Stephen van Vlack

Sookmyung Women`s University

Graduate School of TESOL

History of the English Language

Fall 2006

A Eulogy for Kecskes and Papp (2000)

Since we have managed to bury another book, and a rather hard one at that, I want to make sure that Kecskes and Papp (2000) is not buried alive. I want to make sure that the book is really and truly dead and that means that you need to have gotten something out of the book. In any reading endeavor, particularly one as long and complicated as the one we just accomplished, different readers will always come up with different meanings. This is quite normal. So, what I really want to do here is just give a brief, hopefully very clear, explanation of what I myself have gotten out of this book and how this relates to our overall course objectives.

          As I was looking for suitable materials for this course, after a lot of deliberation, I finally came to the conclusion that this book, Kecskes and Papp (2000), is uniquely suited to our purposes because it covers the development of bilinguality from a foreign language perspective, a perspective much more globally relevant than an inner-core-based second language learning situation. Since the vast majority of us have learned English (or any other language for that matter) in a foreign language context then this becomes quite important and makes the book unique. The other reason I chose this book was because it deals with the connection between language development and culture and cognitive development. In this respect the book is not only unique but invaluable to the issues we are discussing in this class, namely globalization and the role English has played in this process. Certainly all of us have been globalized through English, or at least our globalization has been substantially enhanced by our knowledge of English. The book, therefore, answers the basic bi/multilingual questions of `who am I really?` and `what is going on inside my head?.` Really, whether you believe it or not, this book is all about you. It might seem that they are devoting lots of time to explaining how Hungarian students might learn English or how Swedish speakers are affected by learning English but really these things are in theory no different from ourselves. Under the right conditions we can also have Koreans go through the same types of transfer operations.

          Now, when people approach the reading of a book you need to immediately start to think about what it is that you want to get out of the book. For most of us in this class we were not necessarily that interested in bilingual development. We are not experts in language acquisition, nor do we really want to be experts in language acquisition, so there are many elements of this book which you don`t need to focus very much attention on. I think for most of us in this class what we really want to get out of this book is the idea that bilinguals have special powers over monolinguals (of course under certain conditions) and how we can help bring these special abilities to our students. There are tremendous potential advantages to the development of bilinguality, even from a foreign language perspective and environment. As teachers in an EFL environment we often feel defeated by the very nature of the endeavor. Kecskes and Papp (2000) is good news for us as bilinguals ourselves and teachers who want to help our students develop their bilinguality. We are special and so are our students. All the work we put into learning English really does pay off in the end, but only if we do it right. There are wrong or less effective ways of studying English and at this point we should know what they are. Once we get our students to pass this magical threshold level and develop a common underlying conceptual base (CUCB) they are no longer at the same. This is our new goal. Developing this CUCB enables our students to think in a different way. People with a CUCB are going to be more sensitive to similarities between different people, different cultures, and of course different languages rather than just focusing on differences. In this respect globalization and bilinguality are the same thing.

          Becoming a globalized person means that you no longer think of other parts of the world and other peoples in this world as being strange, unfamiliar, or even wrong. Becoming globalized means that we have a more deeper understanding of different conditions around the world. This helps us in our own specific region. We have more information to use, more knowledge to bear in solving difficult local problems. To be globalized individual we need to neutralize the differences between different regions of the world so that we can apply aspects of those distant regions to our regular common thought. This is exactly what the CUCB is about. A globalized person, like a highly proficient bilingual will use this knowledge to heighten their local experience. This the lesson that Kecskes and Papp (2000) try to teach us in this book.