This month we are publishing Critical Conversation Analysis edited by Hansun Zhang Waring and Nadja Tadic. In this post the editors explain why and how they used Conversation Analysis to achieve a deeper understanding of diversity, equity and inclusion.
Spurred by social justice movements of the late 2010s, American businesses and universities instituted a range of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies aimed at promoting employment and educational opportunities for historically marginalized groups. Now, in the spring of 2024, DEI is increasingly criticized and eliminated as perfunctory, ineffective, and even unequitable. Our volume is in part curated to counter this dangerous narrative by demonstrating that diversity, equity and inclusion are not mere “buzz words” touted in abstract and controversial policies. They are, instead, deeply relevant human concerns that permeate mundane moments of everyday life.
We were particularly interested in how the framework of Conversation Analysis (CA), notoriously seen as over-invested in the minutiae of interaction at the expense of large social concerns, might help us achieve a deeper understanding of issues of diversity, equity and inclusion beyond the surface, given CA’s power of uncovering the “seen but unnoticed” and generating insights that often escape human awareness.
As such, the chapters in the volume use CA to closely examine how exclusion, injustice and inequity are both reproduced and resisted in various contexts, ranging from the family dinner table to the political town hall. We see, for instance, how racially diverse everyday speakers construct English as a white American language through negative evaluations of non-white speakers. But we also see how anti-racist work is achieved through ordinary people’s pursuit of shared understandings and humor. These are just some of the many examples of how we attend to diversity, equity and inclusion in our everyday lives, which the featured chapters carefully unpack.
Our hope is that this volume will be informative and inspiring for readers of various backgrounds: for members of diverse communities, businesses and universities seeking to promote diversity, equity and inclusion; for educators invested in fostering critical awareness and social justice; for researchers interested in evidence-based approaches to examining power (in)equality; and for analysts who might have been skeptical of CA’s ability to address critical research questions.
Nadja Tadic and Hansun Zhang Waring
For more information about this book please see our website.
This month we are publishing New Horizons in Prescriptivism Research edited by Nuria Yáñez‐Bouza, María E. Rodríguez‐Gil and Javier Pérez‐Guerra. In this post the editors explain the book’s key themes and consider future research directions.
How does the book approach the study of prescriptivism and what are the key themes it explores?
In this volume, prescriptivism is examined in a rich and varied manner, spanning historical perspectives and contemporary analyses. The chapters illuminate the role of language norms, social influences and speech communities in shaping prescriptive attitudes. This multifaceted approach is achieved by delving into various aspects of prescriptive practices, such as language norms in historical manuals and sociocultural values in literary texts and scripts. It also looks into how members of speech communities – of mainstream English, varieties of English and other languages –perceive the notion of ‘correct’ and ‘standard’ language.
How does this volume contribute to ongoing research in the field of prescriptivism?
New Horizons in Prescriptivism Research offers a fresh perspective to the study of prescriptivism by presenting innovative approaches and interdisciplinary themes. The research questions in the chapters address the main topics of the evolving landscape of the field and the authors’ insightful analyses offer valuable contributions to current trends, sparking new ideas and motivating further inquiry. Each part of the volume is concerned with different facets of prescriptivism. Part 1 traces the roots of linguistic prescriptivism in (historical) British and American English, and also examines the legacy of historical norms in contemporary language attitudes and usage. Part 2 reflects on the interdisciplinary nature of prescriptivism, with chapters combining linguistic assessment with literary enquiry in order to trace norms and language identity across genres, from poetry to TV shows. In Part 3, the authors look into prescriptivism in the context of New Englishes, touching on Indian English, Hong Kong English and Australian English. And Part 4 addresses the ideological stance of prescriptivism in languages beyond English, broadening the geographical coverage and paving the way for future comparative analyses in other national languages, such as Icelandic, Greek and Dutch.
What is the future of research on prescriptivism?
The future of research on prescriptivism is rich and diverse, with wide scope for scholars to continue scrutinising its complexities. In a globalised and digital world, prescriptive language use and language attitudes continue to evolve, attracting increasing attention. Interdisciplinary collaborations and cross-cultural perspectives will broaden our knowledge of prescriptivism in various linguistic, literary and social contexts. In this regard, this volume provides glimpses of future trends in the field by revisiting the principle of suppression of optional variability in the selection of a standard form, by exploring the diversity of strands of prescriptivism which have been institutionalised by various social forces and in varied linguistic or literary contexts, by tracing the process of linguistic democratisation as opposed to strict prescriptive norms, or by offering new readings of the ways in which social relations are constructed based on how errors and stigmatised features are perceived.
What is the main takeaway from this book?
In essence, this book invites readers to embark on a journey of exploration. The diverse range of perspectives and analyses here presented help to elucidate the complex relationship between language norms, social change and the choices made by individuals. Collectively, and addressing historical practices as well as contemporary attitudes, the chapters investigate the social role of prescriptivism, its portrayal in literature and its values in speech communities. By presenting innovative approaches and varied methodologies, the volume enhances our understanding of the significance of prescriptivism in shaping language history and society. It reflects the dynamics of the field with stimulating insights and avenues for deeper inquiry.
For more information about this book please see our website.
If you found this interesting, you might also like Language Prescription edited by Don Chapman and Jacob D. Rawlins.
This month we published Redoing Linguistic Worlds edited by Kris Aric Knisely and Eric Louis Russell. In this post the editors explain why the book is so necessary.
Has anyone ever told you that the way you language is “wrong”? That it “doesn’t exist”? That “you can’t” do or say or sign something in the way that you have? And, yet, here you are, speaking, writing, signing – doing language in those ways. As a languager – someone doing any form of linguistic activity – you are existing, shaping your world, and sharing that world with others (even if some of those people attempt to use claims to linguistic authority and power to suggest that you are not).
The kind of language pedantry that would suggest that anyone’s language is impossible or wrong is not new. Language is always a site of contestation, controversy, expansion, and tension. Language seems to always stir up these kinds of attitudes about what can and cannot (or what should and should not) be. We live with language attitudes and, often, we accept them as more palatable covers for racism, classism, sexism, cissexism, binarism, and other oppressive systems.
Why? What are these attitudes doing in our worlds and what’s behind them? Frequently, language attitudes are used as a tool to constrain and conserve, as a part of futile attempts to circumvent a core truth: Language is always changing, in large part because the linguistic doings, redoings, and undoings of languagers are very real ways of expressing how they understand their worlds. And like the individuals and collectives that inhabit them, these worlds are always shifting.
With Redoing Linguistic Worlds we – and our contributors – ask: What happens when we undo and reimagine gender and language together? What happens when we move beyond cislingualism (i.e. the intersection between normative ideas about language and about gender modality that center and value cisgender positionalities and ways of doing language)? In what ways is this about a movement past gender binarism (i.e. the idea that gender is a man/woman binary)? How does this open up possibilities for moving past other binarities (e.g. gender modality as a trans/cis dichotomy)? Where and in what ways is this about an expansion of gender? When is it about fluidizing – a blurring of the very concept that people can, might, or should be gendered in any way? How might it be about expanding, fluidizing, burning down, and reimagining all at once?
For those of us whose genders exist beyond normative frames, these questions are evidently bound up in the ways that we experience our worlds and the languaging through which they are constantly remade; these questions are the intellectual exploration of our lives and linguacultures. For others of us – those who sit more comfortably within dominant frames for doing language and gender – these questions may appear less salient, less obligatory; they are not about our own self-understandings, but a means of respecting and honoring those of others. Yet, it is a fallacy to think that we are not all involved in this change-in-progress: When someone engages singular they or xe or any form that expands their linguistic world, they ask others –directly or indirectly – to also expand their own.
If you’re reading this blog post, these are perhaps lackluster examples – you undoubtedly are familiar with such expansions in Anglophone settings – but what of other linguacultural spaces? What does this “redoing the world through redoing languaging habits” look like for others, especially in communities in which gender markings are done more extensively than in English, such as those deploying canonically-labelled masculine and feminine forms? How are languagers remaking the linguistic world through German, Spanish, French, or Italian?
We began this project with the observation that there is relatively little attention given to these linguacultural contexts and their inhabitants – and that what has been given is often rendered through an appropriating, approximating lens. Rather than simply calque understandings of Anglophone patterns onto those of other languaging ecosystems, or map cislingual frames onto communities that reject these, we wanted to understand these from within. And hence Redoing Linguistic Worlds was born.
This volume, the first of its kind to our knowledge, brings into conversation scholars working on how people do language and gender together in French, German, Italian and Spanish. Each of the chapters takes a different perspective – some focusing on classroom pedagogy and teaching practices, others on empirical data from various languagers, still more taking ethnographic approaches to the question of how redoing is accomplished, how it affects the lives of languagers and what any redoing means, individually and collectively. We’re thrilled to see these works be made available to the public – and to participate in the conversations that they engender, wrestle with the questions they ask, and attend to the perspectives they manifest.
We join with many of our colleagues (both those who are a part of this volume and those working beyond its purview) to assert – as the late John Henner so directly and perfectly stated: “How you language is beautiful. Don’t let anyone tell you your language is wrong. Your languaging is the story of your life.” With Redoing Linguistic Worlds we begin to sketch the contours of these beautiful linguistic worlds that are undone, reimagined, and remade when the infiniteness of language meets that of gender.
(Spoiler alert: These infinite galaxies cannot be contained in one volume – We are already formulating the next volume, in which we hope to continue to expand the conversation past well-trodden spaces. We invite any, but especially those working in “less commonly studied” linguacultures and among their languagers, to contact us for more information.)
For more information about this book please see our website.
This month we published Domestic Workers Talk by Kellie Gonçalves and Anne Ambler Schluter. In this post the authors introduce the book and explain what inspired it.
This study of Shine (a multilingual cleaning company) was inspired by the dearth of sociolinguistic work carried out in domestic labor contexts and blue-collar workplaces more generally. As Kellie had close familial ties to Magda, Shine’s owner, we were able to gain access to all employees (migrant women who speak Portuguese and Spanish) and several of Shine’s Anglophone clients who reside in an upper-class suburb of New York City. As such, we were able to talk to the company owner (Magda), all of her employees and several clients in order to better understand how communication is achieved in a small private business where European Portuguese serves as the company internal language despite the company’s geographical location in the US, where English is the dominant language.
Our study had a strong ethnographic component to it meaning that we were also able to observe how the company hierarchy was structured and how daily business was carried out. As both Kellie and Anne are speakers of English, Portuguese and Spanish (at different levels), we were able to witness first-hand how different languages and different language varieties were valued, mixed, and used among domestic workers with different linguistic and cultural backgrounds.
At the same time, we were also able to observe the diverse, creative linguistic and embodied resources drawn on to facilitate communication among domestic workers and their Anglophone clients. Because Magda, the company owner, is a multilingual speaker, she often facilitated communication between her employees and clients thus serving as the main language broker of the company. This fact coupled with domestic workers’ ability to use both Portuguese and Spanish in Newark, NJ (where many domestic workers reside) diminished most domestic workers’ need and even motivation to learn English while simultaneously allowing Magda to control and micro-manage communication between her employees and clients. English was therefore not a prerequisite for employment at Shine.
Due to Magda’s professional background in finance, as well as her managerial and multilingual skills, we also investigated the complex power relations among her, her migrant female employees as well as her Anglophone clients. While we found Magda’s managerial style to be very direct and authoritative, she also had a very soft side to her with regard to both her employees and clients resulting in little turnover of her staff and a high demand for Shine’s cleaning services.
Overall, the book traces the story of Magda as a migrant domestic worker herself, who left Brazil in the 1970s to work as a live-in nanny for an upper-class Brazilian family in New Jersey up until the establishment of Shine in the mid 1980s. We collected data for this project beginning in 2011 until shortly before the book was published in order to provide readers with an accurate and up to date account of how Shine was created and successfully run until Magda’s retirement in 2019 shortly before the Covid-19 pandemic.
We believe our study adds to the growing body of research on language and domestic work by taking embodied sociolinguistics, posthumanism and emotional intelligence into account while simultaneously maintaining a critical perspective on multilingualism, the feminine gendered nature of domestic work as well as the inherent power relations between majority and minority language speakers, where issues of class, gender and citizenship prevail.
For more information about this book please see our website.
If you found this interesting, you might also like Exploring (Im)mobilities edited by Anna De Fina and Gerardo Mazzaferro.
In June 2009, John Edwards, editor of the Multilingual Matters book series, contacted Durk. He suggested writing a general book on the subject of Linguistic Landscape. In John’s words, “this would be the book that scholars would turn to when wanting an introduction, an overview, and an assessment of this emerging field.” At the time, the field of Linguistic Landscapes was flourishing and it was obviously gaining traction. An increasing number of researchers had started to carry out inspiring studies, presented their work at conferences, and published numerous articles and book chapters. The series of annual Linguistic Landscapes workshops kicked off in Tel Aviv in January 2008 and has now celebrated its 14th edition in September 2023 in Madrid.
As usual, our problem was that we were involved in carrying out too many projects, preparing presentations and writing publications. We could not find the concentration and the time to write such a book on Linguistic Landscape studies. Moreover, as Durk wrote back to John: “I tried to design a table of contents for a full-length book. Yet, I came to the conclusion that although many exciting things are going on in the field of linguistic landscape studies, it is not ‘mature’ or ‘coherent’ enough to write such a full-length study.” The plan for the book remained for a long time on the back burner on our list of future plans.
Over the years, we remained active working with Linguistic Landscape data. We published several articles and chapters, for example, on Linguistic Landscapes inside multilingual schools or on Linguistic Landscapes and translanguaging. However, our focus was on multilingual education.
Then came the COVID-19 pandemic. In March 2020, under strict lockdown, we started to design the book and we systematically collected published data on Linguistic Landscape studies. We drafted a table of contents, which was changed several times, and we started the writing process. Other commitments often had to be given priority and frequently delayed the process, but now the result is here.
Of course, a book like this implies making many choices. For example, numerous studies were not included, because we considered those not to belong to the field, whereas others might disagree. As the reader will notice, the book is richly illustrated with over 90 photographs in colour (!) of signage we had seen with our own eyes. The selection of the illustrations was a complex and difficult process. With this blog, we include two photos that for different reasons did not make it to the book. The first we considered for the cover of the book because it has the word “Panorama”. The photo illustrates the difficulty of knowing in which language a sign is. This photo was taken in Beynac in France, so probably it is French. However, the word panorama can just as well be English, German, Spanish, Dutch, Frisian or even Basque. The second photo is the only sign we have that combines Basque and Frisian, the two languages we have studied most. The statement in three languages “Leave your language trail” is what we intend to do with this book.
Durk Gorter, Ikerbasque Research Professor and University of the Basque Country
(durk.gorter@gmail.com)
In September we will be publishing Essays in Linguistic Ethnography by Adrian Blackledge and Angela Creese. In this post the authors explain their innovative approach to linguistic ethnography.
This book offers new directions in linguistic ethnography. It introduces relational ethics to better comprehend everyday encounters; it makes visible the research process, listening to the reflexive voices of researchers; it resists the ethnographic urge to explain and make meaningful the lives of others; and it proposes a polyphonic approach to ethnographic writing which seeks to flatten established hierarchies.
The essays here depart from previous research in linguistic ethnography, drawing on Levinas’ (1985) notion of the humanism of the other. In linguistic ethnographic research we observe that strangers are often disposed to social engagement, participation and connection. This orientation to difference is also frequently evident in relations between researchers and research participants who are initially unknown to one another. Through innovative ethnographic writing we make manifest relations between people who encounter each other as strangers. Relational ethics provides a point of departure as we come to better understand human engagement in everyday encounters.
We propose an approach to research on communication in cities which engages the creative imagination in coming to new understandings. Ethnographic poems can incorporate the rhythm and rhyme of everyday life, and move beyond the literal. They speak to something universal, to clarify some part of the human condition. Poets have much to teach ethnographers about how metaphor, metonym, rhythm and rhyme can illuminate and enhance understandings of social life. We suggest that the poem has considerable potential as a way of seeing, and a way of saying, in linguistic ethnography.
We reflect on the process of turning linguistic ethnographic data into playscripts to be performed in the theatre. The polyphonic voices of research subjects inform the voices of characters in ethnographic dramas which tell stories from a community centre, a city library and a volleyball club. Researchers, too, become visible on stage as they go about their observation and recording of daily interaction. Aware of the audience, even addressing them directly, researchers are at the same time the observers and the observed. Ethnographic drama does not so much explain social life as lay it before the audience, inviting critical comment.
A series of extended vignettes written by researchers in a large linguistic ethnographic team provides a window into the world of the researcher. The vignettes, written at the end of intensive periods of ethnographic fieldwork, reflect on relations in the field, and relations in the research team. They tell stories of tensions, compromises, resolutions and realisations, making visible the often hidden work of successful relations in ethnographic field work. We listen to multiple voices, a chorus of individual perspectives from a range of research contexts, each with its own singularity and irreducibility.
This collection of essays offers a guide to researchers in linguistic ethnography who see the potential of creativity in showing aspects of communication in social life. But it does far more than this, placing the listening subject front and centre. These essays introduce a philosophical orientation to research which offers theory and practice to engage with social relations in contexts of difference.
For more information about this book please see our website.
In discourses of philanthropy and social justice, the phrase “to give voice” is used almost as ubiquitously as “to empower”. Often, it is used to mean to speak on somebody’s behalf, perhaps even without their involvement. Yet, much like it is very difficult to give people the power to do anything, we cannot give individuals or communities a voice. In fact, they do not need to be given a voice, nor anybody to speak on their behalf. They, indeed, have a voice. The question is: Is that voice being heard, being taken seriously? Have they been provided with the space and tools to develop a “voice worth hearing”, as Hymes asked in 1996?
The concept of voice is complex and multifaceted, and its meaning can vary depending on the context in which it is used. Indeed, the idea of voice has been taken up by scholars in various fields investigating a range of notions. In our book, we see “voice” as the communicative power and effective expression of a language user’s views and perceptions in a given context. In sociolinguistics, issues of voice concern the potential social exclusion of those who do not have a command of the socially esteemed language varieties that are prevalent in educational and civil contexts. Exercising voice is a way of challenging the inequalities embedded in society and critiquing the way they are systematically reproduced.
Voice is closely related to agency, which refers to the ability to take action and effect change in one’s environment. In order for marginalized voices to be heard and for people to exercise agency, they need to be able to communicate effectively and persuasively in a given context. It is not only about being heard but also about the “freedom to develop a voice worth hearing” (Hymes, 1996: 64). If minority language users are to be taken seriously, they need to understand and connect with the people and contexts that they seek to change. Cultivating this voice takes time, effort, and the support of others through education, whether formal or informal (Rampton, Cooke & Holmes, 2018).
In this context, (socio)linguistic citizenship is a valuable concept. It refers to what people do with and around language(s) to position themselves agentively, and to craft new subjectivities of political speakerhood, often outside of those prescribed or legitimated in institutional frameworks of the state. Although bottom-up approaches are a key aim of (socio)linguistic citizenship, their facilitation is connected to a range of challenges, particularly regarding the sustainability of any such efforts. This highlights the importance of voice, including voices from the grassroots, and the importance of an engaged, committed community.
Speakers and signers of minoritized communities need a platform, the space and tools to gain knowledge, spread their ideas, and make themselves heard. Research on their languages should therefore include commitments to voice, to participation and agency, lest researchers become unwitting accomplices in linguistic oppression. Reclaiming control over one’s language and reality – that is what it means to exercise’s one’s voice.
For more information about this book please see our website.
This month we published Political Activism in the Linguistic Landscape by Philip Seargeant with Korina Giaxoglou and Frank Monaghan. In this post Philip explains why he chose to present his research in the form of a graphic novel.
The stimulus for my new book, Political Activism in the Linguistic Landscape, was to try to find ways of discussing, in an academic monograph, something which is a predominantly visual phenomenon. Linguistic landscape research is about the display of language in public space. It’s about how the language of signs, posters, placards and any other genre of public communication is used to express social meaning in communal settings. An important element of this language use is its existence as a material object. It’s also very often accompanied by images and it draws its meaning from the context and cultural space in which it’s displayed. So rather than simply including the odd grainy photo of the cases I was analysing, I wanted a more visually-oriented way of dealing with the way that words, images and location come together to create meaning when people are taking to the streets to protest against what they see as political injustice. In other words, I wanted to create a multimodal account of what is a very multimodal spectacle.
A page from the book
The solution – or at least my attempt at a solution – was to use the genre of a graphic novel (broadly understood) as a means of both presenting the examples of political activism I was looking at and analysing the ways in which these signs combined with context and audience to make meaning.
But there was also another reason for experimenting with this format. One which has as much to do with the genre as it does with the subject of the book. And which reflects on the extent to which academic writing is allowed to be ‘creative’.
Recently in my department, there was a discussion amongst colleagues about how generative AI – ChatGPT and the like – is going to affect the production and publishing of academic texts. The discussion echoed the wider public panic about the disruption this technology will have on society generally: human enterprise will be replaced by machines, plagiarisers and pedlars of disinformation will proliferate, and so on and so forth.
One specific line of argument was that the marketplace for academic texts will be flooded by facile articles which are of negligible intellectual interest but have the semblance of competently written academic prose. Academic writing as we know it will become a genre of algorithmically-determined and excessively formulaic text production and we’ll soon be overwhelmed by people churning out articles devoid of creative ideas and enquiry.
The arguments behind this position adhere to a widespread reaction to technological change which views it as irredeemably dystopian. This is an essentially conservative argument: the fear that while we have, over the years, developed rationally-based conventions for dealing with the challenges we face as a civilization, this new technology will undermine those conventions and upset the balanced flow of life as we know it.
But as an argument it also fails to acknowledge that ‘academic writing’ has already become a practice that is algorithmically-determined and excessively formulaic, and that the motivation for producing academic texts often has little to do with creative knowledge production and more to do with the fulfilling of institutional requirements.
The precepts that underpin what has become known as ‘academic writing’ are all too often lost beneath a complicated and dogmatic rulebook of conventions. And the excessively formulaic nature of academic texts frequently has the consequence of hampering the very purpose they’re meant to fulfil. All too regularly the compelling argument or the insightful analysis gets squeezed down to almost nothing due to requirements to list tangentially-related studies simply for the performative value of indicating that you’re aware of them, or the necessity of name-checking alternative theoretical approaches which you have no intention of actually drawing upon. The result is that the process of both writing and reading such texts becomes increasingly laborious – in a way that’s in inverse proportion to the amount of value or stimulus one gets from them.
There’s no reason why academic writing needs to be such a formulaic practice, however, and no reason why it can’t be creatively exploratory. The basic precepts for an academic text are fairly straight-forward: it should be soundly argued, based on valid and documented evidence, and should extend our understanding of some phenomenon or other. As long as it aims at this, the format should, presumably, be able to take whatever form the writer wishes.
And there’s been some recent work which does precisely this. To take just one example, the ethnographic playscripts produced by Adrian Blackledge and Angela Creese (and also published by Multilingual Matters) present interactive data and its analysis in the form of drama, and in doing so foreground the voices of their subjects in a much more immediate and inventive way than a traditional research report can.
It was against this background that the idea to try something that breaks from the entrenched conventions of the academic presentation of ideas and analysis came about. Whether the book achieves what I was aiming at isn’t for me to evaluate. But hopefully, as well as offering a case study of how political activism can make use of the linguistic landscape to good effect, the book also acts as its own case study for how we can explore alternative ways of writing about research.
For more information about this book please see our website.
We recently published Language and Antiracism by José L. Magro. In this post the author introduces us to the concept of antiracist pedagogy.
Look at the artwork on my book cover. What do you see?
I am not sure if my rusty graffiti skills were able to represent the purpose of this book: fighting racism within curricula, within the classroom, any classroom. Although the interdisciplinary orientation and examples provided are based on the language classroom, concretely the Spanish language classroom, I tried to express through my graffiti on the cover that, to fight racism, we must take action and decolonize the curriculum, bring the margins to the center (represented as black and brown arrows on the book cover) and decenter/abnormalize hegemonic language, that language traditionally normalized as the higher status, better, more powerful/valuable/prestigious/valid language (represented in the cover as a white tongue in the form of an arrow pointing to the right). In this process of inferiorization of certain languages/language varieties, these ideological views about language go beyond the linguistic sign, they inferiorize communities: we are what we speak, and we speak what we are.
We have at our disposal so many explanatory and exciting theories within the field of raciolinguistics and about power, language, and identity in general; part of this theoretical body is easily accessible and understandable, part of it is more obscure and unreachable for non-experts. You may already be familiar with this theoretical body or become familiar with it after reading the first part of this book, but when you face your students in the classroom, what? Furthermore, what about if you are not an expert and just interested in how language and racism intertwine or simply curious about how a Hip-Hop professor utilizes, in a very Hip-Hop style, the tools available to him to create content that may help promote a significant change in the way students think about language and use language?
For experts in education and applied linguistics, and related fields such as second language acquisition and literacy, this book will not only help you to get closer to the fascinating field of raciolinguistics, but also to connect that theoretical world to practice through concrete examples. In doing so, the non-expert reader will be able to understand the fascinating theory that supports the activities proposed in this book because, although they were developed to be used by educators, they are created and explained for (non-expert) students. Moreover, in this book, you will learn about definitions of racism and antiracism and about how positionality plays a fundamental role in the non-neutral endeavor of teaching languages; you will learn about a traditional Spanish language department in the United States, its actors, and the ideologies (re)produced in it; you will hear the voices of students exposed to the materials I propose; you will know about how Spanish language learning in the United States links to broader political struggles. This book will even address the curiosity that people who follow me as an MC have shown for years about my experience in academia in the United States.
If you are interested in the path towards antiracism, this book, regardless of your level of expertise, will provide you resourceful tools based on the relationships between language, identity and power.
Dr. José Magro
[él/he]
Assistant Clinical Professor
Department of Spanish and Portuguese/SLLC
University of Maryland magro@umd.edu
For more information about this book please see our website.
If you found this interesting, you might also like Spanish So White by Adam Schwartz.
We recently held an online event to highlight a couple of books in our Psychology of Language Learning and Teaching series, in which authors Gary Barkhuizen and Chika Takahashi discussed their research with series editors Sarah Mercer and Stephen Ryan. In the second half of the event we opened the discussion up for audience questions and we received so many that we decided to answer those we didn’t have time for in a blog post. The recording of the event is available to watch on our YouTube channel.
A long time ago, as an undergraduate student, I was a participant in a study to measure L2 French development after study abroad. I remember being asked about romantic relationships in the return interview. At the time I thought it was very personal – is it an element in participants’ experience?
The short answer is ‘yes’. The chapter by Mitchell and Tracy-Ventura, for example, looks at careers after study abroad and gives examples of how participants often return to the host countries to continuing living with (and marrying) people they met while studying abroad. ‘Relationships’ is a very important theme running through all the chapters, and these include not only professional but also romantic relationships.
Is there a system that would allow those going on study abroad programs to meet up with others who have already been? Sharing experience could help acclimatization, perhaps.
This kind of ‘meeting up’ is often arranged by the organizers of study abroad programs, usually within institutions. A number of chapters in the book give examples of this type of connection, and how useful it is for both those going abroad (to learn from those who have already been) and those who have returned (to reflect on their past experience). Sometimes the meeting up takes place online.
Does your book include anything about teachers studying while working abroad?
Actually, it’s more like working while studying abroad. And the work might be internships, short-term placements in schools, doing a practicum, volunteering, etc. I can’t think of examples of studying while working abroad – is that still a kind of study abroad? A good question.
How do you see study abroad driving brain drain, intellectual capital exodus? This is very serious in a range of countries. Students go abroad and later settle abroad, markedly so in the case of Bulgaria, where I am.
It depends on the nature of the study abroad. For example, a semester abroad as part of a degree program requires the participant (a pre-service teacher probably) to return to the home country to complete the teacher education program. Many study abroad programs are a few weeks’ long only, in the form of an exchange for example, and so participants always return. This question may be referring to independent study, of a first degree, or a postgraduate qualification. Here there are easier options for staying abroad after study (and some host countries actually encourage this), but even so there may be immigration visa constraints about staying and often scholarship requirements forcing return.
These sound like exceptional learners – did you have certain criteria when selecting participants or did you start out with a larger group?
Yes, I agree that they are rather atypical learners. Indeed, I started out with a larger group: I first interviewed 13 students who responded to the questionnaire in my dissertation, which was administered before the interviews, and who volunteered to be individually interviewed. I noticed that these two learners were contrasting and unique in their own ways even at the very first interviews. Half a year later, I did another round of interviews with five out of the 13, including these two, and they are the two I focused on after this round of interviews and the two who never declined my invitation. I can only thank them for the perseverance.
Was your study informed by a particular motivation model or theory?
Yes, I focused on the L2 motivational self system as well as intrinsic motivation in self-determination theory. At the same time, some themes not covered by these theoretical frameworks emerged from the interview data, and I tried to be particularly careful not to overlook these themes. I believe this is one of the strengths of this type of small-scale, in-depth studies.
I’m very pleased to hear that your languages other than English (LOTE) learners really enjoy language learning itself, not just as an instrument. How were your participants motivated to learn English?
They were of course aware of the aspect of English as a global language and were motivated to learn English to be able to communicate with people around the world. At the same time, particularly one of them considered that in order to understand people of other languages he needed to learn their languages. In this sense, English was not enough and was only “one of the languages” he learned; he never mentioned the aspect of, for example, learning English to gain a competitive edge in the job market.
With online language learning, is the lack of natural human interaction not one of the main reasons for loss of motivation?
That may be the case, as many of us are realizing that doing something online vs face-to-face indeed involve certain differences. At the same time, when you are learning through various media, you may get a sense of “interacting” with those in the programs online, on the radio etc., i.e., with those in the community (whatever that community may be) that one day you hope to be a part of. I think this aspect may be particularly relevant to ideal L2 self, as it involves the aspect of imagination. This aspect may be particularly relevant with the radio, which my interviewees used for their English self-instruction. This is because not having visual information may actually stimulate their imagination.
I work as an English teacher at a Japanese elementary school and I’m struggling with dealing with students who have low engagement during the class, due to lack of concentration. In this situation, how is it possible for me to improve their engagement？
Your question reminds me of my kids! I’ve never taught at elementary school, so my comment is based more on my experience as a mother, but I’d say it’s difficult for them to concentrate, first of all, for a long time (maybe 15 minutes or so? That’s probably one of the reasons why self-instructional radio materials are short), and on a topic they don’t find interesting or relevant. Also, the other day I was trying to teach some basic pronunciation of English to my daughter, who’s a 6th grader, which she found quite boring. So instead of teaching her some random sounds of English, I re-started with the explanations of basic sound systems of a language, sort of like a little linguistics class. This she found interesting and was able to understand. So even within an elementary school what one finds interesting depends on the grade, right? Of course, these are all well-discussed topics related to motivation, I think, but the issues of class organization, interest, relevance, and age all come into play.
Thank you to everyone who joined us for the event and asked so many interesting questions! For those who missed it live, you can watch the recording below.
Spurred by social justice movements of the late 2010s, American businesses and universities instituted a range of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies aimed at promoting employment and educational opportunities for historically marginalized groups. Now, in the spring of 2024, DEI is increasingly criticized and eliminated as perfunctory, ineffective, and even unequitable. Our volume is in part curated to counter this dangerous narrative by demonstrating that diversity, equity and inclusion are not mere “buzz words” touted in abstract and controversial policies. They are, instead, deeply relevant human concerns that permeate mundane moments of everyday life.
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