Good Language, Bad Language

There’s nothing that will knock you off your high horse quite like a spot of proofreading. A section of a colleague’s doctoral thesis has been sitting on my desk for an amount of time that is about to become critically embarrassing, and I simply had to start tackling it this evening. There is a reason why I had procrastinated! Not a walk in the park at the best of times, academic texts develop a life of their own when their fate is in your hands. The pages teem with pernickety little things that tug at the seams of your consciousness… a malapropism here, a stray preposition there, a phantom faux ami everywhere. Suffice it to say that there is no longer a film of dust on my dictionary.

It’s a funny thing, the English-speaking hierarchy. Whose language is it anyway? In his book The Struggle to Teach English as an International Language (OUP 2005), Adrian Holliday identifies two streams of English speakers: BANA (those from Britain, Australasia and North America) and TESEP (those who are taught English in Tertiary, Secondary and Primary School). Robert Phillipson, in turn, distinguishes between “core” and “periphery” circles, which respectively represent the haves and have-nots of the English language. The most nuanced picture is painted by Braj Kachru, who proposes an “inner circle”, representing the traditionally English-speaking developed world, the “outer” circle, representing the former English colonies, and the “expanding” circle”, representing, well, everybody else.

This gives us a nice little multi-faceted paradigm for a spot of good, old-fashioned pigeonholing. Let’s see where my students, my thesis-writing colleague and, of course, I, fit onto all this.

What all this means, is that my TESEP, outer/expanding circle colleague whose third language is English, is depending on TESEP/Inner/Core-or-maybe-periphery me, whose second language is English, to ensure that his writing will be palatable within the BANA/Inner/Core inner sanctum of his international university.

No wonder I am using my dictionary.

Third Space Exploration

With the students on their way, work life has become a whole lot more demanding again. Fortunately I am not teaching many different courses this semester, which cuts down a whole lot on meetings, mastering different materials and the like. Not to mention the drama! Several of my colleagues have already been hit by the tumult of disagreement about syllabus interpretations. The same course description means different things to different people, and of course, we all want to have it our way. People who are strong enough to take on teaching in a foreign country tend to have very strong personalities, and meetings have been known to get explosive. In the end, we all just want to do our job the best we can- but the jury is still out on how that should be done.

I spent a fair bit of time today getting the classroom where I will have my Language Through Arts course ready, mostly making space and creating an environment where students will feel right at home. On a paper sign in the next room, some students had written their complaints about the learning environment. “This class looks like a graveyard.” Cheeky, yes, but similes in English! This is a huge milestone, seeing that students are expressing their rebellion in the language they are there to learn. Holliday (2005) would be over the moon. In fact, his reference to “the third space” rather inspired me in my morning reading. This “Third space” is a kind of free zone between language learners and the new language, where learners can establish their own new identity free from the colonial baggage English is reputed to carry. (“The Third Space”, incidentally, became a buzzword in business thanks to the Starbucks franchise, which provides patrons with a space that is neither home nor work- a contribution far more significant than their coffee.) Back to the classroom, though, I am hoping my class will not in any way resemble a graveyard, though I am realistic about the fact that these students are in the very taxing final semester of their studies. The proof of the proverbial pudding will be in the eating, but I do have some pretty nifty tricks up my sleeve, and it is a truly inspiring course. Well, insha’allah, as they say around here: God willing.

Except for my pre-dawn rendez-vous with Professor Holliday, I wasn’t able to stay focused on much other assigned reading today. I did, however, come across some potentially relevant material in my preparation for the course I teach. There is no shortage of material for reading: the question is when to read it all, how to make sense of it, retain it and make it into a meaningful whole that has application to my teaching context. Perhaps that is the question I should begin with … what has my teaching context taught me, and how does that relate to the material…?

Staying In With Noble Minds

I hear the faraway rhythm of someone else’s music that I am not part of. There is a world out there, a night-time seafront world where I can go, nothing stops me, but other things are important now. So I’d rather stay in.

But staying in has been great recently, in the company of noble minds. I feel enriched and edified by the very fact of my study. My whole frame of reference has been shaken a bit by the lectures, but completely dismantled by the readings. The main culprit is Adrian Holliday, who is at times critical to the point of being reactionary. Reading him, I certainly do not agree with the extremity of his views, but I have scrutinized some of my assumptions about what I do. This will be central to my first assignment, and maybe to where I am going with all this.