Skip navigation

Monthly Archives: November 2013

LLED 601 – Week 12

A metrolingual Japanese language: texting speak

This may be as far as blogging goes for this term and I am really excited that most of this week’s reading have brought me back to a fun, familiar place: Japan!! It feels like ages since I was there, but actually was less than a year ago, so much of this county’s culture has had after an influence on design and structure of my learning as a teacher, especially from an educational technology point of view. And now the language itself gets attention from renown sociolinguists. In its written form, Japanese has several formats that share some phonetic similarities, but are metaphorically worlds away from each other: hiragana (the traditional “female” syllabary), katakana (“male” syllabary used mostly for imported words), Kanji (Chinese characters) and Romanji (Roman alphabet characters), and the most entertaining written language Emoji (short for emoticon or smiley characters). Hard to believe for people struggling with the finer points of their home language, especially with the fuss being made over “selfie” being included in the Oxford English Dictionary, that most people in Japan are fluent in all five written forms. Gunther Kress, Louise Rosenblatt and Michel Foucault would all have a field day trying to explain the meaning-making processes occurring in this country (turns out that Foucault had quite a few wild nights out whenever he was there). Even without the reference to Alastair Pennycook’s theories, the development of this fifth writing system is very metro and very fitting for a country that some have called the Galapagos Islands of mobile technology. My junior high school students, many of whom have made their way to university by now, were highly receptive to these unique forms of communication, and yet struggled with English, mostly because it is a visually unappealing language. And this is despite the earnest effort of tens of thousands uncertified English teachers (like me) who “invade” the country and attempt to make English fun by continually playing vocabulary bingo games with their students. When I started out, I inherited from my predecessor a desk crammed with endless photocopied sheets of such bingo activities as below, and promptly recycled them all so that I could have useful teaching material for my classes.

Isn’t this a game for senior citizens?

Without giving too much away, my research project for this class will look at children’s access to virtual world via mobile phones, and a new national policy to ban mobiles from schools. In the wake of Canada’s recent legislation to curb cyberbullying by making it illegal to post someone else’s intimate image without one’s permission (isn’t that what Facebook and Instagram are all about?), Japan seems to be going down the same reactionary route. It was refreshing to read, and then hear from (via Skype) Ryuko Kubota as she identifies the neoliberal collusion as the cause of so much English testing in Japan, and the businesses that do well designing and selling back the idea that English is everything Japanese people need. Many of the people I met in Japan seem to have bought into the “big lie” that English is good for your career. Interestingly enough, quite a few Japanese English teachers (usually called Japanese teachers of English so as not to confuse us JET programme participants), had originally studied the language in order to become flight attendants and pilots, and teaching English was their fall-back job. Not sure what this says about the language demands for those wishing to enter the aviation field, as compared to the less demanding task of inspiring others to learn the language. There is definitely an interesting case study in the making to look into these secondary career choices, and if it means sending LLED grad students to Japan for a couple of terms to conduct research, I will happily accept this assignment – must mention this to Dr Kubota when she returns…

My wife has lots of exciting stories to tell about building her English language skills, and the places that it allowed her to go. It is significant that most of her English language learning happened outside of Japan, and her story is very similar to the code-switching ones reported in Harissi, Otsuji and Pennycook. While these examples are grounded in everyday experiences, they still beg the question “so what” and I suppose a close reading of these articles will reveal more about the identities people form through language. And speaking of identities, it was easy to agree with most of Pennycook’s call to arms for critical analysis, but reading him suggesting to others to be humble and then he quotes himself exclusively on the first page of his 2010 article seems at odds with what he proposes. Also, is he the man that gave the world “plurilingualism” which will no doubt lead to a plethora of pluri- discourses, and I am not quite done with the multi- ones just yet! And even with all these theories and theoretical frames to choose from, they all seem to be parts that an actor could play, if the someone needed to demonstrate what being a thoughtful academic.

Performativity: “We are not as we are because of some inner being but because of what we do. We do not write our own scripts, although neither are our lives fully prescripted.” (Harissi, Otsuji & Pennycook, p. 527)

One chilling response for this otherwise uplifting quote comes from Jan Blommaert’s case study of Joseph’s ordeal in England, with the Home Office seeming to rewrite his lived history to make it fit with national linguistic norms. While my fascination with Japan and English learners from there, it is a vastly different story in many of the African countries where English is a second langauge, even taking a backseat place to other colonial languages like French or Dutch. And for the historical centre of the English speaking world, London, to decide where Joseph must live due to their interpretation of of his life-script, is enough to make one wonder if “what we do” is open to a Rashomon-like retelling.

Reference

Harissi, M., Otsuji, E. & Pennycook, A. (2012). The performative fixing and unfixing of identities. Applied Linguistics 33(5). 524-543.

LLED 536 – Week 11

Meeting with George, getting the scene ready, more to follow…

LLED 558 – Week 11

Last week was the last class reflection that I needed to write, but how could I stop now with such an interesting confluence of multimodal theorists?

LLED 601 – Week 11

So much of what get referenced in this week’s article harkens back to a cultural crossroads for many North Americans: the 1990’s. Critical discourse theory, what can be seen as a beam of appropriately-named “white” light seemed to hit the prism of otherness, and separate into a full spectrum of multicultural, gendered and sociological categories. For Canada, a strong Liberal government for most of the decade created hope for social justice issues of race, national identity, gender equality and environmental policy had a fighting chance of becoming hegemony. Even the United States seemed to be going through a liberal phase, and attitudes were evident in the most familiar form (for Canadians): American network television. Reliable and wholesome prime-time shows like The Cosby Show and Cheers started to give way to edgier and slightly more cynical programs like The Simpsons and Friends, it was okay to explore controversial topics like same-sex marriage or to poke fun at the dysfunctional nuclear family. A far cry from the tumultuous counterculture movement of the 1960’s and early 1970’s, but this was a period in history where most of the radical ideas were accepted rather than resisted. Of course, this idealistic bubble seems to have burst at some point in September, 2001, when the whole world seemed to be dragged back a century or so into fear and war-mongering. Before then, there were some important issues to be resolved…

Lisa’s epiphany © 1995 by Matt Groening
More on her role model status at College Candy blog

Feminist theorists like Annette Henry, bell hooks, and Trinh Minh-ha began to move beyond what Henry terms as the “whitestream” and view feminism though various perspectives. This paradigm shift is closely related to another issue that took hold around my family dinner table, vegetarianism. It started with my older sister, who lost her taste for meat in the mid-1980’s and made no attempt to hide her opposition to other family members enjoying favourite meals like roast pork, meatloaf or lamb chops. Shortly after her conversion to vegetarianism, my younger sister stopped eating meat as well. My parents became more accommodating with the food the provided the family, and as if they were ahead of the curve, restaurants seemed to be catering more and more to vegetarian diners. Yet it always remained a political stance with my older sister, and the rest of the family had to endure sighs and muttered slogan like “meat is murder” at the dinner table. By 1998, Ruth Ozeki’s book My Year of Meats was released and gave support to my crusading sister, making explicit the unwholesome process animals are raised to become food. It wasn’t until seeing it in print that the message really hit home (for me, it was many years later, and thanks to the organic industry many of my favourite meals are less toxic than they were). Feminist and post-colonial theories began to be taken up in academic institutions, and it really was an ironic matter of seeing the spectrum of difference through black and white of print.

My Year of MeatsMy Year of Meats by Ruth Ozeki
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Had to be read to believe the change it would make, and if it means eating a few less hamburgers or steaks for the rest of your life, consider yourself lucky. While no attempt was made to present her work as actual truth or reality, Ruth Ozeki states a clear case for authenticity through narrative arts.
View all my updates

One chapter in particular has the main character, Jane, returning to her small-town library in Quam, Minnesota, to find a social studies textbook she had checked out before as a teenager. The adult Jane works for a documentary television crew, and refers to herself as a documentarian along the same lines as Sei Shōnagon, the eleventh century author of The Pillow Book. What she finds at the library is Alexis Everett Frye’s Grammar School Geography with a shocking description of “The Races of Men” which Ozeki (1998) pulls quotes from:

Such natives are very ignorant. They know nothing of books; in fact, they know little, except how to catch and cook their food, build their rude huts, travel on foot through the forests, or in canoes or on rafts on the rivers, and make scanty clothing out of the skins of animals or fibers of grasses or bark. A few of them know how to raise grains in a crude way. Such people are savages. (p. 149)

Of course, no point in revealing which race Frye has determined is savage, as this piece of evidence can be added to the list of other racist and imperialist writers mentioned in article by Ngūgī wa Thiong’o. While reading Ozeki’s book this summmer, I was teaching a summer school course called Reading Across the High School Curriculum, and quoted this passage as evidence of how high school-entering students were taught their social studies more than a century ago. Fortunately, we could discuss these unfortunate references in relation to more politically correct (another product of the 1990’s) terms and phrases. I was also reading my class a novel, which had this amusing observation on another “Race of Men”:

Don’t get all sentimental, Hadridd. They’re dirty, spread diseases and breed endlessly. Did you know that a colony can outgrow the capacity of its environment in as little as twelve centuries? I know they look cute and can do tricks and make that funny squeaking noise when you stare at them close up, but honestly, culling is really for their own good. (Fforde, 2011, p. 198-9)

This part of a dialogue occurs in Jasper Fforde’s novel The Song of the Quarkbeast and is between two trolls discussing whether or not to kill one of the human characters they found in Trollvania, the northern half of the Un-united Kingdoms. They are not really distinguishing a particular race, simply the human race in general, but it is a telling commentary that this scene occurs somewhere in Scotland, and was written by a Welsh author (two distinct British cultures which were colonized by their English neighbour as if in rehearsal for the rest of the world). Wish I had read books like this one when I was getting into high school, back in the early ’90s.

Reference

Fforde, J. (2011). The song of the quarkbeast London: Hodder & Stoughton.

Ozeki, R. L. (1998). My year of meats. Hammersworth, Penguin.

LLED 536 – Week 10

Out of luck for the third time this term, with another statutory holiday this Monday, but an ideal time to promote the latest play I saw: Medea by the local Noh theatre company Yoyoi Theatre Movement company. It was enthralling to see the combination of Noh chants in Japanese, along with English narration and dialogue. Puppetry, masks and costumes added to the international blend as a far-eastern Medea plot her revenge on her wayward husband. And to top it all, I got to visit another new theatre space, the Orpheum Annex, which is not only connected to my Dad’s place of work, the historic Orpheum Theatre, but occupies the space that was my favourite movie theatre, the Capitol Six. Feels like I am coming home.

Spam prevention powered by Akismet