Tag: language learning

Moving past “The Switch”

Eva

When I was growing up, I would visit my mom’s family in Montreal and les Cantons de l’Est. I have lived most of my life in California, where the prevalence of English quickly overshadowed my first language, French, and I became English dominant. Every year or so, I would visit my grandma in Montreal and be so excited to use my French in the city. Sometimes I would venture off on my own to get a haircut and proudly state “Êtes-vous disponible pour une coupe de cheveux?” My heart would sink as the hairdresser responded, “Yes, of course, have a seat right here.” The switch to English felt so discouraging. It seemed evidence that despite my heritage, I did not belong here and could not even keep up a simple dialogue in French. Back in the coziness of my grand-maman’s kitchen I would keep practicing as she prepared potage, tourtière or croustade aux pommes.

Today, I’ve made Montreal my home and thankfully my French has improved enough so I can work for extra cash as a waitress in a restaurant. There are many customers who come in and order in accented, hesitant French, but I always give them the time and a chance to practice. Groups of twenty-somethings on a long weekend from Toronto come in so excited to impress their friends with a few phrases and are eager to learn les oeufs brouillés or bacon bien cuit. After a lively brunch giggling over mistakes and clarifications, they say I was the only Montrealer who didn’t immediately switch to English on them. When someone does not want to or cannot speak in French, it is abundantly clear and I quickly switch to English when they respond in English. The point is not to force French upon anyone, but also not to discourage anyone’s efforts to learn French in Montreal. Those customers who do want to practice are so grateful and enthusiastic about it and have directly told me so. Granted this may be the language teacher in me waking up, nevertheless, anyone can slow down for a second, like holding the heavy metro door for an elderly lady.

I have discussed “the switch” with many francophones and described how, for me, it can feel disheartening and frustrating. Their idea is to be accommodating and polite, which is generous and well-intentioned. Occasionally a less-proficient English speaker just wants to practice too. Of course, not everyone switches to English right away and there are many franco-Quebeckers who are more patient and tolerant of interlanguage French. But quickly switching to English does represent the overall tendency of French-English bilinguals in Montreal.

However, if francophones want to keep French alive and strong in Quebec, and there is ample evidence they do, then why are they so quick to abandon French and switch to English? 

The monolingual bias or native-speakerism continues to be the reality we live in. The benchmark for language use is the monolingual, native speaker and we subconsciously judge anything less as insufficient. Speaking with an accent does not make someone incapable of communicating in a language. “Broken” French should be appreciated as openness to Francophone culture. Few Montrealers are truly monolingual, so we should be past using the monolingual, “native” speaker as a frame of reference.

If the monolingual bias didn’t underlie so much of our mindset, then maybe people would be more patient and accepting of learners trying to use another language. This means switching to English when requested or responded to in English. This may require a bit of patience, but then Montreal would be more inclusive while remaining proud of its French language and all of its beautiful diversity. 

What has been your experience with “the switch” in Montreal (or possibly other contexts)?

Deliberate Mismatch of Home and School Languages

By: Tianyi Long

Van Hertz (2018) discussed language mismatch of students in educational systems, stating that in communities, bilingual communities as an example, students may use different languages at homes and at school. Such phenomena were assumed to be negative, preventing students (especially working class students) from achieving academic success and endangering the trust of parents in the educational system. However, my engagement with my local communities provides examples of an alternative  possible attitude toward  the language mismatch: students or their families are eager to abandon their own language features to cope with that of educational system. Moreover, this attitude is most likely to happen among working class or immigrant families.

It may be important to note firstly, that today’s society still tends to regard some languages, registers, or speaking varieties as “more valued” than others. The word “valued” here means speakers of those languages are usually seen as belonging to a higher social status and/or have easier access to social resources. Languages used in educational systems are either an approximation of such valued languages, or at least a necessity to access higher education, which usually brings decent career and higher social status. Bearing these in mind, you may find my observations below are actually understandable:

There are occasions when families, usually from working class or lower social status backgrounds, feel the need to shape their children’s language competence (or repertoire) to approximate those valued languages. Further, they are willing to abandon their home languages or language features in order to achieve this.

For example, the Ningbo dialect spoken in my hometown is quite different from Mandarin, the Standard Chinese. Although the Ningbo dialect is their L1, many people of the older generation deliberately expose their children to, and communicate with them only in Mandarin, which is also the language of schooling. In some families (mine included), parents use dialects for communication with each other, but talk to the children in Mandarin, resulting to an imbalanced distribution of language competence with the children, usually being able to listen and comprehend, but not to speak the parents’ dialect.

The top concerns of those families are firstly to integrate children into the schooling system as smoothly as possible, and to erase possible dialect influences on children’s Mandarin accents so that they may sound more “educated”, or more “local” in the cases of immigrant families.

Whilst this attitude facilitates students’ language learning at school in general, thus my reference to “positive” above, and is usually positively described as “a strong learning motivation” by teachers and researchers, we can see there are hidden dangers. First, the epistemology behind such an attitude tends to be purely pragmatic, where the values of schooling and language learning are reduced to a pure tool for obtaining social resources. Individual development, therefore, is more or less neglected (for example, it does happen that the only expectation for some students is to obtain a diploma or university degree.). Second, abandoning the home languages often accompanies the abandoning of student’s ethnic or regional identity, and can be seen as a micro-scoped “colonisation” –  conquering occurs when the major, dominant identity replaces and erases the minor, marginalised one. 

Do you have similar observations in your learning/teaching/living community? Leave a comment and let me know!

References:

Van Herk, G.(2018). What is sociolinguistics? (2nd ed.). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell.

Haitian Kreyol Dialect, or a language

Anne

In 1961 Kreyol was recognized as one of Haiti’s official languages along with French.  Haitian Kreyol is based on French and other languages such as Spanish and some west African languages. It is often described as a “French Dialect” or as a “broken French.” I have always asked myself if Kreyol was a broken French, why do people who speak French do not fully understand when someone speaks in Kreyol? 

In Haiti, only 10% of the population speaks French, and a Haitian who speaks Kreyol is sometimes unable to understand another Haitian speaking French. It is unlikely to see the opposite because in Haiti the colonizing language has been prioritized over the Kreyol. Within Haiti there are three forms of dialect of Kreyol:  the northern dialect of Kreyol, spoken in Cap-Haitian, the second-largest city; the Central dialect, spoken mainly in Port-au-Prince, which is the capital of Haiti, and also spoken by the majority of the population, and finally the southern dialect, spoken in “Les Cayes,” another big city located in the south. 

Like any other language, Kreyol has its own and distinctive grammar that is different from French. One such example is the use of verbs, we do not have subject verb agreement and there are also no verb tenses. Instead we have markers that precede the verb to indicate the tense. For instance, we use “te” to indicate the past tense, “ap” for progressives, and “pral” for the future

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Language learning is about “stepping out of your comfort zone”…

Yating

It’s already been five months since I came to Montreal last September, and what makes me feel ashamed and frustrated is the fact that having been living in such a French-dominant environment for nearly half a year, I still found little improvement in my French skill. 

Being exposed to everyday life with almost everything in French (eg. menus, food labels, road signs, metro stations, daily communications between people etc.), I couldn’t figure out why such a supportive learning environment made little contribution to my French learning. It was until one day, Chen, a friend of mine, told me that, “You can never truly learn a language if you just stay inside your comfort zone”, that I finally realized that in the matter of language learning (either in French or English), I have to push myself to “seek discomfort” before achieving the desirable outcome I have long been expected.

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Language Learning Outside Classroom

Jamie (Xuan Zhao)

Recently I read about a study about how people learn a second language outside classroom; it is quite inspiring and really made me think about what contributes to our learning outcomes beyond classroom in learning a second language.

The study is entitled “From milk cartons to english roomates: context and agency in L2 learning beyond the classroom” (P. Kalaja et al., 2011), aiming to “examine the relationship between agency and contexts for learning, in the hope to show how the students’ capacity to act was, mediated by the tools and resources of the context” (P. Kalaja et al., 2011). Agency here means the “socioculturally mediated capacity to act”, defined by Ahearn (2001). They gave questionnaires to Finnish college students, whose first language is Finnish, asking about their experience in learning both English and Swedish as their second languages.

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Bonjour, Hi! This is so wonderfully Montreal!

Xiaoke Sun

“Language shapes a city” (de la Hosseraye, 2015). While walking around,
Montrealers never feel too surprised to hear the bilingual greeting. I suppose “Bonjour, hi” is the most appropriate expression to depict the uniqueness of this city — of being fairly bilingual. According to Statistics Canada in 2011, the greater Montreal area has nearly 2 million bilingual people. Young Montrealers have a rate of bilingualism as high as 80% (de la Hosseraye ,2015). Beyond the obvious cultural richness that bilingualism brings to this city, it also creates an advantageous environment for learners to acquire French/English as a new language.

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Language anxiety and some possible solutions

Sihong Chen  ( blog post 1)

Last week, Alison mentioned “language anxiety”, which makes me think a lot about my language learning journey and how language anxiety influences my language learning.

From my experience, I think language anxiety has both positive and negative effects on my language learning. However, it is lucky that I always turn the negative into a positive.

I want to highlight two periods of time in my language learning journey and both of them are about English language learning, though in different places.

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How can I help my students break down the barriers of their anxiety to enable them to learn their second language?

Miss Education says:

I really enjoyed last week’s presentation on language and place, particularly the activity we discussed in groups at the end of class. The whole concept of anxiety and (second or foreign) language learning really interests me and so, I decided to do a little research in regards to this. There is one article in particular that I read and feel is worth sharing because it made me realise how important it is to take the time to address anxiety issues in order to break down the barriers that some of our students put up because of this.

Ariza (2002) writes a very touching story about the struggles she faced when having to teach “a group of terrified children, angry at the prospect of being forced to learn [a foreign language]” (p.719). Her students were American boys that were relocated to Puerto Rico due to several factors mainly linked to family issues. All of her students had very solid “affective filters” (Krashen, 1983; as cited in Ariza (2002) p. 719) which got in the way of them processing the foreign language. So, she turned to CLL (Community Language Learning) to potentially reduce the effects of these filters and get her students learning. She explains that her approach as a “counselor” (instead of teacher) was a key solution to the problem that she, but more importantly her students, was facing.

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Social and cultural factors effects on language learning

Faten Alzaid

Hello everyone. It is nice to share ideas in this blog area. Hence, I would like to share with you and write my first comment.

I am originally from Saudi Arabia. I speak three languages; Arabic, English and a little bit of French. Arabic is my first language and most of my educational life was in Arabic too. Being immerse with Arabic all the time, I always have a desire to teach a new and different language than Arabic. Hence, I decided to specialized in the English language teaching field in my bachelor degree. Since then, English became my favorite and second language. Honestly, I have never been fluent in English and satisfied until I arrived to Montreal four years ago and started learning English language from the zero again. The reason behind that was due to the fact that when I was at my hometown, I was not able to match the language with its cultural content and applied it out side the classroom. I also never practiced speaking in English out side academic contexts due to two reasons; 1) I was not confidant of my language ability at that time 2) there were not enough daily contexts to practice in real life, out side the classroom.

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Why are we not good at English?

Liting Liu

When Alison brought up the language loyalty concept in class, I finally found the appropriate word to explain the reason why I cannot help blurting out Chinese to foreigners. I joined a workshop this Tuesday, sitting next to a foreign girl. While I was replying a message on the phone, she accidentally knocked my bottle down and then said sorry. Without a second thought, I responded “Mei Shi” (No problem in Chinese.) The confusion on her face reminded me that I was speaking Chinese to a foreigner. The same situation also happened in my workplace once. There was a somewhat urgent thing I need to report to my manager who is Irish. I went downstairs hurriedly and started describing the thing in Chinese. Not until he called me Veronica that I realized whom I was talking to. Luckily, such phenomenon doesn’t happen a lot. However, the subconscious inclination to speak Chinese rather than English used to be something I asked my students to resist within our immersion classroom. Interestingly, outside of the classroom it happens to me as well especially when my mind is occupied with something else so that no extra attention could be allocated to language processing. Maybe we are all too “loyal” to our mother tongue deep down. We feel like using L1 could express our emotion more accurately with ease. Therefore, L1 is always a prioritized option in our language production.

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