Main Takeaways
Decentering monolingualism as the normative experience validates students’ multilingual backgrounds and better represents global language experiences
Many people do not have one “native” language and acknowledging multilingualism in language acquisition as well as everyday language use is important
Multilingualism and language contact can drive language changes and dialect variation and disregarding these causes ignores the realities of language
Quick Wins
Changes you can easily implement to make a difference in your teaching and in the learning and experiences of your students
- Avoid using the term “native speaker/signer”: Wherever possible replace this imprecise and potentially harmful term with specific information about what factors are relevant for the purpose at hand (acquired as a child, used in daily life, etc.)
- Emphasize the prevalence of multilingualism: Discuss how common multilingualism is, especially on a global scale
- Celebrate the linguistic experience of all students: Be clear that both monolingual and multilingual linguistic backgrounds represent valid ways of knowing and using language
- Be aware of how racialization affects perceptions of language use: Understand that racialized students’ use of English is often perceived as inferior even when they use “standard” forms and notice how this may affect your own perception of students’ class contributions and written work
Bigger Impact
What more can be done to have a long-term, positive impact in your teaching and on your students’ learning and experiences in linguistics?
Suggestion #1: Encourage all students to share their insight about their languages
Students come to your course with their own linguistic experiences and language expertise that should be acknowledged and leveraged during the course.
Why?
- Every class has a diverse range of languages used by students that inform how those students view language and your course materials
- Students can provide examples, intuitions, and perspectives from their linguistic experiences that can enhance learning and participation in the classroom for everyone
- When students see peers and instructors validating multilingual language experiences and addressing multilingualism as the reality for much of the world, they will feel more welcome to participate and learn
How?
- Administer an online welcome survey to learn about student backgrounds, shape aspects of your course, and guide interactions with your students (See Getting to Know Your Students for more on this)
- Create a linguistic autobiography assignment to invite students to reflect on their linguistic experiences (Charity Hudley, 2009; and see Getting to Know Your Students for more)
- Share your own linguistic experiences and how those shape your understanding of language to help validate student experiences and perspectives and encourage them to continue to contribute and share throughout the course
- Be careful not to limit feedback and participation to students who are “native” users of the language in question, but encourage students to share their varied perspectives and experiences with the language
Suggestion #2: Critically examine the status of “native” linguistic competence
The concept of “native” speaker/signer is not only potentially harmful but is typically ambiguous and uninformative and should be critically evaluated within the linguistics classroom (see Cheng et al., 2021 for more).
Why?
- Factors usually associated with “native” language acquisition are inconsistently applied, leading to imprecise theories, incorrect assumptions about proficiency, and racialization of “nativeness”
- Using the term “native speaker/signer” to elicit judgments or intuitions from students can cause confusion, shame, and perpetuation of language attitudes
- The concept of “nativeness” causes the most harm to students from historically marginalized communities by further excluding them and placing value on linguistic homogeneity instead of linguistic reality
How?
- Explicitly state which factors are relevant to the language experience in question, like age and order of acquisition, context of acquisition, language proficiency or usage, and language identity or allegiance
- Make clear the factors used by researchers in papers you read in class and encourage discussions about how studies differ in this regard and whether they are all truly looking at the same concept of “nativeness”
- Ask students to reflect on the idea of “nativeness” with regard to multilingualism during acquisition and in language use later in life
- Discuss explicitly how centering the monolingual “native” speaker/signer in discussions of language acquisition and competence can be harmful for multilingual language users, especially for racialized individuals and in language reclamation and revitalization contexts
Resources
The problematic concept of native speaker in psycholinguistics: Replacing vague and harmful terminology with inclusive and accurate measures. Cheng, Lauretta S. P., Danielle Burgess, Natasha Vernooij, Cecilia Solís-Barroso, Ashley McDermott, & Savithry Namboodiripad. 2021. Frontiers in Psychology 12:715843.
Undoing appropriateness: Raciolinguistic ideologies and language diversity in education. Flores, Nelson & Jonathan Rosa. 2015. Harvard Educational Review 85(2):149-171.
The Vocal Fries Podcast Episode “Bilingualism is. It just is.” (transcript available)