Our guest blogger this week is Dr. Matthew Apple, a second language educator and researcher in the Department of Communication, College of Letters at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, Japan. Matt’s research interests in “possible selves” in language learning stems from his personal upbringing, the eldest son of a family of eight children raised in rural Upstate New York, and his movements in multiple social circles. He has blogged quite a bit about his “linguistic upbringing” and family ancestral history. Matt’s academic career as a student and educator extends from one point of the globe to another. It has taken him through the halls of Bard College (BA), University of Notre Dame (MFA) and Temple University (MEd, EdD).
In 1999, Matt moved to Nara, Japan, to become an Assistant Language Teacher in the JET (Japan Exchange and Teaching) Programme. After three years in elementary, junior, and senior high schools in southern Nara Prefecture, he taught for one year at a Kobe-based night cram school before working as a Language Instructor at Himeji Dokkyo University. While finishing his MEd in TESOL, he joined the Institute of Language and Culture at Doshisha University as a Limited Term Lecturer. From April 2008 to 2013, he was the first non-Japanese tenured faculty member ever at Nara National College of Technology. He became an Associate Professor at Ritsumeikan University (Kyoto) in April 2013, and from time to time he occasionally teaches as an Adjunct in the Graduate School of Education, Temple University, Japan Campus. Presently, he is Visiting Scholar in the School of Irish Studies, Concordia University in Montreal.
“Gaijin da! [It’s a foreigner!]” a little boy in a kempo gi proclaimed, pointing a finger at me.
I smiled and responded, “Nihonjin da! [It’s a Japanese!]” He looked stumped, then giggled.
This was my introduction to monolingual/monocultural beliefs in Japan. During my first year in Japan (1999), I experienced multiple occurrences of this while working as an assistant language teacher (a.k.a., “human tape recorder”) at public elementary, junior and senior high schools in rural Nara Prefecture. My initial experiences at being “Othered” were certainly eye-opening and gave me perspective on my own sense of self as well as that of my students.
After 19 years of living in Japan, I still get pointed at by children (and not infrequently adults as well), who announce,“There’s a gaijin over there!” on a regular basis. My wife is Japanese, so my children are sometimes called “haafu” (literally, “half,” i.e., “half-Japanese”).On some occasions when my daughters have behaved “un-Japanese” (i.e.,expressing their opinions, being too forthright, openly using English in public), their classmates sometimes gleefully point at them with the invective“Gaijin!” as if that explains their supposed deviant appearance and action.
This is one of many reasons why I chose Montreal for my yearlong research sabbatical. As a well-known multilingual city in a notoriously welcoming multicultural society, Montreal, I thought, would be ideal to show my daughters that being a “haafu” person of multiethnic heritage was perfectly normal, an advantage even. And not something necessarily needing an entire movie called “Hafu” to explain.
But I, too, am a “gaijin” here. I’m American-born, and my American accent is similar to a Canadian English accent (being from Upstate New York, I am sometimes mistaken for being Torontonian). Once I open my mouth, however, locals immediately sense that I’m a foreigner. In Québec, my poor command of spoken French is another marker of my outsider status.
In a way, though, I have always been an outsider, even inside my own country. My family moved four times before I reached junior high school, moving to increasingly isolated communities farther and farther away from my birthplace. Each step took me farther away from urban surroundings with people from all sorts of backgrounds to rural locales where monolingual/monoculture beliefs held sway. Perhaps partly because of this, I became interested in my family’s ancestry, which I quickly discovered was just as multiethnic as everybody else’s. This prompted me to study French (high school),German (undergraduate university), and Irish (graduate school). Perhaps (I thought) learning these languages could help me find out more about my family, and myself.
Oddly enough, the more I learned my ancestral language, the more I became confused about my identity as a multiethnic American. Was I a really different person in a different language? While studying German, I did, with some luck, reconnect with a distant relative (my grandmother’s 2nd cousin). Although he and his family were very nice, it didn’t make me any more German than French (or Irish, or English, or…).
Then I moved to Japan and started studying Japanese, a language that had little resemblance to any I had previously studied and absolutely no relation to my personal background or how I identify myself. Surprisingly, although I struggled to communicate in my previous second languages, I became fluent in my L5.
Why?
After finishing my doctoral dissertation on personality and L2 anxiety (Apple, 2011), I became interested in the concept of “possible L2 selves” (Dörnyei, 2009) and how a desire to attain an image L2 self leads to language learning motivation. On the surface, the theory seemed to make sense. However, rather quickly, my colleagues and I came to question the theory. Did wanting “L2 selves”actually motivate learners (Apple & Da Silva, 2016)? Even if a learner had a self-concept in her L2, would that necessarily mean that L1 users of the same language would recognize her as having an “L2 self”?
It seemed to me that, despite the recent popularity in L2 motivation studies of “possible L2 selves,” we have been misconstruing the self as (1) something an individual can have and (2) something only individual language learners perceive. The self is a social construction, formed over many, many years of interaction with others through the use of symbols and language (Neimeyer, 2002). This means that the self, far from being simply a personal self-concept, is necessarily co-constructed, making it more of a relational self (Gergen, 2011), formed in relation to how others perceive the self.
So, simply saying “I have an L2 self” does not mean that you actually do, strictly speaking. How do L1 users of the language perceive you? How do other L2 users perceive you, for that matter? The very term “self” is problematic. If it is true that having an image of yourself becoming a fluent L2 user in the future motivates you to learn the L2, does it necessarily follow that this image constitutes a “self”?
I did not, and do not, have a “Japanese L2 self.” In no way do I perceive myself as being Japanese. Yet I was, and still am, motivated to learn and use Japanese, because I am attracted to Japanese culture and Japanese people; I have a desire to communicate in Japanese.
But according to the possible L2 selves theory, I need a sense of a Japanese L2 self to motivate me to learn the language. But does this “Japanese L2 self” exist? And does the Japanese language, itself, create or require a unique “Japanese self”? If so, which“Japanese self” would that be? Standard Tokyo dialect? Osaka? Kagoshima? A thousand other regional “selves” of Japan?
Could the same be said of a “French L2 self”? Which French constitutes a “French L2 self” for a learner of the language? Parisian? Tunisian? Québécois? Cameroonian? Do only learners of Hoch-Deutsch have a “German L2 self”? (No Bavarian, or Austrian, or Swiss L2Self?). We may speak of having an “L2 self,:” but what we really have are perceptions of ourselves in relation to what we think are the perceptions that other L1 or L2 users of that language have of us. The language does not make the self. The perceptions of others make the self. There are no “L2 selves.” There are only perceptions. Language teachers have taken a psychological concept and interpreted it incorrectly.
To me, the underlying premise of “possible L2 selves” smacks of linguistic imperialism and ethnocentrism, another “strong form” of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis — the idea that language determines who we are by linguistically restricting us and controlling our perceptions of reality (https://www.linguisticsociety.org/resource/language-and-thought). This kind of linguistic determinism is no longer accepted by mainstream linguists or cognitive theorists; why do L2 language teachers still couch language learning in terms of outdated theories of language and thought?
It could be nothing more than a semantic issue: the meaning of the word “self.” I am a self, I do not have a self. I certainly don’t have more than one self. But the bottom line in the end is, Do our language students need an L2 linguistic self-concept, an “L2 self,” in order to help motivate them to become L2 users?
No. They don’t. They do need to understand that language identity and the self are, and always have been, much more complicated than a traditional, simplistic, post-WWII view of national culture and language. “Selves” are people, interacting socially and linguistically, as equals in a mutually respectful society. For us to truly appreciate each other, maybe we should focus on the unity of the self and not an artificial linguistic division into various“L2 selves” that don’t actually exist. Let’s shelve our “selves” at the door!
References
Apple, M. T. (2011). The Big Five personality traits and foreign language speaking confidence among Japanese EFL students. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Temple University.
Apple, M. T., & Da Silva, D. (2016). Language learning motivation in Asia: Current trajectory and possible future. In M. T. Apple, D. Da Silva, & T. Fellner (Eds)., L2 selves and motivations in Asian contexts (pp. 228-238). Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters.
Dörnyei, Z. (2009). The L2 motivational self system. In Z. Dörnyei & E. Ushioda (Eds.), Motivation, language identity and the L2 Self (pp. 9-42). Bristol, UK:Multilingual Matters.
Gergen, K. J. (2011). The self as social construction. Psychological Studies, 56(1), 108-116.
Neimeyer, R. A. (2002). The relational co-construction of the selves: A postmodern perspective. Journal of Contemporary Psychology, 32(1) 51-59.
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