Negotiating the Multilingual Turn in SLA

Abstract

To everything (Turn, Turn, Turn) There is a season (Turn, Turn, Turn) … The Byrds IN 2011, THE PROMINENT EUROPEAN political theorist, Van Parijs, published Linguistic justice for Europe and for the world (Van Parijs, 2011). The book was a culmination of over a decade's work on the prospects, and limits, of justice for linguistic minorities, within a normative political theory framework. It was greeted within political theory as an important development—primarily, because it appeared to directly challenge the 'untrammeled public monolingualism' of Anglo-American political theory that had been dominant up until that time (May, 2015). Anglo-American political theory has predominantly taken the liberal egalitarian position, following the work of Rawls (1971), that adherence to a (single) national language is a necessary condition of national citizenship, a basis for social and economic mobility, and crucial to making democratic conversations more immediate and accessible (the fewer languages involved, the easier the conversation). In this view, minority languages must be dispensed with as quickly as possible. Of particular concern in many of these Anglo-American political theory accounts is the ongoing use of Spanish in U.S. society. In its most trenchant manifestations, political theorists within this tradition have concluded that the maintenance of Spanish—via bilingual education programs, for example—would simply ossify social and cultural isolationism and socioeconomic immobility for Spanish speakers, while also potentially contributing to wider democratic dissent (see, e.g., Barry, 2001; Pogge, 2003; for a rejoinder, see May, 2003). Van Parijs (2011) ostensibly takes a somewhat different position. He argues instead for the notion of linguistic cosmopolitanism, which should encompass bi/multilingualism rather than repudiating it—allowing one to communicate more effectively with a wider range of interlocutors. However, in examining his position in more detail one soon finds that the bi/multilingualism he has in mind is a particularly narrow and reductionist version. English—consistently treated as monolithic and undifferentiated in his account—always has to be part of the bi/multilingual repertoire; a necessary lingua franca. The connection between cosmopolitanism—being a citizen of the world—and bi/multilingualism reinforces a model of elite European bi/multilingualism with which he is most familiar. The everyday bi/multilingualism of most of the world's speakers—what Ortega (2019, this issue) in her article, following Han (2013), describes as 'grassroots bilingualism'—is certainly not favored or even countenanced in Van Parijs's formulation. Indeed, the liberal egalitarian notion that the maintenance of multiple languages presents a fundamental barrier to democratic conversation—the Tower of Babel motif, in effect—remains largely intact. More broadly, as I observed in an extended critique of his contribution (May, 2015), Van Parijs's normative framework never challenges or subverts the fundamental principles of his core discipline—normative political philosophy—while also willfully ignoring the extensive work in sociolinguistics and applied linguistics that might have usefully further informed his thoughts on language(s) and social, economic, and political participation. I begin with this recent example from political theory because of its potentially instructive resonances with current wider debates on the need for a 'multilingual turn' in relation to academic analyses of language (Conteh & Meier, 2014; May, 2014a; Ortega, 2013, 2014). We see this in sociolinguistics' recent turn toward superdiversity (Arnaut et al., 2016; Blommaert, 2013). We see it also within applied linguistics in relation to the emergence of raciolinguistics as an analytical frame (Alim, Rickford, & Ball, 2016; Flores & Rosa, 2015; Rosa & Flores, 2017) and translanguaging as a pedagogical practice (García & Li Wei, 2014; Li Wei, 2018). Within SLA, this turn toward multilingualism—at least in its most recent formulations—has been championed by the Douglas Fir Group (DFG, 2016), and has been further developed and expanded in this special issue of MLJ. In both interventions, there has been a particular emphasis on the need for greater transdisciplinary engagement in SLA, especially in relation to the linguistic–cognitive orientation that constitutes its center. In my response to these debates, I will focus exclusively on Lourdes Ortega's contribution in this current special issue, given that it highlights so clearly both the affordances and constraints attendant upon such a (trans)disciplinary reorientation of linguistic-cognitive SLA. In the process, I will draw parallels with comparable disciplinary debates—such as those in political theory, discussed previously—as well as recent discussions in critical sociolinguistics on superdiversity. The first challenge to any call for greater transdisciplinary engagement in SLA with respect to the multilingual turn—a centrifugal call, in effect—is to address critically the powerful centripetal forces that continue to militate against such developments. This is in relation both to the ongoing maintenance of established disciplinary boundaries and the determination of what counts as disciplinary orthodoxy. In short, those who consider themselves to be—or, in light of such transdisciplinary calls, perhaps a better descriptor might be remain—at the apparent center of the field continue to determine both the limits of the field and what is deemed acceptable (linguistic cognitive) knowledge within it. This explains why previous calls to expand linguistic cognitive SLA, particularly in relation to an acknowledgment of multilingual language use, have been so spectacularly unsuccessful. The trenchant repudiation of Firth and Wagner's (1997) sociocultural critique of SLA in this journal is an obvious case in point (see, e.g., Gass, 1998; Long, 1997). I have previously discussed this refusal to address, or even at times engage with, the sociocultural critique of SLA in relation to Bourdieu's (1990, 1991) notion of field and Bernstein's (2000) understanding of disciplinary formation (May, 2014b). Bourdieu's understanding of field foregrounds the contest between orthodoxy and heterodoxy that invariably attends debates as to what legitimately constitute a field's endeavors or interests. Bernstein (2000) discusses how the establishment of distinct academic disciplines from the 19th century onward and their subsequent organization into self-regulating communities amount to what he terms "singulars." Academic singulars, for Bernstein, are characterized by strong boundary maintenance (classification), which are supported culturally (via professional associations, networks, and writing) and psychologically (in students, teachers, and researchers). As a result, "singulars develop strong autonomous self-sealing and narcissistic identities" (p. 54). In combination, these militate against wider interdisciplinary—let alone, transdisciplinary—engagement. Bernstein (2000) describes the latter as "regions," or a recontextualization and expansion of academic singulars (p. 9; see also Becher & Trowler, 2001). Ortega's (2019, this issue) important contribution to this special issue clearly highlights what still needs to be done in SLA to shift it from an academic singular to a region. To do so requires addressing the longstanding monolingual bias that underpins SLA and a related reluctance to address seriously the normalcy of multilingual language use. However, the elephant in the room remains—what, if anything, has changed in SLA for this to more likely happen now? Yes, since the 1990s, there has been the advent of usage-based linguistics, in particular, along with a growing engagement of key SLA contributors with multilingualism, as DFG (2016) and the current MLJ special issue attest. Nonetheless, the core tenets of SLA—a focus on elite language learners and sequential language learning, for example—remain largely unscathed, as Ortega's discussion highlights. And, of course, the incentive to change—to embrace multilingualism and repudiate the existing orthodoxy of monolingualism—would require not only an academic, but also, as Ortega argues, a wider sociopolitical reorientation of the field as well. Again, that doesn't appear to be happening any time soon. The intractability of monolingualism in SLA is no doubt also an artifact of its wider societal embeddedness, as a still foundational feature of modern social and political organization. This is evident, most notably, in the political nationalism of the last few centuries, which has promoted public monolingualism as the norm via the modern nation-state model (Bauman & Briggs, 2003; May, 2012; cf. the earlier discussion of Anglo-American political theory). As Gramling (2016), in his excellent interdisciplinary account of the "invention of monolingualism," notes: "Whether we opt to call it a myth, a pathology, a paradigm, a relic, or a sham, monolingualism is woven into modernity's most minute and sophisticated political structures, and it is clearly not yet inclined to be waved off the stage by a university professor, nor even by a 'multilingual turn' in one or another discipline" (pp. 3–4). So, the task of re-orientating SLA toward multilingualism remains a particularly daunting one. If it is to be forwarded effectively, if at all, it requires, in my view, further thought and action in relation to the following key dimensions: atypicality and the question of constituency, historicity and ethnocentrism, and methodological nationalism. What is so striking about SLA's foundational linguistic–cognitive premises is how they have come to be generalized from a thoroughly atypical constituency of language learners. In effect, SLA is concerned predominantly with outliers—initially monolingual adult language learners, elite and often college-based, who are learning an additional language sequentially and discretely. The experiences of this group of learners, as Ortega (2019, this issue) correctly points out, are quite removed from the quotidian experiences of most multilingual language users, so much so that she brands them as "the weirdest multilinguals in the world" (p. 32). In response to this constituency problem, Ortega advocates the need for SLA to expand its language learner constituencies to encompass and address circumstantial (migrant) language learners, along with their often-deleterious learning experiences in language classrooms. In particular, she argues that the linguistic insecurity experienced by many of these learners—primarily via their regular construction and treatment in deficit terms—is not only a pedagogical but a wider social justice issue that needs to be addressed as a necessary basis of SLA's disciplinary reorientation. This is a laudable sentiment but it also unwittingly underscores a key point. How has SLA been allowed to build an academic edifice that so willfully ignores the language backgrounds, and learning experiences, of so many bi/multilinguals in the first place? More broadly, how can SLA effectively reorient to account for what Liddicoat (2013) has usefully described as linguistic "hierarchies of prestige" that continue to privilege elite bi/multilinguals and the language varieties (most often, foreign languages) with which they are primarily concerned? In order to address this glaring lacuna, related questions need to be asked. Why has SLA not engaged meaningfully with the learning processes underpinning simultaneous multilingual acquisition, since this is the norm worldwide—if only, at the very least, as a useful point of comparison? As Sridhar (1994) observed 25 years ago: "Given that the aim of SLA is bilingualism, one would expect SLA theories to build on theories of bilingualism and use the natural laboratory of bilingual communities worldwide. With rare exceptions, the dominant models of SLA scarcely refer to this resource" (p. 800). This still remains largely the case. Moreover, before advocating a move to transdisciplinarity, one might ask more pertinently why SLA has yet to pursue adequately interdisciplinary forms of engagement with related fields. An obvious example here is the over 60 years of research on best practices in bilingual education, which consistently highlights the importance of explicitly building on language learners' existing language repertoires as the basis for effective teaching and learning (see Baker & Wright, 2016; García, 2009; May, 2017). The current promotion of translanguaging within bilingual education makes this case clearly, for example, and could be drawn on directly by SLA going forward, as again Ortega highlights. However, there has also been a much longer history of related interdisciplinary research—exemplified in the early work of Corson (1993), among others—that in the rush to recency, increasingly pervasive in academia today, tends to continue to be overlooked, both within and across both disciplines. It often happens that adjoining disciplinary groups lay claim to the same pieces of intellectual territory. This does not necessarily entail a conflict between them. In some cases, depending on the nature of the claimants and the disposition of the no man's land, it may involve a straightforward division of interest; in others it may mark a growing unification of ideas and approaches. (p. 60) In this respect, SLA needs to learn to walk before it can run. It must first reflexively address the academic hierarchies within its own discipline (with linguistic–cognitive studies at its center), as well as those between disciplines, before it can effectively engage in greater interdisciplinary engagement and reciprocity, let alone transdisciplinarity. The turn toward multilingualism in SLA accords with other comparable turns in recent times. In critical sociolinguistics, we have seen the enthusiastic acknowledgment of superdiversity (Arnaut et al., 2016; Blommaert, 2013), drawing on the initial work of the British sociologist Vertovec (2007). Related turns that traverse both sociolinguistics and applied linguistics include raciolinguistics (Flores & Rosa, 2015; Rosa & Flores, 2017) and the promotion of translanguaging in bilingual learning contexts (García & Li Wei, 2014; Li Wei, 2018). For my purposes here, I will briefly discuss SLA's proposed multilingual turn in conjunction with sociolinguistic superdiversity, since both face similar challenges—a tendency toward ethnocentrism and a related lack of historicity. In her critical response to a recent special issue of Applied Linguistics, highlighting new transdisciplinary engagement in applied linguistics, Kramsch (2018) reminds us of the importance of remembering history—of not letting a growing interest in spatial multilingual repertoires obliterate both their historical grounding and their contextual embeddedness. This argument for a diachronic and contextualized analysis of multilingualism, rather than simply its synchronic celebration, is an important and timely one. One of the major criticisms of the growing advocacy of sociolinguistic superdiversity as a theoretical framework, for example, is its promotion of major Western urban conurbations as the sites of complex multilingualism in this globalized, late modern world. This is an artifact of an increased focus on changing patterns of migration and transmigration that arose out of Vertovec's original sociological study of superdiversity in London. However, it also betrays an ethnocentric and ahistorical view of multilingualism, as well as what I have elsewhere described as a tendency to metronormativity (May, 2014c). Let me briefly discuss each of these in turn. The first, and obvious, point is that urban multilingualism is not solely the product of late modernity but has been present in earlier periods of history, particularly prior to the advent of nationalism and the nation-state, in what we might broadly term the imperial era (Canagarajah & Liyanage, 2012; May, 2016) For example, multilingual administration was the norm in the ancient Persian, Ptolemaic, and Carthaginian empires (see, e.g., the biblical book of Esther 1.22 in relation to Persia). Similarly, in the Roman Empire, the Romans were remarkably unconcerned with imposing Latin on their subject peoples. Where it was spoken, it was almost always in conjunction with other languages rather than in their stead, an approach underpinned by the principle per pacem societatis ('through a pact of society') (Rochette, 2011). Of course, Latin remained important for administrative purposes—it was the dominant language of the Roman governors, the army, and the law courts. Accordingly, the preferred Roman strategy of co-opting local elites into imperial administration saw them schooled in Classical Latin and often also Greek, while administering on behalf of the empire predominantly through vulgar Latin (Mufwene, 2004). However, these local elites simultaneously maintained their own languages, while there were no restrictions imposed on the local populations with respect to their ongoing multilingual language use (Rochette, 2011). But perhaps the clearest and most historically significant example of an imperial policy that formally protected the multilingualism of its population is that of the Ottoman Empire (c. 1300–1923). Under Mehmet II, a formal system of millets (nations) was established in the Ottoman Empire in the 15th century in order to accommodate the religious, cultural, and linguistic diversity of peoples within its borders. These millets were first established on the basis of the maintenance of religious freedom for the Empire's non-Muslims. However, over time, the millet system came to foreground the latter's linguistic protections as well, a development that was further bolstered in the 19th and 20th centuries by various forms of multilingual education (Dorian, 1998). In combination, the millet system specifically fostered and sustained regional multilingualism within the Ottoman Empire for nearly half a millennium (Gawrych, 1983; Strauss, 2011). As Gawrych (1983) concludes, "this regional multilingualism remained a significant force for fostering an atmosphere of tolerance toward both religious and cultural diversity into the twentieth century" (pp. 520–521). I note these examples to highlight both the normalcy and historical longevity of multilingual language use—not just in terms of complex individual multilingual repertoires but also in relation to collective sociopolitical administration, at least prior to modern nation-state formation. The focus on migrants and transmigrants in urban contexts in superdiversity accounts—the circumstantial bilinguals that Ortega discusses—could also do with a less elliptical historical analysis. As I have again argued elsewhere, this new preoccupation with urban (oral) multilingual repertoires and a related rejection of the boundedness of languages, still reinforces, ironically, a highly modernist dichotomization of the global and the local, and the urban and rural, in relation to language varieties and their use(s). In this brave new world, multilingual urban repertoires are constructed as dynamic and cosmopolitan, while supposedly local, often rural, language varieties—particularly indigenous language varieties—are dismissed as static and ossified (see, e.g., Edwards, 2010; Makoni, This is an as well as a historically (May, 2014c). This of urban contexts as sites of (2013) terms more broadly as the and complex multilingualism of indigenous for This is by a of key in indigenous language the of local and global language elsewhere as language and practices & the and among different of and the of transmigration and & & 2013). These in are and expand a history of for many indigenous peoples that has regular significant social, cultural, economic, and linguistic complex and multilingual with their over As for

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 85 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.