Download - Alison Phipps
Researching Multilingually: Linguistic Incompetence
Alison Phipps
University of Glasgow
Knowing Multilingual Researching
How can I know what researching multilingually means if I am monolingual?
No point of comparison
No story of growing access to other linguistic worlds
No experience of leaving one set of framings and using a different set
No experience of the feel of competence
Researching multilingual research
Listening to and gathering biographies / data of researching monolingually
Narratives and novels (Helen Sullivan)
Compare research undertaken multilingually with research undertaken monolingually for accuracy and results (use of multilingual questionnaires; interviewing with interpretation; participant observation
Autoethnography of Linguistic Incompetence
1) Learning the Arts of Linguistic Survival
2) Asylum Languages
3) Lifelong Learning in Palestine
4) From language edges (pain/joy – word failure)
Learning the Arts
2 year of autoethnographic work in adult education tourist language classes for Italian and Portuguese
Language holiday in Lisbon
Beginner's language classes
Researching without the language
Ethnographic notes:
Difficulty and struggle to hear and make meaning
The jouiscence of making progress
Resource to common language (German and English) for rest and reflection and writing
Notes full of new words and phrases – mulitlingual research notes
Asylum Languages
Response to Call (Radio 4)
Linguistics needed
Languages useless
Language greetings learned with detainees
Contact with Swahlii, Georgian, Arabic, Congolese, Somali;
Language teaching as leveller
Research value in ignorance. Access.
Mother Tongue
Blen & Tigrinya
New script
Tonality
New questions of language and power
Linguistic exhaustion and pain - autodidacticism
Paucity of resource and opportunity. (payment for lessons illegal; transport problems).
Mother's Incompetence
Allowed space for processing and recovery in English (trauma victims often process better in a different language – see Holocaust survival – Grossmann)
Required patience and vigilance
Value of object, story, each word and script
Keyman keyboard
Materials- phrase books; CD
Patterns
Relationships formed through other means (food, joint worship, coffee ceremonies, gifts)
Listening in to patterns for hand holds – food, greetings, God, place names, goodness and beauty.
Ritual Learning
Habituated practices (Coffee, food, greetings, prayer)
(Mary Oliver)
Sensory awareness heightened: incense, cloth, scarf, coffee beans, skin and hair oil; spices, texture)
Linguistic power remains with powerless
Tsada: expections of whiteness
Chichewa
Greetings
Animals
Status of people
Surprise - Mzungu
Lifelong Learning in Palestine
Arabic: script and speech
Borders
Welcomes
Security
Research interviews
NGO/academic English
Suspicion or Trust
Because I am a linguist/ethnographer I quickly learned:
- greetings
- food names
- Prayer language (Insha'allah)
Monolinguals: la,la,la:
Gesture and some aggression/suspicion that translation maybe in correct
Palestine
Material objects
Scarves
Children practising English and teaching us
Flowers in a garden
Reliance on translation
Gifts and appreciation.
Movement of body in segregated space
Enforced time for observation
Pain/JoyElaine Scarry: Pain is
language destroying
Trauma fragments and disrupts patterns of memory.
Pain/Joy are produced from same patterns of neurological processing.
Advocacy as the compensation for linguistic incompetence (Amnesty International)
Words Fail Me
Researchers are presumed to be linguistically able
Failure of words / writers block is a serious business
Failure to engage multilingually is seen largely as a necessary inconvenience.
Some dimensions of life may be highlighted (notably those traditionally noticed by anthropologists)
Ingrid de Kok: Words failing
Researching Multilingually
Language acquisition – the form its takes, where it occurs, how it occurs is an important dimension to fieldwork and to research
We are positioned through our competence/incompetence and our stories of acquisition and mistake
Social Humility or Technological Control
Autodidactic, technological courses mask incompetence, hide error and failure
Social classes make space for 'rehearsal' and allow speech to be embodied and embedded
Humility, performed and languaged, enables the building of relationships of trust in the field for an ethics of access to be negotiated
The Value in Incompetence
Time to observe
Practice of researcherly patience
Experience of frustration and powerlessness which enables empathy
Noticing of greetings, rituals, sensory dimensions
Valuable stage, but not status quo.
A glimpse into early ethnography and anthropology- a stage in entering other worlds. (Evans Pritchard)
Thank You
RossettaStone.com
• Rosetta Stone gives you the flexibility to fit language learning into your life whenever it’s convenient. All it takes is a computer or an Internet connection.
Solutions for Incompetence?
Rosetta Stone Makes Inc. 500 List
• “We deliver the best technology-based solutions for learning languages. Every day our innovations help people improve their lives and make the world a better place”.
Languages as Technology
Technology is therefore a game pertaining not to the true, the just, or the beautiful, etc., but to efficiency: a technical “move” is “good” when it does better and /or expends less energy than another.
(Lyotard 1984)
“Making the World a Better Place”
• “Rosetta Stone®, today announces a new contract with the United States Army. The agreement, worth $4.2 million for one year, makes the Rosetta Stone language learning program available to all active Army, National Guard, Reservist, and Department of Army Civilian personnel worldwide.”
“Make the Most of Your Time”
• “Building Community through Language Learning!”
• Rosetta Stone Personal Edition contains everything you need to start learning a language. It’s built around our award-winning Rosetta Stone curriculum, which has been adopted by Deutsch [sic] Telekom, NASA, and over 10,000 schools worldwide—and is available in 30 languages spoken by over 90% of the world’s population.
Your Time
• 200 hours, 92 lessons, 3 month subscription.
• Languages measured out in technologically controlled time.
• Liquid languages for liquid modernity.
Rosetta Stone: A Counter-Story
• Discovered 1799• 1814 – Demotic
translation• 1822-24 Greek &
Coptic & hieroglyphic• 1858 – Full English
Translation• Egypt, France,
England, U.S. • 57 years