HEIS Newsletter - May 2019 (Plain Text Version)
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ARTICLES TRENDING MULTILINGUALISM AT A SMALL NORTH AMERICAN COLLEGE Kate M. Donley, Norwich University, Northfield, Vermont, USA
“Norwich Forever” is a common catch-phrase at Norwich University, which is in the northeastern United States. Our college president and administrators proclaim it proudly as they conclude their speeches, and when said in class or among friends, the phrase can express a range of feelings from sincere college pride to subtle irony. My colleagues and I wondered: What would be the effect of saying this slogan in another language, one spoken by a Norwich student, such as Nepali, Swahili, or French? Recently, we experimented with two college slogans as part of a campus-wide initiative to promote language as an academic, cultural, and international resource. We launched a contest that invited community members to submit videos featuring themselves saying “Norwich Forever” in any language. This contest was connected to a first-time campus event, the World Languages Fair, where student volunteers taught attendees translations of our other slogan, “I will try.” A compilation video created in honor of this event serves as vital documentation of the Norwich University community’s linguistic repertoire. Students, faculty, and staff had fun contributing to this video and watching it more than 3,500 times on Facebook alone. This project increased the visibility of international and multilingual students on campus, established new institutional partnerships, and provided some validation for changes in the way we frame our English language classes for speakers of other languages. Reframing ESL to Foreground Multilingualism Internationalism is an important trend in higher education in the United States, yet an associated phenomenon, multilingualism, tends to be overlooked. English-medium universities in the United States privilege English in public discourse and as the language of instruction. Paradoxically, the study of English as an additional language is seldom valued as an academic subject. English language education for multilingual students is often considered remedial (e.g., Porter-Szucs, 2017; Preece, 2010) and tends to be relegated to programs or courses that exist outside of the usual undergraduate curriculum. Unlike their peers in modern languages departments, English language students sometimes receive no academic credit, or less credit, for language study. This arrangement benefits certain languages and marginalizes others. As Preece (2010) explains, in Anglophonic higher education environments “the linguistic repertoires of multilingual students are all too often ignored or treated as problematic, particularly when students use non-prestigious varieties of English and languages that have little status within English-dominant settings” (p. 3). This narrow view of language prevents universities from valuing the cross-cultural knowledge and linguistic skills of multilingual students as a significant campus resource for internationalism. This monolingual ideology is also present at my institution, Norwich University, which is a small, liberal arts college in Northfield, Vermont. Our residential campus is primarily undergraduate with a majority of the 2,300 students participating in a full-time military leadership program called the Corps of Cadets. Internationalization figures in the university’s strategic plans through study abroad and recruitment of international students. There are no formalized language policies at Norwich, and I have observed that a few members of our community have a low tolerance for multilingualism. Campus discourse occasionally stereotypes international students as “remedial ESL” regardless of variations of English proficiency within this population. I have also heard the opinion that international students should speak English when in public spaces. These attitudes conflict with the university’s stated goal of serving as a global leadership academy. Norwich has a small population of international and exchange students–less than 100–along with bilingual and multilingual American citizens, immigrants, refugees, naturalized citizens, and dual citizens. Formerly some of these students would have been placed in one or two English as a Second Language (ESL) courses—English Language Learner I and II—that were credit-bearing yet did not count as electives or toward their majors. Two years ago, the Department of English and Communications worked with consultant Dr. Shawna Shapiro of Middlebury College, also in Vermont, in redesigning our model. Now, the courses are labeled with a description of their content, Advanced Academic English (AAE) I and II. Since then, these courses have tripled their enrollment, reaching 30–40 students annually. This curricular revision was instrumental in our shift to an asset-based approach for multilingual and international students (Shapiro, Farrelly, & Tomaš, 2014, pp. 84–92). Last year, the Department of English and Communications changed my position title from “ESL curriculum coordinator” to “international and multilingual curriculum coordinator.” Hence, our new brand, so to speak, is more inclusive and has been enthusiastically accepted by students. Domestic multilingual students who may have felt stigmatized by the label “ESL” (Marshall, 2010) are attracted by the “advanced” level of English. International students tended to be unfamiliar with the term ESL, so they find our new class titles more transparent. An emphasis on “American” academic English permits us to reach a different population of international students, users of other varieties of English who may be unfamiliar with the dialect of Standard American English and the expectations of U.S. academic culture. Project Description Inspiration for the World Languages Fair came from UNESCO’s holiday International Mother Language Day on 21 February. Motivated by UNESCO’s vision to “preserve the differences in cultures and languages that foster tolerance and respect for others” (2019), my department chose that date for an event and used a video contest to generate buzz. In addition to spreading the word to the entire campus, we collaborated with the Department of Modern Languages; the Intercultural Students Organization; the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee; and the provost, whose office funded prizes. The video contest succeeded beyond our expectations. Modern languages courses participated strongly, with submissions from individual instructors as well as entire classes. We also received submissions from “international” freshman composition courses, my class AAE II, student clubs, individuals, and groups of friends. In total, more than 50 videos were submitted in more than 30 languages. My colleague Jim Black, a videographer for the College of Liberal Arts, enthusiastically embraced this project and volunteered to make a compilation of the submissions. As a Norwich alumnus and social media tastemaker, Jim Black’s editorial vision imbued the video with his own style and sense of the college brand. Black released the video on several popular unofficial Norwich social media accounts along with his own Facebook and Instagram accounts. The video was later shared on the college website. By far, the most elaborate submission was from the Norwich Men’s Ice Hockey team. Their video won first prize in our competition, which was a tweet-worthy accomplishment from Norwich Athletics (Figure 1). Prize-winning videos were announced to the school-at-large, labeled with the hashtag “#MultilingualNorwich,” and distributed through the institutional digital sharing platform Stream. Both videos (Figures 2 and 3) show the numerous languages and also the community members who submitted. Interpretations of “Norwich Forever” are varied: speakers are determined, empowered, awkward, hesitant, and also playful in their performance of a multilingual Norwich identity.
Figure 1. Screenshot of a Twitter post by the Norwich Cadets. Figure 2. Norwich Forever Multilingual Video Contest compilation video. The World Languages Fair took place in the late afternoon in a cavernous lecture hall. In keeping with our inspiration from UNESCO, student volunteers were called ambassadors, and each language had a table that they could decorate if desired. Attendees picked up a festival passport to take from table to table as they learned how to say Norwich University’s motto, “I will try,” in 18 languages. We had more than 30 language ambassadors, and the event attracted about 80 participants, which is excellent attendance for an academic event at our small college. The atmosphere was festive and fun (see Figures 4 and 5 for photographs of the event). Administrators, faculty, and students were incredibly positive. Many attendees offered enthusiastic suggestions about how to make the fair “even better next year.”
Figure 4. Students at the World Languages Fair holding their festival passports.
Figure 5. Foreground, students clustered near the French language table at the World Languages Fair. Discussion: Branding in Education Not all the feedback was positive. I received critical reactions from a few faculty members who were concerned that the project represented a facile approach to multilingualism, enlisted students in a branding activity, and was an example of tokenism. Such concerns about slogans and sloganization in the discourse of language education are mentioned by Schmenk, Breidbach, and Küster (2019). As they explain, “neither scholarly work nor educational practice can or ought to be based on slogans” despite their necessity in marketing and branding (p. 170). Also, replacing ESL with multilingual might be perceived as an instance of sloganization, which Schmenk et al. (2019) define as an application of a meaningful academic term in the shallowest sense, in a way that is “undertheorized, fuzzy, often trivialized and simplified, yet also appealing and catchy” (p. 169–170). Translating two brief college slogans does not constitute much in the way of multilingualism. However, one of my most exciting classes this semester was based on just three words, the motto “I will try.” First, we examined its origin (from the French motto of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, essayons), then we discussed potential translations and issues connected with stylistics, and, finally, students wrote reflections about the motto’s personal meaning. After this lesson, students seemed more comfortable using their other languages within my class, which is a significant step in terms of valuing multilingualism. Reframing ESL at Norwich connects to a national conversation about labeling our discipline at the university level. In “The Quest for Respect: ESL Faculty and Programs in U.S. Higher Education” (2017), Porter-Szucs describes tensions between the “proud” history of the field and its “second-class status” at many colleges (p. 2). In her survey of ESL college educators, Porter-Szucs (2017) noted a number of respondents who, like us at Norwich, have moved away from “the ESL label” and “prioritized renaming their units from ESL to multilingual so as to emphasize their students’ strengths and to escape the stigma of ESL” (p. 23). My selection of the two college slogans did have the intention of branding—not in branding the students but rather in expanding the brand of the university. Taken alone, the video and event might be token gestures; however, the project was part of a larger agenda to promote an asset-based focus on multilingual students. Conclusion The World Languages Fair and Norwich Forever Multilingual Video contest demonstrated linguistic diversity as an expression of college pride, which increased enthusiasm and decreased the chance that multilingualism would be perceived as threatening in an Anglophonic environment. Our emphasis on language resulted in favorable conditions for a viral social media event and fostered new institutional connections among · multilingual faculty, staff, and students; · language-teaching faculty in two departments; and · students who study languages in Norwich classes. Our ultimate goal is to “normalize multilingualism” at Norwich University (Horner & Weber, 2018, p. 284), and this programming represents the first steps. References Horner, K., & Weber, J. J. (2018). Introducing multilingualism: A social approach (2nd ed.). London, England: Routledge. Marshall, S. (2010). Re-becoming ESL: Multilingual university students and a deficit identity. Language and education, 24(1), 41–56. doi:10.1080/09500780903194044 Porter-Szucs, I. (2017). “The quest for respect: ESL faculty and programs in U.S. higher education,” MITESOL Journal: An Online Publication of MITESOL, 1(1), 1–38. Retrieved from https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/mitesol/vol1/iss1/2 Preece, S. (2010). Imagining higher education as a multilingual space. Language and Education, 24(1), 3–8. doi:10.1080/09500780903343070 Schmenk, B., Breidbach, S., & Küster, L. (2019). Sloganization: Yet another slogan? In B. Schmenk, S. Breidback, & L. Küster (Eds.), Sloganization in language education discourse: Conceptual thinking in the age of academic marketization (pp. 169-175). Blue Ridge, PA: Multilingual Matters. Shapiro, S., Farrelly, R., & Tomaš, Z. (2014). Fostering international student success in higher education. Alexandria, VA: TESOL International Association. Kate M. Donley, MA TESOL, serves as the International and Multilingual Curriculum Coordinator for the Department of English and Communications at Norwich University. She teaches EAP for matriculated internationals along with courses designed for mixed groups of international and American students. She has been a member of the summer faculty in the MATESOL program at Saint Michael's College, USA, and is a returned Peace Corps volunteer. |
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