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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