B-MEIS Newsletter - April 2023 (Plain Text Version)
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LEADERSHIP UPDATES LETTER FROM THE CHAIRS Clara Vaz Bauler, Adelphi University, New York, USA
Dear readers, This special issue of our newsletter is the culmination of three years of work towards expanding our own understandings, ideas and practices of bi-multilingualism within TESOL contexts. As a special interest session of TESOL, we have been invested in exposing, challenging, and resisting harmful ideologies that frame multilingualism as abnormal while positioning multilingual individuals as inferior, deficient and/or in constant need to be fixed. These ideologies have for long permeated our field(s), shaping and sustaining much research, teaching and assessment practices that elevate specific varieties of standardized US and UK English over natural localization (Pennycook, 2012) and embodiment of hybridized language practices that are the very fiber of our multilingual, multifaceted, multimodal and even messy human social relations (Canagarajah, 2021). We have been inquiring about what it means to language and what the implications could be for more inclusive, flexible and just teaching and assessment practices in our language-related fields and communities of practice. We started with promoting conversations that would shift the perspective from language as an object to language as a verb. The #LanguageIsAVerb campaign held by our @TESOLBiMulti Twitter social media account in October 2021 became a platform for us all to involve the larger communities, teachers, students, parents, and other interested individuals to advocate for the naturalization of multilingualism in all of its varieties and potentials. #LanguageIsAVerb received contributions from people all across the globe, joining us all with the common goal of fighting linguistic discrimination and affirming multilingual ways of being, knowing and doing. At the inception of our campaign, we started with Blommaert’s definition of multilingualism, which we felt captured our need to be expansive and inclusive: Multilingualism, I argued, should not be seen as a collection of ‘languages’ that a speaker controls, but rather as a complex of specific semiotic resources, some of which belong to a conventionally defined ‘language’, while others belong to another ‘language’. The resources are concrete accents, language varieties, registers, genres, modalities such as writing – ways of using language in particular communicative settings and spheres of life, including the ideas people have about such ways of using, their language ideologies. (Blommaert, 2010, p. 102) As a result of our campaign, we felt that, besides Blommaert’s definition, which helped us move beyond objectifying language to focus on natural variation and multimodality, we also needed to emphasize the crucial importance of centering often marginalized, silenced voices and bodies in language learning and teaching fields. We fostered conversations that would name, identify and disrupt any form of categorization that would frame perceived “nonconforming,” “nonnative” or “not normal” ways of languaging as deficient, wrong or disordered. Our last special issue of Bilingual Basics published in the Winter of 2022 featured our first round of conversations with contributions from Tasha Austin on countering antiBlack racism in language education, Kirti Kapur on the mundane and wonderfully rich ways of World Englishes, Cynthia Carvajal on advocacy for immigrant families, students and communities and Lihn Phung on the use of Discord as a collaborative, multimodal tool that joined together 100 multilingual students from five different countries. Building upon this important work, this current special issue features our second attempt at broadening our understandings and enactments of what it means to language. JPB Gerald, Jon Henner, Laura Ascenzi-Moreno and Erin Quirk highlight the central role traditionally marginalized languaging practices play in resisting and dismantling ideas about language that directly exclude multilingual and multimodal ways of being, knowing and doing. JPB Gerald uses his voice and podcast to promote academic ideas outside of academia, defying the notion of what “academic” is and what it does, Erin Quirk zooms in on family language practices as a locus of heritage language maintenance and resistance, Laura Ascenzi-Moreno challenges the popular Science of Reading monolingual approach to literacy development, drawing attention to affirming multilingual ways of reading, and Jon Henner calls for the centering of multimodality as justice for multilingual, disabled, deaf children in the fight to naturalize multilingualism for all. We would like to thank our contributors from the bottom of our hearts in helping us continue to grow and be able to question our own assumptions, ideas and practices in language-related fields. To be inclusive, open, flexible requires humility and the conviction that learning is never finished. We hope to keep the conversations going. We would love for you to join us. Warmly, Clara, Zhongfeng, and Ching-Ching References Blommaert, J. (2010). The sociolinguistics of globalization. Cambridge University Press. Canagarajah, S. (2021). Diversifying academic communication in anti-racist scholarship: The value of a translingual orientation. Ethnicities, 14687968211061586. Pennycook, A. (2010). Language as a local practice. Routledge.
Clara Vaz Bauler is an associate professor of TESOL/Bilingual Education at Adelphi University, New York. As a language educator and applied linguist, she is committed to unveiling and resisting unjust and often hidden educational practices that propagate language shaming and discrimination. Zhongfeng Tian is Assistant Professor of TESOL/Applied Linguistics in the Department of Bicultural-Bilingual Studies at the University of Texas at San Antonio, USA. Theoretically grounded in translanguaging, his research centers on working with teachers to provide bi/multilingual students with equitable and inclusive learning environments in ESL and dual language bilingual education contexts, and preparing culturally and linguistically competent teachers with social justice orientations.
Ching-Ching Lin, Ed.d is a New York City based teacher educator. Her research interests mainly focus on engaging diversity as a strategic action plan for change. She is Co-Editor and a contributing author of the following volumes: Inclusion, Diversity, and Intercultural Dialogue in Young People's Philosophical Inquiry (Brill Publishers, 2018) and Internationalization in Action: Leveraging Diversity and Inclusion in the Globalized Classroom (Peter Lang Publishing, 2020) and Reimagining Dialogue on Identity, Language and Power (Multilingual Matters, forthcoming).
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