Post #10

            Chapter two in the textbook by McKay describes the contexts in which English is being learned. It also goes into detail about Kachru’s model of English use contexts. A common reason why some people start to take formal English classes is because of the “belief that English provides access to global communication and knowledge.” But there are also other people who are required to take English, so they do not have a choice. The two ELI students I talked to in class who were from Japan said that they never had a choice as to whether or not they wanted to learn English. I asked them how they felt about that and they didn’t really know how to answer, probably because they had never thought about it since they never had a choice. In my opinion, this chapter explains Kachru’s concentric circles of English speakers much better than the other articles. It is a lot easier to understand. Countries in the inner circle are where English is the primary language of the country, like the United States or Australia. The outer circle is where English is the second language in multilingual countries, such as Singapore. Lastly, is the expanding circle, where English is widely studied as a foreign language, like in China and Germany. I still think that it is kind of difficult to see the distinction between the outer circle and the expanding circle. In many expanding circle countries, students have no motivation to learn English. There are even acronyms to describe this idea: TENAR (Teaching English for No Apparent Reason) and TENOP (Teaching English for NO Obvious Purpose). I can understand how students can lack the motivation to want to learn English, but by the sound of some of the acronyms they define, maybe even the teachers who are teaching English don’t understand why the students are learning it and don’t give students the answer as to the purpose. I don’t understand how students could have absolutely no motivation to learn English, because it’s so widely spoken. The chapter goes on to discuss how the “lines separating these circles have become more permeable” because of the growing migration and the increased use of English. With these circles it is also difficult to factor in English bilinguals who function as natives. A little later in the chapter is says that in South Korea and Japan, the importance of English is highlighted, talking about how it is part of the global community, but the English textbooks there show Korean customs and cultural values as “being more desirable than American traditions.” This surprised me because it’s almost like they’re afraid that the students who are learning English will begin to believe that the American way is better.   

            Chapter three talks about multilingual societies and diglossia. Diglossia is when “speakers have two or more languages in their repertoires” but don’t always use them all in the same situation. The languages have different roles that they play in society and are used in different domains such as family, religion, and education. Some researchers say that in situations involving more than one language it’s hard to “draw distinct lines around particular situations and domains and say that a particular language variety is only used there.” In the interview that I did for the cultural exploration paper, the woman that I interviewed grew up bilingual, speaking both Farsi and English all her life. While she and her family still lived in Iran, she said that she and her sister would always speak Farsi with her mom and English with her dad. But after they came to the United States, they began trying to only speak Farsi inside the house since they only really ever spoke English outside of the house. Dania said that now she mostly speaks English with her parents because that’s the language they’re use to speaking most often. Dania will sometimes speak Farsi with her friends too. So she doesn’t have specific situations in which she speaks one language and other situations where she speaks the other language.

Post #9

            Chapter one in the McKay textbook talks about how English has developed as a global language, and what this does to the status of the language and other languages as well. One of the goals of the chapter is to establish a relationship between globalization and the spread of English. There are many different perspectives of the spread of English. One is the homogeny position which “views the spread of English as leading to a homogenization of world culture” (3). The second position is the heterogeny perspective which “describes the features of World Englishes as a sign of pluricentricism that has been brought about by globalization” (3). To me, the first perspective, the homogeny perspective sounds insane! I can’t imagine a world that includes only one culture and one language. I never thought of this as being a possible consequence of the wide spread of English across the world. It’s a very hard concept to imagine, but I hope it never happens. But there are other people, such as Pennycook, who argue that it is neither of those positions but instead a mixture of many other factors. I really like the quote by Kachru that says, “Knowing English is like possessing the fabled Aladdin’s lamp, which permits one to open, as it were, the linguistic gates to international business, technology, science, and travel” (7). I like how the author is comparing the idea of how English can give people so many opportunities, to the story of Aladdin and his lamp. It’s hard for me to imagine how it would be to not be a native speaker of English. After talking about all these TESOL concepts in class, it really makes me wonder what I would be doing right now if I was never a native English speaker. Would I be learning English instead of Spanish? I’m curious how it would be to be on the other side of things. Would I be forced to learn English, or would I choose to learn it? How would I feel about the idea of English possibly becoming a global language? Then on the other hand, I think how happy I am to be to speak English since it is so important in the world. Crystal states that we can’t stop the spread of English, and that in the next 500 years everyone could be automatically exposed to English. Another interesting concept that the chapter discusses is how there is a belief in the power of English, especially among people who are younger. They have the notion that “English will help them get on in the world” (8). There are many incentives for learning English: economic, educational, mass media, and advertising incentives. The media is definitely something to think about. When I was in Spain, on TV there were so many American channels, like Disney channel, where the English words had just been dubbed over with Spanish. I also saw two movies in the theater when I was there. They were both American movies that had Spanish voice-overs. With the use of English growing so much, there is also the possibility of other languages dying. In my English 341 class last semester we read a book called When Languages Die, and it talked about all the reasons why languages die. One of the reasons was because people start to use the language that is better known and widely used instead of their native languages, and they then stop teaching their children. There are also other dangers that can occur with the spread of English. Two possibilities are the growing of monolingualism among English speakers, and an economic divide in English learning.

Post #8

The articles for this week discuss the idea of race and the term racialization. According to both the Kubota/Lin article and the Rich/Troudy article, racialization is defined as a “racial categorization” where people are divided into groups based on their biological features. The Rich/Troudy article briefly mentions how new types of racism are beginning to form, which is what was discussed in the reading from the Holliday textbook from last week, the “New Racism.” The authors state that this type of racism is much more difficult to “name and detect.”

            Overall, the article by Rich/Troudy was particularly interesting to me since it covered a topic that I never knew there was an actual word for: Islamophobia, defined as “an irrational fear of Muslims and what Islam represents.” I knew that this type of fear existed but not that it was actually considered a type of phobia. According to the article, this is not a new idea, which surprised me, but since 9/11 there has been much more of this type of phobia in the media. The discourse of Islamophobia after 9/11 “takes the form of religious prejudice and discrimination.” Last week in class we watched part of a documentary about how Arabs are portrayed in movies, which fits well with the concept of this article. After seeing part of the documentary, even though I hadn’t seen most of the movies that they talked about, I was surprised to see how many Hollywood movies portray Arabs as the “bad people.” The movie that shocked me the most was Disney’s Aladdin. I loved that movie as a kid and still enjoy watching it today, but I never realized how badly Arabs are portrayed in it until watching the clips that they showed in the documentary. The song at the beginning of the movie has horrible lyrics, but I never noticed what they actually meant when I was watching the movie as a child. All of the movies that portray Arabs this way aren’t helping with the prejudices that people have against them, the movies most likely only make those prejudices stronger. The picture that comes to my mind when I think of people discriminating against Arabs and seeing them as the Other, is the classic scene in an airport going through the metal detectors at security. 9/11 is to blame for this type of discrimination in the airport. I sometimes wonder what runs through some peoples’ minds if they see a man with a turban walking through the airport. I also wonder what the TSA officials at the airport think as well, and whether they are told to watch and search Arabs more closely, only because of their race, religion, and appearance, and because of the events of 9/11.

            The purpose of the study in the article is to find out that ways that Arab Muslim students see racialization as having an impact on their experiences of Othering in the TESOL community in the UK. Qualitative data was collected by conducting interviews with the students and giving them questionnaires to fill out. The findings of the study are intriguing. The idea of gender came up often, and how it is linked to “nationality, ethnicity, and religion.” One student talked about how he thinks the other students have a negative concept of male Arabs. He states, “They ask me why in Islam they marry four wives.” Another student in the study also mentioned that she was often asked about the treatment of women in Saudi Arabia. At the end of the article, the authors discuss how the students who participated in the study will most likely go through a hard time because of the Islamophobic discourses that “determine how they are positioned in wider society.”