On getting a non-tenure-track job
As I alluded to in my last job-market post: I got a job. The contract arrived today.
For the last six years, I've been telling myself and everyone I know that I don't really want a research position, but a teaching position. That's mostly been true. But I found myself this year applying for research and teaching positions in equal measure. I'm not sure why that was -- I think it's because that's what is expected when you do your PhD at a major research university (which almost all of us do, after all). It's just the next logical step in your career.
But: I got a teaching job.
It's a non-tenure-track teaching job, but it feels like there is, in fact, a track. I kind of think of it not as a [non]-[tenure track] job, but a [non-tenure][track] job. The dean (my dean? Can I say that now, my dean? Is that weird?), in his provisional offer email, referred to it as a "continuing-track" position. Your could say it has a "track"; that "track" could even eventually lead to tenure ... but it's not "tenure-track." It sounds odd, I know. (You can see this article for some information, though I don't totally agree with everything it says.)
What does this mean, in theory and in practice?
Most obviously, it means that my salary is lower than it would be than if I were an assistant professor, and that I'll be evaluated 80/20 on teaching and service (as opposed to 40/40/20, with research in the mix), and have a standard load of 8 classes a year instead of 4. It also means that even if I've been working there forever, I can still be fired if it's deemed budgetarily necessary.
That all sounds rather bleak if your PhD has been gearing you up for a TT job (though guess what? Only 23% of Canadian education doctoral graduates are TT professors!) but here's what else it means. Unlike some the contingent positions that are more and more the norm in academia, I get things like: an office, options for course releases, options for study leaves (every 6 years), prospects for promotion (from lecturer to senior lecturer to, in theory, Teaching Professor with tenure, which is identical in salary scale to any other tenured Professor position), and so on. And less tangible things, too, like being a member of the faculty in the department (with full participation in everything but tenure & promotion committees), having my web presence in the same place as all the other faculty members (professor or not), startup funds and pro-d money and eligibility for internal grants.
Compared to the pathway many starting PhDs expect (I certainly did), which is a 4-5-year PhD that seamlessly leads to a tenure-track job, this job might feel like a consolation prize.
The thing is, though, it doesn't, at all. It's exactly what I needed: a job in the city I live in (where we want to live & where we started our growing family); a job where I have no pressure to publish; a job where I can build on the networks I started to establish during my PhD but continue to expand at a new institution, doing work that will help me develop professionally.
So: It's not a "tenure-track" job. But I'm pretty happy with it.
What does this mean, in theory and in practice?
Most obviously, it means that my salary is lower than it would be than if I were an assistant professor, and that I'll be evaluated 80/20 on teaching and service (as opposed to 40/40/20, with research in the mix), and have a standard load of 8 classes a year instead of 4. It also means that even if I've been working there forever, I can still be fired if it's deemed budgetarily necessary.
That all sounds rather bleak if your PhD has been gearing you up for a TT job (though guess what? Only 23% of Canadian education doctoral graduates are TT professors!) but here's what else it means. Unlike some the contingent positions that are more and more the norm in academia, I get things like: an office, options for course releases, options for study leaves (every 6 years), prospects for promotion (from lecturer to senior lecturer to, in theory, Teaching Professor with tenure, which is identical in salary scale to any other tenured Professor position), and so on. And less tangible things, too, like being a member of the faculty in the department (with full participation in everything but tenure & promotion committees), having my web presence in the same place as all the other faculty members (professor or not), startup funds and pro-d money and eligibility for internal grants.
Compared to the pathway many starting PhDs expect (I certainly did), which is a 4-5-year PhD that seamlessly leads to a tenure-track job, this job might feel like a consolation prize.
The thing is, though, it doesn't, at all. It's exactly what I needed: a job in the city I live in (where we want to live & where we started our growing family); a job where I have no pressure to publish; a job where I can build on the networks I started to establish during my PhD but continue to expand at a new institution, doing work that will help me develop professionally.
So: It's not a "tenure-track" job. But I'm pretty happy with it.
Others Mean Differently
"Why are many city people so violent in condemning what they consider substandard forms of speech? The answer seems to be that, although the attitudes are explicitly formulated in connection with immediately accessible matters of pronunciation and word formation, what is actually being reacted to is something much deeper. People are reacting to the fact that others mean differently from themselves, and they feel threatened by it.”
MAK Halliday
Why "Ownership of English" is the wrong question
Henry Widdowson’s 1993 plenary address at TESOL, later published in TESOL Quarterly as “The Ownership of English,” started a trend in TESOL and applied linguistics which did two things, one of which I think was more explicitly intended, and one of which I think was less intended but also important:
A (more intended): Started a conversation about non-native speakers’ full “ownership” of English, not as linguistic second-class citizens, but as people who can use, shape, and “own” English in their own right.
B (less intended): Made “ownership” an important metaphor for talking about users of English.
Widdowson’s speech/essay discusses issues which are still very much in play for TESOL scholars who wrestle with the implications of the spread, localization, and use of English in diverse contexts around the world: what is standard English, what are standards, how are we to understand the role of both native and non-native speakers of English as teachers of the language, and so on. At one point he posits what I take to be his central question:
Even if we remove “standard” from this question, in order to expand it to any sort of English, I suggest that this is not quite the right question to be asking. Especially given the recent turn that encourages us to think less of langauges as reified “things” and more as resources that people use for certain purposes, it makes less and less sense to think of languages in terms of “ownership” at all -- even though ideas about native/nonnative speakership or even things like legitimacy or authority are still very relevant, both ideologically and practically.
So, why “ownership?” Who bestows it? How does one come to claim it? Although Widdowson carefully and persuasively argues that English is not (or is no longer) under the sole provenance of British ‘native speakers,’ one might wonder whether any speaker or group of speakers of a language can be said to “own” it.
Try asking this of yourself: do I “own” my language? The pronoun I used in that sentence seems like a clue: I call English MY language. Yet it seems to me this is more of a way of denoting a closeness to or an affinity for a language, or a way of speaking, meaning, or even, dare I say, being in the world. Yoo (2014) uses the “ownership” of names as an analogy, arguing that just as Korean speakers of English using English does not mean they own English, neither does the fact that other people use your name more often than you use it mean that they own your name. Ren (2014) refutes this, arguing that a language is much larger and more complex than a name, and that it's a medium of communication through which people express their identities -- thus, NNESs can indeed "own" it.
I'd like to suggest a different analogy, but for the purposes of showing that "ownership" isn't the issue.
Let's think about the way we refer to other things as “ours.” I speak of my wife, my son, my parents -- but of course I do not in any meaningful way consider myself to “own” these people. When I call them “mine,” I am referring to the strong ties that connect us, my close relationship with them, even in some cases our biological kinship. If you’d prefer a different illustration, think of the way we talk about, say, “my hockey team,” “my university,” “my favorite song.” I don’t claim to “own” any of these things, but I feel a very strong connection to, say, the University of British Columbia in a way that many people in the world do not. I am familiar with it, I use its resources, I can get around it with ease in a way I could not before I was enrolled there.
In the same way, when I say English is “my” language, I don’t mean that I own it, but that I am close to it, I am familiar with it, I know how to use it. I’m less comfortable calling other langauges “my” languages, though I might in a pinch refer to Spanish or Chinese as “my foreign languages,” even if I feel like I’m not very good at them. The fact is that I have been surrounded by English for my entire life, so I feel very comfortable calling it “my” language, but neither I nor anyone I know, nor even the country I live in or other people who speak it, really “own” the language.
Note: Stop reading here if you’re satisfied with this argument. I’m pretty satisfied with it myself. Read more below if you want to get nit-picky about current debates in applied linguistics, world Englishes, and ELF.
So the recent back-and-forth in the Applied Linguistics forum between Yoo, who argues that Expanding Circle Countries cannot have “ownership” of English because there are no Expanding Circle varieties (which I think is wrong, though I think you have to move away from the traditional Kachruvian understanding of both “expanding circle” and “varieties” in order to explain this), and Ren, who argues convincingly that NNES(T)s can be said to own the language because there indeed are (developing) nonnative WE and ELF varieties in the Expanding Circle, while it (like Widdowson’s earlier piece) gets at important issues of ELF, World Englishes, native and non-native speaker teachers, and so on, I think is focused on the wrong question.
If ownership is dependent on the existence -- or more importantly the belief in the existence -- of bounded, observable, structures/systems of language, I think it is probably going to be mired in these sorts of debates for a long time. Large majorities of people will continue to argue that, for example, there is no Konglish, or Chinese English, or Japanese English, or whatever, and thus I think it will be hard to do the work that the ownership metaphor is meant to do: to oppose the hegemony of native-speakerist standard language ideology, or to increase and encourage the idea of the legitimacy, the correctness, the OK-ness, the non-inferiority, of non-native speakers’ use(s) of English, however we conceive of that.
Mortensen (2013) is instructive here -- he discusses the “reification of ELF ” and argues that there are many confusions and contradictions in the so-far “traditional” definition of ELF as “a system.” It seems pretty clear that ELF is a use of English, and the the only clear definition of it is that it takes place in a particular context of use. What can be said about its “features” is fuzzy, though I wouldn't go as far as he does in dismissing the ‘features’ that have been posited by Seidlhofer and others. His point, and the one I want to make, is that we have to start with use, look very closely at what is going on in specific situations of language use, and look at where that takes us.
Most of the ownership arguments do start with use, and extrapolate to ownership. But as we’ve seen above (with "my language” and “my parents”), the ownership metaphor is really only a way of describing facility and familiarity with (certain) uses of language, or ways of using it, and ownership is often a proxy for other concepts, such as legitimacy, authority, indigenization (see, for example, Higgins, 2003).
The way I see it, actual users of language, even when they are getting into the nitty-gritty of ideological debates about it, are always already sidestepping the ownership question, because the reality of the language and its use are immediately relevant in their lives regardless of whether they feel "ownership". Call Konglish a variety or not, say that Korean English teachers have ownership of English or not, but actual users of English in Korea (or China, or Russia, or whatever) are faced with the problems that present themselves there: what to do (or not) about weird English translations on signs, how to make contextually sensitive judgments of students’ writing accuracy, what to say when speaking to foreigners in English, and so on. They draw on their own knowledge of, proficiency in, and beliefs about English -- just like an American or British or Indian user of English would in the same situation.
Whether or not a person feels him or herself to “own” English here is beside the point. We make choices based on what we think is best based on our circumstances. And certainly it has been shown that nonnative speakers have no problem disagreeing with or contradicting native speakers when there is a dispute about usage (Yan’s 2009 thesis about Chinese and British textbook editors, Abdi’s recent presentations about negotiating authority in world Englishes usage, my own data about Chinese and non-Chinese English teachers’ claims of authority in making judgments of acceptability).
No one here is stopping to consider whether they “own English.” Certainly native speakers may be seen as people who, rightly or wrongly, have more knowledge or authority or legitimacy in certain ways. But I'm just not convinced that “ownership” is the right metaphor with which to discuss these things. In fact, nobody owns any language. It changes and moves despite our best efforts to control it. But that’s probably a whole nother discussion.
A (more intended): Started a conversation about non-native speakers’ full “ownership” of English, not as linguistic second-class citizens, but as people who can use, shape, and “own” English in their own right.
B (less intended): Made “ownership” an important metaphor for talking about users of English.
Widdowson’s speech/essay discusses issues which are still very much in play for TESOL scholars who wrestle with the implications of the spread, localization, and use of English in diverse contexts around the world: what is standard English, what are standards, how are we to understand the role of both native and non-native speakers of English as teachers of the language, and so on. At one point he posits what I take to be his central question:
“The question is which community, and which culture, have a rightful claim to ownership of standard English?”
Even if we remove “standard” from this question, in order to expand it to any sort of English, I suggest that this is not quite the right question to be asking. Especially given the recent turn that encourages us to think less of langauges as reified “things” and more as resources that people use for certain purposes, it makes less and less sense to think of languages in terms of “ownership” at all -- even though ideas about native/nonnative speakership or even things like legitimacy or authority are still very relevant, both ideologically and practically.
So, why “ownership?” Who bestows it? How does one come to claim it? Although Widdowson carefully and persuasively argues that English is not (or is no longer) under the sole provenance of British ‘native speakers,’ one might wonder whether any speaker or group of speakers of a language can be said to “own” it.
Try asking this of yourself: do I “own” my language? The pronoun I used in that sentence seems like a clue: I call English MY language. Yet it seems to me this is more of a way of denoting a closeness to or an affinity for a language, or a way of speaking, meaning, or even, dare I say, being in the world. Yoo (2014) uses the “ownership” of names as an analogy, arguing that just as Korean speakers of English using English does not mean they own English, neither does the fact that other people use your name more often than you use it mean that they own your name. Ren (2014) refutes this, arguing that a language is much larger and more complex than a name, and that it's a medium of communication through which people express their identities -- thus, NNESs can indeed "own" it.
I'd like to suggest a different analogy, but for the purposes of showing that "ownership" isn't the issue.
Let's think about the way we refer to other things as “ours.” I speak of my wife, my son, my parents -- but of course I do not in any meaningful way consider myself to “own” these people. When I call them “mine,” I am referring to the strong ties that connect us, my close relationship with them, even in some cases our biological kinship. If you’d prefer a different illustration, think of the way we talk about, say, “my hockey team,” “my university,” “my favorite song.” I don’t claim to “own” any of these things, but I feel a very strong connection to, say, the University of British Columbia in a way that many people in the world do not. I am familiar with it, I use its resources, I can get around it with ease in a way I could not before I was enrolled there.
In the same way, when I say English is “my” language, I don’t mean that I own it, but that I am close to it, I am familiar with it, I know how to use it. I’m less comfortable calling other langauges “my” languages, though I might in a pinch refer to Spanish or Chinese as “my foreign languages,” even if I feel like I’m not very good at them. The fact is that I have been surrounded by English for my entire life, so I feel very comfortable calling it “my” language, but neither I nor anyone I know, nor even the country I live in or other people who speak it, really “own” the language.
Note: Stop reading here if you’re satisfied with this argument. I’m pretty satisfied with it myself. Read more below if you want to get nit-picky about current debates in applied linguistics, world Englishes, and ELF.
So the recent back-and-forth in the Applied Linguistics forum between Yoo, who argues that Expanding Circle Countries cannot have “ownership” of English because there are no Expanding Circle varieties (which I think is wrong, though I think you have to move away from the traditional Kachruvian understanding of both “expanding circle” and “varieties” in order to explain this), and Ren, who argues convincingly that NNES(T)s can be said to own the language because there indeed are (developing) nonnative WE and ELF varieties in the Expanding Circle, while it (like Widdowson’s earlier piece) gets at important issues of ELF, World Englishes, native and non-native speaker teachers, and so on, I think is focused on the wrong question.
If ownership is dependent on the existence -- or more importantly the belief in the existence -- of bounded, observable, structures/systems of language, I think it is probably going to be mired in these sorts of debates for a long time. Large majorities of people will continue to argue that, for example, there is no Konglish, or Chinese English, or Japanese English, or whatever, and thus I think it will be hard to do the work that the ownership metaphor is meant to do: to oppose the hegemony of native-speakerist standard language ideology, or to increase and encourage the idea of the legitimacy, the correctness, the OK-ness, the non-inferiority, of non-native speakers’ use(s) of English, however we conceive of that.
Mortensen (2013) is instructive here -- he discusses the “reification of ELF ” and argues that there are many confusions and contradictions in the so-far “traditional” definition of ELF as “a system.” It seems pretty clear that ELF is a use of English, and the the only clear definition of it is that it takes place in a particular context of use. What can be said about its “features” is fuzzy, though I wouldn't go as far as he does in dismissing the ‘features’ that have been posited by Seidlhofer and others. His point, and the one I want to make, is that we have to start with use, look very closely at what is going on in specific situations of language use, and look at where that takes us.
Most of the ownership arguments do start with use, and extrapolate to ownership. But as we’ve seen above (with "my language” and “my parents”), the ownership metaphor is really only a way of describing facility and familiarity with (certain) uses of language, or ways of using it, and ownership is often a proxy for other concepts, such as legitimacy, authority, indigenization (see, for example, Higgins, 2003).
The way I see it, actual users of language, even when they are getting into the nitty-gritty of ideological debates about it, are always already sidestepping the ownership question, because the reality of the language and its use are immediately relevant in their lives regardless of whether they feel "ownership". Call Konglish a variety or not, say that Korean English teachers have ownership of English or not, but actual users of English in Korea (or China, or Russia, or whatever) are faced with the problems that present themselves there: what to do (or not) about weird English translations on signs, how to make contextually sensitive judgments of students’ writing accuracy, what to say when speaking to foreigners in English, and so on. They draw on their own knowledge of, proficiency in, and beliefs about English -- just like an American or British or Indian user of English would in the same situation.
Whether or not a person feels him or herself to “own” English here is beside the point. We make choices based on what we think is best based on our circumstances. And certainly it has been shown that nonnative speakers have no problem disagreeing with or contradicting native speakers when there is a dispute about usage (Yan’s 2009 thesis about Chinese and British textbook editors, Abdi’s recent presentations about negotiating authority in world Englishes usage, my own data about Chinese and non-Chinese English teachers’ claims of authority in making judgments of acceptability).
No one here is stopping to consider whether they “own English.” Certainly native speakers may be seen as people who, rightly or wrongly, have more knowledge or authority or legitimacy in certain ways. But I'm just not convinced that “ownership” is the right metaphor with which to discuss these things. In fact, nobody owns any language. It changes and moves despite our best efforts to control it. But that’s probably a whole nother discussion.
Writing is Language
Language is a natural faculty, writing is an artefact. That is the reason why children acquire language, but not writing, without guidance. The difficult art of writing requires skills that must be taught, memorized, and laboriously practised. The place to do this is the school. The school is the institution that most obviously depends on writing and serves its dissemination. No writing, no school; no school, no writing. These equations are basically valid. (Writing & Society, Florian Coulmas)No no no.
No. Mostly.
I get that linguistics and sociolinguistics had valid reasons for wanting to approach language as speech. Coulmas explains how Sausseure & Bloomfield successfully banished writing from the study of language in the field of linguistics, and addresses the paradox between the alleged "tyranny" of writing in how language is conceived in the popular imagination, and what I would call the opposite "tyranny of speech" in (socio)linguistics: the idea that only speech is authentic language, and that writing is just the recording of language. It is impossible for me to agree with this, and Coulmas seems to be wanting to move in that direction too, in his first chapter, but then the above passage occurs in a chapter on writing and institutions.
I will just say this now, and probably many times later: Writing is language. It just is. It isn't (just) putting little marks on paper to represent things we say or would say. It is a way of languaging, just like speech is. Language use -- all language use -- is cultural. Our use of writing and speech for language is always already embedded in sociocultural context. That is just how we humans do. There is no reason for us to demand that writing is so fundamentally different from speech that one is language and the other is not, or that speech is more authentic than writing, or that because speech is more "natural" than writing it is more representative of "real" language than writing is.
We absolutely have to start with writing if we are going to get anywhere in the sociolinguistics of writing. This is why I find it easier to go along with Lillis (whose book I finally finished last week) than Coulmas: Lillis is primarily a writing specialist arguing for greater engagement with sociolinguistics; Coulmas is (more or less) primarily a (socio)linguist arguing for more engagement with writing.
I think it would be very hard for a person of my background, training, and generation not to take writing as a starting point in this discussion. I don't carry the disciplinary baggage of linguistics, for a start, but I also come from a time and place where communication in writing is just a simple, obvious, everyday fact of communication. People of my generation (and social class), and younger, constantly write. We write all the time. We write to each other to make plans for the times that we are going to speak to each other. We switch between writing and speaking all the time, and in some domains we do most of our communication in writing.
So here is some talking back to the passage above.
1. Of course writing and speaking are different in many ways. But I'm not convinced that the 'learning vs. acquisition' argument is all that helpful. My son is 1 1/2 years old and I would argue that he is laboriously learning to use speech. We know that people who grow up without anyone to talk to -- that is, anyone to learn from -- do not develop language. You cannot possibly develop language without observing/hearing how other people do it. We can argue that people have a "language instinct" and not a "writing instinct," but that doesn't really change the fact that in a conventional understanding of human society, almost any symbolic behavior that people do has to be learned from other people.
2. "No writing, no school; no school, no writing" strikes me as untrue for many, many people. Certainly people learn how to read and write (or do it better, or a certain way) in school. But certainly not everyone. I could read before I went to school, and most of the reading and even a lot of the writing I did when I was a child and teenager was done outside the auspices of school -- and this is much, much more common now than it was 20-25 years ago. I am sure there are scores of young people who write much more on the internet than they ever do in school.
Where I really want to see the relationship between writing and sociolinguistics expand, though, is the area of variation. I need to read some more sociolinguistics stuff before I can really make this argument, but the problem is that it's too easy for sociolinguists to say "well, writing is highly standardized, just because, so let's just focus on variation in speech, which isn't very standardized." There are a lot of problems with this, especially when you think about language varieties across cultural and geographical differences. Which, of course, is what world Englishes is all about.
Anyway.
Genre & empowerment
I came from a home that elevated reading, argument and debate into a secular religion. Not a day went by when my parents didn't concern themselves with what I was reading, talking about reading, talking about talk, talking about what was coming out of the radio, talking about what they read out loud to each other or to us coming out of newspapers, Radio or TV listings mags - any bit of written text. They didn't stop telling stories about their lives, and relating those stories to the values that underlay them - as most people do, when they tell stories, actually!
Michael Rosen, "How Genre Theory Saved the World"
Me too, though we had a regular religion also. Reading was absolutely constant in our home. Books, newspapers, magazines, books on tape, radio, cereal boxes, etc. If I didn't remember to bring a book into the bathroom I'd studiously read the back of a shampoo bottle.
Rosen's point in the blog entry that quote comes from is that genre theory (in Australia and elsewhere) was meant to give poorer students better access to the 'language of power' by explicitly teaching occluded genres, but that it didn't really work, because the best way to really master those genres is to be immersed in them in your out-of-school life. (An interesting parallel to language learning, perhaps. Immersion seems like a pretty transferable concept.)
Let me think through this though.
language of power = language of elite/powerful/people with money/middle class and above?
I grew up in a house with tons of books, newspapers, magazines, etc. Was it because we had lots of money? Well, we didn't have 'lots' of money, but we had enough to buy books and stuff. And my parents were teachers. The point is, I was part of a culture that valued eduacation -- I don't know if this is just WASP culture or what. I guess it is. (Many of my aunts and uncles have PhDs or work in education as well -- though only one other member of my generation on both sides of my family works in education besides me.)
The argument I think is that you can't teach people to really absorb and swim around in genres they don't see being viewed as valuable in their everyday lives. So if my family was part of mainstream american WASP culture, that was my advantage because I got very easy access to the "language of power."
But doesn't this whole approach suggest that making or remaking students into "language of power"-people is the goal of education? It seems like a kind of crass goal. What if somebody comes from a community that doesn't give a crap about, I don't know, NPR or environmentalism? Isn't that their prerogative
I mean, I guess my own somewhat romantic view of education as a whole-person kind of character-building thing (I'm pretty sure that's what I like about education) is similar, in that ultimately it results in a certain kind of person emerging with a diploma.
Or does it? To have read the right books, to know how to write effectively in various genres, etc. -- is this really the rote production of people? I don't even really believe people can be 'produced.' Regardless of your educational experiences, you have agency to do stuff. You make choices. Some of my friends from my private Catholic high school went to Ivies and med school, some dropped out of college.
So in conclusion I really have no idea what I'm talking about here, and I still need to find a chapter on genre theory for a class I'm teaching. So this didn't help a ton. But I had fun thinking about it.
Those last two sentences are the story of my life, and maybe because I grew up in a house full of books.
George Steiner on Language
Central to everything I am and believe and have written is my astonishment, naive as it seems to people, that you can use human speech both to bless, to love, to build, to forgive and also to torture, to hate, to destroy and to annihilate. In the gospel we read: ''In the beginning was the word.'' And I am asking: Could there be a word at the end? If there is a divine word, a word of creation and forgiveness, is there by the same token a word of final destruction, a word which un-mans man?
-- "Talk with George Steiner," 1982
Language: material, structural, social, spiritual
What do we do with theories or explanations of language which take material/biological descriptions of things related to language as ultimate -- that is, as explaining all that needs to be explained about language?
The nice thing about these explanations is that we don't need to do away with them. What we can do, though, is show why they don't adequately address important questions about language. I can imagine four related approaches to big questions about what language is, what it does, what it means, etc: material, structural, social, and spiritual. (Although maybe the spiritual is close enough to the social.) Material would be stuff like how we physically are able to make words, how our brains know how to make language, etc. Structural would be a detailed descriptions of what languages or language actually is -- all its components like words and sounds and stuff. Social (obviously primary for me) would be communication, discourse, and all the things people do with language. Spiritual would be a kind of bottom-line basis for language from a theistic view of the world —language/ meaning/logos as something uniquely given to humans by our Creator for certain reasons, and implications for that.
I don't mean to keep running into these ultimate questions about language, but I keep seeing these books and articles about neo-Darwinian materialism (not related to language specifically, though occasionally), and I feel like I want language people to have a thicker and deeper understanding of why that kind of thing probably won't work for "explaining" everything about language.
"...Fear for the English Language"
Day 2 of the TESL Canada conference: after spending the morning finishing up my PowerPoint slides and practicing my talk, I showed up to the conference in time for lunch and then the keynote by Steven Pinker. It turned out to be a talk he's given before (seems like there are some videos online) based on his most recent book about language, and it was pretty fun -- most memorably about swearing and its functions. (And only a few mentions of "why we swear" in that vague pop-neuroscience way -- e.g., "this part of the brain lights up when people do this, therefore we know why they do it!")
I did my presentation on acceptability judgments and other stuff related to my dissertation research, and it was fine, but there was some interesting discussion from the audience afterwards, including from one woman who said something like "I'm just starting to learn about world Englishes, and what I feel after learning about this stuff is fear for the English language."
I handled her concern/comment as best I could, I think, but it made me realize that there is a divide between teachers who buy into the idea that variation is OK/inevitable in practice, and those who are keen to promote a standard and more ideologically opposed to accepting variations.
To me, all these new-ish perspectives, like EIL, ELF, world Englishes, etc., aren't threatening to English -- they're just ways of describing what actually goes on with the language. And I don't think they necessarily have all that many implications for teaching, other than "know your context" -- which is a pretty big one, and probably shakes out differently if you accept WEs/ELF stuff as an accurate depiction of reality.
So let me try to lay out some ideas that would explain a more variation-friendly perspective to someone like the audience member who was worried about English, presumably because she thinks WEs & related perspectives are all about eliminating standards:
1. English is an old language that came about as the result of contact between numerous European languages in what is now England.
2. It started to come into something more like its current form sometime in the last 300 years or so, also in England.
3. English has moved from the place it began to a lot of other places
4. Like all languages, conventions in English vocabulary, grammar, words' meanings,, etc, change from time to time, due to idiosyncrasies of its users.
5. Because of #3, this happens differently in different places.
6. Because of #4, there is a need and desire for language standardization in societies, and it is useful to have a standard English for things like education, media, literature, etc.
7. Because of globalization, there is probably a greater need than ever for literacy in standard American and British English
8. However, that need is probably only felt by a small group of people who desire lives in which English is necessary -- those who travel internationally, those who work in internationalized fields like education, government, big business, etc.
9. Those people should be and are taught standard Am/Br English
10. Almost everyone else in the world who learns English is also taught standard Am/Br English*.
HOWEVER,
11. Most people in the world who know and use English are not American or British.
12. Most people in the world who teach English are not American or British.
13. Most communication in the world in English takes place between two people for whom no variety of English is their mother tongue.
14. Since these encounters often take place in transnational, transcultural, etc. contexts, #6 above is less important in these situations.
15. Therefore, the earmarks of standard American English and standard British English are often not particularly relevant in these situations, as long as intelligibility is achieved.
16. Whether people in these situations are satisfied with the degree of intelligibility achieved in their uses of English should probably be up to them.
17. Some of them are probably OK with speaking English in a way that sounds different or wrong to people from the US or the UK.
18. On the other hand, some of them are probably not OK with it, and would like to further learn standard Am or Br English in order to have a better grasp of it.
19. Those people can take some more English classes, if they want, where they will probably be taught standard Am/Br English.
20. Despite this teaching, people -- non-native and native speakers -- will continue to use language idiosyncratically at all time and in all places, and this will eventually lead to small changes in standard English.
---
* I assume one of the fears is that accepting non-native varieties of English or being tolerant about variations will somehow lead to teaching Ss that there's no right or wrong. This probably isn't true, but more needs to be said to assuage those fears, since some of the trendier positions on this do make it sound like we should just abandon teaching any kind of standard.
I did my presentation on acceptability judgments and other stuff related to my dissertation research, and it was fine, but there was some interesting discussion from the audience afterwards, including from one woman who said something like "I'm just starting to learn about world Englishes, and what I feel after learning about this stuff is fear for the English language."
I handled her concern/comment as best I could, I think, but it made me realize that there is a divide between teachers who buy into the idea that variation is OK/inevitable in practice, and those who are keen to promote a standard and more ideologically opposed to accepting variations.
To me, all these new-ish perspectives, like EIL, ELF, world Englishes, etc., aren't threatening to English -- they're just ways of describing what actually goes on with the language. And I don't think they necessarily have all that many implications for teaching, other than "know your context" -- which is a pretty big one, and probably shakes out differently if you accept WEs/ELF stuff as an accurate depiction of reality.
So let me try to lay out some ideas that would explain a more variation-friendly perspective to someone like the audience member who was worried about English, presumably because she thinks WEs & related perspectives are all about eliminating standards:
1. English is an old language that came about as the result of contact between numerous European languages in what is now England.
2. It started to come into something more like its current form sometime in the last 300 years or so, also in England.
3. English has moved from the place it began to a lot of other places
4. Like all languages, conventions in English vocabulary, grammar, words' meanings,, etc, change from time to time, due to idiosyncrasies of its users.
5. Because of #3, this happens differently in different places.
6. Because of #4, there is a need and desire for language standardization in societies, and it is useful to have a standard English for things like education, media, literature, etc.
7. Because of globalization, there is probably a greater need than ever for literacy in standard American and British English
8. However, that need is probably only felt by a small group of people who desire lives in which English is necessary -- those who travel internationally, those who work in internationalized fields like education, government, big business, etc.
9. Those people should be and are taught standard Am/Br English
10. Almost everyone else in the world who learns English is also taught standard Am/Br English*.
HOWEVER,
11. Most people in the world who know and use English are not American or British.
12. Most people in the world who teach English are not American or British.
13. Most communication in the world in English takes place between two people for whom no variety of English is their mother tongue.
14. Since these encounters often take place in transnational, transcultural, etc. contexts, #6 above is less important in these situations.
15. Therefore, the earmarks of standard American English and standard British English are often not particularly relevant in these situations, as long as intelligibility is achieved.
16. Whether people in these situations are satisfied with the degree of intelligibility achieved in their uses of English should probably be up to them.
17. Some of them are probably OK with speaking English in a way that sounds different or wrong to people from the US or the UK.
18. On the other hand, some of them are probably not OK with it, and would like to further learn standard Am or Br English in order to have a better grasp of it.
19. Those people can take some more English classes, if they want, where they will probably be taught standard Am/Br English.
20. Despite this teaching, people -- non-native and native speakers -- will continue to use language idiosyncratically at all time and in all places, and this will eventually lead to small changes in standard English.
---
* I assume one of the fears is that accepting non-native varieties of English or being tolerant about variations will somehow lead to teaching Ss that there's no right or wrong. This probably isn't true, but more needs to be said to assuage those fears, since some of the trendier positions on this do make it sound like we should just abandon teaching any kind of standard.
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My Summer 2001 Mixtape
Yes, that's right, not this summer - 2001, 10 years ago. I don't have the cassette, but I came across the case recently. Not much has changed about my musical taste in a decade, though.
SIDE A
Bettie Serveert - Crutches
The Smiths - Panic
Jeff Buckley - Vancouver
Lost Dogs - Breathe Deep
Superdrag - Hellbent
John Lennon - Oh Yoko
Beulah - If We Can Land a Man on the Moon, Surely I Can Win Your Heart
Morella's Forest - Fizzle Kiss
U2 - Staring at the Sun (live)
Radiohead - Polyethylene Pts 1 & 2
Gorillaz - Clint Eastwood
SIDE B
Weezer - Photograph
Mates of State - A Control Group
Joy Electric - Candy Cane Carriage
Starflyer 59 - No New Kinda Story
Stephen Malkmus - Jenny and the S-Dog
The Lemonheads - It's a Shame about Ray
My Bloody Valentine - Don't Ask Why
The Flaming Lips - What is the Light?
DC Talk - What Have We Become?
Brassy - I Gotta Beef
Live - Stage
Matt Basinger - Out of Here
PFR - Say
SIDE A
Bettie Serveert - Crutches
The Smiths - Panic
Jeff Buckley - Vancouver
Lost Dogs - Breathe Deep
Superdrag - Hellbent
John Lennon - Oh Yoko
Beulah - If We Can Land a Man on the Moon, Surely I Can Win Your Heart
Morella's Forest - Fizzle Kiss
U2 - Staring at the Sun (live)
Radiohead - Polyethylene Pts 1 & 2
Gorillaz - Clint Eastwood
SIDE B
Weezer - Photograph
Mates of State - A Control Group
Joy Electric - Candy Cane Carriage
Starflyer 59 - No New Kinda Story
Stephen Malkmus - Jenny and the S-Dog
The Lemonheads - It's a Shame about Ray
My Bloody Valentine - Don't Ask Why
The Flaming Lips - What is the Light?
DC Talk - What Have We Become?
Brassy - I Gotta Beef
Live - Stage
Matt Basinger - Out of Here
PFR - Say