Abstract
Thank you for this thought-provoking question. To answer it, I would like to return to my days as a Master's student, when I was pursuing my MA in applied linguistics at the National Institute of Education (Nanyang Technological University) in Singapore. At the time – the late 1990s into the early 2000s – I was teaching the General Paper at Hwa Chong Junior College (now Hwa Chong Institution). As an English language teaching professional, I was keen to explore the type of writer identity that my students adopted in their essays. Specifically, I was interested in their ability to develop a personal written voice in their expository essays. That initial interest formed the genesis of my interest in identity research. I was also interested in gatekeeping measures that ascertained whether students were viewed as successful and effective writers. I soon realized that the act of writing wasn’t just an act of identity; rather, it was also deeply ideological in that gatekeepers (e.g. teachers, external examiners) determined whether one's writing was ‘good enough’ for a specific writing discourse community. My interest in identity and ideology subsequently grew when I started my doctoral programme in the United States; in particular, the courses I took that reinforced my understanding of how language, language learning and language teaching were deeply political in nature, and emphasized that all three elements were inextricably linked to identity and ideology expectations. I was also reminded that some identities and ideologies were valued and others denigrated. These sociopolitical understandings were solidified when I collected my dissertation data in an English-medium Singapore secondary school. My student participants came from countries (China, Indonesia, Vietnam) where English was not the dominant language in society. For my dissertation, I examined how these students were positioned by their Singaporean peers and teachers, and explored the impact that a prevalent standard English ideology had on their learning outcomes. My findings confirmed that the ideologies of these students, their peers and their teachers, as well as the ideologies embedded in the national Singapore–Cambridge GCE Ordinary ‘O’ level examination, precipitated English acquisition challenges for my participants. My dissertation findings spurred me to advance my identity and ideology research agenda, and I have used the lens of identity and ideology to investigate social inequalities across various educational contexts. But central to my research interests is an enduring desire to find out why individuals encounter a lack of access to educational resources, and correspondingly ways to overcome this limited and often curtailed access to these resources. Over the years, I have come to realize that to better understand this lack of access, one needs to interrogate and problematize the sociohistorical contexts in which individuals – learners, teachers, school administrators, among others – are situated.
First of all, I would like to acknowledge the inroads that identity and ideology research has made not only in second language acquisition but also in the broader field of applied linguistics. Today, we have two journals – the Journal of Language, Identity, and Education and the Journal of Education, Language, and Ideology – that focus on identity and ideology, respectively. These two journals, along with numerous applied linguistics journals, handbooks and edited volumes, bear testament to the significance these two constructs have had in helping us better understand and develop strategies to bring about transformative change. As noted, work on identity and ideology has illuminated our understanding of inequities, in particular limited access to educational resources that exist in educational systems. More often than not, these inequities stem from biases that come under the guise of a lack of language proficiency. Language learners are constructed in deficit terms, often by way of their apparent inability to approximate the standard language in terms of their accent, vocabulary use, etc. These learners are thus subjected to a monolingual standard ideology that generally expects language learners to attain and embody the language proficiency standards of a mythical and idealized native speaker – a term that is problematic in and of itself because the notion of nativeness is an ideological construct. Who actually constitutes a native speaker of a language? Is it an identity label assigned through natural birth? More importantly, this linguistic prejudice is enlarged when we extend our bias to the individual; that is, if you are deemed to lack language proficiency because of an inability to reach native-speaker standards, then the problem must lie with you. Disturbingly, this problem is often attributed to identity aspects associated with an individual. In other words, you are a bad language learner because of your race, sex, social class, etc. But more importantly, you will never be able to speak from a position of authority and be seen as a legitimate user of a language because these identity aspects hinder you from assuming the mantle of a good language learner. In short, critical insights on identity- and ideology-inflected power disparities that occur in and stem from the classroom and society have prompted language teacher educators to bring about programmatic innovation for pre-service and in-service teachers. In the past, language teacher education was only concerned with how to help teachers improve their pedagogical knowledge and skills in teaching grammar, listening, reading, speaking and writing, as well as more general skills that pertain to adjacent concerns such as classroom management. Let me be clear at this juncture: the ability to help students develop the above-mentioned skills remains vitally important. But increasingly, within more progressive teacher education circles today, language teacher educators have called for an identity-as-pedagogy and an ideology-as-pedagogy approach that centres identity and ideology in teacher education, with the larger goal of cultivating critical multilingual language awareness among students. The development of such awareness also needs to be communicated to policymakers. By policymakers, I do not just mean politicians and curriculum specialists in ministries of education. Those individuals are certainly important, and they need to be enlightened about the aforementioned prejudices and challenges that language learners often encounter. But other equally important policymakers, who are often overlooked, are teachers who implement language policies in their respective classrooms, and parents who enforce language policies at home. For decades, we have been conducting research on developing home–school synergies, and thus it is important that all stakeholders (e.g. teachers, parents, politicians) be educated about how identity- and ideology-related prejudices can impede learning. The goal and expectation, of course, would be to develop a broader understanding of what constitutes a good language learner; that is, a good language learner is more than just an individual who acquires the standard language or standard variety of a language. The follow-up action would be to design pedagogy that recognizes and capitalizes on the various resources that multilingual learners bring to the classroom in order to set them up for educational success.
Thanks for this question. I would like to circle back to what I have said so far. Some language learners are deemed poor learners simply because of the identities they inhabit. Take, for example, an immigrant Latino student from Guatemala whose home language is Spanish. In the United States, he is labelled an English learner, and his Spanish is seen as negatively interfering with his acquisition of English. He may be perceived as a poor language learner because he is viewed as speaking neither standard English nor Spanish. And that is because he is unfairly expected to develop his English and Spanish separately, and acquire native speaking proficiency levels in both languages. With respect to his being a learner of English, as a brown-skinned immigrant, his spoken English might be seen as being deficient by a white monolingual English speaker. The onus to speak ‘better unaccented’ English therefore falls on this Latino student who is deemed a poor English language learner. By contrast, no fault seems to lie with the white monolingual English speaker who has trouble comprehending the accent of the Latino student. Traditionally, the responsibility of becoming intelligible has lain with the Latino student (or for that matter any minoritized language learner), and thus it is the job of his English teacher to remediate him. Highlighting the injustice levelled against such a student and white normativity, the critical sociolinguists Nelson Flores and Jonathan Rosa coined the term ‘raciolinguistics’ to underscore how the educational system and society seem to be rigged in favour of the white monolingual English speaker; that is, blame often falls squarely on the minoritized English learner who is viewed as linguistically deviant even when approximating ‘standard’ linguistic practices. In their critique of this ideological and identity bias, Flores and Rosa make us (re)think this situation, explaining that perhaps the person requiring remediation is the white monolingual English speaker, who needs to develop critical multilingual awareness, to become aware that not all languages are equally valued, and by extension, not all speakers of a language and their linguistic repertoires are equally valued. So how exactly do these insights inform our understanding of today's complex multilingual classrooms? First, and before we can consider reconceptualizing language learning, we need to recognize that languages are not monolithic and that they are not frozen in time – in other words, that a pure ‘standard’ form exists for any language is a myth, a social construct, because in reality, real people mix languages and style shift (i.e. they move across formal and informal registers) in a socially situated and context-dependent manner. We also need to recognize that language is but one of many ways that people communicate with each other because in reality, people deploy a range of semiotic resources (e.g. gesture, drawings) to get their messages across. Map these realities onto language learning, and we realize that we need an expanded view of language learning – one that needs to recognize that learners mobilize a range of semiotic resources to communicate effectively. Using this understanding as a baseline, I have come to see the need for language teachers and language teacher educators to support language learners by acknowledging (and not penalizing) the cultural and semiotic resources these learners bring to the classroom. This paradigm shift requires us to re(design) our pedagogy in ways that help learners capitalize on these resources to enhance their overall learning outcomes. Indeed, at first glance, all this sounds highfalutin, a pie-in-the-sky set of aspirations. But I would argue from experience that all this is possible if we start with nurturing the critical reflexivity of learners and teachers. In other words, both groups of individuals need to be made aware of identity and ideological biases. And this begins by having them critically examine their own sociolinguistic histories. In my own classroom, I have my students draw language portraits of themselves where they identify and depict what languages constitute their linguistic repertoires. More often than not, they demarcate in their portraits their home languages as being close to their heart and affiliate their second language with their heads. Following the creation of their portraits, I probe my students to tell me more about their drawing, and this is when they narrate their prior experiences learning different languages; sometimes acquiring their home language is associated with shame, and other times, they attach much pride to learning their home language. Such affinities underscore the fact that apart from the identities and ideologies associated with learning a language, language learning is also a deeply emotional enterprise that is often characterized by a range of emotions that includes anxiety and resentment. In sum, in working with language learners and language teachers, I always highlight to them that language learning and teaching is a political act that entails creating affordances for learners – especially those who are minoritized – to speak, be heard, and be respected. And that is the core of the social and educational justice work to which I am committed.
As stated, language learning and teaching are political acts. In particular, we need to reconceptualize language learning as merely acquiring language skills such as reading, writing, listening, speaking and grammar. Because language learning is more than the acquisition of a bundle of decontextualized skills, it is important to consider the sociopolitical dimensions of language learning and teaching. We need to remember that the classroom is a microcosm of society. As I mentioned earlier, biases against languages and language varieties in society often bleed into the classroom. In a similar vein, certain ways that some segments of the population (e.g. immigrants and refugees) are viewed in society are mapped onto their classroom language learning experiences. It is not uncommon to find, as I pointed out earlier, that immigrant and refugee learners are often viewed in deficit terms. Because of this, the goal of language teaching from a mainstream perspective is to remove the home language of the learner (e.g. Spanish) and to displace it with the dominant language in society (e.g. English). This is certainly the case in the United States, where a subtractive multilingual stance is in operation; that is, schools aim to remove languages other than English from the linguistic repertoires of minoritized students. Given that what goes on in a classroom is also affected by decisions made at the school, district, national and international levels (imagine, for example, that many international students take the international TOEFL test to gain entry into a US university), it is therefore pivotal that we problematize and unpack the factors that influence language learning and teaching across the various stated (i.e. school, district, national and international) levels. An ecological approach would take into account these different levels, and explore how language learning and teaching are impacted by factors at these multiple levels. Take, for example, the fact that neoliberal logic drives much of language learning and teaching today. Many teachers proverbially teach to the test (e.g. the TOEFL test) so that their students can secure high scores for US university admission. But the TOEFL test, which is designed by Educational Testing Service (ETS) that generated over US$1 billion in revenue in 2022, coupled with the high costs associated with the actual test itself as well as the exorbitant cost of test preparation, makes it unattainable for many under-resourced students. A critical-ecological approach to teaching would thus require teachers to think about the complex neoliberal web in which they are entangled. More specifically, if we study language teacher emotions through a critical-ecological lens, we are led to see how teachers within a neoliberal education system have to endure intense emotional pressure to help their students pass high-stakes tests. Teachers all around world have to contend with high-stakes test preparation because increasingly, schools and universities are ranked according to their performance on neoliberally oriented exams that sort and sieve students. Admittedly, Western values of liberalism, commercialization, competition and profit making such as joining global university rankings, which underpin neoliberalism, have created undue emotional stress for learners and teachers alike; both parties, including the research community, thus first need to be made critically aware of how structural forces impact learning, teaching and research. Next, they need to develop transformative steps to ensure that more equitable outcomes are achieved so that learners and teachers are not exploited by unequal power relations.
I would like to recap several things I have said so far. As mentioned, we need to centre identity, ideology and emotion in both language teacher education and language teaching, with the broader goal of cultivating critical reflexivity among learners and teachers. Teachers and teacher educators also need to embrace praxis (i.e. the act of combining theory with practice) by applying insights into identity, ideology and emotion to their pedagogical practices. Unfortunately, some SLA research findings lack classroom applications. Put differently, some SLA researchers may conduct research that does not yield pedagogical benefits for classroom practitioners. One way to bridge the gap is to embark on research projects after consulting with teachers. In other words, we should seek the input of teachers in terms of what types of research warrant investigation. That way research findings can be ploughed back into the classroom to enhance pedagogy and to elevate learning outcomes. Methodologically, the research–practice divide can be bridged by employing research methods that are accessible to teachers. In my own research, I have collected teacher narratives (both written and oral). I have also conducted ethnographic work that tracks learner and teacher development. Such longitudinal research has enabled me to build trust and rapport with my teacher partners, and it is the establishment of such trust and rapport that helps further narrow the so-called researcher–practitioner divide. Central to my work is the need to carry out ethical research which not only seeks to minimize harm to my teacher collaborators but also aims to give back to them. And I have done this by conducting workshops upon completing my studies and sharing my findings with teacher audiences. In return, I also learned through these workshops from teachers who have helped refine my thinking. In essence, I have always approached my work with teachers with a stance of humility, in that I view our collaborations as opportunities for knowledge exchange and not knowledge transfer from researcher to practitioner. To this end, I have often sought to co-present my work with my teacher partners at conferences and co-author publications – in particular, publications that have a primarily teacher audience. As a critical ethnographer by training, I have always sought to help my readers better understand the educational contexts that I study by communicating my work in a reader-friendly manner, with minimum use of technical jargon. Overall, I think applied linguists need to step out of their academic ivory tower and work closely with our colleagues in the classroom.
Sometimes language learning takes on an instrumental dimension; that is, an individual acquires a language in order to advance their careers. Language learning thus becomes a capital acquisition exercise because the language is learned to improve an individual's chances for social mobility. Building on this neoliberal logic, my Singapore-based colleagues, Lionel Wee and Joseph Park, and I put forward the notion of linguistic entrepreneurship, which we described as ‘the act of aligning with the moral imperative to strategically exploit language-related resources for enhancing one's worth in the world’ (De Costa et al. 2016: 697). Indeed, this definition is quite a mouthful, but the main idea here is that individual learners, often under influence of larger social forces such as the government, might feel a moral obligation to acquire additional languages and become competitive internationally in order to become a valued member of society. These learners therefore come to internalize the ideology of neoliberalism through the mediation of language. As a consequence, language learning becomes an entrepreneurial self-development project, language learners are positioned as entrepreneurs, and the responsibility of institutions such as schools is then to produce the ideal neoliberal worker. In our 2016 article that I cited earlier, Lionel Wee, Joseph Park and I applied the notion of linguistic entrepreneurship to understand the challenges encountered by language learners today. But in our follow-up article in the journal Language Policy that you cited, we expanded the scope of this heuristic to show how the notion of linguistic entrepreneurship can also be applied to institutions. Importantly, these institutions solidify their role as enablers of linguistic entrepreneurship by working in league with adjacent neoliberal entities such as major testing companies. In short, as an analytical framework, linguistic entrepreneurship gives us pause to rethink the purpose of language learning. Have individuals and institutions strayed so far from the joy of learning language that language learning is reduced to an extrinsic material pursuit of language skill acquisition, with little regard for the intrinsic aesthetic and cultural value of the language? And relatedly, how might acquiring a language that holds much economic capital such as English, Chinese or Spanish create a wedge between learners who have access to educational resources and learners who do not? These are critical questions we need to consider in language education policymaking and implementation.
The field of applied linguistics examines language-related processes and practices from multiple research paradigms. But applied linguistic research is generally anchored in real communicative contexts where language is used in authentic ways. The three complementary areas of inquiry – EIL, ELF and translanguaging – you identified are examples of how language is used in real life across the globe, both within the classroom and wider society. Take translanguaging, for instance, which refers to the shuttling back and forth between two or more languages to facilitate communication. More recently, translanguaging scholars have expanded their definition of this construct to include the use of semiotic resources to support communication. The phenomenon of translanguaging occurs naturally among multilinguals when they communicate with each other. To expect learners to only use a mythical standard English while abandoning their other linguistic and semiotic resources is unrealistic and wishful thinking at best. Returning to what I said about language ideology and identity earlier, a stance that stands in diametric opposition to translanguaging would essentially be one that endorses an oppressive ideology that marginalizes minoritized language learners, blatantly refuses to acknowledge these learners’ multilingual identities, and actively seeks to devalue and erase their multilingual repertoires. In this respect, I certainly do not see translanguaging as romanticized pedagogy. Rather, I view it as a deeply humanizing pedagogy that is both culturally responsive and practical. Instead of viewing the cultural and linguistic resources as liabilities, translanguaging exemplifies an asset-based pedagogical approach that capitalizes on learners’ multilinguality in order to help develop mastery over academic content; that is, teachers should tap their students’ and their own multilinguality to optimize learning. (Please see De Costa et al., 2021 for a further discussion of this issue.) In a similar vein, if we hold a mirror up to the classroom and society, the phenomena of EIL and ELF reflect contemporary realities. No one can deny the global spread of English. And because of this, it would be remiss to say that any one group of people can claim ownership over it, because English has been appropriated and modified accordingly to encapsulate the sociolinguistic realities of varied users in different communities. The World Englishes scholarship that dates back to the seminal work of Braj Kachru is testament to how English has evolved over time and geographical space. Even though digital technology has brought people around the world closer together and increased travel options to foster globalization, the odds of an English language learner in Cambodia coming into regular contact with a so-called ‘native’ speaker of English are slim. They are more likely to interact with another English learner from Indonesia within the ASEAN region, with English as a lingua franca being the common mode of communication. Again, I do not see ELF pedagogy as being a romanticized area of inquiry. On the contrary, I perceive it to be a highly pragmatic approach to acquiring English, because it taps how learners actually use English for communication. Most importantly, whether one adopts a translanguaging, ELF or EIL pedagogical stance, it needs to be noted that all three stances constitute an epistemic break from Western-centred pedagogical knowledge production in that the former three pedagogical approaches emphasize the importance of intelligibility in communication. These three approaches also do not represent transplanted pedagogical approaches that are unquestioningly and uncritically imported wholesale from English-dominant countries, while being divorced from the local sociolinguistic realities of English learners.
I think to some extent I pre-empted this question in my response to the previous question. I firmly believe that translanguaging as a pedagogy, as evidenced in the translanguaging research done by Ofelia Garcia, Li Wei and their colleagues, has resulted in better learning outcomes both within the ESL/EFL classroom and in content subject classrooms. Notably, such a pedagogical approach also ratifies and validates learners’ multilingual identities, which itself can impact these learners on a positively emotional level. For example, translanguaging can remove learner anxiety, which in the long run makes English acquisition a less daunting experience. Next, because of the complex pedagogical manoeuvres that are involved in translanguaging pedagogy (e.g. teachers place learners in same home language groups so that learners can support and provide guidance to each other, teachers shuttle between the learners’ home language and English to ensure they understand course content), I would certainly not say translanguaging is simplistic. In fact, it is quite the opposite, because translanguaging pedagogy requires a high degree of commitment and scaffolding by those involved in the teaching process. But more importantly, translanguaging, as I noted earlier, embodies an explicit critical and decolonial stance because it forces us to think about the politics of education and hidden educational agendas that seek to assert a standard English hegemony. As a teacher and teacher educator, I have always believed that we need to prepare students to become citizens of a global society. Insulating learners from the multilingual realities that are more the norm than the exception and advancing a standard English monolingual ideology would be a huge disservice to them. What we need to produce are students who have critical multilingual awareness, if our goal is to prepare the next generation of transformative intellectuals.
