February 2019 – Educational Sociolinguistics

Oh, you are Japanese, BUT you speak English well!

Yuri

I went to Australia two years ago. It was a fantastic trip, and I met many people including 10ish local Australian people. When I introduced myself, all of the Australians said “oh, you are Japanese! But you speak English well!”

“Wait, what do you mean by but?”, I wondered. Is it weird that a Japanese person speaks English well? I never asked the question because I knew they didn’t mean anything negative. I just smiled and politely said ‘thank you’. BUT, there are many Japanese people who speak English well, and there are very many Japanese people living in Australia. Have you not met any Japanese person who speaks English? Really?

ELF: how to best implement it?

Hector Alvarez

I’m currently reading a book called Teaching English as a Lingua Franca: The journey from EFL to ELF by Marek Kiczkowiak and Robert J. Lowe, which provides practical activities to develop effective ELF classes. However, first of all, what is ELF? ELF stands for English as a Lingua Franca, first defined by Alan Firth (1996) as “a ‘contact language’ between persons who share neither a common native tongue nor a common (national) culture, and for whom English is the chosen foreign language of communication” (p. 240). However, the focus of ELF in recent years has become more encompassing, including now both native and non-native speakers of English.

ELF is not a variety of English, but a phenomenon that emerges from the interaction between different English users that accommodate and adapt their speech to their interlocutors. For example, a British speaker who usually use the expression “to take the mickey out of you” would, instead, opt to say “criticize you”, as the former, although common within the British English speech context, is not common among other varieties of English. Hence, in an international context, among users of different English varieties, it’s safest to choose the type of language that steers clear from what would be considered slang from a particular English variety.

When I want to be polite/ impolite…

Mengting Hu

I am Chinese, and I speak English quite fluently as a second language. I have been studying and working in English-speaking environments for several years. However, after all those experiences, when I want to be polite, or sometimes, to be impolite, it is still relatively difficult! Anglophone friends sometimes tell me I am not polite when I think I am very polite. Occasionally, I get disappointed in myself for being too polite when I should not.

Language Appropriation (2 of 3)

By JM

I’m writing this as a mostly loose follow-up to my initial blog post on the ethics of language learning—that is, if language is an extension of culture, then could learning another language be seen as cultural appropriation? I think I’m closer to my own understanding of this, which is that, yes, it is arguably cultural appropriation; however, I’m also now thinking that perhaps not all cultural appropriation is intrinsically negative. I know this is an extremely fraught proposition, but consider the following.

Mama + Louisiana

Max Jack-Monroe

Preparing to co-facilitate a group discussion on the connection between ethnicity and language brought up a lot for me. The readings helped me to think about how I situate myself in terms of ethnicity and language and how these intersecting forces have impacted my life.

I begin with my family history, specifically on my mother’s side. My mother was perhaps the first person in centuries on either side of her family to be born outside of the state of Louisiana (my grandfather’s side was from New Orleans proper and my grandmother’s side from the neighboring countryside). Before my mother’s birth, my maternal grandparents had moved to Nashville, Tennessee so my grandfather (Pop-Pop) could complete his medical residency at Meharry Medical College. A couple of years after my mother was born in Nashville, the family moved to a place, coincidentally, not too far from Montreal–Buffalo, New York. By the time the family made their way to Harford County, Maryland both of my aunts had been born. My grandmother (Meman) still lives in that house, which, despite going through many changes, still seems, in many ways, untouched by time.

**My brothers, grandparents, and I. Summer 2010**

Snow day

Mela

Yesterday McGill, as well as every other educational institution in Montreal and indeed in most of Quebec and eastern Canada, cancelled classes because of the major snowstorm that hit our part of the country. The snowstorm (a 40-cm dump over 18 hours or so) wasn’t all that unusual—it’s just that the dump was swift and the wind ferocious. “Visibility near zero” has such an ominous ring. The cancellations by other institutions were to be expected. But that ouruniversity would cancel classes because of the weather—THAT was a very rare event. Usually we hang in there, or try to, when all other schools admit defeat and let people stay home and safely off the roads.

So the Wednesday evening class for which this is the blog didn’t happen, and I was able to use the class time to reflect on how it’s been going, sociolinguistically speaking. Other people also thought about course-related topics—a couple of new posts and many new comments appeared.

Mirror, mirror, do my lexical choices reflect gender stereotypes?

John Narvaez

I recently watched a TED talk by Lera Boroditsky on how languages shape the way we think. One of her examples pointed out the relationship between grammatical gender and the perceptions that this notion creates in the minds of speakers of languages that use it. She mentioned how, for example, a Spanish speaker would associate stereotypically male words to describe nouns such as “bridge” (“puente”, a masculine noun) while German speakers would assign stereotypically feminine words to describe the same bridge because bridge in German is a feminine word.

I set out to test this idea and surveyed a few friends (5 male, 5 female) asking them to give me the first adjective or word that came to mind when I mentioned a mix of feminine and masculine nouns in Spanish. I chose 6 lexically-linked words: Puente (bridge), casa (house), iglesia (church), edificio (building), estadio (stadium) and piscina (pool). I have translated the results of my survey to share them with you and hopefully bring up some discussion on the implications of this issue in language teaching:

Men Explain Things to Me

Amelia

I am in a group chat, and have been for some time, called “Mansplains”. The group has 10 members, myself included, 5 of whom are men. Most of the discussion in the group is among the women, I think because the type of men who self-select to be in a group called Mansplains are there to learn how not to engage in the behaviour and are thus fairly good listeners. I did not know until I read the postscript to the titular essay in Rebecca Solnit’s 2014 collection Men Explain Things to Me that (after the essay was originally published in 2008, made the rounds, died down and resurfaced again, going viral in fits and starts) Solnit had been credited with the term Mansplain, which was one of the New York Times’ words of the year for 2010. She did not, in fact, coin it and explains in the postscript: “I have my doubts about the word and don’t use it myself much; it seems to me to go a little heavy on the idea that men are inherently flawed in this way, rather than that some men explain things they shouldn’t and and don’t hear things they should” (Solnit, p.13).

The essay describes, in beautiful concision and precise description, an instance of a man explaining something to a woman that seems so absurd as to be exaggerated to fiction… if you are a male reader. I discussed the story with a male friend who asked whether I thought at least some details were embellished, but reading the story as a woman, it only seems too familiar and utterly believable.

Sociolinguistics Goes to School

Béatrice

“My monolingualism dwells, and I call it my dwelling; it feels like one to me, and I remain in it and inhabit it. It inhabits me.”Jacques Derrida.

One of the major changes that I have witnessed in the time since I was last in school, is the overwhelming air of acceptance pervasive on almost every level of socio-cultural behaviour. The education system has evolved, there is hope for humanity.

I’m a firm believer in EDUCATION. My family, my upbringing, it was, and still is, all about getting an education.

This brings me to the troublesome issue of Quebec French monolingualism.

It is about NOT getting an education.

Why not Pinyin?

When I was searching the meaningful road signs for week 4 ‘s activity, I noticed a very interesting phenomenon in my hometown. The landmark “二七” are exhibited in Pinyin（Erqi ) and English (Twoseven ) respectively on one road sign. Besides, almost all road signs are shown in bilingual (Chinese and English) whereas Pinyin is hard to find.

Why Pinyin is absent? Is it necessary to show Pinyin on Chinese road signs? My answer is Yes!