Monolingual Practices Research Articles

Multilingual research, monolingual publications: management scholarship in English only?

This paper identifies several stages of international management scholarship as multilingual in character as the conception and execution of research projects, whether empirical or theoretical, frequently require the use of several languages. These multilingual practices are contrasted with the monolingual nature of management research at the stage of disseminating newly generated knowledge: a stage that is dominated by the exclusive and taken-for-granted use of the English language. The paper challenges the ontological and epistemological assumption such monolingual practice is based upon and opens the 'black box' of international management research by asking questions about its language-based processes, which remain muted and ignored. In concluding, a turn to translation is proposed in order to harness the creativity inherent in multilingual research, while preserving the role of English as a shared language of knowledge.

Multilingual research, monolingual publications: management scholarship in English only?

This paper identifies several stages of international management scholarship as multilingual in character as the conception and execution of research projects, whether empirical or theoretical, frequently require the use of several languages. These multilingual practices are contrasted with the monolingual nature of management research at the stage of disseminating newly generated knowledge: a stage that is dominated by the exclusive and taken-for-granted use of the English language. The paper challenges the ontological and epistemological assumption such monolingual practice is based upon and opens the 'black box' of international management research by asking questions about its language-based processes, which remain muted and ignored. In concluding, a turn to translation is proposed in order to harness the creativity inherent in multilingual research, while preserving the role of English as a shared language of knowledge.

O que faria Bakhtin?

RESUMO Originalmente apresentado como palestra1 no simpósio Multilingual, 2.0?, em Tucson (13 de abril de 2012), este ensaio de Holquist2 - o famoso estudioso eslavista, comparatista e tradutor de Mikhail Bakhtin - explora a instabilidade ontológica de qualquer distinção entre fenômenos e práticas multilíngues, monolíngues e bilíngues. Baseado em Wilhelm von Humboldt, Noam Chomsky e escritos de Ferdinand de Saussure descobertos recentemente, o ensaio aprofunda a exploração feita por Holquist durante toda sua carreira sobre a natureza dialógica e a fundamentação da prática linguística, bem como as implicações disso para a construção futura de teorias no campo dos estudos sobre multilinguismo.

Language use in the context of double minority: the case of Japanese–Catalan/Spanish families in Catalonia

ABSTRACTThis study explores language use in Japanese–Catalan/Spanish families in Catalonia with a special attention to Japanese. In a community such as Catalonia wherein two languages of different status are in conflict within its own territory, the ability of families to maintain a socially ‘weaker’ language and transmit yet another language that does not have an official status within the community raises an important question: how do these cross-linguistic families cope with a ‘double minority context’ in terms of organising their language use within the family? Analysing the data collected through a questionnaire survey conducted with 29 Japanese–Catalan/Spanish-speaking families living in Catalonia revealed that the parents in said families adopted a mostly monolingual use of Spanish; however, this practice does not affect the families’ Catalan and Japanese use. Not establishing a single common language for the family may be one of the strategies to combat the threat to minority languages. In general, especially for the survey participants, Catalan and Japanese remain significantly utilised. Our study also found that sibling existence can influence language-use patterns between parent and child(ren), with monolingual practices tending to be used in single-child families.

Mediating epistemic access through everyday language resources in an English language classroom

In most rural and township English additional language classrooms, everyday language discursive practices of bi/multilingual students are underutilised. This study reports on how grade 4 emergent isiZulu-English bilingual children used their everyday language resources as a tool for epistemic access. Drawing on translanguaging, this paper aims to support recent research that challenges monolingual and monoglossic language practices, which tend to limit children’s learning and complex identities. Data were collected from classroom observational notes, video recordings, and interviews with the teacher, the learners, and the principal. Findings show that, despite classroom practices that constrained children’s learning, children who recruited diverse linguistic resources created a space to engage in meaningful learning and represent their multiple identities beyond the stereotypical ones. I conclude the paper by calling for pedagogical practices that support inclusion of learners’ everyday language discursive practices in order to enhance effective learning and support learners’ multiple identities.

Monolingual and Bilingual Practices: Reversing Power Relations during a Festivity in Pondala

Monolingual and Bilingual Practices: Reversing Power Relations during a Festivity in Pondala

Can language classrooms take the multilingual turn?

For the past three decades, momentum has gathered in favour of a multilingual turn in second language acquisition research and teaching. Multicompetence has been proposed to replace nativeness and monolingualism to measure L2 learners’ success. This proposed shift has not made its way into L2 teaching settings. The language presented to L2 learners is a set of monolingual, standard norms often removed from actual target language practices, implying that these linguistic features are adequate for all situations. We propose that the multilingual shift has not taken place in practice because language features associated with monolingual nativeness are necessary in many of the communicative situations L2 users encounter. Adapting the concepts of communicative distance and immediacy in order to integrate multilingual communications, the purpose of this article is to demonstrate how these situations and their oral or written realisations are located on a pluridimensional conceptional continuum. We illustrate how monolingual standard norms and code-meshing practices represent the model’s most distant and immediate communicative ends, respectively. We argue that traditional mono/multilingual and native/non-native oppositions can be reframed in order to become legitimate models for L2 classrooms.

Monolingual ideologies and multilingual practices in small claims court: the case of Spanish-speaking arbitrators

This article explores the institutional policies and practices concerning multilingualism in small claims courts in New York City. Building on prior work that has investigated the language use of court interpreters and of the litigants for whom they translate, this study focuses on the analysis of institutional interactions in which all participants, including the arbitrators who decide the cases, are speakers of Spanish. Court interpreters are routinely used in such cases, though some hearings were conducted without them in Spanish. Comparing these two scenarios and analysing the participants' metalinguistic comments, this study explores the language ideologies that underlie the institutional policies about language choice and interpreter use and how they relate to broader issues about Spanish–English bilingualism in the USA more generally.

2B or Not 2B Plurilingual? Navigating Languages Literacies, and Plurilingual Competence in Postsecondary Education in Canada

In this article, the researchers employ the framework of plurilingualism and plurilingual competence in a field that has traditionally been dominated by reified conceptualizations of multilingualism that view bi/multilingualism as balanced and complete competence in discrete codes. They present data from a qualitative, longitudinal study of the interplays between the social, cultural, and linguistic in the multiple languages and literacy practices of transnational students at a university in Vancouver, Canada. Their findings question the role of academic English as the sole conduit to success for participants in higher education. They suggest that this relates back to how plurilingualism is defined and integrates the key idea that learning skills, multilingual literacies, (inter)cultural experiences, and different forms of knowledge are transferable and thus constitute assets and tools for better learning (Castellotti & Moore, 2010; Coste, Moore, & Zarate, 1997). Participants revealed a considerable degree of fluidity in their languages and literacy practices as well as shifts in perceptions and practice that change according to context. They proved to be highly plurilingual, reflexively and knowledgeably (Giddens, 1984) moving from contexts in which they mixed different languages and scripts freely to contexts in which they adhered to more normative senses of discrete monolingual practices in English and community languages.

The struggle of being Toba in contemporary Argentina: Processes of ethnic identification of indigenous children in contexts of language shift

The aim of this article is to study how children experience their ethnic identifications in relation to their knowledge of the Toba language through daily interactions with peers and adults (both indigenous and non-indigenous). The study is focused on an urban setting in Buenos Aires (Argentina) where monolingual (Spanish) practices are replacing bilingual ones (Spanish-Toba), and where the Toba language is a valuable feature of ethnicity. From an anthropological perspective, this article focuses on the identity constructions of the children. Finally, it re-examines the agency of the children and looks at how their life experiences impact on their contextual identities.

Strategies and struggles in the ELT classroom: language policy, learner autonomy, and innovative practice

Within the Japanese English Language Teaching context and consistent with the dominant conversation role assigned to the native English speaker teacher, there exists a belief that the most effective manner in which to teach and promote multilingualism and intercultural understanding is through restricting students to monolingual practices and prohibitive pedagogies. These beliefs, whilst entrenched in ideologies of cultural dominance and linguistic imperialism, have also nourished the foundations for the learner autonomy movement to develop through the creation of numerous self-access learning centres. In consideration of these core issues and building upon earlier context-specific work, this paper documents an attempt at negotiating the contradiction created by those institutions who promote the virtues of learner autonomy on one hand, whilst enforcing strict linguistic prohibitions on the other hand. Situated within a Japanese university, 43 mixed-ability English language learners were presented with two reflective awareness-raising strategies that sought to assist them in being more able to make informed classroom language choices when faced with the demands of a prescriptive English-only language learning environment. The results suggest that the English-only policy represents an unrealistic target for the majority of learners and one which may promote a number of negative consequences.

“How Do the Apples Reproduce (Themselves)?” How Teacher Trainees Negotiate Language, Content, and Membership in a CLIL Science Education Classroom at a Multilingual University

This article discusses findings from ongoing research into plurilingual group work interaction in a Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) teacher training classroom at a university in Catalonia, Spain. We explore how participants make use of available verbal and non-verbal resources—for example, their multilingual verbal repertoires, posture, gesture, gaze—to collaboratively accomplish various activities and, specifically, to problematize linguistic and subject knowledge, to construct science teacher discourse, and to dynamically and simultaneously negotiate membership in immediate and “imagined” communities. Although the shift in European higher education toward teaching nonlanguage subjects through the medium of a foreign language would appear to favor monolingual practices and be detrimental to local languages, our data reveal that participants' plurilingual repertoires can act as a resource in classroom interaction, creating a favorable framework for performing a range of activities that would seem to enrich the collective learning process.

Identity constructions in multilingual advertising

Contemporary social identities are hybrid and complex, and the media play a crucial role in their construction. A shift from political identities based on citizenship to economic ones based on participation in a global consumer market can be observed, together with a concomitant shift from monolingual practices to multilingual and English-dominant ones. This transformation is here explored in a corpus of German advertisements. Multilingual advertisements accounted for 60–70% of all advertisements released on various television networks and in two national newspapers in 1999. The subject positions that are created by multilingual narrators and multilingual narratees are characterized by drawing on the Bakhtinian concept of dialogism, and on point-of-view more generally. In order to test the acceptance of or resistance to these identity constructions outside the discourse of commercial advertising, the uses of multilingualism in nonprofit and personal advertising are also explored. All these discourses valorize German–English bilingualism and set it up as the strongest linguistic currency for the German business elite.

Monolingual ideologies in multilingual states

In multilingual, heterogeneous societies language ideologies are constantly constructed and re-constructed in discursive interactions at micro and macro levels. When the dominant, majority group in a society, nation, nation-state or community considers that the ideal model of society is monolingual, monoethnic, monoreligious and monoideological (Blommaert & Verschueren, 1998a), we immediately encounter questions such as 'who is in?' and 'who is out?'. A dominant ideology of monolingualism in multilingual societies raises questions of social justice, as such an ideology potentially excludes and discriminates against those who are either unable or unwilling to fit the monoglot standard. In this paper I review recent research which has illuminated our understanding of language ideologies and social justice in multilingual states, and I offer an analysis of everyday discourse practices in Britain, including monolingual practices in a multilingual educational setting, a language ideological debate in local news media, and the liberal academic discourse of a recently-published report into the future of multi-ethnic Britain. My analysis suggests that in each of these contexts the many minority languages of Birmingham, and of Britain, are being written out of public discourse, as a monolingual ideology continues to prevail.

Multilingualism in democratic South Africa: the over-estimation of language policy

The article focuses on the increasing mismatch between South Africa's stated official policy on language and its gradually evolving linguistic realities. Whereas the country's institutional documents (the Constitution and the national policies being developed) proclaim linguistic pluralism to be the national objective the country seems to be regressing to its pre-apartheid situation of monolingual practice—a situation of “English only”. This phenomenon is illustrated with reference to language-in-education, particularly the issues of language of learning and teaching (“medium of instruction”), language study and language and certification. The article then debates three possible reasons for the inability of the Government of the country to take positive steps towards policy implementation, concluding with the view that language planning is not enough, and that the lack of a meaningful political will in the political (and educational) leadership of the country is the chief obstacle to giving substance to multilingualism in South Africa.

Legitimate language in a multilingual school

This article exploits Bourdie'us notion of legitimate language (and legitimate speaker-hearers) to analyse the social origins and consequences of language practices in a French-language minority high school in Ontario (Canada). Education is a key site for the construction of legitimate language in the social and political struggle of Franco Ontarians for rights and for social mobility. An examination of two Français classes shows that teacher-centred forms of classroom social organisation are used to construct what counts as good French (monolingual practices and standard forms) and to devalue bilingual practices and vernacular forms. The construction, and, in particular, the contestation of legitimate language in the classroom also reveal contradictions between the socioeconomic values of social mobility attached to monolingual standard French and the political values of authenticity and solidarity linked to the bilingual vernacular, as well as between educational ideologies of meritocracy and democracy and practices of streaming and differential treatment.