Mela Sarkar

Sociolinguistic noticing in the COVID-19 era

The previous edition of this blog ran from January through May 2019, spanning a few months in the academic life of one MA cohort in McGill’s Second Language Education program—I was very proud to be their instructor, and encourage readers to look back at what they wrote, as well as to the first, 2016 edition of this blog. Hats off to Alison Crump for bringing it into being back then!

As of early spring 2020, a year after the enjoyable flurry of the Winter 2019 blog posts, our MA cohort, our university, our city—indeed, most of the world—was in lockdown, to an extent that none of us had imagined would be possible, because of the global pandemic that continues as these words are written. A few months later, lockdown has now been lifted and classes are continuing. However, this time (very unusually for McGill) the course is completely online, as I pass the blogging baton to my colleague and old friend Caroline Riches, instructor for Educational Sociolinguistics this term. For her sake and the students’ sake, I am very glad that blogging as a writing genre—not to mention as pedagogy—is an activity that is already completely online and that thrives in that medium. I encourage our readers to follow Caroline and her students this term, and to respond copiously and often!

Women’s oppression and Chinese characters

Dantong

American historian and feminist theorist Joan Scott (1994) proposed that the analysis of language provides a starting point for understanding how social relations are conceived and how collective identity is established. French feminists also argue that language, signs, and symbols are keys to understanding gender construction (Kristeva, Jardine, & Blake, 1981; Cixous & Kuhn, 1981 ), English and American feminist linguists have discussed the substance of the English language as literally man made and under male control (Spender & Bardin, 1985; Penelope, 1990). As for Chinese, the analysis of Chinese characters and idioms can provide the context for understanding the historical construction of gender roles, and the ideas that inform the oppression of women in ancient Chinese society. I will give some specific examples in Chinese to further illustrate it.

The ancient Chinese character for female (女, this is the simplified Chinese character for female) consists of a pictographic representation of a person kneeling with hands folded, a pose seen as a form of submission.

Hong Kong hotel life

Mela

A burst of blog posts blew into Educational Sociolinguistics in the brief time it took technology to blow me westward to the far East for a week of encounters with extraordinary scholars at the Education University of Hong Kong. A brief time by the calendar, but long in subjective time, measured by the innumerable back-and-forth fractions of an inch that make up all the movement possible in the cramped quarters one is confined to when flying for fifteen hours over the wide Pacific.

While I was uncramping over the weekend, the contributors to this blog were writing about sexism in Chinese and racism in English (the term “bootlicking bilingualism” particularly stood out for me as deserving of a wide public) and applying their knowledge of pragmatics across a range of tricky situations from snack ordering to sales pitching. The blog has been busy. Posts about poetry and how untranslatable it is—along with most of the really interesting language out there—have been flooding in.

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.

Receiving the baton: from fall 2016 to winter 2019 in a couple of heartbeats

The second edition of the Educational Sociolinguistics class blog is hereby launched! Many thanks to Alison Crump, whose brainchild it was back in 2016. Alison is a much more experienced blogger and online writer than I am, as readers may know if they are familiar with our research community’s BILD blog and the journal that eventually spun out of the work that BILD members have been doing there. Critical sociolinguistics is what we are all about. As a sociolinguistics course instructor who deftly turned the first edition of this blog into an opportunity to conduct original research on blogging as pedagogy (see the previous post, in which the baton was passed), Alison will be a hard act to follow. But I have confidence that the group of students who will be following along will be equal to the challenge, and will be an inspiration to their instructor. It has been my privilege to teach everybody in the current cohort at least once over the past year in other McGill courses, and I have an inkling of the kind of intellectual daring of which this group is capable. I look forward to seeing where they will take me. Please come along for the ride!