Abstract
Non-nativeness is a hotly-contested notion that has gained a lot of interest in recent research on language teacher education. Researchers around the globe have studied language teachers’ attitudes and beliefs about their language proficiency and/or non-nativeness, and also how these affect their identity and teaching role. (See for example, Nguyen, 2017 and Rose and Montakantiwong, 2018).
For multilingual language teachers, (non-)nativeness is merely one facet of what they perceive of their teaching job. Based on ethnographic studies carried out at the Berkeley Language Centre, The Multilingual Instructor tells stories of language teachers at the University of California (UC) at Berkeley and other UC campuses. Participant teachers were either native or non-native speakers of the particular language they were teaching in an American instructional context.
In this book, the authors employ a two-pronged conceptual framework drawing on ecolinguistic theory and complexity theory, which helps to bond together the stories and experiences of the participant teachers. The book revisits the well-known yet often ignored debate around nativeness/non-nativeness by discussing the complex ecology of foreign language instruction at four different levels: theoretical, institutional, sociopolitical and professional. The book builds on and extends previous research on this topic by arguing that the foreign language instructors are agents in a complex ecological system, which is heterogenous, non-linear, dynamic, open, and adaptive. This is because they are engaged in teaching the language learner to think, speak, and write like a native speaker of another language (Slobin, 1996). The theoretical framework of complex ecology is applied in a productive and insightful way as it helps explain the paradoxical forces that the foreign language instructor has to grapple with. Without it, the book would appear as merely a collection of individual narratives or personal stories.
Each chapter in the book not only touches on an interesting aspect of a foreign language-teaching topic, such as, institutional challenges (Chapter 3), narrative challenges (Chapter 4), and ethical challenges (Chapter 6) but also provides in-depth discussions illustrated by lively stories and engaging experiences of insiders. The employment of Stibbe’s (2015) prototypical forms or types of stories, namely, ideology, framing, metaphor, evaluation, identity, conviction, and erasure/salience explicates the structures of the stories and substantiates the underlying messages conveyed.
Not only does the book capture the various challenges that foreign language instructors encounter, by applying an ecological approach, it also attempts to explore innovative strategies that these instructors use to bridge the existing educational and historical gaps or, more practically, to stay cautious in order to avoid, for example, stereotyping (Shuliang, p. 116), sensationalism (Santoukht, p. 118), or straining their relationship with their students (Victor, p. 120–22).
Having the German classroom as an example of a European-language context and the Chinese classroom as an Asian-language one, Chapters 7 and 8 distinguish the different practices in teaching the language in each context. While the teaching practice is more subjective and historical in the German classroom, it is more relational and transformative in the Chinese classroom. In certain instances, a topic for an activity or class discussion may become both too personal to share and politically contentious to debate. Therefore, the instructor has to save face and help students out of the impasse by reminding them of his/her own position with multilingual paradoxes.
Last but not least, each chapter of the book ends with a conclusion, which provides the authors’ observations throughout the stories and interviews, and their justification of the theoretical framework. This is an impressive way of tying together the empirical observations, theoretical underpinnings of the book, lines of argument advanced and conclusions drawn from the analysis.
To conclude, it is important to share insight from the point of view of at least one of the language instructors’: ‘[a] multilingual mindset enables me more readily to embrace alternative perspectives and alternative media and modalities, to adapt to diverse situations and changes, and to develop a keener sense of language use in a dynamic multilingual society’ (p. 210). Overall, Kramsch and Zhang’s book is a welcome addition to the emerging and quite contemporary body of scholarship on teacher meta-linguistic awareness and cognition in multilingual classrooms that have increasingly become a norm rather than an exception.