1 1. INTRODUCTION In the process of language teaching reform

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ANNA CILIBERTI
UNIVERSITÀ PER STRANIERI
PERUGIA
ITALY
LINGUISTIC IDEOLOGIES AND THE LEARNING OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES
1. INTRODUCTION
In the process of language teaching reform - like the one presently taking place
in Italy - the role of teachers and students is absolutely fundamental. Change
most certainly depends on structural reforms: on a more satisfactory national
curriculum, on more time being made available to the study of languages, but
the real transformation is the work of teachers and students. No reform that fails
to pay due attention to the training of teachers and to students’ motivation and
awareness can hope to achieve the objectives it has set itself.
One of the factors conditioning the change is represented by the ‘language
ideology’ - or ‘language beliefs’ - held by students and teachers, i.e. that
constellation of mental constructs, representations, implicit theories regarding
language, language learning/teaching, that fosters particular attitudes and
expectations and that is bodied forth in different practices and forms of
behaviour. These representations constitute ‘loci communes’ in the rethorical
sense of the term: that is, they are recurrent and crystallized themes, motives,
and sites ( ‘topoi’), often of a cultural type (van Dijk, 1997:25).
Seen in this light, the importance of the study of language beliefs from the
educational viewpoint is directly proportional to the results it can produce.
Indeed, language ideologies are never the exclusive province of language; they
establish connections between language phenomena and psychological and
sociological phenomena - and thus between language and personal and group
identity - between language and aesthetics, between language and ethics, as
well as between language and didactic practices, language and learning
strategies. Investigation of language ideologies of teachers and students is
therefore of paramount importance from the educational point of view, precisely
because of the consequences language ideology - like all ideologies - can lead
to.
The research that I wish to present on this aspect is based primarily on audio
recordings of free discussions between pupils in:
(a) two 4th year Italian mother tongue primary school classes;
(b) one German mother tongue 5th year primary school class;
(c) one German mother tongue 1st year Magistrale (teacher training school)
class.
Recordings took place in Bolzano, a smallish town at the border with Austria.
The teacher had the task of stimulating the class without, however, guiding
pupils along prefixed rails, directing them towards prefigured solutions
(Pontecorvo et alii, 1991). The purpose was to identify the typical ways in which
the pupils thought about language: the recurrent themes, motives, and symbols
which together make up a systematic whole, a sort of grammar. Once they had
identified these notions, the teachers were asked to trace the relations between
them, drawing conceptual configurations, grids, maps.
This data is reinforced by questionnaires given out to, and ensuing discussions
conducted with, a group of first year enrollers on a university degree course in
Foreign Languages and Literatures collected at a University in central Italy.
It seemed to me that the situation of bilingualism - or, rather, diglossia - in which
the youngsters of Bolzano live would make them particularly sensitive to the
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phenomenon of language. As to the University enrollers, I thought too that
students doing a foreign language and literature degree course were likely to be
particularly interested and attentive to the phenomenon.
2. PRELIMINARY FINDINGS
2.1. Language ideologies and the school children
In presenting the preliminary findings regarding the primary school classes, I
shall attempt to draw the most ‘usual’ conceptual map, by which I mean the one
that recurs most often.
For the children I have investigated, a language is a different way of speaking
from other ways and it is made of words.The meaning lies in the words. These
are seen as autonomous, unvarying entities. Each word has an equivalent
communicative function in the various languages. For example, the meaning of
the Italian word ‘ciao’ is ‘hallo’ in German and therefore the communicative
function of ‘ciao’ is equivalent to that of ‘hallo’. Meaning is seen as being
abstract - it comes before use and exists apart from it - and children instinctively
establish a direct relationship between linguistic sign and extra linguistic
referent. This is not due to cognitive immaturity; adolescents and adults
establish a similar kind of relationship.
The difference between languages lies, fundamentally, in the difference
between the words. Words can be different because they are pronounced
differently. For example, Bolzano is called Bozen in German. In some cases as in the case of Chinese - it is not only a question of difference in
pronunciation, the alphabet changes as well. The difference is greater. Another
difference lies in the spelling. What remains always the same, however, is the
communicative function - and there is always an equivalence in function
between one language and another: As a child put it :“When they say hello to
each other they say hello to each other in a different way from us. But they still
say hello to each other” (“Nel salutarsi si saluta in un altro modo che da noi.
Solo che si salutano sempre”).
As to the difficulties in learning a language - like differences among languages they are identified, at times, in pronunciation, at times in the writing, in the
grammar, in the spelling, in the speaking. But then there is the prevailing thesis
that it is always difficult to learn a second language. “A language is not difficult
IN ITSELF” - says a child - “it is difficult if you don’t know it” (.“Una lingua non è
difficile COSI’ (IN SE’), è difficile se non la sai”) (emphasis added)
If we turn to linguistic functions, the only function of a language for these
children is the communicative one. A language is therefore particularly useful
when you travel or when you work abroad: (“Per esempio, io devo andare in un
altro paese lontano dall’Italia, all’estero, e devo comunicare con un’altra persona
e devo imparare quella lingua altrimenti non posso comunicare”). This common
sense opinion is shared by children and adults, by illiterates and literates alike:
language is only an instrument of communication and communicating means
exchanging information or, indeed, just ‘informing’. As a child puts it: “But it
[language] can also be useful for example if [...] a Turk says something you can
answer”. (“Però può servire anche per esempio se [...] un turchese dice
qualcosa puoi rispondere”).
2.2. Language ideologies and the Magistrale girls
For the fifteen-year old girls at the magistrale a language is a way of
communicating and it serves for speaking and understanding one another.
When prompted by the teacher, a pupil adds that it also serves for thinking. But
the answer is piloted. For these girls too a language consists of words. Only
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when prompted by the teacher does a pupil add that, “besides words, there’s
also grammar” (“oltre alle parole, c’è anche la grammatica”).
As for the differences between languages, these are related to the difficulty in
learning them: “German grammar is more complicated than English grammar”
(“La grammatica del tedesco è più complicata di quella inglese”); “German is
more difficult than English” (“Il tedesco è più difficile dell’inglese”).
As to the difference between the learning of one’s mother tongue and the
learning of a foreign language, they say that: “You learn your mother tongue
when you speak to your parents or to people, and a foreign language when you
write, when you learn the words because you have to learn the words before
you can speak” (“La lingua materna si impara quando si parla con i genitori e
con le persone e la lingua straniera quando si scrive, quando si imparano le
parole perché si deve imparare le parole prima che si possa parlare”). And
another girl asserts: “With your mother tongue you already know the words and
in a foreign language you still have to learn them” (“La lingua materna le parole
si sanno già e nella lingua straniera si devono ancora imparare”). Our mother
tongue seems to be a gift that we possess at birth, or something that we learn
without the slightest difficulty.
2.3. Language ideologies and university students
I shall now very quicky present the findings of a study carried out recently by two
American scholars, L. Miller & R. Ginsberg (1995), on a group of American
college students of Russian, who had gone to Russia on a stage. A similar
study, but in an institutional setting, was conducted on a group of Italian
university foreign language students.
The American and Italian studies each investigate the students’ beliefs
regarding the nature of language and of language learning. More specifically,
the notions investigated regard language, linguistic competence, communicative
competence and the ways in which learning takes place. The American students
were asked to concentrate specifically on language learning and on the
relationship between classroom learning and learning outside the classroom. In
addition to this, they were asked to describe the experiences that they
considered to be important for learning. For both American and Italian students
language consists of syntax and words. In many cases the students equate
knowledge of words with knowledge of the language. Comprehension in
interaction consists in determining the meaning of individual words. Says an
American student: “I felt really great that I knew this word. I felt that one day in
the future I will know Russian.” (Miller & Ginsberg (1995:198).
When they encouter problems with native speakers, they attribute them to
structural or prosodic differences between the two languages rather than to
pragmatic or sociolinguistic reasons. As the two American scholars argue:
“Problems are rarely attibuted to cultural or pragmatic differences, language
attitudes, or xenophobia” (188).
As for concepts such as ‘communicative competence’ and ‘linguistic
competence’, the students do not seem to possess the former and have a
restrictive idea of the latter. For the American students learning Russian, there is
only one correct way to say things; Russian is a unified system with fixed rules;
meaning is in words; for the Italian students learning English, to speak English
well means to pronounce correct utterances with the ‘right’ words; success in an
L2 consists in producing grammatically correct utterances. Students are proud
not so much of being able to communicate as of being able to use difficult words
- “verb endings” - says an American boy - “words with a difficult pronunciation” -
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says an Italian girl. Associated with this notion is the notion that one “learns
through constant correction and feedback” (Miller and Ginsberg, 1995: 190).
Witness an Italian student’s criticism of an instructor who doesn’t correct: “Ma
non mi corregge, chessò, non ha tempo di correggere tutti o non gli va”.
And, on the same line of argument, says an American student: “Correction is
part of class. I have no pride. I want correction all the time. That’s what we’re
paying for - for better Russian skills” (ibidem)
Language variation - typical of an out-of-classroom learning situation - is seen
by American and Italian students as problematic or, even, as “bad Russian” or
“cattivo inglese”. Since meaning lies in words, learning a language means
learning the words of which it is composed and which are autonomous units.
Furthermore, since it is words that carry meaning, a given word will have an
equivalent communicative function in both languages.
3. CONCLUSIONS
First observation: There is an interesting resemblance - not to say uniformity - of
vision between the three groups in spite of the geographical and age differences
separating them: (a) primary school children and first year Magistrale schoolgirls
from the Alto Adige, (b) American college students, (c) first year university
enrollers from central Italy. This would suggest that certain ideas about
language are part and parcel of the Western theoretical baggage rather than
being ‘cultural scripts’, to use Wierzbicka’s term. (1998:242). This hypothesis
would naturally need to be tested out on students belonging to cultures farther
removed from ours.
Second observation: If, however, we compare the primary school children’s
answers with those of the fifteen-year-old schoolgirls from the Alto Adige leaving to one side the university students - it seems, prima facie, that the
children’s answers (or some of their answers) come closer to codified language
knowledge (to the point of view of linguists) than do those given by the girls. For
example, as regards the differences between languages and the difficulty in
learning them, the children agree with the idea expressed by one of them that:
“A language is not difficult in itself, it is difficult if you don’t know it”. More
powerfully at work in the fifteen-year-olds there seems to be a perverse school
conditioning effect, as witness the greater banality and conventionality of their
answers: “German is more difficult than English because its grammar is more
difficult”. The doubt that naturally arises is that school conditioning acts on
language ideologies as it acts on our children’s drawings - which are full of
phantasy in kindergarten, a little less marvellous at primary school and more
and more disappointing as children proceed through the school system.
Third observation: As for the ‘consequences’ that language ideologies may
have on learning strategies, I shall give just one example reported in Miller and
Ginsberg’s study:
.. “in spite of the fact that students denigrate formal instruction, their views of
language and their views of learning lead them to try to recreate classroom
situations in interactions with native speakers outside the class. As a
consequence, students do not appear to take full advantage of the unique
opportunities for learning afforded by study abroad.” (p.196).
As a last remark, I would like to add that research such as that just presented
indicates that language ideologies are never the exclusive province of language:
for instance they are related, as I have argued, to learning strategies. But let’s
not forget that linguistic thinking also establishes connections between
language, on the one side, and psychological and sociological phenomena, on
the other - thus connecting language to personal and group identity. As all
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ideologies, mental representations about language share in fact the property of
forming “the basis of social cognition, that is the shared knowledge and attitudes
of a group” (Van Dijk 1997:29). These socially acquired and socially shared
mental representations - as van Dijk (1997:35) has pointed out:
“define cultures and groups and [...] organize and monitor their beliefs as well as
their social practices and discourses. It is this integration of the study of their
cognitive and social dimensions that enables us to fully understand the relations
between discourse and society” .
Moreover, linguistic thinking establishes connections between language and
aesthetics, language and ethics: to give just a couple of examples, textual
exegesis depends fondamentally on ideologies of language; and so does
linguistic standardisation - which often associates the standard language with
qualities, such as clarity or truthfulness, valued by a certain culture. Indeed, as
Raymond Williams (1977:320) put it: “ a definition of language is always,
implicitly or explicitly, a definition of human beings in the world”.
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