Stephen van Vlack
Sookmyung Women`s University
Graduate School of TESOL
The History of the English Language
Fall 2006
Week 14 - Questions
Canagarajah (1999) Chapter 8
1. What is appropriation, what can be appropriated and why is this a good idea according to Canagarajah?
In other courses in this TESOL masters program we have talked about the phenomenon of
appropriation as a way of describing, and indeed getting students to learn how to speak in a new language. The basic idea behind appropriation is that one simply takes what one hears or in other ways experiences from the environment. As a simple example, students will appropriate certain expressions from the teacher which they somehow think is useful. It away, we can liken appropriation to transfer. We said previously that transfer tends to move from a strong system to a weak system, or even more specifically, from a stronger aspect of a particular system to a weaker aspect. Appropriation works in a similar way. When people feel a strong connection toward each other and one person observes positive aspects in the other`s behavior, they will often appropriate those aspects of behavior. People can appropriate pretty much anything from others: particular lexical units, accent or other elements of pronunciation, grammatical structures, etc.. According to Canagarajah (1999) people can also appropriate ideas and this really is, in effect, how learning occurs.
Canagarajah (1999) claims that teachers in the periphery, and often despite their center core training, need to appropriate ideas from their students, or the society at large in order to be successful. There should not come as a particularly strange idea to us. It seems like basic common knowledge that if we want to get our students to learn we need to somehow respect what they know and where they are coming from first and foremost. Unfortunately this is often not the case. If it were there would be no need for Canagarajah to have written this book. Teachers, and here we also need to include non-native speaker teachers from the environment in which they are actually teaching, need to be reminded that they can not simply force their students to learn the way they would like them to learn. Especially with a language like English coming in from a strongly center core point of view will often create disparities within the student population. Thinking that your own teaching situation I am sure this is true. Thus, appropriating some of the ideas which the students themselves hold about learning will enable the teacher to come up with a more appropriate pedagogy.
The appropriateness of the pedagogy will of course depend on the local customs, but it can simply be said that at appropriate methodology would be one which seems to land elements of the standardized forms and modes of the target language with some aspects of local practices and uses. From a simply affective point of view, appropriating some aspects of your students thoughts and expectations will allow you to form a closer bond with the students. Many studies have shown that this type of bond is necessary if students are to take responsibility for their own learning. Should therefore be clear that what we’re talking about here is to a certain extent student centeredness.
2. What are some of the ways we can use to appropriate elements? How can we do this?
The most basic way we can use to appropriate languages is to simply be aware of the situation around us. If we have positive feelings towards the local situation and do interact with it, then we will find ourselves appropriating elements from this local situation without even realizing it. For the most part appropriation is a subconscious process. For us as teachers, however, we are going to somehow need to be aware of how we are doing this and where we are doing this. The first most important step is have a respect for our students and their traditions, even the ones who do seem to have trouble accepting us and the things we represent. In particular it is these students we need to win over. To do so trying to make their lives fit into or revolve around English is not the way. By appropriating elements of what they already do and know and transposing them onto English we can make English fit into their lives, not the other way around. This is how people learn. We need to somehow fit new knowledge into pre-existing knowledge in the best way of doing this is by appropriating elements of the pre-existing knowledge.
3. How can appropriation be used to create more locally appropriate pedagogical practices?
Not coincidentally one of the elements which we are talking about today in Chapter 6 of Kecskes and Papp (2000) is the concept of linguistic distance. What of the beauties of appropriation is that it will bring the first language of the students and the target language closer together from the get go. We know that too much perceived linguistic distance is going to kill or at least substantially hinder learning. This type of teaching methodology/technique wherein teachers flaunt their knowledge over students and inflate their own self image by constantly commenting on both linguistic and cultural differences between local languages and the target language is extremely detrimental to the learning process. Based on this appropriation seems to be one of the major keys to solving the problem of disparity (both between teachers and students and the L1 and TL) in the classroom. We therefore can it probably should appropriate elements of almost every level/area there is. Obviously we are not going to do this at the same time.
It should remain an important factor that we are endeavoring to move our students towards a more standardized version of the target language. As we mentioned in our class last week following Crystal (2003), in order to be successful in this current globalized world people need not only localized forms but also standardized forms. It seems to be almost an inevitability that localized forms will develop. And if we are going to make some sort of order of how linguistic prowess in a foreign-language will develop then it seen as quite clear that localized forms can and will develop before local use of standardized forms. It seems then somewhat ridiculous to try to move people straight into standardization without paying any attention to localization. We even see this in Korea, or we might even say that such a development even more inevitable in Korea where there are no accessible to the speaker communities to enforce standardization. Standardization is enforced by sometimes well-meaning teachers but primarily from hegemonic powers on the other side of the world. Students are aware of this.
Coming back to our main point then, it is important to appropriate different aspects from the local scene, but not necessarily at the same time and certainly not without also putting some attention into what may be standard. Localization can be a very effective stepping stone to standardization.
Kecskes and Papp (2000) Chapter 6
1. What is language distance?
There are two, possibly three, types of language distance depending on how much credence you give to Kellerman`s hypotheses of perceived linguistic distance.
Linguistic/Typological distance
Linguistic or typological distance refers to the actual structural differences between two languages. For the most part this has been mostly studied at the level of syntax simply because syntax has been the dominant area in linguistics for the last 50 years. It is also the area of linguistics which is easiest to study because it is quite concrete. When looking typologically at different languages we can describe them basically according to the way in which grammaticality is encoded. Some languages like English or what are called configurational languages. In these configurational languages grammaticality is encoded in the word order. Such languages are said to have grammatical word order. In such languages, like English, even though we can change the order of the sentences we have to do so under highly constrained conditions. Other languages have what is called pragmatic word order. These languages are not configurational in that the different elements in a sentence can come in any possible word order. This is possible because in these pragmatic word order languages the different elements are morphologically marked for their functions. Thus, the sentence `the farmer plows` can be rendered in Latin either as:
Agricola arat or Arat agricola with no major semantic meaning difference. It should be noted that there seems to be a direct correlation between how much morphology a language might have and whether that language is going to be configurational or pragmatic in its word order. Thus, languages like English which have little inflectional morphology and Chinese which has no inflectional morphology are going to have to be configurational languages, while languages like Finnish, Russian, and Latin which all have a large amount of inflectional morphology are more pragmatic-based in how they use the order of the elements in a given structure.
Perceived Linguistic/Typological distance
It is important not to underestimate the strong effects of people`s perceptions of different languages. Reality is really just how we perceive it and if we are truly convinced of something as being real it`s just as real regardless of how true it may actually be. There is a fine line between truth and reality. All learners of a language, even those with just a passive or passing knowledge of that language, have strong beliefs/perceptions of how that language works and how different it might be from their own language. Everyone goes into language learning with some idea of how hard they think the process might be. These preconceived and often faulty notions have a huge effect on the learning process itself. They affect not only how much a learner might try with the language but will also affect the different strategies they will use in trying to learn the language. We know from our discussions in this class that different learning strategies will actually lead to different types of organization in the brain (remember coordinate versus compound types of organization). So this perception is extremely important.
Social distance
Aside from just the actual structural forms of the language learners also think about the social distance between their own language or languages and the new language which are there trying to learn. Looking at this we cannot separate a language from its actual speakers. The impression the actual speakers of a language make on the learners is essential in determining how much energy and what type of a learner might invest in the learning process. So, it is about motivation. Some people learn languages because they are more similar and familiar while others are enticed by the exotic. Aside from the question of motivation there is the reality of cultural differences. Languages with a more similar cultural base will be easier to learn because there will be more similar concepts which may be easier to eventually co-join in a CUCB. Languages which a much more dissimilar cultural base will have more dissimilar concepts which may not be able to be co-joined in a CUCB. Remember the development of a CUCB is a long and arduous process which requires intensive exposure to the target language (TL). More cultural differences will make this process that much harder, particularly if the learner sees these cultural differences a stumbling block to learning.
2. What are some of the different aspects of language distance?
Here we just want to reiterate some of the things mentioned above with a deeper look at some of the linguistic differences of different languages. We can basically say there are three major aspects of language distance and one of these was discussed at some length above.
Configurational nature of the language = Morphological systems = Word order
Here, again, we are looking at whether a language has grammatical word order or pragmatic word order. As we saw in class with the Turkish examples agglutinating languages like Turkish are more often than not non-configurational because they have a complex system of morphemes which mark words for their specific functions. The functions, then are not marked by the word`s place in the structure as we find in configurational languages like Korean, Chinese, Japanese, or English.
Lexical differences
Differences between the word store two languages might have, regardless of the underlying concepts from which they are derived, have a huge affect on the learning outcomes. Obviously, languages that share a large number of word forms (cognates), such as English and French, Korean and Japanese, will be easier to learn than languages which do not share such forms.
Metaphorical distance
This is similar to what was discussed above in relation to concepts and cultural differences, but focuses more on Lakoff`s (1987) idea of idealized cultural models (ICMs). The basic idea behind ICMs is that cultures take certain metaphorical structures (anger = heat, for example) and build not only language but thought structures out of these. Native speakers of English use hundreds of expressions related to this one ICM on a regular basis. These ICMs reflect the way people think and they vary from language to language, culture to culture. It is also true that ICMs will be more similar in languages which rely on a more similar cultural base. So metaphorical distance really underlies (in a hidden way) so much of what must be learned in a new language.
3. How might language distance affect language learning in multilinguals?
In a very general sense, languages that are perceived as being more similar whether linguistically or socially (and better yet both) will be more easily learned than languages that are not seen as being so close, but there are grammatical variables as well. It is, generally speaking, easier to move from a more marked (GWO) to a less marked (PWO) grammatical system. Then of course there is also the metaphorical structure of the two languages and the learner`s level in being able to use these new metaphorical structures is very much reliant on their overall proficiency in the L2. In the previous week we talked about transfer and how transfer was strongly affected by perceived similarities between languages. People who believe that the languages they are learning are more similar will transfer skills much more easily than people who believe that the two languages are more different. If your think about the English learning situation in Korea we know that the schooling is all based on spotting differences. Hence, no transfer and no happiness.