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Negotiating the Multilingual Turn in SLA: Response to Stephen May
Abstract
In volume 103 of Modern Language Journal, Stephen May suggested that the multilingual turn has not fully delivered on its promises, pointing out second language acquisition (SLA) researchers’ continued focus on parallel monolingualisms rather than on dynamic bi/multilingualism, the lack of theorization of historicity in sociolinguistic research on the latter, the balkanization of academic knowledge preventing transdisciplinary scholarship, and West‐centered methodological nationalism. While I agree with his points, I believe the solution requires more than critical reflexivity, reading beyond our areas of interest, and relinquishing fast‐held methodological principles. Scholarly hegemony and disciplinary elitism exist because we are more than minds touting theories and epistemologies. We must acknowledge how we, as researchers, seek cultural prestige and economic well‐being by affiliating with the global North and its mechanisms for knowledge production. Given this, I discuss what scholars in both the global North and South can do to reform the discipline to address May's concerns, in terms of 1 action those in the global South must consistently attempt, and 4 responsibilities of those in the global North.
... Additionally, he argues that the English monolingual ideology, the balkanization of academic knowledge, and West-centered methodological nationalism still very much dominate SLA. In addressing to this problem, Mendoza (2019) contends that it is through a mutual division of labor between scholars in both the global North and South that the quandaries beleaguering the realization of the now much celebrated notion of multilingual turn in such a discipline as SLA 1 can be dealt with. Her main points can be encapsulated as below: ...
... The solution proposed here is concrete actions of struggle or, to be precise, the praxis of decolonial fissure which ought to be carried out by scholars hailing from the global South. Both distance creation from Western centric epistemologies and the enactment of locus of enunciation are not only viable, but also strategic actions of dealing with those problems of the multilingual turn highlighted by Mendoza, (2019). These actions, of course, require collective, concerted and strenuous efforts on the parts of the scholars from the global South, if the promises of the multilingual turn are to turn into reality. ...
Recent debates over the notion of the multilingual turn in applied linguistics in general and Second Language Acquisition (SLA) in particular clearly reflect the robustness of the notion in the fields. Yet, what is often ignored in the debate is the fact the notion itself is by nature problematic, and, as a consequence, the discussion of its realization in the fields of applied linguistics and SLA is fraught with disputes. In this article, I will first revisit the notion of the multilingual turn in order to show the contentious nature of the term, and then go on to suggest that we need to shy away from creating a division of labor between scholars from the global South and North, as has been propounded by Mendoza (2019); instead, we need to invest our efforts to ponder over more nuanced and situated actions which must be carried out by scholars from the global South to reform the above disciplines through “the praxis of decolonial fissure” (Walsh, 2018).
At present, the amount of data from users is increasing exponentially, and most of the data is stored in data centers distributed in different geographic locations. The cost of transferring large amounts of data across geographically distributed data centers can become prohibitive. Therefore, to shorten the data transmission time and reduce the cost of data transmission bandwidth and maintain the load balance of the geographically distributed cloud system, an optimal data placement strategy considering capacity limitation and load balancing in a geographically distributed cloud is proposed. Firstly, the capacity limitation, load balancing, and bandwidth cost of each cloud data center in the geographically distributed cloud are considered, and the data placement problem in the geographically distributed cloud is mathematically modeled. Secondly, the Floyd algorithm is used to model the cost of data transmission bandwidth and find the minimum transmission bandwidth cost. Finally, the Lagrangian relaxation method is used to obtain the optimal data placement scheme for the transmission time. To show the performance advantages of the proposed algorithm, comparative experiments are carried out. When the bandwidth is 15 Mbps, in terms of the Load Balancing Degree (LBD), the proposed algorithm is 40.3% higher than the Hash on average, 35.6% higher than the Closest on average, and 25.7% higher than the CRANE on average. Moreover, the experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can reduce the data transmission cost, and improve the load balancing in a geographically distributed cloud system.
The purpose of this volume is to dispel some potential misconceptions about the
status of Applied Cognitive Construction Grammar with regard to SLA and SLA
research. This is important because, as we will see, most of the applied cognitive
approaches on offer seek to align the insights of cognitive research with the essentialist SLA paradigm. SLA essentialism is the idea that observable or elicited performance reveals facts about non-observable mental representations. These facts are taken to be laws of sorts about the linguistic module and how L2 learners almost always fail to achieve a native-like proficiency. In point of fact, SLA has been criticized for propounding a view of L2 acquisition as a process of defective appropriation of the linguistic code among late learners. In this sense, SLA insiders like Ortega (2018) see in (psychological) essentialism the sole way toward the postulation of some truths about language learning and processing. As Ortega concedes, SLA researchers have been reluctant to ask questions about the nature of language or to provide a model of mind that supports their assertions about speakers’ L2 use. In contrast to this reductionist view, I intend to show that applied cognitive approaches to language instruction do need to have a solid theoretical background that goes beyond performance to explain linguistic usage.
Obesity and its metabolic complications are characterized by subclinical systemic and tissue inflammation. In rodent models of obesity, inflammation and metabolic impairments are linked with intestinal barrier damage. However, whether intestinal permeability is altered in human obesity remains to be investigated. In a cohort of 122 severely obese and non‐obese patients, we analyzed intestinal barrier function combining in vivo and ex vivo investigations. We found tight junction impairments in the jejunal epithelium of obese patients, evidenced by a reduction of occludin and tricellulin. Serum levels of zonulin and LPS‐Binding Protein, two markers usually associated with intestinal barrier alterations, were also increased in obese patients. Intestinal permeability per se was assessed in vivo by quantification of urinary lactitol/mannitol (L/M) and measured directly ex vivo on jejunal samples in Ussing chambers. In the fasting condition, L/M ratio and jejunal permeability were not significantly different between obese and non‐obese patients, but high jejunal permeability to small molecules (0.4 kDa) was associated with systemic inflammation within the obese cohort. Altogether, these results suggest that intestinal barrier function is subtly compromised in obese patients. We thus tested whether this barrier impairment could be exacerbated by dietary lipids. To this end, we challenged jejunal samples with lipid micelles and showed that a single exposure increased permeability to macromolecules (4 kDa). Jejunal permeability after the lipid load was two‐fold higher in obese patients compared to non‐obese controls and correlated with systemic and intestinal inflammation. Moreover, lipid‐induced permeability was an explicative variable of type 2 diabetes. In conclusion, intestinal barrier defects are present in human severe obesity and exacerbated by a lipid challenge. This paves the way to the development of novel therapeutic approaches to modulate intestinal barrier function or personalize nutrition therapy to decrease lipid‐induced jejunal leakage in metabolic diseases. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
The purpose of this chapter is to articulate the reasons for my unease with the notion of superdiversity, the affective rhetoric it is couched in and the process that transformed a newly coined word into 'a fact on the ground' and an academic brand. I will begin with an overview of processing features that differentiate academic slogans from bona fide academic terms. Next, I will examine branding strategies that made superdiversity a recognizable name in sociolinguistics. Then, I will consider the many meanings of superdiversity and argue that referential indeterminacy renders it impervious to critique of Eurocentric biases and ahistoric premises and makes the new slogan an extremely valuable tool for branding and creation of a new academic hierarchy and new elite.
The article argues that the way in which domination is experienced and oppositional tendencies are formed in classroom life have to be observed closely rather than conceived abstractly. This ethnographic study of 22 tertiary-level Tamil students following a mandatory English for general purposes (EGP) course reveals that whereas the lived culture displays opposition to the alienating discourses inscribed in a U.S. textbook, the students affirm in their more conscious statements before and after the course their strong motivation to study ESOL. Interpreting this contradiction as reflecting the conflict students face between cultural integrity, on the one hand, and socioeconomic mobility, on the other, the study explains how students' desire for learning only grammar in a product-oriented manner enables them to be somewhat detached from cultural alienation while being sufficiently examination oriented to pass the course and fulfill a socio-economic necessity. However, this two-pronged strategy is an ideologically limiting oppositional behavior that contains elements of accommodation as well as resistance and unwittingly leads students to participate in their own domination.
Scholars around the world are under increasing pressure to publish their research in the medium of English. However, little empirical research has explored how the global premium of English influences the academic text production of scholars working outside of English-speaking countries. This article draws on a longitudinal text-oriented ethnographic study of psychology scholars in Hungary, Slovakia, Spain and Portugal to follow the trajectories of texts from local research and writing contexts to English-medium publications. Our findings indicate that a significant number of mediators, ‘literacy brokers’, who are involved in the production of such texts, influence the texts in different and important ways. We illustrate in broad terms the nature and extent of literacy brokering in English-medium publications and characterize and exemplify brokers’ different orientations. We explore what kind of brokering is evident in the production of a specific group of English-medium publications- articles written and published in English medium inyternational journals-by focising on three text histories. We conclude by discussing what a focus on brokering can tell us can tell us about practices surrounding academic knowledge production.
Recent scholarship in sociolinguistics and language education has examined how race and language intersect each other and how racism influences linguistic and educational practices. While racism is often conceptualized in terms of individual and institutional injustices, a critical examination of another form of racism—epistemological racism—problematizes how racial inequalities influence our knowledge production and consumption in academe. Highlighting the importance of the intersectional nature of identity categories, this conceptual article aims to draw scholars’ attention on how epistemological racism marginalizes and erases the knowledge produced by scholars in the Global South, women scholars of color, and other minoritized groups. In today’s neoliberal culture of competition, scholars of color are compelled to become complicit with white Euro-American hegemonic knowledge, further perpetuating the hegemony of white knowledge while marginalizing women scholars of color. Valorizing non-European knowledge and collectivity as an alternative framework also risks essentialism and male hegemony. Conversely, the ethics promoted by black feminism emphasizes a personal ethical commitment to antiracism. Epistemological antiracism invites scholars to validate alternative theories, rethink our citation practices, and develop critical reflexivity and accountability.
Using the System journal's bibliometric data from 1973 to 2017, this study investigated the journal's research themes and their evolving patterns over four decades divided into three periods. Specifically, the study identified and examined the journal's most frequently discussed topics, its most highly cited articles, and the most highly cited references and authors in the journal. The results show that the journal's publications have focused on foreign and second language learning/teaching practice issues, particularly the use of learning strategies and technology, while successfully keeping pace with the new developments in theory and practice in the field of applied linguistics, especially the developments in research on socio-cultural and socio-psychological issues. The results also reveal some areas where the journal may need to focus more on or make some adjustments in order to further enhance its success in achieving its declared aims and scopes, i.e., its missions.
The 'trans-' perspectives offered in this special issue are heady stuff. Post-structuralism (philosophy) meets the digital age (electronics), meets globalization (economics), and meets translingual practice (linguistics) to create a perfectly utopian or placeless space for future exploration. I want to first add my voice to the excitement generated by this trans-perspective, and then examine more closely the ways in which its dominant spatial metaphor gets declined across each of the papers, and finally raise a word of caution against the current engagement with space and the concomitant neglect of time and history. I end with a plea to bring back historicity and subjectivity into our applied linguistic enterprise.
This article examines how a purportedly local, postcolonial reform effort to resist center-based methods is resisted by the students and teachers it seeks to serve. In this context, rather than take center and periphery for granted, the author attempts a processual geography of method. Drawing on data from a 19-month ethnography in the Indian state of Kerala, the author first traces the materials production process and reifications of resistance to argue that method produces centers. Specifically, privileged actors rearranged the terms of recognition from literacy to orality to resist supposedly structural, behaviorist pedagogies but in effect mandated resistance to locally available literacy resources. Then, foregrounding the quality of classroom life (Kumaravadivelu, 2006a) under reform conditions, the author witnesses diverse regimes of shame. Kumaravadivelu (2006b) distinguishes methods (“established methods conceptualized and constructed by experts”) from methodologies (“what practicing teachers actually do in the classroom” to achieve their teaching objectives, p. 84). Because the material and affective registers of classroom life emerged as crucial domains of experience, the author attempts an intersectional analysis that foregrounds the material (Block, 2015; Ramanathan, 2008) in conjunction with that of the affective (Motha & Lin, 2013). Ethnographic attention to the “schema of agents, levels, and processes” (Ricento & Hornberger, 1996, p. 408) entailed in the production and consumption of a method illuminates the multiple and complex ways in which marginality is engendered and lived.
Identity and Language Learning draws on a longitudinal case study of immigrant women in Canada to develop new ideas about identity, investment, and imagined communities in the field of language learning and teaching. Bonny Norton demonstrates that a poststructuralist conception of identity as multiple, a site of struggle, and subject to change across time and place is highly productive for understanding language learning. Her sociological construct of investment is an important complement to psychological theories of motivation. The implications for language teaching and teacher education are profound. Now including a new, comprehensive Introduction as well as an Afterword by Claire Kramsch, this second edition addresses the following central questions: -Under what conditions do language learners speak, listen, read and write? -How are relations of power implicated in the negotiation of identity? -How can teachers address the investments and imagined identities of learners? The book integrates research, theory, and classroom practice, and is essential reading for students, teachers and researchers in the fields of language learning and teaching, TESOL, applied linguistics and literacy.
This article addresses Quechua instruction to emergent bilinguals in urban schools, as part of the implementation of a language policy promoting Quechua in the Peruvian Andes. In the light of two other teachers who work in similar scenarios and the language ideologies of Quechua experts leading the language policy, this article analyzes a focal teacher who constructs alternative ideologies and subjectivities that contribute to transform the power relationships typically enacted in these racially segregated urban schools. Through translanguaging strategies for involving her diverse audience (Creese and Blackledge, 2010 and García, 2009) and a critical language awareness approach to make the invisible visible and the inaudible audible (Bucholtz & Hall, 2004), this teacher constructs a community of legitimate Quechua speakers, which subverts the dominant representation of the bilingual speaker as the “perfectly” coordinated bilingual and the invisibilization of emergent bilinguals in the official language policy. Like other studies that conceptualize teachers as policy makers (Menken & García, 2010), the present study shows that teachers negotiate with official language policies and can ultimately contest them in practice. However, in the case under study, this constitutes a process where the teacher initially reproduces ambiguous and contradictory discourses before reaching more critical positionings.
In recent years, TESOL scholars have offered both explicit and implicit critiques of language ideologies developed within nationalist frameworks that positioned monolingualism in a standardized national language as the desired outcome for all citizens. These scholars have used insights from both the social and the natural sciences to call into question static conceptualizations of language and have reconceptualized language pedagogy in ways that place the fluid and dynamic language practices of bilingual students at the center of instruction. This dynamic turn in TESOL has informed the emergence of plurilingualism as a policy ideal among language education scholars in the European Union. This article argues that this shift in the field of TESOL parallels the characteristics of the ideal neoliberal subject that fits the political and economic context of the current sociohistorical period—in particular, the desire for flexible workers and lifelong learners to perform service-oriented and technological jobs as part of a post-Fordist political economy. These parallels indicate a need for a more critical treatment of the concept of plurilingualism to avoid complicity with the promotion of a covert neoliberal agenda. The article ends with a framework for TESOL that works against the grain of neoliberal governance.
The formulaic styles of dissertation writing inherited from the sciences continue to influence dissertation writers in social sciences, and in particular TESOL and applied linguistics. Some scholars both within and outside the U.S. recommend that we expand the options for dissertation writers beyond these narrow conventions (
[18],
[39],
[43] and [50]). However, the risks involved in nontraditional styles of dissertation writing may be great for students, particularly for second language writers, given the conservative and politically charged nature of the dissertation tradition. In this paper, I review these issues, and then discuss the views of dissertation writing of three Japanese students who were writing dissertations in a doctoral program at an American university in Japan with my support as advisor. Within the context of their program, these students chose unconventional theoretical frameworks and narrative inquiry for their qualitative research projects and developed writing styles that included more personal, narrative, and literary elements than were typical of dissertations in their program. The paper concludes with reasons why change is important and with questions about what role graduate advisors should play in encouraging students to take risks with their writing and so help change the discourse of the field.
Sloganization in language education discourse
- A. Pavlenko
Identity and language learning: Extending the conversation. Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters
- B Norton
Norton, B. (2013). Identity and language learning: Extending the conversation. Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters.