“I’ve got a book I want to share with you that I think you’re really gonna like, Jennifer,” Merrill says, holding the red covered book in her right hand, glancing at its cover[1]. She does not immediately hand me the book, of course. She has this way of building anticipation, of taking a listener on a journey with her. “It’s by Blackledge and Creese and published by Multilingual Matters in 2020. It’s certainly unique and going to open up a lot of possibilities in the field!” She pauses before passing it in my direction.
By now I’m certain she feels my excitement as I nearly snatch the book from her hands. “Interpretations: An Ethnographic Drama,” I read the title aloud. Flipping through its pages, “Oh, it’s a script, a play.” I am amazed, yet not surprised because I acknowledge the significance of this. For Merrill, having spent her lifetime dedicated to applied linguistics research and teaching at a time when women had no place in the academy and when the only research that constituted legitimate scholarship was that which could be quantified, this publication was indeed a noteworthy one.
A snapshot of the book summary further signifies this point:
“This highly original book brings compelling narratives of migration and social diversity vividly to life. At once a play script and an outcome of ethnographic research, it is a rich resource for the interpretation and representation of life in the multilingual city.”
The entire book consists of a play script with only a short paragraph at the beginning of the book that briefly highlights the research guiding the work. An academic text published entirely as a play from a trustworthy publishing house is impressive. But I also recognize that it is something made possible because Blackledge and Creese have already built a credible reputation for themselves.
“Why does it take so long to make a change like this, Merrill?” I ask.
“Because the field is built upon years and years and years of tradition,” she emphasizes.
I feel the weight of her words. I suppose change is both hard and slow and often met with unyielding resistance.
I want to demonstrate with an example that highlights the evolving landscape of research dissemination, that change is entirely possible. In this blog post, I share the experience of how Merrill’s final pre-retirement research project turned into a post-retirement play that took on a life of its own. But first I begin with a short introduction to Professor Emerita Merrill Swain.
Meet Merrill
For those of us in the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA), Dr. Swain hardly needs an introduction, as her name has made its mark, with more than 150 publications. She is perhaps most notably recognized for her work with Michael Canale on communicative competence[2], which has reached over 17,000 citations. She is also known for her theorizations on the Output hypothesis[3] in the late 1970s, based on her observations of French Immersion classrooms, positing that comprehensible input on its own is not enough for language learning, and, more recently, for her work on languaging–the process of using language to mediate complex cognitive processing, that is, thought coming into existence through words. More recently, her work on the inseparability of emotion and cognition in second language learning[4] is gaining momentum.
When given the opportunity to pursue her PhD at either the University of California at Irvine or the University of Alberta in Edmonton, the beaches won over the snowy winters–no surprise! Yet, she returned to Canada to carry out her PhD research in Quebec with young children becoming bilingual in French and English. Trained in both qualitative and quantitative methods at a time when the dominant research paradigm was positivist in orientation, Merrill attributes her openness to innovative ideas to the Dean who organized the School of Social Science not by following traditional disciplines (e.g., psychology, sociology) that are common-place in universities today, but by encouraging students to connect and explore ideas that inspired them, and to group themselves accordingly.
Merrill was hired by the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) in 1972 as the Project Director for the Bilingual Education Project in the Modern Language Center, where she conducted research on the first French immersion programs in Ontario and across Canada. Two years later, she became an Assistant Professor at OISE and a full Professor at age 36–the youngest at that time to achieve this status, one of two women in the Department of Curriculum. She fought hard to earn equal rights to those of her male colleagues, who were making considerably more than she was. While Merrill officially retired in 2007, her projects continued, and so, too, did her connections to students willing, eager and inspired to learn.
I first met Merrill at OISE in 2017 at a weekly symposium of guest speakers discussing the recent trends in the field of applied linguistics, open to the public. Merrill attended several of these talks. Later, I became a member in the monthly SCOLAR group of graduate students that she facilitated to keep active in academic discussions on all topics related to socio-cultural theory. Then COVID-19 hit, for which the silver lining was the beginning of our friendship that developed over Zoom.
Zoom photo of Merrill Swain and Jennifer Burton
Our weekly conversations were academic, but also personal. For many, and certainly for us, COVID-19 provided an opening for moments of deep introspection and critical reflection. In exchanging pivotal life experiences, discussing current world events more broadly as well as trends in the field more specifically, our dialogues were insightful, meaningful, and life-giving—a metaphorical breath of fresh air at a time when masking mandates and stay-at-home guidelines were in full effect. Our Zoom chats were often accompanied with laughter and sometimes tears as we challenged and supported one another through moments of personal growth and transformation. I will forever be grateful for this time together.
Why Talking Matters
The final research project that Merrill conducted with her colleague Dr. Sharon Lapkin before retirement was at a time when both of her parents were experiencing memory loss, for quite different reasons, she believed. Their project took her from the second language school setting where she had conducted most of her previous research to that of a long-term care facility where Merrill, Sharon, and the research team investigated the role of languaging in enhancing cognition and sense of well-being in residents who were experiencing mild cognitive impairment. Languaging refers to one’s use of language as a cognitive tool to mediate thinking, not to be mistaken for everyday routine conversations about familiar and known content whereby language is simply a vehicle for communicating already worked-out thought. Or as Merrill says, “You know those kinds of conversations–the blah, blah, blah kind? They’re not languaging.”
In a presentation this month at Senior College at the University of Toronto, Merrill describes the results of their research:
“The essence of our findings from this exploratory research suggested that higher mental processes were enhanced, even restored, through languaging. Through languaging, memories were re-created with increasing details and coherence, and more sophisticated vocabulary and greater syntactic complexity; ideas were brought to light; poems were written and problems were solved – these activities were each mediated by language…Woven into the cognitive changes we observed were many indications of positive affect. We think this occurred because as the residents engaged in languaging activities, they began to see themselves as more cognitively capable and as having greater agency, which led to their growing sense of self-esteem and well-being. Furthermore, as time passed, the researchers began to see the residents as interesting and engaging individuals, which had positive consequences for the residents’ sense of well-being.”
The research team published 8 scholarly articles in both gerontological and applied linguistics journals. One challenge that researchers experience, however, is the accessibility of their findings to the general public, more specifically to those who need it the most. In the context of Merrill’s research, it was volunteers and both family and personal caregivers that could potentially benefit from the research findings of their study. At that time, a friend and colleague, Marina Engelking, suggested that she and Merrill should write a play inspired by the results of the research. They believed a play would capture the hearts and minds of an audience in ways that academic articles or videos could not. The problem was, neither had ever written a play.
Yet, with Marina’s considerable experience in theatre and Merrill’s research experience, just maybe they could write a play. They enrolled in Act 2 Studio at TMU’s Chang School of Continuing Studies, each taking three classes that focused on different aspects of playwriting. This began their 7-year long journey of writing, workshopping, and editing their play. Their goal was to take the findings from the research study, and based on those results, to create a play with fictional characters and a story-line they hoped would show, not tell, those results. One of the biggest struggles they encountered was the tension between a play as an educational tool versus an artistic endeavour.
Marina Engelking and Merrill Swain answering audience questions at their first showing in Toronto in 2022
The outcome of their joint efforts was Talking Matters, a research-inspired drama on enhancing the memory and well-being of people living with dementia. What’s more, their play won the first-prize Stella award for a new, as yet unproduced play, which came with the promise that it would be produced by Act 2 Studio Works once COVID was under control.
A Talking Matters flier promoting the play and Jennifer and Merrill hugging after the Toronto 2022 production.
To date, Talking Matters has been produced 3 times in Toronto, Ontario and 3 times in Sherbrooke, Quebec, to a wide variety of audiences. Additionally, it was part of a Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) research study on knowledge mobilization. Given that granting institutions such as SSHRC are now requiring a knowledge mobilization component in grant proposals, Merrill believes that it is important to raise questions about the relative merits of different forms of mobilizing knowledge, both within and across different genres.
Returning to the story that I opened this blog post with, the red book that Merrill was so eager to share with me: “Jennifer, you have to make sure the readers of this post know how excited I am about this change,” she said last night when I told her I’m writing this post. Dear Merrill, so too am I. You have touched the lives of so many of us, and while there will only ever be one Merrill Swain, it’s your inspiration that will live on as a legacy in the work that we do, both personally and professionally.
[1] Blackledge, A., & Creese, A. (2020). Interpretations–an ethnographic drama. Multilingual Matters.
[2] Canale, M., & Swain, M. (1980). Theoretical bases of communicative approaches to second language teaching and testing. Applied Linguistics, 1(1), 1-47.
[3] Swain, M. (1993). The output hypothesis: Just speaking and writing aren’t enough. Canadian Modern Language Review, 50(1), 158-164.
[4] Swain, M. (2013). The inseparability of cognition and emotion in second language learning. Language Teaching, 46(2), 195-207.
