The Multilingual Turn

Implications for SLA, TESOL, and Bilingual Education

Stephen May

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415534314
• eBook ISBN: 9781136287121
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Drawing on the latest developments in bilingual and multilingual research, The Multilingual Turn offers a critique of, and alternative to, still-dominant monolingual theories, pedagogies and practices in SLA, TESOL, and bilingual education. Critics of the 'monolingual bias' argue that notions such as the idealized native speaker, and related concepts of interlanguage, language competence, and fossilization, have framed these fields inextricably in relation to monolingual speaker norms. In contrast, these critics advocate an approach that emphasizes the multiple competencies of bi/multilingual learners as the basis for successful language teaching and learning.

This volume takes a big step forward in re-situating the issue of multilingualism more centrally in applied linguistics and, in so doing, making more permeable its key sub-disciplinary boundaries – particularly, those between SLA, TESOL, and bilingual education. It addresses this issue head on, bringing together key international scholars in SLA, TESOL, and bilingual education to explore from cutting-edge interdisciplinary perspectives what a more critical multilingual perspective might mean for theory, pedagogy, and practice in each of these fields.

1

Disciplinary Divides, Knowledge Construction, and the Multilingual Turn

Stephen May

The subject is initially established by the silence through which power speaks. (Bernstein, 1990, p. 28)

Writing in the early 1990s on the “monolingual bias” inherent in second language acquisition (SLA) research, Yamuna Kachru (1994) despondently observed that, up until that point, “few attempts [had] been made to gather evidence [of second language acquisition] from stable contexts of bi-/multilingualism in Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America” (Kachru, 1994, p. 796). Rather, she argued, the Chomskyan notion of the idealized native speaker, and related concepts of interlanguage, language competence, and fossilization, has framed the SLA research field inextricably in relation to monolingual speaker norms.

In making this critique, there is no allied requirement to assume that these monolingual norms are unidimensional or that monolingual speakers do not themselves demonstrate a range of linguistic competencies in relation to them (cf. Ellis, 2008; Rothman, 2008; see also Rampton 1990). Indeed, this is precisely the point that Kachru (1994) is making: Monolingual bias occurs because the notion of monolingual norms as an invariant standard presupposes monolingualism to be the unmarked, unexamined category and “native speaker” competence to be a uniform benchmark in relation to second language learning. In so doing, the existing bi/multilingual repertoires of learners were, in her view, either ignored or perceived in explicitly deficit terms. So too, by extension, were the fluid and overlapping language uses, and related linguistic and sociocultural competencies, of multilingual communities.

Commenting on fossilization as the dominant explanation in SLA for learner “errors,” Kachru (1994) notes, for example, that “[w]hatever the psycholinguistic validity of the notion, it is irrelevant to situations in which a second or an additional language has definite societal roles in the linguistic repertoire of its users” (Kachru, 1994, p. 797). More broadly, Kachru argues that the conception in the SLA literature that acquiring a second or additional language meant being able to then use it in the same way as monolingual speakers simply ignores the extensive existing literature on bi/multilingualism. This literature “has demonstrated that all the languages in the multilinguals’ repertoire complement one another to produce the type of composite language competence that suits their needs” (Kachru, 1994, p. 797). A sociolinguistic perspective of what competent bi/multilinguals do with different codes in their repertoire is thus quite different from the narrow psycholinguistic perspective that focuses on the acquisitional stages of learners, as reflected in notions such as fossilization and interlanguage. “The two perspectives come into conflict,” she concludes, “when language attitudes and considerations of power and control begin to play a role in the debate” (Kachru, 1994, p. 798).

In the same issue of TESOL Quarterly, Sridhar (1994) expands on Kachru’s (1994) overarching concerns when he observes:

Given that the aim of SLA is bilingualism, one would expect SLA theories to build on theories of bilingualism and use the natural laboratory of bilingual communities worldwide. With rare exceptions, the dominant models of SLA scarcely refer to this resource. (Sridhar, 1994, p. 800)

Moreover, if they did, Sridhar argues, they would realize that typically in multilingual communities the second language (L2) is used along with, not in place of, the first language (L1). “The relevant model of bilingualism is an additive one, not replacive” (Sridhar, 1994, p. 800). By extension, the notion of a duplicative model of bilingualism as the target of SLA—acquiring native-like competence in two languages, in the Bloomfield (1933) sense—needs to be replaced with a more complementary model of bilingualism, recognizing, as with Kachru (1994), that “a bilingual acquires as much competence in the two (or more) languages as is needed and that all of the languages together serve the full range of communicative needs” (Sridhar, 1994, p. 802). Adopting an additive bilingual approach, Sridhar concludes, would avoid the “negative characterization of the overwhelming majority of L2 acquirers and users … as speakers of interlanguages … that is, as failed monolinguals rather than successful bilinguals … Such theories condemn vibrant second languages and their speakers to a permanent subaltern state” (Sridhar, 1994, p. 802). It would also avoid the L1/L2 dichotomization in SLA and the related pathologizing of language transfer, mixed systems, convergence, and the interpenetration of systems, which are all central to language interaction in the ecology of multilingualism.

The additive bilingual model has subsequently been criticized, in turn, for reinforcing, albeit unwillingly, a conception of languages, and their use by bi/multilinguals, as distinct and delineable. Rather, as the chapters in this volume outline, bi/multilingualism is a significantly more complex, dynamic, and porous phenomenon than this, reflecting the multiple discursive practices adopted by bi/multilinguals across the full range of modalities, in a wide range of contexts, and with many different interlocutors. This more dynamic, reciprocal, and permeable conception of bi/multilingualism is perhaps highlighted most clearly in recent discussions of dynamic bilingualism and translanguaging (see Blackledge, Creese, & Takhi, this volume; García & Flores, this volume; see also García, 2009). Nonetheless, the notion of additive bilingualism advanced by Sridhar (1994), and subsequently championed by other critics (see below), still presents a strikingly different basis for analyzing language learning than the monolingual norms, and related dismissal and/or subtractive views of bilingualism, found within mainstream SLA.

Kachru (1994) and Sridhar (1994) were not the first to make these observations. Ben Rampton (1987) had earlier pointed out, for example, that what is regularly described as code-switching in sociolinguistics somehow “winds up as interference in SLA” (Rampton, 1987, p. 55). Rampton argues in the same article that “IL [interlanguage] scholarship … runs the risk of remaining restrictively preoccupied with the space between the speaker and his [sic] grammar, rather than with the relationship between speakers and the world around them” (Rampton, 1987, p. 49). Rampton’s nascent critique accords with other early work, such as that of Auer (1984), Beebe (1980), Bley-Vroman (1983), and Tarone (1988), which, along with Kachru and Sridhar, collectively laid the groundwork for what Block (2003) terms the subsequent “social turn” in, or sociocultural critique of, SLA, more fully developed from the late 1990s onwards (see below for further discussion).

Nor have Kachru (1994) and Sridhar (1994) been the last to voice these criticisms (see, e.g., Block, 2003; Ortega, 2009). However, their critical commentary is notable, and worth revisiting, for two reasons: its prescience and directness at that time in the early 1990s, and more discouragingly, for how little apparent effect/impact it has had on subsequent developments in SLA and related TESOL pedagogy and practice, at least until very recently (see below). Of course, this does not mean that the discipline has been silent on these issues in the interim. Rather, as we shall see, it is that the ongoing critique of the monolingual bias in “traditional” or “mainstream” SLA and TESOL continues to be resolutely ignored by its key proponents within these fields.¹

The emergence of a distinctive sociocultural view of SLA expanded the critique of the cognitive and psycholinguistic preoccupations of mainstream SLA—described by Ortega (this volume) as “linguistic–cognitive” SLA—via a range of key contributions (or interventions) from the late 1990s onwards.² In this sense, it has proved a useful precursor to the multilingual turn explored in this volume. Sociocultural commentators have consistently argued for the replacement of the deficit terminology that still characterizes linguistic–cognitive SLA. Leung, Harris, and Rampton (1997), for example, argue that the terms “native speaker” and “mother tongue” should be replaced with the terms “language expertise,” “language inheritance,” and “language affiliation.” Cook (1999, 2002a, 2008) advocates for the notion of “multicompetence” to describe bi/multilingual speakers (and for the notion of second language users, rather than learners; see also Ortega, this volume; Block, this volume). And Block (2003), directly echoing Kachru (1994) and Sridhar (1994), problematizes the L1/L2 distinction itself, given that the latter presupposes the sequential addition of a second language, rather than, as is far more common, the simultaneous multiple-language-learning contexts evident in multilingual environments.³

The ongoing monolingual bias of SLA, reflected in the notions of interlanguage and fossilization, has also garnered specific critical attention. For example, in Firth and Wagner’s (1997) influential critique of mainstream linguistic–cognitive SLA research, they reiterate “the prevailing monolingual orientation in SLA” and the implication that “interactions with NS [Native Speakers] are seen to be the ‘preferred’ conditions for SLA to occur” (Firth & Wagner, 1997, p. 292). In contrast, they argue that many of the world’s English speakers are not English “learners” in this traditional SLA sense, but rather multicompetent English users (cf. Cook, 2002b) who employ English as a lingua franca in multiple varying ways in their daily lives for a range of purposes and in a variety of social settings (see also Canagarajah, this volume; Norton, this volume). Following from this, they press for further SLA investigations into “everyday L2 use” (Firth & Wagner, 1997, p. 292; see also Leung et al., 1997), a challenge that has begun to be picked up by recent welcome sociolinguistic work exploring directly the implications of language learning in multilingual contexts.⁴ This current volume aims to contribute further to these important developments.

But, meanwhile, mainstream SLA theorizing continues on much as it ever has. Aside from a flurry of controversy and counter-response generated by Firth and Wagner’s (1997) arguments, a point to which I will return, ongoing developments in mainstream SLA appear largely impervious to and/or uninterested in seriously addressing these critiques. As Zuengler and Miller (2006) assert, the proponents of linguistic–cognitive SLA, and proponents of a more socially situated and critical SLA, are so ontologically disparate and professionally divided as to remain in “parallel SLA worlds” (Zuengler & Miller, 2006, p. 35). This is starkly illustrated by an AILA Review of SLA that came out in the same year (Bardovi-Harlig & Dörnyei, 2006), which, while purporting to address new developments in the field, manifestly failed to engage substantively with anything beyond linguistic–cognitive SLA. Another example is highlighted by Jenkins (2006), who argues that standard (read: cognitive/psycholinguistic) texts on SLA, such as Lightbown and Spada (2006), Littlewood (2004), and Mitchell and Myles (2004), “still frame as interlanguage any L2 output which deviates from the nativelike and assume that full mastery of any language means that of its NSs” (Jenkins, 2006, p. 144; cf. Gardner & Wagner, 2004). Similarly, fossilization remains a key concept that continues to be regularly promoted in such texts (as in, e.g., Han & Selinker, 2005), as well as in teacher training courses. The only notable exception here is the work of Lourdes Ortega, who has in recent years become increasingly critical of this ongoing (resistant/entrenched) monolingual bias in SLA (see especially, Ortega 2009, 2010) and who extends her critique in this current volume. That said, the fact that she remains the only linguistic–cognitive SLA scholar so identified in the current volume highlights the ongoing exceptionalism of her critique within traditional/mainstream SLA.

Much the same pattern can be seen in the TESOL field. Comparable sociocultural and critical critiques of TESOL have also clearly emerged in the last two decades. These have focused on the (multiple) identities of language learners, including gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality, and their necessary embeddedness in wider social contexts of power and inequality.⁵ Alongside this have been critical accounts of the hegemonic influence of English as the current lingua mundi or international language vis-à-vis other languages and the complex articulations that attend TESOL in an increasingly globalized world dominated by English.⁶

This critical work has also tried specifically “to connect the microrelations of TESOL—classrooms, teaching approaches, interactions—with broader social and political relations” (Pennycook, 1999, p. 331; see also Leung, 2005). The pedagogical implications are not always clear here—a weakness of critical pedagogy more generally (May & Sleeter, 2010)—but they do at least allow for both problematizing existing TESOL practice and developing what Pennycook (1999) terms a wider “pedagogy of engagement”: “An approach to TESOL that sees such issues as gender, race, class, sexuality and postcolonialism as so fundamental to identity and language that they need to form the basis of curricular organization and pedagogy” (Pennycook, 1999, p. 340). How one implements such an approach in the classroom is, of course, the nub of the challenge.

And yet, despite these developments, the relative novelty of adopting an additive bilingual approach to TESOL also remains demonstrably apparent. Canagarajah (2006), for example, in his review of TESOL as a discipline at 40 years, could still remark: “It is clear that teaching English in a manner that complements rather than competes with local languages and local interests, leading to additive bilingualism, is the new challenge (Canagarajah, 2006, p. 25; emphases added). In proceeding to outline what this might entail, he argues that:

Teaching English as an international language needs to be conducted with multilateral participation. Teachers in different communities have to devise curricula and pedagogies that have local...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introducing the “Multilingual Turn”
• 1. Disciplinary Divides, Knowledge Construction, and the Multilingual Turn
• 2. Ways Forward for a Bi/Multilingual Turn in SLA
• 3. Moving beyond “Lingualism”: Multilingual Embodiment and Multimodality in SLA
• 4. Theorizing a Competence for Translingual Practice at the Contact Zone
• 5. Identity, Literacy, and the Multilingual Classroom
• 6. Communication and Participatory Involvement in Linguistically Diverse Classrooms
• 7. Multilingualism and Common Core State Standards in the United States
• 8. Who’s Teaching Whom? Co-Learning in Multilingual Classrooms
• 9. Beyond Multilingualism: Heteroglossia in Practice
• Afterword
• Contributors
• Index