: Fri Mar 31 2000 - 10:23:08 PST


Wow, Jay. Thank you for the tour de force summary of the Berkeley conference. Your
critical analysis of "ideal types" reminds me once again of "monologic theoretism,"
the phrase Morson & Emerson attribute to Bakhtin regarding academic pontification.
Hooray for polyphony, and your eloquence.

Molly Freeman, PhD
Complex Systems and Distance Learning
Berkeley, CA

Jay Lemke wrote:

> Back a week now from travels, and skimming the creme de la xmca ...
>
> Also alas paying the price of doing too much, home and away, and getting
> over a flu ...
>
> But I was interested by the discussion here, just at the time I was in
> Berkeley, of 'morphing bilingualism' and the ways of enriching and
> complexifying this concept (and its cousins, like diglossia, interlanguage,
> creole continuum, etc.) as we move it from (to me) a rather old 'in the
> head' view of language to a (no longer so new) view of speech in the community.
>
> In Berkeley the conference theme was ecological approaches to language
> socialization, by which was meant a broad umbrella sheltering ethnographic,
> sociolinguistic, and complex-systems models of how languages are learned by
> people, and people shaped by speech communities, including contexts of
> 'foreign language' learning, 'second language' learning, and participation
> in communities where various language varieties are used, mixed, mingled,
> morphed, and generally emulsified.
>
> Participants included Ellie Ochs, Ron Scollon, Leo van Lier, Jonathan
> Leather, Jet van Dam, Jim Lantolf, Diane Larsen-Freeman, Chris Candlin,
> Srikant Sarangi, and Ben Rampton (an international crew, many of whom had
> spoken at the applied linguistics meeting and/or TESOL just before coming
> to Berkeley, as I did). Organized by Claire Kramsch and the UCB language
> center, and cosponsored by everyone with the money to buy us a croissant or
> a piece of cheese. It was a wonderful, small conference with a lot of
> discussion of interesting ideas and issues.
>
> One of the most interesting, to me, was the repeated evidence that we are
> really misled by notions of language purity or homogeneous speech
> communities as a norm or ideal. In living communities where different
> language varieties are in use (including dialect and sociolect varieties,
> learner languages, etc.) there are no pure Languages that then get mixed or
> interact with one another. These ideal types are constructs of linguists
> and enforcers of language purity, always for ideological reasons (some more
> politically transparent, others very indirectly linked to the interests
> they support). Learners, children growing up in such communities, all of us
> as still-developing language-users tend more naturally to "mix" forms,
> signs, meaning types, functions, or what have you than to maintain their
> "purity" as ideal systems. Even in the case of phonology, the sound
> contrasts basic to spoken language, as Jonathan Leather showed rather
> dramatically, there are not the simple binary contrasts of ideal theory, no
> apparently inherent pressure towards consistency that drives the
> phonologies of different languages or dialects apart, but a perfectly usual
> and functional blending, distribution, and general playing around with
> sound, abetted by the disambiguating potential of situated activity.
>
> Against such a backdrop the notion that people have to be moved from ideal
> competence in one pure language variety to ideal competence in another
> seems obtusely narrow and procrustean. The efforts that go into the social
> work of purification on the part of the partisans of purity seem an uphill
> battle against the entropy of life, and a pointless mistaking of the need
> to maintain clear types in place of recognizing the emergence of new forms
> and systems, always changing, but in different respects and at different
> rates, that seems to characterize the speech ecology of a community.
>
> Of all the classic notions about such speech communities, only that of the
> creole continuum seems close to the messiness of real life that this
> alternative picture describes.
>
> Also called into question were linearized models of development, or
> learning through stages. What seemed much more realistic was that (a)
> people at any given time have speech repertories that are heterochronous in
> the sense that practices and forms considered typical of many earlier and
> later 'stages' co-exist and interact and are differentially produced in
> different contexts, and (b) that development is not only 'uneven' but
> proceeds at multiple rates simultaneously in regard to different practices,
> even anticipating future stages that should not yet be possible.
>
> One of my own ways of talking about this is to say that we internalize,
> gradually, much of the full diversity of the community in which we
> participate, including its age diversity (or developmental diversity),
> through our interactions with those both younger and older than ourselves.
>
> In a way this is a sort of extension of the ZPD notion from one person with
> a more experienced peer to that person in a group of people both little to
> much less experienced and little to much more experienced. More or less the
> normal human condition, before age-graded schools or notions of one teacher
> per class or even of one or two adult caregivers per nuclear family. How do
> we learn and develop in highly diverse age-mixed settings and activities?
>
> While more general, these notions apply as well to the original questions
> of language learning in bi- or multi- lingual, or just language-diverse,
> language-heterogeneous communities. And every community is linguistically
> heterogeneous on some, and usually many, dimensions -- even small communities.
>
> Finally, one more nail in the coffin of ideal types of Languages -- the
> criteria for distinguishing significant differences among them. Such
> criteria have to embody values; there are an unlimited number of
> similarities and differences between any two speech data sets. Why do some
> criteria matter more, and to whom, and for what reasons (overt and covert)?
> Why, for example, must we accept that syntactic structural differences are
> more important criteria for distinguishing speech varieties than are
> intonational, voice-quality, or more generally musical-bodily 'style'
> differences? In fact much of the debate over whether African-American
> English (aka U.S. Ebonics) counts as a separate language from Standard
> English, and whether it is more like African speech or European speech,
> turns on the assumption that what matters is syntax more than lexis, more
> than semantics, more than discourse patterns, more than emotional tone,
> more than bodily hexis, more than paralinguistic features in the speech
> pattern, etc. What matters more to Dr. Chomsky is not necessarily what
> matters more to the speakers of these varieties. Is not necessarily what
> matters to how people use these varieties or respond to them or learn them
> or play around with them. Or decide that 'they' are discrete nameable
> 'somethings' in the first place.
>
> It is perfectly possible to look in great detail at many of the dimensions
> of variability and complexity in these real situations without reifying the
> works of purification that enable some people to make grand theories and
> bask in their grandeur. Good for basking, and maybe for getting rich; but
> not for helping figure out how to help real people in real situations.
> Every theoretical notion that is not a provisional, dispensable, modifiable
> tool is a trap someone else has set for us. What we need theoretical
> sophistication for is to make useful ad-hoc theory, not to use theories
> ready-made.
>
> Morph. Emulsify. Invaginate. Travesty. Play. JAY.
>
> ---------------------------
> JAY L. LEMKE
> PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
> CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
> JLLBC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
> <http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
> ---------------------------



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