NOTE: This article has not been copyedited due to its length.

Dr. Elana Shohamy is a Professor and Chair of the Language Education program at the School of Education, Tel-Aviv University. She researches and writes about multiple issues related to language policies, ideologies and practices in multilingual societies, especially in Israel. Her more recent studies focus on Language attitudes of Arabs and Jews; spoken Arabic and language attitudes, languages representation of languages in public space (linguistic landscape), Academic achievement of immigrants in schools, language tests as language policies, and various issues related to language rights such as language citizenship tests. Some of her books include: The Languages of Israel: Policy Ideology and Practice (with Bernard Spolsky, 1999; Multilingual Matters); The Power of Tests (2001, Longman/Pearson), Language Policy: Hidden Agendas and New Approaches (2006, Routledge), and Linguistic Landscapes: Expanding the Scenery (2009, Routledge). Dr. Shohamy has authored more than a hundred manuscripts in refereed journals and book chapters. She is a former editor of the Language Policy journal.

Orientation

It is the first class of the semester at the University of Tel Aviv in the Fall of 2015 semester and Dr. Shohamy is addressing a group of principals from Israeli schools who are taking a class on Language Policy as part of their professional development. She asks these school leaders to write down their thoughts on what they think the class will be about. One student jokingly says "Oh, it's time to talk correctly in the class”, another reads from his paper "How to use grammar correctly" and yet another offers a related response “Oh, maybe you are going to teach us how to talk nicely to parents."

In an excited tone, Dr. Shohamy recounts that responses such as those are what drive her and make her work interesting because “they have those notions of what language was for them in their schools, but they never saw languages in other places; they never saw languages in use [practice]; they never saw languages and discrimination.” And she adds “They are all used to "correct language" which is what a school does to you.”

Dr. Shohamy recalls that the first assignment for this class asks participants to engage in linguistic landscape. “I want to show them the diversity of society. To do this, I ask them to come up with 20 pictures that follow a certain set of guidelines. The pictures serve as contexts for writing a conclusion about the costs of studying a new language, the difficulties about learning a new language, and diversity: how many languages they were able to find, and what people learning languages have to say. Anyway, these are the kind of things I am very interested in now: Teaching people who are not necessarily in our field. That's what these principals have to know. The kinds of things they should know but have limited knowledge about.”

Very soon, it becomes evident for these school leaders that what awaits them is a semester-long critical discussion on issues of language and power instead of prescriptive rules for language use. Topics such as language and discrimination, representation and co-existence of languages in public spaces or linguistic landscapes, language attitudes of minorities and majorities, the power of tests, and the length of time for language acquisition of immigrants to learn a new language, are some topics Dr. Shohamy has explored deeply in her career. What awaits you as a reader during this interview is a personal, yet scholarly rich conversation with Dr. Elana Shohamy. Welcome!

Up Close and Personal

Andrés Ramírez: Your work is deeply connected with where you have lived and with your family heritage. You often talk about how members of your family in particular and people around the world fall victims to language (without realizing it), victims to as you call it "monolingualism" even though multilingualism is a wonder. Can you elaborate on this?

Elana Shohamy: This question reflects the talk I just gave last year. When I was there in the summer (2015) I talked about my family in terms of victims, winners and losers. So really in my family we have two winners with my grandfather and my mother who managed to learn Hebrew. My grandfather could do it because mainly he was able to read prayer books and so on. My grandmother was not able to read. So she was a victim of Hebrew. When she came to her village she never managed to learn Hebrew, ever, as she continued using Yiddish. My grandpa knew how to read and was able to make the switch to spoken Hebrew pretty fast. He was very successful. In fact, he was the mayor of the town where I lived and my parents used to live there with him. But my grandmother never learned Hebrew and there was almost (I would say) a friction between the two because not being able to learn Hebrew and not speaking proficiently in Hebrew was the same as being a loser in my grandparents' times. You wouldn't get a job, you wouldn't be able to function in society in many ways, although so many people never learned Hebrew. I would say this is the story of my grandmother who was very good in Yiddish. She knew some English because she came to America in 1905 and lived there until 1917 and then moved back to Israel.

My mother was 17 when her parents moved to Israel in 1917. She managed to go to school and learn Hebrew. She always talked about how she learned Hebrew. Day in, day out, they sent her to private teachers. She managed to learn it, from schooling eventually. But my father came to Israel in 1950 (because my mother went back to America and returned to Israel in 1950) and he was not able to learn Hebrew at all. He knew some English which was good for my grandmother, but I find them as victims of the language because they never managed to function in the Hebrew language, the dominant language of that time. Not knowing Hebrew was very painful to them in terms of the society. My father never really got a job in Israel, I mean he had to do all kinds of jobs [not well paid jobs] and move from one job to another because his Hebrew was non-existent. He knew a few words, but you know it wasn't enough.
Here is another example: My ex-husband's mother is from Berlin. She spoke only German and she died speaking only German. After 70 years she couldn't learn Hebrew. She was almost like, "What kind of language is this? This is the language for the Jews." She never appreciated Hebrew. She could speak French, English, and one other language, but not Hebrew. It almost had to do with looking down on a language.

So basically, to answer your question "How did I witness this kind of victimization of languages in society and my home (because we lived together with my grandparents in the same house)?” You could see it everyday. Of course I never made sense of it then, but when I grew up, it became my main attraction to the language. My father spoke English and this was back in the 1950s when English was considered a bad language in Israel as a result of the British Mandate. So speaking English was bad and absurd to everybody. Eventually, I was very mean to my father because he was speaking English to me and I was embarrassed next to friends. My father did not know Hebrew. As a child--and I think it happens even know: schools instead of giving you the feeling of, yes! you also have a language, they make you feel you do not have the other language. I think we don't talk enough about the dysfunctional relationships between children and parents because of language. You see that with some immigrants we have in Israel. The parents don't speak Hebrew; the children don't speak Arabic. You see this division and the children don't respect their parents for that. So in Israel, for example like I mentioned, an immigrant student can be always exasperated, he/she is always embarrassed and thinking, "God forbid the teacher would run into my mother in the street and start talking to her in Hebrew." So there is this fear of "what if they see my parents?" because the schools value and compliment Hebrew, but they never value home languages. I think it's an area we need to talk more about in the field.

The Journey From the Power of Testing to the Power of Multilingual Testing

Andrés Ramírez: In our field now, it is relatively easy to talk about the idea that languages are diverse, dynamic, complex and in so doing mention translanguaging, for example. But in these very same circles, many seem to remain closed and reluctant to the idea of multilingual tests (the only way to assess full multilingual repertoire as you mention every time you can). It becomes a context in which full language repertoires are not only ignored but users are penalized for using them. So what do you make of that relative ease with the content of saying, "Okay, yeah we understand where you are coming from in this globalized world, multilingual world...Yet, the test is so stubbornly monolingual."

Elana Shohamy: I think what's happening is that in the field the test holds much stronger power than what we think. For me “The Power of Tests” is probably the most important book I have written because at that time it was so obvious that nobody argued or wrote about it. The power of test was something that we talked about and then I was very disappointed to see that I can talk about the power of test (the book is very influential) but at the same time more and more tests were being carried out. You can’t help but wonder: Nobody listens to you? In a way I talked about it and nothing happens? People working in this area are wondering the same: “we brought in the awareness of that, but still we are very weak in terms of policy making.” All the ideas for policy making are there, but they don't want us to change things around because these are fixed things. Immigrants are at the lower place in society lenses. I think we basically create this order in society. I think once we start thinking that we need this sorting or categorization of people to justify those decisions, we prove that we want mostly to maintain the order of society. Just recently, I read something that came out in the New York Times: "Too much testing!" it said. People who make tests started arguing about it, "What do you mean too much testing?" It is understandable. This is their profession and this how they make money. You cannot make money by arguing against tests. I think we are talking about people for whom in fact language testing is a field of its own. It's very problematic, I believe, because they have the monopoly of tests.

Someone said recently, "Don't forget that tests can be also useful for pedagogy." Pedagogy is important. So of course you can use tests. But what's happening now is that it's the only tool for grading knowledge. It is the main criteria for judging schools, judging teachers in the U.S. as we know, judging students, judging parents and so on. If you don't succeed well in school, we talk to your parents and say that you have to study more. I mean it's all based on tests. I am not saying "only" as there are some teachers who look at other things. But I think it's very much meant to be a way to stratify society. This is how they define the status of each person (based on a score on a test). It's so ingrained in our thinking” that I can give a lecture against the power of tests, I mean talking about the power of testing and then I can say, "Yes, that was a test that my daughter took and did so well on it." I even find myself saying that many times" I tried not to say it, but it’s so much part of the discourse; it's so much part of the structure of the western society!

There was a conference last year in Cambridge which i didn't go to. The title was about multilingual assessment. Cambridge organized it and some friends of mine went to the conference and reported that it was purely Cambridge testing. The only thing that was about multilingual assessment was the title. Nothing, none of the papers were on that. So I think multilingualism will get there even if people in testing don't like it for the reasons we discussed. With the power of testing, at the beginning I felt bad and said, "Okay, give them some time. People have to get used to the idea of linguistic landscape." But, it's so big now. I said, "Okay give them time and eventually they will realize it or not." Not always, but I think it's a major change for language testers to do it.

“We have to psychologically and socially legitimate multilingual language assessment”

Andrés Ramírez: Can we say that language testing has seen a lot of advances with the "how" (for example, statistics and state of the art models). Yet, the “what” stays unchanged?

Elana Shohamy: Yes, unchanged because of monolingualism. It's not going to change very much so fast but I think it's in the process. I think it's beginning to penetrate. Now we are talking about it, but two years ago people wouldn't have talked about it. I think Ofelia's book on translanguaging has a big impact on people. I have been talking about it for three or four years. I wish we would have done more work on it. I think we don't know what people are doing about translanguaging at the micro level. I am talking about micro translanguaging versus the macro translanguaging. But I think other people are doing it.

Andrés Ramírez: Let me tell you a little bit about the situation here with my daughters. A really interesting phenomenon that may further illustrate what you are talking about is happening. They are in a dual language school. So they are learning Spanish and English and language allocation is by subject.

Elana Shohamy: Oh, Okay.

Andrés Ramírez: My 10 year-old daughter Sofia, the oldest, has to produce a reading response everyday. It is basically a summary of something that she reads. The interesting thing is that after a while we ran out of books in English so she could write her assignment. Without hesitation, she simply began to pick up books in Spanish, even though the product was in English.

Elana Shohamy: Wow!

Andrés Ramírez: It's an amazing trait of the linguistic landscape that she has. She is not even conscious of it, but she is doing it very naturally. Yet, when that writing becomes part of the monolingual context of the subject and my daughter shows her assignment to the monolingual teacher who is reading the response, all that richness gets lost because the teacher only responds in a way that is not only monolingual and narrow but that unfortunately is common place in many contexts. She responds to English conventions and surface features, such as spelling, capitalization, and punctuation. By virtue of not knowing where her writing is coming from, being unaware of the linguistic landscapes available to her at home and in the community, the teacher is missing an opportunity to recognize in Sofia the amazing aggregate value that she brings to that piece and the potential rich transfer that is untapped. This is a good example I use with my students when explaining translanguaging. Many people ask for the difference between codeswitching and translanguaging. Sofia’s practice lets them see translanguaging as a bigger practice.

Elana Shohamy: I agree with you that it's a much bigger process. In this case with Sofia, the teacher could have asked her to write it also in Spanish. It would have been very interesting to write it two times to witness some micro translanguaging in process. One of the things for translanguaging that I see from students from America who study in Israel is that they have to read and test in Hebrew, especially bible prayers or whatever. Those religious people you may see in Florida or somewhere, they cannot figure out the Hebrew. It's very difficult. And they sit together and they figure it out together. It's fantastic to see that. For example, Torah means this and so on. Your daughter Sofia has to translate to the culture of the teacher who is monolingual.

In fact, I don’t really like the traditional idea of dual language programs. I mean this is two very different classes and two very different systems. They don't allow any mixing. The morning is in Spanish and the afternoon in English or whatever. I think there's a problem there. I think opportunities of mixing languages and playing with both languages (look at what my daughter did at home; how many switching my granddaughter did at home). I mean they read a book in Hebrew but don't have time to speak with their parents. Wow! They switch from so many languages in a day. And if a friend comes, they right away know if you don't speak Spanish or English. They can figure it out and don’t get confused. They know how to accommodate, so to speak, to the situation. I wish there could be more situations where they can use the whole repertoire, not just to know it but to use the whole repertoire.

I just remember another example of a granddaughter. She went to school where like seven other children spoke Hebrew. While sitting in the kindergarten, they never talked to each other in Hebrew when they sit together. The minute school is over and they went to play in the nearby park, they started to talk in Hebrew to one another. So in school they feel it's not allowed. Even within themselves they knew that the teacher never accepted it or complimented it. It's a liability. But the minute they went to the park, it was so different. Of course it was mixed, more of Hebrew and English but it was fine. Because they were with one another and it was okay. So I think we have to legitimate it psychologically and socially. But I think that people are realizing it. We were at a conference on early childhood this summer in Washington. There was a huge discussion (almost a fight) between people who are working on measurement (from Europe mostly) and people who were talking about multilingual assessment and so on. People in psychometrics they don't know how to deal with it; so they were so against it all the way.

My work in linguistic landscapes is again the idea of representing languages that are not represented. I am always identified with the victims as you see. So I would say my work on testing, my work on language policy and my work in linguistic landscape and immigration, for sure, is all about building on the power of those languages and recognizing them as having something. But my linguistic landscape is very much about contestation and about linguistic landscapes colonializing spaces.

I think this is why I am so interested in that: language is being manipulated. We, as linguists, give them a tool called language. Language has very defined criteria. This is wrong, this is right. Nativity is right, non-nativity is wrong. Okay, how about some people who speak English with an accent, like you? That's fine. Yeah, you can teach there in Florida. But we accept this. I have an accent but I can teach in America, too. So we are ready to play a little bit with that. But if you say, "I am using two languages, or if you say my language is still at lower level," forget it. That becomes the main criteria for allowing you to stay in Europe and get citizenship. So we take something that we know is unachievable and use it as a criteria. This is sort of absurd. This is why I think if we change language policies, the tests are not so important. Maybe we will realize that the tests are manipulated and maybe we will be able to change things. So there is too much testing and I think people are now aware of the dangers of tests.

On Accommodations

Andrés Ramírez: Continuing with the issue of testing, you often talk about your work on clinical testing, calling to raise questions about tests, to deconstruct them and the measure of power they yield and all of that. And after the deconstruction, you propose prototypes of multilingual assessments based on full language repertoire, for example, to include translations of the questions that are useful for talking about the test in the first language. Could you elaborate on these strategies and on other accommodations a little bit more?

Elana Shohamy: Accommodation is problematic. I don't like the word accommodation for the reason that accommodation defines who needs the accommodation: somebody who is not good. I think in America they need accommodations. They need to know how to talk to people not necessarily English-born. Think about what's happening in Europe now with all these immigrants who don't speak the local languages whether it's Swedish or German or whatever (they go to so many places). So who should need the accommodations? People who need the accommodations should be the Germans or the Swedes because they as bureaucrats will have to give them jobs, help them find a place to live and get to school and so on. Of course they can bring translators which would be very nice. But even translation...The person who translates has to make sense to both the Germans and the immigrants, taking into consideration both cultural and linguistic differences. So I think accommodations should go to monolinguals, not to second language speakers because the minute you say accommodation that means they cannot work. But I don't want to look at it because I think it's kind of like what I told you about the friction between parents and children.

From day one, we have to make these people realize that they have an asset, they have a language. This is something so strong. I do have a granddaughter who speaks Hebrew. The parents make an effort to speak Hebrew at home. She also speaks Spanish. I constantly try to give her the feeling that I know nobody appreciates Hebrew, but you have another language. Therefore, you can go to Israel, you can go to some places and find a job. The idea is to really create the full language repertoire, an idea that helps me too. I think it's more of a strategy. Before the full language repertoire, if you asked me how many languages do I speak, I would say Hebrew, a little German and some French. Now you ask me the same question and I'll give you a whole list of languages because I know a number of languages pretty well up to a certain point. Even in Cuba now, I don't know Spanish but still after two days together in a car I was able to catch up a lot. I don't have to be very professional because I have something I can build on. So I would never put zero anymore.

Andrés Ramírez: Right. That becomes part of your repertoire.

Elana Shohamy: Identity. Exactly. I ride taxis sometimes and often taxi drivers asked how many languages I speak. When I asked them the same question, they said that they speak only Hebrew. Think about it. This is an immigrant country. Everybody who came to Israel can speak Hebrew. This is an unbelievable situation. This is a language that was not used before as a spoken language until the beginning of the 20th century. It's hard to believe because nobody spoke the language. Of course some of the men could read, but basically it's a totally new language. Let's say a Spanish person is going to read, a bilingual person is going to read, not your teacher. I want to compare two situations: a regular situation where you have to write a piece on how to build something or your views about something or whatever. Kids only can do it in the US in English. What if I tell these kids, now what is your homeland? Spanish? Okay, you can bring as much Spanish as you have, you are encouraged to bring in Spanish as long as you may get comprehension of it. I can guarantee what I want to look at is the level of performance. I can tell you that I tried it once with Russian kids, the level of composition or whatever they would write is so much higher than if it was done in English only. And I am sure your experience is the same thing. There are certain things you cannot say in English. What I am saying is we're losing a lot of academic knowledge of students because we restrict them in language. This is why it took us 9 to 11 years when we give these students math and in other studies. Because in math they don't know some of the questions. They spoke only language. It's not mathematics.

Take Home Message for TESOL

Andrés Ramírez: Do you have a take home message for the members of the bilingual education intersection of TESOL international Association?

Elana Shohamy: I think I am not the first one to say it, but I am just... What does TESOL do in a multilingual era? You see what I am saying? TESOL is so much about teaching English. Okay. Besides changing the title, I think it's time for TESOL to also become more multilingual, maybe in its name as well, by recognizing all these other languages, seeing the danger of English only and people losing home languages and issues of translanguaging and all the things we're talking about. I think TESOL is very multilingual oftentimes in their conferences, but I think it's still focused on English only, and the message of English only is very problematic. I am very much a believer of ELF (English Language Franca). I know it's not a big thing in America so much, but I was invited to give talks through the English Language Franca conferences. I attended last year in Tokyo and then two months later in November. I think ELF is really the test case because in English Language Franca we don't just look at native and non-native, but we explore and utilize a mixture of resources. And I think this is the kind of thing we have to do in TESOL. We have to recognize those languages. I don't know if it's a bad name for ELF, but you see a group of people from places like Japan and Athens who are resenting the mainstream English idea. One of the places where you don't see a lot of mixes is journals. They still require people to write correct English in a very traditional way. I think journals is where TESOL Quarterly or whatever has to change as well....

We don't reach the broader audiences of people's account. Let's say somebody is a business person and has to hire a person. He would never hire somebody who speaks ELF. I think we have to reach the wider community and this is why I am teaching this course to principals because I see how ignorant the world is about these kinds of issues. So I think it's time to educate the public at large about the legitimacy of different varieties and build on what people know. Like I talked about language policy in Colombia (and maybe I get a paper on that), it's not about imposing languages, but about reflecting and then engaging language policies. I think we have to see this is what people are speaking in their neighborhood. So let's engage with them. Let schools engage with who the people are and build on what they know. And I would say that there is much more to say [laughing]

Andrés Ramírez is Assistant Professor of TESOL and Bilingual Education at Florida Atlantic University, Boca Ratón, USA. His research focuses on the academic achievement of Emergent to Advanced Bilinguals in K-16 contexts. Current scholarly interests center on functional multilingual analysis of school text genres in English and Spanish.