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おろしゃ会会報 第15号その2 ２００８年４月９日 |
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会員の仕事 |
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講義 平成１９年度後期一般教育科目の特別講義「グローバルな視野とコミュニケーションのための英語セミナー」（コーティネーター：宮浦国江、中山麻衣子、R Edumunds）がオムニバス形式で行われた。佐々木学長をはじめ、内外の多くの講師が登壇し、2007年の10月４日から今年の１月31日まで、14回にわたり、英語による講義を行った（毎週木曜５限H004教室 受講生約150名）。１月13日・第13回目の講師は、マリーナ・ロマエヴァであった。パワーポイントを使った内容の濃い話だった。以下に掲載する英文テキストは、当日の講義の内容である。 |
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Challenges posed by switching between
languages. Does it lead to an identity change? Lomaeva Marina Thank
you, Ms. Chairperson, for your kind introduction. I am delighted that so many
of you have joined us for this talk and discussion and hope that you will
find it inspiring and meaningful. The topic I have chosen for today’s speech
has something to do with everyone who has ever tried to communicate in a
foreign language. What changes happen to the speaker when they consciously
put themselves in a different language environment? Are they confined to
simply changing the linguistic code, or also include elements of acting,
pretending to be someone who speaks this foreign language as their native
one? My talk is by no means a scholarly presentation loaded with technical
terms. It is rather an account of my personal experience, which I believe is
not unique but shared by every student of foreign languages. So let the talk
begin. My favourite metaphor for a foreign language as an object of
learning is a huge multi-storey building with innumerable entrances and
windows, something like the Japanese department stores “Apita”
or “Jusco”, but on a much larger scale. You can get into it through the main
entrance or sneak in through the back door, or even choose not to enter it at
all, contenting yourself with window shopping. Or just use its parking space
or lavatory and never bother to even glance inside it through the window. I
know quite a few Japanese language students in my country who first did not
intend to study it systematically but chose it as their major out of sheer
curiosity. Wanted to understand what their favourite
anime characters say, or what the ikebana terms like “shin” or “tome”, or
karate terms like “osu” and “maegeri”
mean in Russian. Or, like my younger brother, who unfortunately never
actually made it inside the building, was fascinated by the Japanese aircraft
and navy during the Pacific War, or strived to understand Japan’s motives for
launching it, as my Dad does – he often asks me what the original words of Isoroku Yamamoto were. In the cases I have just cited the
main focus of learners’ attention is the Japanese language itself, but you
can easily imagine situations where you only need a parking space or lavatory
in this spacious building. Think of a lingua franca like English – many of my
classmates at the university in Russia were quite indifferent to it, and the
only use they ever put it to was looking up for Japanese words in
English-Japanese dictionaries. All this because there are still very few
Russian-Japanese dictionaries, and the existing ones do not even come close
to their English analogues. Once
you pick up your courage and enter the building, you get immersed in a
strikingly different environment. You stop being a walker or a car driver and
become either a client or a member of staff – in other words, from that point
on, you have to take on a new role and act in accordance with both your goals
and the expectations of those surrounding you. By the way, you do not need to
travel to another country to experience this – I clearly remember that it was
exactly the way I felt when I accompanied a Japanese delegation to my
hometown in The
more fluent you become in a foreign language, the more smoothly that process
of switching between your native way of speaking, thinking and acting – your
“default identity” – and the one you choose to adopt – your “identity by
choice” – occurs. Which is the most conspicuous change associated with the
progress in a foreign language and can be best measured by the easiness with
which you pick the necessary phrases to effectively interact with native
speakers in various situations. This change can be compared with the steady
improvement of a young actor’s performing skills and their memorizing
abilities until the point when they do not need to wait for their cue in
order to say the right line any more. At that point the audience stops seeing
the actor performing the role of, say, Hamlet or Tartuffe, stops singling
this actor out of more seasoned members of the troupe, and can concentrate on
the story being unfolded on the scene. And the other actors, on their part,
stop fearing lest their inexperienced colleague makes a blunder, and start
treating them as an equal. This “theatre” metaphor provides a glimpse of what
new opportunities await an accomplished foreign language learner. Simply put,
you are not perceived as a foreigner, an alien any more, which is the final
step of integrating into the community whose language you chose for studying.
Needless to say, a complete social integration requires much more than the
mere knowledge of grammar rules, and the importance of mastering the cultural
concepts as well as the role of body language cannot be overestimated.
However, for a diligent student, these aspects are probably inseparable from
language per se, and their knowledge is normally acquired simultaneously with
standard language skills. The
conspicuous change I have dwelt on at length – assimilating into a new
language environment – is inevitably accompanied by adopting a new identity,
which I described earlier as the “identity by choice” (contrasted with the
“default identity”). And it is precisely this inevitable corollary that poses
a serious challenge to foreign language students: how to live with this
“split language personality”, how to prevent your “default identity” from
being eroded and supplanted by the newly adopted one. The worst possible
outcome is falling between two stools, ending up with the first identity half
eroded and the second one half shaped. That is the situation I find myself in
at present, having been immersed into the Japanese language environment for 4
years now, staying out of touch with other foreigners and my compatriots for
most of the time. Before
getting down to the analysis of this “default identity” erosion process, let
us briefly examine the preceding stage, i.e. the formation of the
“identity by choice”. Learning a foreign language is always learning to be
someone else, acquiring a portion of “Englishness” or “Japaneseness”
along with standard language skills, so that in the end your switching
between languages occurs so smoothly you could call it an “instantaneous
reincarnation” into an English or Japanese native speaker. The highest praise
from a member of the community whose language you are studying would sound
like “your English/Japanese is so fluent and idiomatic”, “you could be taken
for a native speaker” – in other words, you are constantly encouraged to
conceal your “linguistic origins” until you blend in with the background. One
of the easiest ways to achieve it is constantly copying others’ speech patterns
and imitating their behavioral patterns, like a Japanese traditional bow, for
example, or typical nodding and saying “hai” in
agreement. Now
allow me to digress for a moment and tell you an anecdote from my own
experience, which is directly related to the subject of copying. I had only
been to Looking
back to that period of my life, I reckon it was an important stage in the
formation of my Japanese-oriented “identity by choice”. I was stitching
together those scraps of “Japaneseness” – Japanese
speech and behavioral patterns I had managed to collect from a wide range of
sources during the years of studying this language at university and my short
stays in My
first encounter with the Japanese was at a world championship in ski
orienteering that my hometown QUESTION 1 Now, I am told that
after each lecture within the framework of this project you are requested to
write a short essay describing your impressions and giving your comments. I
suggest that if you find it worthwhile, you write a paragraph or two about
your first encounter with the foreign language you are studying. Who were
your first role models, the people who influenced the formation of
your “identity by choice”? Were they famous actors, singers, novelists or
politicians who you only saw on the screen or heard on the radio, or the
people who you actually met and communicated with? I would appreciate it if
you shared your experience of selecting, among the individual features of
these role models, those you thought were typical of this foreign language
native speakers. In other words, could you list the particular features you
considered necessary to adopt as constituent elements of your new “identity
by choice”? I
would like to draw a few examples from my personal experience, in order to
facilitate your task. As I already mentioned, my first Japanese acquaintances
were members of sports teams coming to my hometown to participate in
international competitions. We, students, volunteered every year to interpret
for them in order to improve our Japanese or English and learn more about the
foreign countries we could not even dream of traveling to at that time,
because none of us could afford it. We enjoyed working for Japanese teams
immensely – and I fell in love with the language precisely because I admired
those Japanese athletes and could adopt them as role models for building my
own Japanese identity. In
general, they seemed less individualistic and more modest than my
compatriots, and it was a pleasure communicating with them as I did not feel
the constant pressure to assert myself any more. And it was a great relief,
because in Another
impressive quality that I was eager to adopt as a constituent of my new
Japanese identity, was what I found to be a nicely balanced combination of
respect shown to your partner and self-respect, which I discovered in my
Japanese acquaintances from all walks of life. The stereotypical image of The
next point I would like to discuss is the impact of this new “identity by
choice” on your “default identity”. The changes occurring to your “default
identity” are all the harder to notice as most of us have only a vague idea
of what comprises our “default identity”. We are used to thinking of it as
something given, inborn and immune to outside influence, something that is
acquired together with the native language in childhood and remains unchanged
for the whole of our life. However, in reality, our “default language identity”
is the product of a certain social and linguistic environment we have been
brought up in, nurture rather than nature, and its integrity is contingent on
our constantly staying in touch with our home environment. Starting to learn
a foreign language and, as a corollary of this process, building a new
“identity by choice” inevitably disturbs a delicate balance between your
“default identity” and your native language environment, as many of the new
features you choose to adopt might come into conflict with the constituents
of your “default identity” and eventually start eroding it. As a result, you
may temporarily lose the ability to adequately respond to the stimuli of your
home environment. This is what happened to me in that episode with the
Russian policeman, when I had forgotten the natural way of addressing and
communicating with them in my home country. The root of the problem lies in
the necessity of synchronizing your switching between languages with
switching between identities, which is not easily achieved even when you are
living in your native country, and is further compounded by your “default
identity” gradually giving in to the pressure of the newly acquired one, when
you have been exposed to a foreign language environment for a long time. The
longer I am living in QUESTION 2 Here I would pause
again to formulate another question I would like you to reflect on. Many of
you probably have the experience of getting immersed into a foreign language
environment for a long period. Have you had any problems switching back to
your “default identity”, such as automatically applying the speech and behavioural patterns you have adopted in the process of
learning a foreign language, in communicating with the members of your native
language community? If yes, could you provide a few examples of what you considered
to be the manifestation of the erosion of your “default identity”? Again,
an important qualification needs to be made here. I am by no means implying
that the average Japanese is “八方美人”, for instance. It is rather a stereotype of
the average Japanese, which is perpetuated by the writings of many
non-Japanese and quite a few Japanese social scientists. Nevertheless, even
being aware of the danger of accepting such stereotypes at face value, a
foreign language student still has to fall back on them from time to time, in
the process of constructing their “identity by choice”. At the very
beginning, they can lay in its foundation the observations of the first
native speakers they met, who they adopted as role models when they started
learning this foreign language. But as the circle of their foreign
acquaintances grows wider, they realize that what they took for “typical
national traits” at first, were rather individual characteristics of their
acquaintances, and that their new identity might have been based on the wrong
assumptions. They become aware of the vast variety of speech and behavioural patterns, sets of value and social attitudes
among the native speakers of the language they are studying. We all know that
the very concept of a national character is to a large extent a fiction, that
we should avoid sweeping generalizations. But when you find yourself in an
alien environment, you instinctively start searching for speech and behavioural patterns, following which could help you
achieve your communicative goals. As I already mentioned in my today’s talk,
the most common method is copying, but first you have to select exactly what
to copy, what would serve as a blueprint for your “identity of choice”. And
in this process of selection, making assumptions about the national character
and adopting them as guidelines for your future communicative behaviour is, perhaps, unavoidable. And it is never easy
to know when to stop. I realize now how often, in an earnest effort to
capture the quintessence of “Japaneseness”, I fell
into the trap of generalizing, and far from looking and sounding natural,
appeared more like a jumble of stereotypical features that are ascribed (not
always correctly) to the so-called “average Japanese”. Earlier, in reviewing
the process of learning a foreign language, I called your attention to the
fact that we are constantly encouraged to conceal our “linguistic origins”
until we blend in with the background. I think now I might have gone too far
in an attempt to camouflage my “default identity”, which led, apart from the
erosion of my “default identity”, to a curious phenomenon that could be
described as an “identity disorder”. One
of its most prominent manifestations is a strange allergy I have recently
developed to obviously well-meant comments by Japanese native speakers like
“You speak Japanese so well”. I know it sounds absurd, but these kind remarks
usually have the opposite effect on me – I suddenly feel exposed, my “true colours”, that is, my “non-Japaneseness”
revealed so ruthlessly that I get lost for words. It is not that I wish I had
not been born Russian, that I would readily abandon all my daily habits –
including dressing and eating habits – in favour of
the Japanese ones. No, in my case, this odd phenomenon has always been
restricted to the realm of language. Always desperately trying not to stand
out, not to give away my “default identity”. A year ago, I seriously
considered applying for some ordinary and uninspiring job in Imagine
a chameleon that was born wearing a particular colour,
but then learnt – as all chameleons do – to change it according to its
surroundings. One day, after a series of remarkably successful transformations,
it suddenly lost its confidence and froze on the leaf to the colour of which it had just adjusted its body colour. It is afraid to move, let alone return to its
usual colour or habitat, and only wishes to remain
in this state as long as possible, not because it feels particularly
comfortable in it, but because it dreads the idea of failing to regain this
state after it returned to its normal colour. To
sum up, learning to switch smoothly between languages both offers new
opportunities (which can be broadly described as being treated as an equal in
the community whose language you are studying, like enjoying full membership
in an elite sports club) and poses such formidable challenges as the erosion
of your “default identity” and the “identity disorder”, to which I will refer
from this point on as the “chameleon dilemma”. This
“chameleon dilemma” that a foreign language student might get caught in is
further complicated in ethnically homogeneous societies like The
first is, unless they come from the neighbouring
Asian countries, their appearance, which automatically distinguishes them
from the members of the local community. Here an analogy can be drawn with
the plight of dark skin people in my native country. A sizeable number of
them, born and bred in Russia, reside in the European part of my country –
they are sometimes called the “legacy of the Moscow Olympics” of 1980 – and
many more come to study from abroad, but whatever their origins and ability
to speak Russian are, they never fail to catch people’s attention and are
bound to be identified as outsiders, merely because of their skin colour. On the other hand, in Now,
coming back to the issue of the “betraying appearance” of non-Asian foreign
students in The
second factor that exacerbates the “chameleon dilemma” facing foreign
language students in ethnically homogeneous societies like A
friend of mine, who came to The
second, more recent, incident happened to me a couple of weeks ago, during my
trip to “Why
do we snap like this?” I asked my Swiss friend, “We pride ourselves on our
proficiency in English and yet feel so hurt when they address us in it”. And
he replied that the reason is probably the double shock of being denied a
Japanese “identity by choice” and being automatically applied the “English
speaker” label, so that the ability to speak English is assumed to be the determinant
of our “default identity”. This might leave you with the impression that your
“default identity” has been reduced to this simple – and false – proposition:
all foreigners speak English and cannot understand Japanese. And after a
while it starts to annoy you, until one day you fly off the handle and begin
snapping at everyone who addresses you in English. QUESTION 3 I would like to break
here for a moment and ask you, before proceeding to the concluding part of my
talk, the third question, which is related to what I described as the denial
of your “default identity”. Many of you must have been to foreign countries
(probably, English-speaking countries, as we are talking here in English)
either for short pleasure trips or for a longer period of studying there.
Have you noticed any general trend in the way you were treated by the native
speakers of that foreign language, any “default identity” settings that were
applied to you? If yes, what formed the core of these settings – your Asian
appearance, your religion (one might think of it in the case of Islamic
countries – for instance, if you are a girl, not wearing a head covering like
hijab in public), your accent, or something else?
And what was the consequence of being applied these “default identity”
settings? Did you feel you were given a favourable,
even preferential treatment as a foreigner, that they made allowances for you
as a non-native speaker of the language? Or, on the contrary, did their
treatment seem discriminatory to you? Today
I have mainly focused on the negative sides on being applied the “default
identity” settings for a foreigner in Traditionally,
the last section of a talk raising a problem and dealing with it at length
should be devoted to outlying its possible solutions. However, I must admit,
even though I risk disappointing you, that I have no ready-made solutions to
offer. The conflict arising between a foreign language learner trying to
integrate into the community speaking the language of their choice, and the
members of this community, who, while bearing no malice towards that
individual, naturally tend to view and treat them as an alien, is
unavoidable. Equally unavoidable is the conflict between this individual’s
“default identity” and their “identity by choice”. A foreign language student
can choose either to leave this situation as it is, or try to tackle it, but
if they prefer the latter option, they need to set their priorities first. While
it seems highly unlikely to me that they would be able to radically change
the attitudes of the members of the community they are living in, as their
efforts would probably be defeated by sheer weight of numbers, I believe they
have a reasonable chance of success if they choose instead to focus on
exploring their “default identity”. As I stated earlier, your “default
identity” is not a constant, something predetermined by your nationality,
gender, the political situation in your country, etc. Rather it is the
product of a certain social and linguistic environment, remaining open to
change for your whole life. And it is you who should act as the main agent of
change, exploring your “default identity”, examining its constituent
elements, learning more about your native country and your mother tongue, and
making a conscious effort to enrich and develop your “default identity” day
by day. And when you are fully conscious of the distinctive “default
identity” you possess, you would probably stop feeling that you have to
conceal it. On the contrary, you would be proud of it and feel an urge to
make those surrounding you aware of its existence. In fact, this can be
viewed as a way out of the “chameleon dilemma”! But
I again have to remind you and myself that there are no ready-made solutions to
this host of problems associated with multiple language identities. I wish
you every success in finding your own. Thank
you for your attention. |
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おろしゃ 会」会報 第15号 （2008年Ｘ月Ｘ日発行） 発行 〒480-1198 学生会館D-202（代表・安藤由美） http://www.tosp.co.jp/i.asp?i=orosiya 発行責任者 加藤史朗（ 〒480-1198 http://www.for.aichi-pu.ac.jp/~kshiro/orosia.html |