Tag Archives: language

Being bi- or multilingual — not one of my accomplishments, sadly!

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Given the last 30 years, personally and professionally — living with a Chinese person for some years, being around many Chinese people, teaching ESL — I find this fascinating, and embarrassing, because I am really monolingual, even though I did French and Latin at school.

In the video which follows, the young man’s trilingualism is amazing!

Mind you, Michael Xu is also trilingual (at least) with Shanghainese as a first language and Mandarin as his language of education and his national language. Oh, and English now, of course.

Quite a few of the boys I taught at SBHS were similarly blessed, and not all of them Chinese — speakers of Tamil, for example. Multilingualism is a really good thing — and in general we don’t value it enough in Australia.Insisting all Australians should speak only English is really stupid and short-sighted.

The vlogger is touting a language app, Babbel, which may well be good, or maybe not — thought I would mention it as he does do a commercial for it…

No major political axes to grind that I could see. And he is in New York.It is just interesting!

I am not surprised to see that I have posted on this topic during my ESL days:

Being bilingual – language and thought

08 December 2006

Sunetra Gupta – Language and thinking (full transcript from a Radio National Saturday Breakfast broadcast 16 July 2005). Sadly not available in 2020!

I hope teachers and parents find these reflections on being multilingual informative, and her extrapolation from her experience to the workings of language and thought is certainly interesting.

The talk could double as a text for Year 12 on Journeys. “The complex times we live in need a language that will help us understand them. Language affects how we think, how we experience life and how we understand our experiences. Sunetra Gupta spoke on this at the 12th International Conference on Thinking — she is a reader in the epidemiology of infectious disease — and she publishes complex, interesting novels, which draw on her rich cultural background.”

My exposure to a second language occurred at a very early age – almost as I was learning to speak — for I was just over a year old when my parents moved to Ethiopia from Calcutta — which is where I was born, and still, in most senses, belong to. The Ethiopians were, and I am sure still are, a very proud people, and foreigners had no option but to learn their language Amharic (which has the same roots as Hebrew) if they were to survive there. This my parents did most willingly, as it was their interest in other cultures and languages that had brought them there in the first place. I, of course, acquired it naturally and spoke it alongside my mother tongue with ease — as most bilingual children clearly do. Thus, language was never a monolithic construct for me, and I was sensitized to the distance between a word and its referrent almost as I became conscious.

I am not aware that being exposed this early to two languages had any particular consequences for my personal development, and Amharic is now completely lost to me, or if not lurks so deep in the recesses of my mind that it may as well not be there. In some ways, I was not even conscious of navigating between two languages, and so did not learn one of the most valuable lessons from the process of unglueing word from object — which to my mind is tolerance.

Indeed, when we moved to Zambia when I was four, and I was suddenly surrounded by English speaking children, I reacted with anger rather than bewilderment – how dare they speak in a language I do not understand! — I remember thinking. Soon of course I was speaking English fluently myself, and it has occupied a prominent position in my life ever since, although I still refuse to grant it — quite irrationally of course — the same seat in my heart as my mother tongue.

So, just to summarise where I have got to so far in terms of the relationship between language and thought by indulging in my own early experiences — the demolition of a one to one correspondence between word and object is the simplest useful byproduct of learning more than one language — and in my view this is a critical step towards truly internalising the concept of tolerance, the acceptance of different styles and faiths. And although an early exposure to more than one language may have benefits with regard to fluency in both tongues, I think that too early an exposure actually detracts from the perception of the relationship between word and object as not being fixed and absolute…

2020: I have not examined this in detail but Macquarie University has a Multilingualism Research Centre.

Multilingualism is key to Australia’s multicultural future. Located in Australia’s most multilingual city, with one of Australia’s largest concentrations of language and education researchers, Macquarie University is ideally placed to take the lead in multilingualism research. The Multilingualism Research Centre aims to:

  • foster interdisciplinary research on multilingualism across Macquarie University,
  • build research collaborations with multilingualism researchers in Australia and overseas,
  • build partnerships with community organizations in New South Wales to provide research-based support on multilingual policies and practices.

Interdisciplinary collaboration and community engagement lie at the heart of our approach to research that aims to enhance the quality of life in a multilingual world.

The Centre is hosted by the Faculty of Medicine, Health and Human Sciences (FMHHS), and sponsored by the Linguistics Department in FMHHS and the School of Education in the Faculty of Arts.

Bored of? No way!

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It’s undoubtedly a losing battle, but consider 1) I am a retired English teacher and 2) back in 2005 I became a Grammar God!

If your mission in life is not already to preserve the English tongue, it should be. You can smell a grammatical inaccuracy from fifty yards. Your speech is revered by the underlings, though some may blaspheme and call you a snob. They’re just jealous. Go out there and change the world.

Mind you, the issue I am about to consider is one of usage, not grammar.

These days I keep hearing/seeing “bored of”! Unless I am mistaken, even our Prime Minister has been guilty — and that would have the late Alan Whitehurst spinning in his grave. Alan may well have been Scomo’s English teacher.

Let’s check the Oxford Dictionary site.

Which of these expressions should you use: is one of them less acceptable than the others?

Do you ever get bored with eating out all the time?

Delegates were bored by the lectures.

He grew bored of his day job.

The first two constructions, bored with and bored by, are the standard ones. The third, bored of, is more recent than the other two and it’s become extremely common. In fact, the Oxford English Corpus contains almost twice as many instances of bored of than bored by. It represents a perfectly logical development of the language, and was probably formed on the pattern of expressions such as tired of or weary of. Nevertheless, some people dislike it and it’s not fully accepted in standard English. It’s best to avoid using it in formal writing.

Hmmph! I call it a barbarism! See Thesaurus.com.

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Thanks to Nye Perram for posting that on Facebook.

And here’s another I definitely heard from Scomo: cereMOANie! That really seems to be galloping away! See English pronunciation of “ceremony” on the Cambridge Dictionary site. But those lefties at the ABC support Scomo on this one.

…No basis for this “correctness” was stated, other than an implication that because the variant was originally American, it was wrong.

My immediate predecessor, Irene Poinkin, didn’t understand the fuss.

“The large number of complaints the ABC receives about [ceremony],” she wrote in a 2013 note, “suggests there must have been some draconian teaching about this at an early stage in people’s schooling.”

Indeed, a common feature of complaints is the recollection of some kind of magical early-childhood injunction against ceremony with third syllable stress.

“I was taught never to ‘moan’ in ceremony,” a journalist once told me, displaying exactly the kind of blind reverence for authority that Australians aren’t supposed to possess.

Harrumph! You’ll never catch me moaning!

Aspergers, English-speaking and Senator Revenant

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To supplement my post Testing for English competence? read Annabel Crabb in today’s Sun-Herald.

The policy – proposed by Immigration Minister Peter Dutton with all the mellifluity of a man who has spent nine years in the Queensland Police – is currently under consideration by the parliament…

It’s drawn immediate support from Pauline Hanson.

Asked by Channel Seven what she thought of the proposed test and its associated Australian residency requirement extension from one to four years, the Senator declared: “It’s a start in the right direction.”…

The last minor mangle is a small sample of Senator Revenant’s somewhat loose connection to the English language. What price her IELTS score, I wonder?

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Interesting: If you can’t speak English, you don’t deserve to call yourself a Senator, Pauline Hanson.

SHE wears her love of Australia like a badge of honour, but a leading speech expert says Senator Pauline Hanson should consider learning how to speak our language if she wants to inspire the nation.

Michael Kelly, a body language and speech expert gave Ms Hanson’s maiden speech in the Senate barely a pass mark of 5.5 out of 10, blaming her poor pronunciation and “clunky” delivery for creating an “amateurish” first impression.

Putting aside her controversial politics, the 30-minute oration was “not up to the standards Australians should expect of an inspiring member of the Senate,” Mr Kelly said.

Stumbling over basic words like “custody” and “integral,” Ms Hanson gave the impression she had not rehearsed the much-anticipated speech, which “lacked impact,” was “monotone” and at times was “twee” and “juvenile,” Mr Kelly claimed.

“It was like she was completely unprepared. She hadn’t worked out her phrasing, it was monotone and she struggled to read parts of it out,” he said.

“She was mispronouncing words like “custody” which she delivered as “cus-dy” and that just leaves an unprofessional impression,” he said…

The lowest point were her remarks offering to drive migrants to the airport herself, Mr Kelly said, immature and unbecoming of a senior parliamentarian….

To be uncharacteristically fair to the Revenant of Oz. I suspect that much of the trouble she has brought on her own head over the education of children with disabilities, particularly those on the autism spectrum, stems from her own intellectual and linguistic incapacity.  Rather than being taken out of context, her remarks had been typically garbled and ill-considered, but she does have a point. There should be better training and resourcing for the education of children with disabilities in the mainstream. I have a little experience here as in my last three years of teaching one of my duties was to support one-on-one some students with Aspergers. I had a couple of successes and one not so successful. At the time (2003-2005) this was all rather new to us. Glad to say one of the students concerned is now a friend on Facebook.

Many years ago — 1970 in fact — I taught at Dapto High School, south of Wollongong. In those days we had no idea at all — I do not exaggerate — when confronted, if we were, with students with such things as Aspergers/autism. Today is so different, as this excellent page from Dapto High attests. Do visit it if you want authoritative information on the subject.

I looked that up because of an item in today’s Sun-Herald by Peter FitzSimons — someone whose writing at times annoys me. But not today…

Even for Pauline Hanson, her attack this week on kids with autism – maintaining they had no place in “our” class-rooms – took the breath away. As ever, her polarising politics is divisive, driven by a mean-spiritedness that has set post-war records in Australian politics, and entirely ill-informed. In fact, the inclusion of students on the autism spectrum and wider Special Needs students has been successful across our brown and pleasant land, and some of it I have seen up close.

TFF’s brother, Andrew, is Principal at Dapto High School, where they have run a stunningly successful integration program for students on the autism spectrum for the last nine years, and they now have no fewer than 28 of them.

“These students enrich our school and this community every day,” he told me on Friday. “Students are encouraged to participate in the full range of activities: sporting, cultural, academic etc. Participation in mainstream classes is accommodated when ever possible; often playing to particular strengths; Art , Music, Engineering etc. It works. Never had a single complaint. It is inspirational and heart-warming on so many levels for so many of our Dapto students . . . and wonderful for those on the spectrum, and their families, too.”

Great to hear!